001one we will into order roll call will show there are two student representatives so at this time I invite you to stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance all right thank you we'll begin with communications this is a mythic a school board Academy will be held on Thursday December 12th from 6:30 to 8 o'clock p.m. in the district office upcoming winter concerts for all of the schools start a week from today and are listed on the district website the Greendale high school marching band will perform a Pasadena preview on Saturday December 14th at 4 p.m. in the High School Auditorium the band has submitted a video to the Rose Parade video contest interested parties can visit the road / rose parade page at Greendale band comm to watch and vote for the Greendale
002marching band video a cash prize to defray travel cost is offered to the video with the most votes in the contest the 2019 tax bills for the village of Greendale residents are available online now and will be mailed to homes in the community later this month the 2019 bill is the first that includes funding for the Greendale schools thirty three point eight million dollar facility facilities improvement referendum that was passed by Greendale voters in November of 2018 the 2019 mill rate for the Greendale schools is eleven dollars and thirteen cents which is twenty cents lower than the projected mill rate communicated prior to the referendum vote the increase in the school portion of the residents taxes is primarily because of referendum dollars district operating expenses did not increase substantially for the 2019 2020 school budget
003work on the construction projects funded by the referendum are well under underway around our school buildings the district's website construction page is updated frequently with news and information on construction as it continues at our schools we all look forward to the new spaces and we are grateful to the taxpayers of Greendale for their commitment to and support of our schools a three hundred and twenty one dollar donation from the Greendale Friends of music was received by College Park Elementary to purchase tickets for the fifth grade students to attend a performance of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra all right any additional communication I just want to also welcome Dave Patel so Dave is joining us he is a sophomore at the high school and every month we're going to be inviting and a sophomore to come and
004join us at the table and join both Megan and Emma so Dave is there anything you want to share with us about yourself you can just speak and pull it a little closer I'm a sophomore here at Greendale high school and some big parts in high school I'm on certain advocacy student advocacy I'm a peer leader and I'm very passionate about the medical field so I'm taking the PLTW courses here and my favorite subject is math and I take the advantage of the honors courses for that too and you involved with some of the athletics yes I play soccer and do track excellent well welcome this evening thank you alright so continuing on with the agenda next item on the agenda is the Panther pride moment so tonight we have miss Slater who was here
005and she'll be joined by some staff as well as by some students we'll be talking a little bit about their ambassador program at Highland View so welcome this evening thank you for having us this evening and tonight I am joined by fourth grade teacher Shana Rickard she's also our fourth grade ambassadors supervisor supervisor coach that's a good way um and C Williams our school psychologist along with six of our fourth-grade ambassador so we'll be speaking to you in a few minutes so as we know learning is social and emotional before it can become academic and Highland View we place a great emphasis on this work through our training around PBIS as well as our work with social-emotional learning I mean as we looked at our behavioral data from last year we noticed that we had
006an increase in the number of behavioral incidents we we call them majors and minor behaviors and that we wanted to do some work shoring up our Tier one practices so what this evening we'd like to share with you our plan around that work the resources that we're using and how our students are involved as we continue to strengthen our learning community at Highland View so one of the first things that we started to look at what we're responsive practices so responsive practices are evidence-based approaches associated with great greater teacher effectiveness through engaging academics effective management positive community and developmentally appropriate teaching it's also associated with higher student achievement and improved school climate so we started this work actually last year our specialists are Jim music art and Spanish teachers during their learning cycle which we've
007talked about at past board meetings House staff picked different professional development books to read that are specific to their needs as educators the specialists chose to read the responsive classroom for music art PE and other special areas it really helped them build different routines and procedures that they need for classroom management in order to really get the most out of the 25 minutes they have the students each day from that work Laurel Oh chef ski was our music teacher she and I a professional development opportunity that was offered to staff this summer through our PD offerings in August for other specialists in the district that could learn from this work as well from that then we took that the next step with our classroom teachers and read the responsive practices book the first six weeks
008of school most of this reading was completed prior to the start of the school year in August and when we met as a staff for our professional development day towards the end of August we worked through planning with teams and what classroom teachers were going to do the first three weeks in their room and then teachers finished the book for our September staff meeting so by the beginning of September they had already read one professional development book for the year which is a lot especially at that time of the year so kudos to them I mean currently our paraprofessionals are also involved with the responsive practices work both through our staff meetings but as well through the book teasing tattling defiance and more positive approaches to ten common classroom behaviors so they are working and
009learning around that as well so I wanted to think about what I could do besides offering this learning for them what can I do to help support our staff as we work through this and so we really live and breathe by the mantra of go slow to go fast in our building and so we made it that the first two weeks of school there were no district assessments given in our building the focus was really around building that classroom community setting up those routines and procedures through morning meetings and different activities and getting to know your classmates so that we could really strengthen and build strong classroom communities to start the school year and we began our first intervention or wind cycle at the end of September to help teachers be able to continue this
010work through most of the month of September where they were able to against significant time around building those classroom communities so as we continue this work we continue to think about what we are doing and how we are using responsive practices throughout the year and one of the important things is that we need to continually review our routines and procedures it's not just a one shop and done approach that you know when we come back from a long break like today we were off for five days and so coming back and reviewing and going over classroom routines and procedures when a new student joins the classroom or when things just aren't working the way they need to work going back and taking that time again so that we can go fast and that academic piece
011can be in place for our kids another way that we're responding through our tier one work is around our recess times with play works the play works is a group that came in and did some training with us in August with our full staff all teaching staff and our paraprofessionals because really recess and play helps kids discover the joy of being active research shows that active kids are stronger learners and that by playing together children practice how to get along research also suggests that when we play our brains develop creativity and flexibility and because we know that learning is social and emotional we want our kids to feel the joy and success during recess so that when they come in from recess and they return to the classroom they're ready to learn and that recess
012isn't getting in the way of that which can happen often times Playworks focuses on students feeling safe engaged and empowered during their recess times and so these three areas are driving the work that we're doing and mrs. Williams is going to talk a little bit more about that when she talks about our culture and climate goal for our building so things that get in the way of playing when you think about safety engagement and empowerment I put those after the bullet points you can kind of see how it fits together so children who feel excluded or who do not know the rules play less with their peers they have fewer opportunities for physical activity and social development playground lessons are priceless but kids need strategies for success when play is too unsafe or when conflicts
013escalate kids miss out on fun and learning opportunities and children play together outside of school less than they they did when we were growing up by learning games and having time to play at school they're able to explore creativity and leadership and those all hit on those key ideas of safety engagement and empowerment so we implemented play works right away in the classrooms as grade levels and within the whole school through play work students learned skills and strategies like Rochambeau Rochambeau is our version of rock paper scissors which was very much enjoyed by all students so it kind of became our go-to conflict resolution strategy that we had so if like two students got to the chair at the same time you might hear another student call out Rochambeau it out and then they'll do
014rock paper scissors to see who stays and who chooses a different spot we also practice sportsmanship respecting playground boundaries and strategies of safe play when strategy is butterfly touches Forte games or speed limits like toe to toe or hopping depending on the number of students we have playing and the space we have available before we had the air conditioning working in the classrooms we brought the whole fourth grade into the library which was air-conditioned and we played a game called evolution which is where we had fun we learned to play Rochambeau but obviously being in a smaller space we implemented the toe to toe speed limit there and then teachers taught and played with the students many different games kind of right at the start of the school year and it was kind of cool
015to see students enjoy those games but also then play them during their free time choice during recess and they would even invite students from other grade levels to play with them and teach them the games too so excuse me and enter the HV recess team this is a team or committee that the any staff that wanted to be part participate was invited if you are interested so we have a cross-section of cross grade levels of different teachers and content area specialists we also invited a peer professional team member who is out at recess to help give us some perspective in and guidance in that area the purpose of the team is to develop and guide the work that we wanted around our culture and climate goal which we'll talk about in a minute and to
016also continue that work and extent and extend what we learned in play works and through some of the read-alouds the work that we've done so far has involved creating and administering and interpreting results from a survey about recess given to all students and the team members on the recess committee completed several structured observations who play works they kind of gave us some ideas of what to look for and so we could kind of look at what was going on in a meaningful way on the playground and then we took the information from the recess survey and the observations and have started to develop an action plan around each area of safety engagement and empowerment so our Highland View culture and climate goal then is student perceptions of kindness safety engagement and empowerment on the playground
017will become more positive and increase as measured by our school created student recess survey in addition the numbers of playground major and minor behaviors as documented through our work with PBIS will just decrease from a three-year median of 78 referrals so we want to kind of look at both the student input in the past we had been using the Studer survey so we thought this might be a way to change up and help us with that information and then looking at our PBIS data about the major minor referrals that we're occurring across years and this is how we're measuring our goal this is the student recess survey you can read those for yourself but it's about fairness on the playground using good sportsmanship being safe speaking kindly engagement and problem solving and just do you
018like to go out for recess I will say that the I think I like going out to recess was that like 95% strongly agree student ownership and involvement with these goals is key our PBIS team has the same common goals as mentioned with our recess team and this year we have the theme of building community and character to support and involve our our students inside the school and outside on the playground we use quick tickets to reinforce positive behaviors and possum tickets to recognize those above and beyond expected behaviors for example I might notice some students walking out safely to the playground or lining up efficiently so I would give them the quick tickets I might give a possum ticket for a student who was giving a high-five and saying nice try to a student
019who got out in Foursquare or a teacher who got oh that happens a lot and then each month our PBIS team focuses on a different character trait and shares out resources and activities with the teachers to engage in with their class one example from October's focus on integrity was when mrs. flater came in to do a read aloud about intent versus impact with our students and that was about how you might but how our actions and words might impact somebody even though we maybe don't intend on that happening then to further celebrate our students efforts at the end of each month a student from each class is awarded for showing kindness and other positive character traits by being invited to the kindness crew lunch and that is a lunch that like I said is once
020a month and is hosted by mrs. Slater additionally class has also worked together to earn classroom grade level and school-wide incentives tech time is loved by everyone and then we have PJ day even our old school drive-in movie celebration and then lastly a very exciting opportunity for our students to get involved at Highland View is with our ambassadors today we have six fourth-grade ambassadors who are here to introduce themselves and share out about ambassadors all right let them take it away hi my name is makenzie I'm a fourth-grade ambassador at Highland View I'm gonna tell you a little information about the ambassador's to start ambassadors have to be in fourth or fifth grade if we were interested in being in a Highland View ambassador we had to apply by filling out a form on the
