001good evening um we're ready to get started we'll call the curriculum committee of the board meeting to order do we have any public comment this evening you have no comments at this time wonderful okay we're going to turn it over to mr guidas for our new business starting with a presentation on our gain program in the district thank you very much good evening and right before that mrs wilick would like to speak to you about the invitation that you all have at your places good evening everyone uh hopefully in front of you you see an invitation for this year's art show so i am cordially inviting you next tuesday evening starting at six o'clock to come and see our students creative side in the lgi at pw k5 will be sharing or debuting their pieces
002from six o'clock until seven and then we will have a secondary showing from seven o'clock until 8 30 we're trying to stagger the groups a little bit so that we can make sure that we're social distancing but our teachers are starting to set up all of this displays starting tomorrow and so we'll be working hard this week so that everything is ready to go for next week this year's theme is shaping new perspectives and we wanted to choose that as our as our theme because it helps to embrace a lot of the dei initiatives that we've also been trying to incorporate with our students and with our professional development so we are looking forward for you to show and on the back also you'll see a little bit of a summary of what the artwork
003that's displayed on the invitation is about so this is a piece that was done by a seventh grader and an eighth grader at the middle school and they chose to specifically draw about the sumertan butterfly which on the outside is very well camouflaged and you cannot see it but in its surroundings but when it opens up its wing it's a whole different perspective it's very beautiful and so that was a really nice way to try to interpret our theme this year so we hope to see you there next week and if you have any questions feel free to reach out and i'm happy to answer them for you thanks thank you very much uh so again welcome to curriculum video the board meeting this evening our agenda we are going to talk about as miss
004clay said gain this evening you can go to the next slide room thank you we're going to talk about gain this evening we are also going to get an update on our uh mayak our mid-atlantic equity consortium audit and then we have two policies for your review this evening so gain is a word it's a colonial school district word many of you are probably very familiar with rtii the term response to intervention and instruction so gain as well as rtii is a support process and the goal is to improve our students learning and their achievement using research-based interventions using instruction matched to the specific need of the students the basis of rtiii the premise is that all children can learn so in 2017-18 gain was implemented and launched in the colonial school district after about
005two years of training training with our administrative staff training with our teachers um training with everyone our reading specialists went to the iu and they were immersed in some good practices for assessment progress monitoring before we launched so csd added not yet drew colonial added um an enrichment focus to our gain model or rtii model and we felt that this was necessary because we as well as many other districts noticed that our students that were performing at the proficient or advanced level were not seeing the growth that some of our other populations we're seeing with this interventions with this model so we also focus on our enrichment block so that those children that came in succeeding with our curriculum were also going to be growing and not just plateauing so you will notice that we
006have an additional block called our enrichment block now drew you can show us the triangle the triangle is what you typically see within an rtii framework it is a multi-tiered approach that is used as i said to help identify and support students it focuses at the base of the triangle the broadest part of the triangle on tier one and that talks about our tier one instruction or our core instruction in the colonial school district that's high quality classroom instruction it is also differentiated to meet the needs of our students and it's monitored with assessments and screening so with this core one approximately 80 percent of our students should be able to achieve proficiency or reach goals that are established however there are some students that may not reach those expected targets or at different times
007of the year so they would then move to that yellow block of the triangle called tier two again tier two is adding additional resources interventions and instruction this is where your research-based activities take place so if i'm struggling in the area of either language arts or math i would move to a tier two instruction and get research-based instruction based on my needs specifically with my needs matched up with all of my other peers if the tier 2 instruction and that's typically about 15 of the population um they then get the supports that they need if i'm still struggling with my tier 2 instruction i then move to tier 3. this is about five percent of our population um these children need more intensive one-on-one or very small group interventions again they're also research based the
008important thing to note here is that tier three is in addition to tier two tier two is in addition to tier one nothing replaces each other so colonial now you can go to the next one adopted as i said the gain model in 1718. we are using a triangle where we have used a triangle to model our gain growth and intervention network you will see there the same things that we just spoke about you will see the tier 1 instruction you will see that that is our core our general core curriculum you will also see our tier 2 which is targeted tier 3 more intensive and again focusing on that enrichment of the tough of the diamond okay so universal screenings the universal screenings are completed in the beginning of the year the middle of
009the year and the end of the year to drive our groupings of our students so everything that we talk about within tier one two and three is all based on data so data drives all of our instructional decisions you've heard that a million times so this is exactly how in ela and math those uh assessments are listed there then throughout after we group them we get their universal assessments we decide the instruction tier one is working for them or it is not they may need tier two they then get progress monitored all throughout between the beginning of the year assessments and moving to the middle of the year assessments and likewise from the middle of the year to the end of the year assessments children are grouped and regrouped constantly it is not a stagnant
