Special Board of Education Meeting 2-27-2025

001okay it is 6:17 I will call this meeting to order if we will all please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liy and justice for all okay roll call please roll call sorry Jill Maddock Nelson here Bobby Brawn here JD Sher here Angie shriber here Kristen Matt Miller didn't know if she was coming Katherine Solen here Dr BTO here there and then we have uh oh Scott said he was going to be late Scott Peterson and Danny P here public comment no no public comment okay Administration reports student Benchmark data results I will turn it over to Mrs oensi and M St so at this time we have um

002the winter Benchmark data and um we will follow the same procedure that we did the last time where I encourage all of you to go sit in the audience have some light supper Miss tsre will kick off our winter Benchmark data and um it will be a little more casual environment building principles will also present their data and you will be given an opportunity to ask questions okay [Music] you it you're Wonder ask SC that all right okay get I'm is it working there we are so I'm going to start with the district um data across the board and talk through kind of of our differences mainly at our elementary building with act 20 we started that in winter in January so I want to talk through that with everyone so that you can understand

003why some of our data cannot be compared from fall to winter because it won't be Apples to Apples and express why we did what we did on the data monitoring sheet that you're looking at on the screen if you have questions during please ask uh feel free to just Shout It Out JD feel free Open Mic for you all right so this winter is the first time that we started our act 20 literacy assessments so when you're looking at the data 4K we decided because act 20 said we did not need to test them until spring of this year we wanted to get really good with the expectations that we were required to do we will start 4k on Ames web Plus in the spring so 4K took early reading and early math on fastbridge

004just like they always have so when you look at the 4K data you will see we have 81 students across our district we have 22% below identified below grade level and that is a 15% increase of percentage of student growth from fall to winter so you can see all the way on the right the column that says plus 15% okay just like last time that's a really big celebration our 4K have been doing a lot of work around shared writing and shared reading with cisa 6 we have a coach named Laura deing who comes in she was actually here today doing embedded coaching around our 4K program which is a significant reason why we have such good data at our 4K our goal for 4K is to walk out of 4K into kindergarten with no

005one below and we are pretty confident that we can get very close to that goal or meet that goal so 4K is doing an amazing job in all three buildings up that 15% as a district and some they've already started their skill groups which means they've identified their data they've identified skill groups and we're enriching the students that already met the expectation and pushing them on to some higher level uh skills including um reading Horizon so they're doing some phonics if they've already got those letter sounds and those letter names down we want to continue to push them on and help those students who are still working on some of those skills at the 4K level any questions yes ma'am how many of those stud language we don't we don't identify 4K kids as eel

006or multilanguage Learners until we do a screener at the beginning of kindergarten so do we have students who do speak a different language as their first language absolutely um in our 4K programs we have two students currently um that don't speak English as their first language um but we'll do the screener then into kindergarten if they do qualify then they will be added to our group of students our subgroup of el multilanguage Learners okay yes all right any questions around 4K so now we get into kindergarten through third grade we still took math on fast Bridge because again we wanted to become we wanted a system into this new plan and into Ames web and act 20 that was sustainable and something that we could grow our teachers with us and not just do to

007them so that they really understood the process so kindergarten through third grade continued to their math on fastbridge WE focused mainly on the literacy because that's part of the ACT 20 component that we needed to do in Winter for kindergarten through third grade they took their first round of as web Plus testing the difference between asbridge and as web plus and you'll hear about more as we go throughout the year and into next year is that it's taking a deeper dive into our skill sets of every student so when they took fastbridge they we might have tested them on letter sounds in kindergarten the onset sound or the first sound of a word the nonsense words those blending of sounds together making words that are not real words and Words segmenting which means breaking that

008word apart when we took the as web and I gave everyone a packet that looks like this you can see there's specific things that we have to test for ACT 20 at each grade level throughout the year we actually added on a few extra assessments because we wanted to make sure that we really had a understanding of where the deficits are for our students so that way we can identify them and then make sure that we're filling those gaps if needed so when we did our act 20 testing for as web what we did is we went through kindergarten through third grade students we tested their benchmark Mark screener which means a group of different skill sets so for kindergarten it was initial sounds letter naming fluency letter word sounds phon name segmentation and auditory

009vocab we gave every student in kindergarten those five assessments I gave you a packet and if you flip through them you can kind of see examples of those assessments if you're wondering what does that mean and what do those assessments look like after we gave those five certain subtests said if they fell Below on their comp composite score so they took those assessments put it together in a composite score if they fell below the 25th percentile then we had to move on to step two of the ACT 20 plan step two is seven more assessments for every student under the 25th percentile so when you're looking at how do we accomplish this in a district it is very difficult we were lucky enough to have coaches instructional coaches to help with that testing process because

010if a kid fell under every kid had to take seven more assessments within a 10day window so if I test you on one day I have 10 days to finish all of those assessments if you fell below the 25th percentile there's a clock running on it so we had to keep track of where when we tested and when we completed so the second step or third step of the ACT 20 if I fell below the 25th percentile I'd have to do listening comprehension spelling assessment hegerty which is phonic awareness which means hearing the sounds of words phonic screener and high frequency words so that's the extended part so what's really great about am web plus and act 20 is that if I fell below and I have skill gaps now we've done all these other

011assessments we drill down to the exact deficit of a student and now we can intervene on that exact deficit fastbridge didn't give us that level of understanding about a student's need so doing all these extra assessments yes took a lot of time however it has really been able been given us the opportunity to directly ident ify the skill Gap address it in small group targeted skill groups within our classrooms and then be able to show growth around that any questions just right there around the as web testing okay nope um depends on how squirely the kid is if they're really focused with you um it took about 15 minutes per her kid to do the all the extra assessments one of the tests the spelling you could do in a group so we took all

012the kids at that grade level who fell below and did that test all together but it was a lot of planning and a lot of organization to make sure we hit all of these students the teachers were involved in step three because we wanted them to be able to test their students and know exactly where that deficit was because then what we did after that once testing was completed for the students within those 10 days we had five more days to get their reading plan done so anyone who fell below the 25th percentile right now has a specific reading plan that was sent home to parents they have to sign and have like give us permission or understand that and acknowledge that we sent the reading plan it's similar to an IEP in the aspect

013that we are specifically creating goals around what they need to learn in order to be successful there's criteria also around how do I get off of this reading plan in the future so I'm going to be coming back to the school board in the next couple months around a policy around 20 that we have to have to make sure we understand the promotion policy of how I exit a reading plan or how do I move out of third grade if I still have a reading plan into fourth grade what does that look like for me okay so the reading plan had their goals it brings in their progress monitoring and that way our teacher said we know which students have these specific needs we are going to Target them in small group um instruction within

014the classroom so some of our students are getting our core they're getting a small group on those deficits and they're getting a tier three which might mean a really intensive intervention around some extreme gaps we have some students that are closer right closer to that proficiency line and some students that are further away okay the big thing for first through third grade is the oral fluency that's reading a sentence with fluent with intonation making sure that I'm reading um not like chunking words and not being choppy but reading with great fluency that is what is our struggle right now when you get to where I show you the reading plans because a lot of our first graders haven't been reading like a full paragraph yet but we know where to get them to by Spring

015men if that makes sense and it gives gives us our teachers an understanding of the level of rigor that our students should be at at those grade levels because I think sometimes we don't always know what should a first grader be reading this is the passage right here and I think there's some examples in your packets of a fluency passage at each grade level with the level of vocabulary and decoding that they need in order to be successful to move to the next grade level per as web okay so when you look at the screen under kindergarten you're going to see a percentage and I want to make sure we under yep explain what you mean can you say it again yeah yeah yeah um the naap standards I believe so the as web is

016Norm Criterion from what I know um and it's not just Wisconsin it's for like the country normed standards so against kids their age across the country of where they should fall right and and with fastbridge we either had the Benchmark or the norm Criterion we chose the Benchmark as in that cut score of like you have to be this proficient in order to move on like so that you're successful rather than comparing you to other people um kind of in the same vein of as we look at the state report card like yes we can compare ourselves but if everyone's doing really bad do we want to compare ourselves to that or do we want to compare ourselves to like a cut score of this is what I need in order to move on I