021form we were asked to write about what we thought we could do to improve our school we also had to get a parent to sign permission to apply after the teachers read the form then we were invited to join the group ambassadors me as a bigger once a month at our meetings we talked about some of the ideas we think will help to make our school better in some way and then decide on a project our ambassadors are working on building community this year the fourth grade ambassadors are working on solving problems on the playground during recess when done and I'm aren't going to tell you a little more about our project hi my name is Quinn as fourth grade ambassadors we began by deciding on our goals what we want to make recess better
022by making sure recess is safe and safe engaged in empower more specifically we want all students to feel included have fun and to share the space with everybody after we decided on our goals we brainstormed problems that we saw it on the playground some of the problems are that students are not always respecting the boundaries also there's not always enough equipment for people to play with another problem we thought is about students are not always able to problem-solve on their own hi my name is Dylan hi my name is Ammar we are also fourth-grade ambassadors at Highland View we have a plan to make our playground more safe and fun first we are going to share the recess survey that everyone did we're going to meet with each grade level and talk with them about
023what the survey said you will also make a plan to talk with kids about being kind and respectful on the playground we want to reteach everyone how to appropriately use the Buddy bench even when it's wet that has been a problem problem kids aren't using the Buddy bench when it's wet you would like to set up discussions for classrooms to have books for classes to read we would also like to make some videos for students to watch the model kindness respect and expectations on the playground last we want to teach students some new games to play at recess we think all of these things will help with the problems that Quinn mention running through a game student being left out and kids not playing fair hi my name is Isabella hi my name is Skye
024we would like to thank you for inviting us to speak with you tonight and listening to our group presentation at Highland vo we have a new and special way to show appreciation for others we call them shout outs or celebrations we would like to give you some positive energy that you have given us back to you the celebration would you like the kool-aid man celebration or a roller career celebration okay well okay school school board members all you need to do a shout out is sit back and enjoy your kool-aid [Laughter] [Applause] would you like to see the other one that was so awesome okay school board members all you need to do with shadows is sit back and enjoy the ride at the end of the roller coaster you can swim along with us
025later on the ride and that concludes our Panther pride do you have any questions at all for us well first of all students thank you for coming about another round of applause for the sixth ambassador you guys did an awesome job representing fourth grade and representing all of Highland views so congratulations and being strong ambassador is there any comments or questions from anyone else I just appreciate that you're focusing on recess because of course for any school that's unstructured time and that's obviously quite difficult and that's what problems may arise so the the fact that you're turning that quit what can be a challenging time into something positive and ways that can be better for all the kids is really great so thank you I really really like how you're engaging the students - in
026the problem solving and solutioning awesome job I was just gonna say to the students I talked to a few of you on your way in and you said you were nervous you guys did a great job tonight so thank you guys for coming thank you it's always fun to have students come in so thank you mrs. Slater next group so as if one student organization wasn't enough we are also going to have a presentation from our Canterbury elementary school who's going to be sharing with us their LEGO League city shapers group so you guys ready they've been preparing all evening it looks like thank you for having us this evening hello we are the rocking city builders from Canterbury Elementary problem traffic jam parking traffic jam a parking lot of our school create Canterbury elementary
027Greendale the cars are going through the middle of the parking lot and skipping it slide and then the other car sees a car trying to skip they get stuck at the car has to back up and then the other line where people get out the car goes in and that causes a traffic jam there should be two lanes for drop-off and pickup before and after school Elayne for buses and a lane for vehicles dropping off their kids the buses would drop the kids off in the right hand side of the lane vehicles dropping off their kids would have their kids exit out the left and use the pedestrian bridge to cross safely the pedestrian bridge could also be used by parents that park and walk their kids to the door we also should have separate
028parking spaces for staff and volunteers so when the staff is trying to get in the building they can get in out faster super practice business when parent cars are trying to drop off their kids the staff can easily get around them did to get you just a little faster and do their job well the parent cars have less traffic because staff isn't waiting in line to so a benefits staff and the pair's the solution to our traffic jam at school is that there should be a pedestrian bridge near the entrance of the school it would let people who are trying to get across the lanes of traffic not have to wait for the cars instead they could walk over the cars on a bridge so neither the cars or the people walking have to wait
029their turn to go it would also be safer because the people walking wouldn't be hit by cars or have to walk in between cars and if a pedestrian bridge is too expensive we would add an extra set of stoplights to create a crosswalk we think we should add a through lane for people that aren't using the drop-off lane so they could exit easily without having to drive through the area where kids are crossing and getting in and out of vehicles we also think that there should be merchants stop-and-go lights where the two lanes merge into one because neither of the car lanes or o'er buses would hit into each other because there would be light still to tell them when they should go hello everybody thank you for having us we are part of a
030lego league FIRST LEGO League from Canterbury we'll be competing at the regional competition this weekend so this year's team as city shaper the kids have to find a problem around the community which the kids start traffic jam in a parking lot as a problem and they should find the solution for that so we would be presenting this at a competition this weekend so thank you for having us thank you how about a round of applause for these thank you for sharing your problem and your solution here tonight and and I understand you're going to be also sharing it at the village board meeting tomorrow and then you compete this weekend so this is all practice for you guys so you guys did a very nice job good luck on your competition where is my competition
031okay any other questions or comments from any of the board so thank you for coming and good luck this weekend all right continuing on with the agenda we are at the point for citizen comments so welcome to anyone who is planning to speak this evening and we'd like to remind you that school board meetings are for the purpose of carrying on the business of the district these are official business meetings that are held in public and through school board policy 186 the board allows citizens to make comments by scheduling to opportunities and the agenda to receive citizen comments in accordance with the intent of the open meeting laws please be aware that although the Board of Education welcomes comments from the public it cannot discuss or debate items brought up during public comments in order
032to hear from all citizens who wish to speak and to ensure that the official business of the district is addressed board policy sets a time limit for citizen comments and will be a hearing to the board policy and its time limits at tonight's meeting persons wishing to address the board asked to come to the podium and state their name and address for the record comments are limited to only one and individuals will be speaking will be limited to three minutes or five minutes it's representing the group of persons citizen comments are limited to a period not to exceed 30 minutes thank you thank you my name is nate godly i'm speaking on behalf of paige parents advocating for Greendale equity Paige's mission is to represent and amplify the voices of those students parents and community
033members who feel they are not adequately heard or represent respected in Greendale especially in the public schools and to help Greendale School District and the community at large to make a priority of embracing its growing diversity to become more aware of the systemic racism in his past and present and to become a more welcoming community for all parents advocating for Greendale equity welcomes the news that Greendale schools has agreed to remove all penalties it had previously unjustly imposed on a former Greendale high school student who had defended herself against Rice's incident insults that included the repeated use of the n-word as a result of over a year of hard emotionally and physically draining work Shanice Knox and her mother Deanna Marriott now stand vindicated and made whole in agreeing to remove the outstanding athletic suspension
034from Shanice his record Greendale schools has shown that it is willing to acknowledge his miss its missteps to correct them and to move towards a more just vision for our community it is worth noting that MS Knox and MS Marriott have continued to work with the district to improve its handling of racist incidents and other issues of equity and diversity even as this previous superintendent refused to lift the unfair penalty and even after Ms Knox left Greendale high school because she felt unsafe and unsupported their assault on Shanice and especially the school administration's initial decision to punish her for her verbal response instead of offering her compassion and counseling was the spark that led to the formation of page from a group of parents united behind Shanice Indiana to support them and to advocate for
035the removal of the sanctions placed upon her we have grown to a significant voice for anti-racist policies in education in Greendale we continue to lead in this area notably as part of the community diversity equity and inclusion action plan in which two of the four implementation teams are led by page mem and all four have significant page remember representation on them page again appreciates the district's decision to remove the unjust code violation on Miz Knox we request that the board build on this act of good faith by including a representative a page as a central member of the group conducting the search for a new permanent superintendent as we have stated before the change in district leadership and the implementation of the action plan offer new opportunities for collaboration however to pretend that the issues
036we raised around racism and equity should not be central to the choice of a new superintendent is naive and may weaken the standing of the eventual eventual successful candidate current board certainly needs to demonstrate to the community especially to community members of color that it is willing to implement the lessons of the past year in ways that will have a significant and deep impact you can show your willingness by including in all discussions of the social search process a voice whose primary function will be to ensure that attention is paid to candidates abilities in the field of equity and inclusion page is that voice one of our members can be selected by mutual agreement to play this role not for our organization but for the whole community that member would of course agree to full
037confidentiality and other normal protocols of a search process and would then Pacifica dissipate fully in all parts of the process at the last meeting board president crappie doe stated that there is no search committee this is obviously not accurate as somebody must exist to make decisions along the process even if it is simply the board itself as I stated last time there is no statutory reason not to include a community voice that will improve the search and hiring process and every practical reason to improve the processes legitimacy by doing so H stands ready to collaborate with the school board in serving our community and especially in serving the schools where we got our start by ensuring that the individual who ends up leading a schools is fully competent to address our community's needs in the
038field of equity and inclusion thank you thank you any additional comments all right seeing none we'll continue on with the agenda next item on the agenda is approval of our board meeting minutes I move we approved the special board meeting minutes of November 16 2009 teen regular meeting minutes of November 18 2019 and special meeting minutes of November 20th 2019 and closed session minutes of November 20th 2019 as outlined in agenda item 5 I second there's been a motion a second to approve the board meeting minutes is outlining agenda item five any further discussion then I call for a roll call vote yes yes yes yes and I'm yes motion carries next item on the agenda is personnel so as you are aware we named mrs. Ahmed's ik to be our acting superintendent and this
039evening we are posted to approve mrs. Kim Ahmed's ik as interim superintendent for the remainder of this school year so I look for a motion to approve I move approval of the appointment to interim superintendent of Kim amid sick as outlined an agenda item number six second there's been a motion a second to approve the interim superintendent appointment any further discussion I think yep I was just gonna say once again I think it was really apparent as we were in lots of different meetings over the last couple weeks that's we had someone sitting at besides us that we really felt confident and so Thank You Kim for all you're doing and and looking forward to voting yes all right any other comments all right then I call for a roll call vote yes yes yes
040yes and I am yes motion carries congratulations I just have a brief statement and there will be a press release and some additional communication going out to families as well as staff so mrs. mythic will serve in the role for the duration of the 2019 2020 school year and Kim joined Greendale schools in 2001 although she has a high school graduate an alumna of Greendale high school that predates that's joining the district she has worked as a teacher in Greendale Milwaukee Public Schools and the School District of Elm Brook since beginning work as an administrator in Greendale she has served as an associate principal and the director of curriculum and instruction mrs. amid SiC earned her bachelor's degree in French and a teaching certification at Marquette University and she has a master's degree from Cardinal