010process that once you are given tier two instruction you stay in tier two you do not it is very fluid and moved and that's where the progress monitoring helps us so we're going to talk more specifically about english language arts and math but i wanted to start with an overview of what gain was in case anybody didn't know so does anybody have any questions about the structure or the format before we move on to the specifics just a quick question a quick question so for tier two and tier three does that also mean that that's in everyone in those tiers have an eip it does not this is not a special education support at all this is supports for all students there may be children in there with ieps everyone gets to take it no
011no you're fine everyone gets to take advantage of the the gain block it's a scheduled block in all of our elementary buildings and it doesn't matter if you have an iep you can be a student with l services or a regular general education students for everyone sure so good how early in the beginning of the year do you start how many weeks into the school year do you start with that uh first diagnostic that's a great question so we start at our k to threes the second week in with our dibbles assessments so the dibbles is an assessment we use in english language arts um i'm sorry rebecca i'm taking any of your thunder but um that we start that immediately and the teachers also begin to start bassing with the benchmark assessment system from
012fontesimpinel and then our linked assessment soon come after so it may seem like we do a lot of assessing in the beginning of the year but that is the purpose that we do for sorry and you're saying 15 of students require the tier 2 intervention the other 75 also have a gain block though where they're doing the same things absolutely so everyone goes to their game block depending on what their need is so if tier one instruction is working for you you will still get grouped by your need you may be a proficient or advanced student but then we look a little bit deeper at that data and say we're going to push you further within your tier one instruction and go a little bit deeper with concepts that you may not be exposed to
013yet but we're going to send you to advancement so that you try to grow further that make sense is that what you're asking okay any other questions before we hear from our guests all right mr pascetti you want to start with the english language lords certainly thank you mrs grugidis um so i wanted to make sure that we were making some sense of the geometries we were talking about with our triangles and our diamonds and whatnot uh so we've invited this evening miss rebecca caslo who's down here um to my left she is one of our amazing reading specialists here at the four to five center um so she'll be speaking on behalf of k through five to go through some of the programming for english language arts specifically so what each of those tiers
014will look like so without further ado i'll turn it over to rebecca thank you um so looking first um the focus of gain so at k3 um and again it's kind of fluid um we start really looking at the foundational literacy skills that letter naming the sounds phonemic awareness um oh mr bully could you do the next slide oh certainly thank you um those very early foundational reading skills then they move up to the basic comprehension that very basic retell the story elements character setting right there types of questions then they move up to some little bit higher comprehension and analysis where the kids are starting to dig a little bit deeper with some inferencing analyzing the text answering some questions um where they then move into some written response to text at the k-3
015level it's more just that open-ended constructed response where it's a question they need to you know answer it there's some tech you know find like one piece of text evidence to support that and that's kind of where they end in third grade and then when they transition to four or five we are still working on those written responses to text but it's more in the form of a text-dependent question or a text dependent analysis whether a short the text dependent question is a little bit shorter the text pendant analysis is a full-blown five paragraph essay where the kids really have to analyze a pretty complex prompt and then find come up with thesis statements have that five paragraph structure find evidence that supports it explain it and really dig deep into that analysis piece it
016really pushes these kids far so we work on that and then higher level comprehension with inferencing drawing conclusions things of that nature so that's where our focus is for gain in the tiers and again that will vary based on tier one that core instruction continuing and extending it um tier two and tier three we're going to drill back more basic to find those holes in those gaps that need to be closed for those learners that need it and in order to do that we look at some of these indicators of success we look at these different assessments a little bit that mr greatest spoke about earlier k-3 we use various formative checks running records and dibbles which they get that assessment right in the fall but there are some subtests that more deeply address and
017assess specific skill sets so the teachers use those they can use them weekly bi-weekly all throughout the game periods and as mentioned that helps with the fluidity of the grouping of staying in tears switching tears things like that um 4-5 we also have four mib checks running records access to those dibble subtests um and there are some other programs that we also use that have formative assessments such as corrective reading and keyword vocabulary um corrective reading really works with fluency which is what we're doing in like the tier two and keyword vocabulary is working on some of those word attack skills so those are some of the assessment measures that we use in the various tiers and then moving on to the various resources that are used um this is just in general 4k through
0185 because there's a lot of similarity into the available resources in tier 1 they're using storyworks which is a fantastic it's a it's a magazine and it comes out monthly and there are fantastic articles and stories that the kids really get engaged in it has all different genres there's dramas fiction nonfiction comparative texts really great interactive lessons there different focused read-alouds that teachers choose or selected texts to use whatever they need to target for each specific tier the teachers are very selective about that to make sure they're hitting the standards that they are supposed to be addressing and the needs that they're addressing at those tiers there's also ocappy and lexia tier two there is rise and rise up it is a reading comprehension resource again very targeted they are short texts and they are
