001um good evening i'd like to call this meeting of the curriculum committee to order it is october 11 and i will turn a public comment on the agenda this evening we will start with that there's none at this time okay then i will turn the meeting over to mrs gragatus thank you very much mrs petruno and drew will show our agenda we will see that we have lots of great stuff on our agenda tonight we are going to talk about avid we're going to talk about gain we are going to discuss our curriculum review cycle we do have some resources that we would like the board to review as well as some policies for review so i would like to turn the meeting over to miss heather king and her fabulous team ms heather king
002is an assistant principal at plymouth white marsh high school okay thank you for having us this evening as mr guida said my name is heather king i'm fortunate enough to be one of the assistant principals at the high school and i am one of the i am the district director of a program that we have here called avid avid is amazing program i have some fabulous students here and amazing staff members to talk to you about a program that i'm fortunate enough to um have walked into it's 15 years in the making at this point so i'm going to introduce to you let's see we have alex here to stay high hello we have abby we have isabelle we have margaret and then we have jennifer hanold our avid elective teacher and we have lisa
003genovese our avid elective counselor they are one of four pairs so i'm going to get started this evening and then i'm going to hand it over to my wonderful counterparts here so avid stands for advancement via individual determination it is a program as i said before that his we're going on our 15th year at the high school it's a very select program in that we we choose students each year that meet certain criteria and the goal for avid is to close the opportunity gap by providing students with college readiness skills and then the support to have them lead into the post-secondary process you're going to hear all about that tonight both the selection and the curriculum and then the student experiences there is a whole website that if you are interested in finding out more
004about avid i would definitely guide you to this is a little bit about their approach so the approach is that we are closing the achievement gap for students typically students that are selected for avid across the country our first generation college students which again that's getting to be a smaller and smaller population but we still do have a good amount of students that fall into that category we also find students that start in the academic middle because the goal of avid is to grow them through student achievement with the support of the avid teacher and counselor we also guide our students to basically learn how to be students and then guide them into more rigorous coursework we also encourage them to be leaders which is a big part of why they're here today and going
005to speaking in front of you because we talk about public speaking and delivery and just really advocating for themselves in this in this world so um there's teacher effectiveness we have teacher training that goes along with this and we they talk about student learning so just so you understand a little bit about how it works at pw we molded it to fit into you know what works here in the colonial school district we choose students um in eighth grade and then all the way throughout through ninth tenth eleventh and twelfth grade the the the population mostly has a cohort but it is transient and then students can exit or enter based on their needs at that given year students are interviewed for avid and they enter into a special schedule and that they have avid
006as a year-long course and they alternate every day with um it's it's a blue or red course and if they are in avid one day they will be in a core content class the next day and we spread that out through the whole year so that they have an avid teacher and avid counselor that they see several times a week because they're learning skills that those that team is reinforcing so the students enter into this they start and again my team is going to talk about the curriculum i'm just going to give a little overview um avid talks about wicker and wicker it's very funny the kids and i were discussing this today they don't recognize it as the term wicker but the processes under which that speaks they all are very familiar with so
007under that they focus on writing inquiry collaboration organization reading so they will start in ninth grade and they learn how to take cornell notes cornell notes is a very big um it's very important process it's a long process it's probably not one of their favorites but it's a way in which they take notes that is inquiry based and they are helping to find out how they best can master the material that's in front of them they participate in socratic seminars tutorials which we'll talk a little bit about peer editing binders and organization are very big focus especially earlier on and then planning agending time management with that again i could stand up here and speak about avid for hours upon hours and you'd probably have to pull me off the stage because it is an
008amazing program it's a phenomenal resource but i want to explain to you when we get down to it what actually what happens so our students like i said some are selected in the eighth grade i'll go over that curriculum in a moment a lot of them also then transition in through nine through twelfth grade i happen to be looking through schedules the other day to see you know what is that avid student that i want to present to you on paper he just happens to be standing behind me right now and i didn't know it at the time that i was putting two and two together so alex i'm gonna bring him up here and he's gonna talk to you a little bit about his transition but if you look at his ninth grade schedule
009when he got to pw he was a straight academic student which is phenomenal but obviously his teachers and even maybe alex himself recognized there was that opportunity for growth so here we are four years later you can see alex's schedule now he's in ap and honors classes and i will also tell you that abby wave hi our other senior who's up here abby made almost the exact same transition i just i think it came to alex's name first on here so um she's also grown from the academic coursework all the way up to the honors and that progress was made possible because of the support of her his both um avid teachers because they taught them how to use those study skills and then how to go forward from there so um alex i'm going
010to let you talk for a moment hello everybody um before i start i just wanted to apologize for the raps venus in my voice i was screaming all night at the homecoming game and dance but um as you can see starting off in ninth grade i was just taking normal academic classes nothing too challenging but throughout the health or throughout help of avid um some things i learned of cornell notes as ms king brought up about um i'll just briefly explain it if you don't know it's where you have the notes or the questions on the left side of the paper and then you have your notes slash the answer on the right side and that's just helped me um rewrite my notes so that i can better understand them in my brain another thing
011that's helped me become the student that i am is not being afraid to ask questions in class like stand up and so that just be able to get a better understanding of the topic or concept that we're learning about and lastly avid and cur or avid has encouraged me to take harder classes such as honors in ap um i'm now taking one ap class ap economics and then four honors classes my senior year um that is all through the help of miss downer and mr blizzard thank you yes we should clap for your hard work we should see him again in a little while too um please know that through this process and again miss hannel miss genovese will talk about what happens those four years but our students are encouraged they all take the
012psat um we encourage them then they take the sat or the act the college counselor spends a lot of time in their classrooms working through um the different areas of the post-secondary process again i'm not going to steal their thunder but um that is a big part of the avid program here so next what i'm going to briefly talk about is avid at the middle school so mrs mendel works with the avid students down at cms she has i believe right now she's got about 16 or 17 students with her and they meet in the first and the third trimesters 82 minutes a week on b days which is about two times a week and then alternate fridays so during that time it's it's a you know they get the the nuts and bolts of
013what avid is going to be so they they do team building they really talk about binder organization which is something that for the four years this um the binders are checked because a big part of this is about being organized the note taking homework comprehension study skills and then they go all the way down through those in the third semester they revisit and then they talk about setting personal goals they learn what a socratic seminar is and then they talk about career explorations interviewing and presenting that's just a little bit of what happens down at cms and then at the end of their eighth grade year they are asked to interview our team at the high school who will be the next pair of avid teacher and counselor will go down to the middle school
014they will interview the students and then we will also ask the staff for any recommendations again it's based a lot on teacher counselor recommendations of the students that would just fit into this program because it's not a perfect fit for everyone because not everybody needs that but we do pride ourselves because the majority of our students just hit the ground running and then they they go from there so at this point i'm going to stop talking and i'm going to hand it over to two amazing women who have taught me so much about pw avid and just all the great things that we have to offer i have and just so you know as a side note we have everybody's name up here they're um these are the teams for each grade we put their
015college symbol with them because that's a big part of avid it's about post-secondary it's not all college and universities um we do you know support the armed services but again this is the goal for this program so typically avid likes us to always talk about where everyone went to college so i'm going to hand this this over and they're going to talk about the four years at pw hi how are you guys um just for those of you that may not know me uh my name is jennifer hanold i have been with plymouth white marsh since i graduated from college so it's my 18th year here um and about 15 years ago today i had the opportunity to begin working with the amazing woman that's standing next to me i wouldn't be here if it
016weren't for her um and she actually was one of the the individuals who brought avid back to the district and advocated very strongly uh to bring the program to plymouth white marsh so it has been an honor to work with her for 15 years um this is uh margaret and isabel are part of our fourth cohort of avid students so we've graduated three we've watched them get their undergrads their masters um they are nurses they are engineers they are accountants they are event planners we've watched them get married we've watched them have kids um so it is truly a special program to us um and we are thankful to be able to continue it so as far as what we're going to be doing today i'm going to go through kind of the academic curricular
