001movies oh so [Music] so are you joking yeah jordan six jonathan i'm great good to be here how are you thank you [Music] everyone so [Music] goodbye all right is everyone ready all right it is 7 p.m and i will call this meeting to order has this meeting been posted ms midzig yes it has and roll call will show that all five board members are present one of our student members is here and then our second student board member is joining us remotely so at this time i ask you to rise and join me in the pledge of united states of allegiance and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god individual with liberty and justice for all jonathan jacobs is all right so is there communication that you'd like to share
002this evening mr mitzik yes there is this week is teacher appreciation week the greendale school celebrates all staff for their role in educating students i'm so grateful for our quality staff and this week we will recognize their contributions in our words and our actions 60 students were vaccinated at the on-site clinic for age 16 and over on thursday april 29th the second dose will be administered on site on may 25th administration is continuing to work in setting up an on-site clinic for students ages 12 to 15 when the vaccine receives emergency use authorization for this age group parents will be notified of the opportunity to schedule an appointment and must accompany their student last week the cdc updated guidance on face masks for vaccinated people specifically vaccinated people can gather outside unmasked unless it is
003a quote crowded outdoor event we are working with the greendale health department to update these priorities these changes to recommendations for face coverings only apply to individuals who are fully vaccinated which is 14 days after the last dose in the recommended series the first strategic planning work team meetings were held on friday april 30th from 8 am to 4 pm and saturday may 1st from 8 am to 12 p.m meetings were facilitated by dr joe schrader from joe schrader consulting approximately 30 residents representing all facets of the community and backgrounds participated the team reflected on input from the community at the community visioning visit visioning session and community listening sessions to analyze challenges in the environment our strengths are opportunities for improvement and opportunities in the world following the first work session a survey will
004be open for all community members including students to provide feedback on some of the draft ideas for strategic priorities the survey will be used to revise and refine the strategic plan during the second work session on june 4th following this administration will present the recommendation to the board for review and adoption in july of 21. i want to publicly acknowledge and think the commitment of the work team it is a significant time commitment and last weekend they stayed engaged for the difficult cognitive work in april ap computer science principal students at greendale high school created programs to submit to the college board as part of their ap exam the variety of programs being submitted definitely shows how creative our students are within that content area on april 28th 7th and 8th grade track team members
005participated in their first track meet students did a great job in all of their running and field events the inter squad meet provided the students an experience to participate in individual events canterbury school students in mrs bauer's fourth and fifth grade split class put their geometry skills to the test creating a geometry city at the end of april this cross-grade level activity involved a mixture of both 4th grade and 5th grade math curriculums the project-based learning involved students creating a city that uses 2d and 3d plain geometry and solid geometry students use skills like building nets to create buildings and design a city where with shapes lines and angles fourth graders at college park participated in a project-based learning experience to set up and run a school store in april they learned about economics designing
006a business plan and putting the plan into action they determined their products did market research through google surveys requested a loan from mrs owens set prices and advertised for their business they also learned math skills of calculating unit prices adding and subtracting decimals and counting money the goal of the school store is to first pay back their loan any profit after their loan is paid off will go towards their madison field trip from now until the end of the school year in conjunction with our theme of good sportsmanship in-person students in grades k-5 through fifth grade at highmane view will be taught a game of the week by miss muschinski during their lunch recess the game of the week gives students additional choices of games they can play together during their resource resource time recess
007times i'm sorry prom will be held on may 21st at western lakes country club the grand march will take place beginning at 5 pm and will be streamed on the district's youtube channel no person no in-person audience is allowed although they are considering ways in which parents may be able to attend prom will include a plated dinner and contact controlled dancing for student attendees using organized assigned areas on the outdoor dance floor the following donations have been received by the park and rec department 60 child face masks totaling 419 dollars and 40 cents from the nest in greendale 75 for supplies for the bunny hop tour from j j contractors llc a 75 dollar grant for items for the bicycle safety day from safe kids children's wisconsin and a 200 gift card from walmart to
008greendale to purchase candy for the bunny hop tour that concludes my communications and i'd like to suggest that the board consider a motion to reorder the agenda in recognition of the time of our guest this evening placing item seven the nomination to name the greendale middle school gymnasium and item eight the new teacher project uh tntp report uh following citizen comments all right so there's is there a motion to reorder the agenda so that agenda items seven and eight come after and then item three before agenda item four i motion that we change the agenda so that uh agenda item i'm just looking here seven and eight seven and eight go before the other ones is there a second second there's been most of the second to reorder the agenda any further discussion and they
009call for a roll call vote yes yes yes yes and i am yes motion carries um citizen comments first yep exactly one other comment that i wanted to to your communication kim you mentioned the survey that will be going out to the community um later this month kathy if you have an opportunity to go to a village board meeting as a village liaison you may want to just alert the village board to make sure that they're aware of that that a community survey is coming out yeah and encourage them to sign up and and any board any um residents in attendance that evening as well when do when is that survey coming up the survey um yeah we don't have any committee reports tonight otherwise i'd have them to speak to it the survey will
010go out late at the end of this week and be open through may 20th we'll communicate through social media through direct emails to our communications lists and a postcard in mailboxes there will be paper copies available at the public library for those that don't have the digital tools to respond so just make them aware that this is yeah exactly fill it out exactly okay all right then continuing on with the agenda agenda item three any comments from visitors this evening good evening and again please state your name and address for the record and we limit our comments to three minutes um per individual sure thank you my name is heather godley 5331 millbank road in greendale as the board knows i'm dedicated to improving the climate around diversity equity and inclusion in greendale and i
011hope that this is a core focus for greendale schools as they renew their strategic plan i was disappointed that i was unable to attend the strategic planning work session friday and saturday since it fell during a work day and i was unable to get time off i did however make sure to attend one of the four earlier community listening sessions since two of the four sessions were at times when working parents could attend at that event a large part of the discussion from myself and from other community participants was about issues of diversity equity and inclusion and the facilitator notice noted that fact i hope that this vital contribution from community members such as myself will be taken into account in further discussions about the strategic plan and that future conversations will be scheduled to
012accommodate working parents like myself greendale schools must assure that their environment is representative and welcoming for all students and families and that teachers are supported in teaching with an anti-racist lens and show that they're uh then that the district will show that they are willing and committed to making decisions with an equitable lens as they make plans for the next three to five years thank you thank you any additional comments this evening all right seeing them we will jump to agenda item seven where we had a an ad hoc committee review the nomination to name the greendale middle school gymnasium yes we um joe curpido i worked with joe to identify members of the ad hoc committee using the board policy guidelines and i joined sarah dominguez who's a current middle school physical education teacher
013jared gallante who is the athletic director at the high school robbie mcfall who is a community citizen member john weiss the principal at the middle school and kathy as a board member community citizen member to review the nomination to name the greendale middle school gymnasium after richard bergner as we reviewed the nomination we heard specific information from the family around mr bergner's history and the reason for the nomination richard bergner was the first physical education teacher in the greendale schools and worked in the greendale schools as a physical education teacher for 38 years many many many community members responded to the nomination that was publicly presented through citizen comment and endorsed and supported the nomination for not naming the middle school gymnasium after mr bergner not only because he was the first teacher but he
014was also a very special teacher in their hearts at the middle school always willing to give of his time in addition mr bergner was the physical education teacher when the current middle school building was remodeled and added onto including participating in the design of the gymnasium that they are nominating him to be named after in-board policy one of the criteria that would be considered is that the person shall be of exemplary moral character have made an outstanding contribution to education humanity or the community and have displayed outstanding leadership or be a person of historical significance and as the committee reviewed the information provided by the family and the other community members and former students who supported the nomination mr bergner fits this description perfectly and so the ad hack committee does recommend that the board
015approve the naming of the middle school gymnasium as richard bergner gymnasium complete with acknowledgement in signage and we would propose naming ceremony at some point potentially village days this august i'd like to recognize members of the bergner family who have joined us this evening and john bergner was the nominator and he presented at the to the ad hoc committee and do you want to introduce the other members of of mr bergner's we family all students of my father and i think it's relevant and exciting that on this week of teacher appreciation that we are choosing to to bring forward a recommendation to name a facility after an exemplary teacher in our district and so this is brought forward for your information this evening and we will take a vote on the 17th consistent with our
016board norms that you would never be asked to decide on something the night you're presented with the information i do know that this would be an easy vote for you though all right thank you very much kim any questions or comments that anyone has i was just going to share there were a lot of nice pieces that were written about mr bergner and if any of the board members want to see that i'm assuming that kim has that um but we heard some really nice testimonials as part of the board and um he was a great man i i had him myself as a teacher so i have no qualms about this all right very good all right um very good and thank you kim for putting this together and thank you to the burgner
017family i did not know your father but when the idea of naming this came up i had several community members you know approach me or call me in support and just share some of their stories about how not only was he a teacher but he was an active member of the community and we see in your your letter you know some of the things that he was involved with not only with the students but with with the the families with throughout the district so so thank you for sharing that all right and like you said kim will be bringing this back at our next board meeting to approve this and then as you said you know find a appropriate way and appropriate time to to announce this and kind of celebrate that opportunity yes we
018will work with the family on the celebration and the announcement and the signage and notation within the facility for naming so that the sign is appropriate to recognizing and consistent with signage throughout the building a question i have is um when does our next edition of life in the village come out and would this be something that we'd want to put into there as well we will put it in life in the village but i don't i think the deadline has passed for the june edition and then we can do a larger article in a future edition that would be great very good idea i'd i'd just like to add to the burgner family to teach phiad and at the middle school level as a special challenge that your your brother and father obviously you