017can get you more information too around as web they have changed it from the past I used as web in the past um it is definitely updated which is exciting because I think we obviously shouldn't go backwards to what we used before um so it's exciting that it's updated on some of those pieces yes well I will say I don't own either company I will say we are finding as teachers that we are getting more data from am web plus with all of these extra screeners to make sure that we can really identify where our kids are missing the mark in order to be readers no it's very clear um because when you look across if I share the spreadsheet with you which I won't because it's confidential but you can look across and you

018can see if this kid has less in this category and they're scored a two and they should have a 15 right there I know that's a deficit hey they got 10 out of 10 on this part if they were doing phon name segmentation awesome let's go on oh my gosh they have another needed nonsense words perfect now I know know which groups and what I need to focus on as a teacher to make sure that I fill those gaps and then we just keep filling gaps till we have the proficiency we need absolutely and we did so one of the piece of the reading plan is that whatever we say your your students's deficit is we wrote a goal around that for every student specific to them and then we said because this is a

019deficit we are putting your student in a small group targeted skill group and here's a sheet where you can help them at home using this strategy so all the parents got a strategy specific to the goal in which their kid is working on um and that all went home with all of their data their reading plan um and that sheet and then an acknowledgement sheet that they had to send back to make sure we they saw the reading plan yep um I think I will say we have to do a better job of educating our parents on it as we get better as a a district around Ames web we've already talked about having some family nights where we bring them in and show them like this is what we mean by fluency this is

020what we mean when we say nonsense words we do send a lot of information home from hmh at the elementary level which is our inter reading Ela program that says this is what we're working on in this unit this is how you can help your student um but yeah the parent has to read it and do it um but we can always educate and make sure they have all the information that they need to be successful at home coming physically into the building maybe yeah or we could send out videos over Class Dojo explaining it like this is your child reading this is how you can practice at home you know and modeling we've talked about some of those pieces moving forward of how do we get the community and parents involved in that [Music]

021exra practice at home yeah we love extra practice but it's also our job as Educators to have them eight hours a day to educate the children of ano and make sure they're ready so I love that a family would offer and support their child but that's not what we rely on because all kids and equity for our students whether I have a parent who works second shift and can't that is our responsibility and our job um to ensure that our kids have what they need but we will never say no to family's helping yeah yes so that was what I was getting to next so the thank you Ames web plus said 25th percentile the ACT 20 said that's where we have to have a reading plan so in ano we talked about it because

022fastbridge used to be 40 percentile and below and so when we had discussions we're like are we lowering the bar for our anago students by saying now at 25th percentile is proficient but fastbridge had 40th percentile am web am web says 30th percentile is proficient we decided as ano that we're going 40th percentile because if I'm at the 40th percentile I'm on track to where I need to be as a reader so when you look at that percentage that's why it doesn't correlate with the 44 reading plans in kindergarten because we took the 40th percentile and Below that's 59% of our students in kindergarten are the 40th percentile and Below 25th percentile and Below we have 44 reading plans yep so when those percentages don't add up and you're doing the math in your head

023that is why okay we wanted to show so in Spring I can bring some comparison of where we are growth-wise percentage I just can't do that now because I can't compare fastbridge to as web but I want to give people an understanding we have 44 reading plans that we have written for Kindergartens that's way too many we've talked about that as teachers the effort put in to make sure all this happens within 15 days we have too many students falling below and this is why our plans from now till spring look like they do so that we can make sure we leave this year with less reading plans um than what we are right now so looking at first grade you can see that 72% is the 40th percenti below around that oral fluency which

024we just talked about our kids having to read full sentences and paragraphs in first grade we are practicing that currently but we have to do all the decodable skills ahead of time time so we're going to see a lot bigger growth from Winter to Spring in first grade around the fluency part absolutely yes we have more decodables and startright readers and rig readers which are like the next level and Blended books where now we're blending that together when hmh and then in any program that I've seen um as of recent so we do have a lot of decodables that match exactly to what they're teaching in the skill um we send a book yep because we want that physical book where they're annotating and maybe highlighting pointing to the words rather than on a screen

025we can definitely send it in a PDF and we have in certain instance when a parent asked for it um we can do it both but we try to send it home paper form because we put them in their reading uh buckets so they're practicing during the week and then when I take it home I'm super fluent in it and I can practice my fluency with my family so I'm getting skill and I'm not learning a different skill at home like decoding It Wrong by myself where we really practice that during the week and then we send those decodable books home so you can see second grade we have 56% of our students below that 40th percentile on oral fluency the oral fluency is what gets us a reading plan if we're the 25th percentile

026and Below we have a lot of grade 2 students so when we talk to all of our second grade teachers they're like yes we need to practice fluency more we were trying to fill some of those gaps of dakot coding and some of those phonic skills and now we need to push them to reading and so we have a plan for that that we'll kind of talk about at the elementary level third grade yes yes we our phonemic awareness is way better than it has been in past years so hearing the sounds that's that first kind of stage uh our phonics is better because we've been using reading Horizons we have structured literacy within hmh so that has been a huge push our our teachers are better educated around as well so that has been

027um in the classroom excellent because they are able to help support students in a better way um and then we worked on that fluency all the time but we're seeing better fluence because our decoding is better because of our phonics yes yes and some of our kids are really good at passing that they know how to read in elementary school and we talked about this with the middle school that they get to the middle school and then we see them drop in their fluency and we're asking why do they do that well because I get to bigger words are multi- syllable words those multi- syllabic words and I don't know how to chunk them into nonsense words and blends because I don't have a foundational skill that I kind of faked my way through and

028now I can't fake it anymore and we see a dip so we know as a system when you get to the middle school data we have some gaps still in phonics and some of those um foundational skills and we're seeing it in their fluency mhm so if we Shore that up you are absolutely correct we should be readers fluently working on our comprehension um and vocabulary okay third grade we have 35 reading plans um you can see as we get to third grade so we have 44 in kindergarten 49 56 and only 35 in third grade so that kind of also shows that as we're moving towards Middle School we are lowering those reading plans and we have a really good um plan for third grade across the district on how we're going to make

029sure we pass I know the middle school is like how many are you passing us there um hopefully hardly any this also includes our students with IEPs so students with a learning disability the state and DPI kind of say through act 20 they still need a reading plan but they also have an IEP they should be kind of correlated together we're not there yet on that but I wanted to make sure that this is also includes our students with IEPs so some districts don't tend to report that way they just report Reading plans but they take out the kids with IEPs or ILP is for e but we if we say all is all then we know all of our reading plans we know the growth we have to make okay any questions on am

030web plus act 20 kind of our first go round I'm going to pump up teachers and coaches because when I hear from all other districts anago had the best plan and the best um kind of roll out of act 20 where it hasn't stressed out teachers as much as I've heard other districts it has because we have instructional coaches and really great title teachers that were able to come in and a reading specialist and do the testing so that teachers could continue to teach other districts had to stop all their teaching while the teachers gave all these assessments so the screener plus seven more for every child that fell under the 25th percentile they had a stop instruction for a long time we wanted to make it a priority that our kids were still learning

031while we were doing the testing so that we didn't have to stop any of that so a celebration for our teachers and our coaches and kind of how they rolled out the the plan for ACT 20 we're going to short it up cuz we definitely made mistakes in it um for spring and do it even better but as we go through we're going to continue to make it better we will switch to as web Plus for math next year um and for the rest of the district next year this year we're going to continue with fastbridge how we have it we're going to add 4K in Spring to as web plus but then next year we'll roll out everyone in am web so kind of a transition from Fast bridge to as web plus so

032we didn't just yank it on everyone this year um to make sure that they could have their goals set okay you'll see fourth grade we had a -7% this goes right back to our normal fast Bridge a raing we had plus one fifth grade um sixth grade we had 0% growth seven that is not good that is negative growth yep we're back to fastbridge where from fall to winter now we can compare it from fall to winter we went down 7% so in red is bad in green is good my minus the zero okay um seventh grade went up 4% 8th grade down 4% nth grade up 3% 10th grade down 133% 11th grade down 8% so definitely can I yes ma'am yep one thing to notice and you may not be able to see

033it just from tonight's data but when you look at the overall percentage of growth or lack of growth the biggest gains are always made in those early years and once kids get to Mid school age the percentage of growth usually is always much less that's why it's so important to make sure we're intervening early on because that growth just seems to dwindle and it's a common Trend it's not an ano thing but I think it also helps to lift up the fact that of the importance of making sure we're getting it right at the elementaries before we send them to the middle school no yes and also like with seventh grade last year at this time had a NE 6% and we're up 4% this year so when you kind of look from last year's

