001good evening okay goody it good evening ladies and gentlemen we're gonna go ahead and start the bunny rabbit is commanding the attention of the room I'd like to call the October 4th 2017 regular meeting of the board of the Brookfield Board of Education to order and everybody please join me in rising for the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag okay we have we have six regular members of our board here mr. shaker is not with us and I haven't heard from him this evening although it's a busy time of the year for him I know so hopefully he'll join us and I in process so first up is the student spotlight for Arbuckle very good school so mr. Brummel let you do some opening remarks as usual we have but not only
002our student special guests tonight but there is a few I want to say hedgy the hedgehog and clay the bunny are here with us from mrs. hackers class maybe mrs. diamond you could introduce the students in mrs. Hacket good evening everyone I am very happy to share that we have miss Hackett here with her motivational I guess fluency strategy that she's going to share with you today with three students here from her class and they're going to describe to you how they're using their class pets in order to help them improve their fluency they're try to balance this out nicely Oh No [Music] okay how do you ready [Music] got it don't let him chew okay thank you for having us here tonight I'm Audrianna Hackett I'm a second grade teacher at huckleberry these are
003my baby students Caruso and Darla Adams and Conner Sanford and they're here to help us with their families tonight um we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce our reading companions to you all tonight this is clay our eating rabbit and this is hedgy our hedgehog in area focus at huckleberry has been reading fluency and as educators we know that the research tells us that repeat readings increases fluency so one of the challenges of the teachers we face our hesitant readers a child may be a hesitant reader for a variety of reasons and needs and it's our responsibility as educators to think outside the box of how to get them motivated to actually read sometimes children just are uncomfortable reading out loud because for whatever reason they have they're just not comfortable doing it in
0042013 huckleberry began having a D the reading dog to visit our school on one occasion I took the opportunity to speak to Joel a DS handler and he really talked to me about the benefits of animals and having them in the classroom he couldn't say enough about positive effects that he saw when the children opened up and came in to read he said it was absolutely amazing so I began doing some research on it and the American Humane Society actually did a great study and showed the correlation between student engagement and the growth that students made with having animals in the classroom this was the most conclusive and really the most in-depth study that was conducted and Annie in our school was wonderful but unfortunately she only services a small population of our school so
005I wanted to kind of open it up to more students to give them that opportunity to read so thankfully my administrators were wonderful enough to support my endeavors because it was a long usual the two animals that we find found that we're the perfect match for the classroom was hedgy a fantastic Brookfield family actually donated her to the classroom they got her from a breeder in Connecticut she's a perfect classroom pet all the time because she is no fur no feathers no hair she doesn't smell the only thing is is Connor Latoya but he fries and the way this works is the each week we would get in with home and the students all freshen to see the dispersion is part and when they come in when of you some of the matters are very
006hesitant because you're human but when an animal is a completely different story they come the mode and today Mille et shooting ca9 in the minor and yeah they have the opportunity to perform and that is change around the school so they come in and they usually that'll really opportunities some abilities and what we see in is a great turnout so thank you well I wanted to demonstrate to you how we use them so these [Music] what do you gain from it so we're bunnies hawk really far when they are having this is called begging when they lay on their side it's called dead bunny way I like to read to them either I practice over and over again are you really cute but Harmony's for comes in fall and spring it is this hole okay
007I like you said I'm dependable when I are scared around so today I have yeah Hagen versa oh you know I think this is wonderful that you're doing it in the classroom there are disowning really Studies on it yes thank you in the audience okay moving on a little long again so bad we just arrived so [Music] we have leave you won so congratulations team thank you carrying state state law mr. Harding I'm gonna turn this so just appealed and the governor week so we know and with to be held and will be done and they don't remain intact without an override it still remains open that it could be overwritten at some point and having a budget in place that forms local municipalities I think over time will pressure a lot of legislators to
008vote for that veto override it if God forbid wearing it still in this position we sure now the one thing that was discussed was the majority leader obviously there was a lot of authority and power in the house mentioned about possibly vote voting on and not necessarily a full budget but a revenue budget and so to explain it is that the revenue numbers the revenue that the budget that passed had and the alternative budget from majority the majority in the house is the same exact revenue number so what his comments were was that what we have an agreement and in its in lieu of the executive order we can vote on a revenue number which is obviously a lot more revenue that would receive prior which would allow the governor to spend more but the
009problem was with in the absence of a budget which specifically outlined the expenses and what areas we wanted the money to go to the governor would still have the authority to run the state on executive order he'd have more money to decide where to go with it but he would still decide that that's not an option for us because even in the governor's quote-unquote compromise budget the town would get nothing in EECS funding so that's not an alternative we need we need an alternative that specifically addresses ECS and specifically fully funds to schools that's what we I mean evidently we're supposed to go up next week to address this further and obviously at that time I'll have another a sense of when you were gonna convene again oh yeah it's likely to be next week
010and it should be tomorrow it should be right now it should be yesterday this should have been done months ago but unfortunately that that's the update for now okay thank you see how wide it is this red initiative big yet it's pretty pretty sizable at the moment yeah all right so moving on with the superintendent's report just a brief update on the 1819 budget process just a status update for everyone yesterday we had our monthly principals meeting and Ken and I went through the process with principals and so they're working with their teams and aligning priorities for the coming year can't believe it it's beginning of October when we talk about the 1819 budget we just started school as we do this every year I still can't believe it but aligning our priorities starting with
011principals and their teams we will look at priorities and assumptions next week at the BNF meeting business and Facilities Committee bring those priorities in sumption to the full board at the at our next board meeting in two weeks and have that discussion about where we're going to head in our planning and I'd like to just remind you know the board our audience and the folks at home that the budget really is about our educational priorities as we talk money in dollars but it's about our educational priorities and it's the financial plan to get to the mean you know it's our means to to our goals so we always need to keep that in mind about how we're gonna educate our students I wanted to mention if any people haven't had a chance if you go
012to news times but field high school was featured in the news times both in the hardcopy as well as online with the major investment that the the board and the community is made in the world language lab and there was a great story on the world language lab posted last night in today's paper so if you don't have a chance you having that chance please go take a look at that it was just great opening the paper up and seeing that splashed all over the front page just the smiles on our students faces was just great in a lowly Porsche one of our priorities we're looking forward whiskey and doing the same very similar thing so I'm just letting everybody know that something we would love to have an opportunity to have the board experience
013this investment and I'd like to be able to invite the Board of Finance who approved it should come as well mr. bland is certainly would be open to that we've talked to mrs. Holly the new world language email Department share about it as well and she's happy to host and bring people through and that kind of thing why don't you float out some dates yes let's see if we can get people and find a date that works we're happy to show it off absolutely another piece that was in the paper we put a pressure I put a press release out yesterday in the news times and today there was a piece on our move forward with the ruler tool and emotional intelligence dr. ruby was accepted as a fellow in their changemaker program and there
014is there's a lot over the next ten months that she's going to be doing training in and working with our community she's are connecting some of our parents for kind of major parent project in the community under the guise of emotional intelligence in addition to that Rothfeld Education Foundation yesterday fully funded the grant application for whiskey in our middle school to begin the training with their staff on the roller tool and the the Yale emotional intelligence work so we're really excited about that in talking with dr. sarah and mrs. diamond the folks at the the faculty at both schools elementary schools is actually really excited about this possible opportunity and are very interested in talking to some of the functional skin here and how the trainings going and likely pursuing it in those schools as
015well at this time so we're really really excited about the the movement going forward in addition to that just so the board knows I actually as part of the training that I was a part of with dr. Cipolla dr. Ruby and mr. retina this summer superintendents who participate are actually a part of a coaching program so I'll have a personal coach who comes in about six different sessions over the course of the year to kind of work on systematically what the rollout should look like and strategy moving forward to make sure it really is implemented with fidelity eventually in all the schools so we're pretty excited about it so that's going on and then just two more updates that I didn't include in the memo just a reminder that October 6 which is this Friday
016there's no school for the students we have professional development day for our teachers and it's also a long weekend I'm sure Cole I'll get the and then I'd like to just briefly introduce Tracy Kelsey who was here Tracy I wasn't ready for that Lisa Tracy is the principal of another center school in Goshen Connecticut and she is at Central Connecticut as a graduate student working on her superintendent certification so she's doing some internship ours would be so there was some shadowing and attending some meetings and that kind of thing so I want to just say hello and welcome to Tracy and that is all I have unless anybody has questions I just wanted to tag on to the budget process status and it's never too early to say that we are going to have a
017budget roundtable open to the public is November 15th I believe it'll be at 6 o'clock directly prior to our Board of Ed meeting and this is open to anyone in the community just to come and give what they feel the budget priorities should be and just to have a discussion ongoing with the budget all set alright thank you so much huh alright so next up our subcommittee reports policy Steve you want a report on policy from September 20 yeah we we went over maximum policy prior to it being approved at night and we have a few policies to address in the 9,000 policy series that had some issues with redundancies etc and I think we worked to address those so we'll be doing that tonight okay good okay any questions for Steve that's where we'll
018be I see that on the agenda as we go through and you want to give an update on the strategic facility steering committee on what's what's the latest news and I'd love to and you're not stopping out my my happiness here there you go right for me first I want to apologize for missing the two last meetings I had an injury from walking into a building and I had to have knee surgery so thank you Paul and thank you to Bob who read out loud my report on our committee I appreciate your help that being said we had interviews on September 12th we interviewed for architectural firms the purpose as you know keep saying this but to remind everybody of meeting with reviewing and interviewing was there going to take a comprehensive look at all
019four schools they're going to look at the town great the town in its totality they're going to look at how many children are coming in the population they look at the whole ball of wax concerning our four schools and the community so it was very important that we got these interviews right we interviewed three firms fryer silver Petrocelli and Tecton the interviews were fabulous everyone did a great job we met with we met together as a commission and we had a unanimous decision to go forward with one of the firm's we really thought that this firm would represent Brookfield correctly and in line with our vision and what we would like to see done in the school system in the town in the community and we wanted someone that was invested as we are in
020the community and we believe we found that so the past few weeks what we've been doing is as you know they usually give you recommendations and references to follow up on we've done that but we also took it a step further thank you to Superintendent Burrell or dr. Brill and Jerry gay they both really really did extensive checks into their qualifications what they did and did speak to every single entity that they listed as their recommendations I'm happy to report tonight I just got the information tonight that the firm that the Commission did like came out to be fabulous there were no marks on this firm at all and that's of course what we want because we want to represent our schools our children our community to to the best of our ability and as
021a commission we want things to run smoothly without any hiccups so we have actually chosen the firm of tectum they have done like I said a fabulous job the only question now and now you can steal my thunder is what do I do now because I need to figure out how to get the money to put these people on board and we need to be able to find we're just thrilled with this farm by the way and I really really think they're gonna do an excellent job for for Brookfield so just one one aside so when we spoke when mr. Burrell and I spoke to the Board of Finance we actually told them that not only are we facing some reductions to these yes funding and who gave them that stepwise reduction possibilities that got
022increasingly difficult we told them we also needed to fit in the funding for this so they all heard that and I will be meeting again next week with the Board of Finance and with mr. Dunn the first select mr. Dunn's going to actually lay out a proposal to the board of a preliminary proposal on how he would resolve if we got the worst case and he briefly spoke at the board of the Board of Selectmen meeting this week that I attended and he says he's trying to do it with as little reduction on the school side as he can right he's dealing with the contingencies dealing with the fund balance and we want haven't seen that in John I don't know if you've seen it or not actually he talked today okay grace and but
023we need to make sure we fit this thing into that dimension right and if you could talk to him about sure that the need to make sure that fits in there I mean I have excellent members on on are we ready they're they're fabulous and we are we have picked up a lot of steam and we want to keep rolling with this you know we we understand it and we commiserate with with the frustration that a lot of people are feeling HHS is a hot topic right now so we have finally gotten to this point so what should I do with my committee now we're not identity gotta get the money lined up and we gotta get that contract with a vendor watch okay so how do I help you I think you should come
024to the port in finance absolutely should go to the Board of Finance meeting at this coming weekend because we'll be having that discussion okay so I'm not at the stage but I think you want to be there so we could bring you to the table and so I'm going to the Board of Finance meeting next Thursday and I'm going to plea for the money Wednesday Wednesday thank you and Thursday 2:00 with me be by the way I saw how bringing a consultant in to help with a building project worked in practice because the library board actually brought in their consultant to present their preliminary view of the conservative view of what a library might look like and it is very helpful to have a professional they are talking about what space what what needs are
025because it helps the board be supportive and not just selling right it was it brings a professional flavor to it and I was very I was actually looking at it from the point of view of being very glad we're bringing a new I think you're really gonna like them I think the whole board is going to be impressed with them okay yes okay well we had a chance to see them as they progress or will so we'll have an opportunity once we get going set a schedule on how and they will come to see I think we ought to have an ongoing visible very visible report of what's happening it was a big draw on their presentation eyes how they engage the community in 2008 absolutely and and that's again one of the reasons why
026we chose them okay excellent any questions parents a good work okay excellent I'm feeling like old my committee members because they have been fabulous excellent okay next up is the consent agenda um we actually have no items on consent there you go I suggest just before we go to the policies which can may be a little lengthy with it's considering a number of them there's anybody in the new business items particularly a or C that are your woman would you all like to move those for the a will be presented by mister boland de who will be here for the duration of the meeting but we if if we would like we could if mrs. burns is ready mrs. burns why don't you come to the podium laughs item see I make a motion to
027move item I had a fourth item 14c to the current place on the meeting agenda any discussion all right all right all right mrs. burns please floor is yours can I make the motion on this first oh yes please recommend a motion that the board hear our presentation and approve the sixth eighth grade teachers college reading units a study is presented by whisk in your middle school curriculum resource teacher agonists second all right thank you very much and good evening to everyone on the board I want to thank you first of all for allowing me to have this opportunity to present the teacher's college reading units for grades 6 to 8 we definitely are looking for your consideration to have them adopted as a curricular tool at risk in your middle school at this point
028in time there was a cake presentation recently that I attended along with dr. Ruby where I talked about how useful these units could be to our teachers and what I'd like to do if you don't mind is just highlight three of the bullet points that are on the back of the handout for you the very first bullet point talks about the immense amount of research that Teachers College Columbia University does when they prepare any of their materials that they send out to teachers for a professional reference infer professional work in classrooms so there are three big elements that are involved here number one is that the reading units are ground giving students time to read obviously they want to practice their skill in order to get better at it so that's one aspect adolescents really