019know rose way above and and to have people to have your your own students come back later and sort of seek you out that's really the ultimate teacher paycheck so congratulations thanks all right very good then continuing on with the agenda we have some visitors joining us remotely to talk about the tnt tntp report the new teacher project report yes so one of our goals this school year was to do some work to address the lack of diversity among our staff within the district and we with we talked with the board about engaging tntp to do some research and provide some recommendations on how we could improve the diversity within our teaching staff we've been at a previous board meeting rashida came and presented what the plan was and we've been working with them over
020the course of the last three or four months very intensely we meet weekly and so tonight we have with us rashida uh who you met before and then jacob waters from tntp to present their findings and so i'm going to turn it over to uh the two of you thank you kim it's so good to be back with all of you can you all hear can you all hear me okay yes but jonathan is going to mute his mic so that we don't get feedback so if someone asks a question we might have to turn on and interrupt you but we're going to mute our microphone so we can hear you without feedback okay okay so thank you again it's really good to be back with you all um the first time we were here
021we were just getting started we were talking about what we were going to do and now we get to report on the work that we've already done and to share some of our findings and recommendations with you all um so again my name is rashida evans i'm a partner with tntp um and just really quickly i'm gonna have my colleague jacob introduce himself i'll go ahead hi everybody my name is jacob waters i am the director of external communications at tntp and so just really quick um you guys are familiar with us but just really quick for folks who may not have been here when we uh we were at the board meeting back in december um tntp is a national nonprofit um we work at every level of education to really ensure that kids
022have great teaching have a great educational experience particularly with greendale our emphasis has been around making sure you all have the best possible talent in front of kids every day and part of that work has been to look at it from the lens of diversifying uh your your your teaching staff so we're going to get into um just a little bit of what we've done what we've done over the last several months um jonathan is going to advance the slides for us so you may hear me have i may have to tell him when to go and when to stop so hopefully that won't be too distracting for you all i am going to try to move through uh the slides pretty uh pretty quickly not because they're not important but i want to be
023conscious of time but i also want you if there's a place that you want to come back and ask questions i think kim said that you guys are going to ask questions on the back end so i definitely will hang around um for any questions that you might have and if i'm going too fast please don't hesitate to let me know next slide please jonathan so uh the work that we we partnered with uh greendale to do is really really simple we wanted to get an understanding of the context of greendale so you had the big idea of wanting to diversify uh the teacher teacher workforce within the community but what we wanted to do was see what did that what did it actually mean for you all so what were the conditions um we
024wanted to look both internally and externally to understand what those are and then to identify where your opportunities are and so you can see uh for the project objectives right in front of you um we did a landscape analysis um we examined some of your vacancy data to understand how often are you actually hiring teachers because that influences like how fast um you will be able to diversify your workforce we looked at some of the culturally responsive practices uh particularly in the hiring pieces and then we wanted to understand what the teacher experience is in greendale so far and sort of take that as a lens to really think about what are the recommendations we would we would make to you all to uh to help you uh advance your your goals here i'm gonna
025hand it over to jacob who's gonna talk a bit just before we get into the details just about why this work is important why this even matters right now sure thanks rashida jonathan could you advance the next slide please or one more i think great um so again hello everybody my name is jacob waters and as rashida mentioned i'm lucky enough to be one of her colleagues at tntp um long-time resident of philadelphia where i started my career as an elementary school teacher here in the city and so i must say as a 76ers fan i also wanted to express my gratitude to the milwaukee area for the bucks taking care of the brooklyn nets yesterday um you know i really appreciate that and hopefully the same thing happens tomorrow um but anyways part of
026my job at tntp i helped to lead our research and policy work on diversifying the educator workforce and i'm delighted to share some of our thinking with you tonight so tntp and you know i think you know a little bit about us but um you know we're a national nonprofit founded by teachers almost 25 years ago and since our founding we've trained or recruited some 50 000 teachers across the country and are currently partnering with over 300 school systems to help them meet their goals for students including many on educator diversity um and i just wanted to note that very few of those systems are suburban districts that look like greendale and so i wanted to thank all of you first of all for your leadership you've all demonstrated by discussing the educator diversity issue
027you're very much ahead of the curve there and i hope that other districts follow your lead so why does this work matter um so it's not just about the principle of this it really really matters for students so as you can see on the slide um the benefits of having uh teachers of color are particularly large for students of color uh you know as it says here students with the same race as their teacher are more likely to complete high school and go to college less likely to be suspended and more likely to be referred to gifted and talented programs in fact for black students having just one black teacher in elementary school can improve their lives far into adulthood but in addition to this research has also shown that all students benefit from having
028teachers of color so including white students uh in the form of greater engagement higher achievement and cross-cultural interactions that can work against harmful stereotypes so you know to put this pretty bluntly i've worked in education policy for a long time and i think you'd be hard-pressed to find a more impactful priority for districts than diversifying the workforce so thanks again for having this conversation uh next slide please jonathan so you know what we've seen this dynamic play out you know for for decades uh in our organization um and our work with classrooms across the country this finding here is from our report called the opportunity myth from 2018 and what this is saying is that basically um when teachers share the race of their students they're more likely to hold their students to high academic
029expectations that was a very clear finding um which and you know the ex the teacher expectations can matter a whole lot uh when you think about the outcomes for students and so again the findings are very stark here and this is one of the the key reasons why um teacher diversity is so important next slide please um but you know to be clear this isn't an issue that is unique to greendale or to wisconsin so you know in a country where around half of students are of color over 80 percent of teachers are white um and if and that means that for in order to have a teacher workforce that looks like the student population we would need an additional 1 million teachers of color um which is a huge number and while the scale
030of that is startling the work starts right here with districts like greendale taking the issue seriously so again i'm thrilled to be working with you all to help create a better educational experience for all students um i know that these aren't always easy conversations to have but as i explained a little bit before the payoff for all students you know truly is is vast and so it's it's worth doing um so yeah so i'll pass this fast back on to rashida who will share more about our uh specific work with greendale so what i want to do is just kind of walk you through what we've been doing for the past three months we've been hanging out a lot with kim julie and maggie um and some other folks in greendale and it really has
031been great to learn about your community and so um what we've been doing is over the past several months we've been trying to understand the strengths and barriers that exist to uh your current recruitment and hiring practices and then to highlight strategic short and long-term goals that you all can take to to really use and grow a diverse working workforce within the district so in conducting our analysis uh we collected both quantitative and qualitative data through the following sources we use student and parent focus groups focusing on the student experience and the family experience within the district we talked to district and community stakeholders uh in interviews we conducted a survey of school leaders in the district to better understand their staffing needs their hiring practices opportunities and challenges with uh with building a diverse
032workforce uh we access publicly available data from the state of wisconsin um title ii in higher education at the higher education act and then we looked at recent news articles and reports so you'll see so when we talk about our findings we're talking about it from a variety of different ways and we try to be you know as well-rounded in our approach as we possibly could could to give you the best possible picture of the district um jonathan you can advance to the next slide please so here's an overview of our findings um we have four major findings that we want to share and i'm going to outline each of them in more detail in just a few minutes um but i'll give you just a second to read over those if you want and
033then again i'm going to dig right into them in more detail just to give you add some color to what you're seeing here jonathan you can advance to the next slide so what you'll find is that these findings are what we use to influence our recommendations so we didn't just pull recommendations out of thin air we really wanted to consider them in the context of the district so the first finding is that greendale's sizable teacher student diversity gap it's projected to grow um in the coming years so right now where you are um we anticipate that your student population is going to continue to diversify and that means that without diversifying your staff workforce that gap will continue to grow over time um can you go to the next slide please jonathan so the vast
034majority of greendale's teachers are white so 98 students of colors what this means is that students of color have opera few opportunities to interact with teachers of colors in the in the district um and think back to what jacob just shared and what that means for students is that there's a missed opportunity really for those students to have access to some of the opportunities that we talked about again like the high expectations access to college beyond high school and some of the things that jacob just referenced greendale student population is becoming more diverse with the number of students of color increasing 29 in the past five years so given these trends greendale's teacher student diversity gap is projected to grow by another by 39 in the next decade so the work that you're doing now
035is so important um and it's jacob's point like you guys are actually ahead of the game and thinking about this so hats off again to you um we can go to the next slide please jonathan this graph demonstrates the growth of diversity in the student population over the last five years and again given these trends this is how we calculated the projected growth by 39 in the next decade you'll find that in some of the slides i'm going to go to go through um you'll see them visually look different just to project just to give you the same message uh visually different so just kind of take a look and we want to reiterate just a few of those points so uh jonathan please go to the next slide thank you um this graph again
036demonstrates the growth of diversity in the student population uh we did some simple modeling here though to show the rate of higher required to close the teacher student diversity gap here so the left box shows the current gaps and then box boxes two and three shows the predicted rate of growth um of the student population and the rate of growth of the teacher workforce at three different levels so small medium and large increases and so considering the rate of growth of the population of students of color in the next decade we concluded that you will need to hire about three or more teachers of color each year and retain them in order to create a teacher workforce that is truly reflective of the diversity of your student population while it won't completely close the gap
037it will significantly increase access to students of access students of color have to teachers of color and so given the diversity of the teacher pipeline overall we consider this an ambitious and feasible goal and so as we talk about this like we also did consider like the fact that greendale has great retention and so those are some of the things that we'll have to think about too like in terms of strategy like obviously people are saying they and they love being in greendale you'll find that that's one of our findings too and so we'll have to consider the strategy as opportunities become available to really create the diverse candidate pool that you'll need to actually reach this goal uh you can go to the next slide please jonathan so given our recommended goal of hiring