034data to this data there is celebration in there where last year we went down 6% in that grade level those same teachers now are moving up um so if we look at that like um eighth grade had -33% last year yes we have -4% not what we want but as we look at Trends line we're moving even though we're still negative in the direction that we want to be going in um and like yeah have nth grade had only plus 1% now we have 3% so there's we're seeing some gains from last year's data if we're looking at trend lines to this year not where we want it to be so no one's making excuses about it but as we try to make sure that our teaching is getting better and instruction every year is

035getting better from fall to winter in these grade levels we are seeing growth in that aspect okay and then if we scroll down to math math is all fast Bridge that's why there's no reading plans some people math plans which is very exciting um but this is all fastbridge so the growth from Winter or fall to winter so you will see 4K made 19% growth kindergarten made netive 1% growth first grade 133% growth second grade 8% growth third grade 4% decrease we are piloting from K5 a math pilot um this is our pilot year as you guys remember um not that that's an excuse I just wanted to bring it to light that we're doing the pilot fourth is positive 5% fifth grade positive 7% so we're looking at that data too as we're trying

036to determine what we're going to bring to the board as our recommendation around the math piloting program all right sixth grade or negative 1% seventh grade yes you can't really tell in fastbridge that's why it's going to be interesting as we move to am web for Math and do some of those actual screeners what happens in fastbridge is if I'm a student who's taking it and I it changes to based on the the number I'm getting right or wrong so if if I get to like four groups of three and I don't know it's 12 and then they ask me four groups of four and I'm not understanding groups of I get stuck in that performance band and I can't go to other Concepts like perimeter that I might actually know it doesn't let me

037move forward so then it kind of locks me in this score as a student of like this is where I am so I might know perimeter area I might know multiplication on a different like if I'm doing a problem a word problem I can't get there because I can't pass this performance band so then it sticks me in there one thing we talked at the middle school is we want more data around math around like what is the deficit so that we can really address it um I don't think right now we have all that data that I think we could have to make it so we're hoping that as web gives us a little bit more in that aspect yes reports py graphs yes nope it's actually easy to use because it shows exact

038standards that they have not mastered as a student gives you this little graph of here are the ones you've mastered here are the ones you haven't it allows a teacher to go in and then say hey I you need to work on the standard so if I click it then all those questions on Dream boox Come to Me as a student around that standard so that's really helpful or as we look towards the forward assessments coming up in a month I can say oh my gosh we haven't hit a lot of those geometry standards that we need to I'm going to intentionally hit geometry standards for eighth grade so that those questions on dream box Dream Box come to them around geometry so there's a couple different ways you can use it you can use

039it to fill deficits or push to a higher standard yeah I could get those reports I don't have them tonight but I can pull dream boox reports for you yeah I think you have to use it consistently I think there's like it's not a program that you're like oh every Monday we love dream boox and we use it there's some goals around five to seven lessons a week um and making sure you're hitting your goal and doing those things so it can't be a sporadic thing and then you think oh well dream boox isn't working it's you have to use it to some like parameters to make sure and then we have e8th grade uh plus 5% plus 6% 9th grade minus 4% in 10th grade minus 11% in or sorry minus 6% in 11th

040grade and I'm just going to check last year's we had um like sixth grade hadg -3% now we have negative 1 eighth grade had negative 1% last year now we have positive five um positive three in 9th grade now we have positive 6% so some of those pieces that we're seeing moving in the right direction like I said I want to uplift that to make sure we know again a lot of work to do no one's standing up here saying like Anna Go's Perfect all of our kids are succeeding we know that's not true but we have a really good plan and we have really good resources and people that are doing the right work at the right time for our kids okay any other questions otherwise I'm going to hand it over to the

041high school put it's two fingers to scroll if you want can you scroll on this thing I can scroll if you want me to SC it's an oh my gosh we don't have to you might not be able to see the data we're not granted apples I messed up am's computer the other day um okay so a lot of the things that you see in our d don't look great writers when you look at them right like the first time that I pulled up our middle of the Year fast Bridge D I kind of wanted to just I was not happy because it looks awful and we've spent a lot of time challenging our teachers this year we spent a lot of time doing change we've um spent a lot of time um introducing all

042sorts of new things and pushing in all sorts of directions so I dug a little bit deeper and looked at what it truly looks like right because when you look at especially um our Ela when we're minus 13 and 10th grade like that's a huge number and not something that we were taking lightly in any fashion however when you dig deeper and you look at last year compared to this year um our and I have a graph for you that I printed off I didn't have great access to last year's data probably because I didn't know how to use the system well but um we right now are still higher where we ended last year so we did have a huge dip we had a huge gain um and we're still higher than where we

043ended at the end of last year so our kids are Clos thank you our kids are closing gaps um and you can't always see that when you just see like minus33 and when you see minus 8 however when she went over our math data we know that when you get to math at this level there's a ton of words in math so our math percentages are much higher and they are going in the right direction so you that's another indicator that we're closing gaps in ela um but our kids it gets harder as you get older and if you are already starting behind it is harder to make two years of growth in one year so it's not that they're not growing they're just not they're just not at grade level yet um so some

044of the things that we did first semester was we started interventions at the high school for the first time um I am not going to lie when you tell a 10th grader or a 12th grader or an 11th grader that they are going to be in an intervention you get a lot of push back um from a 15 16 17 year old so there was a lot of hesitation from our kids and we really had to work on buyin and culture with our kids and some of our families to be totally honest and really getting them to see so there's a lot of conversations with families of sitting down and saying this is where your student is at right now these are the skills that this intervention is going to work on and this is

045where your student could be in four months if they truly put some effort in and it will make school easier for them in the long term so we had a lot of those conversations at the beginning of the year we've seen progress with those kids um 15 of our students who were placed in vention are now graduated from Intervention and at grade level and for a school that hadn't been doing interventions that's a huge deal um so we now this semester have four additional intervention courses um we also were working on inperson credit recovery so our students who um needed small group um some of it's small group and some of it is online um with a teacher to help guide them so it kind of depends we have a couple we have for ELA

046um we have some EXL for Math and then we have language exclamation which is an inperson um intensive small group intervention yeah so they take a bunch of screeners to kind of figure out where they're at and then we group them accordingly yeah sorry if I'm going too fast for questions I'm sorry um so our teachers have worked really hard this year especially our nth grade um core band of teachers our nth grade math teachers are truly looking at data weekly and adjusting to where kids are at they're looking at their exit ticket data and their plc's they are truly working hard at making sure they're going back and meeting those skills again once if not twice before the second assessment our n9th grade ELA teachers are consistently using their resource they're looking at all

047of their assessment data weekly and then going back and raching those skills and then our ninth grade social studies teachers are really hitting small groups um right now we have Mr Kila writing a essay in his class and he has 100% of his students writing an essay and that's awesome like students who have not written more than three sentences in a long time are writing full essays so those are some of the wins that we've been having that you can't always see in our data and I want to make sure those are celebrated because we've really pushed this year and our staff are really meeting that expectation and I want to make sure you guys know that um I'm interested to see what the end of the year data looks like because I think with

048all of the things that solution tree is bringing in all of the ways that we are continuing to push and using Mike wer and Jamie kers our instructional coaches to be in classrooms and running small groups helping to make sure students are engaged I'm interested to see what we look like at the end of the year now that we have extra interventions running um we're more comfortable with that we're having better conversations with parents about student data um it'll be interesting to see how that that's going um and then Mr Mar's going to talk a little bit more about some of the behind the scenes work we're doing um more with solution tree all right so just I just want to touch um base just a little bit on I know this seems small but

049at the high school level again we tested almost nearly 100% of our kids for fastbridge and I know that seems like a small thing but at the high school level we have a lot of kids that are at NTC for the welding Academy they're on work release um they're in the goto program there's a lot of different aspects so it's not as easy what it sounds like to get 100% of kids tested and we're very close to that again so it gives us the best data possible to um go in the direction that we need to go um the other thing that Mrs bourman talked about was um our credit recovery so basically Credit Recovery is um when a student fails a class first or second semester they either have to repeat that class um

