001thank you for being with us here to this evening coming off the spring break look like everybody's smiling that's always good everybody's all refreshed i hope everybody took time to take care of their well-being as they are with their families that is important to us in the district we do have a board member that is in transit so she'll probably slip in here and route the next five minutes but we do have a quorum so we will get started our first order of business will be a public hearing on the 10 28. mr shrees mr president dr smith members of the board of our last meeting you gave us permission to advertise for this hearing and i'm going to turn the floor over to mr jeff quackenbush to conduct the hearing for you thank you
002any questions for mr bush thank you sir the final the final phases of the high school is the outside site work in the athletic areas the anticipated total cost on that would that we have in the hearing i believe is up to 25 million we don't think it'll cost that much but we're covering ourselves with the potential increase in the interest rates all that being said we can still do this at no cost to the no raising the tax rate we'll just have to do some either use some of our existing balance in our debt service fund or we can do some capitalized interest on the front end but in by doing that it would still be a result in a zero tax increase to the taxpayer and i think we've talked about these projects
003before in the past when we've looked at the whole overall at the high school so if you have any questions i'd be happy to address those at this time what any questions any recap on the projects that we are talking about we need to state anything for the public no question or comments thank you mr freeze at this time any comments or question from the public on our 1028 hearing if there are no questions from the public no further question comments from the board thank you mr quakenbush thank you mr street that closes our public hearing at this time we will call the order to our work session thank you blue ribbon update mr smith mr president members of the board dr smith we continue on we have a little challenge with some weather here
004lately but uh the three story at lc a lot of finished work on the inside cabinetry is going in and uh they're moving to the second floor this week and contin phase 1b and 1c continue inside the building ln uh we were supposed to finish up brick by today but the weather has kind of pushed that out a little bit so the the outside brick will finish up here in the next week uh new addition continues on on the inside phase 1 b and 1c continue on the inside a lot of progress this last week with the pool and the architectural panels going up the two left out on the south end will remain out until they get the roof on crane going in and out and some excavating on the inside once they do
005that they'll back out and finish up the sides uh belzer middle school hvac you'll see there we have our temporary uh chiller in place and they're hooking that up this week interior work continues in the boiler house uh likewise fall creek valley that uh chiller will be hooked up this week as well and the boiler room continues on questions for mr smith regarding our blue ribbon facilities update do we have recorded bit uh footage you know how they do that fast time you see a project just dirt and then you see it coming to fruition we haven't recorded footage on that uh yeah matter of fact we have a complete video of the transportation for the city from start to finish oh that'd be good that'd be good for students to see yeah yep that's
006great any questions or comments thank you mr smith bids for our launch north asphalt update mr president members board dr smith we received bids on april 5th as you recall this was a rebid bids came in below our estimates 10 contractors picked up plans come midday we received three bids our estimates for the project was approximately 500 000 and low bid meeting specifications was bomb gardner at 392 and it will be our recommendation to the board that we go and approve bomb gardner for the asphalt contract at lawrence north high school questions or comments regarding the lawrence north asphalt update thank you mr smith application for common school loan mr streets yes mr president dr smith and members of the board this is something we do twice a year and the timing is really short
007that the state gives us to do this they didn't the window was march 13 to april 13. but we didn't find out until after the last board meeting that this was going on but we'd like to apply for the loan to do so copy copy or refresh district wide as well as our interactive panels that we utilize in the classrooms we can get approximately 1.574 million dollars at a great interest rate of one percent on this money so later on i'll ask permission for us to apply for that loan what any questions comments concerning the application for the common school loan i just had one question just for my knowledge what is the interactive panel refresh okay if you walk into a classroom it might look like a great big tv screen but it's more
008than that it's a touch screen it and so you can interact with it and it works with the computer and the students devices can interact with it as well and they they can capture what's on that screen into their device for notes and that's just a small amount of what it does but it does a whole lot more than just look like a tv screen okay thank you for that board we have one in our conference room also in my office so we utilize any other questions comments thank you mr streets request for rfp for reporting and analytics software mr trees yes you may ask what that all means in layman terms basically it's a dashboard where we can gather all of our information to make it easily read for not only the public and
009the board but our teachers as well we currently have a dashboard called decision ed we purchased that several years ago but we found that it doesn't really interact with all our data very well and it's not being utilized by by very many people because of that because it's hard to use as well so we want to send out an rfp to see what we might be able to replace that with so later on we'll ask for permission to send out that rfp questions or comments on the reporting and analytics software thank you mr freeze i'll let you get settled madame vice president i'm fine okay move on board goes student achievement update thank you mr president members of the board and dr smith i'm pleased to bring to you this evening our third installment of
010looking at our student achievement data relative to board goals and the board goal that we're going to look at this evening is about our district benchmark math and reading assessment so this is our fast bridge data grades two through eight so just as a reminder that we administer our fafsbridge reading and math assessments to all students in the district up through the 8th grade and this is a nationally normed adaptive assessment we're looking at mid-year growth data this evening so one of the questions that we have to ask ourselves as we are in recovery from learning loss of the pandemic is how are our students doing mid-year of 2022 compared to how they were doing at mid-year of 2021. and that's the data that you see in front of you if the data point is