038at least three teachers of color per year you may be wondering what the current talent pipeline is and so while there is a limited supply of teachers of color in the state the good news is that the majority of them live and work in milwaukee and the surrounding counties so we are in luck in greendale next slide please so it's important to understand the new teacher pipeline as part of this analysis while one in tens of students enrolled in wisconsin educator prep programs are people of color fewer than six of them become licensed educators so of the 3 483 teachers of color employed in 2020 60 lead classrooms in milwaukee and the surrounding counties so again that's good news for greendale because it means you have access to the majority of those candidates of color
039the number of teachers of color in the state is growing since 2017 the number of teachers of color in the state increased by 13 jonathan can you go to the next slide and this slide shows that here next slide please of the 3 483 teachers of color employment 2020 again 60 of those folks are right here in milwaukee and the surrounding counties so again this means that you have access and this can be a really good base for recruitment here and so while the challenge is real you have you have more opportunity than a lot of other districts in the state so this is actually again good news for you uh next slide please jonathan finding number three greendale as a community and school district is well positioned to make strategic strategic hires um and
040you'll see you'll see why in just a second uh next slide please greendale is commonly referred to as a destination district people love working in greendale people come to dish to greendale and they stay which is great news the district is situated in an affluent area of milwaukee county and everyone we spoke to during our work with greendale talked extensively about the high quality the education uh students received in greendale so again hats off to you and people want to be a part of that next slide please greendale's teachers salary are are some of the most competitive in the region and again this gives you an advantage when it comes to having a selling point for new hires and again accessing that 60 of uh teachers of color that are in the milwaukee area so
041you again you guys are well positioned to really do this work next slide please as i mentioned earlier we surveyed principles regarding their experiences as hiring managers school leaders in the district are generally pleased with teacher recruitment activities there was some variants and opinions regarding the amount of resources allocated and strategies the district used to recruit teachers to recruit teachers in the district so there's some opportunity to streamline there but again principals found that uh they like the practices that you guys haven't have in place and that they do have access to some really good strategies or to some really good people next slide please finding number four in regards to the culture and climate of the district we have identified both internal and external challenges that need to be addressed for the work of
042hiring and retaining a more diverse workforce to be realized in the district next slide please so here are some of the points again where we identify the challenges and again as we think about this we think about this from a solutions opportunity um and and some of this again is our create some par conversations but again there's also strategy that can go with this um to really rectify what we're finding there really are solutions to this so through through the survey we found that school leaders expressed some concern regarding a lack of a clear strategy to recruit candidates of color as well as guidance on how to lead a diverse team some school leaders describe the importance of building a culture of diversity whereas others were unsure what to do so via focus group data
043we can share that other stakeholder groups identify challenges to greendale's ability to recruit entire teachers of color specifically a culture that is often perceived as unwelcoming to people of color and more reactive in addressing issues of racism in schools than proactive and often not skilled in having uncomfortable conversations about race and then to and then creating structures and programs whose goals are to foster environments that are uh that are valid that value people of color so again you guys have started to do some of this work and so i want to make sure that as we talk through this like some of these things may be challenging to hear but again you guys are doing the work already you've started and you've already made the investment and the big takeaway here is to continue to
044invest in in the work of uh that you're doing uh to build culture and uh competence um across the district next slide please some school leaders uh describe the importance of building a culture of diversity whereas others were unsure what to do this reflects an opportunity in the data to more strategically develop teams to be prepared um to respond to the evolving culture again your population is changing over time um and which is exciting and so we want to make sure that as your student population is changing we prepare the adults for that change as well so we share strategies to address these in our recommendations which will come up shortly next slide please so via focus group data and in one-on-one interviews there were clear themes and experiences and perceptions related to the challenges
045folks believe need to be proactively addressed so that the goal of building a more diverse workforce can be realized specifically participants describe a culture that is often perceived as unwelcoming to people of color and more reactive in addressing issues of racism in schools than proactive additionally students and families experienced staff that were not often skilled in having more uncomfortable conversations about race they were optimistic about the future given greendale's commitment but also expressed some frustration with their frequent participation in groups to share their experiences and want to see those recommendations implemented so you have a group of people who are really invested and ready to do the work and they just want us they just want to see it happen but they believe that it's possible and they're optimistic about what you all are doing
046so far which is exciting i'm going to move us now from our findings into our recommendations so jonathan next slide please based on this landscape analysis we determined that over the next five years greendale will need to hire and retain substantial numbers of diverse effective teachers at every grade level and across all school settings in order to reach your goal of diversifying your workforce meeting that demand will require significant changes and a willingness to adapt as new data becomes available this is not simply a linear technical set of steps instead a change of this magnitude will require consistent reflection and capacity building across the district as part of our work we share a set of recommendations that the district leaders can focus on to accomplish your goals as we get into the recommendations i want
047to name that we we intentionally leave them relatively broad because we want to make sure that as you think about how to implement them you can do so within the context of the district and so you'll see the uh recommendations here and again like there is opportunity to really um customize this to fit to fit the context of greendale but the recommendations are they do stand and they they are the right ones we believe so as part of our report we provided five key recommendations along with specific evidence face practices to accomplish these i'll briefly overview these now and you will have the opportunity to dig into the specifics further as part of your district's strategic planning process the first is to continue to develop and implement culturally responsive practices across the district i can
048say from having sat in uh saturn sessions both with your leaders um and some of the trainings that we led instead having sat in focus groups with your students and and teachers people are excited about the work you're doing they're willing to do the work they're digging in even when it's uncomfortable and they're highly reflective and so again all of those conditions make this right for you guys to continue this work and understand that this is a journey um you know it's not a destination but people are willing and ready to do this work and so i was excited to be able to be a part of this with you with your team and hopefully you guys will continue to push forward with this you have again to jacobs what you guys have started to
049take the steps um and not all suburban districts are doing the work that you're doing so again hats off to you and we recommend that you continue doing this so as part of the part of the work that you're doing we want to encourage you also to continue to develop your shared vision for what an inclusive culture within the district looks like continue to train and develop cultural competence in all district employees so that once you get teachers of color in your building they can have a good experience both with their managers and with their colleagues and peers next we say we encourage you to evaluate cultural confidence as part of your annual performance review and make sure that there's some accountability around these things that you identify and incorporate them into the competencies that
050you use as you evaluate your hiring processes gather data to understand the experiences of staff students and families and regularly and begin to explore the range of reasons for what folks are experiencing so that you can really problem solve with that and then finally uh consider forming an advisory group of community members that can support the district in building buy-in through community start with a small pilot group of invested stakeholders and then build to scale secondly uh we encourage you to do a band a brand refresh a marketing campaign and recruitment plan will play a critical role in recruiting talented candidates of color to the district district and school leaders need to establish messaging that portrays their schools as an inclusive place to work develop a comprehensive plan for a year-long recruitment strategy that leverages
051intraday internet-based strategies and launch data tracking and technology systems that will support your efforts by developing consistent and compelling messages and leveraging existing resources such as the web social media and other communication channels greendell can be can better position themselves to be more competitive with surrounding districts thirdly continue to build relationships with education preparation programs wisconsin has 42 teacher preparation programs according to title 2 data however over 80 percent of teachers of color come from from a total of 13 providers so through establishing relationship with those 13 you guys can create an opportunity where folks are coming and making greendale a destination a place to work for folks of color community outreach and candidate referral programs can be improved to attract more high quality candidates and then internal hiring practices as part of our work
052with greendell this winter we engage with training uh with hiring managers around bias in the workplace we recommend that this this training continues we did three sessions um and that we just were putting a dent in things like there's lots more um to be done but those three sessions i think were powerful and so we we encourage you guys to continue this work um in greater depth to provide guidance and resources for school leaders on hiring and staffing practices that promote diversifying the teacher workforce provide training to school leaders on building um their talent management and school culture skills facilitate in-person meetings on skill building problems of practice and shared learning and best practices and then as always with anything else that you do you look at it find out what's working collect your data
053and improve along the way plan do study act if that's the model that you use but whatever whatever it is continue to iterate as you learn more and gather more data about the work that you're doing so again hats off to you greendale for the work that you're already doing um we are excited to have done this work with you and um hope that these recommendations are helpful to you and can really uh propel you to the goals that you set for yourself so thank you all right thank you rasheed and thank you jacob um and should i open for questions yeah or hi rashida i'm i i actually happen to work for milwaukee public schools and they have 400 openings right now so they could probably really use your help um i have a
054quick question um for julie maybe we had a recent opening of fifth grade opening i think how many applicants did we receive for that one opening approximately um over 80. 80. and correct me if i'm wrong you cannot screen applicants for skin color can you no so rashida i have a a question then so because it seems like you have a teaching fellows it is connected to your program how does that differ from uh student teachers or paraprofessionals is it a could you explain how the teaching fellow part works sure so our teaching fellows programs um we we have those programs in a few different cities and we they're what we consider one of our pipeline programs and so we typically work with um with candidates who are already uh graduates who want to either