029need to have reading that is relevant to them and we will also want to offer them choice so that was another aspect and the final aspect is if you look through the units I do have a couple of the books with me this evening as well you'll notice that they are verbose that there is a lot of material in there that provides the teachers background so really what you're doing is fostering expert instruction in the classrooms as well the second bullet point deals with the fact that currently at risk in your middle school in grade 6 to 8 we have as a curricular tool the writing units of study these units would obviously complement those units and in some cases they would enhance the work that we're doing and trying to make the reading and
030writing connections with our students as well and the third bullet point that I want to point out is the fourth one down and it talks there about the immense amount of resources that are available to teachers and to parents for teachers College there is a huge website that is listed on the front of the handout for you if you want to go in and look at that but for teachers there are videos available there are a lot of resources in terms of assessments there are text sets of books that are appropriate for students to be reading there is a lot of activity on Facebook they are also Twitter chats every Wednesday night I've attended several of those so they are always sharing always updating and we just feel at this point in time that it
031would be a very nice addition to the other materials that we have at the middle school I certainly would encourage any of the board members if you have any questions I know there were a number of people sitting on the board from the Cape committee who were there that evening asked some really great and thoughtful questions or if you would like to you know talk to me at any point I'm certainly available and would be happy to speak to any of you that's it okay thank you yeah say why did you stay up there in case this question so let me start by asking the Cape committee what you're you had a more detailed review of this what yeah it was very impressive and I'm like we'd like you to make sure that people understand
032that this is not a new reading program that this is a tool and a guide but no it was very informative and it made a lot of sense it was just really interesting and I think it's going to really engage the students because it's it's it gives them more responsibility and and and it's just more challenging for them and I was very impressed and I certainly agree with the point that you're making which is a very important one this is a resource this is not something that we have an intention of giving a teacher oh man you all and saying okay you're going to start with day one you know and start reading the script or anything like that as I mentioned it really is a lot of information for teachers to provide the background
033that they need we're dealing with an adolescent population so we want to make sure that motivation and engagement are really high on our priority list and you know what we have here is a resource that would enable us to do that so and as a reminder the board did approve last year the units of study for reading K through 5 so this is kind of a continuation of that so it is will be greater vertical alignment along the schools it is going if it is approved this evening it would be approved almost as a pilot study for this year with the intention of integrating into it into the new curriculum that is currently being written up right now and it is aligned to the standards okay try out some of the lessons just to see
034how the sequence goes and see what the reaction is in terms of our students to be able to work with them and get some feedback from them as well so what is the cost of this and is it in our budget there are three books available there is a main guide and then there are two units that are spiral-bound three additional units are coming out either in late December or the beginning of January I have some of these because I did budget for these materials so this is basically what you're looking at is is already available at the middle school have not handed them out I'm actually going through and trying to do some research myself before I put them in teacher's hands and these are a hundred dollars for one of the kids so
035I would certainly like to make sure that all of our teachers in grades six to eight eventually end up with with a kid in their classroom and then when the other units become available I'm assuming that those are going to be about the same price I'm assuming that they will be bundled I don't have that information yet because it simply hasn't been released but I'm assuming it would be about in the same neighborhood so okay and did we go through a process for selecting looking at alternatives or did we just go right to this and say this is the one because it's an extension of what we have it's a very good question the reason that we brought these for your consideration is because they really do align with the other curricular tools that we
036have from Teachers College and what we wanted to do is to make sure because there are many connections that are made between reading and writing intentionally on the part of the writers of these these tools so what we wanted to do is to make sure that what we were doing was really offering our students the best in making sure that we were making those connections for them I know that before the initial adoption was done there have been a lot of programs that have been available in Newtown and and curriculum has also been written by a lot of our teachers in our buildings so I I know that resources were looked at it there that point in time but again this was going to be in addition to or actually a complement to what we
037already have on board trying to make sure that what we were doing is really ensuring that our students have a complete literacy education so so how many people reviewed this before this recommendation came forward in terms of the teachers in the school or parents or anything otherwise they just come up through directly through Cape and the curriculum team I was going to say I don't know if you want to talk about the original adoption of the teacher's college writing units or the reading units when we came to Cape because we needed to have the adoption of the k5 units we knew that the six eight units were going to be a variable point so that was kind of on our radar but we did not look at anything else okay all right [Music] you said
038this is a resource it's not a curriculum it's a resource how are we ensuring teachers are usually utilizing the resource you know the way should be implemented okay there are a couple of ways that we're doing that currently with the writing units and I'm assuming that what we're doing with the writing units will certainly carry over with the reading units I've been doing a lot of professional development around Teachers College in terms of indoctrinating the teachers to a workshop model I've worked with the fifth grade because they already have reading units we have conversations in our building in terms of all grades five to eight the literacy to staffs get you know gets together and has discussions about how things are going how the pacing is going we use these resources to create pacing guides
039for ourselves so that we know how much time to devote to different topics and then what we try to do is look at our data so that we understand where our students are and we pick and choose lessons from these books that we know will cater to developing our students further as either writers or readers in the building I mentioned a lot of the resources that are on the teacher's college website as a matter of fact on you heard earlier that there's a professional development day scheduled for this Friday one of the things that I'm doing with the staff at the middle school is we are utilizing some of the videos that are right on the site that are free there are hour long videos that give you an in-depth look into the writing units
040so even though there's been some professional development there's always the need for you know listening to things again just to make sure that it's really sinking in this is only our second year of implementation at the middle school with these units but there are also a lot of other points that the staff developers at Teachers College make so that it goes a little bit more in-depth and they have an opportunity to view those as well so I think there are a number of ways that the implementation would you know would be happening as well as you know having teachers try out some lessons take a sequence of lessons and those in the classroom and get some feedback you know be reflective of themselves and certainly get some feedback from the students the k5 units last
041year and we review them now you know after a year at sea yeah you see over any of them you know before moving on with the 6-8 I can tell you that I have had conversations several of them with the teachers in our building I always encourage them to be reflective teachers and take notes we have had to make some adjustments in terms of different units rolling out at different points in time part of that is due to resources and part of that is due to the time that we have in the middle school remember we also did roll out the writing units in grades 6 to 8 last year in terms of that roll out what I had asked the teachers to do was to take on especially in grades 6 to 8 to
042take where we only have one core I'm sure you remember the way that the schedule works so we've got one literacy block of about 48 minutes this year and last year we basically had the same thing in those grade levels so what I asked the teachers to do was to do two writing units at that point in time one of which had to be argument that obviously speaks to the district strategic coherence plan and we wanted in a very high leverage skills so that's one of the reasons that we picked that and then they could choose from doing either the narrative unit or the informational writing unit at those levels with 5th grade what we did was again being reflective having lots of conversations a lot of team planning a lot of making decisions based
043upon what they were seeing that the kids coming from huckleberry were already able to do and then some of the things that they felt they needed to spend some more time with so there was that flexibility in terms of the give-and-take but we feel overall I hope I can talk for my staff you guys are that these are units that they feel truly address the needs that our children have we are still in the process of trying to become and build our capacity and become more expert at at working through them but again last year was trying to become familiar with them you know trying to understand the workshop philosophy and I think it was a very successful effort especially in grade five so that's why I think we're really excited about six to eight
044reading addition if if that gets approved by how did we gauge its effectiveness today just by verbal communication by verbal communication by you know internal assessments that were going on in our building yes absolutely so the assessments or an assessment seemed to the students or assessments that educators provided in response to the project they were assessments that we had in the building in terms of some of the things that were suggested with Teachers College and I'll give you an example of something to make it a little bit more concrete there are times where students are asked to record their thinking in a reading notebook for example and what we're trying to stay away from and what I really encourage to teachers to do is to not every night ask your student okay you've read chapter
045one for example write a summary and then the next night read chapter two and write a summary what we really liked about the teacher's college units is the fact that they go in into thinking from a very different angle so there might be a student who's reading notebook would track a character for example and track the different emotions of that character track the different interactions that that character has with other minor characters in a book for example so it's not just writing a summary you might talk at a higher level one of the lessons that's in here talks a little bit about the pressure so it's not just a summary not just that really service kind of thinking but it's allowing our students to really have an in-depth standing of you know what's going on
046in any particular text and they also encourage using digital text as well so it's not just having necessarily a book into child's hands so these were all things that we had conversations with kids about we looked at how they were doing in terms of their reading I can tell you that our fifth grade last year where we have both of reading and writing units that was the grade level in our building that Chuck I can't remember the numbers from secreting our library media specialists but by far the most books were checked out of the library from our fifth graders so it really was very encouraging for our students to be reading and they were able to share you know in their notebooks with their teachers with their peers their experiences readers so Nepal does that
047answer your question what I would say mr. checker is that um after I do the district implementation plan report each principal will report on their specific student data so I think there's a comprehension assessments that they did local in-house ones as well as specific skill base that mr. Rindell be going over I just have another question what school systems around us are also using this technique I was just on the website looking and it only talks about New York City teachers colleges so school systems help you I'm sure there are a number of systems in Connecticut that use it there are a number of systems down in lower Fairfield County that use it that actually bring people from Teachers College to work as staff developers with them I have a list in my office I
048really I did not bring that with me but there are also a number of schools upstate you know Connecticut as well that use you know around in our area in our Dirk I know Danbury does for example Southbury does as well which is region 15 I know that and do we have any data reports from and I believe it from them does as well I know that on the Teachers College website there is a research tab and they have efficacy data that is posted there from all of the schools that they work in I can tell you that it's not just Connecticut or not just New York this is really an international organized they have teachers from all over the world there and all over the United States it's quite the phenomenon that has really
049caught on yeah and I'm thinking along the same way as Paul is I'd like to see where we stand from last year before extending it is that where you are Paul yeah I'd like to see how successful it was or not successful and well my hope would be that if our success that they're bringing it forward because you know that they want me to I think part of it you have to remember though is it's owned in one year that we that we've implemented this and we talk all the time about the coherence and you know across the board and our new math programs that we have this was just another way to continue that coherence with through the k5 we have k-8 the writing units are ready so that was the reason why that
050you said was it you know I came over they would select yes or selection process I mean it was more about we were trying to keep that coherence because again they're having this workshop reuse writers workshop K through five so our the idea behind it was that like dr. Ruby said was to continue that k2 rate and they how fresh are these these middle school curriculum materials mber so we were very excited obviously to learn about the possibility of these so when you answer these question about other school districts using it and all the data on the website that couldn't be about these pieces that have been out there yes in it I can tell you that I looked at it certainly and it's very very positive I mean I can't quote statistics off the
051top of my head but but it's been very positive they definitely shown some really great growth trends okay and I didn't review the data and I did visit the website of the past couple of days after I saw this on the agenda you know again it looks wonderful I don't know that anybody was on a post with poor reviews or that data that shows that the district didn't do well on it on their website but you know all in all it did look like a very well structured program Jerkins but again we need to know that is the right there for our kids and I guess that that was more of the line of my question that sure I think that'll take obviously the day that I updated later on it's about the Teachers College
052rubric the writing rubric that we've used our scores are not as high as we would like them to be obviously but again this is the first year that she just getting used to the Teachers College the the reason Writers Workshop they should be the Writers Workshop is brand new today so it's getting used to that along with you know the assessment things like that and it use of the rubric so focus my last question would be directed toward dr. Ruby you're quite welcome what's your general feeling I'm a sermon being you know given your role in the district this has been better past you know positive well let me tell you how this unfolded we talked about the advent of the production of the 6-8 materials and Teachers College like any publishing company they're not
053really a company themselves but they work hand in glove with Hyneman and the information as I'm sure all of you who've been in any professional business something's coming out something's coming out and it doesn't come out and then we said that we would look at these materials when they came out you know order a set because they're the teacher's college materials generally are not that expensive relative to buying like a core reading program or a core math program something so they hadn't come out by the end of the year and I to be perfectly frank first found out that they had been purchased when I went to whisk in air in September and so that's why we came to Cape with them because we needed to examine them and the term pilot that I think
054beauty is Collette the pilot concept is truly what is going to happen with these materials because we are in the midst of revising curriculum we spent time this June with Murray Alcock learning you know how to develop a curriculum that's aligned to the standards and build our assessment and we're doing that k12 in all of our the core for right now and visit and health and so since these materials were purchased we're looking at the bundling of the standards that we've done across the school year and some of you were at some of the PD and taking what's in Teachers College so that the students who are learning workshop model are going to be workshop model throughout their entire middle school ela curriculum and infusing what's in those teachers college units into the curriculum that
055we're developing because it's not a curriculum we're developing a curriculum so that's where I stand I have not personally I have to be honest seeing the materials because they just came they were just published what and when I went to the school one day they were there that's my fault I'll take full responsibility for that it was something that since we had been doing it kt5 it was in our building that I was under the assumption that that was our the next step we were doing so I was wondering but I budgeted for it and whatnot the one set if you want to say just got to look at it to be able to look it does it doesn't surprise me that we would buy a set to go look at yeah we're talking tonight
056about adopting it right so that I think there's a big step between buying a set to evaluate by the old I'm sure there's more than one set but it's very difficult to evaluate something like no no I got that that doesn't bother me at all yeah yeah so this is it's truly I think a keyword that was stated by him as a storm is pilot and we're not we're not going off the path that we were on as at the end of the school year in terms of revising curriculum and we'll be examining these materials to see how they can be woven into the year-long context of standards that we created in the summer for each of the grade levels to develop the curriculum which we're working on as we go through the year so