019leveled so the kids are getting that at their instructional level and there are very specific skills for each lesson that they are working on so again very easy to use a resource like that to address the gaps that these some of these students might have 95 phonics is new this year again working for more of those early literacy skills that students might need reading mastery is more of a basic comprehension resource that we have access to and i also mentioned corrective reading and keyword vocabulary as well along with lexia which is just a fantastic reading program that at the start of the year the kids do take a placement assessment on and it puts them in the level that they need and it tackles all areas of reading fluency those basic literacy skills um vocabulary
020comprehension everything and the kids move through it they love it kind of like games almost but it again it is so specific to what the individual child needs and they move through their levels with that and in tier three we have reading mastery and 95 phonics so any questions and i think one of the things to add there too is we're constantly iterating in terms of finding additional resources or refining the resources we currently have our reading teams work tirelessly to identify what the best practices are going to be and identify which of the components in each of these resources are best strategically deployed to make sure that those groupings are getting what they need so it's very student-centered are these um resources that things that the kids can do at home as well or
021is it specifically just in that game block most of these are just the game block but i know lexia is one that the kids have access to through clever they can do that at home whenever they please and there are also some of those tier one interventions as well we're not interventions but enrichment opportunities storyworks is a great example of something that many students do put in their backpacks bring home share with the family so there are definitely opportunities for extension there as well and that's purposely designed especially in the tier one to have those at-home measures but remember with tier two and tier three it's explicit systematic instruction that we don't want to necessarily leave to the children doing on their own because there's nobody telling them they're not doing it correctly so outside
022of the tier one programs the rest of them outside of lexia i'm going to be more specific or any of the other programs online adaptive learning programs are they all teacher directed they're all teacher directed the question this is more of a broader question um and we've talked briefly about the science of reading before but this initiative started in 1718 i feel like science of reading has become much more relevant in more recent years how has or in what in what ways has gain shifted to align more with the science of reading yeah so that is a great question um when we started with this launch in 1718 we did go to the iu as i said for a lot of our training with many of our literacy teams so we got two years really
023in before everything shut down so this is the first year we have been back with gain but we are looking at additional opportunities for not only our literacy team but also our teachers to attend more training we started with the letters training with our literacy teams but again it'd be great to get more of our teachers back to some of these workshops one other just follow-up question pandemic based um have you noticed a trend of say third graders and i heard you say you know third graders for dimbles will take like an oral reading fluency usually like that's usually their progress monitoring have you noticed that there is more of a gap now than you know two years ago with foundational skills like for example how are you able to address um the early literacy
024skills that might be missing how is that working if you're with the progress monitoring more so if that makes sense yep that makes sense to me um so with gain the beauty of it is we're not prescribing instruction based on where anybody should be on a continuum we're basing it on what the students need at that very moment when you're asking about our data we looked at our benchmark data for dibbles from this year and looked at it previous two three years back we are not seeing much of a difference and those have even been recouped by the middle of the year so we're anxiously awaiting our end of the year data okay but you have a system for if sharon is um a third grader and i'm i have these gaps you have some
025sort of progress monitoring tool that brings me back down besides lexia which i know will do that diagnostic on its own but so dimples for progress monitoring it's not about a grade level it'll go about that exactly so you get that instructional level where they're being instructed on and that's the progress monitoring you use based on that subtest awesome thanks sure additional question when when we talk about our tier two and those are when students start having that one-to-one work that's when the reading specialists come in is that when they move to the small group with the reading specialist or is that just um a leveled approach where they go with certain students with a certain group go to different teachers so if we're talking about ela yes the most highly qualified teachers work with
026the media students so the more intensive that requirement is for the intervention that's where our reading specialists do come into play or we have instructional aides that are trained and go to training so that they can also do that and how often do the reading specialist connect with the classroom teacher to look at that data and make decisions they do that all the time um but they use their plt times especially together but um oftentimes it is not a fealtys it's daily it could be in the hallways it could be in the office it could be meetings emails planned holidays i would imagine that since it's so fluid like you could have a kid that just like oh they have that aha moment and then boom they're moving yeah yes but that that is uh
027the case and again it is nobody has ever locked into that tier or even that group it could be they're still in tier two but they may be doing well and as you said it just clicked with that explicit instruction and then they move up to the next group and the next group and the next group anything else for ela how often do per year do you find the groups get reshuffled really so we do the major reshuffling three times a year but that progress monitoring is used to make those interim changes so that they're not in there all three times sorry one other question um i know you said that the um tier one well this the smallest tier is more one-on-one than any other three tier three sorry so your tier two is
028that um like how many students would you have at most in a group that's like here too yep so our reading specialists that we spoke about will go no more than six in a group um and then as the tiers go up or down the tier three the most intensive um sometimes we have one-on-one sometimes but usually no more than three in a group if they have that same deficit not so much a question but just a comment my son um was in i guess about a tier two for reading yes and then test it out and back in so tier one but then during one of those progress monitoring meetings him and his teacher determined he needed more help with his writing and so moved back so i do appreciate the fluidity of it