055change careers or want to pursue a pathway in education and so we take them through our program which is an alternative certification program and so again like the program in a number of different cities um and we've had great success with those programs in terms of diversifying um the teacher the teacher uh pools and the candidates who are actually participating in those programs so they're college they're college graduates who are deciding to go into teaching and they they come through your program and you place them it looks like you're in some large cities washington dc new york new orleans baltimore are you are you in any other suburbs in the milwaukee area so we're not we're not milwaukee right now uh milwaukee actually did have a teaching fellows program probably 10 years ago or so
056um i think at that time um i think the partnership was specifically what i did with the milwaukee public school district i don't think that has to be the case um but we did have a program here and um i don't know like i've gotten questions about another pipeline program here in milwaukee so there definitely um is some interest in us building a pipeline program here for this very reason yeah i noticed that in milwaukee one of the pipeline programs they use is a the paraprofessionals so people come in as a para and then you know go through a quick certification process um if they like being a paraprofessional so um i have one more question and that's the newer program um of milwaukee and lots of folks are starting to explore that pathway um
057because it just makes sense and it it ends up being a strategy to eliminate some of the barriers uh for people of color entering the education profession because it allows them to actually uh work while they're student teaching and not have to go through that period of time where you're working um where you're working for no pay which uh all of us who who came up a long time ago like i did we had to go through that period of just a long time without working and kind of suffering through but there has been a barrier for lots of people of color and so the paraprofessional pipeline tends to be a strategy that helps to eliminate that barrier for folks thank you i just have one more question question rasheeda um with your research in
058terms of ratios and percentages uh so if there's of the of the students are white in a district is it is it okay based on your research to have 98 of the teachers that are white or is there sort of a ratio that you're shooting for or not shooting for i mean we don't want to hire someone just because they're a person of color we want qualified candidates obviously first and foremost but is there a a ratio that we're that we should be shooting for based on your research so uh to your point uh my our goal is always to get the best possible people in front of kids um and that that's first and foremost so i appreciate your saying that um the other thing i would say is that ideally we you know
059we we we we have a conversation we kind of push for uh uh sort of a a mirroring of the of the student student demographics like that is the ideal given just the the current teacher demographic like that doesn't exist right now eighty percent of teachers are white and uh fifty percent of over fifty percent of students are uh are students of color so right now like that that ideal does not exist but the goal even is in a school if 98 of students were worldwide is to still diversify because we know that all students benefit when they are able to learn from teachers of color so we always want to push for that but again to answer your point about a goal like you want to aim for a population that is reflective of
060the student population that you can that you're serving ideally and jacob i'll let you weigh in on that as well if you have something to add yeah i mean so i i i just say in general you know as rashida said the the numbers are not close in in almost all places there are certainly parts of the country where you know 90 plus percent of of uh of residents are white and so ninety percent plus of students are white um so you know i our goal generally is as rashida said to have the student population match the teacher workforce in that way but throughout is you know really across the country um you know and as shown in greendale and pretty much everywhere else um the student population is diversifying quickly um so i think
061it's important for all districts regardless of their um of their demographics to be thinking about this and planning ahead and having these sorts of conversations sir thank you so much and since you're a nationally based uh sort of recruiting teacher fellow program are you seeing a shortage of teachers nationwide because here in wisconsin since act 10 2012 we've seen our decline a huge decline in people going into the teaching profession are you seeing that nationwide um so it's i i would say that it's regional um you know in in tntp's own programs we are not seeing that um you know where our number of applicants for our programs are are increasing um you know it it depends there's so many factors that can affect a localized teacher shortage i mean when we talk about teacher
062shortage i think it's also important to think beyond just the you know number of teachers in number of teachers out to and really zero in on you know what subject area what are the subject area needs um you know what are the what are the what are the grade level needs um in most districts right like finding elementary school teachers is not a problem right but it becomes much harder when you start talking about high school stem subjects or special education or or um or bilingual um and so i would say that in in most places in some of those um you know more more challenging subject areas there's a um you know there is a shortage often um but not in all subject areas thank you so much i learned so much from your
063presentation really appreciate you being here all right any other questions or comments from the board yes i have a few questions and to go offer statistics hi i'm paris i'm a student board member i know my face has been pretty foreign but i'm back and i'm excited about what we're talking about especially christina can't see you but oh yeah it's paris okay so um one thing that she mentioned in the slideshow was the lack of opportunities for students of color to interact with teachers that look like them and i just wanted to uh signify that because it is really relevant in our school considering that we only have maybe like four teachers i would say most of color and i'm a minority at this school um for me to go and talk to them is
064pretty rare we had a teacher of color a secretary for the principal that retired last year and the only reason i would say interacted with her was because i was late to school so much that i had the opportunity to say hi to her and then we also just got hired a nurse of a teacher of color and personally thankfully i'm not very injured most of the time so i don't have to go there um but i just want to like re-emphasize that as we continued to do this work there were strategic about the roles of what the staff members look like so making sure they're also teachers that teach normal classes such as math and english and things that all students will be taking i also know my other experiences with teachers of color
065would be in a specific area that would relate to them such as a language course which makes sense but i also want to make sure that we're not placing them in specific boxes because they meet that quota but that we're also considering them for other positions and places um we also i just wanted to emphasize when we continue this work you mentioned something about trying to implement three teachers of color every year for the next coming years but considering the diversity and the demographics of the students that we're keeping that in count knowing that greendale i would say 10 to of the student population is students of color so if we were to meet that quota as teachers let's say that's maybe like 18 teachers and if it's 18 students of color i wouldn't consider
066that like significant enough in some ways um i just want to make sure that the ratio that the school is aiming for is what we're meeting with the students demographics and then one last question i had was um we saw the number of undergrads and grads trying to be teachers within the milwaukee area what's a way that greendale can promote we want to have more diverse communities and we want to hire this stuff and also sorry one last question if we're not able to yes we do want students or not students teachers with different um exemplary attributes outside of just their skin color but how are we supposed to diversify it if we're not able to know the background or ethnicity of that teacher being hired so yeah that was a lot of questions do
067you have that rasheeda i think i heard the last time i'm leaning in because i had a little trouble let me let me restate the question to make sure i'm answering the right thing your question is if we know that we want to hire teachers of color how do we do that without knowing their background did i did i hear that correctly or missing yeah that's correct yeah that's the that was the last question that she asked about like on how do we make sure that we have diverse talent pools if we can't ask about skin color sure so one of the things that we worked on um with with the team of folks like within the district one of the one of the things we worked on was like how to hire uh great
068people period right and so looking at the competencies and the qualities that we want people to possess coming into the district and so really like and some of what we have to do some best practices include uh looking at resumes blindly and not looking at names because ted people tend to have um sometimes an unconscious bias of if they see a name like rasheeda or if they versus a name like jacob like they may have a bias one way or the other and so we talk about like looking at resumes blindly we talk about hiring based on competencies rather than based on like if somebody is a fit because what happens is sometimes when we look for things like thick it means that are they like are they like the rest of us and so
069people of color coming into greendale are not likely to be like the rest of everybody else but they can still possess the qualities and the competencies that are necessary to be an excellent teacher in greendale and so we try to focus on some of those things and then so some of those things so that you really are looking at the right things in terms of getting the right folks in front of teachers in front of students and then the last thing we want to we work with um work with the district on is really casting a broad net and so like creating so when we talked about like a brand refresh making sure that when we when you're out recruiting your materials uh and everything that you have really makes it uh makes it appear
070that the folks are welcome in greendale and so you want to make sure that people can see themselves in the district and so you want to cast a bra and like in doing that you get a broader candidate pool and then you get more folks coming into the door but again that bias piece is going to be really important because we all have it and it shows up in moments where we least expect it and so part of the work that we have to do is to one understand what biases and then think about how do we eliminate those from my hiring processes so no you can't go in and ask somebody um what their ethnic background is but there are ways to get more folks in the door that will likely increase the number
071of candidates of color that you have coming through through the through the door and just we'll go ahead i'm sorry just add in one thing quickly um you know part of this too and this relates to the question uh about whether we're we're being aggressive enough uh with the strategy is that you know recruitment also has to be paired with retention right like you know just like they say like the best offense is uh is a strong defense right like making sure you're actually keeping teachers of color year after year is is really important because if you're um if you really want to have long-term change you have to make sure that you hire the teachers but they're that they have a great experience and stay um and so uh you know it's important to
072keep that in mind too um as that it's really not it's not just about hiring and hiring practices it's about actually giving teachers of color a great experience in in school and in greendale um so that they want to stay so rasheeda talked about um some other questions in there that i may have missed no i i will i don't want to do that so if there's something i should circle back to please let me know i was just gonna i was gonna affirm some of the things that you talked about with the bias training our leadership team our entire leadership team went through bias training we had three two hour sessions where we spent some time really reflecting on what in our process can dissuade teachers of color from applying and what are we
073doing within our process that could bias the process and make it less likely that we would have candidates of color so while we can ask that question she talked about this idea that our promotional materials when we go to recruiting fairs when we put things out on our website that it is reflective of a welcoming environment that welcomes teachers of color and some of us have really been working diligently that as we have openings casting our net into networks of of people of color so that we have more candidates entering the pool the goal is to diversify the candidate pool not automatically hire the first person of color who applies in our district and that's important but that if they are if we have candidates of color applying that they have a fair opportunity to
