001you're live terence okay good evening everyone tonight is on december 9th 2020 and we will start our um educational support committee meeting um i'll be glad everyone had the opportunity to tune in or um to view this uh program because it's very important as we move forward as we speak about our children in the district tonight for the educational support committee we'll be talking about college readiness and what our district has done to promote college readiness now as we as everybody know since march 16 2020 uh this world has experienced a trauma that's hardly anyone could anticipate it or prepare for says kovic 19 virus has changed our all our normalcies in which we conduct business to travel the way we eat the way we shop the way we work exercise workshop uh how we
002celebrate events and the way that we educate thinking back to march 16th when the school is from close due to the uncertainties of the kovic 19 pandemic uh the global cases has just been sold at nineteen environments all that normalcy is certainly which people does business travel the way we eat the way we shop the way we work exercise workshop uh how we celebrate events and the way that we educate before we get back to martial state the food from clothes due to the uncertainties of the kobe 19 pandemic uh the global cases has just been enforced please thank you look like we had a little technical difficulties so i'll just go ahead and start over um as you all know since march 16th throughout 2020 the world has experienced a trauma that hardly anyone
003could anticipate or prepare for the quran 19 virus have changed all normal seas in which we conduct business the way we travel the way we eat shop work exercise worship uh how we celebrate events and how we educate uh thinking back to march 16th when schools first closed due to uncertainties of the kobec 19 pandemic the global cases has just surpassed 175 000 and italy was just placed on the lockdown with the italian death row just reported over 2 000 citizens earlier this year it was a time for our generation um that never we never had um had experienced anything as such and um and the center for disease control us not to gather in groups more than 10 people and the white house wasn't consistent whether or not we should wear a mask in
004public for the first time our neighbors to the north canada has denied entry into the country to anyone who isn't a canadian citizen or a permanent resident our nation went through a civil rights movement which which has led to long-warranted positive changes in government state and local laws during this time we also work together and push the elongated census campaign in november our country pulled together and still went for four through with a presidential election and is still going through an impactful senate race these are just some of the things that our country has experienced along with our youth who may or may not have a voice in the issues with the unforeseen troubles of the current educational policies due to the copic 19 concerns moving forward today schools across the nation still have their
005doors still have closed their doors and is practicing remote education while other districts have tried the in-person learning or hybrid model and are struggling to keep their doors open due to the covet concerns today our country has over uh 15.2 million clothing cases and have over 286 deaths while new york state has reported um amount of 728 000 colby cases and has experienced over 34 723 deaths and that's not including the copic related depths this evening the educational support committee will address the concerns that has been voiced by our students our parents caregivers and stakeholders and some board members tonight we will look into a district plan for college readiness for our juniors and senior population our high school class of 201 2021 has missed out on fellowship and learning music arts gym sports pep
006rallies class office positions prom seniors class trips and possible in-person uh graduations tonight dr chronic cash will present his administrative staff from the buffalo public schools as and say yes to education buffalo that has been focused on college readiness with our juniors and senior population and the work they have performed to prepare our young adults for higher education whether it's collegiate education or career tech programs we will look at the process and the steps that the district has take to help our students submit college applications and apply for college scholarships we will also look into the district college readiness approach we will look into a report from the guidance department describing their contacts with our high school seniors and their parents and caregivers as they assist our juniors and senior students transitioning to college we
007will speak about our grants about our district received from the gates foundation and also to say yes ohio has been using funding from the working for college mentors from the university of buffalo media college buffalo state college area community college and villa maria to help assist our students in the area of college readiness we also will visit our near pier mbk program um gear up schoology and how robocalls are being utilized in efforts for college readiness preparation for the new york state uh and the new york state um accessory college initiative programs um right now i'd like to hand over to our buffalo public school superintendent dr criner cash and uh to say a few words introduce his on staff that will be speaking tonight okay thank you mr heard board members good evening community
008good evening um that was a great introduction uh mr heard and so with that i will introduce mr david hills uh one of our secondary associates for school leadership and he has assembled a team uh that i think will be very responsive to the uh topics that you've addressed tonight mr hills if you would begin your seven eight slide presentation uh and then introduce each of the successive members that will present on your team and board members i would simply ask that if we could get through the slides each in the presentation uh make notations in the columns and then we will come back and have a full discussion uh at the end we find that that helps with the flow of the conversation and makes it easier for the public uh to understand so
009mr hills roger cash thank you so much um mike lucci do you have those slides ready to go thank you chairman heard educational court committee board members tonight we're going to address this critical the critical moments that are in front of us and the efforts being made to support our seniors as they transition to post graduation and their college experiences and their careers experiences i will be sharing on behalf of toyah wilson and myself the secondary associates for school leadership and i will be addressing the building supports that are being put in place to support seniors as they prepare for the next step our director of guidance and counseling services martha younger will be presenting on behalf of the student support services department and she'll elaborate on all the supports that are being put in
010place for her her department for juniors and seniors as they prepare for the college admissions process four key individuals from say yes will be joining us and they will close out the presentation by linking the specific supports they've put in place for our seniors those individuals include betsy barron daphne ross tommy mclamb and a cherry rivera next slide mike [Music] so when we look at college readiness um writing is for students to make the next best step the educational bargain is a key network um that brings all of the components together to make sure that our students are best prepared for transitioning when they graduate our early education rigor builds very early capacity for our students to engage in successful expectations and college success the new high schools and the exit strong existing high school
011programming combined engaging career experiences high levels of student choice and matching of aptitude to programming and strong college and industry partners we meet the holistic needs of our seniors and families through elt through our extended learning through our saturday programming which is continuing virtually um and has supports for preparation for higher education and then finally our new relationship with or teachers help us to refine and define our expectations and understandings for what our students are capable of next slide so our seniors this year our 2021 graduating class are our 2017 cohort they are actually um we've been preparing them since they started in pre-k all the way through and the 2017 cohort is critical because our seniors have to graduate in order to take their next step so the first thing i'm going to address
012is what we do with the current cohort to ensure that they are on track for graduation there's um each school has gone through a profits of convening a comprehensive team that reviews the cohort data for all of the seniors that are on record for that graduating class they analyze the current cohort um they make sure there is consistent outreach to every member of that cohort and that it's targeted this approach was really launched last year and i have to say through the strong work of toyah wilson associate superintendent wilson who is who has brought forward a process that's rigorous that looks at each student's data and that process being launched last year allowed us in last march when we entered a period of uncertainty to have clear and accurate pictures of what students needed to
013do in order to graduate and that data really guided us through the process during the distance learning of getting those students to record high graduation rates through knowing where they stood and what they had to do and that process has been amplified this year um there there's been an identification at every secondary school of a data champion that data champion is one person assigned to the cohort who tracks all data make sure that we don't have any students falling through the cracks and along with other members of the team that data champion is trained by the office of shared accountability under the directorship are the leadership of md bullock recently appointed the um the office of shared accountability has also developed a data tracker and that data tracker gives you live access to all the
014information on student data so we're able to track attendance we're able to look at student profiles and the office of school um the office of shared accountability has worked with us as asls they've worked with principals to make sure that that data tracker is usable and works with all that they need in order to serve students one of the greatest tools that's been developed in that tracker is a graduation tracker component and that graduation tracker will show for each cohort all the students in the cohort credits they have um it allows you to select by various credit bands it will show how many regions exam they've passed and if they are on track for graduating on time if they're on track for an advanced designation if they're on track for any of this certificate bilingual
015certification cdos it will it pulls all that information if you see a student with concerning concerning indicators you can actually click on that student and see all of their information at once it facilitates live action planning where student needs can be identified and then every team has significant membership that allows them to reach out to students to help students through to really make sure that they are on track and on time for graduation are also providing schools five-week data so that they have from shared accountability um all the points they need to have comprehensive indications of how students are doing that's happening at promise report time so they can tell how many students are on track for passing their courses and students who are not on track for passing their courses and they can monitor
016every single student and the students who have um concerns they're able to track back and build strategies for those students so those protocols they have been strengthened tremendously during this time of remote learning teams are now meeting several times a week at the building level they're meeting with their associates for school leadership they have had several meetings with representatives from shared accountability who go through all the cohort data and that has helped building teams to have a much better sense and to communicate to students where they stand in in their cohort and that process is also being put in place for the 20 2018 cohort going forward next slide like at the school level there's a tremendous amount of work being done to support seniors as they engage in the application process schools have established
017schoology groups just for seniors so they're able to post information established deadlines have discussion groups they've included video video tutorials on both schoology on their web pages and on facebook that give it a step-by-step breakdown for students and some guidance counselors have also recorded little snippets uh little tutorials if you're applying on the common app this is how you do it if you're getting your fafsa information together this is how you do it so schools have made sure since we're in such a virtual environment that they've leveraged social media our existing learning management system schoology and other means to to build capacity in the student basis for some students they're also making sure the career plans are developed that cdos certifications are being followed up on and that for students who need transition planning those
018transition plans are taking place so that students all students have an ability to visualize what their next step is in september and do what they need to do now in the appropriate timing to get ready there there are schools that have established senior support groups those support groups are small groups some of the meeting with community partners some of the meeting with other school-based staff and those support groups discuss getting ready for college along with other issues of being a senior during this challenging time one of the key components is embedded into the english four curriculum is a process of getting ready for the common app getting recommendation letters ready knowing how to ask for a recommendation preparing your college essay completing the app the application students have been working on that with their english
019teachers we do have a small group of students or actually a very appreciable group of students who are advanced placement english and so they're not in the traditional english four curriculum those students are meeting separately with their guidance counselors to make sure that all students have time to put their best foot forward on the application process there also are in english for classes and in the social studies either participating in economics students are having time with say yes stuff they're having time offline with ce staff they're having time with their guidance counselors in order to prepare for the common app that's they're working to get submitted in this next month they're also working to get their fafsa information together and their support in place through say yes so that fafsa information can be compiled and
020submitted by the families and many schools have had virtual support sessions uh schools have had say yes has had virtual support sessions and that's going on on pace and they will speak to that when we get to the say yes section additionally three schools are piloting a gates college transition course which is a half year course then senior year to support the transition to college so those schools are integrating into student schedules to make sure that it's put in place so that they have an experience that launches them to the next step and that that pilot program will be expanded to each school in the future we've had increases in advanced placement courses from 16 1 620 different students or different registrations and ap courses in 2018 and to 2153 last year and this year
021as of october 2nd 2183 students are participating i individual participations in ap courses that includes some juniors even a few sophomores and seniors that participation in high expectation highly rigorous well-structured advanced placement courses allows our students to start to build the mindset of college success and prepares them for not only the level of work but the culture of college work and for vision envisioning themselves in the college setting we have also introduced we have p-tech programs at several schools hutch tech with courses taught through dual enrollment the south park b solar program with ecc mckinley with both the b green program at alfred and the buffalo teachers program at buffalo state each of those pathways in technology in early college high school programs allows for students to start earning college credits and actually have a
022transition spot in a college program when they complete their 12th grade experience and those transitions are crucial in helping our students to take the next step we have partnerships through middle early college where students are starting their sophomore year taking college courses at both ecc and buffalo state in a supportive school culture where they're able to see college success before they reach the age of graduation and then transition to their next step and we also have a da vinci high school opportunities or leonardo da vinci high school opportunities for students to access college court and get college credits several other schools 156 192 198 206 301 304 305 and 415 all offer dual enrollment courses so that students can participate either with a buffalo teacher that's an adjunct teacher where there's an articulation agreement or
023through actual college courses and receive both uh receive their high school credit while they are their college credit while they're in high school those dual enrollment programs are again they build up students transcripts when they go to college and they build up the experience of being in a college setting and doing college level work so a lot of this takes one-on-one supports and our guided staff under the leadership of martha younger does a tremendous job of making sure that they have their guidance counselors well positioned to connect students with resources to support students and to help students so that they are prepared through the whole college process so martha is martha younger is going to be going next and like if we go go to the next slide good afternoon everyone as david hill said
024i'll be talking from the counselor perspective of how are we preparing our seniors and juniors for college so as you know college processing does not automatically start in grades 11 and 12. actually college going aspirations we start with them as early as pre-k we do college career nights we do career um fairs for those individuals so that they can see at an early age what occupations are out there and what they can start looking at as far as what they want to be when they grow up we also partnered with cte to start doing college interest inventories so that kids will be understanding like what schools they want to go to that offer those particular programs and that they can get a better understanding of again what college and career readiness is all about so
025counselors help operationalize ongoing college activities such as they conduct annual record reviews as david said but the rebel reviews does not start as early as high school they actually start as early as sixth grade per state education so we are really starting with our sixth graders to get them to understand what it takes to graduate from school what types of interests are out there for you to start looking at college and career readiness the other thing that we do with them is provide students and families with the college application process we inform parents and students through workshops we did a workshop last year called college 101 and that was to help parents understand what the college application process is all about and we ended that with a college tour out at ub we also ensure
026that all tiffany's temporary laboratories take a district funded psat as you know a lot of colleges require a standardized test so this is an opportunity for our 10th and 11th graders to start taking the standardized testing that some colleges may require we fund one fat and the grade 11 for all juniors so that by the time they get to their senior year they have completed at least one standardized tests which may be used for college admit we also encourage our students to take the act as well so it's not just the sat we encourage them to take the essay the act and as you know many of our students are um eligible for fee waivers so they don't just solely rely on what the district provides our counselors utilize fee waivers to assist them in
027other ways some of them may be applying for many colleges some of them may have to take that test more than once but like i said they are eligible for fee waivers we also make sure that they're registered for college fairs our seniors take a college fair every fall cao we've done the hbcu and we've also done um college fairs virtually so they haven't missed out on a lot of the college fairs we collaborate with say yes liberty partnership upward bound gear up and step to add additional supports for college access and college readiness we also conduct parent and caregiver presentations we've done the ncaa eligibility um workshop we've done like i said college tours we've also done one called getting ready for college and then last month we had a wonderful presentation on finding
028money for college as you know it takes money and dollars to go to college we've also researched and provided students with scholarship information through fafsa completion and we also encourage students and parents to start looking at scholarships that are online once again we utilize say yes we have a college specialist in every school that assists the counselors with making sure that the students complete the fafsa research for scholarship dollars and the tap we provide students with letters of recommendations we all know that colleges request recommendations and we also assist students in writing letters for recommendations we have identified space at almost every high school that has a college access center and the purpose of that center is for students to go down and find out what's available for college to start applying for colleges and
029to meet with fafsa completion teams next slide mike so getting um students ready for college we don't forget about our sports athletes we support those students by connecting them with the core courses that ncaa require as you know students may want to play d1 or d2 schools but there is a requirement for them to play in order to be eligible so we make sure that the students are aware of those courses and to enroll them in those courses we also make sure that students stay focused on other courses just the ones not only the ones that they must focus on but everything we really really stress the students uh colleges are looking for well-rounded students which means that they need to be academically socially community service they just need to be well-rounded in order to
030get to college you're not just going to pick a student that's only focused on books we really want to make sure that our students are focused on everything we encourage student athletes to register and take an s.a.t or an act in at least the fall of their junior year we also have had like i said ncaa presentations to make sure that parents and students are aware of what that process is and entail and we also collaborate with the college course i mean high school coaches this year i worked with cicely owens and mike house we have one counselor at each high school who has been identified as the council liaison between ncaa the athletic department and the students so we're really making sure that the students and the parents and the coaches and everybody is
031on the same page and understanding what our students really need to be ncaa eligible our counselors also provide um like i said the college fairs we do the cal college fair every fall we use the hbcu and we do the dac act so every fall we also have a western new york consortium who comes in and do virtual tours with the students to make sure that they're aware of what those particular colleges have those colleges include most of our local colleges and and having um them to understand what those colleges and we also do instant admission ub nccc ecc or some and brian and stratton are some of the schools that have come in to do instant admission like i said we partnered up with gear up step and upward bound to make sure that
032our students receive additional supports these organizations also provide evening and saturday hours so we're really trying to cover all the basis to make sure students and parents have that information and have access to someone who can assist them with completing that fafsa we also have um our counselors have also made sure that they post on facebook instagram schoology they have counselor hours um where students can pop in and you and we collaborate with the english and social studies teacher who has all of those students to make sure that those students are completing applications as well so that completes my portion of what our counselors are doing and then making sure that our students complete the application i just want to let you know last year our graduating class for 2020 received over 18 million dollars
033just in scholarships and that does not include that yes so we're really pushing funding for our students to go to college and they are doing the scholarship applications and accruing those dollars so our next presenters will be say yes and betsy barron talking about the mentoring what say yes has um collaborated with us on and how they are supporting the college orange process for our seniors and juniors badly good evening if we can have the next slide please and i'm going to ask my colleagues tommy and shady to take this slide please all right thank you betsy and thank you for this opportunity uh first of all we're going to jump into our scholarly mentoring and uh what we have to do with that and uh who are transitioning into a post-secondary education it's looking
034at victory our we're looking at our juniors and they're we're in their third third and fourth quarter of the year and also our seniors somewhere around the first the first quarter also what we're looking to do that we're we're targeting them but uh we're looking for one-on-one mentoring matches and the they would match them with mentors who actually have come from the community who have a completed post-secondary education and also our professionals in their field uh what we also do with those mentors those mentors are actually trained so we give them actually four hours of training and the mentees also are trained in addition to the training we uh do also some of the work of some of the social emotional issues also that a young person needs to deal with and that transition from
035high school to college but our focus is not just on matriculation but it's also on persistence to make sure that they have the supports necessary in order not just to get into college but also to uh complete and then the uh the other piece i always want to highlight is that even in our training we interject our training with things like uh racial equity and inclusion training for our mentors so they can understand the the backgrounds and sometimes all the situations our young people are coming with understanding that colleges is it is academic but it's also other issues also surrounding that uh in addition to that what i like to kind of highlight is that we we point out all of our young people to all of the supports that buffalo public school provides such
036as you know the fafsa completion and and any internships or anything we could actually uh they're able to get into and we'll talk a little bit more about those internships but one thing i'd just like to say is that we also spend around making sure that as we walk with that young person that young person uh looking at the uh holistically at that whole young person and making sure that we're given the supports necessary to transfer uh to a transition over to post-secondary education i want to also talk about one of the other programs that we we work with it's breaking barriers and the breaking barriers is youth uh leadership council and that youth leadership council is made up of young men ages 12 to 24 and inside that group of young men are a
037number of young men who are boston public school students who are our juniors and seniors and we make sure we integrate our programming so those young men are also plugged into our mentoring program and our near peer program which uh shady will talk about that uh shortly and then as but as we uh do that we are actually staying in contact with them even during the virtual time we spent time to make sure that we're connecting with them on a regular basis uh even walking with them and pointing them to the areas in which they need to be looking at as they're preparing for the jump into uh post-secondary education so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take it over to uh uh and shady and shane's going to talk a little