041Stritch University and educational leadership she is currently completing her doctoral work at the University of wisconsin-madison in educational leadership and Policy Analysis focusing research on the role of equity and continuous improvement and during the interim period the board will offer multiple opportunities for both the community and staff to meet with mrs. amid zyk which will combine listening sessions for all stakeholders that will provide feedback in consideration of mrs. Amit SiC continuing as a permanent superintendent beyond the school year the dates of these events are as follows we'll be having one listening session on Saturday November I'm sorry Saturday December 14th another one on Monday December 16th and then two in the middle in the in January one on Tuesday January 14th and another one on Thursday January 16th and all that information is being provided
042in a press release as well as email communication that will be going out to families and to staff so congratulations Kim welcome next item on the agenda is the school safety plan so last meeting we heard a little bit of the security and safety at this board meeting we we take action to approve the school safety plan that is an annual requirement that the state has required and given the events that have happened in some nearby communities I think this is just an important an important reminder that these plans exist and hopefully we'll never have to implement them but we do practice them and we do have them in place I think that it is important as you heard on some of the news coverage today students talked about being prepared knowing what to do
043thinking it was a drill but in an actual scenario we're prepared and knew what to do so that's part of what happens with our safety plans and we appreciate the approval of the plan to continue any questions or comments this evening I just want to compliment I think it's Steve Wright the thoroughness of this report and I know I will be signing off on the actual individual reports for the schools but there's a lot of work that's gone into working with our community members and in in order to make this safety plan really work so I just want to compliment you on how thorough the team has been on this and thank you for the update any additional comments all right then I'm looking for a motion to approve I move to approve approval of
044the school safety plan as outlined in item 7 on the agenda there's been a motion in a second to approve the school safety plan any further discussion when they call for a roll call vote yes yes yes yes and I'm yes motion carries next item on the agenda is we will continue to hear the first trimester reports and this evening we have all five schools represented as well as our Park and Recreation and our athletics we're starting with the high school so so just as you rehearse this afternoon [Laughter] [Music] each school present one of their goals that was shared in the online material but there are multiple goals per school all right good evening before Jared and I come up and do our cool a cheer for you which I like I just like
045to like him just said we're going to you're gonna hear a presentation tonight actually of two of the three in Greendale high school goals Jared will go after me and he's going after the student engagement piece as far as it goes with student participation in co-curricular activities I'm going to present the acct and standards alignment work which is the second of our goals and the third goal is viable pathways for students and RACR academic and career planning goal although that's not gonna be presented tonight via slides you were able to see the report on that mr. crystal path day one of our ApS and in a co planner and that goal is here to address any questions that you might have about that when it comes to that time but I'm here to talk about
046the college and career readiness goal and the student engagement and and also as you as was outlined in the report that that I put together for you and our continuous improvement so we're always trying to improve the college and career readiness of our students and this goal specifically gets at the measurements of career and college readiness as measured by the statewide junior AC T test and it's a currency that them all public schools they take the test and we're measured by the test in a variety of different ways and we also know that it is one of the indicators that will provide students opportunities for college acceptance and also scholarships so we continue to use two approaches and when we look at this goal one is the practice of preparation that would provide the students
047and the other one more importantly in my mind is ongoing high-quality curriculum and and that's now in part aligned with a CT standards and so as I go through the goal here our annual goals we would like to increase the percentage of students reaching college career readiness benchmarks on the junior acct test which is you know is given in February or March of each year and our short cycle goal for the first cycle here is we again want to administer the pre AC t-test and use the data from this test for communication and planning for opportunities for our students we also want to market and initiate the second year of the online AC t-- prep course which you approve two years ago we also want to support the teachers throughout the standards work that they
048are currently undergoing and and we they're working in course teams to plan their units together to submit their units for reflection and as they plan their units which is something obviously they've always done within their course teams but instead of just their content standards up in front of them they also have the AC t-- standards up in front of them and and so as they plan the units on an ongoing basis we are going to be able to see what kind of standards coverage we have not only for the content area standards but also for a CT and then make some some decisions from that and also we wanna and more importantly we want to create a system to analyze those plans that the teachers are submitting to give them continuous improvement and feedback and
049to begin the processes as I mentioned the AC t-- standards audit so how do we do we administered the pre AC t-- and that was in September and the results are already in PowerSchool teachers use that as they look at their students and and and the things that they do within their classrooms for preparation but also we use them that data to try to have students enroll in some of the other opportunities that we have for AC T preparation we once again kicked off the AC t-- prep course when I wrote this report forty-eight students were involved in it there are now 46 that that has happened the first year - as students see the workload of an online course and it's not sometimes the easiest thing to juggle with everything else that they're doing
050but we've I've taken some steps this year based on student feedback to kind of lighten the the load that they get weekly as they go through this course and also to have better communicate along the way with them so 46 percent or roughly a quarter of our junior students are are involved in this right now we are providing continuous support and improving feedback to the course teams that are working in the standards work we have a steering committee they made up of teachers throughout the building all of them fans and impassioned about the work of standards and standards alignment we created a reflection document that the course teams use after they plan each unit and then we get together and we respond to their their questions their reflections their statements and continue to make the
051work real and in improving for them and we've also provided a lot of facilitated work time during our staff meetings and they were able to work next to the teachers and to answer questions as as they plan so we that definitely has been has been met and creating additional opportunities for students for a CT preparation the universal which every student gets which is in their core classes within a month and a half of the test usually after we get back from from break the the core classes will be providing that to all students and then we have some of the optional opportunities like the online course and also some resource period offerings that we are putting together where are we going continue to support staff as they use the pre acct data for these opportunities
052for students and also within their our SLO s as part of the evaluation process we also want to continue to work with the steering team to recalibrate and re communicate exactly what the standards initiative is what they've done so far how far we've come and then also what it's going to look like the rest of the school year and into the next school year as far as the expectations for teachers and the on the course team and the standards work and then finally we'll be working hard this short cycle to attract and retain students within some of these preparation opportunities that we're going to make available to them after the after we start second semester so that is the current status of the AC t-- and standards work any questions or comments anything for the
053students touchy subject I took the a CT online prep course last year well I started it it was a lot of work on top of a full course load but I'm glad to see that there were adjustments made to that I think this is a really important topic and junior year is a crazy year so it's tough to keep it in the front of people's brain so the more work we do with this is important [Music] you're going through this right now sure I'm not doing the course but I like participating to school-wide pre ECT for the juniors and I found that super helpful and a lot of my peers also mention that because you were able to text take a physical test and I think that's a really great thing and I really enjoyed
054that well maybe not enjoyed it but found it beneficial thank you for that candid feedback all right soon as we move into student engagement and for the first trimester for student engagement things are pretty light here we don't have too much to really look at a lot of this kind of wraps up as we get into the second and third trimester as we look at numbers but some of the areas that we're looking at here obviously again maintaining our high overall levels of afterschool participation rates and then one of the other goals we're looking at is establishing the student-athlete leadership club so I'll kind of discuss a little bit of that work there as well so first as you take a look at our numbers we're at 385 fall sport athletes right now we don't
055have the club numbers as some of them kind of come in here in the next couple of months as some of the club's kick off a little bit further so overall the number looks higher percentage-wise a little bit less because the enrollment is higher this year so we're at about 9:20 this year which then helps as far as what those numbers look like at the start of the school year so I'm always kind of keeping a running track of percentages as well so we kind of see things are ebbing and flowing a little bit number wise a percentage wise for staying pretty steady around 40 but it's almost up to 42 which is great so something that we hope to keep building off of and then one of the areas that we're gonna continue to
056kind of look at and some work I've put in already this fall a little bit behind schedule but we're looking to have things starting off at the start of the new year here in 2020 I'm being able to meet with students I have some different topics and ideas of routes we can take them down I didn't just want to meet with kids and say okay what do you want to do I have different ideas of what the leadership Club will look like as far as having different presenters whether it's professional athletes from within the area or having different leaders talk we had our Wisconsin athletic director convention had some great resources there that we'll be able to use and we're also looking at coop in with some of our schools within the woodland conference to
057have a full sportsmanship summit or a Leadership Summit within our collective group of 14 schools so a lot of the behind-the-scenes work is getting done but we'll be kicking things off with the kids and kind of getting everybody I'm going and getting that ready here in the next month or so so that's where we sit as far as this point in time and if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer anything students I have a question I know last year that a lot of the sports including like fall sports that I participate in did athlete of the month does that continue is that based on what coaches want so this year we looked at just based on number of shirts we have we did athletes of the month at the end of the
058season so it was all of our state qualifiers we've kind of talked to different coaches there's different feedback of if it starts to separate a team I'm by honoring just one person or if it starts to help I think some programs loved it others thought were kind of shining the light on one person when we're trying to build this cohesive group I'm so we're gonna be meeting with coaches and kind of talking a little bit again of how do we do this and maybe do we just focus of a team of the month and then letting that rotate based on accolades of what teams have done so we're not singling out certain people because I know even some of the students felt a little shy to want to have a t-shirt that says I'm the
059athlete of the month if they felt their teammates deserved as much of the praises they did thank you you're welcome athletics and that's okay if you don't have anything I think the club is a super cool idea because a lot of times you know sports clubs we're all super separated and we all have our own like social group so the more you can tie those together I think that's awesome good point I think it's another example of you know we heard from the ambassador program of the 4th graders again this is just another opportunity to engage and empower that the students to really have them help develop with that climate and culture looks like in the different schools so thank you thank you all right and I think mr. Weiss and miss doe are are
060presenting for the middle school good evening tonight we are presenting our we have three goals as Miss Semitic mentioned tonight we're gonna present on the reading but I just wanted to I know you had the packets for our math goal as well as our student our youth engagement goal I just wanted to make two quick comments one around our math goal I want to commend the the math department I'm really digging deep and how we can personalize learning and increased student engagement by working with our students on perseverance through really challenging problems so you know each year we talk that we use the star as one of our tools but the math department is really working hard to really get get the students to think about how their perseverance through math problems can help them