074show their excellence and be considered in our system and we recognized in part of our training that we do have some biases that idea that we hire a lot of graduates of greendale schools and our graduates are predominantly white as we know from history and so that can lend a bias that there's certain times when we're looking for specific curriculum knowledge that might be used more often in suburban communities than urban communities and that could unnecessarily influence our decision making so there were some things that we really reflected on when we're looking for and so that's the idea where she talked about competencies for hiring what are the skills that we need and the competencies that we need not necessarily what training have they had yeah rashida that that i will that's my biggest takeaway
075from your presentation that's a brilliant wrap up is the looking for the competence versus someone who's the right fit i think that can be applied almost in any you know career path so thank you very much that's very wise uh comment uh paris did you have any other questions um thank you for the clarification so i wasn't able to attend those meetings but i have a better understanding of the question i was asking her one last question for the board specifically is i know i attended one of the tntp meetings in march and we did some breakout rooms with ideas of how to diversify the staff obviously in her presentation she showcased that some people had no idea what to do and then i was informed that we would have another meeting but i don't
076know when that is or if students are able to attend those if that's something the student equity team might be looking into now that we have a more established group as well as we were talking about some ideas of not just implementing more people of color within the school district but in the community as a whole because we know greendale is a very small community in itself so most of the school district does make up the community but what are other ways that could attract people that don't want to go into the teacher field or the educational field but they do want to bring something forward to the community such as a business or any other practice they may be doing paris thank you for that idea that's actually something that we talked about at
077length as part of our strategic planning process looking at opportunities for mentorships and community connections for students of color outside of just the school building but as you raised within the visioning sessions i think that is something that we'll see reflected in the strategic plan and we will we should follow up with the the student equity team some of them participated not all of them participated but to see if we can extend our work with tntp to be able to bring them back for that conversation and maybe in in that kind of tying into the two questions that just were talked about i was obviously part of the strategic planning committee that met this weekend and we spent a lot of time so it was great to dive into the presentation on our own and
078then obviously have uh get to hear it from you directly so thank you for sharing all the work that's going on and putting some additional narrative behind the the text a lot of stuff was coming out of that and we were trying to figure out the short-term and long-term perspectives that we could be taking as a school district to be proactive partially going back to what you mentioned paris you know if you're looking at i think we hire about 15 teachers a year just based on natural attrition retirements people moving out of state whatever it might be so the reality is we don't have a ton of openings all the time within our district but if we can obviously cast a broader net make sure that we're you know diversifying our candidate pool that's something
079that we're hoping will allow us to you know reach in and kind of hit those numbers that that you mentioned in in kind of goal number one but then the other part we were looking at was a lot of the research you know is tied to mentorship and role models and obviously a teacher in front of the classroom is a is a great way to do that but are there other ways that we could address that faster by having mentors and role models available that look like every and all student in our student population in different capacities and so that was something that we're trying to figure out um and and think through across the board how do and then the other comment was around the uh we have educators rising program for example that's
080around greendale students you know is there an opportunity to maybe make that broader going to your point paris to figure out how we can bring in other community members that might also diversify that pool for our future population of educators that might be eligible to our district but also trying to figure out how do you not take on too much at the same time so how do you focus on the things that are most important and that we can actually have impact on versus spreading ourselves too thin to actually do any one of those things well and so those are those are always the things i'm trying to you know think through and make sure that we're not having great intentions but not having the impact that we want in these different areas and if
081there are certain strategies that you've seen really work well in all the work that you've done across the country you know how do we have kind of the local impact that we want to have here at greendale but also help our surrounding communities because this is not something that only exists in greendale so just want to get your thoughts maybe more generically on like how do we you know there's only so many hours in the day how do we make sure we prioritize our time energy resources to have you know the biggest impact possible and i know you gave some some specific you know one through five but when you're thinking about a strategic plan that's going to be three to five years are there certain components you think really need to be animated in
082that plan to help drive success yeah i mean that's that's some really smart thoughts there i mean i i really appreciate what you you mentioned about the opportunity to find uh role models in school buildings that are not uh teachers there actually a study came out um a year or so ago that actually looked at the diversity of college counselors um and the impact that that had on on students of color and you know perhaps not surprisingly there was a huge impact that you know students of color who were assigned to a counselor of color had a greater chance of graduating high school um you know greater chance of going to college so i think you know i wouldn't say in general there's as much research on the on the impact of that in in
083all non-school roles like you know a school nurse of color right was was mentioned earlier i'm not sure about the the research on the impact of that but i think um you know when it's important to i'd say apply a lot of these principles to all hiring practices throughout the district right like but when we're talking about focus on competency um increasing the size of and the diversity of the hiring pool i think you'd see similar benefits um in non-teaching roles as well rashida i'm not sure if you had anything to add no thank you covert and i was having a little trouble hearing um the speaker so jacob i'm glad you were able to answer that question any other comments or questions from the board i just wanted to ask do we involve you
084talking to the microphone so sure sorry and and this is maybe more for julie um do we involve students in the actual interview process and are we tapping into like the equity group that's here and like how how does that kind of roll out because i i know we have a there's a state system that people go into for applications and so forth but just curious as to the role students might have in the actual application process it depends on the position that we're hiring for and for some positions particularly like administrative positions we do involve students and we have a student team that is involved in the interview process we do that less so with teacher candidates okay although we do have one higher right now that students will be interacting with our final
085two candidates this week is there a reason why why with the teacher candidates we don't involve them as much or i think some of it is logistical honestly because often times we'll we interview during the school day so it would be removing them from class to do so i think also some of it is just as we're analyzing the expertise of the teacher candidate that's you know depending on those competencies that we're looking for it may or may not be appropriate to have students involved in that part of the process but it's certainly something that we can consider sure yeah i just i i guess it just kind of crossed my mind as we were talking and as paris shared some of her her involvement um that i thought it would be another great avenue
086all right rasheeda and jacob thank you this evening for sharing your presentation this was a very candid conversation i think you gave some very good feedback um you know shining a light on where we're doing well where that we have opportunities and then providing a couple of very specific recommendations that that we can focus on because i think when we started the conversation we said we want our staff and our teachers to reflect our student population and i think that that's about an 80 20 maybe 75 25 ratio that we that we want to reflect and i think you know paris the story the anecdote that you shared where you could name you you could call out and think of the specific person of color at the high school that shows that we have a
087long ways to go you know where where you can identify one or two or three people that that reflect you know who you are um this is a great indication a great anecdote that says we've got a ways to go um i think this is a great investment i'm glad you guys were able to come out here and meet with our team like i said this is a very candid conversation we'll continue to see and talk about diversity and inclusion because as a district we just get stronger making sure that all of our students and families feel welcome here in greenville schools and this is one way of making sure that that is accomplished and if i could just add two i appreciate it the way in which you pointed out the attributes that we
088do have going for us to really make this work i mean it's not something that's monumental that can't be done but it's actually something very doable with um with you know like you said being close to milwaukee and and having the bigger pool and everything i think it was really good that you highlighted that this is not something that can't be done but rather something that can and should be done all right thanks thank you rashida jacob we appreciate it thank you appreciate the work we've done with you and we look forward to talking to you soon thank you thank you for having us everybody thanks so much all right so we just finished agenda am seven and eight we'll go back now to agenda item four um because we reordered the agenda so we're
089going back to agenda item four where we will approve the regular meeting minutes of our last board meeting and move to approve the regular meeting minutes of april 26 2021 as outlined in agenda item 4. i second there's been abortion a second to approve the regular meeting minutes um any further discussion can i call for a roll call vote yes yes yes yes and i am yes motion carries item five teacher appointments so we have two teachers um both special education teachers at the high school anything that administration wants to highlight or one at the middle school one at the high school and both are currently serving as paraprofessionals in our district okay so they do they go through because i know we've offered the program so they were both grant recipients as part of
090our fast forward department of workforce development grant and so they attended and they were held a bachelor's degree they obtained their master's degree in education duly certified in regular and special education so really excited for this opportunity they completed their student teaching this fall in the fall semester and we'll move into teaching positions in the district so they participated in the program that we've kind of alluded to earlier where we're trying to find alternative avenues for for staff to come through so that we're not just hiring through the traditional staff that we're actually working through some of these alternatives okay any other discussion otherwise i look for a motion to approve i move approval of the uh teacher appointments as outlined in agenda item five a second there's been a motion a second to approve
091the teacher appointment any further discussion can i call for a roll call vote yes yes yes yes and i am yes motion carries then continuing on agenda item six is approval of policies so there are several policies outlined in agenda item six that were brought forward at our last board meeting and i don't think that we had much changes or much you did not have any changes but at the last meeting in policy 410 the board directed me to review the suggestions from citizen comment and we made one other change those are highlighted in red under the anti-racism practices we changed the to our and actually though should be stricken but our is in there as a replacement word and then in the second to last paragraph under that same section the group parents or
092guardians has been added to this attitude and commitment will prevail in all policies and practices concerning and included parents guardians in the stakeholder group so those are the two changes to the equity policy all right thanks kim any additional comments or questions uh i just wanted to make one uh comment since it's a brand new policy uh just really encourage people to read it it's it was a year in the making it sounds like and it's very beautifully written it's very thorough the first paragraph and the last paragraph are excellent summaries if you don't want to read the whole policy and i would just encourage people since it is a brand new policy to read it and to bring forth any questions that you might have thank you and and thank you to thor noel