057it's not it's I said we needed to come to Cape to let them know these materials were in the school district and then we needed to take explain how they were going to be used and then brought to the board because we're in a position that I said I really don't feel comfortable having materials in the school that are used for teaching our curriculum if it hasn't been brought to the board through Cape twice I've heard the word pilot use it's not the way the motion reads I know I was absolutely reading the motion as well so I will accept no piece of it so I told Colet since you read the motion you would be then need to be the amend only just make sure that the Cape when you guys reviewed it reviewed
058it in the concept of all pilot and if you guys I don't know if you remember the when I gave the the committee review last time I did emphasize that as well yeah it was just used for a pilot with the intention if it does is successful integrating it into you know the standard based curriculum that's being revised and we won't be buying any more units until we have one set and we review it and see how it fits into the context of what we're doing because just so you know I don't expect everybody to know when we talk about Teachers College at workshop Teachers College uses workshop workshop is a framework no person could use with does use workshop Rahil uses workshop it isn't the workshop concept is in Teachers College they've just used
059it for 30 years so we could use the materials that are in these rather cost-effective materials to build our curriculum we can also use other materials and other books I think Agee spoke to a really good point that these are adolescents they need to have engaging texts and that's one of the reasons why we had originally in our budget for this year building classroom libraries because we need to have in the schools the types of books that fit the the topics and themes and aligned with the standards but that kids are going to gravitate you because reading no matter whether you're a good reader or not reading this isn't something that is top on kids hit list so - there is there are so many more engaging things that they see them is more engaging
060so what we want to do is try to set a fire in these kids while we're teaching to the standards and so I think I think I you said it when she was talking - it's not a program it's it's a tool and so we have to examine the tool and see how it fits in that's not you know hook line and sinker what we're going to be teaching and when we have our curriculum developed so so I think a pilot implement move to amend the motion to read that the board here presentation and approved the sixth eighth grade teachers college reading units of study for a pilot program of the year 2017 2018 as presented by with you know school curriculum resource teacher Eddie burns yes so is that so is everybody I'd like
061to take her all in favor of the amendment to the motion and then we'll hold on the motion okay any further discussion on the amended motion just quick question in your committee we I said you really spent about 45 minutes discussing Rosa and Harry and myself and we um we looked through everything we looked through the recommended reading text that they used for it the rationale was good we thought it was a worthwhile tool to be used as a pilot this year great and that's why we have your committee okay any other questions okay all in favor of approving the amended motion please say hi hi any opposed all right thank you thank you very much thank you all right so we're back to the regular agenda we'll run old business on by loss so
062that do you want to do these individually or do you want to just like one motion for all them that all just the first reading correct I thought deletion on top of this elimination there's five if we if we do it one at a time just because I think there's there's even something in here that I want okay you neighbor Florence the whole do what if I saw an item a bylaw number 93 twenty five point four three recommend a motion that the board approved bylaw number ninety three twenty five point four three electronic participation for first reading as recommended by the policy subcommittee Steve's you what I want yep disco I'll let you do brief discussion agent Paul second so just a brief discussion this was it memory serves me right there was a
063few policies with the great resources we have here in the board found similar redundancies that we need to address and they were absolutely absolutely redundancies so it was a good thing that we addressed them the first one here is this policy bylaw number nine three to five point four three what this just is electronic participation in meetings there was a redundant policy which is ninety three twenty one be it was ninety three twenty one subsection B of ninety three twenty one which also addresses electronic communications after discussion with the policy board we felt that the ninety three twenty five point 43 was a more up-to-date and also provided a little more flexibility in regards to the board's discretion to to make electronic communication work at meetings and therefore we're recommending that to move forward and
064were the leading ninety three twenty one which we'll get to in a second just ninety three twenty one be yes yeah ninety three twenty one a is still going to remain okay okay so and this one is otherwise unchanged from is this our existing policy or is this the issue our existing problem this is our existing yes it was updated in 2008 Pro to 2011 okay good this was something that's after my birthday all right so the motion is to emotions to accept this for a first reading which would mean we would vote on it in our member meeting so all in favor of the motion move forward next one is pile on number 93 21 we're gonna prove 93 21 time place notification for meetings for a first reading is recommended by the policy
065subcommittee it's moved and seconded Missy so 93 21 is I just discussed based upon what we just approved 93 21 subsection B will be completely eliminated and deleted to eliminate any redundancies the only thing that remains is something that we've already discussed and approved which is necessarily outlining the bylaws of the board this was audio the only reason why the entire policies being brought forward is we have to eliminate an entire subsection okay so in that presume that means C will become B I just you know and I think that we might want to see disappear altogether no C will remain because it's lingual references would remain so that should just become part of that quranic' in 93 21 right correct so it will be well it's I think the legal references are still a
066subsection of its own so with that said I would ask I would make it a motion to amend the motion to approve for first reading if I may and change subsection C to subsection B if the board would be favor of the amendment sorry I didn't call for a comment but I think it was too easy okay any other discussion on this one all in favor of moving it forward to first reading okay next one is pile on over 93 20 so the board approved the deletion of the old version of bylaw 93 20 meetings is recommended by the policy subcommittee hi do I have a second okay moved and seconded Seaver so what what there was another redundancy here and if you look at actually no there's not I believe that John I think
067this might have been we might be I think we were reviewing the same exact policy but it's the same exact policy no you're deleting one and adding another one there was two versions of this particular bylaw one was online it was new Millford that's why it's the same exact number okay and it's just somehow got up there and so we didn't working off of that excuse my voice so we're eliminating the older policy the policy that we have before us in exhibit F is a policy that was last updated in 2002 the policy that we'll be moving forward in exhibit G was last updated actually the same exact time so we actually had to approve the policy is there a number it's can explain because it's goods we had one policy that was the Brookfield
068policy that that was approved somehow by mistake online in our policies was the same number policy but it was actually you know force policy however that happened - no - I don't I don't know but we actually did work as a policy committee not even looking to see and we started working off of that policy so that's part of the back story there why there was some confusion which is the discrepancies a lot of confusion in the first one that's why we thought this group of policies bring everything back through let's try else 9320 that we're deleting was the one that this board had approved yes no no I'm sorry that 40,000 a - right so that's the only officially Brookfield approved policy or recommending deleting it you all have worked from what is effect
069as a Milford policy in FMN did it kind of hit us better and that what you'd like to do is just get rid of the old Brookville approved one and won't work from the new ones I have oh yes and it has also worked through council as well it wasn't just us as well and I did want to note that if you look at some of the corrections in the next policy in exhibit G there are a lot of changes to what was currently before us based upon discussions with our council okay but we can't and you know I just saw this we can't delete this without it being a first three though can we we can't delete it without the one that's why this the first reason it's a first read for Italy um
070then I need to lint I need to amend that because it doesn't say first read for the deletion one it doesn't ya know just as approve the deletion okay so Amanda that the board approved the deletion of the old version of bylaw 93 21 for a first reading as recommended by the company 93 for a random motion that the board approved the deletion of the old version of bylaw 93 20 meetings as recommended for first reading as recommended by the policy subcommittee second okay all in favor of the amendment no that's good good catch all right so any further discussion on that confusing but I think I got it I agree but yeah you think we need to first read it because the deletion is not an enactment of a new policy but I think
071exactly right I think from that standpoint to be transparent I think it's fair placing it with another one should pair with each other and I kind of agree with that any further discussion all in favor of the motion and next is bylaw 9320 recommended motion that the board approve the new version of bylaw 93 20 meetings for a first reading as recommended by the policy subcommittee they moved and seconded any further discussion on this one so yes it's just just quickly this this addresses more particularly the meetings of the board has addressed a lot of the issues in bold you'll notice are more technical in legalese and that was because this was run by the the attorney for the board more particularly if you look some of the FOI changes that was something that was
072very critical to making sure these policies are legal and will be something that are fluid when we run our meetings and also most importantly legal when there are no meetings the one thing that I do want to change is I did notice reviewing this the other night that there seems to be a still a little bit of a redundancy if we look our policy 93 21a and if you look at our our which we've approved if you look at the it that that dictates what our policy is for special meetings and if you read in the second paragraph of 9320 a they've seen it's it's very very similar but it's it's slightly different in particular to where the threat upon we requested three board members if you look at our what we've approved for a
073first reading ninety three twenty one a it says the boys the board secretary upon the written requests the three board members in this policy here in ninety three twenty eight says chatter - Chardo town court or upon requested three board members it doesn't further dictate that the board's secretary upon written request so i think it's up to the board how we want to handle it we can either add that language in or simply just refer to ninety three twenty one a we just just change the language exactly to what we have in ninety three twenty one it's a ninety three twenty one that would be my recommendation I hate having diversity yeah I agree I agree and then if we want to modify this is just a person reading that we've already prune 490 321
074a if we want to bring additional changes forward for a second reading we always think do that you have 93 21a everyone's an expander let me let me just suggest we can bring this forward as a first reading at this point as it stands and I said now the policy committee to make recommendations for changes at our second rate and so I think that's the best one we'll probably the simplest and most we can make those changes as we are reviewing it in the second right so then I'll ask the board just approved is for our first reading with the understanding that the next policy meeting will address this particular redundancy okay any discussion all in favor and that one is 9320 to recommend a motion that the board approved bylaw 90 322 public and
075executive sessions for a first reading is recommended by the policy committee [Music] so the only change here is in regards to executive sessions the previous policy which was revised in 1990 but we did review it nonetheless and it still attains to what we're doing today the only change we wanted to make was in regards to executive sessions and having the superintendent president every single executive session so the only language changed the super-thin are designated representative may attend all executive sessions I think may change the generally the super-tender is always there but if there is an instance we want to prevent an executive session group from going forward if for some reason I believe I'll wait there okay con us on that one now on favor of moving it forward to the first Street say aye
076aye all right so we're moving all these forward to the first read which will be in our November 2nd read will be November it's a it's after it's November 15th yes the Thursday's and I just like to take a moment thank the policy committee for all their work and Lisa for all her work we over the last probably 14 to 18 months have gone through a thorough vetting process of the zeros the 2000s and now the nine thousands which is essentially how the board operates the bylaws and well over 50 policies and you can see the confusion just with four or five policies tonight and the back and forth and how long this takes our policy book is over 350 policies and it's really it's a yeoman's task and I thank all of you and
077the three members of the policy committee worked closely with for the last two years will are not running again so give you the whole point is retire policy I just want to quickly very quickly first off arrange oh I put a lot of work into this and they in it they're they're helpful hand in their eyes behind these policy Corrections for vertices are great along with John and Lisa is just I I cannot say the amount of effort it is it is truly amazing what you do is it really I get more astonished that as every policy meeting goes by so thank you from everyone in town thank you Steve Winwood the policy committee like any questions or Corrections to these I think it's you know prior I just I would say the day before
078the policy next policy meeting volitional which will be our next board meeting the 18th so I by 275 a 17 so by October 17th you like send those to Steve yeah okay thank you okay okay so that's that's it for old business and first I have a new business this is agenda item 14 a is the VHS music department field trip to Niagara Falls Regt emotion that the board approved the Brookfield high school music department to take a trip to Niagara Falls from Friday June 1st to Sunday June 30 2018 to participate in the Darien Lake Park Music Festival this will be requested by principal and instead of the EHS music teacher mr. Blandon please come up to the podium inside Oh good evening Susan a George sends his apologies not feeling well today she
079wasn't able to come and present to you this opportunity they're hoping both the band and choral programs would like to participate in so they're asking for the board's approval this Venice to travel is the corporations that use for the last several years to do most of these trips which traditionally happened in the spring to early summer this one and particular happens June 1st through 3rd you can see I believe you have the handouts from what the total cost is per student as well as chaperones there is a tiered payment schedule you know we're looking at I look at the number and I say five hundred fifty five dollars it is out there which is not exactly a cheap trip for students to take however there are opportunities for fundraising throughout the course of the year
080they just have their mattress fundraiser which will help defray the cost there'll also be a fruit fundraiser and several more throughout the course of the year that correspond relatively closely to when most these payments are due so students can actually defray the cost of what that might be this particular trip it's three days it leaves on Friday and we're talking eight hours of travel we're going all the way to Niagara Falls so it's about eight hours of travel on Friday June first leaving at about six o'clock in the morning and they won't get to Canada to live up to a clock so they'll be on a bus for a long time of the stop for much so once getting there on Friday we'll have an opportunity go do a little sightseeing in Niagara Falls and
081made of the mess during beyond the falls and then they have about an hour ride back to the hotel for that first night that second day is when the actual competition really takes place this is at the darienne lake park its Music Fest there's band and choral divisions there's multiple divisions there'll be schools attending from not just from Connecticut from New England and other parts of central part of the state in New York and Pennsylvania as well this is a typical adjudication festival where they actually sing and get judged they have options for just judging scores judging the comments that helps us to take our program for both band and choral programs and get judged against some of the other programs that are around you know the states area through New York Connecticut New England
082and Pennsylvania that takes the majority of the morning and afternoon on Saturday and then Sunday they're back on the bus after breakfast and they're heading back so they'll be back by Monday so this affects one day of school essentially which is that Friday that is the best job I can do presenting I don't have all the intimate details certainly mr. st. George or mr. lammott certainly if you do have further questions that I can't answer and I would absolutely be willing if the board is willing and has more questions can certainly come back to the next board meeting and answer those more specifically if you have them but I don't want to put that information out there typically are the chaperones chaperones generally our parents are generally ones that go on the trip and any
083chaperones are filling out volunteer forms as part of our process for vetting chaperones that are on trips so it would be the two instructors and parents only correct yep that is usually who goes I don't have that typical number I can I could judge I could pull up a field trip list I'll let you know what went last year and how many but it's a significant number of both the band and the choral program scalpers yeah they're all competing on Saturday different bayonet World Vision's and how many how many years have they done this trip this not this they don't do the same trip every year they tend they've gone to Myrtle Beach they've gone to Virginia Beach so they then go into a couple that they do a lot of Florida at one point