029you know when you identify what the students needs are moving them in and out of those groups and not being stagnant so that was that's great so when you do that i mean kids are intuitive but um is there any um just like do the kids on like think about like i'm not smart as that group over there or like how does that that's a great question and we get uh often that question in the beginning of the year because we do send out parent communication it does not tell you what here per se that your child is working on um but we talked about the science of reading earlier it goes through all the different parts of reading and math when we get to math mr mark's probably feeling a little left out right
030now but we do send home parent communication and we tell the parent exactly what skill their child is working on and as we talked about it's the whole grade level moving at the same time so when it's let's say 1 30 uh is the game block everyone is out in the hallways shuffling about going to the different rooms so nobody really picks up on everybody just knows it's gain i go to a different teacher sure all right mr merc let's hear a little bit about math all the questions have been answered right you know lucky you so for math you'll see uh parallels in terms of process but obviously the content is different for grade level focus in k5 you'll see in k3 at the beginning of k3 there's a lot of focus on number
031sense and place value that's critical to developing student skills in mathematics then as you move up as the students move up into third grade it'll evolve it'll evolve into fluency and accuracy with basic fact basic facts followed by computation in all four operations once the students get up uh into grades four and five the focus then still remains on number sense and whole number computation but then they start to drill down into students uh understanding of fractions and then from there they'll continue to focus on that number sense because number sense place value those topics are usually what kind of at the beginning hold some students back in mathematics so that's why that's always going to be a continued focus throughout all five grade levels but they'll end up you know looking at problem solving
032and open-ended tasks before finishing fifth grade our indicators of success in k three and four five we see uh some similar similarities uh off uh each of the grade levels will look at formative checks unit assessments and benchmark data the only exception there is k3 we do have a bridges uh assessment that assists our teachers in um identifying who's you know which students still need to focus in some areas uh resources for game uh you'll see the same resources listed in in each of the tiers and that's because most of the resources we get for mathematics can be is adapted for the student and can be differentiated and it's uh once when i say adapted you know it can involve with the student as they're working within the programs but you'll see one we recently
033spoke about the greg tang lessons and resources teacher created activities open middle website extension activities dreambox dreambox assign focus and then ixl diagnostic and learning the dream where you see dreambox listed that's primarily k3 and ixl is for grades four and five uh similar resources in tier two uh we have uh in things that are in addition or bridges uh and the teacher created scaffold lessons and finally in tier three we have students working in bridges dreambox assign focus and intensive skill focus so those are that's an overview of mathematics and gain any questions on those i have a question uh specifically around english language learners um and math uh interventions or enrichment um materials do any of the programs the online or what strategies or accommodations or not accommodations modifications do we use in
034support of our els specifically around language so you know if i'm a native spanish speaker i may know the math content i might not be able to access it just simply because of the language so what do we have in place to support reals so where we can where we have the ability to translate we will provide that translation within the program sorry do any of these programs have an adaptation within it like i know alexi you can program to accommodate where the students home languages do any of the math programs have that i'd have to double check what the extent of the translation is but it could be less it could be sound but i'll get i can get back to you on that yeah thank you and i could piggyback out that as
035well when we talked about our reading specialists we do whenever when it is that game time at each grade level we use all the teacher support that we can that could be including our l teachers who work with a group if they have a small group of students and there's some elves in there they would go to the training and use the math lessons designed for that because we do give them our sciop protocols they're trained in that to give them a little bit more support in that way two of the game programs we have for math are online programs greenbox and ixl when moving students to gain what percentage of that time 45 minutes hour how long gain is is spent with students actually online doing independent work through the computer programs as opposed
036to one-to-one direct instruction it depends on the focus for that week or that time period um also when they're differentiating the activities within those time periods that it could have some students on those programs while working individually with others and in the midst and with doing that are students getting the recommended minutes on the program or i guess maybe with course a week or within that period are they getting the recommended minutes to show the progress as recommended by the program itself we do know that we have more resources for ela and that's typical in many school districts we have been working and are going to continue to work right mr merc we've been looking at assessments that we're using um dibbles does have a math assessment it is again just a universal screener that's
037just going to give us a better idea if a student is struggling with those foundational skills and we are also building up more resources for math everybody met mr tang at our last ccob meeting so as we go through the year this was our year back to gain we are continuing to build up those resources based on our students needs one last question the you mentioned that we started gain in 2017-18 2017-18 if we would attract the original students that we gained either k2 somewhere between k and 3 and we look at where they are now in the middle school have we seen or have we done any work to kind of track the initial supports are gained accounting for the pandemic years an intervention due to pandemic to see if there's been any impact