093on the from the policy committee for working on that yeah where exactly can you access the policy so um on the website when you're in the board packet there is a blue link that says policy under item six when you open that there's a memo and then each policy can be linked on the blue number in front on that memo so policy 410 is linked there i was gonna also go ahead i see it now okay and then the other thing is once policies are approved we post all of our approved policies on the website and that is i believe under district you know the district heading yeah the same place that you go for board agendas there's one that says policies and it'll be posted there live once it's approved yes it's on the
094website under district board of education um policies i was just going to comment too that i i want to thank all of the individuals that were part of formulating this policy as mary kind of alluded to it's it's um been in in progress for quite some time now uh but there was there was community involvement with this as well so i i think it's important to note that there were additional people that took time to work through this and to really give their input so i just wanted to mention that and kathy just you did bring up the student equity team before and they were part of creating this policy as well it went through if i'm not mistaken it had three different groups that were actually all kind of working through correct yeah so
095it was good very meaningful discussions for the groups that i attended but knowing that students were part of this i think is very important as well all right any other discussion otherwise they look for a motion to approve i move to approve uh policy number 342.2 home about instruction 342.7 english language learners 345.3 high school graduation requirements 346.1 student assessment and 410 student equity and anti-racism as outlined in agenda item six second there's been a motion a second to approve policies as outlined in agenda item six any further discussion now you look for a roll call vote yes yes yes yes and i am yes motion carries uh then jumping uh from six to nine professional development and staff engagement report so again this is an annual report that we hear from administration to talk
096a little bit about the professional development and other opportunities that our staff have at the at this in schools i'm just going to turn it straight over to maggie all right thank you so um this has been a very interesting year for staff development um we really had to be reactive to the needs of our staff as this was an unprecedented year so we did a lot of reflecting of our practices and what our teachers needed in the moment to be able so we were very um flexible about what they needed and we took feedback after every professional development to see if we were hitting their needs and how we could with the changing landscape how we can make sure that our teachers are getting the training they needed when we came into school we
097we had to learn all the different safety protocols we had to learn how to do hybrid we had to learn how to help students come back into the classroom out of being out of the classroom for so long so we did spend a lot of time um working this year on social emotional learning and then also around digital tools and we also really in um got some feedback around how to help our teachers take care of themselves during this time during the pandemic and learning that if our teachers have good social emotional practices that will trickle down to our students and then they'll show and model those appropriate behaviors and at our most recent professional development day um we also celebrated um a lot of the equitable practices that we're using in our spaces and
098talked about how we can increase them for next year every staff meeting every um professional development has different objectives all the objectives are on the agenda on the memo that i wrote and then we will be planning this summers to have three different pathways for our six through 12 staff they will be following equity pathway sel social emotional learning pathway or a standards and assessment pathway and they will have an overview of all three of those in may and because our elementary staff are adopting a new science curriculum we will be spending that time to um focus on the new generation science standards and then the curriculum over the summer so that's our professional development plan from the plus and looking forward and i'm open to any questions that the board has all right thanks
099maggie what questions or comments does the board have i have a comment um i wanted to thank you and also uh um for the rabbit hole that you put me on because of your links so i appreciate the links i spent a lot of time because also i got lost and i'm clicking through stuff and i'm you know a couple hours later uh my wife and kids are like are you gonna hang out with us this weekend and i said no i'm reading maggie's report with 3 000 links and all the great stuff that's going on um but i do it was really nice to be able to see the breadth uh and and the depth that that obviously is has been provided to support greendale teachers i think this reiterates even something we talked
100about um this weekend which is something that is that we should all be celebrating is our teachers you know they do such a great job um in this week obviously being teacher appreciation week um we start off with great teachers and then we invest and support those great teachers to become even better and so thank you for all the work that you do and the rest administration to continue to support and help our teachers be the best that they can possibly be and i think that that's a good you know the way you laid things out you we can see the investment that happens with professional development so you know there's 16 hours before school even begins and then you know every couple of months at least a half a half a day four hours
101of professional development that is scheduled right into the school calendar so i think that that is a nice reminder of seeing exactly the investments that happen um as thor mentioned maggie i just had a quick question for you i've seen this equitable classroom practice document before i think it's it's it's been out there but i'm wondering um well and i'll just read the first one i just think all of them are super important but the first one says welcome students by name as they enter the classroom and then in red underneath it says ask students for correct pronunciation of their names correctly pronounces students names and that's such a basic thing you know most most people who aren't in the classroom wouldn't even you know think that that would be irrelevant but it is such
102an important point as students are coming as you're getting to build classroom community um where does this document come from for anybody who might want to access it outside is it a do you know uh is it on a website somewhere yeah um so this is also part of the board document so they can look it up okay right there and access it there yeah okay um and then it'll make a copy for you individually so it's kind of cool that way i learned that little trick but it's from louisiana and um i got it from some of the work i've done with city collective forward we use this in our practices around what is good for kids and that's the great thing about this document is that it's really a lot of the things
103that our teachers are already doing and really celebrating the work that greendale is doing because i think sometimes when we think about equity it's such a big thing and one of the things we kept asking our families were asking our students were asking and our staff were asking is we want action we want to see it so these are very tangible items that we could do and welcoming kids in the classroom am i doing that right now or i'm not calling them by name every day that's something i can do every day so it's really about breathing those practices and making students feel like they belong thank you can you just speak uh i have a little bit of understanding of it but the ed camp style breakouts can you just touch on that a
104little bit yeah that was a really fun um thing to plan so the ed camp is um teachers get to use their feet to decide where they want to go that day and if they're not getting what they need in that professional development they can actually just pop out into a different professional development it's really driven by teachers need and after being in school in a month and a half we found that for october there were so many different needs that different people needed from technology to different skills and there for people who were online or in person so it was a really great way to get a lot of different professional development available to our teachers thank you can you speak maggie and maybe going forward it might be helpful to see this in
105the report but can you speak to some of the opportunities that our staff have to maybe take on some additional roles responsibilities or some leadership i'm thinking of our mentorship program or our technology or curriculum heads or you know things like that where we try to develop teacher leaders in other ways you know this is professional development but we also provide you know they can also be mentors they can also be part of different committees they can also um lead some of this pd so can you may speak to some of that admit yeah absolutely so um and so i love that we're talking about this for teacher appreciation week because we really um one of the best ways to keep teachers engaged is to develop them give them feedback and make them leaders and
106greendale does such an excellent job with that so there's different we have teachers who are curriculum facilitators k through 12. we also in several of these professional developments in the edcamp you can see that many different staff led those throughout our k-12 we also have staff that led the professional development from the equity team on the equitable practices um and on friday's professional development and then we do have opportunities for teachers to be mentors we also have opportunities for teachers to dig deeper on the professional development over the summer or in their own personal learning as well okay and maybe i'm wondering if you know going forward since this is an annual report if we can maybe list out some of those opportunities because i want to make sure that the community and the board
107is aware that in some instances in most of those instances we make an investment there's an additional stipend or there's an additional payment to those teachers for taking on some of those roles so i think it's important just that that we see where some of those investments are and some of those opportunities are given to the staff great yep i can do that next time perfect thank you to two other quick things one was i know wisconsin i've worked with schools all over this all over the country and i feel like midwest and wisconsin in particular are a little bit more insular states than many others are at looking outside of their state to see best practices i know that that's something that we do in greendale this is more focused on what we do
108internally but obviously even like you mentioned this coming from louisiana or that coming from somewhere else so it would be really nice to even highlight some of the you know the great professional development that different groups are taking advantage of to bring back into our district um i think that's really powerful that we don't and this has been a strange year people aren't traveling a lot of places because of the pandemic but yeah we actually are really looking at trying to look at different places who are doing this work that's why bringing a national person like the new teacher project and looking outside of our normal benchmarking districts to broaden horizons that's something that we're absolutely doing that's great and then the other part that i i um you know keep seeing is an opportunity
109because you know our teachers are so highly rated and they do such a great job and are recognized because of the great job they do does that become an opportunity to kind of shift through that learning triangle as you were just talking about where you know learn practice teach um so now that they're not just learning and practicing in the classroom but they're teaching others on on how to employ those skills and that might also perk up jonathan's ears a little bit because maybe that's also a revenue generation model that we can tap into to bring in additional resources into our district because we do have that i mean that was one of the beauties of the rabbit hole that i went down with all the staff that are leading these different sections and all
110their slides and they're pretty i mean they're already building out all these great resources and um you know what a great opportunity to be able to share that that knowledge and and help kind of even dive in deeper as you're supporting other groups that are trying to figure that out as well so just just a thought more than anything else thank you one other question do we have uh do we know how many teachers are actually with tuition reimbursement this year i know that's that's something that we offer julie for some approv for some approved courses we've definitely um slimmed down the amount that we've changed the criteria for being reimbursed for tuition so there's fewer this year than there have been in previous years because we focused on specific master's degreed areas and full
111programs so it's not you can't just take a random graduate course for credit uh it should we're approving credits that are working towards a master's degree in an area that's related to their area of work yeah so we have i believe four teachers that are actively in program for um pursuing a master's degree that's a pre-approved program we have some that started a new program this year those new programs were put on hold as part of the budget constraints for this year but looking at that into future budget planning as to what the allocation is available for tuition reimbursement so there is additional staff members that would be interested in the tuition reimbursement option if it's available and tuition reimbursement is an incredibly uncommon benefit for teachers we are very unique in offering that all