084in time they've gone a bunch of different places they tend to mix it up a little bit to get a different variation of competition [Music] in 2004 and it's been a long time so students are given the opportunity to fundraise right to get to that point where they could the rest of the money that's not that they don't raise through fundraising is paid for by families families don't owe thing there's no district funds on there never has been correct in fact that parents group is usually very active at helping the kids with fundraisers this is the biggest thing that parents group does do we do they need passports for Canada not yes so all of them will have to passport procure their passwords I found that very ensuring and asking that question I spoke with
085Bob mr. Lumm Manolo mr. st. George's about that to make sure they understand that passports are required you know even with a verified ID which I now have which is quite interesting will not get you to Canada it can get you out of plane you know in the States but will not get you into Canada so passports are required yeah yeah that's and there's a lead time to that so managing the kids to manage that lead time is gonna be a challenge it's interesting and having never been to Niagara Falls myself I hear a lot about going to the Canadian side it seems like that seems to you know it's a very small portion of the trip they're actually on the Canadian side only that first day and really and then looking at doing some
086research myself really it's only for the journey beyond behind the false is what I can find cuz the Maid of the Mist is on that here's the Leon the New York side and the turnig on the falls is the Canadian side so it must be wonderful I apparently it's you know one fifth of the world's freshwater falling over those Falls is critical okay further discussion thanks mark okay all in favor okay all right passes unanimously all right last item on the agenda this evening is the district implementation plan so let you do some introductory remarks mr. Brooks sure sure okay I wasn't sure all right so um the district implementation plan it's a two-year plan start in the fall of 2016 and the report that I will succinctly and swiftly move through this evening because
087you receive this I believe it's an eight page document over the weekend I will move through as an overview after I introduce and then I will ask the principal's to come up and share their student data information where they're at in year one as mr. Brenda was starting to allude to a little bit during mrs. burns presentation I'm going to kind of look down and read through the introductory memo because there's a lot of context that's very important not only for the board and the public but the folks public who might be listening it at home so again this is a two-year plan and this is this is a summary all of the district implementation plan goals the objectives the outcomes and there's many many goals and objectives within this document to remind everybody back
088in February of 2016 the board approved the strategic coherence plan the strategic coherence plan consists of four goals goals for learning teaching for learning measures for learning in systems alignment or infrastructure on October 5th of last year so almost exactly a year ago the district implementation plan that were pouring on sieving which operationalizes the strategic plan was presented to the board as the two year plan this plan is anchored by four core goals articulated by many objectives actions and outcomes I've attached a quantifiable summary indicating which objectives or actions are completed and which are still in progress for the upcoming 1718 year the majority of the plans objectives and actions have been completed very proud of the work I think we all should be very proud of the work we've done a lot what you'll
089know in my next paragraph that I talked about is the results portions of things 29.5 of 47 actions or outcomes or 63% have been completed work will definitely continue to maintain what has been accomplished and to complete the work that is designated as in progress much of the work completed you'll see some things like professional development or kind of cultural shifts in how we're operating our district those are going to continue so deeper work needs to continue with that this next paragraph really talks about goal 2 which is where the principles are going to be presenting local assessments have been implemented in the past year and are continuing this year analysis of the data indicates that considerable growth opportunity for student achievement remains several swirl scores fall short of our indicated targets the targets were
090intentionally set high as deficiencies in the identified areas we'll recognize as priority areas back in 2015 with the implementation of reliable and valid benchmark assessments now in Montand project monitoring tools we are now developing fluency as educators to use this data to identify and monitor our students in the impact of the adult actions the teaching on student achievement vertical line assessment protocols are being fine-tuning this year to support the targeted instruction to meet individual student needs and finally teachers and administrators continue to work diligently to enhance and deepen their learning while implementing these newly acquired standards aligned curricular tools and assessments to improve student learning outcomes the efforts of the faculty and administration this past year served as a foundation for the next steps in realizing our goals for the strategic plan and staying the
091course will ensure continued progress toward achievement of all the dip objectives and I just want to harken back when we talk about 1718 this year going forward to back in December last year when I initially presented the 1718 superintendents budget I had a subtitle on there work work the plan this year we had planned the work and started working the plan in 1617 or continuing it we're not implementing lots of new things lots of new initiatives looking for change with our staff we are looking to deepen learning the initial learning from last year of administrative the administrative team and the teachers so they can fine-tune those are doing and really become expert in all the new materials and strategies that were using it's a critical contextual piece I want everybody to understand all right so
092on page two I'm just going to move to page two and then I'm going to go kind of rapid-fire for you in the interest of time and it's certainly open for questions so the first goal is on leadership development and capacity building there were four particular adult outcomes under there that we wanted to achieve and three and a half of the four have been achieved and we'll continue working on those things like working on our supervisor provision feedback skills you've heard that quite a bit on teacher evaluation and really using adult evaluative data as well as student assessment data to drive our planning we did that in 1617 and we've done that in planning our PD for 1718 and this year we've got what's called a walkthrough protocol you see that written in blue that
093is in progress we're working on kind of like medical rounds when you see these television shows you see doctors walking around in assessing situations together and collaborating our teacher leaders our teachers and our administrators we're gonna be working on walkthroughs where we do the same thing and analyze instruction so we're really excited about that but developing that protocol and how we're gonna go about that is really going to happen this year so that's considered in progress goal number two is the student achievement area reading writing mathematics and professional development the professional development goals in terms of delivering professional development providing targeted individual PD for our staff that all those adult goals have been achieved from check those two do's off those are ten and a half out of twenty-five particular outcomes have been completed the
094ones that are either in progress or still still have some work to do the and or have been achieved that are specific to reading writing and math and specific to each will be discussed by the principals I'm not going to bore you and read through all that student data well let the principal's present that and their powerpoints however there's something really important that I'm excited about with a professional development that is a demonstrable quantifiable as Paul you were getting to that earlier it's hard data some information that we've gone just this this this past month regarding our K through three teachers their knowledge of teaching reading and the assessment of survey that they take every two years so the teachers took this assessment in particular survey in 1415 they took it again in 1617 dr.
095Ruby's gonna share just briefly a little bit about the results aggregate results of that achievement thank you so when I first need to share with you is that the reading survey is a requirement of the State Board of Education through legislation of all k3 teachers classroom teachers and these the scores well how an individual teacher performs on a test is a confidential issue we don't get individual teachers scores and if we are not allowed to report out on scores I couldn't I couldn't tell you that the average score was eighty or anything like that that is not allowed by law well they can present to you is what you have on this sheet and that is areas of improvement or areas of decline and so if I can just speak briefly about this Connecticut foundations
096of reading survey they're the teachers got a total score they get there are three sub areas that you see foundations of reading development development of reading comprehension and reading assessment and instruction and then as identified on the chart in front of you the sub areas each have objectives so I want to report out the highlights on us so what I have in the column since I can't reports is this the scores is give you the change in how teachers were formed out of a total of a hundred points there was an increase of seven point one four points overall for all the teachers that took that now remember we have brand new teachers we have experienced teachers and some of the brand new teachers would more likely than not have had I would say reading
097instruction in how to teach reading that's very different from experienced teachers because of the dyslexia legislation that requires universities to provide instruction so it's not just because you're a young teacher you need to be in the profession longer to learn so we looked at all of our our teachers across the board when we came in 2015 in August and saw what the results were and saw what the areas were that needed to be worked on and looked at what was in the schools and talked to the principal's about how reading was being taught in the in the early grades and that was why we came to you if you recall and told you that we needed to get a phonological anaemic awareness program we need to teach word study and with that too mr. Chuck
098owes point before you need to provide professional development and part of the real kind of juice that's in some of these programs as mrs. burns alluded to before is that real high quality programs have embedded professional development in the actual materials and then there's ancillary professional development that comes from our company we provide professional development so what you see on on this paper is that when you look at all of the sub areas our teachers increase by statistically significant point values and I'm not going to read the point so I'm gonna move down to the objectives and I highlighted three objectives that were of note in red and if you look at objective 4 that was where our teachers scored the lowest in 2015 and was understanding word analysis skills and strategies which is phonics
099they increased by fourteen point six points on average so things don't happen like this when you're when you're working with adult learners that have to improve their skills to then support children to do better so since from 15 to 17 the work that the teachers were doing in their buildings learning the new materials and having PD they were able to increase their their average score by forty point six points the second lowest objective in the 2015 administration of the survey was objective one and none of us were surprised by this week we could see it when we when we first started talking about this two years ago understanding phonological and phonemic awareness thirteen point five five points increase that translates into how kids are being taught and we we see that we see that in
100some of the data that dr. Sandlin is gonna present with the phonological awareness skills and where kids started and where they ended up and then even on objective eight which is understanding informal formal and informal methods for assessing reading even though they scored highly on that and into that I mean they'd score probably on that in 2017 all the assessment whether we complain about it or not I mean they the teachers got better in their understanding so I'm I was we we have more work to do and we're going to continue to work on professional development of our teachers using using data to inform us we do take teacher input but I have to be really crystal clear that sometimes teachers asked to have professional development and certain things that are very interesting but we
101have to look and make decisions over whether just an interest is is enough to make a financial and time investment in certain professional development because we really need to move the needle to get kids where they need to go so this is as in-depth as I can get with this data because of the confidentiality of the assessment but I think that this one sheet tells a really nice story for how hard you know people are working every day thanks Maureen so we're starting to have an impact yeah it really is nice to see that demonstrable impact and you'll you'll see clearly where there's some alignment to the s back scores that you saw at the different schools two weeks ago to now with the principal's presentation or really goal to has four different objectives in
102the holistic presentation of the dip tonight and I don't want to belabor that because the principals will talk about it so just moving on to page six in the document to goal three is to bring your attention you want that on all of the objectives under goal three we had a date of June 2018 we're halfway there with achieving our objectives here this is all about establishing learning targets and developing and thank you a curriculum development schedule which this was talked about earlier tonight is trying to talked about earlier dr. Ruby's already referenced so go through really talks about the work of dr. Alec Hawk the work we have been doing in developing our curriculum instruction skills and then obviously the assessment protocols that go along with those and all the alignment I like incredible
103work and I know mrs. Thurman mr. Belden you were part of the the administrative PD at the beginning of the school year at the end of August and some incredible work going on there so we're really making progress they're pretty excited about that and then the final goal begins on page seven we essentially achieved all all of the objectives that we set out to achieve as a district under culture climate in communication for number four and as you can see we set out to ensure timely communication with parents about school and class information timely communication with parents regarding projects monitoring of their students and then also making sure we establish positive school climate exemplified and modeled by all of our employees in the organization and if you just briefly take a look and this will
104be posted online for the public to take a look has a lot of information there's a number of the actions and objectives there and thirteen or fourteen of these were achieved with incredibly high favorability percentages for comments from parents in the eight high eighties and mid low to mid 94 Sentell things like I feel well informing about my child's academic progress the principal or assistant principal is available and willing to listen the school is a safe place for my child the adults that this will treat my child with respect things like that I don't want to go on and on and on so we're really moving in a nice direction we averaged the four schools together to kind of get a district composite but each of the principals will briefly talk about that as well
105this evening and then on page 9 the final piece just want to share we did participate as an administrative team in an indigo assessment which is a leadership assessment about our leadership styles and how we interact with others with differing leadership styles we're thinking about moving into this and doing an assessment of our teachers and eventually assessment of our students this really proved through our analysis cost prohibitive so we've held on that however as we've talked about a great length over the last two months we're moving in the direction in terms of culture and climate with emotional intelligence work and not really the emotional intelligence action is the only moon piece folded in to the district implementation plan to operationalize the strategic plan for the coming year it's a two-year plan and we want to
106work that plan and so that's that's what we're going to do so I'll stop there I don't know anybody read or and over the weekend have any questions or would rather wait for the principals maybe the principal to be better oh gosh um they maybe could because it's done by school they may they may recall what that was um I want to see the percentage of groups responding parents yeah yeah it was much higher than what you expect on a survey and we did put it out three or four times kept reminding people and tweeting and facebooking and doing everything please fill it out we want your feedback yeah so thank you for indulging me I do appreciate it um why don't we start um there's no questions for me we the principal's maybe we
107can start off in our pre-k K and run the doctor say line and please no word that I did in preparing for this is each principle to keep it to up to five minutes that presentation so no no longer than that five minutes so in dr. Borel assured us that you have this so I'm just gonna hit the highlights so I focused on my student achievement goals which I thought you would be most interested in so in terms of my reading goals were very proud of what our teachers and students and parents together as a community achieved last year as you've heard there was a focus on looking at achieving our reading goals by increasing our foundational reading skills last year so our first goal was that eighty percent of our grade one students and
108kindergarten students would reach benchmark in our fountas and pinnell assessment i'm going to go through the goals first and now go through the outcomes and our next goal was we looked at last year we were switched to a nother we had done doubles the year before but we went to DIBELS next which had a different recommended benchmark so we we were had a goal of 60% in grade one and fifty percent of students in kindergarten would improve one level so you can be intensive strategic or at core so that was a growth goal and also in the bottom of this is that forty that eighty percent of students would be a 45 out of 48 on the past that's a phonological assessment skills test and that is a goal that is actually above mastery so
109how are our outcomes I also listed the core how many kids were at benchmark because I thought you might like to see not only what was the growth but when you just looked at benchmark how do we do so for on the nonsense word fluency test we wanted 50% of the students to grow we had an outcome of 81% students so this year of course we're gonna have to set our goal higher and 81% of our kids didn't meet the the benchmark now you can there's actually two sections of that test so one sub test we did well we had 81% of our students at core but the other sub test we only had 55% of our students so that's what we're going to have to be looking at this year phonemic segmentation fluency 92%
110of our children met the goal for growth and 92% of our children were at benchmark the phonological awareness skills test we had 75% of our children met that goal of 45 but again 40 would have been mastery so that was a pretty ambitious goal and on the fountas and pinnell test for kindergartners 87 percent of the children were at goal or at benchmark good for first grade the nonsense word fluency test which is a dibbles test 89% of the children met the growth goal 69 percent of the children were at benchmark so that's a goal that we need to keep working on 79% of the children were at what we call words read correct that means and that is what the teachers focused on in first grade so that is when given a nonsense word