038um on their academics at the middle school because i know we're still working on our middle school math scores so thinking specifically about that and the game program that we implemented has it demonstrated or has it shown us the results that we wanted or how do we track i know we're working on our math middle school so how do we track to see that the gain that cohort students that started in 1718 what is their outcomes in their math now at the middle school they should be about middle school at this point so where the majority of the tracking does come in is when so at tier 3 we get that very intensive instruction if a student is still struggling after tier three they could be referred to for the child study team if they
039do get an evaluation the psychologists go very far back with our gain rti model our intervention model so that would be the tracking system we have in place we do not but we could look into probably with linkit to actually track all the way through for our tier one and twos as well but right now our tracking does just go with our special ident special ed identification process when the stupid question when the students come back from the game group back to their primary teacher what sort of access do they have to the kind of the data the results of what they've been doing in their game groups they're struggling with this they're doing this so that they can kind of compound the benefits they're getting from gain in their regular instruction is there some
040sort of flowers it's kind of they see the results in the test score for the teachers you mean yes so they have that plt time to discuss that they also have access to all the progress monitoring of their individual students no matter which teacher they do see um so they work on that and as i said earlier they a lot of times it's just those informal conversations um the reading specialists or the l teachers our special education teachers like to celebrate those successes so it may just be a quack hey did you see how well rosemary's doing she's really improving on her fluency or her accuracy so they do have access a lot of students also track their own progress monitoring so they will come back to the classroom bragging about their successes too from
041a teaching standpoint when you have these kids in these groups like how much time is a teacher also taking administrating the progress that the kids are making do you mean like if they have to record like what's what's going on um how much time time is progress monitoring most of our classroom teachers are working with our tier one students some of them are working with their tier 2 students the reading specialist would be the ones progress monitoring those students on the subtest and then now everything is digital and they put it into the dibbles well it's now called the amplify platform but and so that is all at their fingertips on the computer and then how about for the math so same idea the math is done by our gain interventionists in some of our
042title one buildings um and as we're just talking about the assessments we don't have very much um for progress monitoring teachers classroom teachers are using their own unit assessments that they give and that is a good indicator on whether or not the kids are still struggling in the areas that they did are we good to move on all right mr james is going to talk to us a little bit about the audit thank you rebecca good evening everyone so we're going to talk a little bit about the mid-atlantic equity consortium audit we started this process really last year and discussing the audit that we will be conducting for the 21 22 23 21 22 school year and we were scheduled to do our audit beginning in january um we sent our audit out to our
043solicitors um once we received the mou and the scope of work from maac which is the mid-atlantic equity consortium and upon their revision of the documents they had some recommendations they wanted to make sure the district was in a uh the correct place in terms of the language that was being utilized um concerns about the scope of the work and the charges the ownership of the intellectual property and how that information would be backed up what were the legal jurisdictions uh because mmac is based in maryland as versus us in here in pennsylvania and exactly what was the maec um so once we got that information back we said that uh that our solicitors provided that information and the information went back to naac where it currently stands now for their review um and i
044consulted with dr christian um and we kind of made a determination that we weren't going to be able to get the audit out in enough time for this period because that audit would have really needed to start in early february and so since the information from our solicitors there were some concerns and some questions that they wanted to review we had to send that back to nac but i wanted to review exactly what the mid-atlantic equity consortium is for those who are not aware of it um so mac was actually founded in 1992 as a non-profit educational um uh dedicated dedicated to increasing access to higher education higher quality education for culturally linguistically and economically diverse learners currently maac is comprised of 15 states in the east and also includes puerto rico maac is funded
045by the department of education so what happened was when p pennsylvania department of education rolled out of its equitable practices hubs um they recommended the maac audit tool for districts to begin to look in uh to do some introspective work in determining where they stand on terms of equity throughout the district and in fact we utilized the portion of this maac amac tool in uh april of 2021 with the teacher behaviors portion of the tool we wrote out to our two teachers to help us shape our professional development for the 21-22 school year so what does the audit do for us the audit tool quickly examines our policies programs and practices that directly or indirectly impact students relative to their race ethnicity gender national origin language disability age sexual orientation sexual identity religion or other
046social cultural significant factors and the three components of this tool are the criteria for equitable school the criteria for equitable classrooms and the teacher behaviors which i said we extrapolated a portion of that tool last year um to survey our teachers um the tool is really designed to help develop a more concrete understanding of what it means to be and what it means to practice equity in school districts as well as to reflect whether current school policies practices and procedures are in fact equitable um so how is this the audit conducted so what happens is each building will conduct their own individual audit um the the teams will be comprised of 10 to 15 members including teachers building administration staff caregivers in the case of a high school there will be some high school students