011in green that means it's an increase over proficiency compared to 2021 and it might be an increase at the grade level or an increase within the cohort so maybe third graders as you can see scored five percent higher than they did as second graders if you look at the 2021 data compared to the 2022 data so on this screen you can see it broken out by race so this is the percentage of our students that have reached that proficiency mark you do see one grade level of concern from our second grade where we're a little flat-lined with our black subgroup and we have actually declined within our hispanic subgroup all other grade levels you see green across the board second grade is not really a surprise to us as that's the cohort that has been
012most significantly impacted by the pandemic if you think about their three years of schooling kindergarten first grade second grade that cohort has been significantly impacted on the next screen is further disaggregated and we see that continuation of concern in second grade with large increases at our other grade levels and so this tells us that that second grade has to be a priority for jumpstart the og tutoring that we have offered through our partnership with marion has to be an emphasis for our second graders especially and you can see we do have growth at all of our other grade levels when we look at math math is similar in that our second grade cohort is our cohort that isn't showing as much proficiency as last year's second graders so again that point of emphasis for extra
013support and jump start we do have the majority all but one sell with significant growth you can see and this was true for reading as well our most significant growth is at our middle schools and no surprise there last year if you remember we were in a hybrid model at our middle schools where half of our students were at home the other half were at school and then they flipped so no surprise that we're seeing um double-digit increases in proficiency this year and then this slide is by subgroup again lots of green with second grade being our great level of concern one point to add to this data is a continued monitoring of our attendance data so typically pre-pandemic our student attendance rate would average 96 to 97 percent at this point we're averaging 91
014percent so we still have a significant gap in that data point that certainly impacts achievement as well so just in terms of overall analysis i've already spoken to the concern with second grade they need to be a priority we did administer iread 3 to our second graders as an optional opt-in to the ibreed testing with the state that has given us some good data when we're seeing our greatest subgroup gains at the middle level which tells us that our students need to be full time in person that the virtual instruction is not the best learning environment for the majority of our students as we look at at further analysis we know where we're getting the biggest bang for our buck is in that daily on grade level core instruction that even though we do have
015students that are behind in terms of of grade level we've got to continue to provide that on grade level core instruction and then supplement with interventions and so as we've analyzed our interventions so this would be additional time outside of the core where we're giving students support we're using the 60th percentile as an indicator that we're making significant growth in the the interventions that i've listed there so our retired teachers we now have quite a cadre of retired teachers that are serving across our entire district and they lead the way no surprise our veterans lead the way in terms of of getting growth from students our orton gillingham work and and we see great growth in the small groups across every elementary school and part of the reason that we're continuing that into jump start
016with our partnership with marion university we do have a couple schools that are getting good growth from a program called lli that is not universal across our district we have other schools that aren't getting as much growth so we've really dug into that individually by school our lexia core5 computerized program is getting some growth at a couple schools our greatest growth has been in the middle school with the sra corrective reading program we've got some teachers whose students are averaging as a group over 90 percentile growth and that's really really amazing i mean we've seen some decent growth from eighth graders at xr math as well and so everything you see on the screen is esser funded and so part of our job is to analyze we still have a couple more years of our
017esr grant where are we getting the greatest result student result for the money that we're spending and so now that we're we have a semester in we're able to analyze and further support principals as they're deciding what interventions make the most match for their students be happy to entertain any questions or discussion so how many retired teachers do we have now in this dr anderson you do the contracts for us would you come up and speak to the the number of retired teachers that we have use your teacher voice we have a couple additional at the middle school as well in the supporting the sra corrective reading program could you give us a little bit of insight why our attendance two things why are attendances at 91 now and also a little bit of insight
018into the sra program that is so incredibly successful and i know it's for middle schoolers but is any of it would any of that program be appropriately used you know fifth sixth grade yes um i'll address the the corrective reading program first this has been a long time standing intervention particularly at belzer for for many many years and we've seen that kind of growth over all the years that that we've had corrective reading and it's a very scripted regimented some teachers would call it boring and it is but it's about those basic skills that some of our students have lacked and so it's research based very focused and when taught with fidelity in an environment of high expectations students can really show great growth yes it would be appropriate for upper elementary as well and
019we have a couple elementary schools that are trying it um we do need to provide some more professional development this summer for teachers thank you and then the 91 yeah in terms of the attendance piece and mrs bush might be able to to more directly answer this but um one of the um phenomena that we've seen across really all segments of society is that return from lockdown that return from being a home that return from i'll just zoom in when i can to you got to show up in person and that's really been a challenge across so many segments of society from employment to attendance at school and so i think some of it is that getting back into the in-person in-person flow mrs bush would you add anything to that i would i would
020concur with that mr notre we have had not just a small break in the routine we've had a a major break in the routine that has lasted um a couple of years and so um just being out of the sink and the routine of school in addition to all of the hardships that you know i know that we're all seeing light at the end of the tunnel you know on what we hope are the the heels of this pandemic but we still have a lot of families that are that are suffering the residual effects of that um we have families that um i'm seeing transportation be a bigger issue than it's ever been before and so i think that's part of our our attendance issue and then um just you know families that are that
021are staying with other family members we still have some of that and so that combination i think has just got us to a point where we're just not quite back um at the level of attendance that we want to see but we're slowly inching there and our families know that we will get their children to school right absolutely yeah absolutely yeah okay i have a question it's concerning um will you answer the first question concerning the funding that is through esser and so just for future forward or if i'm moving too far ahead stop me okay will we will this be something that we'll be able to use future forward so not just this year but this next year as well yes yes for the next two school years we have cares grant funding for