038bit about near pier and what we're doing uh connection with the gates the gates hi foundation i am the near peer mentoring supervisor at say yes so the new mentoring program um just started and launched this year um and it is a part of the initiative that we received with our gate foundation grant um this program is specifically for seniors in high school so we take college students who are currently in college at a local buffalo college and they mentor our seniors in the buffalo public schools these um mentors that are also within the colleges have also graduated from a buffalo public high school so they um have experienced the environment of a local high school and understand the ins and outs of what it takes to take those next steps to matriculate into college
039and this also helps um not only into the matriculation and increase that um for our high school seniors to manipulate into college but also help persist more college students and make sure that they themselves are graduating and um focusing on bringing other students within their community up along with them um our program meets on saturday morning virtually because we meet virtually we were able to provide laptops for not only our mentors but also for all the seniors um in our program we're currently actually in the process of dispersing those laptops um i was able to disperse uh 15 of those laptops yesterday house to house we go to their homes drop them off to them um so that due to the pandemic um they're not out and exposing themselves into the community more than they
040need to for safety purposes so um i go right to their porch drop it off we text and i know that they they come out they grab their laptop and they text their thank you and we keep going um so that's been able to happen also when we meet on virtually on saturday mornings we talk about a certain going culture which we do twice a month on top of that the mentors which we do do a group model every mentor will max out at five mentees so when we are in our meeting we will meet together in a big group and then they will be brought into breakout rooms with their mentors and talk in a more intimate setting um part of that also is to um provide an academic support system which i tell
041the students that they're providing for each other um especially this year due to covet and not being able to have the norms and socialization that they're um used to disappear allows us to provide some of that and give them some stability in that area um and then it allows them also to start meeting people that could possibly be going to colleges that they will be going to attend um in the next year they also then the mentor and the mentees are required to contact make contact with each other one on one twice a month and um on average my mentors have um been in contact with their mentees two to three times a week um so they are definitely conversing and utilizing their mentors and asking questions based on um the common app that they're
042starting to fill out they're asking questions the college essays they're starting to fill out they're getting input back from their mentors and um so on and so forth asking other questions and then the mentors themselves um tommy talked about how we train on our mentors near peer mentors do a one week expensive training and they also have to do background checks fingerprinting they go through all those safety checks as well and then we'll also have to meet with myself twice a month and we do one-on-one where we go over their group of mentees and any questions and any assistance they may need to further help those students whether it's from um giving them advice on how to find more scholarships for them and so on and so forth next slide hi everyone again this is
043betsy berwin i'm the scholarship director at cs buffalo and i'm just gonna touch on the scholarship specific programs that we have i think most folks are familiar with our scholarship program and that's available for all students who are in the buffalo public schools who complete at least grades 9 through 12 and enroll at either a suny institution a cuny institution or at one of our more than 100 private institutions which are around the country we coordinate with the buffalo public schools council um division with martha younger um make sure that we are in touch with every single high school counselor um this whole us in front of students so that we can share the application the very simple application that must be completed to the eligibles for say yes and we provide both group and
044one-to-one support and on average we see about 94 of eligible seniors complete the application so we have a really good response rate for that in addition to the scholarships um and actually uh let me just say one thing a question that we have often gotten is how do we work with excelsior excelsior is the free college um program from new york state um that gets a lot of attention and it was launched as a scholarship for the middle class and when it was launched um we had a conversation with new york state and they said well we should actually be the last dollar after say yes fills in and and we were sort of like well we're a private scholarship so the state should be the should be there and then we should be the
045last dollar and the way that that was resolved is that new york state made a generous 10 million dollar gift to the say yes buffalo endowment and because of that the majority of students who are in buffalo are not required to rep apply for excelsior they don't need it because they are almost fully covered by say yes the only students who apply for an excelsior grant are those who do not have 100 eligibility so for example if you start high school um in the buffalo public schools and you were somewhere else before then you're only 65 eligible for your tuition to be covered in that case you would apply for an excelsior scholarship one thing that we've just noticed in the last week is um that they have updated their website and you may be
046getting questions about this the excelsior website is now has messaging that says basically due to kova that they are having some tight circumstances and may not be able to continue to provide scholarship aid so that's just a flag but here in buffalo we don't have much to worry about because of that generous gift that we receive from new york state and we're really filling in there in addition to the scholarships we also provide support in trying to apply for the financial aid like i spoke to you so with the tap at new york state and also the fafsa we have trained support staff that go into every single high school and right now of course all that's being done virtually these are students at the university at buffalo and many of them are bps grads
047themselves they're trained in how to do the completion and then they work one-to-one with students and their families we've seen year-over-year increases in these every year since we started this work in and something interesting to note is in the transition to virtual which took place as chairman heard mentioned in the spring we actually saw an increase continued increase both our fafsa and our tap completion rates and partially we think that is due to the virtual conversations that we were having when we were working with a student sometimes we need the parent there to complete a financial aid application and when we were in the home virtually it was much easier to do that gear up is a subset of our tap and fafsa work and this is a cohort model focused on a group of
048students that were in seventh grade in the 2014-15 school year and that's your class of 2020 who just graduated and they provide intensive college prep and high school transition supports to students that grant is still in play for some of the students that are still left finishing up their high school career and an exciting point is that it looks like there's going to be another round of grants for that um so we can have another co cohort of students participate that hopefully starting next year the last item i'll note is our college kickoff this is something that we have every year it's a one day conference style event for our graduating high school seniors and we do get some juniors and some parents that participate as well we work closely with the bps counseling team
049as well as all of the partners locally at the institutes for higher education to do different workshops on things like time management how to read a syllabus and what that is and we annually get about 150 students who participate in that this past year we had to do it virtually and we actually saw increased participation which was great the other thing that we did this past year that we hope to carry on moving forward is we saw the need with the switch to virtual learning for students to have access to a device so a laptop and we were able to start a fundraising campaign specifically for this and raised enough money to purchase laptops for any student that needed it so last year's graduating high school seniors anybody who needed a laptop we were able
050to provide them with same with the current college students that we were supporting and we're hoping to continue to do that as we move forward and again same with the laptops that shady talked about those students get to keep those laptops or theirs and i'm going to ask you to move the slide and i'm going to introduce my colleague daphne ross to close this out good evening everyone um daphne ross here with say yes buffalo i'm responsible for our marketing communications as well as the work of the gates grant that i will briefly just give you an overview of the initiatives that we are doing in partnership with the school district as well as our local college partners so last year we received a grant from the bill and melinda gates foundation for 2.9 million
051dollars and the purpose of that grant was really to increase our support of students making the transition from high school to college we have done a lot of work over the years and helping students get to college and helping with the high school graduation rate but it you know it's all for nothing if they get to college and they drop out because they don't have the supports that they need in order to remain in college so the work of this grant is really to strengthen that transition period for graduating buffalo seniors and we're doing that in a number of ways that i'll briefly go over the first mere fear of mentoring we already heard about from my colleaguey chady who's leading that work the second we also briefly touched upon this but we are piloting
052a college transition curriculum that buffalo public school students will take in their senior year um very um it is helping to to them to learn all the skills that they need to make that transition from high school to college and we're working very closely with kelly baldw thank you to kelly and her team for all of their work and ann botticelli for getting his curriculum off of the ground we're excited that we will have a pilot to launch um in january and then the course is a two-year course where students will take the second part in their first semester of their freshman year at any one of the local private colleges that are listed there in front of you but the four colleges that we are working with are buffalo state madai suny erie and
053villa maria college and this partnership is focused on those four schools because they represent the vast majority of where our scholars matriculate to most of our students who receive funding from say yes stay local so between those four colleges is over 75 80 percent of our population of students the next piece was to really um take we took a look at the work that has that happens on the bps side and we wanted to replicate that on the college campuses if you are familiar we have mental health clinics and mental health supports embedded in every buffalo public school to help our students who need support with their with their challenges that they're facing so we took that work and replicated it on the college campuses and we're able to create or expand the mental health
054services that are offered to our college students to get to college the support that they had at the bps level continue that care and that support and we also um on the k-12 side we have family support specialists that are there to help our families navigate their non-academic challenges and barriers to high school graduation and we did the same on the college campuses we were able to hire 11 counselors between those four campuses and they're embedded on the on the college campus to help students make that transition but to also help them persist and and get all the way to college graduation um as you know we are a strategy that is trying to help students from cradle to career so through the gates foundation support we are able to help students in that really
055critical transition period from high school to college but also through college completion as well and one last piece i'll mention is the data system that we are working on in partnership with the office of shared accountability our colleague chris lee is leading that work along with um ebony bullock's team and they are in the process of creating a data dashboard where student information can be monitored across every level from administrator to district-wide level and the goal of that system is for it to communicate between the k-12 dpf or with our type of partners so that once a student does enroll on a college campus the information and the support that they were able to receive at bps they can get that in college right now once the students graduates if they have supports and resources
056or they have learning needs that information does not translate to their college campus they have to seek out those supports on their own and that is one of the main reasons why students are not completing college so with this system the college will be able to see what support and service a student had at the bps level and will be able to offer that support and guidance on the college level and that is all that we had thank you colleagues well done very appreciated mr hurd i'll turn it back to you for more discussion okay um thank you so much for that wonderful presentation i'm sure that um we're gonna take this time to give our board members and uh i'd like to have an open forum with other administrative staff members as president to
057uh if there are any questions um you'd like to ask right now uh once again um i just wanna this this is a very important topic and um the future of our youth um trying to um uh find them great homes you know for uh collegiate opportunities uh it's very important this is this is what we work for and this is why you know we all take the positions the roads that we're in now and i just want to make sure that we reach out to every child that has an opportunity to go to college and we continue with this great work um i'm gonna start taking questions i do have a hand up right now from miss mccosy hello everyone um just i don't i don't even know if the word impressive is what
058i'm looking for i think that uh there's so much so many moving parts and all of them in a positive direction and i i think that um you know there's no issue here but making sure that whatever can be done you know from who we just heard from with communicating to the community what the opportunities are there's so many rich opportunities that we just want to make sure everybody knows about so i have two questions on like the collaboration effort one um how does everyone kind of make sure that everything is in place once you know the the say yes does their part to make sure that everybody understands and knows that connects with them or how are we utilizing those same folks that when i heard that you have um folks that are coming
059in to help out in your centers are they also uh liaisons to make sure this has been communicated to all the public on top of who they're speaking to so just making sure we're all in connection with the same programs you know like how does that look as far as like collaborating and then my real concern and question is there's so many opportunities for those who understand and know and where to go and how to get there but when you do the data person um the data mr hills had spoke about it that data person does it start there when you start realizing the folks especially because of covid the students who maybe are not able to connect or are not participating or we don't hear from um those students to me i'd like to
060know how do we collaborate uh across line say yes and all of these great opportunities how do we make sure that those students are not being lost are the data people starting you know making sure that the say yes folks are reaching out and you're all inconsistent um collaboration around these these students who maybe are not participating enough or we're realizing that they're not showing up in class you know what to me i'm looking for and you may not be able to answer it now but what is the process to make sure that everybody is following like a particular student you know john smith has not come to class for the last a month and you know who's following up with john smith on top of the data person is it these folks that are
061coming in from buff state you know are they also in collaboration with the data person to make sure that they're not missing any deadlines for these when the guidance counselors are working together like all these moving pieces they're fantastic but i'd like to know how do we collaborate and not miss the boat and connect when we have even just one student who's not you know especially with covet who's not really in participation not knowing what those reasons are and as far as the laptops go uh say yes and betty when you're talking about that absolutely fantastic and you know if there's any way we can make sure that everybody knows that this is a possibility if they don't have one moving forward like let me help figure that out because there's there's you know let
062us all know how we can make sure that's communicated so board member cody that is an excellent insightful framing of the issue that a lot of schools are working with the one benefit of having this new world of teams meetings and virtual connection is schools are able to have a lot more frequent team of meetings where they pull in everyone involved with intervening with students so once that once it becomes apparent in the in the data that the data champion sees this there's this kid falling through the cracks they bring it back to the team and the team has the student support members from the the special ed um counselor the social worker the the psychologists they're there the administrative team are there the uh say yes site facilitator will be part of that meeting
063um the family support specialist can be brought from counseling services and guidance the guidance counselors are part of that so they're able to convene in ways that we haven't been able to as easily in brick and mortar because there are so many other things going on and those teams are meeting very very regularly to make sure that the ball is being handed off from person to person to keep track of these kids that when their indicators are falling through the cracks very often you know it's one person who figures out how to connect that to them on social media very often schools are bringing into the team a teacher that has a strong connection with that student whether it's the family liaison an advisor or just a teacher they've always connected with and they're able
064to bring all those together and sometimes it's just getting about getting that one phone number that one phone number or the one new address or and being able to make that connection so it's really it's really all hands on deck but those cohort reviews and those dated champions are able to kind of single out those students that might be falling through the cracks that is really good to hear thank you so you're all at the table at the same time is basically what i was asking long drawn out question to get that answer thank you so much um thank you miss mccosy for your inquiry next we have another hand raised from city hall 807. well that's that's me terence okay uh lupatruci here i just had a question it's it's great that we get
065so many kids into college and programs these days uh there's been a market improvement thank you very much for all of your efforts i'm just wondering about the retention completion and graduation rate for these kids once they get to whether it's a program or a college or whatever it may be i'm just wondering if you're tracking that if you can speak a little bit to it where i can take that question this is betsy from say yes um so yes we absolutely are tracking that um and we work closely actually with the buffalo public school district to do that with the office of ability we get a list of high school seniors from them and we work with an entity called the national student clearinghouse which is really the preeminent data collection warehouse for student
066data in the post-secondary environment and what we've seen is the way they look at it is six-year cohorts so on average it takes a student at least three years to complete a associate's degree and at least five years to complete a bachelor's degree so they look at six-year cohort so they can see the full scope and as you know we've only been in place for eight years so we have our first round of six year data that compares the class of 2013 to the class of 2012 and we do see a couple percentage point increase in the retention and actual the completion of degrees so we are seeing that um that increase in persistence but then also in actually completing a degree and a follow-up is it i know that that's one thing that sometimes
067sunni sometimes glosses over is their uh graduation rate for students that matriculate is it higher than the sunni rate just in general i actually don't know the answer name or i don't know um the answer to that question but we could look that up and get back to you all right thank you okay um we have a couple more hands up next we have um board president sharon belton copman thank you hi everyone thank you for your presentation it was very informative i appreciate the work that you're doing my questions basically are dealing with the data associated with this i have questions of any number of seniors do we currently have how many are on on the path to graduate um how many credit hours i know somewhere there has to be a report here
068that's if you're doing if you're meeting with these people but our young people certainly there's data that's available i'm curious to know what the true picture reflects i'm also curious to know how many of our children who graduated last year attended college this year we are we uh at a low are we at a high where are we with that so it's great i love the report but um speaks volumes and um if these supports are in place um in each school then there i i would imagine that there are for each school and so i'd like to know when the board can have a copy of those uh reports so that we can see what's going on inside our our buildings uh concerns that the uh community is stating that uh we're losing our
069uh school students during this period of time and if it's not true then i want to be able to have the information to support that and if it is then i i figured we we would do some extra uh things to try to reduce that so um does the data exist is the question and when can we see it yes absolutely uh president common uh toyah are you on board are you there toya wilson yeah yes i'm on i'm online could you just sort of re-emphasize what we've been discussing in staff meetings about how we are from the very beginning of the year uh providing an array of supports for our seniors in particular uh and how we're keeping that data we started it last year much more rigorously than we've ever had in the
070past and that's why our graduation rate got to 76.2 because we were tracking every single student and making sure they were in the proper cohort and making sure they were getting the services and supports that they need so that was last year and now this year and that was last year we started in the spring or started later in the year actually we started in january and got those results this year we started from the very beginning of the year and we expect the equally impressive results um so so what what can you say to this issue or this narrative that that we're losing students or somehow we're not addressing the needs of our students because you would correct that please so absolutely um that is the work that was mentioned through that graduation tracker
071that has become really critical work and so it actually we have the ability to drill down on every single school to look at the the true cohort because the graduation cohort is actually defined by when you start ninth grade so it's not necessarily by your grade level it's necessarily when you start ninth grade the state expects you to be graduating in four years and so when you pull up our data dashboard you can drill down to each school and you can see where we are in every single um category of tracking students by credit by um by course that they need by regions exams that they need um or whether they re received exemptions and so it really does have a really a good breakdown on are these students on track for college success that
072have we gotten them to aps what's going on with that um are these students on track to graduate to make sure that we can get them off to the next level to be successful who is looking like they're slightly off track slightly off track what can we do to help improve what whatever we need to to make sure that these students are getting back on track and then the students who are our triage students how do we really look at okay something really is out of whack with these students how what's the plan to support them so when you look at the overall numbers um you see that and i'm just i'm on the data dashboard now as we speak um and and this is live data that is new to our our principles this
073is something that um ebony bullock um in the os osa plume has really worked hard to roll out and it's impressive it's it's something that um the principals were exposed to and have gotten trained on and they are really loving it so look at the total cohort and it looks like 2480 and then it gives me a breakdown by school of how many kids actually fall into that category but then i can go deeper and i can drill down to individual students to look at what's going on specifically and that's the the cohort review that um david hills mentioned earlier i call it the war room because we walk in and everybody has a laptop open a piece of information about what's going on with that student and that we're referencing it we're looking at
074okay these two students look like they're on track because they have regions exams but okay their tenants have fallen off in the last three weeks something's going on and then we dig deeper there's something going on with the family okay so how are we helping that's that's a that's a true example of a couple of students who are sitting in our high schools so just that team really does dig deep to make sure that as we look at these cohort numbers we continue to try to connect everything to each other and be successful thank you victoria i think that was very comprehensive president cottman do you have any follow-up for that yes i do i i'm glad i do believe that each high school and their support for each student and i don't think that
075the community doesn't think that the people in the schools are not doing their jobs conversation is is that we they have seen i've been told that there's an increase of the amount of students who are working now um during these times and that they have not been able to maintain their uh so my question my next question is what percentage of the students are on track to graduate okay since you've got a uh uh the information there uh uh and my question is coming from corporate america is are we approaching this in a uniform way so there's a problem at one school and the principal leaves and another principal come in and pick up where that principle was and trying to move things to the next level because my concern is is making sure that
076yes we had a great graduation rate uh last year uh thank goodness for covet we didn't have to take any tests so we were able to boost things up in a big way it'll be the same way but in moving forward percentage of our students or do we need to spread the alarm to the community that our children are not our seniors are struggling and they need support it's not just a buffalo public school issue this is a community issue when our children don't graduate and aren't successful i want some ownership city if there is a trend going on that they can be somewhat held somewhat accountable as well in the community to uh wrap around these individuals with some support as well i'm interested in the data if the data is out there i'd