047selected um and and we were already in preparation for that so our building principals had already selected teams um for this school year so we're hoping to utilize the same members of that team there may be some transition with uh retirements uh parents that may have students that were maybe particularly into four or five and now move to the middle so it may be more relevant to them for them to participate in the middle school um then when those individuals on the team they will take the audit independently of with themselves and then they will come together as a group and develop consensus so an example would be um a question do school assemblies special programs and speakers reflect the diverse nature of the school and or a larger community and the the frame that
048you would you would describe whether it was latent emergent established or advanced so i might say gerald james says i think we are latent at this stage but we would that would take by my individual my individual recommendation we would take that to the comm to our consensus group where we would have to come together and submit one answer for each school building so what that does is allow us to audit the schools individual individually for specificity for the school and then we will look at it as a whole throughout the district for district right data so those obviously that time frame can be a longer because again depending on how long it takes you to develop consensus as a group will be the determining factor for how long your your team is really meeting
049together um so the services that mac will be providing for us is the initial training and implementation of the mac audit tool they will provide coaching and ongoing professional development with our district leaders they will provide the analysis and the data collection through qualtrics and then they will facilitate the leadership meetings for our recommendations and strategic planning and the cost of this service is free um i repeat that the cost of the service is free this is being funded through the department of education and the center for equity it's very important though that we conduct this audit um prior to the end of the school year of 22 fiscal year for them which is in december because that is the scope in which their grant is funded through while they don't have any concerns about
050being uh receiving another grant cycle we want to make sure that we are under this grant cycle and complete this audit by the end of this school year um so i met with mac team members this morning we will begin become reconvening as a tentative date of july 6 to determine our scheduling dates for september and the audit will again run through we have a tentative outline so that will be completed somewhere in the early december range to give us enough time um we will not discuss this at the april meeting but we will discuss it again at the may dei meeting which is in may 25th so with that are there any questions regarding the audit thanks mr james i have one question do we um or do you i guess i should say
051um do you think that there's going to be many false positives results doing this in september when the school year is just beginning as opposed to and i know we're trying to make the december 2022 i'm just thinking about how many false positives are we going to have as a result of the audit doing it at the very beginning of the school year i think that we i think that's going to be the mix of the good the way that the teams will be structured that we will have a you have to develop consensus so if it's individuals that on your team that may not know as much information that's where the team will come into play because remember you are only submitting it for one school um so i think that that will help
052alleviate some of that and that was one of the reasons why we didn't put it out as a survey because really it could be based on your own individual knowledge and that may be very limited did you elaborate on the format of the results are we basically going to get like a stoplight like red green or are we going to get when we get the results of the audit what are we going to do with it or what's going to look like and what are we going to do with it so what happens when we get the results from the audit that's what the the maac team will kind of give us some recommendations and then we will sit together as a kind of a leadership team and kind of develop a strategic plan for
053what those results yielded and what our what we should do moving forward in terms of what we're doing well areas of improvement um so that's what we'll do that's the kind of developmental phase after we receive the audits um that we see the results from qualtrics i have uh two questions um i heard i think that's free i heard you say about 15 or so per building for the team is that correct so it's 10 to 15 and obviously the number is a little bit different because i think that the middle school and high school may need a few more team members we had started with 10 it was the recommendation um by mac 10 member teams but we need may need to increase that because of the this the size really for the four
054or five the middle and the high school okay so to have a good reflection of individuals all right so just in terms of the implementation or the framework just tell me to understand so the the 10 to 15 folks who are a part of the process are there opportunities for additional focus groups outside of that and um and then to what degree are family focus groups involved or community focus groups involved and i'll start with that please so i think that that's what kind of what the audit may yield um is that we may need to do a better job of communicating with four focus groups so i think that that's in terms of just the audit itself it won't have individualized in other focus groups relative to the audit but that may be some
055of the results that we get out of that that we may need to have more focus groups so that we can have more input from community stakeholders so families such as mine who don't have kids necessarily in the uh school district we would there be an opportunity for members like us to give input or invoice onto like perception perception data around so i think that's one of the things we want to do is develop a belonging survey as well as for all members of our community because remember we're only taking really a small population of our entire district but i think that's one of the things that we really narrow in other words right now okay so we do want to expand on that and develop a broader tool more probably more survey style for