022the next two years although just like i answered the question about corrective reading many of these have been in our system already the retired teachers is a new one and we haven't taken advantage of that previously to the pandemic and we're seeing the greatest results there okay thank you so two years we're able to see and utilize this is awesome thank you you're welcome i just had a couple questions thank you for this um the first one is on the reading and math data one of the examples could be slide four so if some one group is in middle of the year 21 for second grade then diagonally down would that be mostly the same group of kids then with a little turnover yeah just a little um for third grade just to kind of
023see how they've improved or okay yes we pay really close attention to that diagonal data okay because that's the cohort yeah so tracking that reward over time okay thank you for that and then the second question i had it was mentioned i believe at our last board meeting you had talked about possibly analyzing the data from students who attended summer jump start especially in the lower elementary grades is that in process right now because we have our meeting with purdue university later this week where we'll really get the details of it their big picture is if students attended jumpstart they performed better on this data yes okay thank you you're welcome a diagonal on this african-american group from third to fourth grade that's a that's a huge number decrease huh in math at 26 percent
024yes that's why why it's in red yeah and and you take when you start fourth fifth middle middle school math it's hard to get it's hard to catch up if we don't do something extra right absolutely so the question becomes so when we say we're going to do more for second graders what does moore look like what does that mean that we're not already doing so i think step one is the emphasis from the building principle with students and families about the importance of our summer programming the the data study that i just referenced with purdue is clear if you come this summer you get better results during the school year not all families make that a priority necessarily for their summer vacation and so that's step number one as our principals ensuring that we
025give our resources to our second graders but we got to get them in the building for the month of june yeah and then we think about our district you take our black and hispanic those are two largest populations so those students have an impact on the overall performance of the district just in size right certainly so we have to put our efforts in absolutely she won't make something doing saying that correctly that's right and then so so how does this uh i know there's just one snapshot so some uh you know assessments or assessments but so this is one snapshot of how we are doing as a district but then we do another snapshot around in the year i learned and we do in fact we've already had another fastbridge screener since this data this
026data was from january we had one into february early march as another uh checkpoint so you're right it is one data point um doesn't define a child by any means but what it does do is allow us look to look at trends across the building it allows principals to look at it by teacher so they they know where their holes have been um from an hr point of view but just like this second grade data it really allows us to tailor what our messaging needs to be to our community to make sure that we get the kids who will most benefit from an additional month of instruction into our buildings this summer so we use it for different purposes but in the life of a child this is one data point right and but we
027can look at this data by school by class yes by a teacher yes interesting it's good data it is okay any other questions or comments just one more going back to retired teachers how do we go about recruiting the retired teachers and is there a limit on how many retired teachers we can take on um given the money we have available through the cares act or otherwise well we are fortunate to have um significant dollars to be able to invest in learning loss and our district has chosen to make learning loss the priority for this particular grant money so we do have the the funds i expect to have even more next year um we're really through the building principles relationships with retired teachers is how that happens so um we have building principals who
028retired teachers you know put in the retirement letter and they've already had the conversation about will you come back and and tutor for me um next school year and so it's now become part of our process of retirement you know the question is a comment thank you mr notre curriculum update english language arts grades 4 through 12. thank you mr president members of the board and dr smith we have engaged in a program review process for english language arts and i'd like to invite dr anderson and mr harsha to the microphone as they have led this process and i see we have some of our leaders that are with us this evening as well so thank you all for being here dr anderson dr smith mr president members of the board thank you all for
029listening to this presentation tonight for our ela program review the first slide just talks about the law around the idle doe and state law around the adoption process we last observed i mean sorry evaluated our ela program in 2016 and now we are doing it again because our adoption is almost over and we want to make sure that we are keeping up with whatever is new out there so we can provide the best educational experience for our students our current reality is our team has worked very extensively around what's new and what's cutting edge with education we wanted to make sure we research building knowledge and the science of reading and make sure we are aligned with the best practices in ela and so as we went through our process we wanted to make sure
030that the goal of this adoption was to align with best practices and not keep doing the same thing over and over again not only that we wanted to make sure whatever we adopt in the next adoption is promoting positive identity development throughout our curricular resources we have had a extensive pilot process where harrison hill elementary and brook park have conducted a year-long pilot of ckla which is core knowledge language arts in grades one through six what i really want to point out is some of the data points from those two buildings harrison hill and brook park have are performing better than pre pandemic on the ire iii assessment also both schools are showing continuous improvement overall and in their subgroup data than in previous years and both schools are above the 51st national percentile growth
031with their subgroups and achieving higher than before therefore closing the achievement gap and so that was one of the programs we really extensively looked into we also through the pilot process asked other teachers throughout the district to pilot a unit and we took their questions comments and collected their feedback afterwards quick question here dr anderson yes on this partly process so in layman's term though i mean it's good wording but what are you what are you telling me about harrison hill in brook park from this pilot process through the pilot process they are performing better than they have in previous years using the materials that we are discussing at this time significant improvement or just in like like one percent half percent 13 like what are we talking about here significant harrison hill's significant it's