077like to see what it looks like so um president cottman if i could i in my haste i i'm looking at the dashboard and i jumped right in prior to and i'm looking at it again and the number is actually 2608 that's in this cohort and when we look at who's on track we really want to look at who at this point has 16 credits in three regions because those students we know are going to graduate and right now we have 1 932 students who fall into that category which puts us at 74 percent on traffic i'm talking about great that's what i'm talking about now we can brag on that yes we can i can i that point that we have we are reaching at least 70 almost 75 three-quarters of our students i'm
078on target to graduate and we're still and we have issues with 25 and we're working those as well so that's that that we can work with yeah and that's much further ahead than we were last year so we expect with the systems we have in place and that doc miss wilson has bought along with her colleagues and they're sharing best practices at their principal meetings they will bring that number up considerably from there so we're on this every day every week all throughout the year uh thank you for that question and i think you do also president copman is have periodic updates on just that in some in our boardwalk sessions you know maybe once a month or every two months every two months uh say could you just bring us up on the senior
079class okay and so you would also have in that your information about the amount of students who are the percentage of seniors that are actively enrolled in school as far as coming to uh to attend on a daily basis those numbers are there and things like that so yeah yeah the dashboard is a is a very it's a i have to i really am impressed with the work that um ebony and her team have done in a very short time um it's a really comprehensive dashboard and so there's different components of it and you can really you can dig deep into attendance that's one component it's just it's on a different page on what i'm on right now but then you can you can sort to make sure that you look at just students in
080certain cohorts or by grade level because remember i talked about cohort being different from grade level and that matters you have to really switch your thinking when you're talking about the two um but i will say this is this number of uh 19 32 and 74 that number is going to fluctuate and change but just as we started last year we started lower than where we landed and we ended up higher than the 74 so definitely we are on on track to um to beat the graduation results we had last year to improve thank you thank you for your work appreciate it okay um thank you if you don't have any questions please take your hands down and the next person that we have up is um board member at large larry scott so my
081first reaction is this is just very insightful information the presentation the discussion that we're having um i think betsy you mentioned some advantages of this remote approach um in reaching students and reaching f families you know there is this narrative out there that this remote instruction is just doom and gloom for our students and it seems like that's not an entirely accurate picture of what's occurring and i'm just wondering if just generally speaking there's other advantages that staff and say yes buffalo staff have experienced um in this real remote model that seem to be an advantage right now for our students and for our families colleagues that is what your board topic in the student achievement section where you see first marking period in review we are specifically going to address a wide array of
082emerging practices that can you hear me okay a wide array of emerging practices that are with evidence uh proving to be uh actually much more helpful to students than we ever imagined that that whole topic is going to be devoted to that and you're going to hear a very impressive uh presentation backed with specific data and evidence that frankly flips that whole negative narrative on his head about what's going on with remote learning especially in terms of buffalo public school uh so we're we're gonna you're gonna get an inside look back with data about where we are and where we still need to go we know none of this is perfect but when we do come back to in-person learning we will have now a double-edged tool package of of in-person instruction that is that
083is going to become exemplary because we're learning so much in the remote and we're staying focused on our instructional priorities and our walkthroughs but then we also have these emerging practices and data with with in-person learning so great question uh larry but if you could just hold to right after that jesse ketchum uh presentation part or or topic item then we go into that and that'll answer all of those questions for the listening audience and for you board members [Music] okay thank you um i don't believe they have any more questions up right now but i do have a few questions i would like to ask myself and uh one of the things that um that i want to refer to is about having a aggressive approach by our guidance department i know that say
084yes is doing a wonderful job assisting the district and helping with these goals i mean it's phenomenal just to hear the the number of um programs that's being offered right now and through grants and through um working with the buffalo public staff but i like to know um is there a i requested a list of contacts from our guidance department that reaches our students that's that's talking to our students about college education and scholarships um do we have anything like that um when you say a list of who's talking to the students other than the counselors yes the guys counselor and and the um well first the first question is the guidance department just to make sure each guy's counselor is working in each school is having contacts with the students yes they utilize the
085schoology and they also utilize teams to make sure that they are interacting with the seniors especially to make sure that applications are filled out so they are um actively engaged with students mr herb um on a weekly daily basis they also have team meetings with them they also push into like i said um the senior classes to make sure that they're communicating what is needed where they are and they also do robocop homes so they are doing um active communications to make connections okay i did talk to a couple of students that did say they haven't had any communication with their guidance department and i asked to call their principals um to um rectify that that situation um just to get the beat on that i just want to make sure that that every guidance
086counselor is actually reaching out to every student along with the programs the other thing too is you can have them contact me um have the students contact and parents contact me as well so okay um the second question is um uh is there a list of programs that's offered at each school can we have a list of that because we know that some schools have some programs and it's under some grants but just so we can uh have a understanding what's being offered at each school to make sure our students are being treated yeah we can get you a list please thank you um another question that i have um referred to um campus visits i know this year it was it was impossible to um do the campus visits but how did in the
087past how many children normally works with the campus visits we're doing virtual tours now okay so typically um majority of our seniors take a college tour in the fall and remember we have the big knack fair in the spring so that includes 10th 11th graders because typically by um spring our seniors have already made up their mind so we can start bringing in the 10th and 11th graders for the knack act fair in the fall we provide blessings depending on how many students participate i know mckinley used to have eight buses so we used to have a robust um amount of students that attend that knack fair in addition to like i said the uh western new york consortium that comes in every fall they also bring in their counselor admission officers sit down and
088have contact with those students as well we've also done hbcu tours down the road in rochester we provide busing for that so we've um also had the empower mature that was this past um november on the weekend of the 20th and the 21st we are really and say yes has provided busing and transportation to different college tours as well as young as seventh and eighth graders so we're really starting to get those kids on board a lot sooner okay well uh what i would like to see is possibly um on the buffalo public school web website and there could be an actual link that goes to um working with college and college tours uh working with scholarships and um and working with um helping with college admissions um taking tests um it will be nice
089to have a separate department or a separate link on that web page that that a parent can go to and see what what programs are offered and um to see know how can they help their you know children um you know in college as a creature have you looked at the guidance website i did take i did take a look but i'd like to see the link on the bps webpage that will go directly to it okay so you want it on the district website yes okay yes thank you we can do that and we could probably also connect with office of parent and family engagement too because they use the um tie-in so we can ask them to put one on their link on their page so they can that connect to the bps
090i mean the guidance website too thank you that'd be wonderful um are we able to wrap up mr heard because we are uh a hour and a half into this uh meeting yes ma'am just a couple more questions thank you um do we have data on how many our children took the psat or sats this past year um you mean 20 20 i mean 2019 yes yes i can get you those numbers okay thank you so much numbers of 10th and 11th graders that's the psats okay and um uh you mentioned um instant administration for your speaking of the university of buffalo um could you um go more into that about instant um administration it's the admissions um they will have college admission officers come to the um district per school and they do instant
091admissions on the site so evaluating the transcript and telling the students that they're accepted you'll be there's probably a little bit more in detail for ub but as far as ecc and nccc brian and stratton they do them all the time so we always have a set up there that doesn't verify uh uh specify uh guarantee the mission though instead admit it does it does okay and um just just to close out um but the say yes program you know that but yes scholarships and how they work with the suny system and that to say yes i also work with private colleges across the country and not bcu's can you go a little bit more detailed into that and how can a child apply for a private or hbcu college and also um the monies
092that the family would have to put just in case they do get accepted to one of these out of state colleges or universities well i can talk well right now say yes only um has two hbcus on their list that's in north carolina south carolina benedict and um bennett college i can actually update you on that number ms younger it's actually we now are up to five so we've got benedict jennings simmons college in kentucky paul quinn college and more house oh more houses on there wow so we have benedict simmons called lake courthouse and there was one more i'm sorry he's talking at the same time bennett okay thank you so much um once again um uh first i'd like to thank mr david russ for putting together such a wonderful team over at
093say yes buffalo and um also um dr hills for your presentations um miss younger um uh miss baron uh tommy mclean um miss shady and mrs ross thank you again for taking the time to help put this presentation together and inform our parents about the opportunities for our children and working with our district uh i believe we have one more hand raise is that not no it's not okay thank you again once again and as of right now uh we're going to end the educational support committee meeting and turn over them to dr kathy evans brown over student student achievement thank you all thank you very much very thorough i'm familiar with some of the pre-college programs i was one of the first directors of liberty partnerships program at the university back in the day
094so i'm getting ready to tell my age but they're still viable and that's a good thing mr heard okay so now we're going to get into student achievement uh four things actually to cover jesse ketchum food choice resolution period and review emancipate curriculum and overview and reopening of schools update first uh we're gonna look at uh sometimes when we look at remote learning and i think just you know globally we look at or we think about putting a child at a computer period what we don't say is kids are learning live from educators teachers who are actually teaching them and so it's a different uh feel and it's real so um i think you know with that explanation it provides more of a transparency about what we mean when we talk about remote learning dr
095cash is going to get more into that but i needed to get that off my chest and then we also as a district um talk about what we really do we do some good work you know we have 52 hub learning hubs in this community and you don't hear about that but these are hubs that young people can go physically every day and do remote learning um and with a teacher and also um get meals and um the parents can go to work and feel good about their day because their kids are being supervised okay so those are two things i wanted to get off my chest um we talked about the jessie ketchum school choice resolution discussion this is from our november november 18th board meeting um that lou pertussi and sharon belton cottman
096our president co-authored um there's a couple of us that also signed on the resolution i was one then mccoosie and paulette wood able at the time um because uh some board members felt like it couldn't be done first secondly there were there were you know legalities that kind of thing so we tabled it so today i want to refer to lou before i turn it over to dr castro thank you kathy yeah i've received it kathy myself and some of the other board members have reached out to me about the resolution we've made some progress in terms of we've do we've been able to identify a process whereby we believe that by moving the data up that we'd be able to accomplish this goal but there's still some um based on discussion that we're having
097one thing we still need to work out is for some of our schools that start admitting children in fifth grade how those are going to be handled so as the conversation continues we still have a little bit more so at this point uh you know we're going to keep it on the table but we're just not ready to go through into a deep discussion right now because the first marketing period the emancipation curriculum and the reopening are going to take a lot of time so we really want to devote to after you based on my conversation with dr evans brown that those are going to be our three priorities for this evening cash i'm going to now provide you with the forum um do you have any update on this jesse ketchum school choice resolution
098at all um i do in addition to the technical issues colleagues that you know were stated we get that and i think we can we can work those through um what i like about it is it needs to be part of a whole cloth strategy to start to increase uh the number of minority children that get access uh earned access into into our criterion schools um and so that was what i thought was a good i why the resolution was such a good idea is that um instead of just saying we need to set aside seats for minority children well we need to set aside some seats for students that we know uh can succeed at city honors and happen to be minority uh these students have already proven that they're excellent students in in
099all of the array of uh criteria that we that we acknowledge excellence so i thought it was it was a good idea to say absolutely we should say now once we see what what makes a difference and what number we need to set to is it two two set asides is it seven set asides is it fifteen set aside and then let those students uh who want to go to city honors uh go uh you know regardless of whether it's uh after the end of the the eighth grade year it's been set aside uh now what i've what i've noticed is that most of the the students in the jesse ketchum uh population they do get their choices uh they tend to get their first and second choices is what i've seen now we'll look
100at that some more but i love the idea as part of a larger strategy because you're going to hear about it soon a larger strategy of how to start increasing the number of minority children who who deserve to be in city honors and can take seats there and start to offset this long uh inequity and discrimination that has occurred in parts of our system and parts of our system so that that's why i want the resolution to stay viable uh and then become part of our strategy in that regard okay thank you our members for sponsoring that there's a couple of hands on president copman followed by dr rivera and so um thank you madam chair i just wanted to be clear that when the resolution was written okay and any resolution that's presented to
101this board viewed by legal before it is put to before it is put before this board and so in order for the resolution to um get clearance our council nate kuzman reviewed the resolution i'd also like to say that some of uh there are a large number of students who are not minority part of the jessie ketchum award um and i want to make sure that you understand that this is an academic uh set aside so to speak and it is acceptable and it is legal okay uh it is it is uh uh warranted based on a condition other than race and so it is acceptable so i wanted to be clear with that um of the that are going on now are the same issues that would have gone on had the resolution been
102passed dr cash as listed in the final paragraph and staff would bring back to the board their recommendation on how to implement and expedite this so just wanted to put that in there because there was some some misunderstanding that may not have been legal me as a legal document a legal request thank you uh dr rivera thank you very much mostly i wanted to just make a comment that i really feel like resolutions such as these are critical especially since we recently passed an equity resolution i think that doing as many ways as possible multiple ways to increase equity and opportunity for historically underserved populations in the district is critical this would be one piece but i like the idea of an expansion of thinking about these things about ways in which to make this
103happen to recognize as president common points out academic excellence but also to identify students who have the potential for academic excellence and because of the ways in which the system has worked haven't necessarily had the opportunity to be recognized and to give them that opportunity to move forward to access all of the different academic opportunities especially and this is an especially important thing to say on the heels of our last conversation about say yes and about access in college and uh retention and success in college it's all of a piece oh i look forward to working more on this with everyone really important thing and i think that you should be thinking large right this is one we should think about what it looks like in fifth grade to do this kind of initiative we
104should be thinking about what it looks like to identify students who need this kind of support and opportunity because our students are very talented all of our students are very talented and they deserve that recognition okay thank you i don't see any more hands as relate to the jesse ketchum school choice lou you have your hand up in city hall from the last time i'm sorry dr evans brown i took it down thank you um and so yeah i think you know as a district we always have to think high uh standards for our children we have very talented children in this district and we want to give them every opportunity um of of choice with that said this is going to be an item on the student achievement agenda uh until the it's resolved
105so moving on i want to now uh forward the next three piece points actually to dr cash um and he can introduce how he's going to uh present that with his team thank you uh chairman uh evans brown this next topic is called first marking period in review and i want to set this up a little bit if you recall we started the year in remote instruction and we all stood together out in front of city hall and basically outline the rationale for why we would start remotely at that time coming out of the summer even and beginning into no september we were starting to see an uptick in cases and we just felt that it would be good to start our school year remotely and then after about four to six weeks we would
106take a look at it see where we were how we were going what was some of the promising practice and what were some of the areas that we needed to be especially vigilant about four to six weeks came and it became clear that it was not a good idea to stop and start something different for a large school system in the middle of the first quarter we were starting to get some momentum staff was starting to get uh stability and connection with their students and their first teacher and i made it the recommendation to you and you consensus supported it to continue throughout the first quarter with remote learning so that's where we are we're past the first quarter we have some data that have begun to come in in relation to it but most
107importantly we've been working tirelessly uh day and night through the weekend through the week with our principals with our teachers to learn about their experiences and what we needed to do as a district to continue to support our great teaching staff who who have just been magnificent this quarter in a way that i've never seen before and then our principal and administrative teams who have been magnificent this quarter in ways that i've never seen before so i asked staff to work closely with their principals i've been meeting with the principals i've been meeting with teachers and groups and leaders and all kind of folks myself but more importantly i wanted the staff to tell us what they were seeing and finding with this experience because the narrative of remote learning doesn't work or remote learning
108we know is no good it's not good for our children folks who don't who aren't in the classroom and aren't doing this work every day tend to make that statement a little bit too quickly for me comes a little bit too quickly and what i what i what they need what we need to do is start sharing what actually is occurring and what some of the promising practices that are emerging that we can then use to help students grow and grow their whole rest of their life because just like we talk about certain things are a new normal learning how to be adept and facile in the use of remote learning and in a virtual environment that's the new normal that's the new normal in the business community that's the new normal and work organizations
109that's the new normal inside homes and all these folks are at home working because their businesses and their organizations say you can work remote for the rest of the year um students need to get get into that too because their first job may require them to be really really good uh with remote kinds of work so that's what you're gonna hear tonight it we don't buy uh that narrative that this isn't working this isn't good um and all of that stuff we are at this work every day this is our profession this is what we do now we know it's not the best best of all worlds to be right in front of a great teacher that's always going to be the best thing and that's what we want for our students in the best
110of all worlds but while we're in this situation which is extraordinary and you'll hear me say more about it later then let's make the best of what we've been dealt okay and so let's hear about that and so i'm really really excited to turn it over to our inimitable see that that's a hard word and i learned it inevitable dr cassandra wright who will speak on behalf of many many colleagues tonight and her energy and her passion for this work is second to none and she will go through about six or seven slides but colleagues what i want you to listen carefully for carefully for is her notes and her voiceovers and her evidence and her uh data points that she's going to start sharing with you to show not that it's perfect not that
111we say it should surprise teaching but i'll be darned if that narrative that is out there is correct okay and we make that right now right tonight right today so dr wright take it over knock it out thank you so very much dr cash madam chair dr evans brown madam president cotman board members and colleagues i am excited to talk to you tonight in quantifiable data points around the positive wonderful and impactful practices that are happening in our schools on a daily basis mike do you mind putting up the power points please so i'm going to talk to you about our first marking period in review the next slide so we know that we have been operating under a theory of action the next slide please mike we know that great leadership great teaching and
112great community sports support is what makes schools successful now i found a quote by judy smith who is a renowned crisis manager what she said was there's always an opportunity with crisis just as it forces an individual to look inside of themselves it forces a company but for public schools to re-examine its policies and practices and that's what we have started doing as a of mark 13 that motion to begin in online instruction for over 30 000 students first i want to acknowledge that we are in an unprecedented time who would have known that we would be in this space where we were catapulted from the comfort of normalcy into a space where we were all struggling to navigate now during these times anxiety kicks in and emotions cause people to feel unsettled but i
113need to let you know that there are members of our community who have remained clear-headed and steadfast in their mission to ensure that every single child under their care receives the best possible form of education in these surreal circumstances our school leaders our administrators our principals our assistant principals our teacher leaders they have done phenomenal work so we know that necessity necessity is a mother of invention and our building leaders have done an amazing job creating and keeping in step with emerging best practices now and when we return to in-person instruction so during this presentation we're going to be talking about this notable work that has been done under the leadership of the board of education and superintendent cash so we have we'll talk about student and family engagement remote instruction equity and accountability equity
114and opportunity kudos and opportunities for improvement student and family engagement so when we think about student and family engagement we have to talk about the multiple types of outreach we engage in use of personnel to make sure that our families are taken care of and technology well we used to talk about student engagement in terms of events open houses occasions signing sheets but now we have to think outside of the box around what the student and infant and family engagement mean for over 32 000 students in a completely online forum number one we said we need to make sure that they have technology all of our students from pre-k to grade 12 have devices 97 of our students have devices and estimate three percent of our students use their own device thirty thousand two hundred
115forty four students had devices out of thirty one thousand one hundred and forty eight students 94 percent of pre-k k and 1 have their devices and 98 of grades 2 through 12 have their devices we realized that families had needs they they weren't able to connect through to the internet so we distributed 4743 hot spots and we're still distributing interconnect kits from spectrum kits as of last week were delivered now it's not enough to make sure that we have connectivity and devices we wanted to make sure that we saw our kids so we needed to verify their attendance our attendance is holding strong overall at 95 percent in new york city their attendance is 85.5 remote and 82.9 in person rochester's current attendance is at 80 percent in yonkers their first week of learning was