017side um you know not getting too deep but just giving you an overview of what happens in the classroom each year with avid and then as the counselor piece because we work so closely together lisa is going to show you some of the college and career stuff that we do each year um so the first year when they come into ninth grade we call that building strong foundations in its most simplistic term really what we're doing is we're teaching students the hidden curriculum um like they said they don't know what wicker means but they they know a lot of the stuff that we've done so it's everything from organization um how to keep a binder specifically you know in this new online environment how do you navigate canvas how do you organize a google drive
018um time management you know how do you keep a monthly calendar a daily calendar how do you back plan for larger projects um note taking but also just kind of teaching them the rules of the road the game how do you have a positive conversation with the teacher how do you email a teacher but most importantly i think lisa and i see our roles especially in this formative year as just creating an environment for these kids that they know no matter what happens outside of the classroom that they can come into that classroom my classroom her classroom and we're an advocate for them we're in the building we see them um so we're here to help support them in any way we can so that's ninth grade and all the things that jen said about
019me go back to her she's a phenomenal avid teacher i think our students have had the success they do because of her and the amount of energy and time and love that she puts into each of the kids all of the classes that we've had she told you that she's been here for 18 years i've been here for 32 i wasn't expecting to say that but i've been here a long time and the avid program is definitely one of the highlights of my career dr cotter a long time ago heard about it asked me and mrs tambrello our college counselor at the time to go to new york to listen to it i came back incredibly excited about it and sat at a lot of these meetings trying to convince the district to to buy
020into it and i'm so glad that they did so the counselor's role is really to partner with the teacher um they deliver all of the soft skills like she said the curriculum we come into the class um as much as we can get in there um to to partner with her and then to help build camaraderie with the kids to build teams to build hopefully a family by the time they graduate that they really feel that way some of the specific things we do college and career related each year in ninth grade we just started talking about the importance of getting something beyond high school i think originally 15 years ago we really pushed four-year schools that was the goal because of cost and a lot of other things now it's really about what is
021right for each individual student that could be a two-year school we actually had one student at least two went into the military by the time we got to senior year that really was what made sense for him and that's what he did um but for the most part we're looking at two and four-year schools we have our largest group of technical student tech school students in our group this year so we'll be looking at you know two-year technical colleges but the importance of having to do something after high school having that plan and then we start looking at you know how to figure that all out we use naviance a lot with the interest inventories the skills surveys jen has them do a college research presentation and then we start having them senior year they
022have to put together a senior brag sheet for each guidance counselor to write their college recommendation and we start building that or at least the thought of it in ninth grade understanding the importance of having a resume having activities clubs community services we start talking about that in ninth grade as well all right what do i do just arrow yeah there we go okay um so 10th grade is kind of just a natural extension and expansion of freshman year we do a lot of the same skills um just honing in again on that hidden curriculum so we call it refinement and enrichment um so we are still kind of really helping students grow and build upon that hidden curriculum but we also add in a couple of new things to kind of up the game
023since their courses are a little bit harder hopefully some of them have made the leap into an honors course or two by that point um so we look at things like argumentation and inquiry and higher level questioning critical reading skills that they can apply um to to their academic core work classes we also spend a great deal of time of of you know giving students support um within that classroom if we're asking them to take on these challenging courses then we want to give them the resources whether it's tutors or collaborative learning time to make sure that they're successful um in addition to that all of them take the psat so we do a lot of original psat prep so that they can get kind of a basic understanding of of what standardized testing looks
024like why it's important and how they can navigate it's that process you know because it's it's complex and yeah so that's what we do another big piece of what we do each year and all the counselors do this in the classroom as we sit with each student and we talk about their specific course selection for the following year you know we we want to make their course selection and the elective classes that they choose meaningful to what their future goals are whether they're still exploring different majors and we encourage you know different elective classes that we have that might spark an interest in them or if they know what they want to do then we want to you know have them take as many of those classes that we offer that fit into that so
025we do a lot of individualized meetings with the students over course selection and and career planning um in 10th grade you know again we're still looking at helping them know what college admissions officers are going to look for in the application what their personal preferences are helping them to start narrowing down if a small school a big school you know what what things they're really important to them again they continue with the career research project we try to bring in career speakers if we can um you know last year our our 10th grade year was a little cut short from covet and we didn't have a whole lot of a junior year last year but what we would normally have done yeah oh well yeah um so the 11th grade year is kind of the
026prime year this is where my two are right now um and it's called setting the stage um so really junior year is where it kind of kicks out of the hidden curriculum area that's running nicely in the background they still get those supports but there are several things that they need to accomplish by the time they leave here to go for their last summer before they become seniors um one again is an analysis of their psat score so that we can do individualized prep for both the sat and the act we also help guide them as to which tests would be better for them based on those results so we do a lot of that they need to by the time they leave have their original personal statement completed so that the goal for us
027is to hit senior year running um with the application process so we'll spend a unit writing their personal statements exploring what they mean what makes a good personal statement that that requires them to delve very deeply you know into their own personal lives so that can be a long and an emotional process for them um so we do that as well um and then this is really the time margaret i was laughing the other day she's like texting her mom and she's like miss hannah's making me decide my life today like you know what i mean because this is where we're really going to try to nail you down like what schools do you want to apply to what do you want to do what do you want your major to be and those are
028really big decisions obviously for a 16 year old who just got her license to make so you know we spend a lot of time with that um and then they will leave again finally with having their recommendations lined up with their teachers um so that they can leave for the summer and know that they are leaps and bounds ahead and basically all those things i'm in there helping with you know as much as i can the we're trying to figure out which college major um will in the beginning of the year really look at where are you from from a transcript standpoint you know what what do we need to improve on where's your gpa where does that leave you with what type of schools you can start thinking about what do you need to
029do this year to bolster that um figuring out which teacher what's the right teacher for you to ask for your recommendations that's a big thing you know we want them to find at least two teacher recommendations so we have conversations about what their major is which teachers they've had which would be good fits for them um they will then finally finish that that brag sheet that we talked about and have that complete we'll also talk about ncaa clearinghouse uh information if we have students that that applies to um have some meetings with parents um you know we want to make sure that the schools that we're recommending are we're on the same page with parents so we learned our lesson there a long time ago uh what kids tell you in classes and not always
030what what mom and dad are saying so we make sure that we do that um and and throughout it all jen and i act as as well as all the other counselors and and teachers you know we kind of hope to be the in-school parents if they're having trouble with anything um oftentimes there are a lot of other issues that that they need to talk about and and we hope that we've established a rapport and an environment where they feel safe to do that and and so far we have and so i think you know to to teacher and counselor you should add like mother buck kicker all kinds of other things because we're you know we're the ones that hold them accountable when they need to be held accountable and we encourage them and
031support them when they need that too okay and then the last one this is when this is when they decide they like the course so so 12th grade is what we call payoff and preparation so when the kids come back in september of their freshman year the goal is for them to have all of their applications out signed sealed delivered and ready to go by mid to late october at the latest so they come in there's some kind of final revisions and then we're spending class time i mean we're filling out the common app where we're you know and now with the financial aid piece coming in earlier we're tackling both of it at the same time so not only are we doing applications we're helping kids especially depending on need fill out fafsa um