032important to tell us brooke park a little less significant okay um just because we just began this year harrison hill this is their second year of the pilot and statewide there was a decrease in proficiency on ireat3 so less students are proficient now than last year so no big surprise there with the result of the pandemic harrison hill and brook park have more students proficient this year than they did in 2019. that's huge so all the the learning loss to the pandemic yet we've got two schools who have more third graders proficient than they did before the pandemic okay and i also want to note that that is consistent across almost all of their data points so it's not just ire 3 but it's also on our fast bridge assessment these are third graders correct
033i read three as third graders but fast bridges everybody yes okay so we conducted our research on what's out there we basically looked at ed reports which is a database of all the materials out there and they rate them and so we looked at that we also looked at our district grade level curriculum specialists reviewed it trying to see if it was the best fit for us and for our specific students again we piloted in multiple schools across multiple grade levels committees met strategically throughout the year to evaluate the program and they developed a rubric to align with not only ckla but our personal goals as a district so why did we choose ckla or core knowledge language arts has very rigorous texts it follows the science of reading which one of the big things
034with the science of reading is that we always do letter id before letter identification prior to doing letter sounds students need letter sounds to read and so we want to get them reading earlier so they start with letter sounds and then go along with letter id it fosters high engagement at both harrison hill and brook park along with their achievement it supports our rigor work through meaningful tasks and it promotes student teaming not only that as going through the materials it definitely promotes positive identity developed through the text through the images and all things in between so in looking at the cost of our adoption for grades four and five there is a decrease for families it goes for in fourth grade for from thirty five dollars and fifteen cent to twenty eight dollars and
035from the same amount in six fifth grade to thirty dollars and we're adopted we're looking to adopt this for three years sixth grade we put a paws on because a lot of their resources are aligned to middle school and so we want to further explore that process to make sure they're aligned with the best fit because even though they're in a elementary school in our district most textbook companies have them with the middle schools as far as resources so we want to make sure we're doing the best possible thing for our sixth graders no matter their environment whether they're in the middle school or they're in the elementary schools also for dual language we will continue to adopt allante adelante sorry and we will use el grants to purchase those that is all go ahead
036no that 150 no that's gonna come from it it hits the district the district it's gonna hit the district and that concludes the elementary portion of this presentation and i'll give it to mr harsha pardon me good evening mr president dr smith and members of the board the process for our secondary resource is very similar to what dr anderson just described at the elementary it has been six years since we have adopted a new resource our grade seven and eight are currently using my perspectives which is a product through pearson um and our plcs currently utilize that as their foundational research they do supplement with various other texts and resources uh grades 9 through 12 are also using pearson and then again in our all of our courses 9 through 12. on the next slide
037you can see our process like dr anderson said we do rely on the ed reports database and we also got our teachers and mr notre mentioned we have some of those representatives here who piloted uh springboard which is a product of college board studysync which is a mcgraw-hill product and amsco starting in october all the way through march and our building leaders were able to provide feedback and try out those resources in the classrooms with students and we utilized the rubric the list of the things that they looked at are on the next slide you can read through there what we were looking for and having conversations about how this resource met up with the quality of text the cultural responsiveness and positive identity development our standards alignment the texts and tasks variety of questionings
038that will push our students to think and to speak um and vocabulary so those were the items that we looked at our recommendation is springboard for grades seven through eleven and i just tried to outline there some of the reasons the feedback we got from teachers on the ed reports springboard met expectations and sometimes in some cases exceeded expectations on their report as a resource the questions and the tasks promoted speaking and listening right now we have a heavy focus on getting students to work together in academic teams and a lot of the prompts and tasks provided by springboard fit really nicely with that push a lot of higher order questioning and evidence-based writing academic dialogue and that aligns nicely with our s.a.t and psat provides scaffolding to support all of our students that need
039them strong teacher resources and obviously integration with canvas which is our learning management system as you can see there is a cost breakdown the previous prices were around 12 dollars i think it was twelve dollars and twelve cents so a slight increase from 2016. and then again just a note there this is through grades uh basically seven through twelve but remember that in our honors courses ib courses dual credit courses and our themes of literature in english 12 there is a variety of excuse me a variety of texts that are used just as a reminder there dr anderson and i would be happy to entertain any questions i do have a question um you used a variety of curricula to determine which is the best and you your team got together was there a strong
040consensus that springboard was the best yes and both at the high school and at the middle school level that was the resource that rose to the top i actually was in a middle school classroom last week and got to see a teacher engage and even ask some of the students what they thought and but yes that was the that was the one that rose to the top for sure at both grade level at both building configurations sometimes if you teach a particular curriculum you might prefer that because you've gotten to know it a little bit and i guess also um all kidding aside do you know what that hundred and fifty two thousand dollars comes out to per family it's paid for through grants so it's it's not a cost because it's a supplemental resource
041okay thank you with the last adoption being in 2016 so here we are going to do an adoption 2023 knowing that we've gone through this pandemic and all these other struggles barriers obstacles how you want to group that all together so was there any thing that was taken into consideration because we know what we're going through for this particular adoption any lessons learned anything like oh yeah this is a good time for us to do this adoption because of what we've just gone through with the pandemic i would say that one of the uh important elements of the resources that we looked at was what embedded scaffolding and supports they have for all students we think often about our students that are in receive special education services and those that are in our el program