116at 85 now that we know that our kids are attending we wanted to make sure that they were logging in so schoology usage are is around 21 to 25 unique logins daily we have to note that our kids are not just logging in during the school hours we ran the reports our kids are logging on at night in the middle of the night on the weekends on the days off they are constantly engaged students can also enter instruction directly through teams and so we're not sure that we are actually capturing all of our students via schoology this is an opportunity for improvement for us to make sure that our systems are talking so that we can capture all of the data accurately what we know though is minimally 21 000 to five thousand unique schoology
117logins daily we know that there was a concern about our children who may be missing we gauge who may be missing according to our senses reports every single year not just this year every single year we have students who are enrolled to come to school and then they change their minds they go other places and then there's this process of sending for reports receiving evidence that the students have left and then reconciling those records what we know is that according to data dashboard 1176 students are in census out of over 32 000 that are enrolled last year that census number was one thousand one one of the challenges is that because everything is online and because there are just varying systems of operations across the nation we are seeing a lag in response time we're
118requesting records so for those families that are incenses there's outreach and supports so we send people to home teachers go to home your a's and assistants go to homes principals go to homes to a teacher assistant principals go to home people are knocking on doors school resource officers social workers we do make sure that we find each and every child we're knock on the doors of the neighbors we talk to the kids about if they see their colleagues their classmates in addition to making sure that our students are engaged academically we wanted to make sure that they were well that they were fed that they they were okay so we're told to say that in the first quarter we delivered two families over one million one hundred fifty six thousand one hundred twenty nine good
119fists and one million one hundred seventy one thousand 332 lunches were distributed from school sites i want you to know also there are families that reached out to their principals or to the teachers that they have connections with and they said i i can't get that at a baby at home it's wet it's cold outside so we have our family and navigators or our say yes navigators our counselors our teacher aides and assistants delivering meals to families we are making sure that we are engaged with families in every way possible not just academically but we're trying to make sure that their needs are met or that we are calling family in infinite campus the teachers were asked to make sure that when they reach out to families they log that interaction to date we have
120over 21 392 pages of recorded parent contacts in infinite campus each of those pages log about seven to eight contacts our families are important to us and our teachers our administrators are going above and beyond to make sure that they are connected and engaged those are just the logs that are an infinite campus we can't quantify how many text messages phone calls pop-up visits that we receive from parents to teachers from teachers to parents and let me tell you our students are definitely exhibiting a significant amount of agency i can't tell you the number of principals who have said these kids are calling me they're reaching out to me in schoology they're reaching out to me in teams because they want to talk about their situations their academic status our students are also a part
121of this and we're very proud of that we have continued with formalized and informal parent conferences over our platforms the district has set up call call centers so if a parent can't reach a school there's a there's a call center that they can reach and those calls are answered each and every one of them we're just so proud of all of the connections that teachers students administrations are making with our families there's two subgroups that we pay very close attention to and that would be our special education population in our multilingual population we do a specialized things for them for a special education we designate a parent a parent coordinator to support parents of students with disabilities we've made sure that we've conducted online surveys to determine what parents are interested in accessing in person
122and related services so we can implement them when we are able we have hosted forums where we have invited students of special needs to come in and talk to us so that we can hear their voice our multilingual education partners we made sure that there is full usage of talking points talking points allows families to text school and staff with in their preferred language via the cell phone to date we have over 11 691 talking point messages sent to families by teachers and their the families are talking back we have over 924 messages from the the families to staff we're really very proud of that so we're not sure where this this narrative of people not being engaged is coming from but we're very pleased to support you to support our narrative with quantifiable data
123that indicates that we are absolutely connecting with our parents why because they are important to us i'd like to go on to remote instruction let's let's talk about online learning well um can we go to the next slide please there you go okay so we're 100 online while we're online we're making sure that we are culturally and linguistically responsive we also know those of us in our positions we are challenged by the isolation we are challenged by the onset of shorter days we wake up and it's dark and by 4 30 stark again we are all challenged and if we are challenged and we know that we have lives of a level of privileged we are so incredibly concerned about our children so we have made sure that we have combined all of these aspects
124to ensure that we develop innovative teaching and learning strategies to engage our online student personnel so there was a question about well how many teachers are actually providing live virtual remote learning we have 3 670 teachers to date 3 teachers have developed and delivered live remote instruction our teachers are engaged with the students and i have to say that small remainder those those are teachers that have the title teacher but they are instructional coaches they are attendance teachers they're not necessarily individuals that would be engaging with students but they engage with adults and families our guidance counselors are online doing sessions our sst teams their online with sessions with kids our educators are engaged the department of the technology department working with their skilled technicians and their student staff they developed tools and tips to
125support teacher and student and family efficacy i'm not sure if you all remember but we have a tech squad of student leaders who conducted professional development for families and kids so that they wouldn't find such a steep learning curve now based on principal input the district had the foresight to procure several programs to accelerate student learning so we have a learning management system which is schoology we listened to the principals and the parents and we narrowed the learning management system from the varying formats we had in march april may and june to one and now it's schoology schoology allows teachers to curate academic content and allow students to access and submit lessons the message teachers and teachers provide feedback we have teams teams allows for virtual conferences we have lexia lexia provides literacy intervention tailored
126to the unique needs of students k through 12. we have moby max it provides mathematics interventions tailored to the unique needs of students in zern zurich provides instructional video standards-based practice fluency practice tests to match each module lesson in grades one through six mayan provides a vast collection of e-texts including numerous culturally and responsive texts we have online licenses for k through 8 science and social studies programs and we've made sure that we purchased and distributed grafting calculators so that kids could use them at home the district spared no expense to make sure that our families had the best in class online learning programs so that our kids could be engaged to a high extent we need to also acknowledge that there are parents who really want paper or books so we have ongoing materials
127distributions at the schools so the school send home materials manipulatives books art supplies athletic supplies all sorts of supplies so that kids have tangible school-based supplies to support their learning at home they're learning during synchronous or their learning during asynchronous time the principal saw a need and they said hey this is a fast moving machine they developed instructional handbooks for teachers they conduct ongoing professional developments for synchronous and asynchronous instruction they've incorporated project based instruction the the office of teaching and learning has worked very closely with tntp developed a list of look fors in the instructional priorities so what does good instruction look like online versus in brick and mortar we really have to sit and reevaluate that so and in her team working with principals and coaches they work collaboratively to develop a list
128of what you should be looking for principals and assistant principals and coaches when you are supporting online instruction on that note i want to say that our chief academic officer i want to get a quick shout out to school number 59 she visited 59 and saw some exemplary practices there i think that board members will be very proud to know that the new york state education blog featured our own build academy because of the exemplary online instruction strategies that they saw that's fire they could have gone anywhere in new york state they landed in buffalo and captured the wonderful things that are going on again i don't know where that other narrative is coming from but i'm presenting you with quantitative evidence to demonstrate to you that while this is not optimal i'm not saying
129that it is necessary though so while we are in this state of what is necessary to ensure the safety and the education of our students we are doing we are watching our principals do amazing things so clri it didn't stop it ramped up our teachers our school teams our equity champions are developing and implementing school-wide online strategies they're not stopping at anything to make sure that our children are respected and valued this on this crisis has helped people who have been in a privileged state have some level of understanding of what it's like to feel isolated of what it's like to feel powerless and those feelings have catapulted them into making sure that our children are recognized for being the phenomenal diverse population that they are so our principles are ensuring that their teachers and
130their staff are able to view videos from dr emdin whenever they want to there are having book studies on books like cultivating jesus there's active participation in opportunities like we had today with dr x kennedy it was phenomenal and our teachers and administrators are taking what they're learning from clri and making sure that they are supporting our families who are in need we know what the demographics of buffalo looks like and we know that there is brilliance in all of our students and we know that we have to work hard to make sure that they all shine and that's what's happening social emotional learning wow i don't think i'll be able to say enough about this but i do want you all to know that dr tanja williams and her team they have done a
131phenomenal job of making sure that the school counselors are fully engaged we have school counselors that are holding grade level meetings they are actively engaged in observing not only our students but our faculty and staff we're making sure that there are still cultural enrichment activities or virtual performances via our artistic departments there's virtual pbis schoology badges virtual awards celebratory assemblies we have school psychologists who created short yoga visit videos for for students and staff they're making sure that there's daily announcements with student celebrations sending home certificates of perfect online attendance for the first quarter paraprofessionals are engaged and they are taking self-placed courses so that they can be a part of this community we don't want them to feel marginalized everything that we do is first to make sure that we are taken care of
132emotionally so that we can be there completely for the children again our sensitive subgroups of the special education students and our multi-language learners our special education department their psychologists hold office hours to support parents who need assistance for their children's behavior or challenges with adjusting to what we have to do to keep them safe our multilingual department is having a heavy focus on our native american families now there have been 60 56 near pot activities launched and posted on the native american resource program web page there's been coordinated field trips to the smithsonian museum of the american indian in new york city we're doing everything that we can to make sure that people feel valued and included and botticelli is going to talk with you about equity and accountability good evening i'm going to begin
133by speaking a little bit about grading for equity we know that we need to be cognizant that many students have been adversely affected by the pandemic we don't have a way to know what every student is experiencing but we do know that many students feel the stress and have struggled in many aspects including academics because of the pandemic so knowing this we took a step back and reevaluated our existing board regulation which governs the way we grade and we made it uh some modifications to that practice to better um adapt to the needs of our students so we've allowed a broader window for students to submit assignments so you might see some students receiving an incomplete for the marking period that means that they have some missing assignments that might have caused them to receive
134a score that would have been below a 65 and we're working with those students we're creating plans to support those students and allowing them to submit those assignments so that they can recapture their grade schools are in the middle of creating action plans for students who might be struggling for various reasons who might have had trouble completing work or connecting with the school during the first quarter we have an increased emphasis on communication with families because we know that the families are our partners in this work and that we need their support to help their students be successful so it's very important whenever we see that a student might have some missing assignments or might be struggling with particular concepts in class we want to reach out to those families to make sure that we
135connect and together work toward a plan to support the student for that reason we also have office hours in place in our schools so often when students are working asynchronously they're able to log in if they have questions and they can connect with the teacher of that course or the teacher can pull small groups to help support those students but we know that that is only one of the many strategies that schools are going to have to implement to make sure that all of our students are successful we've also added additional reporting tools in our infinite campus system that includes a grading snapshot a record of incomplete assignments a parent-teacher correspondence tab that my colleagues alluded to earlier so when we reach out to families we can make keep a record of that contact and
136then we can go back to that to make sure that we've connected with families and we can also monitor gradebook usage and all those tools support our principles to help the teachers who are helping our students so it's one of the many ways that we're trying to make sure that we we cross every dot every on and we don't let any students fall through the cracks based on that new work we have collected some preliminary data uh related to first quarter marking period grades we're still working with schools to verify everything but right now we've been able to pull a data sample of one excuse me 113 342 grades in the four core subject areas so that would be english math science and social studies um and so within that 113 000 grades we see
137that 75 of our students have received either an outstanding or a satisfactory which are used in our primary grades or the equivalent equivalent of an a b c or d in a numeric grade so about 75 of our students fell into that category we had another six percent of our students who either received continuing supports needed which is roughly the equivalent of a needs improvement or they received below a 65 on their marking period average and then we have approximately 18 of our students who received an incomplete for the marking period and those are some of our target students that schools are in the process of making plans right now to support those students to ensure that they can make up any missing assignments and recapture a numeric grade for the quarter we know that
138we will help our schools with a framework to do this work so schools right now as they create individual plans have been given a range of different strategies that they can select from and they can also create their own strategies so they were a document was shared with them that lists a number of strategies for communicating with families better communication practices for students all students in the classroom and then additional strategies for students who might be struggling with an incomplete we've provided strategies to help teachers better organize classes and to help students learn organizational strategies because we know sometimes lack of organization can prevent students from being as successful as we would like and then we provided strategies to help students prioritize and plan to make up any missing assignments they might have and one
139of the key strategies is talking to the student and discovering what barriers might exist and then making plans to help overcome those barriers helping students who might have a number of missing assignments take a small bite of that bigger puzzle um and make a realistic plan to recover their grade we're currently releasing a pd and some demo courses in schoology to give teachers exemplar practices that they can use to structure their own class and curate the content in their own course in schoology we've also provided schools with look fors and i know my colleagues spoke to this but it's best practice what what should we be seeing in a classroom in this remote environment because we know it's different but we still have the same instructional priorities that we've been having for the past few
140years we know what good instruction looks like we just need to tailor it for this particular environment in terms of special education cse meetings are still being held virtually and we're actually implementing a plan now to increase student voice and self-advocacy so they began meeting with eighth grade students in 15 to 1 and 12 1-1 classes to make these students aware of the differentiated program offerings at the high school level and to help them um feel that they have a better handle on their options and the choices they can make as they go to the high school many of the students have reported that they feel more informed as they select new schools and fill out choice applications we're also in the middle of our strategic plan we're currently working to deliver effective specially designed
141instruction and to monitor that at the school level we're tracking credits to increase the graduation rate and again working to increase student voice the multilingual education department has been working with it and has held a number of multilingual family days to provide families language supports and ensure that they felt confident when they came to pick up their devices and they could use them when they were at home they've held various community meetings via teams to discover what might be working or not working for our multilingual families and to make sure that we could address any concerns they might have with remote learning and they've also adopted an assessment tool called anneal which lets them assess bilingual education and the family the student's acquisition of spanish an additional support has already been brought up by my
142colleagues but the data dashboard has recently gone live and it's continually built out with principal input and so now principal can look at their attendance rates at their building they can pull assessment scores for students they have a graduation tracker they can look at the suspensions that they're building and with that data at their fingertips they can make more informed plans for their school um osa has also excuse me identified data champions at each school and that particular person will be trained to track and aggregate and review student data again this will help us as we make plans for students to recover lost learning schools are continually holding data meetings and we've developed an ell early warning indicator report collaboration with the multilingual division and will make sure that everything is interpreted correctly and that
143we have wellness checks and support for our families and i'm just going to mention it again you recently approved the purchase of graphing calculators for at-home use for our students who are taking courses like algebra so we are very excited to be able to provide those to students in the very near future and dr wright i'm going to turn it back to you thank you so much mike can we go to the next slide we're going to talk about equity and opportunity so when we're thinking about equity and opportunity we're thinking about wraparound strategies for our families encore and enrichment and advanced placement so connecting law students i know that some people think that now that we're online we are minimizing opportunities for students to be engaged in rigor so we we have evidence that
144says that's not the case but first i want to talk about the in-depth home support that we are giving to our families so again we know the demographics that we have here in the city of buffalo we know what the poverty rate is like we know that many people are out of work there's deep need there's a need for counseling there's a need for additional tutoring there's a need for support and translating there's a need for it help there's a need for clothing and food and i can't quantify to what extent our building and central office personnel are going above and beyond to make sure that we're meeting the needs of our families are there one or two people that perhaps didn't get connected to that may be the case but i heard uh the
145counselor earlier said well tell them to call me so if there's someone who is saying well i didn't get a call or i didn't i wasn't supported let us know and let us do the work i have to let you know your our data there's a small a very small amount when you're talking about 32 000 families children there's a very small amount that may not have been reached and they are using you in their relationship with you as their agency so that they can connect with us so please don't see it as a lack of involvement compliment yourselves and know that they trust you and that's why they're coming to you when families come to me i don't fault the teacher or the principal i say i'm so grateful that i'm approachable and they
146trust me with this information so i think that that's what may be happening with some of you they trust you and please trust us when they bring you the challenge we want to own it so we've also continued encore and enrichment to the best of our ability we are mandated to social existence so with say yes and our innovative navigators and program coordinators we have continued with saturday academies online we've continued with concerts online i have one school they have a performer one performer who's going to come into the auditorium and he's a professional they're going to live stream it to their families we mentioned earlier yoga classes online meditation classes online cooking classes online ways to quickly engage kids online we are continuing with our arts in our enrichment with our children because they're
147important to us advanced placement here's our data on our ap courses i know that there was a report that our ap enrollment went down according to our records um when dr cath came he placed a strong emphasis on ensuring that there were opportunities for all students not just that some of the criteria schools were all students be enrolled in ap courses so we started with 620 students enrolled in ap in 2018 and 2019 and then in in 2019 to 2020 we had 2153 students enrolled in ap courses this year that number went up by at least 30 and we have students enrolled in ap courses we are engaging our students and on this point i i want to make i want to make it clear that another advantage to our online strategy is that we
148have a significant increase in teacher absenteeism and leaves significant that means children are being taught by their own teacher on a daily basis because we are online that's an advantage for our children who need to have the best teacher not a substitute if at all possible for our children and families who have formed relationships with these teachers this is an advantage to the strategy that dr cash and the board of education has supported to date and is backed up by science online instruction was absolutely positively the way that we had to go and our teachers and administrators looked at it as an opportunity to to magnify their best practices and grow their instructional repertoire mike can we go on to the next slide kudos opportunity for improvement so i want i want to say that
149this powerpoint presentation wasn't just put together by me and uh toria wilson did world's content dabney darlene jasonowski it wasn't just put together by the associates this was a collective effort by us and our principals and so we asked them so what do you think about this slide and what are your thoughts about this slide give us your input give us your honest input because they are driving all of these best emerging best and emerging practices they are the innovators they are inventing programs and strategies to make sure that they are reaching children so this is not optimal it is necessary and because it is necessary we are doing a really good job per our data points we are not perfect there is no district that is whether they're in person or online but we
150are doing a phenomenal job so emerging we have emerging best practices we have some kudos and we have opportunities for improvement per the principal ranks some emerging best practices so these are things that they hadn't done in brick and mortar but now that we're online they're saying well when we go back we're going to continue some of this work for example daily syllabus posted for students and families they're going to continue what they developed for parent and student engagement classroom checklist so parents can help students be prepared for instruction various school-wide book studies virtual classrooms that more in purple inspiration innovation online learning work for families and students teacher collaboration is expanding with clear and focused professional learning communities using teams without the traditional constraints so for example school number 99 she has uh she
151she may have seven teachers at a grade level so it was impossible for her to be able to pull all seven teachers out before he didn't have the means to provide coverage for them all now because of on the teams she's able to meet with all of her teachers at the same time some of these practices are so great we are definitely going to take them back with us when we return to brick and mortar we had neglected the professional development of our teacher assistants and teacher aides this experience has let us know that we have to do better maya angelou said when you know better you do better we're going to do better by our professionals our student teachers the use of schoology we had schoology before but we met we minimally utilized this
152capacity we never realized how much we could do in schoology and when we return we are going to be better educators because of what has emerged from this crisis so opportunities for improvement so there's been some language that loses meaning in translation so family liaisons include teacher aides teacher assistants principals so assistant principals all kinds of teachers so when uh a teacher is calling they may not say hi this is cassandra i'm your family liaison they are the family liaison but they may not be identifying themselves as such so then if you say hey has your family liaison reached out to you the pair the child they would say no so that's an opportunity for improvement on our on our part another opportunity for improvement is uh how we will need to continue to work