032and you know and get financial aid and things along those lines and you know that tends to be a really rewarding process it tends to take a lot of stress off of parents as well as the kids themselves because they know that they have a place to do it um this is where miss lynch the college counselor comes in almost daily yeah the three of us will be in there at the same time constantly um and then literally it's just it's the celebration part um you know and and celebrating their success and making those final decisions and then uh in the spring depending on what the demographic looks like we do a lot of college transition activities like you know how do you read a college syllabus because it's a lot different you know how
033do you how do you navigate staying emotionally and physically healthy on a college campus like things like that um so that's what we do well you said everything yeah and the counselor also is the one that will organize with the teachers um college trips that we do and i know one of the students is going to talk about that so i don't want to take away that but really we're there to do everything and anything that the students need us to do as a team how it works thank you wonderful job so i'm briefly going to just bring it back to a course that we have at the school called honors avid tutorial a few years ago from the inception and then up until a few years ago avid's a big push in avid was
034to have college age tutors push into the classrooms to teach the students the tutorial process the tutorial process there's a little visual here it's 10 steps but it's basically you're not teaching the student the material you're teaching the students how to struggle through the material to find their own answer so by the time they learn that tutorial process they're understanding you know when i'm alone this is what i need to do to get to that answer so it's very difficult even though we have a couple colleges that are local to find college age tutors that can come in at that very specific time of the day only certain days a week we always struggled but we weren't the only ones because when i would talk to other district directors they said you know it's almost
035it's next to impossible so we got creative we um went through the process and we created a course called honors avid tutorial so what we did was we have students in their 10th and 11th grade year apply to be an avid tutor for their junior and senior year they are actually taught the avid tutorial process and then they push into the classrooms and they tutor so it's peer tutoring um i do hear that it's easier to go in the ninth and tenth and eleventh grade classrooms because a lot of times you get up there you have seniors tutoring students but again they're you know their peers at that time and they collaborate but they also don't need it as much because they've gone through the process and they've learned it but it's amazing that we
036were able to branch out of the avid program and then bring the tutors in our own school into there and our we have a whole separate um wonderful curriculum um angela duckworth's book is her grit book is explored in that um in that course i've met her she's phenomenal there's so much to learn you could have a whole course on just that but that is briefly our avid tutorial all right so now you have heard way too much from me and a great bit from my colleagues we're going to hear from the kids because that's what everybody wants to hear from so i'm going to hand it over to isabel and she's going to talk about collaboration and team building hello um so for collaboration and team building i really like it because you learn
037how to deal with like different types of people you're not just like you you don't always agree with people so it helps you learn how to speak to them and not like a dissent a condescending way and um team building it really helped me grow to have friendships in my class that i call like my family now so they're it's really important to do it so yeah thank you thank you isabel one of the biggest um pieces of avid is what abby is so excited to talk she was jumping at the opportunity to do this one today right ab so the college trips are also a really big part of the avid experience and um part of when if you have the sheet in front of you that lists the costs of avid a large
038part of that is every year we do one overnight trip and um abby is going to speak to that but we also do a lot of day trips but again in this world busing is so very limited and expensive um that's where a lot of our costs and crew just in on top of the membership we really have a minimal budget except for we really try to do this overnight trip because that gives them experience they pick um usually four different types of post-secondary institutions so that the kids can really get a feel of large versus small or technical you know so abby's going to talk to you about two different kinds of trips that she's taken hello everyone um also like alex i like to excuse my voice because i was also at the
039homecoming game screaming so i apologize if i sound raspy but like miss king was saying um i was very excited to present this because this part of avid is my favorite only because it's the most on hands to me at least when you're really out in the field and it's actually we're in that picture alex and i um this was our day trip to franklin and marshall and i think the best part about the college trip is that you really get to see okay what college is for me personally i'm a person who likes to be around people so i prefer bigger campuses much like pw i like it large i'm more into that but frankly marshall was a very small school and it allowed me to see if this could be for me if
040a smaller environment a more closer environment where you're more together with everyone would be for me and personally it wasn't but i did enjoy the campus and i was able to once again see how other people fall in line so it's like oh you're more into smaller schools and it just made a better conversation for us and it being a day trip it made it easier that i didn't have to worry about missing anything super important in school and just kind of like oh i could leave and i could go see something but i could still come back home and i could tell my mom everything that happened but what i'd really like to highlight is the next slide this was my favorite trip by far um this was my sophomore year and it's my
041favorite because pitting out um pit and iup i actually applied to and i'm very proud to say that i got into iup so you know visiting these schools thank you um visiting these schools had i not been on this trip and had i not been an avid i would have never even known these schools existed because prior to this trip i had no idea about iup i didn't know anything about the campus i didn't even know indiana pennsylvania was a real place so you know visiting this campus is saying wait it's like really beautiful the dorms are huge the campus life is booming and it was amazing and then i go to pitt and i see that i personally want to be a psychology major so i see their medicine program and their programs involved
042in the medical field are amazing and i'm like wait i could apply here and i could really excel here and i just think that doing this overnight trip it allowed us to not only see more schools and most people with penn state altoona wouldn't consider a satellite school they're usually like main campus but visiting a satellite school you're like wait it's not that bad it's like i could actually do this so i just think that personally for me and i think i could speak for a lot of us who went on the trip because all four of us did it was just a nice enriching experience to see once on hand we were allowed to go in the dorms we were allowed to go in the dining halls we were allowed to go in libraries
043and we were allowed to basically live on campus as well as meet other students which allowed us to see okay what do you like about this campus what do i like about this campus and i just think that i'll speak more on everything else later but i just think that through avid it's a very enriching program that allows you to really get a touch at life and as i say it you become an adult in this class basically and you kind of learn where you settle in this life so thank you [Applause] she's a tough act to follow they're actually going on another um overnight trip their first in two years next week and we definitely would like to thank the foundation as well for that because the foundation has given us the money to
044be able to do that because it's it's definitely something that uh is a big budget but they're super excited where um the four colleges like lycoming lockhaven technology right bloomsburg and penn penn college of technology and it's very nice because the schools one will offer lunch for the students on campus um i'm not gonna two of them two of them one for each day i'm not going to give all the surprises because the kids don't know all of them just yet but um the colleges are very great um to all of us the students when we go in for those visits um a couple things before again i'm finished speaking to you a couple yearly events that unfortunately not the kids really haven't seen well either because of covet or it's coming up so that's
045not an unfortunate part but every year we do the avid signing because there is a contract that we ask the students and the parents to sign we call it coffee cookies and contracts we have it before the first open house and we invite the avid parents in and we just give them a little bit of the same overview so they could do a meet and greet this wednesday is our annual fafsa night so we have all of the seniors and their parents are invited to come in with our college counselor we have a dinner they sit down and they get that fafsa completed together which anybody who's filled out that fafsa there's a student or a parent that's a blessing in disguise to get anyone to help you and then um we again this is
046something we missed last year but we really enjoy it we do a final review it's either midterm or final review whichever courses that the kids are taking um we bring the avid tutors and the avid students into the cafeteria we split them up by subject areas and just let them go and help each other we don't even have to do anything they just really go you know i need that help with my math or my social studies and they help each other and the avid tutors help them as well all right and one other thing that again um this is this depends on the class that's speaking but um senior scavenger hunt it looks different each different year but this particular year they took the students to a college campus and then they said go
047find the bursar's office you know find the public safety go to the stadium take pictures send them back so it was a really fun event for those seniors who are getting ready to leave pw and go to their post-secondary um this handout that you have is something that is a lot of pride and joy if you take a look at this this is just one avid class usually the classes are anywhere between 15 18 upwards of 24. you can see by the end of their four years they had collectively as a group 78 post-secondary acceptances this scholarship money was only their chosen school and the scholarship money they were awarded for the four years that they were there i mean we they get offered into the millions in in scholarship money over all of the