112right thank you all right then continuing on with the agenda we're here for some third trimester reports um and this time we're here to listen to some of the central office departments with hr business operations equity and instruction and technology and given that the human resources short cycle goal we just spent 40 minutes talking about she gets a pass so it's in the it's in the report but the tntp report really gave us a picture of where that's at so we'll move on to business great thank you so our annual goal is implementation and evaluation of cleaning and work order processes in the maintenance area so the priority is for the implementation of strategies that will allow us to monitor the effectiveness of cleaning and work orders so we added a couple of slides here
113also in the written report we provided additional detail of our work as well here you're going to see an example of our cleaning training so we continue to do that on tuesday evenings each week so john devry of tartan comes in and that's no additional cost that's part of our partnership where we are purchasing chemicals from hillyard and partnering with them on cleaning procedures so john has been working with teams in the building started at highland view continued on to the high school and now is also working at canterbury school as we move about the district and as part of that work works with those teams to clarify and refine what the tasks are that we're doing on that daily basis and so here's an example of then identifying that on a short card that
114gets laminated and put onto the cart itself so this is an example of what that would look like so it's a little bit larger than your three by five card but it's got all that info so if you have any questions about which chemicals you should be using or the order of those tasks this is all identified for quick reference for those teams and then as those custodial carts are created they're created in alignment with all those different tools that are identified on the card so we're appreciative of that partnership and we know that that adds a lot for our custodial team that they're grateful that we're having those ongoing conversations and making sure that they have all the tools that they need to do the work and all the training that they need to
115do the work appropriately another area that we've been able to help the custodial and maintenance team is around training for our control system so here's a snapshot of our train controls so we're thinking about our hvac and temperature controls we had training with train on one of our wednesdays and so that we utilized that opportunity when students were not here physically to bring together all the custodial team members and maintenance team members to do training what they shared was this was the first time that they've had access into the control system and so we believe that this is a good leverage point to distribute some of the work so as teachers are having questions at that building level about what's going on in my classroom we want to train our head custodians or even our
116second shifters enough that they can answer those quick questions and they know when it's an issue that needs to be referred for additional investigation and potential repairs so building their capacity their knowledge base is really important to us as well as having them feel like part of the team that they're getting that ongoing training to get access into these systems in a way at a level that would be appropriate for what they're trying to do on a daily basis so then in terms of the maintenance ticketing so we continue to use the school dude system and so here you'll see by month numbers and i count this up as 267 work order tickets some of the numbers were lower in the month of april we did have spring break but we continue to see a
117number of work orders being submitted and continue to see expansion of the adoption of this so we're continuing to get staff members coming forward and asking the questions about how do i create an account what should i be putting into the system so they understand the needs behind what's an urgent item that you should go find a custodian directly versus what are those things that we want to organize by submitting into the ticketing system so we can then prioritize them based on a priority level what's the urgency of this and what's the capacity of the team at the building level we're also going to look further into the the timing how long does it take to close a ticket and when we initially look at this information we're at about a nine day turnaround as
118we get further into our implementation and feel like we have a deep deep understanding of our custodial team of all the skills and that they should have around taking care of these maintenance tickets i believe we'll be coming back and talking about a target of around two to three days on average i think that will be a goal in the future right now our focus is on the implementation of the system and we're going to gauge that data and try to understand what may be those tickets that are taking longer because some may be outside service providers if it's electrical work that we don't have the skills to do in-house those items may take longer we'll do further digging into it but we'll set some pretty aggressive goals for our team as we get further
119with the implementation that was one of the questions i had jonathan was you know obviously some things are we'll call long lead items or if you're using that for planning in the future state you could throw off your numbers because if you put something in that you know you're not going to do for a while just to keep track of it so maybe just making sure that you have some way to parse that out if you end up using the system that way yeah as we analyze the data we'll have to take a look at it but you'll be able to identify that if you had a ticket that was out for 100 days and it was because we intentionally delayed that for summer like we're going to replace the flooring in summer then we
120can do that analysis but but definitely at some level you want to set some some high level goals for that team and you can do that in a really fun fashion i've done competitions with the custodial teams and they get they get really into that depending on what the stakes are for it so our next steps are one continuing custodial cleaning training so that will go all through this school year into summer and in the next year and we're going to continue to get feedback from our teams about what we can bring to them next in-person demonstrations are really the most important to me in my philosophy of how you do custodial cleaning training it's just not something that you can do as well as effectively virtually you need to be in person so we
121appreciate that we have the partnership on that we're going to continue to monitor the work order numbers and we're continuing the onboarding of our new director of buildings and grounds i'm really appreciative of the work that steve coombs has been doing to continue this work on and really keep things moving while he's getting settled into his new role i know he's really excited in that role and has been working extremely hard getting an understanding of these systems and how he can continue their implementation i know that there was a question um i got from a community member around obviously steve had a role previously and then what happened with that and that was shared in the district update with us but would you mind just kind of sharing what's going on with you know the
122filling of those of his role and or his previous role and what's happening there yeah so steve served in a maintenance role previously and so that position was posted and we are in the process of doing transition of bringing someone on board into that maintenance role and there'll be some additional shifting that will happen based on the staff member there's a staff member that was internal in the district that is moving into that maintenance role and so then we're bringing someone else in to replace that individual for the spot that they vacated but that work is happening in the next couple weeks that we're bringing everyone into their new spot so he steve is also very excited about seeing full full staffing levels and i know he and julie worked very hard on that that
123hiring process to get the right the right people into those roles great thank you jonathan why were there 79 tickets in march what was going on in march it just seemed like there was a lot more in march was there some change or moving or something there were 79 and a couple slides back sorry there were the work order the work requests the school dude requests that were yeah i think i think what you see here is because we're in the first couple months i think you're seeing the continued implementation i mean february is uh in terms of number of days is a little bit shorter month so then in march you see the continuation and then april is a little bit lower and so i that that can be kind of natural and we
124also had spring break so i guess leading into that that week and then thereafter there might have been a little bit fewer new work orders that were coming into the system at that time but in general i would anticipate that as you look to the month to month we will slowly increase that over time because you're slowly getting an increase in adoption oh exactly just getting more familiar with how to use the even getting an account and utilizing it for the first time so that january february march progression was what i expected to occur okay and these are just the what if a teacher or the clock is broken in her classroom so she fills out uh he or she fills out a school dude form is that yep it creates an electronic work order
125that gets assigned to someone on the custodial team and then as they complete that the ticket gets closed out you get the email back with the notes on what was completed and when okay and this is a new system this is this was utilized many years ago in the district and we um re-re-implemented this fall this this system so that we could track tickets okay interesting thank you all right thank you jonathan um ryan are you up next ryan's turn so this year we've been looking at the hr account provisioning and deep provisioning so a staff member comes on board what accounts and access do they need they leave what needs to be taken away or there's an internal transfer what needs to change so it's an incredibly complex workflow that touches a lot of
126people throughout the system so we were working off of a spreadsheet in the back somebody some change would occur and add a drop or a transfer and they would be added to a tab in a very complex spreadsheet we've migrated from that to a google form so it's a lot cleaner and it emails the people that kind of touch that workflow but now we're looking to move forward and and improve upon that even further and the google form just doesn't give us any any metric to measure off of and so we're looking at systems that we can migrate to yet again that will give us that data to continue to improve so the first thing we did was look at well is there some internal tool that we're already using so we're not getting yet
127another thing skyward is one of those things that's integrated into business services and hr on the back end so that was an area that we looked at and they do in fact have something that does exactly what we're looking for but the the way the logistics of it for example some person changes instead of one person doing room signs now it's another you have to completely erase the entire program and recreate it from scratch um so that not sounding like a great option continuing to look at other things that are available to us and next slide so a program called servicedesk it's owned by the same company that does our technology ticketing currently it does provide some of these features and it definitely does the metrics and if you go to the next slide anybody
128who's gets excited with data would get really excited if they could read everything on the screen but this integrates not only with that workflow but also technology ticketing work order processing on the back end it provides all of those metrics so this this particular program is very large it can do a lot of different things so we're working with sales to try to navigate what would be the best fit for greendale and entertaining the idea of migrating from our current ticketing system to the service desk and also picking up the ability to process that back-end workflow along with it so we're not there yet but that's that is the work that we have done in this last cycle towards that goal out of curiosity would would or does that um more complicated and enterprise system
129allow us to do some things maybe that school dude does that we could trans transfer that as well something to look into it certainly does the we do have a category in the system for things that are long-range projects so it might be something to look at but i this is definitely geared towards the the technology area okay to your to your question thor um when it comes to the ticket tracking for facility maintenance one of the things you're looking for that is emerging in companies is the ability to start asset tracking and doing kind of looking at 3d building maps how can you start to incorporate a lot of internal facility data that's typically scattered throughout the the facilities department you know you've got building paper building maps that are everywhere you've got historical
130um trending on maintenance you've got records on filter changes and so whatever that system would be you're looking for emerging technology that starts to capture that so that you can start to diagnose and prioritize where resources should shift to and so we've been engaged in a conversation with school dude about another level another version of that software that can do some of those things and we know that there's other competitors in that field we would we would love it if there was one vendor that just did everything perfectly but it also depends on like what are your goals to do to be really efficient in the work with what you're doing understood yeah i was just looking at another potential efficiency nope good point so going forward we're going to continue to look at those