111as a stimulus they could could decode the whole word automatically and so we were happy with that result but we would like the 75 percent obviously to go up more the earth which is oral reading fluency we had 89 percent of the children met the growth goal but 69 percent of the children were at benchmark for words read correct and 66 percent of the children were at goal for accuracy so again that's something we like to see increase this year and on the fountas and pinnell 86% of the children were at benchmark so when you measure growth it's just any amount of growth or well it not certain of degree of growth well you have to they have set standards for whether your intensive strategic or so you have to go up so we didn't
112count to tell if they were one letter short and they didn't move into the next category we didn't count them as having met the growth goal but that's not really we you know we were unsure of what kind of data we were going to get so we set a growth goal I would not set that kind of goal again I would stay with who is it benchmarking who isn't this year I wouldn't set that kind of goal again frankly um I'm sorry [Music] in writing there we go in writing both grade levels the goal was that 70% of the students would demonstrate grade level competency on the teacher's college rubrics reading using blind scoring protocols 93% of the kindergartens met the benchmark and 87% of the grade one students met the benchmark so going forward
113in literacy we would like to focus on looking more closely at differentiated learning for this for the groups of children who are traditionally difficult to move as you notice we have a lot of numbers in the 80s so that means there's still a group of children who weren't not necessarily getting to and with those other children that we really want to focus on part of our writing goal was blind scoring and we didn't get dig into that deeply enough last year so we want to increase that and we really want to keep integrating data assessments with our effective differentiation in the foundational reading skills and finally in the children in the younger grades and having to switch for three different genres of writing on demand sometimes it's difficult for them to switch from genre to
114genre and what we find is they're not focusing enough on what is the purpose of my writing to do that so this year we're going to put a big emphasis on that idea of the author's purpose so our mathematics goal last year was that 85% of our students would demonstrate mastery of grade-level standards on the my math assessment and that was defined as 80% 99 percent of our kindergarten students and 96 percent of the first grade met the goal now you have choices in my math of what you're going to use for an end-of-the-year assessment and we did not use the spec version of the assessment and that huckleberry used we are going to switch over to that this year because obviously we got a result that was not a panel I want to say
115fair but was not a good result for us so we we're going to switch over so one of the things we're going to do this year is formulate what weekender Garden has already done at first grade is doing it this Friday is to formulate an assessment plan for every single standard so that we know how every single standard is being assessed informally and formally in the classroom first grade is it working on star star map that has been we've done our first round of that and collaborate tying that to the standards and that into our assessment plan and then finally working on lesson plans that expand our use of data in the classroom and after sailing if I'm any I just want to be make sure point of emphasis when she was talking the -
116I was talking about the math assessment and the choice the ones you refer to is the s back aligned end of your assessment through the math program rigorous assessment that's why so now that that was the result obviously very good the kids did very well in the particular assessment but she wants to give a more rigorous assessment and you'll see in huckleberries data their results aren't as I was going to say robust and voluminous but you know but they're not as high because they chose that s back along assessments so again this is learning for us in your white which assessments we choose and so forth so dr. shealynn thank you great we chose the format due to the age of our students because the format look better it's it's a learning curve dealing with
117a new program so and afterwards we when we got going we thought it'd be easy but we didn't want to change the format in the middle of the year because it kind of mixes up your results so our last goal was family communication our goal was that 89 85 to 90 percent of our responses would be positive to one of two questions or both questions my child's teacher communicates frequently as needed and I feel well informed about my child's school we had 94 and 92% positive response we tend to have a good response at central school because of the age of our children our teachers are in pretty close contact with their their teachers with their parents and our goal is to really continue this to try and be in closer contact and make sure
118that we're being effective it's not just the amount of communication we have but are we being effective so that's - thank you [Music] throw okay crystal times already up there ready to go okay so we look at our reading Turkish first we also are using the devil's assessments to measure student growth we started with dwarf the oral reading fluency in second grade the goal is that 90% of students would be at the benchmark for both words correct and accuracy we had 56 percent of our students at that benchmark which was higher than our previous year so the numbers are low but they're higher than they were the prior year and I think that well I'll go into a little bit of an explanation of why we think that is in third grade the we were
119looking at students having leading the benchmark for both ourf which is oral reading fluency as well as DS which is a reading comprehension is greater so this take this looks at their data together for that goal we had 43% of our students in third grade who met the Dorf the oral reading fluency and the days benchmark 49% of the students met the end-of-year benchmark for oral reading fluency only and 69% of them made the benchmark for our days only so you'll see that I put it out together fourth grade again we combined dwarf and days into one goal we 40% of students who read it who made the benchmark from dwarf n days 45 for dwarf and then 63 for days there's a chart that I'll go into a little bit more detail I want
120to go through these quickly so you can see numbers we are we also a goal around close reading and we're looking for the growth goal being ninety percent of students I'm showing growth we had 78 percent of our students who showed growth I think some of that had to do with the assessment we used I can as dr. dr. Roy was saying over choosing the assessment and it wasn't the best necessarily to show the growth in in terms of close reading so on that that's an area for me for us will be modifying for this year and it's very evident in this in this slide here we used to 80% our goal was 80% would you the grade standard away 20% of students on that assessment that she's a great little standard again it was
121a result of the assessment not I don't think it's a true reflection of what kids are able to do agreed and that kind of thing there's a quick summary as I mentioned we some of the things we put in place this year were around implementing open court in second and third grade which is the reading foundations program and doing some work in fourth grade in a very consistent manner as students what we're noticing is through that instruction that the students are acquiring the reading foundation skills that they need in order to be successful they are beginning to assimilate them into their reading practices so the results were as a result we're seeing that their rate is slower but their accuracy is much higher so again it takes some time they're they're learning this skill that
122they need in order to code the words so they're slowing down in order to use those skills and isolate them into their reading practice which again is causing their rate to decrease but their accuracy is significantly increased for teachers as well as also as dr. Brown was mentioning this has been a huge learning curve for our teachers because the skills that students now that we have an assessment that's showing us where the the deficits are in terms of student understanding those skills are not skills that are typically taught in 3rd and 4th grade as with with the kind of attention that we've been giving them and their matter of going back and kind of filling in some gaps that we've had in the past so on for our teachers this has been a huge learning
123curve in terms of what you know phonics and phonemic awareness in fourth grade what does that look like where the instruction look like and they've done a great job they really they really worked very hard but we're again it's it's it's taking the adult learning applying it to the instruction and then looking for students and then I'd be able to assume like that Adobe practices and I mentioned in transition for serious could you please Excel no more because you had said that some of the low scores were due to the incorrect tests but then you had said that it might be just an assessment that you're not used to using so-so so if you look at the close readings on scores okay okay that when we were putting together our performance tasks in order to
124measure close the close reading strategy that kids were using and in an effort to not in add another assessment into the mix we looked at the performance tasks that we're being administered as a part of our reading units and applied the rubrics that we use to that assessment it didn't give us the kind of information we were looking for in terms of what the close reading strategies are that we were hoping to see so that's that's where there's a misalignment of the assessment with the with the instruction with the goal work not standardized assessment great teacher main assessments so that's part of what okay and I think there's a distinction that has to be made because we here out in the public and we get concerned about high-stakes standardized tests like the smarter balanced once
125a year are kind of things those are standardized assessments but the local smaller progress monitoring with the dibbles and some of these other assessments you're hearing those are standardized assessments as well they're reliable they're valid and the teachers follow them they're trained in them but there are many times where we use teacher created tests and assignments that we have rubrics and things like that and those are not standardized so we just need to be very astute and transparent about what assessments were using and when and for what reason so you know presentation okay awesome Network okay so in terms of let me go into writing so in terms of our writing again we were looking for a benchmark expectation of students to score out of three for a scaled score the goal was eighty three
126percent weight sixty percent of our students achieve that scaled score that is up from last year where when you're forty seven percent so it's definitely an increase in in the number and the percentage of students achieving that score and there's also broken out by grade level here again the growth target our growth target weight we exceeded the world starting with ninety-five percent of students with which no growth but to your point mr. Beldon how much growth and that wasn't specified so 99 98 percent of our students did make growth but it might have been by a half point or a point on that rubric on that four point where brick in terms of as I mentioned the students who achieved the scale score target you can see that as I mentioned with 60% of our
127students achieve that target of three and there's a breakdown by grade level there as well we are again utilizing the units of instruction with fidelity we're finding that we're calibrating around the rubric we're blind scoring so that's helping as well in terms of unit some consistency and and feedback to students we are we have made opinion writing a priority across content areas so it's not just happening during the opinion writing unit that's happening in writing is also happening in our content areas as well as our special areas so students are having more opportunities to to formulate their opinions and practice their writing skills and in those in I'm sorry the scaled score of three is that can you like put a Devlin another kind of value to it that are not proficient step 4 all
128right three is at standard so it's a it's a one to four ruber condemning and and if you you should come in and see what the students are doing with their student checklists there I can statements are all tart targets that are at the three so they're working towards that standard and that is also dr. Bateman to the checklist that is something that we are utilizing or with more I think more fidelity and attention this year so the students are owning their learning and owning you know kind of what they're when they're writing keeping that in the back of their head so that they're able to then formulate their responses that are more aligned with the rubrics some of the expectations are okay so this this is what dr. bill was talking about earlier we
129chose to use the s back aligned assessment that's that as part of my math this year in an effort to prepare students for what they're going to see when it came time for them to take the aspect in in May so what we've discovered is that students performance on the so this target which you know the which was the overall end of your math benchmark assessment we're finding that that and if your summative assessment result did not at all reflect student achievement on chapter tests and so we're which one eighty eighty percent involve for majority of our our our students in our classes and what that causes to stop and say is you know what is the difference between the chapter assessments and and how is that information that we're getting different than what students
130are expected to do to an economy and if your assessment the chapter tests only assess skilled and computation so there aren't as many opportunities for application skills to work problems in that kind of thing which is what the aspect and and the are the the benchmark that we chose to use is it pretty much requires them to do we did add some some problem solving skills or common solving questions to the chapter test but it still wasn't at the same at the level that was necessary in order to prepare them for the end of your assessment that they were going to the other ones didn't enter your assessment so we discovered again that we need greater focus on teaching students how to apply those skills they have them in isolation but in order to apply
131them in terms of problem solving and more complex problem that that's something an area that we're focusing on the other thing that they became apparent is that students did not necessarily have the stamina necessary to sustain the level of focus they need in order to attend to the details and complexity of the problems so you know it's short bursts and working on these problems absolutely but when they need to sit down for the full assessment it was not they they did not have that stamina to stay focused and and certainly to deal with the language of the question the language some people will describe the s back that's really as a reading test and they so we're also looking at how we can apply our close reading strategies and how we're doing that to math
132problems into our math instruction because again a lot of kids get lost or fine and get lost in the language and we're trying to work on that with them as well we've also we have started using problem called problem solving Fridays so we're putting again more opportunity for students to apply the skills that they're learning in isolation which again they're demonstrating their have great master the skills by themselves and then the applications where they're having some difficulties so that's that's where we're look that's what we're looking at for this year we're going to stick with that s back aligned assessment because I think it is giving us good information and we're looking at other ways again to to support that the in-class instruction assessments we're doing at the chapter level in order to UM have
133a better predictor so I want to add to what Mary Rose just said that was a great explanation this was this was a really good thing that the teachers were able to implement a new program use it with as much fidelity as you can when you're implementing a new program and then be able to dive deep and question you know why are we seeing this because if you're not we here in popular press we get questions from parents you guys ask questions about why do we have the way do we have to have more than one assessment why do we have to have so many assessments well you need to have different types of assessments because you need to be able to assess different things and if you're only giving the the chapter tests or
134you're only giving teacher-made tests and it looks like kids are doing well and everybody's got great grades and we're all happy because everybody's just doing great they're all on the honor roll and then you get an outside test and they don't do so well it's easy to pass that test because there's nothing wrong with with the children and there isn't anything wrong with their children but what we're seeing now is that we can teach students in the example that Mary Rose gave with math we can teach them with fidelity and they can perform certain skills that we're teaching them but as teachers we need to be thinking all the time about you know the program isn't the teacher where are the teachers so if we know that students need to be able to do and
135I could you know list the standards for you that's what they need to know and be able to do then if we're not seeing that type of assessment or that type of opportunity in a program we need to we need to look further because there are other assets that come along with the program that the teachers can choose from to improve the opportunities that kids have to use what they know and that's what Mary Rose explained with the problem solving Friday which I think is my opinion and then then they're prepared for for a test like s back and it s back isn't a bad test I know people have different opinions it's been it's aligned to the standards and it's asking kids to do hard things because those are the things that they're going
136to be expected to do as they go through the grades and when they get out into the workforce and into college and and and career so I I'm happy with the analysis that they did at the school level then call up and ask for help or say that there was something wrong with the program or something wrong with the test Jessica and Daniel and Mary Rose and the grade level teachers joke deep into this data to try to see why are we getting different results what does it mean and what do we have to do and this is a cultural shift for the district in looking at what we're teaching students in all the areas and then critiquing ourselves so that we can make changes to make it better we just had this discussion actually
137the faculty today we were talking about our aspects scores and shifting that mindset as dr. we were saying from the aspect being just this impossible test that you know kids they're going to try their best but it's just too hard to saying like the aspects should if we are doing our preparation and aligning ourself as well to the set to the aspect then they by the time students get to that point in May they should this should be an easy and easy a chance for them to share and show what they learned but they need to be prepared for that in an assessment situation they're definitely getting that through instruction but in terms of them independently than sitting and having to demonstrate what they are able to do in an assessment situation is that's where