042and that was important to teachers that some of those were embedded a lot of those you know we are sometimes forced as educators to make on our own but the resource provided a lot of those embedded supports so that teachers don't have to try to make those on their own i think that's important to consider for any resource as we come in out of the pandemic any other questions or comments we had a teacher stand to introduce themselves to us we don't get to see teachers that often yeah thank you for being here with us thank you for all you doing our students thank you for the support you know the questions and comments thank you i think i have a question if you haven't answered this maybe you didn't maybe you did we'll see
043um as far as the with our dual program with our dual language program has that been tested within this too or how that looks within that metric yes so adelante is our current resource okay the recommended recommendation is to continue our current resource okay thank you any other questions or comments outstanding work thank you curriculum update music grades k through six mr noteworth so the other area that's been under curricular review this year is our kindergarten and elementary music program and so dr anderson has been busy and also led that work so dr anderson i'll turn it over to you mr president dr smith members of the board um the first slide again is our kind of adoption process through public law 73 2011. um with the process the last time we adopted music resources
044was in 2018. our current reality is we do not have any music or instrumentation currently at the elc's we researched articles about what is appropriate for students at various levels we learned that pitched instruments have a positive effect on academic performance particularly in mathematics also we updated the elementary curriculum guidebook which is kind of their guide of which is aligned to national and state standards and they are creating a pacing guide to ensure that music is the same throughout all the elementary schools and elcs the process was led by our regional music specialist which is damon clevenger he could not be with us tonight we examined the mission and vision of the lawrence township elementary music program the team met multiple times throughout the school year we conducted the research and we looked at best
045curricular resources by developmental level attached to this slide is a couple quotes about how music and instrumentation matters our research consistently shows that young children provided with instrument instrumental instruction score significantly higher on task measuring and spatial temporal cognition and eye coordination and arithmetic and students at the elementary schools with superior music education programs scored around 22 percent higher in english and 20 higher in math on standardized tests looked at which instruments we wanted to have at each grade level and the pitched instruments are in bold because we that was our part of our research in wanting to be sure we have pitched instruments at every level the highlighted ones are the additions to each grade level so not only did we want to make sure we had pitched instruments we wanted to make sure
046that we are keeping current with the music's top the instruments taught at each grade level dr anderson um so i i don't really know what a boom why i don't know what he said so i don't know what high pitched instruments are you got to explain this to me okay so i know i flew the phone but what are we talking about so pitched instruments are instruments that can play a melody or a song like happy birthday where some instruments are just beats and basses in in parts of an actual song this actually plays a melody that's what the pitch stretcher means okay we've learned a lot in this process yeah too mr president i might have been on the beach the boom whacker yes okay so um as far as adoption of resources and
047what we wanted to do for the elcs we wanted to continue with our quaver subscription which is what students students are currently receiving now but they also wanted to add an additional music play online subscription and a first step subscription for the elcs we also wanted to add one fte for an artist in residence at the elc level and what that means is not only are the students going to the music class once a week but the teacher is also going with them and so the teacher can help on the other days where the music teachers at another school so that we can have music every day in classrooms i am happy to entertain any questions or discussion this is also part of yes sir this is that's the funding also the teacher the teacher
048that's why you have a super so remind me kind of where we're at on the thinking about sixth graders getting integrated with respect to seventh and eighth grade band and instruments for that so we are very thrilled with the participation this year with our sixth graders who uh signed up and go our bust over to our middle schools each day uh throughout the year and we're looking forward to next year in our planning already to making sure that we're still able to continue that next year i don't know the exact number how many we have involved it's it's i want to say around 150. it's in the hundreds at each school and they have access to orchestra band and choir yeah that's great so what are we doing on from promoting that aspect of it
049um i don't know whether the pandemic you know has you know kept some people from wanting to elect into something of that or we have other logistical issues but can you all talk a little bit about how we might even encourage more personally i was impressed with the number of students we had enrolled considering it was we're still emerging from the pandemics we started this back at the beginning of second quarter uh this school year so we're promoting it through open houses at our middle schools as well as our elementary schools since they participate it's really an extracurricular uh at the sixth grade level uh just because they go after the elementary day over to middle schools and we're pleased that we're able to provide transportation as well so that has not been a barrier
050for students we are also promoting for next year's program now with our current fifth graders through electronic uh media and print we have schedule we're scheduling in person for the choir and band directors to come over to them to the elementary schools at the beginning of next year to kind of get the revitalize it and make sure that we have a good sign up for next year and i'll add to that i do appreciate um i have a child that is currently in the orchestra program and so i do um appreciate the seamlessness of it as well as being able like when it was um when it had first started on just how i was notified how easy it was easy to click on a link to sign her up and i will proudly say
051she's playing my violin from when i was a child thank you i thank you for this just in general just i understand the importance of music so we benefit from it thank you i would say far be it from a board member to add busy work to any administrative staff however i'm a little bit curious what the attendance rate is for our sixth graders that are in that program and if it supersedes the attendance rate overall um if if that's ever something you can look at fine if not i would guess it's higher um and miss anderson you spoke about dr anderson i'm sorry you spoke about um music every day in the classrooms because the teacher will learn alongside the children and then the teacher will do that every day in the classroom and