050back in person or they have to take a summer school class or an online class and much of the data that we've looked at is when a student's taken an online class um on an online program program without an instructor they're not garnering many of the skills that they need to be successful as they move through their High School career so like Mrs bourman said this year during prime time we ran at algebra Credit Recovery we ran biology and we ran English n credit recovery and we had many students that um passed out of that credit recovery in person and the data shows that when the student then moves on to the next grade level so if I did algebra in person credit recovery and I go to Geometry I'm much higher likely to pass

051geometry because I did the in credit uh Credit Recovery if I did it online the data is showing that when those students go into geometry but they pass it online in algebra they're also failing geometry so the in-person instruction has really helped to move kids in the right direction and gain the skills that they need in order to move on in their High School um path um summer school many of it's been um again credit recovery on a Chromebook or on a program again those students were going back into um those um classes again from algebra to geometry and just failing geometry again and right back into the credit recovery program on um the the Chromebook so again summer school we're looking to move back into person um and eliminate the credit recovery on the

052Chromebook again it's it's it's showing the data is showing that those students are getting the skills that they need with the in-person instruction a little bit about solution tree like Mrs Warman talked um we've developed the guiding Coalition if you don't know what that is it's basically a school leadership team made up of myself Mrs bourman our instructional coaches and then a couple other um staff members to help guide our district because we know that we can't do it all of ourselves our instructional can't coaches can't do it all ourselves and sometimes um when you have a peer talking to a peer they're going to help drive that um culture in a positive way so the guiding coalition's been a huge um asset to our school um some of the things that we're working on

053um with Coach um waringer and solution tree are um the fer model which is like a graphic organizer and then Cornell notes um basically identifying that key vocabulary we know that if a student is reading something but they don't understand key vocabulary they're not going to be able to comprehend what they're reading um in any subjects whether that's history Math Science Social Studies fied um so we did a lot of learning around that in a couple staff meetings we had staff members present and then we had staff members come back and present again we're doing more learning around that um here at our next staff meeting and we've actually had some staff members came back and said this is really working we're seeing students more successful in our class um we've also worked a lot

054on small group instruction Mr warninger just presented at our last staff meeting about the different areas of small group instruction many times people think it's just pulling kids and putting them in a small group yes somewhat but not entirely um there's different targeted groups that you can pull for small group instruction there's large um small group instruction so there's a different varieties of small group construction that can move um again the needle on Student Success soltion tree um recently came here and what we did with our instructional coaches and admin is we went in the classrooms with our instru our coach from solution tree and we looked at what our instructional look fors um we all we're looking for a common um assessment on what we wanted for our staff so we looked at learning

055targets we looked at um areas of need agendas and then we talked about gradual release so we know that our staff is looking for the same feedback and the same common feedback so we're delivering the same message and we um focused on again learning targets um release agendas and um again areas of highest need so basically if I sit up here and talk JD the entire time you might not learn a whole lot right but if I maybe um present to you the information that you need and then you're working on that that's giving the learning to you so that you can better learn so we want to put the learning back on students and not just me sitting up here talking and me learning because you might not be engaged so we're trying to

056release that information to students so that they can Garner the learning and it's not just coming from me so jie I I do it and show model we do it together to give you support and then when you do it I can give you feed and if you underst it or you're walking out the door where I have to pull you a SP Tom and so a model of framewor for lesson plan to make you're ACC inform you T your learning so it's something that we're not quite there but we're continuing to look to work on um and then just the the work that we continuously do around scheduling um like Mrs Borman talked about how we can continue to intervene with students um and then our jetto program which is been a huge successful

057um for us this year it's at our high school traditionally it's been at NTC um but we've seen a high success rate in our goo program and we continue to hopefully grow that any questions AES thank you for sharing that we have a lot of we have a lot of Staff this year that have really taken risks and challenges and stepped out of their comfort zone and I think that comes down to the peer-to-peer communication more than just having to talk to Mr Moran and myself and having Mr wer there and Mrs kers there has um there are all of that is a less risk than having Mr morer I come in the classroom and co- te with you and so I think that's really been a huge benefit to us it's at the end

058of the day everybody stays unless you have um like Co-op ya work release and um you are assigned a location we also did Credit Recovery during that time and we have interventions running during that time but that's something that oh sorry yeah and that's also something that we're looking at for next year not changing the schedule but changing um the name and how we placing kids what they're doing during that time to continue to make it more productive no no they're here most of them honestly are working on like AP classes that kind of stuff enog in your sta there's students in classs most of the time serious I mean I can just I think the change in way we approach kids the way we talk to kids um the way we approach them the

059relationships that we make those are all really um driving forces with universal tier one um just behavior management pieces and I think that has um we've gone from this kid to how can we help this kid and what are their strengths and what can we do and I think that goes a long way it sounds really simple but I think that's been huge in um the culture of our school not only for our staff but for our students do we still have challenges no doubt about it um but I think that Universal piece has really helped um there's some other things that we've put in place just with um Mr Frederickson um in working with students um and keeping kids in school maybe um a separate location for the time being um that has helped

060but again I think that Universal piece is the biggest piece that has helped drive us we all know you guys have your and so you guys time to come here and person deal with that group of students and hopeful I don't know and I will say too that I do think that it did carry over for some because I know one of the before Amy and I went back into buildings as principles we came to the high school one day and ran into two students who were typical Hall Runners last year and they were over the moon sharing their grades and how they were passing and making A's and they had future plans and that was never a conversation that we were able to have with them last year um so that's always a win-win

061when you have kids who are engaged and care about what they're doing you know they they felt like they had some and then told us that we were keeping them from class I don't know what it was like last year exactly but I know that this year staff are stepping up and they're saying hey this student at beginning of the year I had some staff say hey this student was is constantly by their locker and constantly late for Pride time can I just take them in my pride time my room is right here and that students started getting work done they started developing a relationship um so we're seeing staff step up and really um meet kids where they're at we have some staff who are working um the ELA department is working with the

062CTE department for some of our struggling Learners because they want to be able to write um how to break down an engine and write more of like a how-to guide than their essay and so as long as it's still meeting what they need to get done they're being able to work together on um getting that student back engaged in the classroom and so we're seeing a lot of that we're seeing um we're reading Shakespeare but I have an El learner so I have the cliff notes and I have the cliff notes in um like a funner version for them um to help bring them in to make sure that they're engaged um because some of our students are just not they they weren't engaged and they weren't feeling like the classroom was a place for

063them so our our team has really reached out and tried to do um just different things just so kids felt more welcome um I think that's been a huge success for our staff okay I think it's just a lot of communication with um families and I mean those are students we talk to a lot with their families and I think it's just um continued conversations but um we take Ser we take learning very seriously and um that message is clearly conveyed on a daily basis to students and families and we'll continue to do so so it's not what we want it's not where you know where we want to be but we we are taking learning very serious at the high school I appreciate that the discon that builds connection admin theel trying to come

064up with solutions to address the strle just kind of being your own Island that From perspective does not seem to be thee anymore you're on the same ship going in the same direction and on the same page and then you get follow through or buy from STA and and I'll just I'll add one more thing that you know I think we continue to grow in the cell phone area piece in the um and I know that again it seems small but um learning when you don't have an electron device in front of you um helps you stay engaged and also eliminates behaviors and other distractions as well that could lead into other things so it's been a huge asset to our school to not have cell phones in high school yep it's I wouldn't say

065every kid follows it but um they I think it's what's really nice is that we um kind of like Jill had mentioned um this is our policy everyone knows our policy we state it every day and we communicate it and there's really no questions um about it if something if some student were to violate it um we follow the policy and it's it's gone very um very well and there hasn't been a lot of push back so when the bell rings at 7:40 the cell phone has to be in their locker at 3:15 they can pick it out of pick it up out of their locker and take it back home [Applause] yep yeah just in case you wanted she'll put it up there scroll on my computer if you want to see what fing

066up okay but fancy two fingers not one okay well that was really good high school you should be very proud of yourselves nice job um we're also working with solution tree we are focusing on many of the same things that the high school is working on um but we're also working on some little different things we have a lot of good things going on but we have a lot of room for growth everybody always does and we constantly work through that our biggest Focus this year with solution tree is unpacking our standards like what are the priority standards um that we should be teaching and need to be teaching and how do we know what would be essential and the most recent work we did was a couple weeks ago and we um created a