138we need to focus our time more than one places high assessments align between Center and huckleberry you just look at centers information in 99% and if you were to just take these two documents in isolation and everybody's coming at a center and 99 except professional mouth and they're coming into huckleberry there seems to be no correlation between one school to the other mm-hmm what are we doing to integrate the assessments in everyone well math and reading just all of them because it seems to me that you can't interpret Center absolute so if I could just answer for just the the time period that we're talking about here the two years we've implemented new strategies instructional strategies that the Graduate releasing responsibility and the workshop model and new curricular tools at the same time and so
139the children at center school they they haven't been in school they don't have the Maragos refer to gaps that were identifying so once the children are up in the second grade third grade fourth grade if they haven't been having intentional sequential phonemic awareness and phonics instruction and they've been using some whole language strategies and look at the picture and what do you think it's it so they're gonna look kids can look like they're readers when they're not really reading the words because this and you're making a face I mean okay so let me explain that if you if your there are strategies where we ask it look at the pictures well you see in the picture we have a discussion about it and we use the vocabulary to describe the picture the same vocabulary that's
140on the page so you've kind of you know front-loaded the the child to read and they so they can be telling telling the story because they're very simple small short sentences and we can think that they're that they're really reading but they're not necessarily decoding the worse and that works that's a strategy that works for kids until the pictures aren't there and the script of the story isn't something that they that they know it's not about a birthday party or going camping or you know the types of stories that are in those books so they can get through the grades and they can get up to two mary-rose this isn't happening now at center school because we've made curricular changes and Chris and her team at the school are using materials and following a curriculum
141where they're teaching phonological awareness phonemic awareness decoding and we're assessing and when if you looked at deeper at the data at center school you would see and and and Chris could face I'm talking about how kids are in your school in the beginning of the year everybody isn't at goal there are kids that are in what we call the read at risk there are kids in the yellow which is strategic and they're kids that are green there at benchmark and they have to you know swarm in on those kids that we now know before we were doing these assessments they're all cute they look good they're you know they're happy we don't have data that tells us what they really know and are able to do differentiated in remediation intervention is being provided by the
142reading teachers and special ed teachers and so if you look at the data from this year at more closely than this overview were giving you at the kindergartners and first-graders you're seeing what we call effect there's a report that we can get from dibbles from the website effectiveness of instruction and it actually tracks the kids from the beginning of the year to the middle of the air and you look at them and you can look efforts the grade level as a whole I can look at a class I mean I look at this for my this look at classrooms and I can see how many kids that were in red the red zone it really need a lot of work in the beginning of the year we're still in red at the middle of the
143year if they're still in red that is not effective instruction we did not meet those kids needs if they were yellow red and they went to yellow the instruction is effective but when if that child still yellow we need to step it up so what Chris had was kids that were were striated in the grade level that were red yellow summer green the beginning a year and then the teachers worked all year to get them to whatever the percentage is eighty nine ninety three percent so we're starting with these little guys now with what with what we've been implementing in the plan that John you know articulated and but if they've already gone through kindergarten first grade second grade they're in third and fourth grade there's a lot to make up and so that's why
144this that's why the scores will look different so you're saying say if we project this out two or three more years the alignment of the scores school over school should start absolutely because our whole their only reason we live is to close the gap I understand that so what I heard though was that the assessment that was given okay so math and that's what we're working on it that's one of the reasons that we asked you to entertain and you did the change that we made in our curriculum specialists you can't have silos of schools and have a school system and so we wanted to have coherence across the school so we did two things for this year we had the one curriculum specialist who was covering all subjects at a huckleberry take over English
145language arts for K through four and one person who was serving as a math coach in huckleberry that position going from k2 for for math because we need to there needs to be a through line we need to know what's going on and you want people it's it's hard when people are in different buildings to really have that ongoing communication that you need to have we did the same thing with special ed so that we have this the special this is harder harder work it's hard to work to be in two different places than to just be in one one building so but the special ed department chairs overlapping so that there's transition services and we don't lose continuity with kids so that we don't anticipate that that type of thing would happen where one
146person work first of all we were using assessment so that's a step in the right direction okay we're using assessments that were reliable and valid now we need to align those assessments to be able well we're we're recognizing that and that's the change that I mean that's why we're doing what we're does that make sense yeah that's exactly what my question was Senator Graham and the interviews and they figured it out but I mean like it's like why do what oh they asked why is this so different and then they talked and that's how oh you're you're using because it came with them with the program it's brand-new they're following you know the instruction and you get to you get to select which tests you're using so I think that we're in the place yes
147yeah correct and and the other thing that you need to know is on the on star map star map we are allowed to set the standards that are the norms that you want to use and you can use Connecticut norms or you can use the s pack aligned norms national data and we ran well you guys are here we ran it when we were doing the PD we ran the data two different ways and if we use the Connecticut norms okay that has a blue color even beyond green and our kids were really s looking below Wow well when we when we uncheck that box in the system and we put in the the norms for s backlines national norms wait and look as below as we did before so we're using the more rigorous
148normal you asked my question so what I'm seeing is I'm hearing yes median grade level standards through our testing in centre school they come in to huckleberry and there's transformation than that I mean as you would expect it every great moment kids are learning more skills and having higher bars but we aren't progressing them to meet the standards of those right now that's that that wasn't what I said we are meeting the grade-level standards dress numbers were calling them well and so I guess my question is are the things we're doing transformation transformative enough to they they that sorts of actions that help you make quantum improvements reasonably quickly so that we can be a reasonable expectation of 82 percent of our kids at grade level and that's a reasonable expectation or are we doing
149stepwise change which might in just their over a five attackers I guess like that's what I'm not getting out of the presentation is it yeah I mean I absolutely we've already seen I think the transformation is starting with the teachers right and starting with building their skills so that they are better able to evaluate the students they're coming in understand and recognize what the needs are and then match their instruction with what the student needs are so yes do I think that this is going to I think that we're going to be in the 85 percent range next year I'm not I'm not sure I can't predict that but we are definitely closing that gap and making things quickly making those strides where we should we should see some significant changes where again as we
150were saying we're trying to take students who have not had this kind of I can show you other data that shows that our kids are reading on grade level and exceeding on many other assessments but then what our experience has been is that they that's great until they get to about a third and a third fourth grade level and then they start to fall apart because they don't have these foundational skills that they need in order to continue to be on that trajectory so I'd rather I'd rather know how bad it is in terms of what the skills are and have you know where we can really focus our time and really be able to do what we're doing so that in the future but we can't stop teaching the strategies and any me demonstrating
151all the things they think you really know that helps kids you know when you're sure hopefully are able to [Music] and they did I have last year this is a man meditation instruction so you know been any of your programming and I was having had you just ended it because of this is a good starting position right away we do tend to be in the middle skilled so they really go and others absolute direct order you making it harder them that enters [Music] teaching in Albury [Music] but under your eyes you're seeing your difference yeah they look fabulous so are we teenagers and inside her - how do I mean you can't go from first grade and I had a voice for to go into second grade and you don't have a high score but
152that are you seeing you're seeing the students I had an inverse grade they were there because they German is one year grade the district and in the two years of significant happens that I do not have that seemed great I like please know your we are long as well [Music] fabulously one of the other areas that were to focus on and our goal is that all the teachers are without data and also look at data and identifying just last year this year what are they smacking me and then having the ability to design the time around designing the can I be able to give more specific targeted kids that didn't have any were [Music] but you know you can see the reading there are really cool because of those hits have those little gaps so
153it's just one of our great so we're really making sure that our school environment is learning environment and then we've been working on our report really dominated Prudential learning coaching entities and then just really looking for how many school and the children progress and we are right right just a little below what other harbors or the grow we made and [Music] you know I'm just not high but being able to the language being able to be able to really not just a but let's easy there are able to see just what we're asking them to do when they're sitting there I'm not just there's a difference between you know a 60 problem or a 30 problem computation test and a 3 problem test that involves word problems requires them to use all of their different
154skills in order to solve the problems do you think you'd so they just literally have a larger mental desktop that they have to act with is that what you're saying yeah okay so not stamina the like for length of time that we're asking them to do during the time that they're doing those assessments okay thank you for clarifying okay thanks Mary Rose absolutely thank you all right WMS a lot of the [Music] mrs. here we go you bang here we go a lot of the data that we have will be similar it with the assessments as Huckleberry and I think you'll see a little bit of that pattern that we've been you've been speaking about but the first objective that we had at whisking here was a reading goal around our did the GRP assessments
155and then something that we had done for many years we had a lot of data along the way from below and huckleberry up to was skinnier and we had a lofty goal of 90% the students will show growth as measured by the comparisons are bringing at the end of the year we overall at 81% of the students if you look here the that is what it's broken down by by each grade fifth sixth seventh and eighth those are the number of students that met goal on the DRP test interestingly our fifth and sixth grade those are two of the highest scores we've had in a long time and our seventh and eighth grade were well more with eighth graders probably the lowest we've had over probably a five six span window and part of that
156could be we sat down we talked similar to like they've been talking about you know diving in and figuring what went on here why did that happen and some of the things that we thought about was dealing with we the way we give the assessments at the end of the year the time we give the DRP the star math the star reading and s back are around different times and this happened be right after the yes back so I don't know if that could be one of the reasons why as eighth graders they didn't do as well because usually we short in the mid to upper 80s for the DRP past for dibbles for fifth and sixth grade similar to huckleberry we had a goal of this was objective two and three 85% of fifth
157and sixth grade students would be at benchmark for the dibbles we had forty four point three percent of our students in fifth grade and in sixth grade we had fifty one point three as you can see the underneath we we just I just broke down the three three different categories of words correct the accuracy and then the day's scores this was new to whisk Ania for the first time that we had done this and administered this test although the fifth grade did have have it from the previous year but one of the areas that we took on well that we felt was an area that we really wanted to work on was accuracy and our accuracy scores as you can see actually were the highest ones that we had based on this test but obviously
158we want to make sure that we are working on all aspects of the other dibbles fluency itself performance tasks our goal was at 80% measured by of assuming of reading comprehension based on more performance tests that we had we had an overall of 81 percent of our students and I just broke it down by the different grade levels that we had for writing our first goal was around opinions / argumentative writing from the teacher's college writing rubric this was will demonstrate growth by a comparison of the total points I know that mayor's had talked about before we had 97 percent of our students made growth in the total points again that doesn't mean they met the goal of the the scale score of a3 necessarily but it meant that they had made growth in the
159total points based on the rubric the next one was 80 percent of our students will be on grade level this is our overall grades 4 5 through 8 we had 50 2.8 percent of our students met goal on that teachers scallops rubric and in the next few slides up break it down by the grade levels [Music] so on the right as you can see is the scale the number of points in the scale score that's along with us so you get an idea for the total number of points you had to add between 28 and 33 total points to be considered at goal based on all the different areas from the rubric fifth grade we actually read 78% and then I just put third next type at 13% were at 2.5 so just missing they
160could have been a 27 they could've out of 20 2.5 or they couldn't only sighs it's 27.5 and there was about another 13 there was 13% more of our kids we're at that level which is a good thing for structure development conventions of three parts maybe our rubric I just want I put there the beginning of the year and then the end of the year the difference between the those sections over sixth grade as you can see was 54 and another 17% we're at 2.5 and then the scores below show from beginning to end seventh grade again is also 46 and then 36% we're at 2.5 and eighth grade which was our lowest at 33% another 22 we're just below that and you could see if you look at the as the grade levels went
161up the difference between with structure development conventions the starting point or the beginning of the year based on that rubric the number of students that go for structure were at 3% development 3% in conventions 4% and in with this rubric you could have something as part of rubric could be I give you something simple as they had to have a direct quote within their their piece if the kid did not have that quote within that piece they went to the bottom of that that scale for the rubric so they didn't get points for that so that's where a lot of the things we use it as an instructor more of as an instructional tool to see the areas where our teachers need to pull small groups and work with you know individual students but more
162or less small group or within the whole class depending on obviously what the area was for math our goal was 85% similar to Uncle Barry and at 80% or better 5th grade was at 7 percent of our students sixth grade 66 seventh was forty eighth grade was 23 and actually that eighth grade percentage just so you know does not include the students that take algebra that's not part of the Glencoe math assessment system so these are the students that take that take our common core math 8 class so it's not the students that do take our house around just make sure overall you can see 46 percent of our students scored 80 or better and interestingly this is very similar to with our aspect scores our fifth grade was the area that that had the
163lowest scores for us in the aspect math test and what we just talked about before was we gave the same thing that s back version of that test so the more rigorous tests what percentage of the eighth grade students take algebra and what per job we're proud of that's at least 50% and some of the stuff we it was interesting that you talked about talked about stamina in a sense the our students obviously besides eighth graders in the past don't have end of the year assessments to be able to our our goal is to be able for them to retain something obviously that they learned throughout the year different than when I am taking a unit test of fractions we'll say and also the fact that it does include the application type problem that they
164have - they're not as if you want to say easy concept skills specific so that you know that's part of it we look at all a lot of this at our math department meeting the last time and we're trying to find ways to make sure that we are covering well what needs to the standards we're covering but we're trying to figure out maybe we're not we're looking at it maybe we're not covering this certain standard as much as we should be in certain areas especially like I said with fifth grade the 100% goal of performing at benchmark on star math from beginning in the year those students be at the end of the year would be at benchmark we were at overall ninety eight point six percent of our students stayed at benchmark second part
165of that 85 percent of students that are below would make a year's growth depending on again where they start it's a year's growth doesn't mean they met goal they made a year's growth based on the star math reports and we do use the the higher level like dr. rubyists said before we had an overall of 87 seven percent of our students made at least one year's growth on that test communication goal yep we talked about the effectiveness of instruction if you're at benchmark in the beginning of the year we accept expect you to stay at benchmark because you're getting you know core instruction that meets your needs so you can move along and on that that slide I think that one of the key data points is that of the children that were at benchmark