061academically and and and increase their achievement and then also around our youth engagement I just want to mention this because with our our work around the youth engagement Emily's done a great job of increasing the participation of our students and the many activities but this year I just want to commend her for her work on taking a look at our studio survey and putting together a student leadership team quickly at the start of the year and having them give us feedback as to why we're receiving some of the results that we're receiving and that work is lending itself nicely as we've now launched sources of strength at the middle school so a lot of the discussions that we had early in the year are playing a nice role in the larger group that we have
062of sources of strength at GMS so but our focus area that we're going to present tonight is around our reading goal so our goal is that again by the end of the school year that 50% or more of our students will be above the 50th percentile but this year the English department and Dana Mari are reading intervention reading interventionist excuse me focused on an area of weakness for our English language arts students specifically reading standards six through eight point two so they they created a short cycle goal this year that looked at using their professional development that they had this summer through the teacher's college workshop in that implementation and are looking at monitoring the growth in the areas of character language plot and theme as measured against Jennifer sara bellows learning progressions and there's
063a particular focus on the standard RL 6.1 6.2 and this short cycle focus was on character so the students were presented with a reading were given a reading assessment so students listen to a read aloud of a grade level text and here's the example of one of them they were giving a following pre assessment and this one was a text called thank you ma'am and then they were asked for questions describing traits of character something about a meaning within what they are reading a problem that the character is facing and then a lesson that the character learned so they were giving a given a pre-assessment after they were given the pre-assessment then they used the reading progression rubric so I put up there the character one because I was a focus but there is one
064a progression for plot and setting vocabulary in figurative language and then themes and ideas as well so students were assessed again using that progression rubric where each box is like this represents one two three four and five and so forth so they want to move the students along that progression so the baseline results were then used to develop individual entry points for reading conferencing with the students and so they implemented mini lessons from the teacher's college focusing on character and just I put some of the samples for the conferencing sample questions that they do when they individually conference with with a student and this allows them to meet the students where they're at and then also move the students further with their reading and this just shows the pretest for character and then in November
065the post-test for character so as you can see in the pretest we there was no fours in there and so in November with that just a short amount of time of with a conferencing students moved from there's a decrease in amount of ones which is great and then also an increase in fours and the threes as well as the students moved along that progression and the next area or the next focus that they're working on is theme they did give the pretest and posttest for theme and the elderly weren't focusing necessarily on that you can still see with that conferencing that there was progress with that but they are really going to focus and do their many lessons around theme in the book or in the books that the students are reading you have any
066questions I just appreciate how specific it is not only for the students but for the teachers mhm so easier to measure and easier to focus everybody's attention on these specific criteria all right thank you and then we've got our elementary teachers our our elementary principals from Canterbury Highland View and College Park thanks so tonight Canterbury excuse me is presenting on culture and climate and our area that we looked at as a team was looking at the district goal of service excellence and then looking at training of bus drivers on the importance of role in building our culture and our short-cycle goal was increase our scores from the student surveys in the area of I feel safe on the bus so that's a survey that students take each year and you can see our scores over
067the last three years have gone down so out of five three years ago we were at a four point zero nine three point nine two left two years ago and then we went down to a three point seven nine so we definitely want to increase those scores and we want students to feel safe when they ride the bus so one of the things are a few of the things that we decided to do is implement our PBIS strategies on the bus so students earn we call them pause at Canterbury so they can earn those pause and throw out their school day but now they can earn them on the bus as well and so each we have two buses at Canterbury 41 and 42 and they have each been provided buckets for pause that they
068hand out for positive student behavior that they see on the bus students can earn pause riding to school and riding home from school and they are quite excited when they get off the bus in the morning when I meet them out there they've got their paws and they're very excited about it as a result of that students that ride the bus are enrolled in a special pop hol just for the bus so they earn pause throughout the day in their classroom and they have class pop holes but this one is just for kids that ride the bus and we do a special one after school on Fridays and one other thing that we've done is students in each grade level are creating special thank yous for the bus drivers so far we've had three because
069we've been in school we did one September October and November and so if you follow Greenville schools on Facebook you couldn't see that Canterbury has thanked our drivers it was fifth grade third grade and I think fourth grade did it already and it missed sue and Miss Maggie are really excited about it and it just shows that the kids are thankful for their drivers and really tries to create that sense of community on the bus because it is an extension of the school day it's an extension of Canterbury and we will be we have not done it yet but we will be over the next week or two surveying students on their comfort level on riding the bus so we can compare those scores to what we had last year so hopefully those scores are
070going up I will say oops sorry back a little bit we have seen a significant decrease from this year to last or last year to this year in bus behaviors there have been Tracy mentioned earlier majors and minors there have been no majors on the bus at all there's been one recorded minor incident on the bus since we've implemented this so we've really seen a decrease in the amount of issues knocking on wood here that things don't change over the next three weeks here before we go into break but we've really seen a decrease in the amount of bus related issues it's been really positive and as we move into our next area the culture and climate wanted to look at the cleanliness of the building and the developing a process for cleaning classrooms been
071working with Jonathan and Brian Kafar nasaan that our survey from left the last three years of cleanliness of the building has been a four point three five four point three six and last year it dropped to a three point eight which is the significant decrease from the previous years so we are looking at a process of having our second shift really have a time to schedule of things that are going to get done and really working through that to make sure we're doing what we need to do for students and staff at Canterbury in College Park is reporting on our reading goal we are working on goal setting specifically this year and at the beginning of the year just kind of pulling out where kids thought their strengths were and where they could improve we
072also have been working with Jennifer Ceravolo not her personally but her text understanding texts and readers so I know that the reading specialist at the middle school has actually been working with our elementary reading specialist too so we've got a nice k-8 collaboration going in our reading team which has been really kind of exciting for us and it's fun to see that we're using similar models and people to support our work so we started out with just looking at strengths looking at where we can grow and we want half of our students who are below the fiftieth percentile then this gets kind of weird so it's 38 percent of our students were below the 50th percentile we want half of those students to grow at least one proficiency level so when you have the little
073circles on the graph the green is the students who are at level the purple are above level so those students who would be in the pink orange or blue would all move up one color for half of them would move pink to orange orange to blue or blue to green if some of them move more that's really exciting but we identified some groups because when we looked at data with our equity work that we've done across the district there are certain groups of students who come out on state tests or into their district tests and those are students with disabilities abilities English learners and students who identify as black so we chose those three girl groups as a focus to really look at to make sure that throughout the year we're doing everything we can
074to help those students grow at the beginning of the year there is a very small gap between students who identify as black and our full school population which was great to see our other two groups had a more significant gap so we are continuing to work and monitor their growth we made our goal with the first trimester we want seventeen percent of our students to move using a classroom assessment where the students are reading to the teacher and the teachers are taking notes and asking kids questions 51 percent of our students grew one proficiency level using that assessment but in our identified group only 34 percent of our students group grew but we still did make that goal which is exciting but we know we still have work to do we did have a large
075number of students who are English learners move into our district this year and into our building we have 12 students who have been in the building in the country under about 15 months right now so that is a little bit knew of a challenge for us we've had smaller numbers of students achieve with English proficiency there so we are working on strategies for that and as you can see from the data as the students got older the upper grades it was much harder to make that whole proficiency level growth the level of text when we're talking about theme and fifth grade they are interpreting like two themes within a story or comparing themes across stories they're doing things that when I taught middle school was kind of above some of my seventh and eighth graders
076and we see our students doing that now in fifth grade so the expectations for kids are very high at those upper grades so for our next trimester goal rather than having students grow one level of proficiency at the upper levels we're having them grow just to number levels and when you look at the reading assessments you grow a couple of numbers before you grow a whole proficiency level so we've changed the goal a little but still making sure that everybody's moving forward and then continuing to look at ways to support students looking for appropriate text for our English learners making sure that we have text in their home language which we don't have a lot of so that's something that's on our radar now if a student's proficient in Arabic or in Hindu it's much
077easier for them to progress if they can continue reading in their native language as well as in English so that's one of our next steps this trimester and then having students set goals on our units of study which is that curriculum rather than more basic like I'm going to increase my engagement now we're going to look at specific work from our pre assessment so they'll take the pretest they'll look at where they can grow where they're doing well and set goals that way and then just continuing to support all students in a collaborative model where we have our English learners teacher and our teacher for students with disabilities in the classroom pulling different groups of kids where everybody's working together were able to scaffold learning for all groups of students within the classroom okay hi
078again I got to present actually on our culture goal a little bit tonight too but the main focus for a short cycle event and presenting on math so our one of our our main focuses this year at home view around all of our goal setting is excuse me is to structure our building goals in a way that aligns our work more cohesively with what our teachers are doing within their educator effectiveness work around theirs their SLO is their student learning outcomes and their PPG's their professional practice schools so we've really tried to work to help teachers align that work together and so for math this year we have our annual goal is that 75% of our students will achieve grade level expectations and math as measured by the 50th percentile and the star assessment so
079that results in a nine percentage point increase from our baseline data which has in September sixty-six percent of our students are currently at that 50th percentile or above and we also have specific demographic groups that we're looking at students who identify as black Hispanic Asian Native American as well as students with disabilities we're looking for a specific plus six percentage point increase in their proficiency level as well on the star assessment so our short cycle goal was really around teachers collecting student baseline data figuring out what's the population of students they were going to work with to help us achieve these goals doing some different progress monitoring with them and then talking to them about what professional development needs they have in order to move our goal in our student achievement forward so this is
080an example from our short cycle results our teachers were able to align their as theirs SLO goals and professional development needs to more cohesively address our math goal so we introduced a new data collection tool so that what we were doing during grade-level collaborations and our intervention collaboration cycles when we're meeting to talk about students and their data oftentimes especially during those win collaboration times we were talking about data that were weeks if not months old and so now they're able to talk about data that is more formative in nature that's working off of the unit pre and post assessments that they're giving both in math and we're doing that in reading as well so it's made the conversations more specific around what the kids need and what they need as teachers to help push
081them forward in ker we've also encouraged the teachers to link their SLO to their professional practice school that's kind of like their professional development that they need so that it's kind of bringing all their plates together so they're spinning a bigger plate but not multiple plates at one time what we're doing then is looking at those pre and post assessments and so in the area of math when we looked at teachers who were specifically focusing around math 30% of our students were proficient during our pre assessments for their units and we've moved that to now 48% are proficient by that post assessment that they were given so next steps we want to make sure that our teachers are documenting and communicating the professional development needs that they have is a secondary goal aside from the