048acceptances so it's it's absolutely amazing how much money they pull in from this group of kids who when we see them freshman year we just can't imagine how amazing they're going to be by the time they're finished so again i'm going to hand this over to margaret she's got a nice little story to tell you and then she's gonna give it to isabelle alex and then abby hello i'm margaret so i actually watched my brother go through the program when i was in middle school and i saw when he graduated that he was so prepared for college and he actually went through miss hanold and miss genovese so um through the avid program we actually barely discover ourselves and figure out what we want to do with our lives recently i've been talking to friends
049actually and we've been talking about college and they have no idea what they want to do but i feel so prepared because of avid um thanks to avid i've actually toured four colleges and returning four more next week and avid has pushed me to take classes that i would never imagine i would take i'm actually taking honors western civ right now and history has never been my strong subject thank you for continuing to support the avid program and it continues to truly support the students like me and my brother thank you [Applause] good perfect hello again um i just want to start off by saying i'm very grateful for abbott um i've never believed really that much in myself but on like the academic part of it i always thought i wasn't like the smartest
050and when i went into avid um they really pushed me to go and do my best and now i'm taking honors courses and taking anatomy which isn't an honors course but it's stressful and so like i'm now more believing in myself and i know that when i do graduate high school i'm going to do great things in this world and i can't wait because miss genevieve's miss hannel has really helped me so thank you again and thank you for your support and now alex is going to speak so what has avid done for me honestly avid has been one of the greatest decisions that i've made in high school taking that class uh bringing back what abby was talking about with the college visits i was only able to go my freshman and sophomore year
051due to code with my junior year but those two trips really exposed me to the important questions that i'm asking myself like uh what's the student population size that's best for me student-to-teacher ratio like the location how far it is away from school my major or if the school has the major i'm gonna pursue and then like extra curricular activities such as well i play baseball so baseball or like corn hole and skiing um another one of my main things is presentational skills um which is what i'm doing right now i honestly don't think i'm the best at it um but doing two or three throughout uh avid um it's really helped me get more comfortable with speaking in front of a cloud without freaking out as much and then lastly based on the brief
052points that i brought up about what avid has done for me i feel like i will be able to go to a good college that is the right fit for me and then also be successful there as well hello again um as the closing statement i'll probably talk the most but um i think out of uh alex and i have been in avid the longest because like ms king was explaining i've actually i was in avid in eighth grade and i went through the interview process and i had the joy of having mr taylor and i had the joy of learning how to transition from middle school to high school and honestly i thought that was going to be very rough for me but with avid i was able to transition smoothly um just a
053touch on what that looks like as they were explaining it is very it's softer in middle school and it kind of just gives you a glimpse of is this class right for me because prior to me being in the eighth grade class i had no idea what abbott was i was very confused and i was like what does that even mean and then you know after going through the class and meeting some amazing people i was like okay i could see myself excelling here and it enabled me to get my notes done with cornell notes and it taught me how to be more organized because previously i was already a very organized person but i hadn't really set where i was going to fall and avid allowed me to explore that and it allowed me
054to see okay what works best for me how do i like take my notes how do i like to keep my classes organized and moving forward into high school i was able to really form myself as a student because starting out i had took challenging classes but i never took an honors class i never really been in that and i didn't know if i had what it took and after my freshman year i was able to take two honors classes after that and i took honor spanish and who would have thought i'd be an honor spanish and it was honestly amazing and they kept pushing me and they kept giving me the tutorials and they kept saying you can do this you know don't give up and having a single mom it was like having
055that second parent with me and i was able to come to school and feel like i got stuff done and now as a senior taking all honors classes it's just a new experience for me and i've now been able to submit 20 applications and i'm just waiting and i've already heard back from two with yeses so you know that kind of enabling that kind of pushing and that kind of you've got this and constantly hearing that you know you are enough and you're not behind anyone you're not above anyone you're you and you're what you need to be this year i think it's perfect for this class and i've really had the experience of meeting some amazing people who have been my best friends and i honestly the experiences that i've had i couldn't find
056anywhere else avid is really a unique kind of class and it's not something you find everywhere you don't get this kind of hands-on experience and you're not granted this kind of information these kind of tools to be better as a student and once again going back into visiting colleges it's just a really amazing experience because not everyone gets to see that and like they were explaining you know it's kind of like other students don't know what they're doing and all week i've just been helping other people apply to colleges literally so it's kind of like i'm a tutorial myself now and it's just amazing to see how wow had i not been in this class i'd be in that exact same position i'd be just as lost and i'm just really thankful to be granted
057this kind of experience and i just want to thank all of you for constantly supporting us and supporting avid as a group and i hope that you continue to do so and if anyone has any questions i'm free to answer [Applause] so as you can see they make my job very easy but um this was one of our well a couple years ago graduating class we don't have masks on there so if anybody has any questions any questions from the board i just wanted to say lisa and jen um this is probably one of the things that i'm most proud of since i've been on the board that we we thank you for bringing this lisa to plymouth white marsh i've been excited about it from the beginning and each year it just seems more
058and more successful so thank you for all your hard work and you too um i know you've put a lot of time into this and just really is one of the best things i feel like this district has done so thank you and you got your kids are like amazing so exciting and so um so well prepared and you speak so well so thank you thank you all for the support because you do make this possible um i just have a question about the the um if if say money wasn't an issue and staffing wasn't an issue how many more students would you guys want to be able to offer this to because it seems to me like there you know i mean it's a great group that you have but i would love to
059see you know more kids be able to reap the benefits so it's actually an interesting um question and discussion and lisa and i were just briefly talking about that because beth lynch our college counselor deserves a lot of credit as well um we've talked about that and looked at it in the past um and where there's a will there's a way but honestly we feel like this cohort every year the one section of students is perfect avid asks us that as well because there is something called avid school-wide where you know they really have most of their district underneath but a lot of those schools are down south and they are you know lower performing and not a lot of parent support so i feel like we've we've analyzed this often and we have um
060a really solid foundation with the one it's one class um per grade and we do like i said we do exit and enter students every year as a team we look at that and we ask the faculty for input if they feel there's someone that needs to be in this program and again if post-secondary plans change or if have it's just not a good fit you know we have the discussion with the student and their family um and then we move them out so i appreciate that it's a good and it's something that we look at every year but we we feel like give or take 20 in those numbers we really have a solid foundation and group any other all right thank you again i think we went a little over our time limit
061sorry about that thank you everyone for listening thank you all have a good night it was well worth going over that little bit a lot of time say thank you mr bogley for going back we are now going to talk about game and i just want to remind everyone game was first presented actually to this committee in 2018 um when we had first implemented it gain is colonial's term for what you might hear as rtii or response to intervention and instruction or mtss which is a multi-tier system of support so gain is colonial's acronym that stands for growth and intervention network next slide drew keep going down to right after avid questions so as i said it was first introduced in and just to recap the history of gain there it is thank you drew
062you will notice that the district began researching and planning for gain in 2015 and 16 and then continued through the next two school years full implementation of gains started for all in 2018 and continued until march of 2020. uh like many other things it came to a pause it is now 21 22 and all are concerned about our learning interruptions and potential learning losses that have taken place due to covet our goal this year was to refine our best practices as they relate to gain gain is defined as a systematic approach for providing focused prescriptive instruction based on data that will grow the academic achievement of all students so some words to keep in mind as we talk a little bit more about gain is that systematic focused and prescriptive because of the need to
063regain no pun intended our focus we're using consistent practices data collection tools resources for lessons progress monitoring protocols this consistency and fidelity will ensure equity and inclusivity amongst all of our elementary buildings gain is a practice that is occurring at our elementary buildings right now drew if you could go to the next slide please we reminded the board as well as our staff and administrators with our professional development opportunities earlier this year around the research regarding accelerated learning and remediation due to the instinct of many wanting to remediate based on our learning disruptions caused by covet again accelerated learning keeps students moving forward on their intended grade level trajectories by strategically preparing them for success in their current grade level content acceleration prepares students for new learning combined with just-in-time teaching it is and relies