067like a forward document where we have our skills that are going to be assessed on the forward exam and then also like throughout our content what have we already hit and what do we need to spiral back to to ensure that we know that our students have this knowledge um one of the sheets that te has right here and we'll pass it around it's called a a blitz tracker so we have our Red Robin we talk about our ano Pride and then each grade level and each student before um e Ela and math will have a blitz tracker so they'll track their skill the teacher also tracks it with a red green it's very similar to what you're seeing up here with our fast Bridge red the student didn't um attain that skill yet green

068they did if they didn't attain it then we're running a small group within that classroom with the teacher right away and there's some pictures of some of those that Tila is passing around too we really challenged our teachers um recently too with like a bingo board with high leverage strategies we didn't force everybody to do it but we're getting a pretty good turnout so we're happy about that um unfortunately what you do see with teachers and I think you were kind of alluding that to sometimes you don't want to be the tall poppy you don't want to be that teacher like oh you're really doing all those things you're just doing what your principles want you to do right um so that's an unfortunate unfortunate thought process but it's reality so really breaking down a

069lot like what they has said at the high school you still you have that and you maybe don't have it at the elementary level but you definitely start seeing it at the middle and then the high school level so our Bingo board is really trying to get people to show no matter who you are I don't care if you're a special Edge teacher or a band teacher whatever grade level teacher you are you're probably doing a lot of these high level strategies but you haven't even given yourself credit that you're doing it or maybe you've done this and you've done it in a different way that nobody else thought of so some of the teachers provided verbiage with their bingo and some have provided pictures we've take th those pictures now that they're sharing with

070us as long as the parents give us approval to put them on social media we're putting them in our pride weekly um our Dojo our different website messages just because I think sometimes we focus so much on maybe like a celebration or a shout out of a student maybe around Behavior but maybe academic but to me I think we need to kind of change that story too what are our teachers doing and then what can we do to partner with you at home a lot like with the reading plans we got to really do more of that with our families um and just we just have to break that barrier down we need to bring them in we need to go to where they're at a lot like what our school board has done with

071different things like with the referendum we need to do that more because I do feel since Co has even gotten worse so we need to make sure that we're getting back to that so we're excited about that yes you can talk um just one thing um along the Bingo boards and those High leverage strategy pieces I think one huge difference maker with those is engagement within the classroom um when students are engaged especially connected with some of those highlevel strategies uh they're not just a showbo but it's really getting students excited and engaged around vocabulary words around writing around a lot of those things that are unengaging in a classroom if you would present it um in a different way and so that those strategies being presented the way that they are has really raised

072some of our engagement um and this is a crucial time of the year for that because we're well into the school year we have a lot of big topics deep content right before our forward exam that we're diving into plus all the Spiral Review that's taking place for forward so it it's a great time to get students engaged and get them learning in the classroom and I'm going to turn it right back to you T because I think one thing that we all need to talk about is attendance and I know that you didn't talk about the high school but I know you work through that but every single teacher that has a meeting with a family or with us attendance is one of the number one things that com they miss this learning how

073are we going to ensure that they get this learning there's so many days they were gone go ahead yeah so I mean that's been a a huge thing that we've been working on here at the middle school with all of our students and families from fourth grade all the way through 7th we've had some really good celebrations around the attendance piece um like even to the point where this first semester in terms of citations given to students or given to families at our seventh grade level so kind of going through um our attendance program leading up to that seventh grade level getting ready ready to graduate we were very excited that during that first semester we had zero students that received a citation at the seventh grade level which is a huge celebration and it's

074not even that you know they could have received it and we just didn't give it to them none of them met the criteria for receiving that so that has been a huge celebration just seeing them grow and understand the importance of the attendance piece and we continue to build on that um trying different incentives we have a need incentive that is coming up called march to class um that's going to be done in the month of March here where students um can receive an incentive before going into spring break for students with 100% attendance in March and also 100% attendance to class on time which has really helped doing some of these different things and some of the attendance are tardy clinics and those kind of things have really helped reduce the number of students

075that are showing up to class late or coming to school late so we got a lot of good celebrations around our attendance all right so that that again that attendance piece is a huge piece when you're looking at this data with any fast Bridge language arts math all of it um we are our teachers everybody really they like what Trina kind of said too like you see your R your dad and you're like oh okay we're not all in the green and that's good like we want to be on green but we looked at the longitudinal data also and we are making progress and what we do notice that typically you see this typical dip a little bit in the mid year and then you typically see this bigger growth at the end of the

076year so um we're not hoping as a strategy we have directly put some things into our strategies uh we meet pretty intensely with our coaches and our title and um our reading Specialists Amy helps us a lot too we take a look and just really what are what are the major concerns like an assessment can show you one thing but maybe you have to dig a little bit deeper so we did add a new assessment for ELA this time um beyond the fast Bridge we took a look at what's called words your way and that gave us a little better look into some of the students with their spelling and their phonics if you remember back in the beginning of the year fourth and fifth grade every fourth and fifth grade student had reading Horizons

077which is an intervention universally every single fourth and fifth grader had it the whole first semester at semester our goal was to be able to not have everybody have reading Horizons and to be able to tear that off who really needs this continued reading Horizon intervention and who doesn't and then how can we start putting them and giving some different opportunity so we did succeed in that so fifth grade we actually have one intervention group with reading Horizons and no we have two currently right now and actually we're meeting next week Friday to kind of look at our data again and make sure do these kids need to stay in here or are we going to be adjusting them um and then our fourth grade also has two reading Horizons but it went from like

078110 students now we have 40 students getting serviced in an intervention time versus a full block of class time so that's a big celebration we're continuing to monitor that um but by using different pieces of assessment that really does give you a different lens to look at it because not one piece of assessment is going to give you everything we have found that language exclamation which is also used at the high school they we noticed that we saw um Improvement there with our students so we've added two sections for our weight intervention for language exclamation so we're proud of that special education started with a lot of different interventions this year new ones um Spire is one of them so we're continuing to grow with that particular knowledge we do still have extension during our

079win we added extension for reading win in fifth grade because of that whole reading Horizon we were able to reduce the number of students that needed intervention and we have a reciprocal board wonderful time intervention going on with fifth grade same as sixth grade and seventh grade fourth grade we're still not able to provide that extension opportunity because we still have too many students that are filling the gaps um but we also have those different types of things going on in math too so go ahead yeah so we'll talk a little bit about um just tier one level for math first our fourth and fifth grade teams Amy mentioned a little bit earlier they are going through a pilot right now and they are have been piloting um two different curriculums and we did get

080some awesome results from at both the fourth and the fifth grade level in terms of the winter fast Bridge assessment and it does have in part to do with that that curriculum piece of it both of those programs our our staff had said have been very engaging for our students there is manipulatives there's a lot of chances for students to be engaged in the learning and one thing that we really notice is a lot of those topics especially some of those major topics like fractions for example where you're digging into that at the fourth and fifth grade level and that's a big part of what that forward exam and our fastb exams are around that has been covered more in depth and students are getting a much deeper level of learning by using some of

081these new resources that we have also the assessments that students are taking that are part of these resources are amped up and so that has been a big change for our staff and our students uh and there's barriers to that but also we've seen how that has flown into both our fastbridge and hopefully our forward ex uh assessment as well in terms of students being able to tackle those types of Assessments so they've been really happy with the pilot program so far um and we're continuing to dig in around both of those resources at the sixth and seventh grade level they are more challenging for students absolutely they require a much deeper level of knowledge around those topics from our students in order to solve those correctly um but it also gives us an opportunity

082and some of the resources in terms of um the breakdown of proficiency and some of those proficiency scales those are really allowing us as instructors to take a look at where is the student scoring and where are they at and here's maybe a couple strategies that we could do with a small group in the classroom in order to help build that proficiency higher so it's not that they're not showing some level of proficiency um but definitely the level that they're asking for there and that we have talked around especially with our solution tree work as this is where we want students to be at those assessments are there um and that's just differentt and new compared to the resource that we were using so it it does feel differentt for our staff and students they

083are getting some of both yes yep they've gotten to experience both of them any more questions around the four five I'll move to 67 uh for 67 for us we've we've had uh a little bit more of a challenge this year we did reduce our number of staff at that level by one teacher just due to our number of students that we had at those grade levels and that switched our schedule a little bit where we're not running that block time for the ELA and math which is kind of reduced our level our our time that that staff our our students are in front of the staff and so that has been a little bit more challenging in terms of getting to that small group piece uh we're teaching that lesson for uh math and