082student achievement is really to increase our staff support and buy-in around our goals that we have building wide as well as their accountability we also want to increase teacher reflection around their instructional practices their student achievement and the needs that they have and then increased learning from staff to staff as they are all doing what they need specifically for professional development but then sharing that learning with each other throughout the year not just how we've done in the past where it's kind of like an end-of-the-year share out with the learning cycles that we've done it'll be more periodic throughout the year instead of just an end-of-the-year thing so then one of the big next steps that we have this is a form that we have the teachers fill out so this is completed around the
083mid-year which links directly with their educator effectiveness work for their mid-year goal review so they're looking at how are you analyzing and using data how have you engaged in professional development how is that professional development impacted your instruction or their instruction and how is it impacted student growth so that's part of what is coming next and it like links directly to what they're doing within their SLO and their PPG and then we'll build off of the next assessment piece that we have coming up with our wind cycle to look at what they need to help continue moving their students forward any questions or comments for any of the elementary schools I think what you said about Tracy the PPG's and the SLO is being aligned I'm sure the teachers appreciated that since it's more efficient
084in their focus and what they need to do just picked up Sarah what you shared earlier is you really the the buses are just an extension in the classroom and I think we've talked about that with other staff is remember a couple years ago care where you talked about you know the the janitorial staff and you know just kind of bringing them into the classroom and having everyone realize that everyone plays a part in providing us a safe environment or a learning environment so I think that's great that you're continuing to expand on that all right thank you and then we will look to mrs. Schweitzer for the parking recreation this should be very quick so continuing to work on the school dude project and I promise we are getting closer to finishing it so
085we can move on to something else you have to thank Jonathan he's been actually very very helpful in a lot of the document preparation but we're still working on creating that community portal for use of the school dude reservation system to make it better for our community users who need to do that members of the policy committee this document looks very familiar you've seen a lot of redline and we've been going through the 8:30 rule which is the community one talking about how to use it with we've been trying to really streamline it and I think one of the the good things that we have created is now when you go into 8:30 rule there will be different segments for just the auditorium or just the pool or just the outdoor athletic facilities the tennis
086courts so you're not trying to read through these 23 pages of community services and then the specific rules and regs that are needed for each of those individual categories are also defined within that use of of that particular facility so I know board member Thor and Kathy have seen this and Jonathan has has brought it to you we've spent a lot of time on the auditorium and Anna Dombrowski auditorium manager has really helped us with that and we've reviewed those fees and structures based on where we've been and we kind of went backwards from where we were going we're kind of back to where we were but we've just got a big investment in things in the auditorium and felt to stay with more of the individualized charges and so that's what the committee has
087has reviewed our next steps are just to post the 8:30 rule online and I believe we're very close to that the updated fees from what we've discussed within the policy we need to have a meeting and brandy van who works in the district office she's kind of the point person for school dude any organizations need to filter through her she checks on their tax status on their insurance if all that's in place and so we need her help but we need to go to school dude and contact them as to how we can now implement the rates and fees up again the board has given us the go-ahead to do so that when an outside agency does make the request that it's picked up their tax status from their app how they've they've been submitted
088into the system and then this can just populate all the charges based on what they're requesting out of school dude and we have to communicate to them when we're ready for the portal and we also have to develop a tutorial yet that will be posted on the website so then people will know how to access it and use it and then make sure we have the link for the community users as part of the use of facility school do-it system so we're very close and we do hope that it'll be ready to totally go sometime in January but no later than the end of January so that's where we're at any comments or questions so all the groups that can use facilities a lot just understanding a lot of access to do it on by
089themselves is that correct yes that is our goal we think it's more efficient that they can go into the system they'll be able to see what's available but again just because they asked for it does not until whoever the authorizing agency like with the gems that is our recreation supervisor in the schools some of the outdoor facilities fall within the high school athletic department but that will be identified as to who the the end provider that sign off on will be but yes we're hoping it'll be more efficient for the user to be able to just go in select what they need and then staff assigned to those specific facilities will have to go in and make sure that it's done properly and do the follow-up communication so with the other groups be notified that
090this group has wants to use you know gym spaces you know X number of dates in other words my concern is that it's somebody that has more time in their hands and they take up all the space right and that's where we still need to refine that because that's where our rec supervisor has been allocating X number of dates and facility for junior panther basketball you know this group can have college park you can have this one so we will need to have how they can go in there and select and that will be part of the tutorial okay it still follows the same Eric role kind of structure so it's not changing that it still provides the same structure it's just now figuring out how to do that in an online environment that it
091makes it easier for folks to reserve space and then also I think the other part that you know kudos to everyone that was working on this and think that one of the charges we all had was how do you make it simple and cut down I think you mentioned the page number Jackie to make it easier as you're looking through you know it shouldn't be a laborious process to figure out how to leverage some of the space if it's available I want to make sure the community has access to the community facilities so I think it'll be a big improvement that these groups can see the spaces available yes we do too so we just need to get it all together so that they can do that Jonathan did you yeah I think just to
092quantify we had a document that was about 23 pages so if you're trying to reserve a space you know gotta sit down and spend a couple hours I'm trying to read through it and some of the commentary that came up was a lot of these items are repetitive can we structure this in a way that's going to make more sense so we're going to break it apart where they're rule documents if you're going to use the athletic football field that apply just to that and you can click that link but the rule itself rule document will be about six-and-a-half pages instead of 23 and that's just a lot of work by the policy committee and Jackie and I know Anna Dombrowski played a big role too with with looking at some of the auditorium and
093we spent a lot of time trying to get that into a spot where we feel more comfortable that people will actually spend the time to read those documents if it isn't so cumbersome to go through so we're feeling good that a lot of that work on the front end will pay a lot of dividends for us as we roll this out that would have been a good if the fourth graders are still here that have been a good I think I think this is a good example that you know we do want the community to use the facilities we're here Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to to 5:00 p.m. but these buildings are completely occupied after that whether it's the scouting organizations or civic organizations like the Lions of the veterans or you know
094youth sports you know all of our buildings and athletic fields are occupied so I think it's just another example that we wanted to make sure that that continues and I think Jackie is a couple of years in the making that this whole school dude thing I just want to commend you on sticking with it and you know there's obviously a lot of Hoops that have had to be jumped through so you've done a nice job with that in in it it was several meetings for the policy committee but I think it was worthwhile in the long run the dividends will pay off thank you thank you for coming this evening alright next item on the agenda is Ryan is here and we're going to be hearing and the annual update on the technology infrastructure and
095integration report so technology has been defined as anything that it was invented after you were born so as you can imagine for our students a lot of things that we might consider technology and report on is just part of the world and tools that they can use so over the years what we've reported on is technology is now just part of what they do every day we've had students with their own devices for the last five years and so what Ryan's going to share with you tonight is how we make sure that those systems remain safe and functioning for the students and their uptime is so that they don't lose out on learning because their tools aren't available to them thank you and student members just so you are aware at one point in time
096you left your classroom you walked down the hall and you entered a room with computers in it and you did things for a set period of time and then you left and then you had computer time again next week so yes things have changed quite a bit so some of the things we do in the tech department very public so the Refresh of the Chromebook devices some not so much but we I wanted outline and frame out some of our strategic updates that we do so on a regular basis we've been working on replacement cycles so again a very public thing the Chromebook initiative that we have is every four years that gets cycled we've been working to get the teacher devices on that same cycle so that's one example there but also there's a
097lot of network infrastructure that most people don't see that is essential to keep all of that everything on the tables here working so coming up with replacement cycles for that critical infrastructure equipment as well another thing that's done regularly is to audit filtering services thing you know we're constantly being attacked by the outside so making sure we have filtering services in place to keep all of our devices and our kids safe is something that we do in addition to keeping things under warranty so all of our critical pieces of hardware are under the type of warranty so things that are more important that would affect more people is under a four our replacement plus we have one on a shelf somewhere things that could be out for a longer period of time a lesser warranty
098but nonetheless it's under warranty and we also maintain a lot of subscriptions and confidentiality agreements most notably with Google we have a lot of things in Google Drive in our mail and we need to keep that safe also did a lot of work recently with our business manager and I want to thank them for assisting with that we now have a long range capital expenditure I'll call it forecast so there's a lot of things like the from the phone system to our wireless systems that are a significant expenditure for the district I feel very confident that we have a good forecast so we know what's coming down the road and can better plan from a district perspective the budget for that so again this past summer we've done a lot of work it was a
099shortest summer that we've had to replace the most amount of devices so I want to thank the technology team and our student helpers for all the work that they did to make that very very quick turnaround so just imagine like this half of the library full of computers that's what it was here's one of the pictures from the first of two loads of laptops this past summer we also updated our production servers what we had in production running our 50 servers moved to the middle school and we use that as our backup infrastructure and that has also been refreshed I with a student ready access and teacher devices those have been replaced we upgrade at our district firewall that protects the entire district's network and we continue to work with our Mac pack which is
100our student tech group we have our annual meeting kind of a luncheon chat which are very productive meetings and one of the the things that the students do in that group is public outreach at the CLC so they staff a desk there and members of the community can sign up for a slot if you've been to the Apple store and the Genius Bar you might have an idea of what that's all about but it's everything from I don't know how to set up this new phone - how can I face time with my grandkids type of a thing and we've also connected to El Dorado College we've been working on this fiber thing for a very long time so the update on that we are physically connected with fiber to Alverno it is in both
101of our racks and I really really wanted to be able to say we're using that for internet right now at this meeting but we're waiting on a patch cable that is a couple inches long and a piece to plug in it's been on order for several weeks so waiting for that to come in the picture up here illustrates the length of how far we need to go to make that final connection so I will be so happy when that gets plugged in but that's how far we are it's actually in the building now and I can tell you that I've been working with a group called we can which is the third acronym I know for we can which stands for the watch educational community area network what that means is as soon as we
102connect and some things are built out in Muskego and Franklin we will have three redundant connections to the internet right now we rely on one if that gets severed that will interrupt quite a bit of learning so that's one of those things for redundancy that we're working towards that connection to Alverno is a one-time cost listed there and then the maintenance for it will be split between the parties that are going through the pipe to Alverno so initially that'll be three the village of Greendale us and Franklin and then as more construction happens more entities will connect and that cost of maintenance will go down so yes the last 14 inches are the hardest but we're almost there I do want to talk about security again so one of the biggest threats we face is