153to modify synchronous and asynchronous schedules based on what we learned this first quarter regarding attendance and engagement we are going to use our data to drive how we will provide professional development around synchronous and asynchronous schedules for our students and families what we need to do a little bit better also is identify tools for improving engagement so we are working closely with the technology department and tntp we have a vision we just need to fine-tune what we can do to enhance engagement without creating fatigue so it's a delicate it's a delicate balance some of the kudos include decrease the number and frequencies of calls to the health center so at first parents thought that they should just call the help center number now they're in touch with their teachers instead of calling the help center
154number they're getting online sometimes when their kids online popping in and saying hey teacher i need to talk to you so they don't need those online services they have direct connections with their teachers we have built a phenomenal cadre of professional learning communities so principles in every single principal meeting we have principals who share out on best practices that they have enhanced or best practices that they have developed so historically we had a bit of a competitive spirit school against school i'm gonna beat you now because of this crisis what has emerged is this learning community of professionals wanting to make sure that their colleagues are okay and are successful so they're openly sharing their secrets to success raising their hands and say hey can i get on that agenda next week and it's beautiful
155our age and our teacher uh teacher assistants have infinite campus access so they can support the attendance challenges that we have with some of our kids they get right in there and they see if this child isn't logging it and they make phone calls they didn't have access before we don't even know why we never gave it to them but that's something that we will carry on into when we return to in-person instruction we are seeing students and families settle into virtual learning and thrive i don't know why people are saying all of the children aren't doing well that simply isn't true there are children who are thriving in this environment we our children who historically were removed from the educational setting because they were sick or because they got suspended they are able to
156engage in academics because the teachers have created synchronous and asynchronous lessons they're not missing abs there's a lot to have a lot of good that has come out of this more students are becoming accountable for their own learning so what happens when there's something new there's always this frustration point we heard that we should have expected that but what you have to do during a learning curve is live through it while providing support and that's what we did is everyone thriving i will repeat myself i am not saying that i am saying though given our set of circumstances we have made the best decision for our students it's necessary that we are in this format for learning and in response to that the pres the principles have risen to the challenge the teachers have risen
157to the challenge the students have risen to the challenge the families have risen to the challenge so i want to end with this quote that i found from boris yelston he said i understand that it's hard for everyone but one cannot give in to emotions so board members we're hearing a lot of emotion out there and i just need for you to realize that's in the severe minority what we have to do is draw lessons from the current crisis and know that we'll work on overcoming it the key one word though is to gather please know dr cash and the personnel of buffalo public schools are working together to make sure that our children in this beautiful diverse city of buffalo are getting the education that they deserve while we are holding no and we
158are not considering any expense to make sure that they get it so thank you for this time and please let your principals know that they've been doing a good job they need to hear how proud of you how proud of them you are thank you extraordinary and inspiring as always dr kathy evans brown return it back to you i will say this let me say this uh colleagues sandy i would i'm gonna ask maybe nichelle to send the draft of this slide deck that includes all of your notes and all of your data points and all of your factoids that you mentioned i want to send that to the board right now because i did the reason i didn't send it before that edition of it is i really wanted them to listen to you
159i wanted them to hear you and i wanted them to feel you because you're speaking for many many many many many of our colleagues our families and students but right now maybe they even help with the discussion that will follow now uh i would like to have if if you don't mind uh those slides with the notes sent to the um to the board okay wow thank you dr cassandra wright i thought i was listening to your defense how thorough it was that was very very uh robust there's just a dissertation defense not everybody knows what you're talking about your dissertation defense of defense i mean that's what i thought was going on here that's right dr dr evans brown i i have to say that was a cabinet group effort along with the principles
160that so that wasn't just me that was everyone putting in their energy they just want more thank you so much but now there's a question i see one hand up from our president sharon cotman belton cotman sharon so thank you so board members um our committee and workshop um we're gonna have to figure out a way that our listening audience can ask questions uh we're bouncing some ideas out uh there today uh between darren and i about possibly uh seeing what we can do so that the the listening uh community can ask questions one of the questions that came up and can answer it with clarity uh there were several questions but she did say when she was patient she got most of her questions answered so that's a good thing uh i thank you
161so much um dr uh and and and staff and all the other uh associates and the principals who are working and pulling this together so here's the question okay so the the the um person the parent is questioning the stats about 95 attendance uh and i'm quoting we didn't have that pre-covet how's that being determined because 25 000 unique schoolology users out of 32 000 students at 78 doesn't guarantee engagement so yeah not 95 no it's not it's not 95 colleagues and i heard that when when uh when sandy was saying it what it is is 85 percent as of friday december 4th and then if you disaggregate between pre-k to 2 uh 3 through 8 uh 9-11 and then 12th graders you start to disaggregate it you'll see some other numbers as well which
162we have done in these slides where you'll get uh should have gotten it by now uh that has all of the notes associated with it so we apologize that's 85 uh today in the aggregate in the aggregate okay good and then the other question that was posed by uh this parent was um amount of incompletes um that were received during the first quarter and or this marking period that i had in my notes that we had uh that i had written at eight uh we had six percent of the students um who required continual support who um who received incompletes and that's how i i wrote it in my notes okay i'm sorry that who have incompletes what is the six percent number oh continuing those were the ones that need continuous support okay thank
163you all right thank you so much for clearing that up all right thank you president compton we have another hand up dr ann rivera and then followed by larry scott yes i was wondering about the 85 attendance rate as well do we have a sense of how that might compare with students in hybrid formats in other districts uh we do have a sense of what it compares with other large urban districts and in that regard it is it's among the leading it's at the top of the top say 10 15 20 25 in large urban districts uh i can't say what it is for the for the suburbs or for the uh smaller school district i just don't have that data i was just curious because a lot of times we assume that our attendance
164is higher if it's in person right and the numbers that you're giving us doesn't that doesn't necessarily correlate this is elementary but it's not that far off for high school those numbers are very consistent with our in-person uh data year over year and the middle the middle grades as well um what we want to see is the very young children uh get that up a little bit and we understand why that's why i'm going to be prioritizing uh bringing them back as soon as as soon as we can and then certainly sometimes the older students uh for a host of reasons in high school uh aren't cracking that uh 90 mark like we'd like to see they tend to be in the 70s high 70s low 80s even during regular in person and that's and
165that's what it was showing up so far this year in remote as well then i have a question that's a nice segue for my next question it's my last question which is um so if we're talking about access so we're talking about equity and access here and the ways in which remote learning can enhance that and interest as we move forward to make remote learning available for students who have barriers to attending school so dr wright gave us one example of students who have illness or chronic illness and can attend in class that can attend online uh that speaks personally to me because i've noticed that with my daughter who's chronically ill and beyond that there are students who have transportation issues access and attending school there are family issues very legitimate ones there are
166a lot there are a lot of reasons why students may not be able to actually physically be building i'm curious if there's an interest in pursuing this model as an option to increase our access for our students who might have those barriers yeah that's a great question uh dr rivera and i don't think we neglected so much but we did have a lot and then and certainly because sandra you could say more about some of the students who typically are get marginalized uh in the in the regular in-person environment but who actually we may be doing a better job of outreach and contact uh now so some of the students that you know the students who are chronically ill for example students who get long-term short-term suspended for example during regular time students who may
167be homeless students who may be suffering from uh multi uh issues going on in the home and how we're reaching out and trying to provide supports there not quite as good as in person but we didn't we haven't neglected those students can you say a little bit more uh to dr rivera's uh question there because i think it's an important point absolutely so my background is special education so i am especially sensitive to students who may have like school phobia or anxiety or let's think about that child who may be feeling bullied and just need to time out so when we think about our online instruction when we return we're going to have to consider multiple ways in which we can reach children because right now school is pretty much a one size fits all
168you come in you follow the bell schedule you do as you're told that doesn't necessarily work for all children which is why some of our more energetic children or more shy children or our children who are a little more um adamant about uh pressing their issues are doing well online and so for those students we don't want to abandon this modality so that they can be successful what we have to do is think of creative ways so that we can continue and refine its implementation so that we are respecting all sorts of learning styles not just the ones who need in person but the ones who really are thriving in this space we don't want to just go back and forget about them we won't do that thank you i appreciate that i look forward
169to hearing more as it develops now let me let me add because i think you've given me an idea that i know we've been talking about staff so dr rivera one of the things that we're learning is there are students who are going faster who are developing some agency in the remote environment in the virtual environment that they wouldn't normally be expected to or we haven't always seen them and do uh in the in-person environment and so one of the things that we've been talking about and was a great idea um from multiple sources was we need to develop i think a virtual school not for students necessarily that are struggling like our virtual account you know that we have for those students who are way back but for students who who in this environment
170are actually going better you know why put them back in person in brick and mortar and get lockstep into a situation where like we say our one side doesn't fit off and and we're actually finding that students can do quite well so we may need to design and be prepared to launch a virtual academy that is the other booking of what we have with valerie kent and her team that's still needed but i'm talking about students who you know i really believe that's a market that we can capture if if we do that right and maybe they can still do things and join us uh in some in-person activities and so forth but we're finding and there's a lot of testimony to this point that students really like it and they and they're thriving for
171those who are for those who are so i wanted to throw that out there to see if the board liked that idea uh and that might be something around the equity issue that that you could direct me to start uh exploring further i know that i'm interested in that because like dr wright said it's not a one size fits all with school there are students who can't handle virtual learning and there are students who really thrive in virtual learning and i think the more that we can differentiate our school system idea of needs of our students the more that we're meeting the needs of our community and also we'll see higher student achievement so personally i would i would advocate for that especially if we have a virtual setting where then students can still access
172social activities that are a critical part of school okay thank you dr rivera very interesting so i see one two four hands up we're gonna have to keep it moving guys so if you can cross and uh consider the next person so larry scott's next i'll go quick so my my question is for miss botticelli i believe in regards to the grading policy there was conversation about having like an faq for parents or like a parent friendly um policy for the parents to have an understanding of the great operating policy is that something we're still considering or has it been done actually we just sent out um a translated version to all the schools so they have it in english and i think four or five other languages right now that's the 312 version to
173go to families and then we're just gonna make some tweaks for a k2 version okay is that something that could be shared with the board sure absolutely thank you great president great presentation dr wright thank you very thorough thank you uh larry um i think jennifer we have jennifer who i believe in city hall and terrence if you can you know be quick uh we do have a couple items more to discuss you know be considerate so thank you dr um so my question is let me put my hand down my question is um i'm thinking about uh maybe doing a forum within my district er would you be available uh say if we were to do separate forms or bring have information sessions would that be something that i'd be overstepping to ask if
174staff would be available to um no no that would be a great idea be it great you know once the new year starts and i really yeah i just want to stress one point that you made um uh dr wright and i i really would like for people to hone in on this it's not a dig it's for real when people who really have the privileges that a lot of people do not have the fact that you said that and and stated it publicly it's not a dig it's the truth so we are all one group of folks that were struggling with the same thing and yes some folks who are used to being able to just have when it's accessible now get to kind of see the other side of the coin of when
175people do not have and maybe instead of being upset about it and pushing back we can work with those folks that maybe do not have work with the district to figure out how we can all be on the same page and make this like a level playing field i really appreciated that comment that's well stated jan thank you for that yeah thank you jen um ne i i don't know if the uh lou was first or terrance terrance can go first parents anyway okay thank you mr patricia um i'll just like to um say one thing um i had about 12 different messages from from parents some of them were duel but um i'm not going to go through that right now because it knows my email but um i went to a couple of
176community events um online and spoke listen to the radio shows that goes on in and the community some members of the community speak different about about remote learning um i believe dr wright you gave a wonderful presentation today and gave a lot of statistics you know that that's very valid and show a lot of value of this education you know and remote learning and some of the great things that that these the teachers have accomplished um during the time of remote learning we know that um it was thrown in our face and um everybody had to adapt to it and and we had to um come together moment you know with the district to try to initiate just to make this work and i think you guys are doing a wonderful job you know um
177doing this um how can we you talked about wrap around strategies i think that that should include the district also far as uh parents and and stakeholders how can we try to encompass that wrap around strategy stakeholders the people you know who's who's challenging um this type of learning and you know our biggest concern is the health for our children health for our teachers you know help for our community and um you know i think that the community needs to maybe hear maybe on radio or or hear more newspaper something about this presentation that we can send out you know that they can read and get an understanding you know the values remote learning and moving forward so that they can try to adapt it and try maybe um when some more families over to
178try harder you know using remote learning do we have any solutions or anything we can utilize for that type of wraparound strategy to accomplish the communities and these community groups so we always encourage the families to go first to the schools and if they're not comfortable going there if they come to you then as i was saying earlier so people connect with people that they trust and so if they haven't found a person within their school community that they can trust then you give the referral to us and we will absolutely take care of them so but i also hear you saying how can we just make sure that the word gets out around all of the different strategies that we have and the supports that we have to make sure that we are promoting
179the great supports that we have for all of our families i know that we are working on a deeper communication process to ensure that the work the word gets out um i know that dr cash has his plans for ensuring that people are well aware of all the supports that are they have privilege and access to and so i it's an opportunity for improvement for us we've said this amongst ourselves we've not done a good enough job talking about all of the things that we have to offer and quite frankly we'll we're building that communication plan to ensure that we get the word out to families i mean and colleagues what mr herds i think i heard a little something different in there um but to mr hurst question i wanted to present this comprehensive
180uh presentation to you tonight um having some first quarter data heading into the second quarter now all of the extraordinary events going on around us that in our world is a little different than in some other folks world sometimes i feel like we're living in two completely different worlds but i'm gonna have something to say about that in a little while um but i'm gonna tell you let's now's the time now's the time because you're fully armed you're fully armed to go on any radio station to go on any tv station to go to any community forum and get it done say ho ho ho ho let me correct you i like don't get it twisted let me let me correct you let me help you okay and then we go and get this straight
181and i'm gonna do it but you can do it now you can go on those little eleven o'clock program little nine a.m programs go on and get on there and get it straight because i'm gonna get it straight i'm getting ready to go on a tour okay and i'm not having it i'm just telling you i'm not having it and i'm gonna get every single thing that is wrong and twisted i'm gonna untwist it right and then talk about what we're gonna do next and where we're going stop carrying their agenda and start carrying our agenda okay it's an important special guest waiting to undergird my recommendation to you just to finish i just don't want to overlook the parents who are struggling that have the issues and the problems those more also so that
182you know the the homes that are crying right now you know that's in pain you know that we can also listen to those homes also i'm with you i agree okay give them to us we'll take care of them one by one by one by one that's a promise from me yes thank you and uh lu [Music] i'll be i will be brief i'll heed your words dr evans brown uh dr wright thank you very much for the presentation i also like the fact that you touched upon the communication piece because as we sit here those have been the texts and emails that i'm getting it's it's a new learning environment things are changing parents have a lot of questions there's a lot of information out there but but things keep evolving and changing and
183they feel that they want to be more engaged in their children's educational process uh let me just get to my question quickly because i know we have speakers waiting um i know that one of the problems that we've had with with respect to offering ap course is that oftentimes there would not be enough individual students in one school to offer the course so we'd have four kids at one school three at another six there through this remote learning has there been any way for us to collaborate students from multiple locations to take one course if there's six up in it and you know three at city honors and four at mckinley that they could remotely learn and take this ap course uh wherever it may be yes let me let me uh turn that to
184end but yes we've been working on that for several years there's a name for it and you know it better than i do where we have a teacher teaching remotely and this was back in regular session right in person but he he or she would be the teacher for students from multiple schools and we had the technology to be able to let them get on and and we wanted our best teacher teaching to to all of the kids so yeah that's going on and can you amplify amplified as a great question from uh from mr petrucci we called it a live learning initiative so prior to the pandemic we purchased um special cameras that teachers could use so two or three buildings could link together and one teacher would teach the ap course and other
185students um would join that particular course thank you very much you've answered my questions no problem well thank you for that so dr cash now um you want to introduce the next portion of our uh agenda because i want to finish with this really important uh strong recommendation that i'm going to be bringing to you but i want to first bring in uh dr fatima morell uh just to in her own uh concise way bring you up to date on where we are with this important uh nation of national attention work we're getting national attention for this important work and she wants to bring you up about where we are right now great speaker this morning and then where we're going next uh with it um and again my apologies if some of you thought
186that we haven't informed you about that my my sense was that we've talked about this for the last four or five board work sessions uh so any anything that you felt like you weren't in in the loop on that certainly wasn't intentional it wasn't my intent so my apologies for that uh but there's great work going on you can claim it and exclaim it and uh take it so that's where we are dr fatima morrell let's get through these slides and be clear about what's coming next because this is a really really rich comprehensive curriculum um not quite any like it going on in the country right now colleagues so dr morrell good evening can i please share my screen or do you want mike to do it are you gonna do it if you
187can do it do it i think mike has it okay can you see my screen um i don't know i don't see anything you know yeah there we go try to make it make it bigger there you go sorry okay go ahead [Music] can you see it now yes yes okay thank you um thank you dr cash so before we do get started i would be remiss if if i did not mention um the wonderful and historic opportunity that dr cash um and i put together for our district today and i am just so uh grateful honestly to be um under the tutelage of such a great leader who understands the uh need for the work of our office and who supports it and nurtures it and encourages that and today we were able to
188bring in uh who the new york times have coined as one of the 100 most influential researchers and historians of the world and that was dr ibram x kindy and he was uh here today i want to thank board member uh um mrs belton cotton madam president um for coming in today and also i did notice um miss paulette woods and so thank you for coming if any other board members did show up thank you um and dr cash thank you of course for that welcome so i wanted to kind of open with that esteem board members to say that pretty much piggybacking on what dr wright said the work of clri and the work of our district did not stop with the pandemic we doubled down on our work and we thought about new
189and innovative ways to ensure that ours that our students are being supported our teachers are being supported and that the learning and the growing continues um in our various offices so dr kindy really launched for us uh today this ideology around what is emancipation curriculum and his timing was perfect because we knew we were coming tonight to you to really talk about how do we create anti-racist spaces and um curriculum and pedagogy for our our young people and i'm thrilled i'm excited that and i would like in a very short time to try and bring to you this fantastic journey that we will take our young learners our students pre-k to 12 on over the next several months and in the in the years to come and as dr cash has said to us on
190many occasions um we are doing national proof point work in our district not only in the office of clri but even our remote learning spaces the work around those those promising practices the work coming out of our office of instruction and the office of clri and it is national proof point work and we're actually getting a lot of national national recognition for the work that we're doing so i want to take you on this journey where we discuss the emancipation curriculum discussing everything from um el rito de la delaries of 1868 through the legendary work of hermann badillo in our first bilingual education practice from the indigenous protest of the dakota pipeline to the jingle dress dancers and the tribute to george floyd in minneapolis from imhotep a multi-genius black man uh of 8th in
191africa to harry pottman and her suffrage work as well as frederick douglass and his abolitionist work from our new american learners and cultural games around the world and their significance in families and homes from those students of burma for me somalian and puerto rican descent all the way to what is ramadan and our arab culture so there is a lot to that uh is uh delivered to our students and i would like to take a brief time to just share with you what this is all about so what in the bps emancipation curriculum you might ask well it is tailored to the historical linguistic and ethnic backgrounds of our students where students see themselves positively in the curriculum and it is um a curriculum that takes those voices that are historically marginalized and disenfranchised in
192our textbooks and in our classrooms and in our curricular and attitudes them to create joy and empathy and to ensure students know their intellectual brilliance and we're cultivating genius within these here lessons within our classrooms with our teachers we're not only edifying students we're also edifying teacher knowledge because with each lesson there's a lesson to learn about history about culture and about what it means for all of our students and these lessons are infused into the standing curriculum so what does that mean it means that we're not saying to teachers take out what you currently teach we're saying to teachers we're going to insert general voices diversified voices particularly authors of color that would also provide a multiple perspective on that lesson that you are currently teaching and so during this time of twin pandemics