084then getting into some work time with students and we don't have as much small group time and one thing that we saw at both the sixth and seventh grade level with our win interventions students that were with a math group especially on the lowest end did rise up and even students at our extension we have some cele ations around that extension piece our seventh graders have had a a group of a little more than 20 that have been engaging in the eth grade uh CPM book or the eighth grade curriculum and been able to kind of accelerate their learning through that and that group has actually grown we have three or four more students that have reached a level where they can now join that so we have both on our lower end and our

085higher end um we did see growth at both the sixth and seventh grade level it was the students that we didn't have a assigned to a math intervention and elat intervention kind of they're in limbo in the middle there they were proficient um and when we think about students being able to either gain or lose just one or two points can show them on either side of that line in the green or in the red so we knew that we really needed to be intentional in this next round of win intervention with all of those students and see if we could get them some more time in front of the math instructors so we did create more of a rotation for our win at both the sixth and seventh grade level um where students more

086students now are getting to rotate in front of their math teacher and getting more time with their math teacher in order to catch up on some of those small group interventions around the skills that they didn't get the first time in the classroom so we know that's going to help have a bigger impact when we get to our spring results there's anything else around tier two just one last thing that's not up there our Behavior has been amazing this year we looked at our data halfway through the year and I think we were 50% decrease in Behavior referrals from the year before and then if you go back even four years every year it's decreased that says a lot about how you can get things done in that classroom because we don't have as many

087disruptions it's been very consistent the students know the families know the teachers know how we're going to be working through these things and I feel this year has been the most consistent that we've had yeah agreed I I think it like the system that we've worked in and all of our staff kind of even what the high school was getting at a little bit it's the culture it's everybody working together um to just put learning at the Forefront and so anybody that is joining into that system I really only think is going to benefit from that um I I wouldn't see it going in the other direction just because it just keeps building and as it builds everybody is recognizing families are recognizing students are recognizing staff are recognizing how much that really helps in

088terms of us being able to focus on that learning piece and it's just GNA welcome people into that culture it shows in our data I think as your data goes up and the conversation around your District goes up we've already heard from other districts of like what do you guys do in ano like what do you mean your dat is going up people are talking about like the messaging is different out there and you see that when you go to apply for a job you pull it up on weekend most people go directly to the state report card and pull up some of that data and say like okay from past years they got something going on at that District that is moving in the right direction which I want to be a part of

089um I think things that we're doing is is hitting the community and communities around us because I have worked in multiple districts and people will say how come before I was hearing like all this negative stuff and now people are like you got to go there for their act 20 they cell phones at the high school we can't get our high school to do that like there's some of that positive talk and I think as that spreads as our data goes up as people continue to be proud ofo and then not just internal but spread that we'll see the candidates we already have candidates I think 12 for one position that we posted and these are 12 like actual candidates not just like I don't have a license I'm just trying to throw it in

090there like people who are qualifi who we would look at as actual candidates to interview so I think that the message is to continue to build yeah and I do think is a lot from the community and the staff because typically if someone's going to apply they're going to reach out to someone who knows someone or someone who's in the district and then staff will say yeah we're getting our act together things are really taking a turn for better in our district yeah we we just love to put in I know High School talked about it but that staff piece is absolutely huge when you talk about building a clock culture maintaining high expectations and just that Focus around learning um we have so many of our staff and grade levels that are investing in

091lunch and learns which is just giving up their lunchtime Let's help with students um bringing students in after school doing Labs after school um just so much work with and the focus on you know the learning and the students it's been awesome we love them so thank you staff not be an issue at all for you because when we open upk that'll be a third grade student going into that school the E graders are going to Middle School out of the school and in excuse yeah we're not worried about it at all so the Middle School admin will not say about themselves so I'm going to say it for them uh we work with a solution Tre coach named Amy Clark and which is Nationwide they come together and the highest performing coaches which is

092am Clark she's one of the best they have at solry she works with schools across our nation she has to come with one celebration and each coach has to come and they sit with all the other coaches in the nation and she cated out that she has never worked with an ad team like ano Middle School who when she says something it is done it is done to a high level she said she is shocked at like she comes progress that has already been done she said she's never seen anything like it so it was celebrated Nationwide to all the coaches of solution Tre so thank you for sharing that Amy because was I like to ref to two of you as Dynam youu are it's really exting to watch you guys see your work

093action I really appreciate your dation thank you anybody need a stretch break bathroom break good all right keep going okay so we're kind of going in reverse order which is um a little different from the past so there's a few acknowledgements that I kind of want to mention you had Cornell notes up there for your upper classmen we have second and third graders taking Cornell notes and that's just been a huge push for writing so when we look at vertical alignment it's very neat to see the efforts that you know we're doing at a younger age to make sure everything is nice and steady for you guys um is already happening um I also would like to mention your countdown to forward um thank you to Heather and teal they met with solution tree Heather

094had mentioned that they're doing a countdown to forward exam so we are doing the same thing at our elementaries really investing in test taking strategies we are pumping up um gold stars and things on the announcements for effort and mastering test skills so thank you for that um the math pilot is also very engaging for our students um particularly at the kindergarten age like you think oh let all your kindergarteners go off learn getting counting collections like that's chaos when you think about the planning but these kids are so engaged they're counting they're stacking they're questioning each other so to see five and six-year-olds do that has been pretty awesome let me think what else we had oh attendance we've had a great attendance meeting with a 4K student from West at the Middle School

095uh they had a fourth grade brother so we were able to align our efforts so all right do you guys want to come up with me or do we want to okay well it's all very it's just it's just very similar okay it's just very similar as we step into all of our um plans um so as you look up we have a lot to sell Cate with our 4K team um these are a group of teachers and instructional assistants that are willing to take risks they're always reflecting um we've had great PD and these students at 4K are writing they're drawing they're illustrating they're labeling like that is impressive stuff for four-year-olds to be doing and a huge shout out to our staff so when you look at the number of reading plans um

096it looks a little da and I would like to shout out Amy and miss giry and all of our coaches the planning for ACT 20 was very seamless teachers were thankful you know at first we were all like what how are we going to do this and every teacher was calm um we were able to get all of the testing done efficiently instruction continued and I think the biggest reflection when you're looking at these reading plans is each plan is a student like we had to send these home and say your kid is not meeting our expectations or Benchmark level like that's really hard to do so I think they took it very personally and like it gave them like a sense of urgency where before it was maybe just a little bit of an

097assessment and oh we'll we'll dig down and do better next time where now it's like this is for real we we we got to do better than what we have so our goal at the end of the year is obviously to reduce these reading plans what was the district total we looked at and we didn't obviously have act 20 and we were still using fast but we always try to keep a barometer of where we are we're down about 15 reading plans of where we would have been last year winter if we would have had to do them or done them so different testing it's not Apples to Apples but just kind of as we knew 20 was coming we were trying to compare and see okay if it was here how many would fall

098under okay if it was now how many would fall under we've moved in a year in a really good place um and we're hoping by Spring if we can um meet the qualifications to promote out of that reading plan so we don't have to move into next year with it you are the plans yeah I mean depending on the deficit a lot of our kindergart right have some of the same deficits that were're working on so some of it yes is the same um but it's eight pages long an intense plan and has to bring everything in like attendance is a factor their progress monit is a factor so it it some of them do look quite similar if their kids are working at the kindergarten level and they both don't have their you know

099awareness yes they're both going to be working on that in a small group um but we had to do that for every student on a plan yeah so as the staff continue to build their small group instruction it's been very targeted um and we've been able to already see some growth in progress monitoring so when we have like our midyear check-ins with staff my question for them is what are we going to do differently by the week of March 17th to get students off of reading plans like what are we doing what student are we target targeting what is the skill that we're building um and kindergarten looks a little bit different in at West compared to the other two schools we have 10 kindergarten students going to the title location for an hour and

100there's three different centers so they're working on key skills in each of those centers with miss krog and miss kishine where the rest of the students are staying and they're working on their 95% and then they get their small groups centers and keep in mind there's 44 of them so we have a very huge kindergarten population so that's been awesome to see each kid truly get uh what they need to build their skills um first grade um is the least of amount of students per per class so for for us to see like 17 Reading plans I think our first grade team was just like super defeated but I've seen the energy the planning the commitment to making the changes in our first grade team to be sure that students do not have these reading