052that starts in pre-k and kindergarten does that continue on through elementary school one through five six we're going to try to weave it in through our academics but yes that's exciting that's exciting because when children have music intermittently they learn to fail so that's very exciting any comments any other questions or comments i just had uh one question dr anderson what is the time frame for adoption on adding the ftes um and if you've already said that i apologize we look to add that fte next for next year programming plc's okay thank you you know the questions or comments thank you mr notre thank you dr anderson district student equity outcome report part three thank you mr president members of the board and dr smith i'm pleased to bring to you our third information session
053on the district equity committee measuring equitable student outcomes and just as a reminder this is driven by your board policy if we'll skip all the way to the f recommendations because we covered the first half last time and so we want to dig into the last half of the action plan beginning with the first letter f that's our accountability section next one there we go um so this is the accountability section and the the first recommendation in the account accountability section was professional development in illuminate which is our formative assessment system so the all the data that i shared with you previously this evening fastbridge data that's part of the illuminate system and so it became clear through the data that we were receiving in the equity audit that we needed to continue our professional
054development for all of our teachers around and our principles too around data analysis in the formative not counting on those summative statewide tests they're important data points but our formative data really allows us to take action and so this was already a goal that we had identified within my division and that's the reason you see so much of it that's already in progress and the equity audit just confirmed that this was a focus area that we needed within the district the second one in this category is around our instruction and the recommendation is to integrate our instruction much more tightly with our students cultures their languages life experiences in essence culturally responsive teaching and noting that this is in the accountability section so also having a system of accountability to ensure that culturally responsive teaching
055is happening in each one of our classrooms and that it's not invitational it's not that if teachers share the same background as their students but really being intentional um in learning how to teach in a culturally responsive way and then making sure that it happens and so you can see a variety of different actions that need to take place to to make that happen and we're really framing this in a positive way around positive identity development for our students and so you've heard that woven into some of the curriculum presentation this evening that even as we're looking at resources do those resources build positive identity for our students and you can also see mention of our ftim pilot our teacher evaluation model pilot that we're in it also has a section that is focused specifically
056on culturally responsive practices that we need to bring to the forefront sure a quick question though that so because we hear that a lot so teachers stand in front of classrooms about six different cultures in front of her how what are we talking about here trying to teach to be culturally responsive let's the community understand will be yeah so in a nutshell it really is about that positive identity development do our students see their cultures languages life experiences as assets that they're bringing to the classroom or do they see them as deficits that they're bringing to the classroom and in an environment that's culturally responsive our students see their experiences as assets and teachers use those experiences to leverage learning and so it could be as you've heard from the the ela presentation this evening
057do our students see themselves in the type of materials that we're putting in front of them do we have authors that are diverse so that means if i've got a classroom that mirrors our district i've got authors that are african-american i've got offers of hispanic descent i've got white authors i've got multi-racial authors and so we had to ensure that our resources that we're putting in front of our teachers and our students reflect that so that's just a real quick example there's a lot more that we'll train our teachers in but in essence do our students see themselves bringing assets to the classroom or deficits to the classroom thank you so much to hear what what we're doing so if the classrooms are getting this multicultural education through their resources through their reading materials etc
058then our students themselves are living in a multicultural environment and seeing the beauty of those around them as well absolutely and learning from each other absolutely the next category is our seo social emotional learning and just a reminder that the equity audit data was primarily high school driven and so one of the recommendations was clear that we needed to adopt an sel program at the the high school we do have second steps kindergarten through eighth grade but we did not at the time of the audit have a specific curriculum or program for social emotional learning at the high school this one is a big recommendation and it's a big topic this is about racialized language and defining the type of cultures that we want to have in our schools specific to racialized language and really
059providing that shared vision developing that shared vision providing that professional development for teachers and supporting students because what might be appropriate outside of school may not always be appropriate inside school and those are some conversations that we need to have as a community and so the next slide you can see um that that's where we're starting is with the research and the conversation um to create that that shared vision around what should be appropriate in terms of language within our schools and how do our teachers support students and living up to that expectation what great what grade is this here so this would be for the whole district but the data came from our secondary students and teachers let's talk about this for a minute because we know language is language spoken language in different
060household different communities totally different from what i'm sitting up here talking right absolutely so but we also know language is part of a culture though there's certain things i say in my culture only in my culture because i know my culture know what that means where it may be offensive to some is not necessarily offensive to my culture so so that's a we it's a it's a line we got to walk on this one here a little bit right so and we also know certain languages are used in certain cultures to make sure that it doesn't offend me when other people say it to me so if i make it a term of endearment in a sense so that when you say it it doesn't bother me because we said it anyway my dog or