193uh uh the twin pack gimmicks of covet 19 and heightened racial uh awareness and and the fight against uh this met against systemic racism and it's dismantling this curriculum not only supports our students in raising self-esteem and self-awareness but it also centers the joy it centers self-advocacy and it centers um um the the fight for equality in their lives they're learning and as agents of change in their own community so when we talk about dismantling disproportionality and dismantling the school to prison pipeline is students see themselves positively if the curriculum in the classroom is mirrored back at them in a positive way and they see the historical uh brilliance of their ancestors and of their contemporary uh role models then they're less likely to misbehave they're less likely to act out and they receive that
194rigorous instruction that also um connects them into the school spaces in ways that if that curriculum is not diverse it could not so when we look at our resources um the purpose for the the um emancipation emancipation resources is really to create racial harmony in our schools and so um all of the resources that we have not only can they be used by pair uh teachers but they're also very parent friendly and we've created interactive timelines that create clr that uses uh that can be used in the in-person or remote uh uh platforms right so we're looking at 1619 project we started that a couple of year um almost a year ago and we're continuing to um bolster those lessons and make sure that they are included um working very closely with our office of
195instruction the amazon curriculum the web-based curriculum has been a while for around for a while we're both doing the use of that digital platform the black lives matter at schools guiding principles and lessons are also included in this compendium of lesson resources and curriculum the historic brownie brownies books which are edited by w eva du bois continue to be used the moments and fun videos which edify the the the um the voices of african americans right here in buffalo and the beginnings and early inklings of the uh niagara movement that became the naacp in the michigan street baptist church along with uh pastor reverend dr jesse nash and his work with w.e.b the boys and mary talbert are included as local history in these lessons um teaching tolerance also have a plethora of literature resources
196developmentally appropriate lessons and um lessons that engage students in critical thinking and so and also we use the southern poverty law and centers lessons and also our mayan resources this year we updated to ensure that they were culturally responsive and um would uh serve the needs of our students who are majority of color and these all of these resources rather in person or on the remote access are to provide connections to self diverse perspective social justice activism and anti-racist practices not only for our students but for our teachers and our parents as well and so we have what we call um the interactive timelines and what we have done here is by um by time periods we have um inserted um less than links that not only include undo prime lines you can find all
197the lessons for the uh grade bands and our grade bands really are pre-k k 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. and so you have these lesson links within these grade bands but additionally we wanted to speak with joy in the lives of students so we created opportunities for art and music and dance and um read-alouds and so on so what i would like to do at this time um with your with your um permission is to just briefly go through a few of the emancipation lessons of course there are over a hundred of these lessons pre-k12 so i can only give you a snippet of what some of these lessons look like and i would like to do that at this time i will add that all the lessons
198include um a lesson on juneteenth pre-12 all that all great bands include a lesson on juneteenth and that has never shown its face in our district curriculum it's really important we we we we we uh celebrate it uh every year here in buffalo while school is in session but we never talked about it in classrooms we also have um all lessons will include in issues of enslavement all lessons include an ancient african lesson and of course we continue with our black lives matter guiding principles that guide our lessons and we also have lessons that include this historic movement black lives matter that continues to go on today um at each great level we focus on the four ethnicities of african americans led to next new americans and indigenous americans and the literature and critical thinking
199um in these lessons form the basis for each lesson um you will find in all of these here lessons a short reading sometimes a little longer based on the grade level and then there's always interactive activities that you can do at home or online or in the classroom setting so i'll start with a basic pre-k to one lesson one of favorites on fry bread um it's an indigenous lesson at three k to one can you see what's green everyone sees the screen that says um indigenous emancipation lesson hello yes okay thank you and so in this lesson the infusion is at pre-k k and one and it's in theme three in our community in week four at pre-k it's in the journey's book unit two lesson six at kindergarten and at first grade is in
200our journey's core program unit 4 lesson 18 and so briefly students will uh read to will read to explain the importance of fry bread for native americans they will discuss how something becomes a tradition um the use of food and family celebrations and they will apply this learning to their own lives and write and illustrate their favorite tradition and pre-k the story vibrate aligns to the theme our community kindergarten journey story the five senses and in first grade where does fool come from um our um objectives students will read about an indigenous family tradition that is different or similar to their own and draw and write a family tradition and white is their favorite essential question how does something become a tradition why is fried bread important to native americans we are lying that are
201new york state standards for english language arts and social studies so these lessons um can be taught in either course um for the early elementary such as this we um appreciate english language arts and the black lives matter guiding principles we give teachers a recommended principle for discussion and we bold it and for this particular discussion it's diversity is the celebration and acknowledgement of differences and commonalities across cultures and then we also have the student-friendly guiding principles at this year time and so when we look at the student-friendly wording we say diversity different people do different things and have different feelings it is so important that um it is so important that we have lots of different kinds of people in our community and that everyone feels safe another way to say that is diversity
202back to the lesson um our vocabulary we always include for our earliest learners um picture vocabulary which also supports our english language learners so fl fry bread pow wow tradition and celebration were our words and then at the bottom you can see in the appendices the visual or that vocabulary as the teacher displays it on her screen or her whiteboard we also always include a copy hard copy of the book itself if the teacher wants to read that out loud but on our interactive timeline and um in the lesson itself we do have the read aloud and i will share that momentarily but looking at the procedures for this lesson our students will review the vocabulary words and the pictures the teacher will and the students discuss the essential questions how does something become a
203tradition why is frybread important to native americans they have a song fry bread and then in closure students would write at this level pre-k or draw a picture my favorite family tradition is and they fill in the blank i like this tradition because and then students would share their pictures with their classmates and they'd have a turn and talk and this and then the students and teacher was seeing the fry bread song am i back at the are you all following along with the link do you see emancipation curriculum lessons yes we do thank you so if i want to play the music that is attached to this and parents can use this as home to edify these lessons at as well so we like it hot we don't like it cold we don't like
204it in a pot nine days [Applause] private hot and so on the interactive timeline that's where you will find all those various uh uh arts artistic resources and art art integration music integration dance integration and also the read aloud itself if the teacher chooses not to read it but would like for it to be read aloud hi i'm kevin millard and today i'm going to be reading fry bread the book that i created with wanna martinez neil the illustrator and i'm going to read this book to you for global children's book club so let's get started fry bread a native american family story fry bread is food flour salt water and so if the teacher also decides to just let the students read that she can have the words of because she has the hard
205copy or he has a hard copy and they can just read it right along or reach here she can read it him or herself additionally um we have a lesson link on cesar chavez i'm not going to go through that but just to show you the art integration piece so if the once the teacher teaches about cesar chavez at this level and his strong advocacy for farmers there's a actual uh art piece that goes with that where the teacher can talk about the symbolisms and students can see if they can relate to any of the characters in the art it's just a really good art piece that can bring joy to the children and we need cesar chavez in the middle holding the dove for peace because he really wanted peace but he didn't want
206to have people dying from poor treatment by drizzle the big strawberry conglomerate and what in watsonville california so adding art letting students draw their own cesar chavez by looking at that piece when you go into these here lesson links as well um you will go there's one that was i shared with you pre-k one and you now see two through four can anyone see two through four yep two through four emancipation curriculum lessons yes thank you so all of we go two through four we go five six seven eight and as i said to you it's a wonderful fantastic journey through history through culture through music through language on these timelines i would like to just briefly uh there's a story here on celia cruz uh if we hit music for celia cruz she's a
207cuban singer well-renowned latinx singer and songwriter and a great lady that we don't talk about often but i think that um and just listening to her music how wonderful is that for our children after a long a nice read about celia and then to listen to her music and get a better deeper understanding of who she was but to also center joy also at grades two through four um i would like to just share the ramadan link so on this lesson it's a two through four lesson can you see that lesson that says uh new american emancipation lesson thank you and so the curriculum infusion is at grade 2 journeys unit 3 lesson lesson 13 grade 3 journeys unit 2 lesson 8 and grade 4 journeys unit 4 lesson 20 and it's a ramadan a
208time for reflection it's a lesson for our second through fourth graders traditions each lesson chosen for infusion from grades 2 through 4 discusses culture and how people in society relate to each other in this lesson a time for reflection students will uh students will discuss the traditions of ramadan we have questions like uh write a friendly letter to mrs penworth who's actually in the in the anchor text about ramadan relate their own traditions to the traditions of ramadan this is really important not for our students but for our teachers because we also have you know we want to know when kids are checking out from the cafeteria or or not you know they're not online because they're in prayer we might want to figure out what's going on and it's ramadan what is ramadan and
209how does it outfitter go together what are important dates with ramadan and again we're lying to english language arts the guiding principle is collective value for this lesson as empathy and diversity our vocabulary imam ramadan muslim muslim islam quran and then they go through a historical launch of what ramadan is they talk about um they talk about um dates and when you can digest food and so on and so forth um and then there's this awesome read aloud which is also on the interactive it's on the interactive timeline as well so you can just go there you don't actually have to go to this read-aloud but this is a beautiful read-aloud about skipping lunch and not eating and praying you know what they what they what's important and the arab family at home around ramadan
210time playlist lunch box a ramadan story written by reem farooqi illustrated by leah lyon [Music] we won't be needing this for a while said laylah's mother hanging up leila's lunchbox imagine i won't be eating lunch for a month replied layla with a twirl and so that's on ramadan two through four and then there's a nice um um um music that go with that but i'll skip that for time we'll go let me just go up to grade nine and ten um juneteenth um i would like to highlight that lesson at grades nine and ten um again it is at every grade level but we highlight it on the interactive uh timeline for grades nine and ten so when i hit the juneteen story um uh where we see the infusion and should junting be a
211holiday right so students at grade 9 and 10 can be able to write an argument to support a claim about the recognition of june teens as a federal holiday using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence we have lesson objectives understand and describe the history of juneteenth what juneteenth what is juneteenth and why is this celebrated in the african-american community should it be recognized as a federal holiday and we align to a collective value and loving engagement is the commitment to practice justice liberation and peace our vocabulary emancipation proclamation abolition then we have some visuals that the students the teacher would post and the students would discuss that visuals from buffalo um and then we have our anchor text by henry lewis gates and he basically uh talks about the history uh in 1865 when
212general gordon granger read the emancipation proclamation in galvinstone texas freeing the final slaves after two years of not knowing that they were they were free and then there's procedural steps around readings around the read-aloud and also what we include here for artifacts on the timeline we have the um the governor's um executive order um claiming this was in june 2020 and it was updated on december 9th 2020 um so this is current um that it should be a holiday for new york state and um we also have uh and this will be my final the drill team and darren um i have you know that uh the crusaders we're better you hear me i heard you [Laughter] actually the evaneers were better than all of you but it's all right looking at juneteenth and you
213know looking at one of our drill teams and talking about the the spirit of juneteenth and why we march and uh you know what is the significance locally so that's something that can be shared that is also on that interactive timeline and finally i would like to share with you uh the seventh and eighth grade ancient african lesson and then now that will be i will go into a closure so this um ancient african lesson um on the timeline is aligned to um it's the ancient african african emancipation lesson aligned to grade 7 at module 1 unit 1 using the parallel using the anchor text along walk to water for that module and also at grade 8 module 3 a mighty long way and so using these two texts uh the text at each grade
214level we will have students to think about the contributions of imhotep the great doctor and architect of ancient africa and for them to think about his contributions and then what contributions was made by salva okay in the book a long walk to water and what contributions were made by carlotta in a mighty long way at grade eight and then comparing and contrasting additionally this lesson can is easily convertible to grade seven um the narrative of the life of frederick douglass which is already taught at module three unit one so it can be also inserted there and then students will be able to understand the ways in which imhotep contributed to the growth of ancient african society make connections with the other texts ideas cultural perspectives eras and experiences and so the whole thing is there
215they are lying to black men as a uh principal um um are committed to building a black men affirming space and since imhotep is the oldest multi-genius ever uh this is how we connect to black black bull our black boys in our district um there are graphics of implant and writing responses and there's even the writing response um that we aligned directly to that guiding principle of black men where our young scholars at grade 7 and 8 are asked to brainstorm ways on how they are similar to imhotep and how they will leave a contribution the way that imhotep has left a contribution and then on the interactive timeline um if you hit that pyramid you will see this again parents students community everyone will have access the achievement of the black people of ancient
216egypt had shown us that black people built truly one of the greatest civilizations of ancient times do you know that the person generally regarded as the most talented individual in the history of the ancient world was a black man he was an egyptian named and so and then just the anchor text on this because i don't want to forget it the anchor text in this reading um is called who is impotent by akua chike and stevens tavares and all of our readings are always in the appendix so teachers don't everything for our lessons in the emancipation curriculum there it's all there maths references uh uh graphics uh discussion points um mathematics science everything is linked uh graphic organizers uh writing pro um spaces everything is linked so that in this virtual environment the teacher doesn't
217have to go far to look for anything and there's also an opportunity for parents to get in on this on this uh conversation um and to to to use these resources with our with our young people and sometimes they just want to use themselves because i certainly am learning a whole lot reading these resources and so finally our new emancipation curriculum is split into sixth grade bands as we discussed pre-k one two four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve there's approximately twelve to fifteen lessons for each grade level lessons focused on literacy criticality and ethnicities represented in our bps community these lessons are highly diverse and aligned to both english and ela and english ela and social studies standards each lesson infuses one or more of our many district approved resources and focuses
218on raising awareness and appreciation for black and brown cultures historical contributions in communities thank you discussion thank you dr morel much appreciated as always dr evan brown back to you dr morrell for a thorough uh analysis of the emancipation curriculum i'm sure that the board here got a lot out of it in our viewing public as well um for the purposes of time um i'm sure there's questions but we still have another last point that dr cash would like to address and that's on our reopening schools update if you don't mind we can move on to that or do you want to ask questions for dr morale she's doing such a great job colleagues um you know if you want to say a few words certainly it's your board meeting but i i think if
219you send things maybe by email or or want to make a comment or two but i've got us a guest on online that i got to get this recommendation to you out beautiful presentation and give me your email as dr any questions that they may have thank you awesome thank you dr morell thank you dr cash darren is our guest uh online he's logging on right now okay um right mike if you could put my slides up please and we'll begin i have four or five slides colleagues for you and then we conclude with our recommendation and darren brown will go through that slide at the end with you with me annotating colleagues in many ways this is the most important recommendation that i bring to you uh so far this academic year i want
220to be clear and unequivocal at the outset we want our students to be in school we miss our students we love all of our students we love and miss all of our staff we're a family here in the buffalo public schools unique in many ways in the entire country and as a large leading edge urban school district we know that our students and families are provided an extraordinary array of services and opportunities when we're in school together fabulous first-rate teachers young but extraordinary high energy principals and principal teams nine employee groups ten if you count exempts all of them doing really above the line work for this whole year even under some of the most difficult circumstances imagine we want to be back together again we want to talk with each other we want our
221students laughing and happy and talking with one another and going up and greeting their students fellow students and their teachers in the morning coming off of buses full of cheer some of them some of them with dour faces and we got to pick them up and get them ready but these aren't usual circumstances these are unusual unprecedented harmful people are dying circumstances and sometimes i i don't know i don't know where who's who's paying attention to what because our first job is to protect the lives and the well-being of our students and our staff that's our first priority we've always said that safety is priority one and this pandemic yes it's having a difficult impact on and on families and the economy we get that but families have always adjusted to something like learning loss
222we're already in the plans for catching up learning loss we got a lot to say about that in the next workshop but you can't make up for death you can't make up for getting sick for weeks and sometimes months at a time and you're still not right and you may never be right again and in the black and brown communities we know dozens of people who this disease have taken the lives of it's a horrible horrible death you suffocate to death and i don't know what your tolerance in this community is i'm not from here but i know in my experience and in my life because i care about my children and my life and my family and relatives and loved ones life i care the same about these buffalo children in that family's life
223and i don't want to lose one of them not one and i said that from the beginning and that's why we closed before anybody else thought it was anything serious enough to do and now we're here in the worst scenario since the onset of the pandemic and we have an increased safety guard rails for folks we've lowered the safety guard rails for our schools and our families and our children next slide please here's the evidence to show it a few months ago i started and we were at 45 000 new cases per day nationwide now we're up to 220 000 cases per day nationwide the 14-day change is up 18 the death toll nationwide for the disease is 345 000 now surpassing heart disease as the leading cause of death in our country right now
224right today icu beds all over the country are starting to head toward capacity and overflow erie county reports 4 305 new cases in one week and you used to have just a handful back at the start the positivity rate is 7.0 percent most since the beginning of the pandemic and the numbers are going up schools all over new york are opening and closing due to rising covey cases this isn't any race when it comes to life and death you're going to open and you're going to close again because the surge is just starting and all the reports are that it's going to be the worst of the surges to date and not reported as much are the cases of children that are on the rise over 1.4 million child cases since the onset nearly 124
225000 new cases reported just last week nearly 400 buffalo school children have tested positive since november 1st through today and we know about the neurological symptoms in younger people and multi-inflammatory syndromes and children so forth and so on so to say that it doesn't spread in schools what does that mean i don't even understand what that means if adults it is raging in and adults come to school it's going to come to school stop it next slide please sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words when i first started with you three months ago we stood out in front of city hall and we said cases are on the uptick it's not as bad in new york as it was at the onset back last spring in march what we think is safest to start
226remote see what we can learn from it because it's going to be the new normal anywhere you look at it fauci had predicted that over a year ago that the real world was coming next fall when we head into the cold season into the flu season into the holiday seasons and then here it comes in october i said and i give you the date every work session on where we are with kobe facts in the country and in erie county and you started to see it increase two months ago and we said okay we're gonna wait and see but now i think i'm gonna wait until the end of the first quarter let's keep perfecting and getting better at our remote learning environment so that if we need to stay in it longer we'll be
227at least better and better at it and not look at it as just a substitute for in-person learning because we don't know this disease was the first time of our experience with it experts aren't it's a new expert you're learning every day about it and then last month i told you we were starting to really spike and even though we're not in person we had our biggest spike for staff cases in november they tripled the number of the two months before and we're not even in school we went up to 82 cases positive and then this last slide is where we are today next slide please this is a close look at it new york right up there in your right hand corner western new york right there orange red whatever these colors are point
228is it's all bad it's all bad so if i didn't open in remote in september i mean if i didn't open in person in september and again in october as this climb and then november and now now look at this data i'm not sending our children and our staff into the mouth of the volcano you're gonna have to override me on that not gonna do it we can catch up learning loss we can't catch up illness and one is too many for me for our community and for our staff that's my standard you tell me if you got a different standard next slide please so the summary to date i've been consistent all along we have a theory of action that's not changed it's centered on three major tenets strong leaders great teachers strong community
229support we're all in this together we need to help each other through it to it and through it you just heard about the promising practices from remote learning they're extraordinary and they're very promising they're not the end all to be all doesn't mean we don't have challenges but we're working through it because we're in extraordinary times and because we really do care and love about every one of our teachers every one of our staff and every one of our precious children and children are beginning to die from this disease all across the country the phasing plans you heard about it the staff were extraordinary and talking about some school-based plans the district gave them the template and the schools came in with their plans accordingly specific to the needs of their highest need students and
230we shared with you several exemplary plans and we said as we've said from the beginning that if the science permits will be ready to go on two months note i'm sorry two weeks notice two weeks notice but the science hasn't gotten better and adults are behaving badly it's not the kids it's not the kids and it's not all the adults they're a lot that are trying to be safe for themselves and for everybody else but not enough are doing it so that i feel all of our staff our bus drivers our health care workers our frontline food service all of our teachers our aides and assistants our secretaries and administrative assistants on and on all of us can be safe and i can open schools today or next week as some are going to do