101plans um our first grade still has win but they are keeping their own students so we agreed that everybody knows their own students the best instead of sending them you know across the hall to a different teacher so they have 10 minutes of small group every every day and then you're getting your targeted skill and honestly some of the groups are only five minutes we're going to do this for five quick minutes and then the next um several students are going to come up um second grade another large class um we have 42 second graders and um our two dedicated second grade teachers have so much experience and if you think about someone being in education for 39 years you think they're just going to use you know their old skills and not try anything

102new but these two teachers always digging in always trying something new always taking risks asking a lot of questions so second grade grew tremendously in the spring last year so I predict that to be the case again and I think our third grade across the district uh looked very strong so with that being said we have forward exam coming up and I know our teachers are like I really feel super ready this year for forward so that has been very uplifting and one of the components to get offing at the end of thir grade is you have to the ELA of the forward so that's they still still trying to like figure out I know very so that and that they're hitting their skill group and their progress monitoring they wavered on that a little

103at the last meeting I was at that maybe we won't do that but in our heads right we want them to be able to pass thata forward test for fourth grade so that's going to be kind of our barometer of where our reading plans fall and if our reading students are hting that and well it's wavering in the old2 world right now so there isn't a definition of like holding them back but there is going to be some requirements SCH if you are on a reading plan you will be required to go to summer school students with an might look a little different so there's some different qualifications a student with ANP if it's a language barrier and I'm like my first year in English then yes I'm not going to hold it to that

104accountability of passing the ELA test so there's some there's some wavering there that they're still trying to figure out what that actual like defining offer situation so as soon as I I'll and our title team at West is very strong so I'd like to shout them out as well um the amount of time they spend finding the root cause and connecting with the students is very impressive so we spend uh couple times a week meeting and um what tidle is working on in in their classroom we are replicating in the small group session as well so if you're working on letters l m and Q in small group in title guess what we're taking that to the teacher and the teacher is reinforcing that same lesson so the students are are kind of getting a

105double dose and that has been um very instrumental with miss kishine and miss krog so I totally appreciate that U moving on to math I think the math world sorry go ahead just I'm not in education I'm somewhat familiar with I sharing all of this work is well appreciated and receiv from at least it takes a lot I'm just trying to W myin around how is it for a teacher to's help right creating PL anding testing how is it feasible to do all these things you got to go handle on it there's going to be things that you're going to figure out don't work so well but to the staff thank you to the staff and the administra because this seems insane to me have eight pages times x number of students per grade and

106buildings it's a lot so when I'm putting in cont sat here alling I have no IDE concep how this comes together you guys hav't figured out I want to recognize that it's a lot and thank you for that whoop whoop for Amy whoop [Laughter] whoop you that other districts like I'm always on these webinars and things for ACT 20 outside like at night it's a cool life like 9:00 watching act 20 webinars but the the stress in other districts around like you said the teachers had to write the reading plans alone but no one trained you on how to write a reading plan and we had to create our own reading plan here in ano there's not just a makeshift one from so for teachers in other districts that are like I don't know how

107to make this what am I supposed to on the the special part about ano is there was a collective team to sit with those teachers and walk them through we had a framework we already had all their information pulled in they could work on the goals so I think that that's a highlight for ano as we look for candidates you know coming in to the elementary position that you have people that are here to support you and a team that wraps around you that you're not sitting in it alone and what I'm hearing from other districts from I don't know how to do a plan so I just like click letters into AOG do and set and for the best well we know what happens then everyone doing their own thing becomes not a system

108so the system that an has will definitely and make better as we go but I think that that's something that should be for that system people to support when you come in that you're not yeah good work um so as teal talked about and Amy we're in that math pilot year but the excitement around math is huge um some things we'd like to see it is kind of a replica of what the Middle School's doing with have with math interventions as well and Jolene and I have been doing some walkthroughs together she is our our math coach um and she spent a lot of time in our kindergarten classes creating these math toolboxes and really creating Independence for um our math students so I look forward to us choosing a resource going through some training

109um and really nailing down and I'm talking about kindergarten for math because they were very very appalled by their results and they're like we got to do something different so our teachers already started small groups for math as well um so again I will shout out all of our staff and um our support systems and um I'll take any questions you might have none you ran out okay don't mind I'm going to operate over there so I can scroll my own computer and all that good stuff yeah so the next one is North Elementary and one of the biggest things that I can say we have really worked on is getting Behavior under control because the building was not in a state where kids were able to learn there was so much disruption so one

110of the big things that we did was we put a plan in place during instruction all classroom doors are closed because if you have a student who leaves the classroom and they're trying to run up and down the hall if all the doors are open it's providing them an audience so we really worked on implementing some type of a PBIS system and setting very explicit expectations for students and for how we were going to operate as an entire staff and I feel like that has been one of the best things that we've done because our students are being successful they are able to sit and attend and learn and be students we have brought back Monday morning meetings where our staff are now running those I did it for a couple of months and said

111you know this isn't me this is we it's our building they're our students we're going to do this together and they were Troopers of course and took that on and they're incorporating students into those Monday morning meetings and it's part of our daily announcements we celebrate the students another thing that we have worked really hard was to bring families back into our building because that was something that we really needed to work on and we had a CEO assembly today and I can tell you that the gymnasium was loaded with families which was a blessing and when people were leaving they were stopping and saying that was one of the best things I have seen seene I wanted to raise my hand too just like the kids because we were all there celebrating the kids

112know the expectations and we're we're operating well now does that mean we have no behaviors no it means we have less we have hiccups from time to time but our building is in a place where they know when learning time starts and they know what the expectations are our kindergarten classrooms had um some students who were not not really at a place where they were able to start learning and we spent a lot of time bringing back student study team meetings where we worked with a coach who had some extensive behavior um experience we put plans in place we met each week and we kept tweaking it until we had success and just today um one of the students came and found me in the art room and and was eager to share how successful

113he had been on his um assessment which was something that last year there were there was no knowledge around what a letter was much less a number or how to make the sound so we have a lot of success stories and lots to celebrate at North and we do I am very proud of my staff they work very hard they're um very resilient they don't seem to ever shy away from anything I throw at them let do this you know they jump in and and they're ready to go so I'm very proud of the hard work that they've put um toward this year one thing that was very concerning to me going into North was I knew that we had our current third grade students had two years that their classroom teacher left so third

114grade test scores count twice so I was very leery of how we were going to be able to manage that and I'm very proud of how hard our grade team has worked at North and they've made some significant gains in growth academically as well as behaviorally our um class overall is struggling a little bit with their maturity level but I am seeing that turn the corner which is exciting as well because they too are preparing and and being students so one thing that um Miss madic didn't talk about that I want to put a plugin for all of us even at the middle school and I'm thinking it's happening at the high school is we have gotten um our instructional assistance some extensive training I am a firm believer that when we have extra people

115in the building that we should be leveraging their skill set as well and there is nothing saying that an instructional assistant can't retach something so getting our instructional assistance trained they've been doing at the El entry level some Orton Gillingham training so that when we have kids who are struggling with letter sounds or letter identification our instructional assistants can pull them out or push into their classroom and do a quick five minute drill to help close that achievement Gap so that has been something really big as well so now we will go to the data so as you will see North Elementary we had a 3% increase in our 4K and we're really excited even our kindergarten teachers are talking about how excited they are next year to get our 4K class because they're so

116well behaved they're completely quiet in the hallways you never know they're anywhere around and they're working really hard and they're doing doing very well so um they have a rather large class I think there's 23 kids in the classroom and we have one teacher but um they're working very hard and and making growth for kindergarten we have a total of nine reading plans um that's one thing I also have to say about my staff I feel like they're pretty competitive and having reading plans wasn't something that they took easily um but they were up for the challenge and again reiterating what everyone else has said Miss St did an exceptional job pulling the instructional coaches our title staff our reading Specialists together so that our teachers didn't miss instruction time and they were able to

117continue the learning for our students so our kindergarten has nine reading plans we still have 44% that are below first grade has 15 reading plans which is 69% of the class is still below grade level second grade has 15 reading plans and third grade has 16 reading plans so for a total in the entire building at North Elementary we have 55 reading plans is the am in the district she won't say it so I'm North has the least amount of reading plans right now um so some of the things that we're doing is uh very similar to what Miss madak is doing at West and what Miss tstream is doing um as soon as we got the reading plans the overall plan was we're going to start working with small groups that's always a great