056all of our members of our community okay can you speak a little bit more about how we could you said each person on the team will take the survey independently and at the middle school at least at the high school level potentially at the middle school also might be students involved in taking the survey yes so when we talk about building consensus amongst the group so you have teachers administrators caregivers and students when we all sit together when they all sit together to build consensus how do we ensure that student voices are being heard same thing with caregivers which shaman was mentioning how to make sure that their voice is being heard what is that process to coming to a consensus and coming to a determination that we're emerging our um i don't know what
057the bottom tier was but how do we get to that consensus how do we make sure all voices are heard and taken into consideration in that space and i think that's really that'll that'll be really for from us to kind of set that that those guidelines that when we're in this space that we're in this space unified collectively that no one voices over the other that's what our determining factor that's what we need to do is um really come together and granted there may be some students students may not have all the information in terms of and even maybe not the caregivers either in terms of policy and things like that that they may just not know um so we definitely don't want to overshadow students voices because that's the reason why we're asking students
058to come in today and maybe that's something that we may want to think about in developing just a student group to do the survey on their own and they can come to consensus together yeah i'm thinking about um putting all these different groups in the same room positional um hierarchy in terms of equity of voice even from like a teacher's standpoint to an administrative standpoint being able to and i'm sure this goes as part of the training and and and the agreements or norms about having equity of voice and and everybody's voice being equal in the space but also making sure that it's a safe space so that a teacher can comfortably provide critical feedback um to the environment that they work in or that students feel comfortable in parents as well feel comfortable providing
059that feedback and just think about how can we do that in that way my other question is in terms of the survey what space or what input do we have on what the survey questions are do we provide like overviews of areas we like to look at or they just give us a whole thing and we have to do the entire uh survey so the form is the and i'm glad the two things when i go back because i think you you brought something very important about establishing um those norms those norms and the same way we're kind of talking about what we're those norms and agreements now with courageous conversations with our educators those are the same things we would establish when we had these groups uh in terms of the um the the
060the the questions the survey the audit tool was already done what i have asked maac is mac and they've asked us is to go through that survey tool and look at questions that may not be relevant to our district also look at questions that because when this tool came out in 2021 they developed questions that were specifically designed designed for cobit 19. and so also look at those questions and say well maybe it's not relevant to cover 19 but it may be relevant to our digital learners or our uh technology how we use technology in the classroom so we will have some input in some of the questions that we we would pull out there and we did i did speak with them about the ability to be able to input questions that may be
061really colonial center that we really want to know the answers to i'm sorry go ahead the questions for the uh for the survey in terms of balancing subjective versus objective is it balanced um i think that their the questions are the questions are designed to really based on what you would know from the district there there are some leading questions i believe um there are some questions i think that we have you have to that's why the consensus is good because questions that may stay like all of the art staff but we know that there is no all that can never be really 100 knowledge of that so i think that there's a good mix of of both of those things and then i had a second question in regards to kind of follow up
062from jamina in regards to me maec i'm having a hard time with acronyms today as you can see um in terms of the services that they will provide um will they provide a service to recommend some strategy similar to what gemina was was offering in terms of the strategy and how we divide the game doesn't make sense that's the last part of the process where they provide the most hours roughly about 20 hours of their time will be dedicated to the analysis the recommendation and the strategic planning no i meant i'm sorry in services and i'm talking about the strategy and how to make sure that all voices are heard oh that's a part of the training that's yeah that's part of the initial training okay we'll send out the link that has a copy
063of the of the instrument as well and you can pull up a little drew that if you click on that link right there there is a a brief um overview of the uh the audit right there on the bottom mid-atlantic equity right there oh maybe because your appointment but i can make sure that you have a copy of the audit tool yeah as well as part of the results do we get access to baseline data so we can compare and contrast to other districts of similar size or breakdown or we can compare what's normal we would probably that probably would only work in districts that you utilize the mac audit to i can ask them because that's one of the things that we talked about in terms of who has the ownership to the intellectual
064property of the data so we can certainly ask maac if they have comparable districts relative to ours that we can compare data for any more questions from the board okay move on to policy review thank you thank you thank you mr james we do have two policies to review uh this evening they are pretty easy to review with you they are currently two policies that we have they are just going to be new titles and language replacing the versions from 1970. um this is we are replacing them with psba's language and again they are recommended the first policy policy 803 is about our school calendar basically just says as you are all well aware we do have an annual school calendar um the board determines the hours within the sessions along with our state laws
065and regulations it typically consists of a minimum of 180 days as our does the board has the right to alter the calendar and the superintendent prepares it annually and presents it to you for your consideration that is policy 803 and questions on that great and then the next policy is 804 again new title new language recommended from psba to replace the old policy 804 and this just speaks about our school day and just set the typical school day for instruction she'll be in accordance with the law regulations and board policy and that the board establishes the time for the daily sessions of our schools and the superintendent has the authority to close delay or dismiss schools for emergency reasons to protect in the health and safety of our students any questions on those i have