064on robust tier 1 instruction that includes grade appropriate assignments strong instruction deep engagement and teachers that hold high expectation for students this includes our differentiated instruction our formative checks and us adjusting our instruction next slide drew please remediation is not considered effective remediation supplants that tier 1 or that core instruction that takes place in our classrooms it pulls our most academically vulnerable students out of that core instruction in order to remediate them it attempts to reteach every missed skill based on the misconceptions that before students can learn new information they have to catch up on everything that they missed it often focuses on drilling students on isolated skills so how will we or do we address these missing skills we provide students with gain it's systematic it's focused it's prescriptive and it's based on data
065you've probably seen this graphic before drew next slide please the pyramid is typically used to describe rtii mtss or in our case gain the pyramid represents our three tiers of instruction tier one being again our core instruction we use our differentiated instruction within here we use our screenings our formative assessments typically eighty percent of students respond to tier one instruction are doing fine in the curriculum however game practices are needed with about 10 to 15 percent of students that would be your yellow your secondary tier tier two or your gain instruction that fills our gaps that fills our holes that fills our learning losses we may see more of those learning losses due to covet so we are using our data and they're placed accordingly based on that data and we diagnose what holes and
066gaps they have in their learning based on grade level assessments progress monitoring allows us to track the efficacy of the intervention that we place these students in and typically about five percent or very few of those students need to go to tier three or that red tip of our pyramid those students are not responding to the tier two interventions and need additional interventions very prescriptive smaller sizes and you'll notice on the left side of that pyramid they talk about the size of the instructional group our tier one groups are classroom groups our classroom sizes our tier 2 and our tier 3 are smaller groups and the smallest at the tier 3 level implementation was to extend to grade 6 through 8 but again cove would pause that our plan is to get back to planning
067with our middle school to see how we can develop a game model in our middle school programming however we knew that we were not going to be able to put this together in september we're going to use careful planning we're going to work with teams and see how we can implement a game model in our middle school as well gain functions thank you drew within the school system only with our other processes and you are aware of these other processes the school improvement team or sit identify students that are in need of this targeted interventions and or enrichment lessons tier one students also need to grow therefore we need to plan for enrichment lessons for them how are we also going to expect these children to increase their achievement levels we also have our professional
068learning time that allows our teams to reflect on the data the progress monitoring is what we are doing working if it's not how do we adjust and refine these practices and interventions and then the student support team needs to assess and review all of the data to determine the next steps additional interventions and possibly evaluations if needed all of these systems again work together i know this is a recap lots of information now any questions about our gain support system i would like if you wouldn't mind to take a minute to take us through a real life you know scenario or what if you know with a kid and what that would look like so at a particular grade level so we even yeah so we right now have been collecting our beginning of the
069year assessments basically we use those as initial screeners our children that are not performing where they should be at a grade level are given additional screeners or more diagnostic tools that's to try to figure out what tier two interventions are needed so october 23rd second uh are our data meetings that friday plt grade levels will come together and they will go through all of the data of their students the literacy teams and or math at each of the grades will sit together and go through data of every single one of their students and talk about where their placements are how are they performing data wise data data data they will also give any sort of input you know listen i know rosemary i know how she's showing up on the test but i just want
070to explain to you that this isn't what i'm seeing in the classroom make adjustments as needed then teachers all get their resources children are placed into groups and teachers at each grade level along with additional supports it could be specialists that are available reading specialists giep teachers learning support teachers they all take groups within that grade level and they have a focus and they have a list of students so they then deliver those interventions is that like a daily or a weekly group oh i'm sorry it occurs throughout the week there's a certain amount of days that are ela and a certain amount of days that are masked okay and then how long are those sessions great question they typically last about six seven weeks with progress monitoring that take place weekly at the tier
071two the tier three could be more than weekly and then if there are changes that need to be made throughout those six weeks which are usually very few and far between if you use the data accurately to place them um then you can make those switches in ebay but then you come back have another data meeting let's see how everybody did let's see the increases in our achievement let's see what our progress monitoring shows us and then we make adjustments and we move on from there and then you have three data meetings throughout the year anybody else have any questions i know before the pandemic there was sort of game time and the students would sort of move and they might move to a different teacher and groups i know the pandemic has changed things
072i assume now that we're delivering this these interventions in the same classroom and with the child's teacher and maybe a reading support specialist will push into the classroom to help we are no the reading center so we're back to our more typical gain model with lots and lots of seating charts uh so children are moving again we're masks um and we're following the protocols and mitigation strategies that are in place but yes we are moving and going back to the typical game model oh that's great i was not i didn't know that actually yeah well we haven't started yet okay our 22nd is our uh data meetings okay wonderful sure and are those game sessions where the students move is that 15 minutes 30 minutes 30 minutes daily thank you sure any other questions great
073all right and now we're off to our curriculum cycle review and i'm going to pass it over to miss marie willicheck she is going to start with us yes good evening everyone and it's been some time since we've come to talk about the curriculum cycle and we also addressed this back in 2018 for the first time um many reasons partially because we were revisiting the understanding by design process and we were updating it to the 2.0 version and since then as you know we've had a little pandemic and so that has shifted some things in our curriculum cycle so we want to give you some updates just to show you some of our newer initiatives and how we're basically back after the curriculum and the uh the pandemic and how the impact of such things
074have had on our cycle so first i just want to give you a quick refresher on what the stages are because you're going to hear us talking about them very briefly but in in stage one of the curriculum cycle and actually before i even go into this i should preface there is a difference between curriculum and a lesson plan so the lesson plan is the daily responsibility of the teacher and how they're going to execute what the information is that students need to learn and be assessed on as opposed to the actual curriculum itself which identifies what the essential understandings are of a given unit what they're going to be assessed on and how that curriculum will articulate from grade to grade in a student's learning path so the lesson plan and what a teacher
075does on a daily day are reflective of the curriculum but the curriculum itself is not the teacher's individual lesson plan so it's important to make that distinction so as we talk about the curriculum cycle and we look at the first step this is often time a three to four year process and going from the whole entire thing from beginning to end so stage one is really about doing your research and going and looking at your individual courses looking at student performance and the standards and identifying where there might be weaknesses and perhaps targeting areas of where we might need to so to speak beef up our curriculum or have some additional supports also oftentimes we want to look at the stakeholders and look at our students and our demographics and make sure that we're implementing
076certain things to support all of our learners if we're looking at the secondary level we might want to go and focus on some college and career readiness components and also look at courses that are available at the secondary level to see how this course might translate when students move on to a post-secondary opportunity and we also if we're going and looking at a new course then we need to complete proposals submit those to the board and then also consider the funding implications that would have this usually can take anywhere between six months to a year in stage two we're going back and we're looking at the curriculum development itself this would be our curriculum writing now typically this would take place mostly in the summer time and we would grant teachers curriculum writing hours under
077the guidance of supervisors or other additional consultants depending on the course and we start with the enduring understandings and then we break our curriculum apart from there we're going to look at what specifically we're going to be assessing the students on and we then implement it into our 2.0 format which i don't want to bore you with right now but it's a structure that we always use to make sure that our curriculum is presented in a specific structure and for net and then we also will then go through and draft our curriculum and go through and investigate various resources that we use this is not like minutiaes of what videos will be implemented with a lesson but rather like what are our core materials are we using a specific textbook are we going to be
078using an online resource etc um and so those things are investigated at that time so again in our curriculum cycle that stage also could take anywhere from six months to an additional year now mr mark my my colleague over here is going to explain to you steps three and four of the curriculum cycle and then we're going to talk to you about where some of our courses are within the cycle thank you maria stage three is where the curriculum comes live it's where we see the implementation occur uh we begin the curriculum um while also supporting the teachers with professional development uh this probably takes one of the longer stages because it takes a good two to three years to see a curriculum uh go through and start the evaluation of it uh this is