166when they started to be in the air that they stayed at benchmark so we feel that the core instruction is effective and we need to work harder at figuring out how to use the data sets to inform our instruction and intervention for the kids that aren't at benchmark so that we can move everybody and I will talk a little about that in the last slide also for our communication goals the panorama survey our our goal was based around my child's teacher communicates with me as frequently as needed we had been 76% the year before and this year we went up to 82 percent increase and then going forward some of the things that we I want to just highlight for reading this would be this will be our second year administering the dibbles test and
167for fifth and sixth grade and we started the star reading test in seventh and eighth grade in January of last year and I put here consistent with assessing our students obviously throughout the year but and a better understanding of how to help our students bate I just put there based on the data like dr. Berube just said the students that read benchmark are staying at benchmark it's the students that are below benchmark in in certain areas that we need to make sure that we are targeting specific targeting areas for them to make sure that they make the improvement that they need a smaller number of students needed for invent intervention I think hopefully as the years go on and students are administered this the same test over here it's more consistent than just being the
168first time you've ever taken a test like this reading interventions we have a little we we've changed a little bit where students now similar to our math lab our students are pulled out during the Eun U and H time which is specialist time for small reading interventions now based around different parts of the fluency some of it would be reading comprehension based on the assessments that we have from dibbles and also with with star reading so obviously in dibbles there's that accuracy also that we are focusing on I just professional development continue to calibrate through our dibbles assessments because as you give it you know there's I get the assessment to a student as I gave it we want to make sure that all the teachers obviously have any different teachers that are given it
169to the students that we are doing it with fidelity and doing it the same way through our calibration of these assessments that's what close reading strategies continue to work on that with professional development for writing this will be our second year using the teacher's college grades five through eight with the writing section the TC writing rubric the then developing small intervention groups around the weaknesses based on that rubric like I said as an instruct and then the professional development is doing I was gonna be around teacher-student conferences as was mentioned earlier into student checklists to be able for students to self assess and also set those goals like a group you mentioned before about I can't statements as they go forward for math this year we have come up with a new UNH rotation our
170math specialists are teaching these classes for students that needed to refine their basic math skills so the first few rotations are actually where students before when we have them and as the year goes on they'll be taken out of maybe five classes of the specials every other day for five classes we actually have it now where some students have a whole entire rotation of eighteen classes of the math lab and you know we have found that to be so far it's in an early stage but we found that and I've actually had parents email me and say can they stay in there for another time in that rotation so hopefully we'll start to see some benefits from that also obviously the math lab that we've had before will continue and that again is based on
171our star math and also some of the classroom assessments that we have where students are pulled out based on concepts and then math we've done this but we want to continue to make math as it's it's a way of thinking showing how that think how the thinking is developed rather than just sewing the result as a number and again it goes back to the application I could have a student do mathematical problem out like the multiplication problem but when you then put that into a problem asking students to figure out based on a certain number of students how many groups would we had if you can only have groups of three you know based on something for say a party or whatever maybe so kids are able to use their knowledge of whether it's adding
172subtracting multiplying etc within the problem and then and the last thing was a parent survey is just continue to find ways to build a positive relationships with our families I know last year we started to remind app four a bunch of our teachers had monthly updates that I send in newsletters PowerSchool obviously and then our parent assessment nights helping parents to kind of understand more about the assessments that we we give and what they mean and what it means for their own child questions what um what unify class or the students missing they we gave them a choice that they could we they all go to PD and health they could make a choice of this replacing general music art performing arts 21st century skills they and also they can't yet they can't they couldn't
173they have to take the unity special uh world language so they can't get out of that one also that would be wanted like PE and health all the other ones are you finding there's a trend as to which one they're choosing um to be honest with you I want to say there wasn't there was there was one that wasn't chosen as much but the other ones were around the same amount it wasn't a big like I do is a big notice a noticeable thing I say Tekkit tech ideal there was a big difference in the number sector and that's just for math oh you're going to start that for reading and writing as well we just this year we started with this as part of the math it is something that we feel if it
174was something that was successful that we also could go to that the thing that with the with the reading part of it is we're trying to figure out based on you may not need 18 sessions to working with a small group of students on something that I say with whether it was fluency or or something to that nature you may not need that that long a period of time it gives them the the opportunity to make it maybe only four sessions it maybe eight sessions depending on the the students that you have within that group and their abilities it's vital that they get these skills and it's necessary to get these skills to move on I just hate that and you have to find the time from the summer and I'm gonna be agitate kills
175me that we have to take it out of that time but obviously we need to find the time that students you know are able to do that because we can't always just rely on alt time all the time for these students so that's why we decided to shoot it and again that so far we've gotten positive feedback I haven't heard having on any negative feedback from from parents at all about the students in there so those rotations are over yet so Jim Fitzpatrick does the fifth and sixth Caitlin's and Katie who is our seminary masters as does the seventh and eighth grade throughout all the numbers you see you know reasonably small on fifth and sixth and then it declines a little bit in seventh and eighth in terms of great achievement is there something
176that needs to be tweaked in the seventh and eighth which hypothesis which I'm going to have things like you know I was in a eighty four eighty percent eighty percent and 70 percent said well that was a di di big again you know it is either the performance tasks sometimes it it could be the fact that as you go up as you go up the grades it's it's more rigorous it's absolutely as you know we talked to us before what is expected of the students yeah you know it's expected so not that it's an excuse but D like I told you the DFP we really were like banging her head because every year we put together the schedule the amount of when we had assessments we try to be able to try to make it
177so the eighth grade isn't all at one time you know taking this arm at start reading the DRP so we try to you know move it out a little bit spread it out so that happen to be we know it happen to be after the smarter balanced test and we did actually ask a couple of students and you know because I we went some couple some of students that literally they Ryan goal before and they went down and when a couple is like I'm like what happened here and then we looked at actually the amount of time and in certain here is that they they took on these things like in a star map and things and we can see that when I talk to students a day that actually took 12 minutes to finish
178the star map and I said well let's look at you spent 32 minutes last year look at your score and this year you spent this amount of time and now look at your score and again it's a learning experience for the kids and obviously motivation not that I mean that we've come across right now I cannot say right now can you go over the differences in the assessments the Glencoe math assessment versus the star math the Glencoe math and the my my math is similar to what they talked about for huckleberry in percenter and the star math is the is based on the state standards although the my math in Glencoe is based on the state standards also the kind of course is a discrepancy between how they're performing on star math oh yeah almost
179all of them are at you know benchmark at the end of the year those who are below come up you gotta remember though it's um it's even though the number was higher it was the the amount of growth that they made was one year's growth I have may have been am trying to find that slide for you which was in the date is something like this yeah yeah for this event a star math afterwards yeah well in the difference for the for the star math was their based on the grade level expect expectation I think it was called that they were a two point or say will go with a five their a 5.0 we talked to the company and they said by the India there should be a five point nine like nine months
180of growth and that's what we considered like to be a year's growth in there so but a kid might have been a 5.9 but is a site as of 5.0 went to 559 but did not meet it maybe as a seventh grader so didn't meet goal per se but they did make one year's growth so that may be a little miss leading that statistic so this is the assessments for the end of last year yes especially yep so when did we get this data what do you mean by when did we get to select and in particular the writing goal when did we get this meaning when did we collect this data one where's this data available not in here usually at the end of year yeah and they're sort of going in mr. Blandon
181knows that only 50% of his students are not even 50 33% of his students coming in tonight are from eighth grade from an eighth grade method where the goal so he knows how to structure his ninth grade classes to Lajoie shortfalls well I think what is sharing data that in that way to that degree that we know that these kids coming into ninth grade and didn't need this level of help well you got to remember too it's based on the high school does not currently use have the teachers use the teacher's college writing rubric right now no no that but based upon this data set we had 33 percent of our eighth graders meeting a writing order I can't answer that specifically but because I don't I know that they share data that between the
182two schools one of the things that we're working on we had webinar yesterday is the PowerSchool a assessment and analytics module because we want to where I think we have an upload next where beta school to upload all of our data that way every data set that you've heard talked about here into this new power school module so that everybody who receives a student or who has a student will be able to see their historical data so right now it's a matter of and I can't tell you exactly which scores they get but I know that the guidance counselor's from the high school and the guidance counselor's from the middle school shared eight about their students in fact one of the requests that we just got was people wanted passwords to the high school people
183wanted passwords to the like that even the PSAT data because those are different data you have to have different credentials to get in so they you know and I can't tell you yes they have this data because they they ask and they share the data that is usually the common data to them but they they certainly will have all of that every single thing that a student has as an assessment will be on this student database and we expect that to be hopefully up by the end of November December because this is a little different we're not talking about we have a subset of 50% of our students who are reading meaning or right and goal so maybe we need some targeted instruction this is 67% yeah thank you I think of you talk to
184marks teachers and you talk to Liz you know we've been talking about this which is one of the reasons why we need to have these assessments about how the students come into ninth grade in terms of their how much they've read before they get to how many books they've read in eighth grade what they've read how they're writing and that's been it that's been an ongoing discussion for the since I got here that we've been working on it yeah I'm just concerned about the impact at ninth grade and hopefully we're addressing the gap in seventh right now so we're going forward the high school experience can be the high school experience and not again and I think what's really important and we're actually like I think I can talk about this because mark is going
185to present a cape and hopefully in November the questions that were raised with regard to AP scores so you know mark has been working on that with his team and one of the things that he's doing is an analysis of grades received in those AP courses and how do they align with the AP scores so I think you saw some things and some of the data that were presented already tonight with regard to formative assessments that our teacher made assessments and then how kids are doing on s back and standardized assessments that have reliability and validity data in all of our grade levels and what we're seeing is that in general students do better on teacher made tests than they do on outside assessments and so that really causes us to pause and think about
186you know how are we how are we doing this work of creating assessments and if you you know two of you were at some of the Marie Alcock work and is part of our curriculum revision and we're not going to create binders of you know this lessons and we are actually aligning all the work that's in the curriculum app to the standards and then the teachers are going to have support through professional learning from dr. Alcock on developing assessments that our teacher majors and assessments that actually aligned to the standards that align with assess the skill and the application of the skills that you say you're teaching so that we can really tighten up and have alignment between when we get an S back score or a PSAT score an SAT score or an AP
187score they should never be a surprise because if you if you know what you're teaching and you know how you're teaching it and you're assessing what you're teaching according to what our state standards and our curriculum is there should be an alignment between your internal assessment and your external assessment and if you you know I think you're gonna speak to it but you didn't make a comment what we saw on star and some and some of the other math tests for fifth grade aligned with what we got an S fact well there is an alignment the s back story that we told last time we met aligns with what you know what we're seeing here so well I nobody likes it everybody wants we want to say all students are performing at ninety percent you
188know but if we didn't have this data if the all if the principals and the teachers didn't do the work that we've been trying to do and get up and running over the past few years we wouldn't really have this information we'd be saying we have what the issue is still exist yeah it would still be there and we would we would be singing that you know our kids are doing really well they're doing great on practice and penelo they're doing great on DRA at dr PDR a all these things and that darn s back test it's unfair because we're not doing as well on s back so I think that we well you know none of us are gonna say wow great job these are great scores I think what we really do need
189to do is look at what is the information that we're getting out of that those assessments and what are we doing with it together ourselves and more importantly get our students to where they need to be and I think did my unbiased but I think that and we haven't heard from market but what these three principals have talked about in terms of the honesty of looking in the mirror and looking at the data and looking at what it's telling us and then working with the teachers and the curriculum people working with the teachers to change how we're doing business to get where we need to go I think that's really the story that we're telling tonight yeah I just I just wanted to make sure that again transfer of data between 8th and 9th grade
190is there because he's not seeing what's coming it's gonna change how effective his instructions gonna be well why not Aggie basically I mean Aggie and Liz had those conversations also you gotta remember to as Liz beam for the high school filters and we have so you know also the different grade levels from 5 to 6 shared 6 to 7 and seventh day for art for whiskey near have shared that information to obviously because they do this was the area that you know we were the lowest what what was the reason I think is they look at because they got to know like you said they're gonna know who's coming in and where our our our town falls and they do take them to begin the year also so you know we do it free so
191right off the bat they can they get a good sense of where they where the kids are at when they come in yeah I hope so cuz you're under one one roof on it historically been the transfer or one in addition the one school to another world which sort of drop the information thank you thank you mister Lana you got five minutes no we're working little sands technology here it looks like I see you blurry screen and nothing behind me so I'll do my best to illuminate um alright it's my school I know I get hit all the buttons I want but so what I'll do is like I said go without a little technology here and talk a little bit about the high school update on the school improvement plan our first objective at
192the high school for first goal is really tied to the improvement of instruction through feedback I have the distinction of having my visions yeah and here [Music] Dean did it I bet it's the one where you don't push the red button you didn't push the red button did you John are you sure the red button is there you go thank you okay I've been warned I used up three of my minutes already [Music] timers done sorry so the first goal is really tied to you know improving instruction through feedback supervision and evaluation I have the most administrators in my building so you start looking at unifying and aligning the observation and feedback protocol we provide to teachers we've done a lot of work with revision learning spend a lot of time last year doing these
193they're not called walkthroughs their collegial collegial calibrations where we broke up and into different groups and went to different schools and really dope deeply into the actual teacher rubric and so within our own we have a reflective administrative CLT while our teachers meet every four days for 83 minutes they have this collaborative learning time administrators have that time as well we try to build it into our schedule we try to keep it sacred and have that time to meet what we have the opportunity to talk about the types of feedback we're given you know so what we found after doing some of that focused work with revision is really the second bullet is pretty important because it shipped a more directed feedback relative to indicators and attributes in the rubric if you've ever seen the