066a question that may or may not even it's not related to the process of the policy but to one of the policies themselves um what is the process that we use as a district to determine holidays um for within 180 days or i'm sorry outside the 180 days how do we determine the holidays that we're setting for our calendar i think it's just been a probably a year-to-year traditional approach and so we're certainly open to any discussion of that and i believe it's going to be a topic in our next community relations and student life i mean okay thank you it's there's always a challenge you have to be and we need to be obviously respectful of all holidays as much as possible we have to have the school year finished by june 30th and
067we have to have 900 hours of instruction for our kindergartners 990 for our first through 12th grades and 180 days so um but i think it's been a certainly been a topic in many districts not just this year but over the past few years thank you mr guidance sure also i did want to let you know ms moreno that mr mark was multitasking and he did get me some information on um the l support that we do have within dreambox and ixl they do have the translations in spanish with spanish-speaking teachers if they are designated by the teacher to turn them on it doesn't look like they have many other languages but we can touch base with them about that and they also have adjustable readability levels and audio for students as well i think
068that's great i think it's best practice to have conversations with students depending on their age and their families on what is the best approach that we take when we're doing that with any of these programs so many that there are without a doubt sorry yeah well yeah the home obviously the home language survey would be one indicator but depending on what uh level an el student is like if i'm you know a big a new newcomer then yes that makes sense exactly four or five it doesn't make sense great thank you appreciation oh we have if nobody else has any other questions just to point out i really like the new policy 804 because the last paragraph says the superintendent or designee can develop the rules for snow days we just heard it's going to
069be in community you all deputize if you're sitting on this does that mean they have 4 am calls will be shared do they have to get up at 4am and drive around they do no i'll i'll still do that they just have to have their phones on which they all already do so i think we're out of the woods although we're getting a little bit of rain okay if there's no more comments on the policy review do you have any public comment that's coming looks like we have one please state your full name and place of residence hi this is right can you hear me yes we can sorry this is quality ing plymouth meeting um i just had two questions the first one was regarding the gain i know we talked about tier one
070and tier two um i'm just reviewing one of my child's gain sheets that was rolled out to the parent beginning of the year and on there i'm not seeing anything about which tear my child is in is that something am i missing something or who would i speak to about knowing which tier my daughter's in hi how are you it's rosemary gridis um we did speak about that we do just keep the language focused on the skill and i believe at the bottom of that sheet it should tell you exactly who you should contact either the literacy team at your child's building and of course your child's classroom teacher first and foremost because they do know exactly fantastic thank you my second question has to do with the equity audit so um my question is
071when if and when the surveys are rolled out to the students will the parents be given the opportunity to review the questions beforehand and also given the opportunity the option to opt out yes so the the equity audit tool the students will the parents can get a copy of the equity audit tool for review and certainly students will have the option to ought to opt out it won't be designed students will be volunteering so any student that requests to be a part of the equity audit committee or a team would have made a request but certainly the parent can review that information okay fantastic that's it and just as a point of clarification mr james the entire student population is not getting the surveys the students that are on the team that have volunteered to
072be on the equity team for the school that's correct thank you it's just middle school and high school correct we haven't even determined whether it would be middle school we'd select the appropriateness of the questions right now for high school which kind of raises another question so if it's if it's just high school we're looking at a team of roughly 10 total so we're looking at maybe two to three students what is our application process or how are we selecting who out of the students who volunteer are interested how do we identify who we're going to select to we were just talking about that we need to develop a process and probably increase the size so we have a good uh representation wonderful thank you yes and high school we'll have a larger representation than
073some of those schools anyway and i don't know if it's too late in the process but could we work with the um could we work within the process to get questions that are more appropriate for middle schoolers i mean i feel like if we're only asking students questions of high school we're only capturing the high school we're not capturing you know what i mean i feel like we could maybe push a little bit and say hey we need we need to get some yeah we need to get a bigger scope of our student voice we can talk to to me and see what they have developmentally appropriate yeah yeah we the pde has the grant to use and the permission to use the instrument so we'll see what variations they have yeah and i appreciate
074the fact that it's free and i appreciate the fact that it's all approved by pde but i i i just don't want to go into it and just wind up getting a narrow scope and then not getting a true picture of what of what people are really experiencing and students staff families you know everything and if we if it's whatever reason the middle school students cannot participate can we find another way that they could be engaged um some other way i think the key sorry to interrupt you gerald i think this really should be used as a catalyst for uh using this information for focus groups and involving particularly our middle school and high school students not that our k-5 students don't have a voice but obviously um you know the experience our middle school
075and high school students have is more involved and so i think that's going to be i think you had already referenced that as one of the primary catalysts that this will produce thank you any other comment okay if there's not any other comments on the board all right then we're joined thank you thank you