231and they'll be closed again before you know it next slide please meanwhile you've heard already what we've been doing academically what we've been doing with outreach to our families we've been working harder than we ever have than we ever have because this work is fluid it's 24 7 seven days a week all seasons all seasons we don't stop there is no break on the weekend there's no break in the evening because families are in need and that's what we do that's what we do so this notion that we haven't been doing anything needs to be debunked and it has been i trust tonight when you heard from our team but we've also stocked up on all of these purchases that are necessary when we do start we have all the major ppe and cleaning supplies
232that we could possibly need we have gloves and masks of all kind 95 n95 all of it it's in the store plenty of it to last for months thermal imaging cameras cleaning and sanitizing supplies materials related so we can socially distance in all schools in non-school spaces on and on but what just changed what just changed on last thursday or friday i think it was friday dr brown was that the governor put out new guidelines relative to testing because before if we got to here we would all be shut down gotta shut it down with the numbers that we're seeing in our community right now but that's not what happened what happened was we lowered and lessened the requirements such that i don't even know what they mean 20 30 on our kids and on
233our numbers of staff equal to about four or five kids and half a dozen teachers each day for a month yeah we can do that that's easy we'll be able to do that but now what do we know point is we don't know much and it'll get past that nine really quickly so i've been talking to everybody to get their feedback to get their sense of where we are and what we need to do next even with all of these challenges we've talked to you about it instructionally and support but i'm in touch with the health advisory committee and our esteemed members almost on a weekly basis one of my staff or me i talked to the principals i had a meeting with them on tuesday all the principles elementary secondary i talked to many
234many many many many community leaders in this community i talk to teachers and teacher representatives and many many families have tweeted or written to me or sent me emails so dr dennis quote is here now to give me to give us his professional opinion about what not opinion but facts based on what's going on and why he makes a recommendation to us that i also support and that we will finish on the last slide next the one next with what should happen so i'm going to keep this this slide up so you can be looking at it while you hear from our medical director for the buffalo public schools who is the professional we should be listening to on matters like this for our school system dr quo thank you for being here glad to
235be here good evening can you all hear me yes we can dr quo okay fantastic thank you um back in september i i gave a mini grand rounds for collider health about reopening of schools and it's something i've been involved with and thought about quite a bit and at the time the following points were raised that schools reflect the community and any spread in the schools reflect what's going on in the community and if the community spread is relatively well controlled and if there is adequate tracing uh and the capacity to test and trace and isolate then schools can be open safely with all of the precautions including you know ppe and density and ventilation that dr cash had mentioned um we all knew that there was going to be a spike in cases uh
236you know where as the weather turned colder none of us knew exactly how the spike was going to go and as it turns out there's pretty widespread consensus that the spike was about as bad as we could have imagined and the reason i i mentioned that is that they started to go up about the last week of october and the positivity rate has risen relatively high and it's still pretty high it's thought that maybe it's starting to slow down a little bit but we're also now just starting to get into the post thanksgiving uh pieces and we expect a further rise in cases uh as we get to november as we get to december and january some of the other things that's important to know is that what's what happened in the rest of the
237country actually really impacted uh new york state and western new york one thing that really impacted our ability to test trace and isolate with the county was that uh as cases rose throughout the rest of the country the number of test kits that were ordered and uh delivered to work in new york both with the county and at colida health was diminished quite a bit because they were all diverted to other parts of the country where there were more cases at that time so all of that really inhibited our ability county did actually quite an amazing job given the resources that we were given given the context of everything going on in the rest of the country at the time but several weeks ago dr gail burstein mentioned to me that the county was starting
238to have trouble keeping up with the number of cases because they've just risen to record levels and peter winklestein dr peter winklestein who is the uh the head of uh who provides analytics uh he's the chief medical information officer for information technology officer for collided health he presents predicted hospital census models uh and under a number of scenarios uh in the uh you know given uh whether there were any uh you know interventions or changes and policies of how we are handling this as a community i think folks know that elective surgeries the governor has told us that elective surgeries need to be postponed uh going forward the hospitals in western new york are actually a double of admissions of what they were back in the spring um coletta health uh peaked about 240 to
239uh admissions uh back in the uh i'm sorry i i'm sorry that's uh i take that that that's western new york collider health uh for example uh did peak around uh probably about a hundred 120 admissions back in the spring uh right now we are at 211 emissions uh hospitalized across uh across the board children's hospital is is taking adults uh and as uh the division head of general pediatrics these are patients that are coming onto our hospital services and that's because miller fillmore and buffalo general are basically at capacity and we are helping out by taking adults on our services um dr winklestein is concerned that our cases may actually even from today where we are at double the number of admissions in western new york than we were uh back in april he's
240concerned that we could easily triple that even from today's numbers and um although these are just analytics to help us plan at the very least we're all expecting that even from our current numbers that they're just going to continue to rise um to the point where uh you know they were talking about opening the graf memorial uh in order to offload some of the inpatients that we have across the collider health system and um there's just way too much community spread right now and you know the thinking my my recommendation is that when we know that the cases are on the decline and we get and we know that we are confident in our ability to test uh trace and isolate that is a point where we can uh reopen schools because we have to
241think about not just the students but also the teachers and the staff and everybody that supports our students um i do think that we are at a point where we can really make a plan in the timeline so that when these numbers go down um we'll be ready to to start to reopen uh to in-person learning uh uh ideally in a phased approach so that we have the ability to keep up with uh the tracing and and and the procedures we are really at uh i tell folks that um what we're going through right now is actually far worse from a spread standpoint than what's what was going on in the spring uh we do know more about how to take care of cases of kids who are of uh children and adults who are
242sick and i think that's why we're not seeing as many people die or go into the intensive care unit but it also gives us a false sense of security because i think folks look at the death rate but you know when you have a lot of people who are sick you're going to still get a lot of people are going to die but i also want to emphasize that um we're not seeing that many kids get sick and coming to hospital but we're seeing a lot of adults and these are parents of our kids these are staff you know we know we know that teachers are sick we have a lot of folks in the hospital who are sick right now and um this has to calm down i think before we have any ability
243to try to move back towards reopening i'm hoping it'll start to calm down in january i think we have to get through the december holidays see where the peak is let it come down and then uh but i do think in the meantime you know we've been in discussions about getting what's necessary to move on reopening uh as soon as we can but i think february is actually the best time to to to aim for at this time but we got to let the cases calm down so that's what i got i'm happy to answer questions or clarify anything colleagues you see before you the timeline while we have dr quo here and and the recommendation um now would be a good time for you to start uh the questions so again dr kathy evans
244brown i'll turn it back to you and might just leave this uh slide up if you could please thank you dr quo thank you dr paul um i do see a hand up and thank you dr cash for this updated information it's really cool i do want you to stay on did he stay on there okay good all right okay this information is split but this is the reality that we're living with at this time so i see that i believe uh board member patucci uh thank you dr evans brown uh dr cool i just have a question how would the um when the vaccines are available and successfully implemented how would that impact the district and the district reopening um i i think right now that the vaccine is not going to roll out
245fast enough to impact us during the next two to three months we know that uh the the word for us at the atlanta health is that um we will be getting vaccine we will be getting uh an allotment uh hopefully before the end of this month and uh it will go towards those on the first uh really on the on the highest risk front line uh for example the emergency room and the nursing homes there is not enough vaccine the thought is there's not going to be enough vaccine um to go beyond a very a relatively small number of folks uh in december and uh it may not be until late winter or early spring that we're going to see this start to get out to the rest of the folks um our strategy to
246reduce spread is really community mitigation at this time um i do think that a you know a long-term solution is the vaccine um my hope is that uh we will through community mitigation that we would be able to make plans to uh move towards reopening the schools regardless of the vaccine the vaccine uh i do think that the vaccine will be a game changer but i don't think it will arrive in western new york in high enough numbers to really impact the timeline that we're presenting here thank you very much thank you for that um i don't see any other hands this one dr ann rivera thank you very much i have two questions one is what kind of number so there was made mention of lowering the spike what kind of numbers would be
247low enough to feasibly bring what are we looking for in terms of numbers and numbers of cases to effusively bring back students into buildings uh uh just to clarify are you referring to the county uh numbers um in your presentation you had made mention of the numbers being too high still can you give us a range of what that is so that we can align it with the information that's in the community sure um i think the positivity rate needs to come down significantly um you know the positivity rate in the seven to eight percent range right now it denotes that there's actually a lot of testing going on uh in the community but it is definitely above the range that the world health organization recommends uh you know that it denotes a certain level
248of fairly high level community spread it just means also that we're actually doing a lot of tests in western new york um i think that the positivity rate needs to go what about five percent uh that'll give us an indication that we're not seeing uncontrolled spread there are some other factors such as how long it takes for the testing to come back because right now you're hearing that a contact trait thing uh you're hearing that uh it's taking you know days for tests to come back um you know i think that the hospitalizations need to have uh this is not really an official recommendation but this is you know really based on what we saw in the spring is that the hospitalizations really have to start to come down you know over probably a couple
249of weeks before we can start to talk about what a reopening looks like because that would represent not only diminished transmission in the community but also that the healthcare system is not going to be strained and i also finally um i want to make sure that we work with our our partners at the erie county department of health who i've been in touch with on a fairly regular basis to make sure that when we send x number of students back with x number of teachers and staff in the building that we have enough contact tracing uh and that and and right there tells relies on the number of positive tests that the county tells us that they have today right now they're running you know five seven seven five six seven hundred positive cases a
250day and they said they're having a hard time keeping up with that so i think that that loads probably if i had to guess it's got to be cut in half and our positivity rates got to be cut probably well under 5 before we start talking about reopening schools i have one follow-up question about infection in buildings so there's a lot of conversation out there about student-to-student infection after staff infection but not a ton about that relationship of students infecting staff staff and affecting students what do we know about that because actually in the elementary school years and the preschool elementary school years there's actually virtually no documented spread from student to student and student to staff um if you're talking about uh the high schoolers you do tend to see more of that possibility
251and that's likely because the high schoolers seem to be uh spreading uh able to spread the virus about as efficiently as uh as as adults so um you know the uh but the the research from this there's a fair amount of research that's come from other countries you know and they date back to the the springtime uh before we really even had in europe for example adequate uh testing and tracing and they found that there was really minimal evidence that the younger kids were spreading it to teachers and spreading it to family members it was pretty much all the other way around now we're talking about the high schoolers that is a different story and so i think it is uh reasonable to uh for the younger kids to work towards bringing them back sooner
252um the older kids uh it has to be a culture change plus adequate masking and de-densifying okay thank you thank you for that uh there's another hand uh terence heard board member terence hurt um thank you dr evans brown and thank you for your um presentation dr cole uh i have one one question it's about the antibody testing um if we identify a group of of kids or teachers that that um that have the antibody testing that um so that they had the virus and now that it's exceeded from the from their own blood or bodies or or however the antibodies is carried um are those people likely um to turn back to in person learning or do you feel that's still a harm or a challenge um i think that's a challenge the antibodies
253just tell you if you've been exposed um in and of itself antibodies don't tell you how immune you actually are there's a fair amount of thought that uh the antibodies win over time and that you lose uh the protection that you might have the the thinking is that you probably lose it over about a three month period and we are starting to hear about reports of individuals being reinfected uh after a period of time so what we're recommending for uh interpreting antibody testing is that it just tells you that you've had the exposure sometime in the last three months and there's not a whole lot else you can conclude about how immune you actually are and how much protection it gives you and how long it'll last okay thank you thank you uh support member
254heard there's another hand up uh board member larry scott dr crashed are you are you going to walk us through this timeline or darren and i will do that but i wanted to get as much from dr crow as we could while we have him on the line and see show you how his recommendation based on science and his particular field of expertise are lining up with our phase one uh recommendation there of february one that was my main point for dr quote then i'll then we can let him go and you can go on with darren and me but if people still have questions for dr quo we should take advantage of that while he's here i'll hold off on my questions and there for you my two questions um question for dr quo
255i've been reading a lot lately about um there are there seems to be an escalation of cases among staff in particular and students there isn't evidence of spread within buildings what we're seeing like batavia high school is now full remote or batavia district and we're seeing a lot of school districts around albany that are shutting down because of an escalation of cases among staff and students do you have any any comment or information that would be helpful for the public based on those cases we're seeing for those situations in some of the other districts and possibly throughout the country um i think that um what i what i i think we need to not underestimate just how much virus is circulating out there right now you know i know that we all want to try
256to get our kids back into in-person learning when it is particularly when it's safe to do so i'm not i i think that um as a community we need to understand just how much virus is out there it is a lot and it is uncontrolled um and uh it is also uh predicted to get worse before it gets better um i think once we know that it has started to get better that is when we can reopen um and um i think that uh certainly uh we are in a different place than we were in uh march and april you know back then we definitely did not have enough testing we definitely did not have enough uh ppe uh and we didn't understand how to take care of those who became sick with kovid we
257do now but it also meant that um you know we have uh or but we also mean that we are in a position right now where we have so much spread that um it's kind of it's pretty uncontrolled right now so that's really where i would that's really the feedback i would give uh folks i think it's just going to get worse before it gets better and the analytics that i've seen coming out from our group at ub are pretty much saying that that's what's going to happen you good i am i'll hold off on my other two questions for later i have a question dr quo there's uh conversations in the community in the community that schools are opening charter schools are opening and buffalo schools aren't opening now are you facing i mean
258i i understand because i know that i'm gonna interject this i know for a fact that we have lost uh a 27 year old mother in this district um just about six weeks ago and then recently um a 41 year old young man passed that my kids knew so the spread is more widespread than we've ever be and i think when it becomes when it hit home we we're more apt to to say hey this is for real um but you have people who say that private schools are opening charter schools are opening why aren't the uh why aren't the buffalo public school system open or the district not opening up our schools i mean you adequately said why but could you just expound to the community i'm thinking because we have a bigger district
259um maybe you know some of the charter schools and the private schools are much smaller um can you add to to that particular uh question i actually can i it's my i think that every school district uh has to do what's right for their own kids and it has to take no account in my opinion the following uh keeping in mind that as a pediatrician one of our roles is to really look out for the best of support for child health and wellness and development we knew that the the the virus was going to surge during the winter because that's what history teaches us when folks go inside and and i think there's a lot of pandemic fatigue i think it's important for us to provide our children with the best consistent learning uh to
260have uh yeah the teachers that are that that they know that are uh that they know and can develop those relationships uh and partnerships with and um right now i think if schools try to open up they're just going to close again because there's going to be too many sick parents and too many sick teachers and it doesn't really do anyone any good if we just ping pong back and forth and teachers and everybody have to switch curriculum because that disrupts learning and i think we have to double down on what we know is going to give our kids the most consistent and the best that we can offer at any given time you know i i i do ask like our kids uh and our families in the clinic you know make sure that
261you account for the fact that uh we are in a pandemic and we have challenges but the last thing i want to do is ping pong back and forth from different modalities of learning disrupted learning and then watch people get sick in the process so i think that um you know it's certainly we had a crystal ball i could tell you exactly what's going to happen but i also do think that uh folks are kind of underestimating just how wide for this virus is and uh when we move to reopening the schools i think we need to do it in a controlled fashion in a way that we know that once we're ready to reopen we're to reopen and it's going to stay open to in-person learning and in the meantime we need to double
262down on on the right on the right modality of learning that includes consistency and dedication from our best thank you that was a very thorough um answer for the community and for this board there's one other handout dr ann rivera thank you this is my last question uh dr co you mentioned that your concern is also about student uh about children um progressing developmentally and the need for consistency and learning could you speak a little bit about how you see uh the ability of students to make up learning the and so really what i see is doing is we're trying to balance what you said very well about uh losing learning or hurting uh developmental learning and getting sick we're trying to balance those things out in being remote knowing what you know how how
263high stakes is students losing some learning during this period so i'm speaking as a pediatrician um i think it's i think this there's pretty high stakes in doing the right thing making sure we do the right thing um you know in a in a perfect world we wouldn't have a pandemic and um you know and so it is what it is and we have to make the most of what we have um as a pediatrician these are things that i'm recommending to the families i work with you know one is that i make sure that they're in touch uh regularly with their teachers with their educators and with their pediatrician and if they see their specialists to make sure that we're constantly monitoring everything from sleeping to behavior to mental health there is some medical
264treatments that we sometimes look at whether it's medications or looking at sleeping or appetite or you know we're seeing kids who are under eating we're seeing kids or overeating and these are things that we have to specifically ask questions about and by keeping in touch with folks and working together that's how we try to mitigate this as much as possible um i am recommending that folks when they look at their learning plans that they take into account things like how is behavior change um you know and uh you make that part of their discussion with their teachers because i think that's something that we have to we have to account for and then of course we have to make sure that we keep our families as healthy as possible because if parents get sick it's
265going to be a lot harder for them to be able to work with their kids and their and their teachers um i think i just i really as a pediatrician i make i ask the questions it's not enough to just say um yeah how's your kid doing i think we have to ask things like how's your child sleeping how's your child keeping up uh you know and ask very pointed questions about that and we do talk about you know uh making sure that we're it's it's not like we just take what we did in the classroom and just just say we're gonna do the same thing online you know we it's it's a it's a it's a different learning modality and uh we have to make the best of that thank you very much i
266appreciate it thank you i don't say any more hands um for doctor quall uh dr cuo i have one question um how fast can you order with your license if you could just say you have a license now to order tests because we're connecting to the ecdoh how fast can we get our 4000 to 5000 tests that we'll need at the start do the testing and then uh start to increasingly add to that number each month what what just give us a little sense about the logistics just on that issue yeah um i will have to uh i i honestly will have to get back to you on you know a better number on that i know that uh this the state has been very supportive in trying to get schools these tests as quickly
267as possible and the time frame i'm thinking of is like within a couple of weeks but that's not a number that i necessarily want to be completely held to um we have to start that process and move forward i definitely don't think it's like two months okay thank you the point is we need to start it now though right absolutely i think the sooner we started better and now's the time got it sharon cartman i believe this is the last question for you dr quall i'm gonna wait i'm gonna wait until they go through this um reopening timeline thank you dr crowe for your uh information and for your concern for supporting us in this district we appreciate you very much thank you you're very welcome thank you dr quo okay so dr brown darren
268if you could just take us through these main bullet points and uh kind of where we are uh with these items and then we'll go back to the board so as you see the first bullet board members is the recommendation that we begin in-person learning for our media students and our selected populations based on the science and the research on monday february 1st 2021 that is the first day of the second semester we hope to have a phase in approach where we have a full complement of our students in a hybrid model for some and some other students attending every day by mid-march the new requirements of being in the orange zone for testing is that we complete 20 of testing of the students we have on-site and the teachers and staff over the one-month
269period with no more than 10 percent of testing of students teachers and staff over a two-week period so we can't do all of the testing in the first week or the second week it has to be spread out over the month but knowing the number of pre-k to grade two students that we have and with every school having their neediest students every school was allotted 100 spots for that and our 12th graders for example we will be ordering approximately 4 200 tests for the first month because we need to reach that 20 testing requirement from the state and then we would continue to order more tests as we need for our students now the question keeps coming when will students be allowed to attend and on what days in the month of january in the
270beginning we're gonna have to survey parents to see what parents are gonna keep their students home and what parents will be willing to send their students to school for example if we have a class of 25 first graders and 10 parents say i want to keep my child home or remo remote learning which will be the parents choice we may have the capacity maintaining social distance making sure all our students wear their masks our students and staff we may have the ability to have some groups of students attend every day ordering the test now ordering the tests as you heard from dr quo and dr cash that's something we want to begin right away but for school districts to order tests we have to have an lsl erie county has been very supportive and helpful
271allowing us to go into an mou with them to use the erie county department of health emergency lsl so that mou has been signed and sent back to erie county that allows our medical director dr quote to order the test through the new york state department of health using the ecdoh emergency lsl now the question has also come up who will be doing the testing in school and our nurses will be doing that testing we'll be working with supplemental health that's what we have our nurses through they'll be providing the necessary training for their nurses supplemental health works in other districts too they have begun testing so they know what training is required and so we will ensure that our nurses have that testing training so that they're able to do that in our school