061whatever whatever whatever so and again part of my culture i hear that from big mama uncle aunt mom or daddy um that's just part of how we talk in our culture right so i'm just concerned how we going to how we do this without whitewashing or in a sense uh well that's not how we speak in this setting sure so if you look at the the next slide the the action steps are really about developing what that means and so for this particular one there's not a whole list of action steps it's about a process to determine what the vision should be of what you're talking about so there's not an answer here to that question it's about a process to come to a shared vision of what is it that would make sense in
062our schools given that we have multicultural schools and that the the term that's used in one culture is not appropriate for another culture to say that right and so part of that defining that and teaching students that teaching adults that but that's the process that you see in the action plan so this is one that is later on the back burner and in terms of implementation there's some others that we need to get to much more quickly but because this was reflected in the data from both teachers and from students about racialized jokes sometimes jokes that were not received well because there wasn't that common understanding that you described that then created a whole series of issues whether it be conflict student to student conflict teacher to student conflict teacher to teacher and so it's
063important that we not shy away from the conversation but that we have a process to have a healthy discussion to determine what that outcome should be can i just add um one of the things that i'm interested to see how this shapes and molds just looking at it through as we're trying to find language trying to find um building upon this what it may look like through a punitive lens like what are the consequences if said goes forward um so i'm interested to see i know it's hard to answer that now it's not really a question as it is just processing as i do um but what that looks like future forward through a punitive lens and how that would actually affect would this be helpful or would it take away from all i'm just
064watching absolutely and whether it would be punitive or whether it would be instructional and restorative that's good thank you for processing i and i i guess i would like to know if we're envisioning um a multicultural language usage where one culture might be allowed to use certain language but another culture does not or are we trying to find a single a single language that will be used at schools are we going to allow different cultures to speak to each other in their comfort zone sure and i think that's one of the outcomes of the process so there's no answers it's all about the process for this particular recommendation thank you thank you for leaning into it this right here is uh it's a game changer if we get it done right uh because there is
065something to be said about the use of language in different settings yes that's part of education yes it is so i want us to lean i want all of us to lean very hard in this one and just as a reminder to the board that these recommendations come from the data points so it's the data points that drove the recommendations this isn't dr mayfield's opinion or my opinion or anybody else's this is there had to be enough data points in all of the the research that dr mayfield did for this to end up being a recommendation okay as we move on to the the next section the next section is about gender bias and this is specific to our adults um in ensuring our distributive leadership model that is representative and not just representative in
066terms of faces but in terms of decision makers who has voice what's that voice look like who gets to be part of the decision-making groups and is that representative of all of our different stakeholders and so you can see the variety of different action plans that are ongoing to ensure that we do have distributive leadership and that staff members have voice in decision making that represents all of our stakeholders and then the the last section and and in some ways this is the most important section um this is the section that is are is our community ready to do this work and so through all the data points it can go one of two ways the data points can come back that oh you better do some more foundation building before you tackle this or
067the data points can come back yes your community and by community that includes our parents our students and our staff and we're ready for this work that's what the data indicated so there's several action plans around how do we further this this work and so this first one is about professional development and ensuring that time is dedicated to the topic of equitable student outcomes in our entire professional learning system so that's in our staff meetings in our professional development in our professional learning communities in all aspects that we keep equitable student outcomes at the forefront and so all of the action plans are designed to ensure that time is allotted to this work the continuation of that one this one now is about how do we engage our families and keep our families engaged in
068this work um our focus group process was very powerful um and one of the data points that came out of our our focus groups was how do we keep this going how do we keep this conversation how do i as a parent stay connected to this conversation and so this set of action plans is all about engaging our families around their common interests around their opportunities to network and interact that meet the needs that that our families have this one is also about professional development but this is a little different the professional development for this one is focused on how to have the conversation so the the topic that we were just talking about of racialized language we've got to have some professional development on how to have that conversation that focuses and and notice
069the specifics here empathetic speaking and listening so seeking first to understand um and so a whole variety of action steps that are designed to get us to that point where we can have um conversations like we have been having this year but it's going to get deeper as you as you all have noted this evening and we've got to be able to facilitate that in a way that moves our district forward moves our student outcomes forward and then this last one is about partnering with others um other sister schools is a term that dr mayfield used that in our district means the school that's like yours two middle schools two high schools or your sister's school elementary um she meant within our district but she met beyond as well that we are on the cusp
070of really really great work as we begin to implement these actions and we're going to need to connect with those around marion county around indiana nationally who are also gay engaged in this same work so that we can continue to learn and continue to grow ourselves and so um our recent presentation at the ascd conference is an example of that um and this particular action is around continuing that type of work and then we close with um a quote from dr mayfield's book and this is just really a significant quote in that it has nothing to do with your race ethnicity culture class population school location or student population culturally competent educators recognize the power of their influence to change the course of history for the better and they work collaboratively with colleagues to strategically