079where and that's where uh enhancing interventions and enrichment begin that stage four process when we begin to brainstorm those things when we do eventually get into the stage four uh uh evaluation stage that's where we start to collect some data we look to look at how students are performing we make sure our curriculum mat especially if you take matt for example you know how is everything progressing from from kindergarten up to 12th grade is everything uh cohesive and connecting we also do a needs assessment we look to see did we meet everything that we established in stage one and then last we look at uh adjustments here and there and we look to see if uh you know do we need to restart the stages or just some minor things that we have to do
080to the courses to make them uh what we intended uh and you know i did bring up mathematics uh before right now just for example all math courses are in stage four um we're looking to see how uh we're still collecting uh our program and course data and we did have an interruption here so it's just gonna set us back just a little bit more before we look at if we're gonna start that cycle over format uh marie here's gonna talk about uh her science courses yep thanks ed um very briefly currently the science curriculum especially at the secondary level is supposed to be going into stage one right now uh however i put it on hiatus because in 2024 we are going to be adopting new pennsylvania state standards so instead of wasting our
081resources and redoing the curriculum now and having to re-change it again in another two years we are going to extend the licenses that we have for our curriculum and luckily i mean i'm one of the people on the committee hopefully developing the standards so that i will have a little bit more information earlier than others and we'll make some slight changes but we'll be preparing and get ready for the in two years from now when we can make those changes at the elementary level although we're not technically in curriculum cycle the pandemic kind of forced us to do certain things um and look for new ways to try to teach hands-on activity so we did adopt a couple new units that have actually been so to speak piloted sorry but i thought we did anyway
082but it worked out really well in our favor and so i had shared with everybody a roll out right before the pandemic of what we were going to be doing with our elementary science and we kind of expedited it a little bit so we're a little bit ahead of the game and it is already aligned to the next generation science standards work so we're in a really good place with that and we will continue to move forward with that um but even though we're on a pause with a lot of our curriculum right now we're still always looking and reevaluating especially with our diversity equity and inclusion goals making sure that we are finding ways to give teachers professional development and implement their their lessons so that they can have those pieces inclusively but when
083we go into our curricular revisions that will be a new element to that and with that being said i'm going to hand it over to joe he is going to speak to you a little bit more about ela in social studies thank you maria so given the very nature of social studies and english language arts written large k to 12 we do have the advantage of being at different stages in the cycle at any given moment in time which is advantageous in as much as we can really carefully consider each of the courses particularly the secondary level where some of them may be themed out some of them may be elective courses in addition to your core complements where you're really taking the time to do the research so for example right now we are
084resetting 12 in our 12th grade english to the stage 1 phase which is going to allow us a lot of opportunity to look post-secondary look at career and backwards map to make sure that we are giving students particularly in their senior year the things that they need to be successful in the world once they matriculate out from the elementary perspective what we do have very much like what maria was talking about we do have the opportunity to take a look at a couple of units many of those things are based in phonological awareness for example for our second grade teams using 95 we are also working tirelessly to a scale up benchmark reader's workshop which is going to be a fully integrated program third grade has already implemented that um kindergarten and one are in
085that second phase and then in the following year grade two is going to be in the phase where we're piloting that in an effort to make sure that there's a synthesis between and among content areas of social studies english language arts science and mathematics and that's really what that program prides itself on so students have that integrated experience moving up into middle school but the idea is that we take each of those courses in turn and we're kind of scaling backwards and then moving towards the middle to make sure that we have that vertical articulation piece and with that i will turn it over to mr gerald james thank you joe and so as as as we begin to and we continue to work through our curriculum cycle we want to make sure that we're
086always doing that uh through the lens incorporating the lens of diversity equity and inclusion and we want to process that intentionally um and so we what i'm going to do here today is kind of give you an example of what that looks like for a specific content area i'm going to pick on joe here a little bit in social studies and and so in stage you want to give an example we want to be inclusive by serving our students and soliciting feedback from various stakeholders we can be diverse in our thinking about what students will encounter upon leaving colonial because we're keeping in mind that we're preparing them for a global world some of our students may not go right into a four-year traditional college they may go into the workforce they may go into
087the military so we will be really intentional about how we're preparing them and we want to give practical experiences by considering our stakeholders and the development of our how we did with our two new courses and listening to our students and that was a practical experience of how we really looked at it through a diversity equity and inclusion lens in a stage two uh we want to be established these enduring understanding concepts um and give them skills way beyond the classroom um with ubd as maria mentioned earlier with with the end goal we want to again focus on not the student to the colonial relationship but also the student to citizenship and practical how students adapt into the world um we as we draft our curriculum we want to investigate resources and do so an
088inclusive way that identifies a broad and diverse text and from diverse authors and perspectives something we continuously do particularly in our ela and social studies departments for stage three we want to implement and be responsive to the needs of our educators through engagement and professional development in this stage as well as others important that we be able to pivot a word that dr christian often uses still maintaining our content and alignment um we want to enhance our interventions and ensure equity if there's a digital assignment uh as as ed was sharing earlier there's digital components of the assignment do we have a print option to ensure that each student has the opportunity to complete this assignment and we want to be cognizant of what's going on in society and how that may impact the implementation
089um such as what we just incurred in terms of the pandemic and social unrest um because they could place barriers in our implementation and we want to be really cognizant of that um practical ways we want to support our teachers expand on things like courageous conversation and culturally responsive teaching and through the mciu and i know joe you wanted to share a little bit of something about what's some of the things that the libraries were doing with the mcie yeah certainly so we have a literacy team that we've assembled um and this work has actually been ongoing since the spring which has been fantastic so in an effort on in many cases are during the stage two development um many of our courses are at that point where we're trying to cultivate resources that are
090both viable aligned to standards and academically rigorous um and as one of the frameworks as gerald had been talking about that we need to look at all of our texts through making sure that those texts are inclusive and making sure that they're reflective but they also offer windows of opportunity for our students as well i mean this is the way that you know many curricula and colleges are moving many of the ap college board assessments are working in this way as well as is the keystone so all of these things are kind of moving in that direction i'm happy to say that through the mciu and associated literacy teams we are able to cultivate a really robust diverse collection using national consultants of texts for both our classrooms and for our core offerings um so
091we're just going to keep continuing that work to make sure that that's infused throughout our curriculum thank you joe and for lastly in stage four how our students perform on assessment um where were there any noticeable gaps and determined profile trends for our students taken in the course and what do we need to improve those courses to ensure we want to make sure again that we're soliciting that feedback so and as maria had shared earlier the difference between the curriculum cycle and our lessons plans we also want to continue at that level and supporting our teachers and through the lesson planning we'll be working with our teachers on lesson planning on how to um help our educators import dei and their learning outcomes and the infusion of dei can range from uh usage of inclusive
092language within the syllabus to learning outcomes and still instilling uh di based readings and assignments within the course um so those are some of the things that we want to continue to do and not just shift the skill set um we want to be inclusive in shifting our mindset and in doing so we will achieve a culturally competent and culturally responsive environment thank you any questions about our curriculum cycle terrific and ms wilicek is going to offer up some two resources that she would like to have the board review seeking approval i'm very excited about these i have two items that i would just like to present for you the first one is for our computer science courses it's called coding rooms it's a very cool tool um and we have given it a brief
093pilot and love how it's working out basically what the um the program offers is the opportunity for students to code in various languages simultaneously like a chat room almost but encoding so as they're developing their code they can be working off of each other step by step and the teacher can intervene as well so it's very helpful when they work in projects together whether they're in school or home and it works for all the different coding languages c plus plus python java all those fun things so um it will be paid for out of the ready to learn budget so it's not coming out of the school district budget per se so we will be handling it that way and we think that it's really going to give us another leg up on our already