103user getting an email with a malicious link in it and they click on it and they they infect our systems and this is called phishing so we contract with a company called no before and we simulate phishing emails to everybody in the district that has an account so we actually spam our own people with a simulated link except when they click this link it enrolls them in training and I see some smiles around the table school board the business office are the two largest targets they have access to more things than most users and so they will be targeted the most but how that works is you click on the link you're automatically enrolled in that training and then that's ten minutes ish and once you complete it the goal is hopefully you will be
104a little bit more alert of what a phishing email looks like and can spot it if not we'll just re-enroll you automatically and you can do the training again so I have a little data on that that dashed line is what the industry standard is and you can tell which month is September right there in the middle the tallest one we've kind of forgot and as people take that training statistically it does work so shout out for anybody who might be in the training please do the training so that's that I've got it ok got it I wasn't looking at anybody by the way when I said that we have two other systems go Guardian so this is what we use to filter for student Chromebooks and we also can get reporting if anything is
105flagged that will automatically trip an email to the appropriate administrator to address and then we have gaggle which is specifically a live human monitoring for content in Gmail and in Docs and drive the system will has an algorithm where it'll spit out a notification because a lot of times we'll get false positives and filters like this and somebody trained will actually read it and determine if this is credible or not and if so it'll either be an email depending on the severity or a call at any time of the day or night and so that is incredibly important piece that we subscribe to for student safety it's there's a lot of data on that I could spit out that is it's been very impactful I do want to mention that we have looked at another
106product called securely there's one feature that these two combinations of products don't provide that we're interested in and that is more parent involvement in what's going on and ability to filter at home and so we did look at that securely does not it's a little bit more expensive and it doesn't do live human monitoring and the way it technically works is very restrictive on our machines and machines that come in as guests and so we looked at that at the same time goguardian has kind of woken up to yes this is a feature people want and there's actually a parent portal that's in beta right now for goguardian so our hope is that we can offer this to parents very soon as soon as it becomes part of the regular product and that concludes the
107report I'd be happy to take questions we're comments or questions does the board have anything from the students about their experience with the devices it's just something - you're used to I know that I like these new ones more because of the touchscreen so I'm really grateful that you guys put in all the work to get them to us this year thank you Thank You Ryan and I'll just add that in my professional life you know the phishing scams and and all that is something that industry is is certainly looking at closely and I know what they've warned us about is particularly during the the holidays when people are out you know it they seem to increase the phishing scams because they know people are gone and they expect people to kind of let their
108guard down a little bit so I'm glad that we're continuing to focus on that certainly all right thank you then for their encore presentation I think we'll be inviting mr. Lotus back for his proposed high school changes so this is an annual report that we hear as we kind of get into get ready for the second semester to talk about what course changes we are anticipating based on maybe some some teacher or some student preferences or some you think can you switch to Apple TV please got it nice thank you that's going to be a little bit later on in the report here but thank you as joe said we have this yearly report gives me a chance to talk about additions deletions and any modifications to the GHS course catalog some of these things
109have been talked about quite a bit this fall and some of the things towards the end of the report are things that we're still kind of taking a look at so it's it's a mix between things that when we come back in two weeks of the next meeting hoping that you approve the new courses and we're all out we're able to get those into our course handbook and unto all the registration materials which the process um has started already but today I sat down with Karen Stuckart I'm our post-school power school coordinator from the technology department and it set out the timeline for this year's our scheduling which has pushed up almost an entire month with the early start to the school year so things are moving and this is a big part of it
110course deletions these three things are out in front of you for deletions from the handbook and really for no other reason that they haven't run for at least two years a couple of them for four years and so those courses computer applications which is a business course Greendale swim program appeal active and current world issues a social studies elective we're looking to delete them from the course catalog the one that I am most sad about is the current world issues it was a great course with a lot of student voice in social studies but it was created by Amanda Marburg who was a social studies teacher at that time and is now a full-time reading teacher and so not only do you lose some students interests because it's not tied to a certain name especially
111someone engaging like miss Berg but the passion behind the course and the planning of it is hard to push to another staff member so hopefully something like that could be proposed by the social studies department in the in the future but for now one of the problems in our student handbook I think is that there are a lot of a lot of choices and we leave a lot of things in there where it kind of confuses student choice and leaves us in a position where we have a lot of classes that might have mediocre enrollment where we could really push for we could really push for courses the students are engaged with so those those are the three deletions for this year course modifications these are courses that are already approved but some are having
112some modification that we just want to alert the board to just like mrs. M Tech doctor's inducted with ap biology last year ms Hama with her by AP biology class miss Homme is also applied for and received cap opportunity for her students for Advanced Placement environmental science and so students have two avenues of which to gain course or college credit there we also have had an ongoing issue with enrollment in digital electronics which is a project lead the way course and newer Project Lead the Way ap course computer science principles as we continue to develop our computer science pathway which will be ultimately four classes strong a lot of times these courses compete against each other and so what we are proposing here is that they are offered in alternative years and that allows for
113students to have a clear path of what they can take it allows strong enrollment in each of the courses instead of having to make decisions to run with with lower class sizes so I just wanted to point out that with the AP environmental being offered for cap as we continue to add cap courses it is going to reduce the statistics around our AP classes and our AP test taking but it will increase the number of students or at least maintain the number of students who are earning college credit as high school students which is the ultimate goal to allows to afford students the opportunity to take college-level courses and earn credit for those courses help remember so you have to choose they a student enrolls in the class and then you have the option to
114at the beginning of the semester enroll in the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh course simultaneous same professor nothing changes nothing's different and there's a fee associated with that of a hundred dollars per credit but the grade and the credit is based on the performance over the course of the semester whereas if you are taking for AP credit and you choose not to enroll in the college at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh then you are subject to the test at the end of the year which is a lower cost but also the credit is based on a performance on one day in a three-hour period as opposed to over the course of the entire semester or year in some cases for courses so it just offers students an opportunity to choose which way they can most demonstrate
115their learning in the course to earn the college credit and the cap is B - or better is that challenging in any way for the teachers to have some of the students working towards the test in May and some of the students the teachers who have done so so far which is biology and Spanish no they have not seen any difference because the course and the content is the same so there is some practice and some test preparation materials that happen but the students taking the college-level course see that is valuable as well because they are preparing for what an exam would feel like at the university level and what is the percentage roughly in those classes of CAP AP last year in the cap AP in biology we had 50 students and 20% of
116them took it for cap credit and the remaining took it for AP it was very new and so it was introduced mid-year and there was limited understanding but it was explained in the class in Spanish we've offered cap for quite a few years and it is about 95 percent take the course for cap credit very few one if one or two maximum take the cap span or the AP Spanish test they'd be Spanish language is the one that they take continuing on with the modifications here we have to meet student interest and engagement we we have a number of courses which are junior senior semester English electives as part of the four credits necessary for English for graduating for the English requirements for graduating and the course used to be called satire and science fiction
117apparently science fiction and fantasy is a much more alluring title for students mr. Christensen has kind of holding this class over the last couple of years and and sees where the student interest is within this class and there it is marking it marketing it more toward science fiction and fantasy and so we as we do with teachers and their elective courses we if it makes sense we would like to try it for them and so we're looking to modify that offering not not a whole not not a lot different but some of you and we if approved will be working on a few new titles for all class reads for that course editions as you probably saw this one coming we have to add American Sign Language level three for next year as we enter
118the third year of that program we looked at the data and 39 of the students in level 2 are in 10 3 11th grades so thinking that a few may fall off we probably wind up with one section of maybe a very large section but one section of ASL 3 and so as we get the numbers back from what students sign up for especially students coming in taking ASL 1 we will be faced with a possible staffing challenge but that's one less thing that I won't worry about until we actually see those numbers a very popular program and miss McCauley is doing a wonderful job with that where you'd like to add a health advocacy it's an elective course and you know this the state the state statute I believe still reads that students have
119to have point five health credit from between 7th and 12th grade and and in Greendale there are three ways students can take that health credit they can take it as an eighth grade elective over the course of the school year as when they're at GMS they can take it during any summer opportunity that they might take it in in our summer school or they could take it as a semester course here at the high school the last at least this year we've only had two sections of students take it here at the high school so that gives you an indication you have two sections about sixty students and we have upwards of two hundred thirty two hundred forty in our freshman class if I can generalize that way a number of students are choosing to
120do this course at middle school or at or during summer that that's a good thing for flexibility and within our schedule but it also gives us a scenario where a number of students might have their last health specific course as eighth graders and so one of the things that was that's being proposed as a health advocacy of course which would take health topics and put them into a project-based learning type of an environment where students are responsible for researching something in in a high interest area for them and then using their voice using social media using presentation using video whatever it would be being able to [Applause] educate either just down to the public through public service announcements or with with other students what they're learning has been so a very PBL based class it
121looks similar to teams with impact program in some ways where where there is a where there's a health topic that's that is identified and then a lot of learning and some outreach around it so this course would be a new course within our health and PE department the last of the additions a very interesting one oceanography as a science elective and this course would be an offering we do a really good job with our electives within the science department for the biomedical pathway and also for engineering you've heard about those pathways for years this would be an interesting offering for students that are interested in our science maybe future careers in marine biology geology environmental science aspects also it'd be to start with maybe a semester class offered to 10th 11th and 12th graders the
122only prereq would be biology and taught by Miss lovest and Miss lovest is in her second year teaching with us here and she happens to be married to a doctor lovers from UW whitewater who has brought in a coral reef project into her ninth grade biology classroom for the last two years and with with the great promise of that and the student engagement around that we wanted to put that project and also going a lot deeper than they can with in the ninth grade biology classroom and and really have a class where students can focus on oceanography there would be all sorts of mentorship and and opportunities guest lecturer opportunities from UW whitewater and also she's built into it in additional field trip to UW School that would offer this type of course so pretty