071critique where we've failed in the past and where we'll endeavor to navigate the future be happy to entertain any further questions or discussions regarding our committee report thank you for that um i had a comment it's around j3 i was thinking about that regarding engaging our parents and our communities in addition to the action steps that we're going to be taking to increase that i really feel positive that as things continue to open up from the pandemic that will help in that regard i mean i've even noticed a significant difference this school year uh being able to be on site um parents getting to meet each other actually meet with the teacher so i'm i'm very hopeful that that will really help j3 absolutely thank you i'll just go around the horn dick questions or
072comments nothing here wendy questions comments i'm just overwhelmingly grateful to our community that and so many people in the community took part in the surveys and the work i'm not just our administrators not just this board of education but so many people contributed and um i'm equally grateful um really overwhelmed by the work that you the administration and our superintendent have done all of our teachers and um yeah a little verklempt this is this is lovely i honestly that this is my heartbeat and i love that the amount of information actually leaves i don't have a lot of questions right now and that's a lot for me so i thank you for that i'm just i thank you for the level of just how we're honoring to parents to just community that means a lot
073to me it's hard to honor when you're having uncomfortable conversations and so we are doing that well and i am i'm excited so we are too thank you thank you outstanding plan we we have to know [Music] when something is done so we gotta be able to measure it if we can't measure it we just we just really talking so as we get closer and closer to this you know i would like to know so when do we know that that is done like when i know my gas tank is full of gas right not just like i keep looking at i think i got some gas but we we need to know when this action is completed and be able to look back and be able to say did this action have impact now
074this is a this is a lot because you're dealing with both our internal which we have control of the internal we're also reaching out externally and we have to be encouraging be mindful that even with a well planned like mike tyson says once you get in the ring get hit things can change so we have to be flexible in some regard when things are not moving as fast and be able to say hey we have run into some challenges we need help and and also this kind of work it's about who you are as a person and what you're willing to learn that's what that's the one thing i'm learning about this kind of what am i willing to learn about myself and others and sometimes that doesn't always come across as positive some people
075so bored and leaders we have to continue to talk about what i always what i like about this this is about student outcome yes don't take it personal yes take a person that we want our kids to achieve that's what this is about so as we go once we get into this work uh let's make sure we keep that at the forefront of why we're doing this work and some people don't want to come along you're like i understand right but we have to move forward so can i have mr notre to interject for us the next steps for the board and i what are we going to ask the board next so our next board meeting will ask for approval of the committee report and what that allows us to do then um we
076as i've mentioned throughout we do have some action steps that have already been in motion um and those are presented to you on a regular basis like the fastbridge data that we reviewed this evening but others will need that board approval to to get launched and so at that point then we can really formalize the action steps and go the step further of attaching the metrics to each one and then begin working with our building principles around what this looks like in their school community so we've presented a district-wide committee report now we need to personalize this to each one of our school campuses because it may look a little different in in our schools based on their community and so that'll be the next step is working with our principals to make it personal
077thank you any other questions or comments thank you sir you're welcome board on to our action items approval bids for the lawrence north asphalt mr president members of board dr smith recommend the board approve the lawrence north high school asphalt bid the bomb gardner as presented so moved second recommendation has been moved by ms amy norton norman and second by dick frieza questions or comments all those in favor signify by saying aye aye and oppose the same motion carries approval of application for common school loan mr president dr smith members of the board i recommend the board approve the application for the common school fund loan as previously presented so moved second recommendation for the application for our approval of the common school loan move by mr dick fiji second by mr crystal puckett questions
078or comments all those in favor signify by saying aye aye and impose the same motion carries approval of the personnel report good evening mr mcgregor dr smith and members of the board i recommend that we approve the personnel report as submitted so moved second approval of the personnel report move on miss whitney mustin and second i miss crystal puckett questions or comments all those in favor signify by saying aye aye and oppose the same motion carries thank you thank you board for our action items administrator report miss amy any comments correct me if i'm wrong i believe this past week was um librarian week and then assistant principals week so i just want to acknowledge all the people who serve our district in that regard in april is also autism awareness month so um again
079thank you to our exceptional learners staff and just everybody in our district and then my last comment was the national school board conference i'm sure you guys can expound upon it but my biggest takeaway is just it was very engaging and encouraging to be around so many school board members across the country and superintendents who kind of had the unified goal of serving our schools thank you mr frijii no comments he knows this in the executive session oh okay not a vice president i don't think we've been together since the sixth grade basketball championships and it was such a beautiful community um high schools would kill to have that many people at their games um and in particular there was one gentleman i spoke with on the way out and he said oh this is
080this ride home is going to be terrible he said you know because these kids lost and they're all going to be crying in the back of the car and you know kudos to all of our parents for you know all the love and the the tender care they give their kids both winning and losing and um it was a wonderful evening thank you mr pocket i'm gonna ditto everything that miss norman and miss mussen said two thumbs up all righty doc smith i'll keep my comments short and brief thank you board for a wonderful trip to san diego on the national school board conference and uh we learned a lot and we had a lot of time to interact and uh to speak with one another which is always rewarding but i do remind the
081board that in a few minutes we will be taking uh place in an executive session so that's all i have until that meeting thank you dr smith thank you board board next board meeting will be will start at 6 30 be on monday 25th we will do the full board meeting in the pd room this room will be used for our civic duties correct so earlier we will stay in the pd room for some recognitions and for our board meeting as well so next what means at 6 30 p.m there's no other action board i'll take a motion to adjourn so i moved second property second by consent