094pretty awesome computer science programs that we have can i just ask is that um six to twelve or this particular program is for our higher ap courses we don't okay the java and c plus plus in in our middle school programs at all okay yeah and then the second resource we are looking at is we are looking for an additional resource for our ap physics courses so this would strictly be an online resource um providing additional um questions and the online textbook basically this is the college board approved textbook so it's not something that we need to sit there and go through and analyze because college board kind of directs us as to what we choose um so this is just the online version of that and the questions the reason why we picked this
095one from the list that they recommended is the questions that they offer the end are most reflective of what you see on the ap test that we feel is going to be best suited to prepare the students for what they will be tested on at the end of the year any questions thank you you're right and our final exciting part of the evening our policies uh so there are two policies that we are reviewing tonight policy 130 which is homework and the edits that we had um suggested basically was just taking out the words in line one under purpose uh presented by the teacher was the first line um everything else we are suggesting to keep as it was presented again this was reviewed in the fall of um with the intentions of after the
096approval we would gather a collective group at various grade levels consisting of administrators and teachers and then from there proposed guidelines at each grade level and we did not yet get to that so we're hoping that after approval we will gather that group to go over the guidelines so that they are consistent amongst grade levels and then policy 212 which is called reporting student progress again um we kept that this is a recommended policy we kept much of the language the same it is regarding communication between school and home it talks about how the reporting of student progress will include academic progress grade reports parent parent guardian conferences with teachers and we did suggest some of the wording to change um it said both student and parent guardians shall receive ample warning of pending grade
097of failure we are suggesting that we change that you shall receive sufficiently appropriate notification of a potential failing grade we just thought the words sounded better and then um in the next line under guidelines it was repetitive with by parents and guardians again and then in the final line again just rewording that instead of review and evaluation of methods of reporting student progress methods of reporting student progress to parent guardians shall be reviewed and evaluated on a periodic basis which is currently what is taking place with our report card committee in the district questions or comments can i just take a look at 112 the uh homework 1 130 i guess it was because 1 30 yes 1 30 yeah that didn't show up on the screen there we go well that was it drew
098you got it i have to share it okay so i guess i don't know if it would be part of a policy but just a question and and kind of figure out um the practice of some teachers to grade the homework and have the homework grade be reflected in the students overall course it's not whether he he or she did the homework it's on whether the answers were correct or not um is i don't think that's really addressed in here is that more of a regulation kind of that would be more addressed chris when we have those groups that come together and talk about expectations across the grade levels and more consistency we don't want to get so granular in the policy itself but that would be the guidelines that we all follow but yes
099that is something we do need to consider because if you also see it says the demand of homework shall be consistent with the best interest in the students in regards to other valuable experiences outside of the school right so they can be equally as valuable and they would be the discussions that we would have right so i guess my concern is um when say we'll just pick math because it's a true sorry quantitative you know so a teacher explains a new concept in math and assigns page 123 of the textbook you know go over those 10 problems so students go home do the 10 problems turn them in the next day well if they don't get them correct i don't feel that that should be held against them if they did the homework and they
100tried because in my eyes the purpose of homework is to kind of you know reinforce what they learn in the classroom but that's not always the case in in the when you get to the middle school in high school there are teachers who will grade it and oh you got four wrong so there's a six out of ten and that goes as part of your grade i don't think as a parent that that is what should happen agreed and as you stated it is supposed to be practice and reinforcement of those skills so if those skills have not been attained yet you know that is something that we would discuss i agree with you so if a parent has an issue with that happening then do they go to the teacher like who where do
101they go the first adjustment would always be to talk with the teacher okay i mean i do understand that there are assignments long-term projects and things like that that do are part of their grade but i just think in some cases it's not warranted so okay thank you any other questions regarding the policies okay we're good okay um any um public comment on birth this evening we do have one email that i'll share that came in recently uh this is from nick jacquez from apologize if i didn't pronounce your last name correctly nick from plymouth meeting last monday during morning meeting at colonial elementary school a child read and defined the following terms over a loudspeaker to other elementary school students at ces lesbian bisexual gay transgender do you believe that act was appropriate do
102you believe it's the school's job or the parents job to address these terms with their children if i could provide the board and the community some context certainly one of our goals as a district is diversity equity and inclusion and each month we our students and their have been invited to offer a morning announcement maybe three or four times a month recognizing different observances observances for that month for example september 15th october 15th was national hispanic heritage month october is lgbt history month february is black history month so students do research topics provide some key definitions that are that the research uh provides some historical figures related to that historical topic and some key dates uh lasts about 30 to 40 seconds and i talked to mrs rock and mr talbert the principles and you
103know moving forward we can use friday folders to inform our parents what the upcoming observances are for that month and what the history is being shared uh certainly well intended as far as diversity uh creating a teachable moment uh certainly yeah we should be discussing our underrepresented groups as part of our our mission as it relates to dei and there certainly should be a partnership between this school district parents and guardians and educating children and making sure everybody's on the same page so appreciate the comment um and that's my response we have two additional comments please state your full name place of residence hello i'm here i'm here can you hear me we can't hear you can you hear us yes i can since you didn't uh can you please state full name in place
104of residence please i sure will neve plymouth meeting homeowner taxpayer and i have a question about the avid program what qualifies a student for the avid program if a student is a c average but not low income does that make that student eligible for that program yes go ahead hi yes so it doesn't it's not necessarily on one specific criteria so um it could be low income it could be first generation um college out of their family it could be their grades there's a gamut of criteria in fact i'm glad that you brought that up because while i was again we presented for 45 minutes but as i said before i could go on for hours um each cr each group of students is interviewed with by a team and there are varying factors so
105it really can't be narrowed down to one or another it's really exciting excuse me excuse me that sounds prejudiced what does that mean first generation college and linguistic challenged and low income if a student is a c average why are they not offered the same help i'm sorry i don't know heather heather yeah honestly answer that question we can we can certainly give you a call and go through all of your concerns you don't need you do not need to give me a call i want this public i want everyone in this zoom meeting to know why it's multiple criteria and we can not only give you a call and review it but we also can publish it as well what the different criteria are there's not hiding anything it's a 15-year program that's been
106very successful i don't care how long it's been in process okay that sounds prejudiced to me it's certainly not the intent thank you for your comment please state your full name and place of residence matthew williams plymouth township we can hear you we can hear you sir great so further addressing that what would be the criteria that for a student with special needs that would have any sort of recourse to this program and in your outlined i guess draft that you will be sending out or publicizing on your website what would qualify a student who needs the help who isn't passing and who is graded on merit from their homework assignments opposed to a student who is opposed say to a c average to an a average standing on what grounds do you determine or
107are the determining factors in which you will address what needs to be done to help that student succeed in hiring their education or in not hindering their academic ability to further succeed good questions we want to raise the bar for all students if the student has a disability we also can work through the iep process and work with the iep team to develop specific goals for that student to be successful whether including transition postgraduate transition whether it's the higher ed or directly to the workforce as you heard a couple of the board members ask questions about potential for expanding avid you know this is a this is an excellent program and we want to support as many as many students as possible i think abbott is a great program i just think it should be
108utilized accordingly i am a yale i am a yale law school graduate that has graduated from not only yale university but yale law from your school district so i am one of the very few that graduated with a 4.0 gpa with straight a's and second in my class so it is actually not only appalling to me to hear some of the addressed questions and some of the criteria that you people are using to determine a 15-year policy that if we were to speak about things that happened 15 years ago i think it's might be in some way or another pertinent to address the needs of today's students and the academic requirements that they fulfill now to further their education and succeed like me because i know that i needed extra help and extra tutoring even