123pretty exciting now the last thing that we put into the if I'm correct the last thing we put into the science department is an elective was medical ethics two years ago three years ago and that continues to run to so that this fits in with students who simply want a high interest area and and it also it just provides an extra elective within the science program I want to finish this report talking about the connect Academy so this might be a decent time to stop if there are any questions about any of the additions I just talked about I had a question American Sign Language I think it's great that it's going into the third year my question was with the 39 I know that's a high number is there a cap off number if
124students don't drop off as you said I mean will they because I've been in her classroom and it's not big enough for probably more than 25 all of her classes are at 30 right now I already hear 28 no and so so how high would the number go I mean what if only two students didn't take it out of those 39 that would just be that would be an be deaf just make that decision taking a look at it I don't think I don't see that as a course that couldn't go to 32 33 you know somewhere I just depends we've also talked about to keep it manageable and and really with that staffing issue that we would have it's that perhaps there would be some sort of a preference process to people that would
125sign up for one maybe upper classmen we haven't talked about it really because we have had the problem yet but there might be some sort of a process where a student might have to wait a year to get into class size targets are 25 to 30 and our minimum class size to run is currently 15 and when we look at budget and enrollment numbers those are the guidelines that we use one of the things I was reading through this I made note of kind of comparing to what the trends are around jobs and noting that the computer sciences example obviously that's the highest and the fastest growing job right now yeah cutting that back for that course and then the other one was around oceanography and just thinking about the reality of that in this
126area versus having the freshwater science schools right in the backyard you notice there has been thought to kind of thinking about this area and how that connects versus the courses that are being offered we have looked into the freshwater science program we've met with UWM around the freshwater sciences there is not currently a course being offered but we're going to talk about connect and pathway number two that we're considering if media communications is successful is stem environmental which would use the AP environmental science a statistics course and the freshwater science relationships at UWM so oceanography may be a study that can help drive interest towards a connect program in AP and in stem environmental which is a junior senior level offering so if the he is open to sophomores it may drive interest in my
127other when I was this is just a random comment when I was reading the health advocacy I first thought I had was navigating the health care system which is probably not a very fun thing that people would sign up for but it's probably really important and difficult to understand for anyone who's ever had to deal with it so it's got I don't know if that's woven into some of the advocacy component versus kind of picking a topic and pulling it forward but is it helping them understand also the health care system that is not currently in the description but it's not a bad idea because we have not developed the curriculum and its entirety it might take a little bit whatever so there could be a small component of that and the personal finance in
128Econ the students might be able to told me that better but in no great content though no just that health insurance cost some money that's what they learn in econ so Steve you mentioned now the current world issues interest kind of faded what's the process of students getting the information to take classes what does that look like how do students know about in general yeah okay unfortunately almost always word of mouth and what that teacher is like but I'm paper and I'm the resources that we give them when when some of these courses are approved one of the first things I do is go to the Pioneer I'll look and have them write a story on some of the new offerings and so the students can get it that way we at the high school
129we break we break student registration in two weeks and so for example if I'm a tenth grader right now I'm a ninth grade right now because they go first and the 13th of January I think all the counselors will be in their classrooms on Monday and they will go through any of the new course offerings they'll go through a sheet that's ninth to tenth grade specific highlighting some things for them the students have all been through this a number of times and and they and then that all the information that they get is not only the students hands but goes home with the parents that night and then they get the week to make some of their choices as far as what they're going to do there's a personal touch at the end of the
130week where the counselors will scoop in and anyone does an incomplete schedule and talk with them and then one thing that we stressed with the students is just because your week is over we don't end up really spinning the schedule until mid March or late March and so that there's plenty of time for students and parents to come back and change their and change their preferences if they want and obviously even when the schedule set there's a deadline of one you can go in and change any of those classes so the information is you know a part of what we're doing this evening is getting the information I need to finish the Han Student Handbook but we try to pull that apart John and its ways you know either on smaller sheets or in presentations
131to make it more digestible for students in addition there's the individual conferences with parenting student and counselor entering freshman year and during their junior year before registration for senior classes so there's two opportunities in addition to do a personalized individual conversation about what courses are available thank you so last year at this time in front of you guys we were talking about launching a pathway Academy and one of the things that I believe that we left this meeting is that mr. Mitnick and I were going to go and take a look at the program in Pewaukee in the program and I'm Brook and we did that and we ended up as you know navigating towards or gravitating towards the Pewaukee program for a variety of reasons we entered a Memorandum of Understanding with them at
132no cost just a erred relationship and they've been helping guide us in this process Kim's been a big help Kim and I have partnered on this and also the addition of Tom Herman as the consortium director across the five schools and having him one day a week he's been instrumental in helping with some of the operational tasks around this but we entered the agreement with pakhi we we took a total of somewhere but some guidance counselor's in a total probably about 10 teachers and came back and sat in a room with three different groups of teachers and try to decide all in in high interest area for students and tried to decide what would be the first Academy that we would we would do and for a variety of reasons mostly student interest but also
133teacher passion we are starting with the Greendale high school Connect Academy for media communications and this is the the quick real quick presentation I'm going to show you is what our 11th graders saw in their academic and career planning advisories just last we or the week before break and it's a it's it was meant to be a marketing tool to get the idea into the students heads as they start to think about classes so what is the connect Academy innovative our experience is going to bind existing courses and new courses to produce a more personalized learning experience for students with a huge piece being a mentorship and real-life challenges and problems that the students are studying and coming up with solutions for in their identified area of interest in this case the media communications project
134based very collaborative hands-on experiences for students and as I said there there will be one of the goals of the program is to have a one-on-one mentor for each of the students so even a student who would like to study this content doesn't necessarily have to be a student that is for sure going to post high school training school experience where they're gonna for sure be in this career area but they're in it because they're interested in some of the experiences and skills they're going to be provided but also that mentorship which isn't isn't just going to be within the media communications field if I am someone that thinks I'm studying to be a veterinarian but I also want on this experience what we'll try to do is hook up hook them up with somebody
135with in the medical field if not a veterinarian so there's there's ways that it's a very specific to media communications content but also with the mentorship piece I think we can put things in place for students and one thing that Pewaukee told us is that waiting to see who you have in the class and then do some work one-on-one with the students as far as our post-secondary ambitions and then go out and look for some mentors for the students so that's a huge piece to this it's two hours per day all year hours two and three have been identified it will students will receive two and a half ghs credits for the work that they do the teachers that I talk before miss hütter journalism in English with Merkel art and digital productions and his
136Wagner communications and journalism are the teachers that will be instructing this connect pathway they talk to the students about what they were doing though they're creating a maintaining and I'm on publication conducting interviews public speaking armed skills learning about film and film production not just from an artistic viewpoint but also from a production viewpoint or or or how to use film video audio in in the business world and then professionally use of all social media are just a few of the the things that that were shared with students as far as what they can be doing in this class to get this done we've had I'm proposing some some new classes here for English writing for the media is a course that provide three college credits from UW Oshkosh if the student chooses to enroll
137in the cap opportunity of fundamentals of public address our college credits from UW Green Bay this would be our first affiliation with UW Green Bay up to this point we've been solely UW Oshkosh and one other reason you might say you might ask me that you know that we've had a cap cap speech class for for a while here and one of the things that that they want to do the connect program the Oshkosh and its cap requirements before the speech class was not flexible enough for the types of things that they want to do so miss Wagner worked with UW Green Bay and a new course fundamentals of public address which gave a lot more ability to do things like creating scripts and creating PSAs and things like that so that would be a
138new course for us that would also be eligible for three college credits and then introduction to film is is a three credit class from UW Green Bay you you know that we have a film class right now that's cap once again I had some limitations as far as what they would approve as far as the curriculum to get the credit from you ash gosh so we're proposing to go three W Green Bay which had a wider latitude of the curriculum could happen in that class and then digital media productions that will be a skill-based overlay of everything the students are doing and so we're creating a connect digital media productions course for students to gain a half credit in so those are the courses that the would make up to our Z for the entire
139year for the media communications connect and finally I talked them with the mentors and and one of the strengths that we heard from Pewaukee is that them as the program continues in its years just the more options for job shadows internships and things like that happen as as the program develops so this is the first year of the program and as Kim mentioned quickly before is that it with success we would be going back to student interest we would be going back to the other two sets of teachers that were sitting at that table when we chose media communications and and trying to figure out what the second Academy would be for connect so we think that it's meeting a lot of our objectives the project-based learning specialization student experiences outside of the school things
140that we're really trying to hit and week and if we get the formula right and if we get the experience right for students that we can continue to add different academies in the future right now I believe Pewaukee is up to six or seven different academies in about the nine years that they've been that they've had their Academy so I will stop their questions I'm not sure I'm following what is it what do you mean that Pewaukee has all these academies so if I was the lucky high school principal would say Pewaukee high school in sight and then there would be underneath their education or global business Academy so what they did is some we're just like we're doing right now sat in front of the board and launched their first Academy under the name
141in sight and since then about every year they've launched a new Academy under that name and the Academy is a path pathway her do it as a pathway bundle this is very exciting so with the hours two and three and there are three courses so you're choosing two out of those three no they're taking all of those and so as you'll see they'll have two and a half credit on the year in a two hour class period so that because of their integration in their project-based nature we're able to offer the content and the skills within all of those courses within that time frame so then what will be the limit is there word on the number of students then yes we were really worried about not having enough initial interest of just the juniors
142what was the number Kim was a 58 III thought 39 but maybe 58 there was way more than what we expected so we'll take a look at what our options are we do have three teachers in the room that will be there all day that the whole class period all three of them will be in the room so we'll work with them to determine what is our actual capacity given size and interactions and well those three teachers have a common prep yes yes and also with that number during the lake juniors when we went through this the teachers really encouraged us to like sign up even if we like weren't sure about it so I know a lot of people who signed up for it not knowing like completely sure if they wanted to do
143it so I think that might be one reason why the numbers really high too we're okay with 58 and having to figure out how to find space we were worried we'd be at like 15 and then that would make it very difficult to run the program and one of the things we learned is when you get that number start working with those students right away I mentioned earlier that you start to talk to them about the field interest and that's one way to get them in talking about it and as we need to start putting some mentors together for them but it also brings them to the table perhaps with their parents to to really kind of commit I just didn't sign up for it because I like miss Wagner you know now it's getting