118strategy and the teachers started planning with the coaches immediately as soon as we got through the as web um testing and we met I was able to take time to go and meet with the teachers at East and at West and it was very beneficial to hear the teachers talk about the test results and what the reading plan was going to consist of and how they were already brainstorming strategies and things that they could do to make sure that we're closing the Gap and we're improving our student um achievement and next I will skip down we have skill group interventions I'll save that and let Miss sream talk about that in hers um and of course tidle we're still using tidle and we're also using um spire and sound sensible reading Horizons for interventions and

119Spire is that was Spire new this year for the elementary so that was a new those were both new what we found last year is we didn't have enough intensive interventions around those like students who had gaps in a lot of different of the foundational skills so not just phonics but I'm missing a lot of it sound sensible really hits all those gaps ands quickly into readers so we use that around our students with IEPs and title students are their kids that are furthest away from that proficiency line thank you and up next we have math our 4K has had a 27% increase kindergarten 7% first grade 21% second grade is 14% growth third grade has a 5% growth so combin B 14% Improvement in math at North Elementary and I know our teachers are

120really anxious about the um math pilot and nearing the finish line of getting ready to make a decision and then um learning about how they're going to get their professional development next year regarding the new resource um one thing that we all know that we still need to work on in the district is a math intervention or interventions but it's like I told staff yesterday when I was in a meeting with some of them you know we're trying to eat an elephant but we got to take it one bite at a time there are so many things that had to be put in place so we're getting there it's just going to take us a little bit of time before we do um continuing to work through plc's I think last year when we started

121with instructional coaches there were lots of questions around well if we're struggling for teachers why do we have coaches why don't we just pull them and put them in a classroom but when you use instructional coaches as an academic return of investment and you work through the understanding of what an instructional coach does with classroom teachers I really feel like many of our staff today if you were to tell them we're going to pull your instructional coaches they would be very upset by that because it's an extra thought partner and many times when you're a classroom teaching you're on an island all your own and I think they have found Great Value in our coaches so so um kudos to all the work that Miss stut has done with her instructional coaching staff and now

122with um our district reading specialist and getting us up and ready for um the as web testing and the reading plans so questions okay thank you so when I was asked to take over East Elementary Glendon and I really wanted to make sure that if we did get a principal to come in that we had things align so that that principal didn't have two separate schools to run so a lot of the things that she is doing I am also doing at East East didn't have PBIS before that positive behavior intervention support so that was one of the first things that we both put in um for North they've had it for years and a lot of the teachers had an understanding East we did not so we're taking a little bit of time to

123grow that right now um before we get to the data one of the biggest things we did at East was the culture and climate of the building um when I walked in there were kids running up and down screaming in hallways screaming in teachers faces um I I walked in thinking like don't change too much and then like 20 minutes and I was like nope we got we got to do some stuff so um the teachers have worked really hard and one really good thing that we do is we have a plan around every kid not only academically but behaviorally and the expectation like everyone is saying is this is a learning environment we don't come for anything else um so that has helped we have morning meetings as well we really worked on East

124has a lot of uh big emot emotions in our students so that emotional regulation a lot of our students now will come and say like I'm feeling this and they can identify a feeling which at the younger years is very important they're taking accountability because before it was everyone's making me mad and we couldn't get to academics when now it's I chose this Behavior this is how I fixed it sometimes they just come and tell you just to tell you like I did something wrong I was like I didn't ask but also great how did you fix it and they always have a plan so we've been training our students to if you make mistake how do you fix it how do you move forward without having big reactions and big emotions um our hallways

125are quiet now doors are shut everyone's in there learning um the biggest thing is when a kid comes in the hallway even to go to the restroom you are missing learning you better hurt the learning is happening so they'll even come out I know I'm missing learning but I'm going to go to the restroom and I'm going to go back in so that feeling that our students know that the learning is happening and not just I'm just out here but that you are missing something if you are not here and that sense of belonging has been really important at East because our kids really felt disconnected from school and it's just a place somebody drops me off and I have to come and now you hear kids talking about I get to come and we

126intentionally did that at staff meetings talking about kids we talked about like a kid and the entire school is wrapped around them everyone has a role Your Role might be all you need to do is say hi in his name you don't need to address any behaviors with him if he's doing something wrong in front of you that's not your lane he's got this core group of people who do that he gets love from everyone else all the way down to his classroom so that he's not hearing this what are you doing what are you doing why are you doing that we had that a lot with our students trying to redirect and it was too much that doesn't feel good coming in the school so we really defined our roles around who's handling behaviors

127with certain students who are their go-to people and who are the people that just get to love them and our goal at East was you say every kid's name every kid's name as they walk down the hallway when they come in before they hit their classroom door they should hear it four times with a smile on your face ready for the day and that was important because we wanted them to feel like you belong here we know you you are loved here and that's why we get to have you in our building so that's been a huge change and we can see it in our students now they come around and say like I'm so loved yep and we're learning you know so they're starting to repeat it which is great because now I think

128they feel like I want to be here rather than this place again and the teachers have really put in that effort to show every student that they are important as they walk in the door so our data here at um East we're proud of our our 4K up 28% they have put in some work in that 4K um we had a lot of students who came in at the beginning that didn't have a lot of their skills which is great that we're showing a lot of great work there 16 reading plans in kindergarten 17 in first grade 21 in second and we know that oral fluency is we were not pushing them hard enough on their fluency we didn't have the level of rigor that we needed to so we've address that and our grade

129three which is a great celebration is eight reading plans only one of those kids do not have an IEP so when we looked at that we said okay our third graders are going to rock that forward assessment for ELA so we flipped our win time to math because when you look at our math data you will see that third grade has -10% so we flipped our wi to small group math instruction we struggle with our place value number sense um understanding our basic fluency facts and as Middle School is looking at me like don't send them with that data we will not um so we have a plan to make some small groups an intentional Focus we have our instructional AIDS like Miss soinski said that have training now that feel better about pulling a

130small group um so we'll work through that 19% up in 4K Kindergarten has a 0% we are not loving that um we weren't doing as many small groups and intentional um targeted groups that we needed to so we've changed that already 18% growth in first grade 12% growth in second grade so across the board seeing really good stuff happening knowing that our third grade math is kind of where that focus is going to be I raced our third grade uh math on multiplication fluency the other day because they were like we have it's fine Miss dutre it's and it's not fine like we are lighting a fire under you you have to do better and you have to have some urgency for your education so we have some competitions going um with our third grade

131classrooms against teachers to see if they can beat us and I said we're not going to take it easy on you cuz you need to know your multiplication facts cuz fourth grade is coming so they're really excited about about that some say they were practicing at home to beat me I said I hope so so having some of that joy around education and learning that the fun isn't just ice skating and recess it is the learning another celebration across Elementary is we do one minute uh conferences with our counselors with every student so they just finished that they said it was the first year at elementary across three buildings that they had more kids say that math and reading were their favorite subjects usually it was fet in recess and launch which is not a

132subject um but they actually said that their favorite thing is learning and that this is the first year where across the board kids felt like they belonged and they loved being at school like their their verbiage was like I belong here do you know how many people love me and that we haven't seen before so just an added piece of all three Elementary buildings that our kids are feeling those changes because it's one thing if we do them but if it's not coming through our kids then what's the point so if you want to just collect or go back um Miss o jinsky to that document that have on there I'll share this out with the board if you want to look I know JD might be interested yep we do have to post um

133act 20 stuff on our website at some point one of the things is uh kindergarten through third grade intervention option so these are this is what we've already shared with our staff we haven't put it out to the community yet but it's different interventions under every one of those specific skill group groups that if you're struggling we can help create a a barrier for your deficit that we can really intervene and get you where you need to be So eventually all of our act 20 stuff will be on our website and we'll make sure that everything's posted along with our new policy that eventually comes into place um as we move forward with that but this is a great resource for our teachers so that they can know I have this skill Gap in this

134kid what do I do sometimes in districts you just end with that question of what do I do or I Google something we have explicit systematic interventions at the elementary now where you're not veering off course we have it for you here it is let us model and then let us give you feedback so that's been a great great success any questions on any of the data for tonight miss o jinsky anything to add all right well thank you so much we will see you back in spring for data um with a lot more celebrations and and hard work I you I