109though i'm not a special education needs student or have never been but i was given every opportunity and more and i don't understand why any other student would not be given that same opportunity 15 years ago does not apply to 2021. we're living in a new day and age and i think this is something that needs to be addressed immediately because this is embarrassing to me as a taxpayer it's constantly evolving and and avid has grown and we work with the national organization of avid i think it's a great program but i just think you need you you need to have more access to more students that can that can actually further hit and and further at their education and not have it hindered by either whatever special needs these students have or need they
110deserve the same education and the same standards of education which should be provided by you guys because you are the board we elect you as taxpayers we certainly appreciate your comments thank you any other hands drew that's it audience members thank you for coming out this evening hi my name is claudia ing i live in plymouth meeting i just had a question about the quarantine protocols so on colonial's website um i see what the protocols are for the classroom is that the same for the buses as well it's not and it's very frustrating can you try to clarify do my best okay so because it's a conversation i've had with county officials and state officials so to start the school year i'll talk about classroom first and i'll try to be succinct in the classroom
111last year you remember if you were close contact within six feet uh and somebody uh had uh was positive for coronavirus then uh the individual who was positive and everybody within that six feet radius quarantine this year there's a specific exception and we have that chart up there but it's it's from the county and it's well intended but not easily read there's an exception in the classroom and the classroom is that if everybody's masked and about three feet apart and the mask is secure you don't need to warranty that exception does not apply to the buses the buses if you're within six feet mast or not for 15 minutes or more you must guarantee and that we met with the county officials they had their attorneys on there they had dr lorraine the medical head
112medical professional and and i my argument was and i'm not they're medical professionals i appreciate that liz especially in the elementary setting kids are together all day right they're in a room primarily with the same cohort for five six seven hours you know minus recess lunch etc they're on the bus they might be on the bus just for 20 minutes next to their friend and then they have to quarantine and they the rationale i was giving was given was that they're seeing in their positive cases they're seeing more spread and public transportation than they are in a school setting i didn't get any data relative to that but that was the answer that i received and i asked for any supporting studies or data related to that so what we do when we find out
113we have a positive case we look at the row in front the row behind and the road across we have seating charts for all of our buses uh and then we contact families and unfortunately we've had a you know a bit of a run the past the past few weeks where we've had the quarantine kids particularly in this building and it's very frustrating for our parents i certainly understand that sometimes we find out that somebody didn't ride the bus that day which is you know good for that individual situation or they were able to provide an antibody test maybe they recently had coven uh so then we can allow the student back in but the bus in the classroom are two separate entities and it's i keep saying it's very this is very hard for
114a parent or guardian to reconcile so i certainly appreciate you feel the frustration yeah no no i and i figured there was what didn't flow through the i knew the bus was a different situation in the classroom right we all i saw i'm sorry to interrupt you we also look at the gps so we request that we have gps data on each of the buses so we if the if because some students might be off on the first stop and it's only seven or eight minutes so if they're if it's less than 15 minutes then we notify those families hey you were near a positive case but it was only 13 minutes and and so you don't have you're not required to quarantine okay but can we i mean since it's a dish can it
115be a district decision so can you say you know i know the the montgomery county and public health is saying xyz about busing can we as a district change that and say you know if we open the windows on the bus and it'll be i mean um and say you know maybe maybe we just do the same as we're doing in the classroom and kind of go our own way uh we may not uh it's that's it's uh there's not an exception for the buses okay all right well thanks for the clarification you're welcome i think somebody else had their hand up thank you for your comments hi eileen de torre from lafayette hill i had a question it's not curriculum related because it is an optional survey but we were sent an email list
116two weeks ago i guess um from dr fowler about the pennsylvania youth survey and sent an attachment and then we were asked if we wanted to opt out i didn't know anything about the survey and i kind of read flagged it when i saw that it said opt out why would i want to opt out of something for school so i had to investigate it further the questions were not given to us as parents i had to click on this onto the website um epis i believe it is epis put my information in and request that the um questions be sent to me i have a sixth grader this year so this was all new to me so i wasn't sure what it was um i got a copy of the questions the next day
117it was pretty quick and another friend of mine did the same but a lot of parents that i spoke to in the following days passed right by the email and everyone's busy they didn't really take notice of it um so i wanted to inform myself and i did i printed it out and it's five pages from back so it's about ten pages worth of a survey and um i understand it's done to help you know develop programs help prevent things in communities that i understand the intent is there however i have an 11 year old that's you know he's a young sixth grader he's not 12 until april and about ninth question in it says on how many occasions have you sniffed glue breed the contents of an aerosol spray can or inhaled other gases
118or sprays in order to get high in your lifetime on how many occasions have you used cocaine in your lifetime on how many occasions have you used crack in your lifetime during the past 12 months did you make a plan on how you would attempt suicide in the past 12 months have you done anything to harm yourself such as cutting scraping burning as a way to relieve difficult feelings or to communicate emotions that may be difficult to express verbally so i did a little further research because it i read these questions as a 44 year old and it was heavy for me so and by no way do we shelter our children we come up with age-appropriate conversations situations come up and we might have to tell them stuff before they're old enough to learn
119it but life happens however all these questions were a lit a little bit off the charts for me and i sent this to a few other families and they were very upset i understand if you want to opt into this however my frustration is why weren't we given the questions up front why did i have to go research this on my own to get these questions because i kind of felt like it was a red flag when i saw it was opt out and according to pa title 22 chapter 4 it says school entities shall adopt policies to assure that parents or guardians have the following the right to have their children excluded from research studies and surveys conducted by entities other than the school entity unless prior ring consent has been obtained so my
120question is why wasn't this an opt-in survey why did i then have to go print out a paper and opt out of it why weren't the questions given to us up front and then given to us to read and make the best decision for our family i understand again the intent of this but i just felt like it wasn't age appropriate i was picturing my son sitting there thinking about suicide and i wouldn't be next to him to talk to him about that and he would be scared in school maybe because maybe he would think was i supposed to make a plan to attempt suicide it was a lot of emotions going on and i understand a lot of you have younger children than me older and these are discussions that are going to come
121up in life however um i guess i'm mainly upset why we weren't given the questions right in the email and then it was my choice to read it or not why did i have to go seek it out and why is it not opt-in rather than opt-out and i purposely hand delivered my opt-out for myself because i wanted to make sure i got to the school and i got confirmation that he is opted out of it and i do appreciate that but um i think all parents should know about this it's it's a lot of information and my kids talk to me about a lot of stuff and i would hope that if i he took the survey without me realizing this was happening at school that day i did pay attention to this email
122i don't know what he would have come home like what kind of mood and maybe in eighth grade we'll talk about more of this and he'll be ready to take this survey um i just think it needed to be handled differently um because you know they're still sixth graders playing with their baseball trading cards and not worried about harming themselves and a lot of people came back to me and said this i feel like this is going to put ideas into their heads and what if maybe they will go home and drink cough syrup that's on here too um it was just concerning i hope this is something to consider as a board member i would hope you print this out i would have made copies i didn't think um certainly but it's 10 pages
123long i just think everyone should be fully informed on this it's a it's a heavy thing for kids to handle so thank you thank you uh mr tutor um it is a it is a very involved survey that pays has been giving across the state for years uh and it's designed for middle and high school uh and i certainly appreciate your comments as far as uh we can contact pays moving forward talking about we can get permission just to put a link directly to the questions rather than the link to download we try to when we send our messages to parents we try to make them meaningful i know you get a lot of emails from the district and undoubtedly drugs and alcohol and some of the related topics are uh certainly uh part of
124the fabric of our community unfortunately as well as suicide those things but i understand your point especially i was a middle school principal for many years and developmentally sixth and seventh graders would uh respond maybe differently uh than more mature students high school students so we can certainly talk to the pays folks because ultimately it does be i think it's well intended and it does lead to access to programs for drug and alcohol education mental health well-being those types of things and then we can be more transparent and give parents more education to make those decisions so i certainly appreciate you bringing that up anybody else in this audience anybody else true no that's it any more board comment or discussion okay then i will adjourn this meeting thank you all so much you