272buildings additional info governor cuomo has said that if hospitals locally reach 90 capacity he still has the ability to shut a zone or a region down so just because we're reopening and we're doing the required testing and we don't have the spread in the schools the governor is still able to shut a community or zone down if their hospitals reach 90 capacity prince will always have a choice of sending their students back to school or keeping them home on remote learning because we said we want to start with the media students and selected populations pre-k to 2 and looking at 12th graders parents are not forced to send their students back they will have a choice so we will fully support them whatever choice they make because we understand these are difficult choices to make
273additional phases schools will also be working to figure out when their additional phases will hit again we want to have by mid-march a full complement of all grades in the school building whether it be some students attending every day others attending uh remotely and then other students in a hybrid model however we don't want to hold schools up if they are ready to move ahead to their next phase allowing additional students to come back all their procedures are in place and we're in line with what the county is requiring and what the governor's office is requiring we will support those schools and increasing the number of students that they are bringing back making sure we're following all the required guidelines of hand washing mask wearing and social distancing in our school buildings thank you dr
274carrich thank you dr brown okay larry scott has larry scott sharon belt and cotman have questions thank you dr brown hall um so mike my question um my first question has to do with the the media students starting february 1st are we still planning to have those students in five days a week yes so those media students that were identified initially i know the plans i believe were shared with you at the october board meeting those plans will be going public on our website those media students the plan is still to have them in the five days a week yes no and all staff in five days a week okay and then for the full complement we're now looking back at a hybrid approach do we have a plan for what that's going to be
275what that's going to look like for staffing because i know that this now stretches staff and you have essentially three different roles that need to be fulfilled um it's not a hybrid like you're you're saying because i'm not i'm not a big fan of it but in order to get all the students coming back and having some experience with schooling with the numbers down and pre-vaccine you can't do it all students every day you have to because we don't have the capacity uh to do it safely so that's why uh a hybrid that would be you know unique to buffalo uh would be to will be the approach that we're taking and that's why these schools are leading going out like that with their with their population from tier three the highest need then tier
276two uh coming in uh behind that uh and and then trying to get on out to to the full to the full compliment but uh that's what we're going to be uh looking at very closely um over these next uh several uh days and weeks to see which hybrid or which approach to bring back all the students um in a saving approach is going to be best for buffalo so to be more specific do we we have a sense of for example what my second grader and my fifth graders week will look like in this full complement of all students in mid-march i think depending on the school uh that they attend we could probably get get a get a day in the life uh for you but because we're not putting that whole system
277overlay uh onto it as as as you know this is all coming from central uh i can tell you tonight what a day in the life would look like for him or a day in the week would look like but if he goes to school 80 or 81 i could get an asl uh to be in touch with you and and start to give you a sense of what that would look like my question wasn't necessarily for for me just knowing but for other parents to have an understanding when we get to this this stage what their week could look like my last question um has to do with the virtual learning center so i think we talked about this briefly at one point they are expected to end in january i believe so is
278there ever any potential for an extension for the the virtual learning centers we're looking at that now i've directed uh dr carestas will caresses to go to work with a team of folks including virtual leonard senate representatives david rust over at say yes and in our team to see what we could do to continue funding that through the start of school at least we have a rough estimate of a million dollars that it would cost to do that from january one or four in this case through february 1 monday january 4 monday february 1. about a million dollars and i'm looking to cost share that rather than try to bear the full of that as a district public and we have some bite on that uh to share that cost with us but my bottom
279line short answer larry is that that's important for us to continue that strategy okay mark called me the other day uh about that and and wants to brainstorm with me on how we can continue that funding he's concerned about it as well excellent thank you sharon cotmanville belton cotman thank you [Music] and followed by terence heard so i just have a a short question the parental choice parents are either do the turn in or to stay at home remain consistent for the entire marking period darren my answer is yes for that um what is your shot keep repeating the what would you say dan if if you could repeat the question miss cotmix i didn't hear the whole thing parental choice piece okay once the parents make their choice it remain for the entire marking
280period yes in promote remote or if they decide to come into the school well the market apparently ended by february one that that'll be a whole semester right but i'm saying okay starting monday february the 1st if a parent stops to keep their children at remote learning will they have to uh will that will that be consistent for the entire marking period we would we would ask that mrs cottman for consistency because it takes a lot for our schools to plan proper planning correct and we would ask parents to please stay committed at least for the entire marketing period with whatever they have chosen for their uh mode of learning yes you need to make sure that that's written in there as well okay thanks that was a good question and was it and and
281it's your turn thank you my question is about parent and student support so if we're looking at the safest option being to wait until february to phase in we're hearing from parents and i myself am a parent and can see it if staying home is the op safest option what can we do to support parents and children who are struggling so mr scott mentioned the virtual learning centers i thank him for that because that was one of my questions but my other question would be along the lines of are there initiatives that we look at is there enhanced programming we can look at are there more options in terms of social support can we innovate in any ways to help support families who are struggling with supporting working supporting their children and for children who
282may be showing some signs of some some behavioral signs like the ones dr poe was talking about having some issues with sleep behavior with mental health with eating is there anything that we could do as a district to help support them yes thank you for that question that that's that's the right question and it's really really important stays on my mind on a daily basis dr williams tanja williams while that's a big part of your wheelhouse uh colleagues any any other others of you in your huddles and in your work together that wanna uh support and answer a response to that question please do so um but tanja if you could start with a response sure good evening everyone so all of our schools um and i think i've presented um in the past on
283it but we certainly are enhancing the work of our community partners all of our schools every single one of them is attached to a community-based partner that really is an expert in social emotional counseling and so we meet frequently every other week would say yes to make sure that we're staying abreast of what the needs are in schools what the trends are that we're seeing and how we can best support you know those children so when it becomes when it gets to the attention of a teacher or a school leader we have an expedited process to make sure that we're able to tie those students to those agencies and they provide telecounseling and some of them even do face-to-face counseling um when it's necessary and as you all know we do have very active student
284support teams in all of our schools trained and licensed school counselors social workers and school psychologists that stand ready to support dr students if you have any other ideas because i sort of hear in your question that you may have some ideas that can be helpful in this regard you know let us know and we will be happy to uh consider them as part of our framework of support particularly when it comes to student engagement because that's the most difficult piece with any kind of online learning is feeling engaged feeling engaged feeling seen feeling a part of the community because the distance that this produces we experience it all at the board table you know every week that we meet all of us experience it to a certain extent in our own social lives more
285adults it's even harder for children okay tonight i want to commend our teachers and all of our staff for really working to engage students but when i hear parents and even i see it in my own child periodically even though she's doing pretty well with online learning we're lucky that way it is easy to disengage it's really easy to disengage especially when you're not really feeling ready to learn and then that becomes compounded for our learners who have any learning differences so i do have some ideas about what we could do maybe to innovate to engage our students more to help them feel more connected those even while they're virtual which hopefully will help ease the burden that parents are having to try and constantly make their children engaged when they're in a virtual setting
286look forward to having that conversation with you all now and if you could just say a few words about the ongoing pd that we provide teachers through crystal benton who does such a terrific job for us to help them get better at engaging students you were just telling me the other day in our meeting what you were seeing over at 59 for example when you did the virtual walkthrough um let dr rivera and the board know how we have ongoing pd for this very issue because it is it is so important in the remote learning environment so we had offered a quite a bit of pd for superintendent conference day and because so much of it was self-paced we've been able to keep that open so teachers can go in new hires can watch it
287teachers can revisit it after they've already watched it so that is all still available to our teachers and then on top of that we're working on several new presentations that get a little deeper into schoology and how to best organize courses for optimal student access so i recently shared a quick preview with the principals at their principal meeting this week um just to get there get a little excited but it it shows how strong organization of a course um and appropriate curating of the materials in the course and training of students how to approach appropriately access the course can really improve student submission of assignments improve their organizational skills um and and help everybody access the learning in a more efficient way so that's that's on the radar right now we're getting ready to roll
288that out to schools and then the i t department continues to work with schools um as needed or as requested to show them how to better use nearpod for example nearpod is it's a program we actually had prior to covid but we didn't use it quite as much as we're seeing now because right now you can use it to engage your students and student engagement is one of the things that we've been seeing as a very big need across the district so nearpod for example has built-in strategies like polling and surveys and drawing tools and other things that kids can use to show the work that they do on a math problem for example and then the teacher immediately receives all the data from each student so when i was at 59 the other day
289i got to watch a teacher pull up all the student submissions so they were doing a math problem in nearpod and she was able to pull all of them up and see their responses immediately and select one so it has been working with schools to to enhance the usage of programs like that we're bringing cern in to work with the principals in january because we want to make sure that they know how to run all the reports and can appropriately support their teachers so we just keep trying to bring in refreshers as well as a second level of depth for those programs thank you for that thank you um yeah we also know that student engagement is a concern i mean students have been in remote since march and i think one of the other
290caveats to this is that uh parents get to a point where you know they're even saying i i just can't uh you know um you know make this child uh do remote and so they're frustrated too so we need to look at some kind of development for our parents as well to support them you know in this this space um the next question comes from uh terence and then lastly is jennifer mccoozy okay thank you thank you um good presentation i just like to make um a comment and a question um i know that um we said right now we're on track for a 74 cohort and that leaves almost at least almost eight eighteen hundred kids you know that will fall short and one thing i need we need to concentrate on probably would
291be our summer program next uh with that i had a lot of reports from from students saying that um that some students log on just to log on and then they and they mute their on camera um so that you can't see what they're doing and a lot of them play games or do other things but i know that the grades you know shouldn't reflect that but i just heard that reports from students so that they they can say they're in class they are logged into class but they may be talking to somebody else or on their phone or we're doing something um indifferent um what i would like to see is um the possibility maybe having um extended school days for our kids you know they're struggling or um the possibility of um our
292seniors that's struggling uh for those to be the first people to that we look at to possibly come into the buildings also i said before i would like for our seniors to come back but um listening to the doctor's data you know um you have to revisit you know i can visit my thinking but i do know that there are some seniors who are who are struggling right now not logging on and was mentioned earlier that seniors are working or they're helping you know with their younger um brothers and sisters though with their work or the time that they're supposed to be doing knowing their classwork so it's a struggle in some households which leaving you know the older kids to be to be the caregivers while other parents work and trying to maintain their
293grades so maybe if it's possible we can look at you know some extended classes i know we got some union concerns just by saying that but maybe on a saturday um we go into our virtual classes maybe we can have other teachers you know show them work sometimes students you know work with teachers and they don't get it from one teacher but it's mild show them a different way how to do the work or or you know work with them you know on the same project you know they might fear a lot better so it's just the way on people learning and their ability to know how you learn when how information is given to you so um i know we want to keep you know keep the cohort going so just looking for ways
294to though you know that that really may need help in identifying those students yeah we're those those are good comments uh mr heard we're we're all over those students as well uh each of the high schools have identified those students already as part of their high needs students and they'll be some of the first to come back in person but we also have some mentoring programs mr heard and maybe that can be another strategy that we connect with some of these uh older students who are falling off off track a little bit sometimes it's good to hear from mentors who who are nearer to their age and the university of buffalo mentoring program the one with tommy mclamb and you're familiar with uh mentoring program those are this is the time to use our our
295mentors this is the time so let's let's make the connections uh board members if you have specific students that you're aware of give them to us through dr brown and dr williams and we will then connect mentors with with our students because they also provide they also provide tutoring the mentors from ub provide tutoring as well as mentoring okay great jennifer mccousy i think jennifer last one i'll make this brief i've been holding off just to make some uh and i'll pose these questions over email as well but i wanted to do this because i've been receiving texts um the things the there's a lot of pd and a lot of and i brought this up before and i know we're doing it but we're concentrating on bringing in more and looking at more advanced
296and continuing to upgrade pd for the learning um for our teachers around what the products are and engaging and that's absolutely amazing but i just want to point out that we have some concerns and people have reached out and said that they would love more pd around support for them in general around like you know just having to to engage just having multiple students in a class who are dealing with you know maybe issues with connectivity or you know how they can't sometimes even start their class until 10-15 minutes in they don't have a lot of time like there's there's some moral support they said there everybody feels supported but they would love to hear that there's more um [Music] i guess research or upgrading or more interest in investing in more debt more pd
297that's supportive for them morally so that they're always in good spirits for their students you're talking about them there's no complaint that there's not enough it's not that to hear that there's you know we're always upgrading and teaching them new things on how to engage but they would like you know what whether or not or if they can be updated or i would love to be updated as to when you know we might be looking into more supports for moral engagement for them so that's one i just want to bring that up and then the second thing is when we have um uh the therapies uh physical therapy occupational you know um and speech therapies because we keep moving this we have to i'm in agreeance you know personally but we have to keep moving
298these timelines um does this uh mess with the contracts that we have with these programs does this increase the cost of this is this because the the in my own personal experience there's only so much limited time that a lot of these folks have and now they're realizing that more and more students might need their support so it's almost to the point that some of these folks are being overbooked or feeling um overwhelmed are we experiencing anything financial around um keeping these folks where they are would we be in trouble if we had to bring more of these folks on i just feel like you know again in my own personal experience that there's there's a lot of um need and now they're identifying so many so much more need i'm just wondering where those
299particular that particular group of folks whether you know we're good with them contractually we're able to bring more people on or is this going to be an additional cost because i know the need has become greater when you say um contractually are you referencing uh vendors that we bring in are you talking about the btf contract no i'm thinking i'm not sure the the speech and they're those therapies um speech occupational physical sbtf or a different type of contract that's what i'm asking like whoever these folks are are we in good shape with them because i know the need is greater do is it if it's btf or whatever i'm just curious because i know the need is greater is it going to affect us financially moving forward are we going to be able to
300maintain the people we have and bring more on or we do we have to kind of you know finagle some things well with all of that i'm sorry go ahead no i'm saying with all of vendors okay i am not aware of financial impact at the moment but i can certainly um get kim holsher to share uh more detail well kim kim can say right now whether or not uh this is a challenge or a problem or whether we're good right now kim kim's not on right now dr cash she can still say it tell her to holler probably is you're right she probably is we just i can easily take i can easily follow up over email i realize how late it is i don't want to really tie folks up but these are
301you know the the latter was something more of my concern based on what i'm seeing but the first one i just wanted to make sure i put out there publicly because they're asking so jen that's those are good questions i think we're good right now from what i understand and what i hear each week when when i meet with the team uh but we'll certainly look into that and try to anticipate because as time goes on the need you're right we'll get greater uh and then on your first point i just want to say that's that was an opportunity for improvement um and i think it's right for teachers to bring that up uh how do they get the support and the strength that they need you know to keep every day um being on
302their a-game having the energy and the emotion that they need to give to their students while also trying to manage their personal lives and their own families uh at peak level uh that it's a huge huge challenge and and so we need to do uh better with that i think you're right give some focused attention uh to our staff around their needs i appreciate that answer dr cash that's really that's exactly kind of what i was getting at so thank you so much for saying that absolutely so colleagues if i could dr evans brown um if i have i have some some tie up to this uh be very brief the first thing colleagues i would like and mike if you could take the take the uh last slide down and just show everybody everybody's
303face um i just like us to have uh hopefully all together i'd like us all to be together on this important issue um i want to go to a i want to call a press conference for tomorrow morning at 10 a.m at the buffalo uh culinary school the new buffalo culinary i'd like to invite any of you as board members that can attend to stand with me uh as i make this announcement uh community-wide all of the press will be there and um we we will start being on the record for this plan for any questions and and for any other thing we can start going on to the radio shows we can go on wherever you want to go if you want to go somewhere we'll button you up and have you ready to
304go uh if you want me to go somewhere um well don't answer that but the point is um if you want me to go on to media and go to meet with community groups uh then i'm happy to do that on your behalf on the district's behalf so forth we have to put a full court press out now uh about communication uh on a regular basis about where we are what we're gonna be doing and getting really really granular uh for our community so that i wanted to say we'll start that tomorrow if you're in agreement uh tonight and then the other thing i'm gonna do with your support and approval is there's a two-part letter communication piece that i alluded to about about a month or two ago but now uh it's time to
305start executing those letters so within a day or two i sent out what's called a pre-notice to all of our district users and staff that get ready be alert uh in the next few days about 30 days from when we start i'm gonna i'm gonna send you a 30-day notice and and that's for all of our employee groups uh to be aware of what we're doing to call them in they got to get their plans ready their personal uh matters and family needs together and be calling them in with a 30-day notice and then the same thing for families and parents to start taking care of any needs that that might that that might mitigate so that's going to happen over these next couple of days again i'll mention all these things with the media
306and then i'll cc you on these letters uh that will that will be going out so that's the conclusion of our particular presentation and the plan uh at this time um and again if you'd like to join me tomorrow uh at 10 a.m i would welcome you to be there with me um we'll social distance um wear two or three masks if you can um and then let's let's do this let's do this i think we can stage it safely less than 25 people because that's the rule in the new culinary um what's that room called darren right there like the foyer uh jim will take care okay can you remind us of the address what's that 45 huron street right there next to the curtis hotel okay anything else anything else board members before
307we conclude and say goodbye yes um can you please email the um your last um pdf dr brown you had dr brown i think we sent it you did in the inbox dr brown i'm here i'm evans brown there was a letter that you were going to read and she got kicked out too it happened to me yeah i mean what did you say i mean i know i had it sent it to the board the board received an uh email uh late in the meeting asking us to participate in an effort to help mckinty mckin mckinney-vento students to provide monetary support and have a nice christmas was sent over many of you may not know but i with the um any vento uh students um or the uh department and so they're asking for
308support we have upwards of around something kids or something that are currently um uh 40 or almost 100 kids children that between the ages of 5-18 who are homeless that we have identified carries as such the mckinney-vento and central registration center staff are contributing to help buffalo public school students who unfortunately are living in shelters this special initiative is to provide support and encouragement to 99 of our students 48 girls 51 boys ranging in the age from 5 to 18 with gifts from the holland for the holiday season helping our students and family is a universal principle and we are inviting board members to make monetary contributions that will be used to purchase gifts for our students and family 100 of your contribution will be will fund the purchase of gifts for students living in
309shelters in the city of buffalo please email uh oh my gm at buffalo public schools or marva brown excuse me at mm brown at buffalo public schools if you would like to contribute or have any further questions we thank you in advance for your contributions to help the students and family members enjoy a happy holiday season so they reached out i heard about that they were doing something i reached out to them and they had said that they wanted to ask the board to assist them uh this is a noble cause um and i hope each board member will find it in their heart to at least provide something for our children as well as the district staff dr cash this is a big list send it to me president cop and i'm going to
310get it on the district-wide users and certainly i'll make a contribution all the executive team will um and we'll make sure that they have a great a great holiday but send me that information tonight right now thank you so much all right do we um do we get specific what type of items that they can use in the facility for money monetary gifts i mean items i'll reach out parents i'll reach out to them and find out and then we because because they can just increase we'll get it together i promise yeah the basic needs are met in the show are we all together on this yes hand up paulette appropriately how many of you can join me tomorrow morning at 10. i know some people have to work but how many of you can
311join me i'll be able to join i'm going to try my best the reason i say colleagues i'll wait for you if i know you're trying to come just let eleanor know you might be running five minutes late and you'll be there otherwise i try to be there on time at 10 o'clock okay okay all right all right so that concludes our robust five hour meeting who's counting have a good night see you guys tomorrow if you can make it and god bless you stay safe have a good night