144real and I'm going to commit to hours at my schedule to this the next year so we'll be grabbing that group of students and really making sure that these are students that are committed because the last thing we want to happen is the cap that at some number and then have six or seven drop off during the summer and one of the important things that we did was we included two half credit English courses so if they sign up for it they meet their English graduation requirement in the two-hour pathway of course as you as this kind of you know assuming all goes well and years down the line is is this gonna be stay restricted to a certain grade level or is it yes this is advice for eleventh and twelfth graders and that's
145consistent with what the community strategic planning team said around Career Pathways is that they didn't want kids entering the high school to be forced into choosing what they wanted to be when they graduate four years later that they wanted that ninth and tenth grade to be exploratory have lots of choices and options but anything that's focused specifically on a career was later so we are looking at eleventh and twelfth grade no that's great I think especially eleventh grade as it starts to kind of gain connectivity across the schools is important because you now have that opportunity to start really diving in your senior year if there's something of interest to you anything anything from the students that about the course changes or additions or deletions this is really exciting I think I'm just really impressed
146I think I wish that I would be here to see this happen but I know I'll hear about it and sounds pretty cool and I would agree that this is pretty cool stuff I think you know let's let's be thoughtful and think about how do we introduce this you know it sounds as if we had some communication with the students how do we engage with the parents you know I think they've heard bits and pieces about the strategic plan and some of the career pathways and and this is this is a natural progression but I think this is very tactical to say okay what do I what are my students do their junior and senior years now and and it looks it could look a little bit different if they would go down this this
147connect pathway and I and part of the they want to get you too far to the pollution of the marketing and the planning but there is a there'll be a schedule any student that has shown interest so far there'll be a another big meeting scheduled with more details for them because it was just a quick seven to ten minute introduction during their ACP advisory there will be that and then with other students when the students continue with their interest towards it then that information will start going home to out ahead of when the students sign up for classes from a stand point of space I know that there are some conversations on different places that this may be I think it was listed as either wrestling or the IMC so we know for sure that
148covered within the referendum that this space is will definitely be renovated there was a thought that we would develop a connect classroom downstairs but that was not in the original scope of work so as we work with the construction team around finalizing our scope of work if it's not feasible to do the renovation to the wrestling room downstairs within the budget then the team has looked and said a lot of the the needs that would be within that space would be available in the library and so we would reserve a section of the library for that course if we are not able to fit the wrestling room renovation within the budget because it was an expanded scope of work after the referendum passed and one other thing just a note of caution having worked at
149universities when everyone says that college credits transfer and I think you want to say that with a be careful on how you wear that because you do have college credit but whether or not it's actually accepted at the different institutions for the degree that the specific student wants to go into correct you've been doing some work with students on transfer ology and actually we do some of that work around the cap course as well so as you're looking at narrowing your course your university selection your college selection if you're looking at a technical school that you go in and look at the name of the course and look for how it transfers into the school that you're the schools that you're researching so so yes you're right just because you have college credit doesn't mean
150that it has it meets requirements I would say that's something that is really stressed in cap courses when I signed up for Spanish in her presentations it was repeatedly told to us make sure you contact the universities you're interested in look really do your research so that you're not um thinking that you're gonna get credit where there may not be so that's that's fantastic I know that that was something that was not often said when I was working with students that were coming into the university as I worked at and especially not to their parents all right so thank you for this presentation Steve like we said this will be coming back at our next board meeting for approval so that the changes can be updated and the course handbooks that will be coming out
151in in the after the beginning of the year thank you all right thank you all right next item on the agenda we're moving onto agenda item 11 where we Kim will lead us through a book discussion on chapters 5 & 6 or the book that we've been reading it the biased is the name of the book yes so this month we read chapters 5 & 6 how free people think and the scary monster and those questions to guide our discussion as we as we talk so the first question that we'll be looking at is what resonated with you in these two chapters is there something that really stuck with you the one student that was from the prison setting who couldn't believe that somebody spent all this time on his paper and that had that
152that had never happened before it got me thinking that's a reminder of why we're all in this room today and every every board meeting to make sure that we're giving students the attention they need for their future so I thought that was a pretty pretty powerful moment yes one or page 125 I highlighted that circle that started and then highlighted the word cares next to because I think there's something to really be said about you know showcasing that you actually care about your students and how important that is regardless of where they are background you know so on and so forth so I was pretty awesome too to see that room and come delight agree what struck me was the first chapter how free people think just the title alone I guess thinking about her
153experiences that she had and realizing that people look at freedom in different ways and may take it for granted you know just her experience even getting pulled over I thought that was you know kind of telling as far as you know I don't experience those same kinds of things and so I just thought that the chapter alone really needs to make a person think about you know how we view freedom and how freedom is maybe not the same for everyone she talks about how you know in some page 122 classroom became a sheltered space for those in a prison where they're divided ethnically which surprised her and surprised me I know this particular thing was a safe space for those prisoners who wanted to talk about and write or take a class and made me
154think about education should be that safe space for kids to be able to come and learn and talk about and think and be able to express themselves another another there's a couple other things that kind of struck me I'm going to just reinforce some things I think we're doing really well in Greendale I need to continue to do but in Chapter or page 115 there was a highlight around the it was actually in reference to students that were growing up without essentially father figures but it talked about the lack of social and economical resources and I think all the work that we're doing around social-emotional learning the things I think even that we reiterated today as our fourth graders were coming in if we don't have that kind of social emotional learning piece set up
155straight it provides a barrier for academic learning and so how do we make sure that we're focused on the whole student and not just part of the student that was something I think is really important in general and then the other part that was I think just reinforcing again and something that wasn't necessary surprising or shocking but I think is easy to dismiss is this idea of the vicious cycle that was referenced and I think that's something that is a reality right I mean depending on if something happens and you're punished because of that it is a lot harder to kind of circle back up and she had a line that she used in here around this revolving door between freedom and you know fill in the blank and in one case it was prison
156but other case it was just kind of the getting in trouble and kind of circling in and how do you kind of circle out of that and you've kind of created that once you're in that vicious cycle it's really hard to get out of it something that I really took away from these two chapters is just thinking about all of my teachers that I have seen care about students academically and they show that every single day but just getting teachers to care about students like the whole student and their social emotional learning and making students feel comfortable enough in the classroom regardless of their race I think that's just the thing that was constantly in my brain like what can we do to grow that so that was just my big thing that I took
157away from I think to add on to that I know one of the questions we talked about how do we apply this to the educational environment and so when we look at the traffic stop situation and they use the statistics that twenty-eight percent of Oakland is black but sixty-one percent of those that are arrested and so you identify these patterns and so those things that we're looking for we will find and so how are we setting our patterns and I think that's something that students are looking for it do my in a pattern where adults are always looking for the positive and what I'm doing and so I thought we saw tremendous examples of that with Canterbury what they're doing with Awards on the bus incorporating other adults into looking for the good and all
158of our students what we saw with Highland View and what they're doing with positive games and having ambassadors and what we're doing with sources of strength that were constantly focusing on that and I think that's why we have a lot of community partners that are involved with our Coalition for diversity and equity and thinking about that plan and the strategies that change our focus how do we see all these positives and our students and create that culture for everyone that resonated with me and then also even thinking about as she was doing the research on how police officers talked to people that there was actually became a predictive nature to how they the police officer talked to the person whether the person stopped was black or white or of another race and that idea that
159which we when we're treated to be a certain way the response is expected and so regardless of the race of the police officer those interactions were the same and she talked about her own in her own experience the police officer who stopped her was black but he treated her with a less in or less respectful way than what she was seeing in the research around how white people who are stopped so as we think about translating that into the educational setting as much as we're looking for the positive that we are offering everyone and in looking for the positive saying things in a way that's respectful and inviting for all of our students and not differentiating on the basis of race and because that's an implicit bias that's something that we need to actively train
160for which is what we're doing with with some of our anti racism training and work that we've been doing which was included in the October 24th and we're continuing to do through our schools and our equity teams so the village and all the people that you highlighted before I think that's really important is that all stakeholders are getting involved in this and not not just a group here there that every single one of us has a responsibility to be welcoming yeah at that point in the book really stood out to me too and I think it's really interesting to see like all the biases that people have and really like finding ways to like break that and I think that that's like really good to continue working on within our school there was a there's
161a what is it chapter six was the second chapter that was you know talked about the dehumanizing kind of nature of some of this work but it was actually intriguing that to me it kind of connected back to chapter five when she was talking about how she was actually teaching in the prison for that first time and then a student stood up and walked towards her and this feeling that she had and kind of you know she's like what do you do well you know how do you react to turned out he was going to use the restroom and that was probably a pretty common thing that would would happen but her bias kind of clicked in immediately and she realized that and she ended chapter six with a statement that says our brains our
162minds are molded and remoulded by our experiences and our environments we have the power to change our ways and thinking to scrub away the residue and ancient demons which I thought was kind of an intriguing way to kind of circle back on that to say we all I mean none of us are perfect we know that things are gonna happen we're all gonna make mistakes we're all going to have feelings that aren't you know that are just kind of ingrained in us from whatever backgrounds we have and so knowing that and addressing it and stepping up to it and owning it I think is something that's so important if we're gonna make make change and I think there's a lot that I've seen through some of the work that the students are doing which gives
163me great hope you know in addition to obviously all the work that's happening across the community but I think at the end of the day it you know if the students if it's not resonating with you it's all for naught it has to be something that you own that you realize that you are in the driver's seat and that you are empowered to kind of take action on so thank you to all of you and all the work that I know you put into to this particular any further discussion it's good conversation thank you all right then we will read the next couple of chapters at our second our board meeting in January yes all right then we are at the end of our agenda any additional comments from visitors this evening all right seeing
164none we are going to go into closed session to discuss salaries review compensation for our administrative staff so can I have a motion to go into closed session I move we go into closed session under wisconsin statute 19.8 v 1c and the principles conference room immediately following the meeting for the purpose of considering employment promotion compensation or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the government governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibilities specifically to review compensation for non teachers a motion a second to go into closed session any further discussion then I call for a roll call vote yes yes yes yes and I am yes motion carries we are adjourned and we will be back in two weeks for our next board meeting and we will not be returning to open session
165correct