194teachers rubric it's a huge rubric there's a lot of information a lot of expectations and through our work with revision we focused really really tightly on the attributes within indicators so really down to a very targeted level that are going to give us the most leverage when providing feedback to teachers and some of the work we have moving forward is really to help teachers understand you know when we look and observe a lesson and we provide feedback to it's going to be directed it's going to be specifically tied to those attributes because we know that that's going to get the most benefit students the most if we can provide that really good feedback for them but it also has a shift right from where we were perhaps that proficient or exemplary levels because we're focusing
195on such a specific criteria so there's a need for the faculty to really get more in depth that rubric who's been around for but we're going to spend time with that as we go through our evaluation cycle with teachers and we found some pretty good feedback based on that that our administrative team we're actually down to an administrator technically what we gained one in kemon so we're actually evened out there but we're real excited to work that together I've been doing so so far since the school year started second objective is about really focused on improvement of instruction using the gradual release of responsibility model you've heard about that from the district improvement plan or implementation plan or just remind you again that's the I do we do you do together you do a loan
196sort of model it's a way to structure instruction for teachers to plan we have spent a lot of time last year I actually was able to purchase a book which was better learning through structured teaching and by departments the teachers actually broke up and did a book study by departments and were those were meetings were monthly where they talked about different sections went through and had anecdotic anecdotal examples of what they might use in their classroom to structure these different types of components of lesson design one of the big takeaways there is that teachers sometimes feel the need to incorporate every single one of those four components in every single lesson which can get daunting to try to do that so we're really looking at how can we possibly spread it out a little bit
197more and use instead of a lesson plan design more of a unit template to help teachers kind of plan to make sure they have those extra experiences because we do need to get to the point while it's great for collaboration and there's a great video out there where students we saw a video over the summer where a student goes on a job interview it's a cartoon the student goes on the job interview and the interviewer asks a question and the students looking around and the interview says well what are you looking to do and he's the student says I'm looking to think here and share with someone right which is what a common thing we do but we sometimes forget at the end of the day they're on their own they're alone we have to
198provide them that opportunity the collaboration is important these need to be part of the process but we have to remember that end game so it's important for teachers to have that and we're looking to a develop a lesson plan tool or unit plan tool in the school objective three this is where we start getting to some of the questions that when you get to the high school level there's not a lot of standardized assessments when it comes to some of these reading and writing assessments this is where we get to cfas these common format assessments about reading and writing and you'll see that in looking at the results the baseline for each one 74% for reading shuttle a 296 for reading and then the baseline for writing was 48 and the final is 87 point
1995 so we've done a lot of work to try to mitigate bias and take that out with blind scoring and development of rubrics but at the end of the day we need to work and this is the work that we're doing with dr. Alcock as well to talk about assessment literacy what are we actually measuring you know the conversations I've had with little dispenser at the end of the school year last year as we move through and started looking at the reading and writing data we were collecting we had different rubrics the different grade levels so why we might be able to identify in one particular grade level here's how they were doing if to say the mister chuckles point is we start even within the high school so look and translate that data to
200say okay we're going to look at what the ninth graders did in writing and translate that let's look at those sophomore year teachers there weren't enough common dimensions in the rubric so it becomes what are we having a conversation about and that's not that's not necessarily a function of anybody doing anything maliciously it's that group getting together and that's CLT those ninth grade teachers or those tenth grade teachers having that in-depth conversations this is what my kids need and then how do we expand that conversation to make it where there really has to be grade level and then school-wide ninth through twelfth grade so we see inflated results these results that you see here is no surprise to you that I look at these numbers and I know they're inflated they absolutely are so we
201need more work on assessment literacy and understanding what it really means to assess and the work we're doing with dr. Alcock to align to standards and have standards-based assessments is going to help us get those numbers back in line and really measure what kids are able to do or not do this is objective for this is one about the fact that Brookfield high school has been a focus school in the area of reading because our scores from the 1415 school year which was the us-backed test there was an achievement gap in reading between the high need students which our ELL students special education students and our free reduced lunch students the gap between the non high needs and the high knees was bigger than the state average and so we became a school on watch
202so they compared they they have a whole index and I can't even begin to really get into the in depth of explaining it where they were able to translate us back data they collected connected to the SAT data that was done in 1516 so there's some good news here the high needs group in this is in 1516 that's the data that we have fifty three point two percent of our students so that was an 18 percent improvement and the high needs subgroup so those students well it's not the same cohort necessarily because it's a different group of kids but regardless that longitudinal data shows that there's an 18 percent improvement for our non high need students they went up twelve point four percent so you see a greater increase in the non high me and
203the high needs kids which is great and then as far as the gap it went from seventeen point four it went actually to seventeen point four percent which was down from the original 23% gaps who saw five point four percent improvement so we're seeing things we're actually only point eight above the state average for the gap which is great we're getting closer to closing that gap and that was our first year that was my first year as principal this updated data here is my first year as principal so I'm excited to see what's gonna happen as a result of 1617 when I get that this year and I won't get that data to the end of these 1718 year like I talked about the last meeting the state just is behind and how long it
204takes to get this data rolled out to us so this is this is encouraging and we're seeing and hopefully you know from some of the training we've got from the school improvement grant opportunity to see even more growth there so I'm I'm optimistic about that star math has been a challenge and I'll say that for a couple reasons one when I came to look at this actual result of what I'm looking to say 100 % of students you see it's very similar to what the whisky near middle school goal was 85 percent when I mark June and I spent time going back and the lake students are rostered it was very difficult to pull this measure out so what I what I did is I'll show you this chart here so what this shows is
205the benchmark on the far right column of what those individual grades so you look at grade 9 if you go all the way across the right the scale score they need to be a benchmark for the state of Connecticut is 853 the ninth grade is the most promising set of data now whether those students are taking the test more seriously you know and there's a lot of different conversations we've had about assessment I think the expectation we had star math star reading which was new right remember teachers and the high school are seriously giving their own common assessments this is the first leg kind of outside thing that we were doing and they were taking a look at it it was a new process for them and you look at time on tests like Dean
206alluded to and I think some of the expectations you know when you go in to administer a test for the third time this year sometimes students we found at the high school and this is not this is conversational anecdotal data we've had from talking to kids they felt they were assessed a lot because I also put a lot of pressure on my teachers to say I need data we can't operate under this I think this is going well or you know these kids I listen to them read they're reading well that wasn't good enough for me so I required some assessments which were the administration helped create outside of star reading in star math so kids were getting assessed a lot and that's the problem the problem is when you say the kids were getting
207assessed it was like something done to them that was kind of I think the feeling and so I can see great scores in ninth grade where you know at or above benchmark you know from the beginning and you'll see when it comes time to that spring administration for the tenth and eleventh grade they were good fall winter and then balls off for spring I don't have any any understanding as to what the exact specific reason is for that to occur and then when I look at it 12th graders and Mark and I had a lot of conversations about this the department head of math at the high school we don't test all our 12th graders so this you know for the students that are getting this test and star if you're in AP calc if
208you're in BC calc if and you're in AP Stat and you know you weren't administered this test so these are students that are struggling right and what that says that's not an excuse that says we're still there and we have work to do so while this may exclude that group of kids this just says we have more work to do with our seniors regardless of where they are to get them to benchmark you know mark and I had a lot of commerce actually a conversation today about you know how do we how do we approach math instruction to make it just to grab kids it was interesting we went and watched some slow Studies classes right we watch the social of these classes to this teacher was we've walked in we did these engagement walkthroughs
209or as we're walking through classes and spend like 3040 seconds in a classroom just to see how kids are engaged and kids were debating about ropes Pierre in the rain of terror and how they would do the French Revolution differently I didn't know the teacher was in there because even hear his voice and then mark and I left and said he looks at me goes mark we need to do this in math how do we do this in math and so we started talking about more of a project-based problem solution and you know one of the teachers that we were talking to said well it's great you know you could do a whole year about building a house I said that's great the kids aren't connecting to building a house some might they might get
210a whole year's course on how to build a house and we could look at all the different math problems that we can integrate and all that but unless there's some connection or some just inherent you know driver desire to solve those problems so we're looking at a bigger picture we're talking to some other districts we're looking at some of the state curriculum or one of our jump shooters to try some lessons and units there that really was based around puzzles and see what else we can do and that's a side note to the instruction piece that we have to be doing it better you can see ninth grader is great but we're starting to fall off and this is a piece we need to work on I'm happy report that this year when we give
211the start data we'll arrange by class I'll be able to give you that benchmark specific benchmark that talks about 100 percent on goal stay on goal throughout the year 85 percent will be able to have those measures specifically for you but this is what we ended up with last year sure one of the other things that we've done this goes to the vertical alignment question that yes so with storm half with the SUBSCRIBE as a prescription we probably only eat one now but the submission to our map is coaching it comes in and it's it's video coaching and so we set up video coaching for the two elementary schools and we had Jim Fitzpatrick Katelyn and coffee and and Mark to it on the call with us so that they could benefit from what is
212going on in the elementary school and we're going to continue that throughout the year with having if we're having PD on middle school math the elementary people can be there and the high school people can be there and will we do high school or e so everybody be involved because they need to hear and see what the what's going on in those schools with regards to the data because like the conference that we get call that we had today was about data analysis and informing the folks at the elementary school who just started using star what the with different reports that are in star math tell and how you use the different data reports to do whatever it is you need to do so that's happening and this less lascal is about communication communications that
213not that I continue to try to figure out how to crack I'm not there yet I'm still working on it I say that because you know if you look even how these questions are phrased I feel well informed about what's going on in school that's a very subjective question right that anybody can answer any number of different ways in fact if I'm a parent taking the survey and looking at the second question my child's teachers communicate with me as frequently as needed in the high school you don't have one teacher communicating with they could you could six to seven different teachers and some absolutely are better than others and you have to a greet that data I did take a quick look though I know someone had asked about you know what percentage of families
214were responding to these surveys at the high school last year there's 181 family members which puts it about 20 percent of the parents responding so that's about where we were so our numbers went down they went down 3% and 4% unfeeling Mullin forms and teacher communication we have had this conversation about what we can do with the survey to get at what the specifics are when you look and you answer this question that doesn't give me a whole lot of information to take back and say okay let's do this differently because it doesn't say a whole heck of a lot it just as I feel whelmed informed or not well informed where are you so I'm hoping that we can rewrite some of these questions and that conversation is with panorama to get the data
215that we need that can help me figure out how I can best guide my teachers and my own practice to make sure that we're communicating with parents better look I'll give you a word of advice from a parent of a high school student sure easy respond okay it's as simple as that I'm not talking about an email and getting back the same day yeah but at least within 48 hours it's not just me I speak with other parents I hear a lot of the same issues over and over it comes down to lack of response and that that's really you know the biggest complaint that I hear amongst my my kids friends and everything else it's know I sent that teacher a note Alethea and that's a lot of hurry back the people that are
216responding to the survey generally you know are the ones who probably have an issue and studies prove that right you know if I'm happy I'm happy it's save was coming out to vote you know people who are content and complacent huh you know what everything will be okay it's either you feel strongly on one side on the table or the right one of those people come help but the same thing people respond to the survey right but it does come down to something as simple as teachers responding in a timely fashion so if you want to ask parents I would just ask parents as they're walking in and out of your main office all right hey we have a survey what's your biggest issue with communication I think you're gonna find better data and more
217data then rewriting a question is sending out the survey it might be coming back about timely feedback right okay thank you one other question mark um you had speculated that for the for your objective five going on the spring scores went down because the students were just tired of being tested and that a lot of that was time on test and taking a looking at that it I said some of the philosophy of it being done by the time we got to that and may you we had whether the a/b testing or doing si you know and I think the teeth the students value certain tests if I say SAT or PSAT to a student it has inherently more value to them because that college connection is there this star assessment you know and I've
218heard kids say we have to take star like and almost rolling their eyes about it because it's something else they had to do again so we have working a shift that like how can we and so to that and some of this coaching and being able to use that data to help students so that student who may roll their eyes because they take the star test what are they seeing as a result of number one getting their scores and we're going to be sure that we communicate scores to students all right that's one of the big things that we have to do some unike scores to students so they may be better understand them instead of taking this test and you know getting back no results right and that's an overarching piece that we've talked
219about so I think there's some component it's not the entire story though but that I think it's a piece that factors into it have you ever measured how many days assessments are given in the high school I have not specifically like and by course or just in general like that just in general like you talked about time on tests right you know I've been given on average 25 days out of 180 to 150 days right that percentage moves a lot thought I'd be curious to know had something I could sack eyes as where as I'm getting results from the you know from the data I'm collecting from the department's it's something I could tack on to you know certainly and get some of that information as well yeah when I'm talking about you know I
220just actual like spend time in class the formative testing is like the unit tests that's the class right you're talking about state you're talking about standardized tests thank you thank you Mark thank you Mark well it's been a long and exciting evening i it's it is 10:20 at night so unless there's any other questions one we go to upcoming events and then later this Friday October 6 it's a professional development day no school for students Monday October 9th there is no school in observance of Columbus Day Monday the 16th as our student rep had reported there is a parent assessment meeting with skinnier Wednesday October 18th is a clinic for flu vaccinations 5 to 8 o'clock p.m. at was interval school this is available for all Brookfield residents our next Board of Ed meeting is
221Wednesday October 18th and I did want to say one more time the Brookfield Education Foundation Gala is Friday October 27th tickets have been extended a little bit longer but they are selling out so if you would like to go please go online and you can order tickets there I have the honor of being the ex officio Board of Ed member for the Brookfield Education Foundation and I will tell you that just at yesterday's board meeting the BEF awarded over 21,000 in Grant's well just yesterday so we get this money to do this by fundraisers such as the gala so what's in there right night yeah absolutely great now yes and that is it for me okay thank you and without further ado all adjourn the meeting without objection thank you [Music]