131options maybe it is service desk maybe it's another one we know it's not and we'll continue to do that work all right thank you and again this is not your technology report i mean you have a separate technology report this is just a trimester an improvement cycle so um rashida referred to pdsa as a continuous improvement process plan do study act and so when they're reporting they're planning on their study so once they've acted they're coming back they're planning and they're they're sharing the data from their their actions so this is one action item that ryan's working on for continuous improvement of efficiencies of our technology and that's what all of them are yep thanks for the clarification all right so maggie equality and instruction equity and instruction all right i feel like i'm talking
132a lot this board meeting all right so um i'm really excited i first want to just honor that may is asian american and pacific islander month heritage month so i just want to honor that um and you can always follow the student equity team because we are celebrating that on instagram with highlighting different um asian americans and pacific islanders all month so feel free to follow us um just wanted to add that in so our focus area for um was to decrease percentage of students who identify black or latinx that are removed from school for behavior consequences so this um that's our big that is our big goal and then we're thinking the short cycle goal it's around continuing that professional development and implementation of restorative practices as a part of universal instruction and intervention
133a universal instruction is just the instruction that everyone's getting in the classroom so the three things that we were implementing between now and february we have completed oh next slide please i have all these nice checks because we completed all of them we did implement restorative practices um with the entire student population we also have been continuing community circles um with staff and then we've also started the social media campaign with our student equity team which i also referenced in the beginning with our um instagram page so i'm going to show you some examples of this work that we're doing next slide please so um some of this i mean there's a lot of words on here but i'm really excited about the feedback we're getting from staff around implementing restorative practices throughout the year
134more than half of our staff feel more comfortable leading circles we were very and we were in the low teens when we started in the beginning of the year and now that staff are participating in every professional development and have had to do it themselves in their classroom they are feeling more comfortable and adding it to part of their practice also um the staff circles that we're doing 90 of them that encourage deeper listening and sharing between their circle groups and i just want to you can read this but i just want to share one and highlight one that came from the pd on april 30th on friday i think the circling that we have started pd days with this year is one of the most valuable practices i've been asked to participate in while
135teaching it is so important to connect with co-workers throughout the district be vulnerable and build trust thank you that work of building vulnerability in our staff of making them better educators because if they can model that risky behavior in a safe space with their peers they're going to model that with kids and we know that if kids are able to make mistakes that's how they learn so this is really amazing things that our teachers are doing and i'm really proud of the work they've done with this also um we have here are two of our instagram posts so if you want to follow us it's ghs underscore student underscore equity underscore team this is um two of our posts one is for women's history month and the other one was sharing ramadan um which we
136have several of our families celebrate that until may 12th and then to kind of talk about that bigger goal that we've been working on we i am excited to share that 100 of our schools are using power school to document incident referrals and we also have had 21 out of school suspensions of which five incidents of suspensions were students of color and were suspensions were white students from a district standpoint we have proportional representation of demographics in this data which is an improvement from our last time that we looked at this data where we saw that students who identified as black and latinx were over represented in suspensions than their white peers there's still work to do on the individual school level um and we are going to be working i'm going to be interviewing
137each of the high school students who have been suspended and asked them a couple of questions just so we can continue and improve on our practice and learn from their stories to inform our work for next year i'm open to any questions that anyone has can you clarify um suspensions with incidents and yeah so um we so i kind of we moved from when we were having online school it was hard to kids were all there there was no so um kids weren't getting out of school suspensions but there might have been an incident that occurred now there is a difference between something an incident is something that occurred uh out of school suspension is something that an administrator gives to a student as a consequence for an incident that occurs so if i slap
138a friend i go to administrator and they make a decision about my consequence and sometimes that consequence is the out-of-school suspension and we know that when kids are out of school they're not learning so we're trying to decrease out-of-school suspensions in general there are some times that kids do need a consequence and out of school suspension is an appropriate consequence we do not want to over represent kids of color in that which is historically what happens nationwide and in greendale we had that problem for the past couple years so i'm excited to say that we are proportional with our suspensions this year and i think we're moving in the right direction so there's three more incidents than suspensions correct what are those three incidents and why are they included in the incidents as opposed to
139this and not included in the suspensions were they and so i think were there no consequences were they in online school and so suspension they didn't miss school so i am looking at this data the incidents and the out-of-school suspensions are the same thing it's just someone gave me some late data so the numbers are wrong i apologize on that and it should be so the out-of-school suspension should match the number correct yes i i apologize for that oversight maggie i had a question for you on the back to the restorative practices um i i'm maybe you can just i'm imagining that you did you started restorative practices in the the circles from an equity standpoint but what perfect timing uh with this pandemic from a social emotional learning so i wonder if you could
140talk about that aspect as well i want to say that it didn't start from an equity perspective we've had community circles in our school district for many years we've just elevated it to make it a universal practice this year okay i was just about to say that can you steal the words right from my mouth yeah this is something that really helps everyone feel belonging and some schools have been practicing um community circles for over 10 years so we're trying to build on that practice so that every student has a opportunity to partake in it and we're getting our teachers more comfortable with running community circles so when things are hard and you do need to restore harm that you have the community built in your classroom to repair that harm sure okay thank you
141i'd be curious to hear from either paris or axel i think axel's still here right um i just as far as how you feel these community circles are working and just give your input i guess um we've only taken part in a few this year mostly they're taking part in acps which i think are valuable because with those groups we've kind of met with those same group of people since the beginning of high school so to be with that group of people you're already more comfortable being around them and we've done other things outside of these restorative circles to get the group just comfortable with each other and be more vulnerable to situations i know the first couple um times we would talk about an incident or something for example like the capital what happened
142with that there was some hesitation at first of what exactly do we say or um during black history month and black lives matter week what exactly are we talking about unfortunately because of family circumstances i was pulled out of school and i wasn't able to take part in most of those um community and restorative circles but based on the feedback i've gotten from students they say compared to the first day they did it to the last day of that week they really start to understood and enjoyed their experiences there and thought it was really helpful to deeply connect with their peers where they may not have in just a normal school setting so thank you all right uh thank you maggie i thank you for this this um this quick update um and again i've
143said it before you know i think these are great opportunities to showcase where we are at uh they're intended to be a safe environment so that you know are we making progress are we not do we need more support do we need to redirect as opposed to assigning blame or looking for fault it's really supposed to be a a candy conversation so thank you for for sharing that everyone all right we are at the end of our um work session any additional comments from visitors this evening again i invite you to the podium uh just please state your name and address for the record good evening my name is nat godly and i'm speaking on behalf of paige people advocating for greendale equity in their report this evening in their presentation this evening tntp highlighted
144some positive elements particularly that greendale is ahead of many of its peers and its focus on diversifying its faculty but much of what we they said we already knew and so i want to highlight some areas that should be a focus for improvement both the school level and at the policy level as a general comment the district now has clear recommendations and must move quickly to turn those into practical implementations with close input from students of color and other impacted stakeholders in their presentation the consultants noted widespread reports from students of color of a hostile environment in the community and in the schools while a historically segregated community will obviously take some time to adjust away from a culture founded in segregation and institutionalized racism it is especially disturbing that so many students reported that
145in the event of racist and other bias incidents they did not feel comfortable going to teachers or administrators that greendale students feel that the adults in their school environment are unprepared and uncomfortable around discussions on race indicates an urgent problem that should be the primary focus of professional development racist attacks by students on other students will sadly continue for some time to come and the district is limited in its ability to shift the community and national cultures that drive those attacks but as paige has been saying since the racist attack on chinese knox in september 2018 what the district can and should do quickly and directly is train its staff particularly its administrators to handle such complaints competently and sensitively the climate of the school and the well-being of students who have been victimized and
146excluded must be administrators primary concern that some administrators responded according to the questionnaire that they did not feel comfortable having such discussions is deeply deeply worrying to those of us who are parents of children of color as well as to many others there can be no compromise between student safety and teacher or administrator comfort student safety must come first those teachers who place their comfort above student safety must change or they must be changed secondly in the questions that followed the presentation one of the board members repeated a falsehood that is commonly used to undermine affirmative action and other methods of diversifying the workforce suggesting that rough quote we don't want to hire someone just because they're a person of color this represents a fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation of these kinds of hiring efforts which
147only introduce affirmative measures to differentiate between candidates who are otherwise equally qualified in the interest in the interest excuse me of rebalancing prior inequities that disadvantaged students and candidates of color it also flatly ignored and disrespected the consultant's prior statements that teachers of color while especially benefit beneficial to students of the same race are beneficial for all students including white students as the consultants and doctor amidst it clarified the primary intent of the consultant's recommendations is to diversify the overall pool in order to increase the number of qualified candidates of color scholars of color already have to defend their degrees and professional skills more than those of us who are white and have equivalent qualifications we will not be successful in attracting them to greendale if key decision makers are already fueling racist myths about
148them among those who want to resist change thank you thank you seeing no additional comments we are adjourned and our next board meeting is in two weeks on monday may 17th