BOE Meeting 10 25 22

001okay we'll give everybody a chance to turn on that's it if you want to let him in outside yeah you want to open that door all right we're going to call the meeting all right the meeting of the camp Board of Education for tonight October 25th is now in session I want to thank the board members for uh for making the meeting and Peggy hello Peggy one of our board members is joining us via Zoom so um anyways I want to um welcome our administrators thank you for taking the time tonight I know you guys I see when I drop my uh grandson off my and I don't have these there too early but I know you're there early early and here you are late late so but thank you and uh I want to

002welcome Mr Mrs Mesa who's Simone's uh Mom and Dad they came to uh rudoran so we're going to give her a big part tonight would you meet us in the uh Pledge of Allegiance please foreign reorganized our agendas so that there's a few reports that we'll go through and then we'll get to public forum for anyone who wants to speak in public environment so having said that you're back to back tonight so you're on for the student report please okay so tomorrow October 26th there will be a Canton Middle School DC current meeting Friday October 28th or a week of CIS qpo where there will be the caspco Fright Night Wednesday November 2nd will be the CHS National Honor Society induction Tuesday November 8th Cherry Brook signers will be closed due to election day and

003then same with in high school middle school and CIS because of professional development um ongoing we have Alice in Wonderland which is approaching on Thursday November 10th at 7 pm Friday November 11th at 7 pm it's Saturday November 12th at 12pm and it's 12 10 for adults and eight dollars for students great are you performing at all or no I'm um director's assistant okay is that a paying job no um I I wanted to ask you first of all any other members have a question for Simone no but we spoke earlier about informing um the high school about like who she like more about the representatives of older students and freshmen and sophomore have said stuff to me like oh what if I have a concern and this and that and I said are you

004aware of and I mentioned their positions and they were not aware so she might bring that back to kind of get the word out that you know this is who we are and this is our role and this is what we do what if we did a couple posters you know um you have a question for the Board of Ed see Simone see Bella see Khalil what if we just put a couple of those up in the high school so kids knew um I could put them on like the TVs too yeah have a question for the Board of Ed see your board of ed wrap yeah you know that kind of thing because I think people just don't like they're not aware of our role so we'll get a giant picture of you oh

005yeah waving like this and the kids are you after my job because you can have it no hey so I was at a I had a nice opportunity to speak at a Girl Scout meeting and I met this um very talented Girl Scout who was in the eighth grade and we were talking about the warrior and what we might be able to do when it comes to that so all of a sudden she gets up on the Whiteboard and she says Mr Daniels what do you think of this and she draws this beautiful kind of Spartan helmet with a c on the helmet and and it just you know it just depicted and I I said to myself I said that's what I'm looking for it's ideas like that and she did a free hand

006and I thought it was pretty cool because the C was there but you know it's not a warrior it wasn't a you know this bulky gorilla you know something like that but it was a helmet a kind of a Spartan you know Roman kind of helmet with the c on it and I think it depicted what a warrior helmet would look like so I thought hey maybe we're on to something here so you know I know that um Mrs Hayes is going to talk to you about um maybe seeing that kind of getting that kind of input uh from both people of middle school and the high school on what what the warrior is going to be what what are what is our mascot going to be I think that's like a really cool idea

007having people submit like ideas like visual I guess maybe not like a concept because you don't know we'll find the perfect thing but it's good to like see like we can put them up here and we can all talk about like which ideas are liking and what parts yeah and maybe we could have you know very something simple but maybe a one two and three you know you get a thermos you get a sweatshirt or something like that and we can we can provide to the top three and then maybe the school can vote on it at that point between the middle and high school something like that yeah exactly and it was in our gym and juniors and seniors got to come and like we had our own like periods to go with and

008it was really informative and there's like so many different schools majority of them were in New England um so I I wish there maybe were more schools that were not on just the East Coast but it was really good I heard there was a big line in Providence College table kind of out the door actually I I wrote um I understand from um superintendent case that it was extremely well done so I wrote thank you notes on behalf of the board for the folks that put it together I loved it good good you get a cure Us in on what you're thinking about or what did you I don't know I looked at a few different schools like there was so many it was really overwhelming but it was it wasn't good overall good yeah

009pounds okay thank you for that support anything else for Simone all right okay let's go to the superintendent report Mr Case thank you very much uh chair Daniels good evening everybody it's great to see all of you tonight I have a very brief report tonight because of our uh presentations that we're looking forward to uh the first one I was going to mention was the first one was the college fair um so Felicia thank you for asking about that a big shout out goes out to our school counseling staff Deb schweiger our our counseling supervisor Jennifer theorados and also Michael Fury and Ian Beeman Mrs Beaman the administrative assistant for the counseling department did a fabulous job um I saw Mr depipo out in the parking lot directing traffic to make sure all of our

010College Representatives got where they needed to go so it was a team effort uh really well done another highlight last week was our high school symphonic band of Performing the concerts uh the Disney concert that happened Saturday morning which allowed many of our families with young children to enjoy the concert children came dressed in their favorite Disney outfit and uh it was so well attended and I hope that a good bit of money was raised for the students Walt Disney trip coming up in April and Simone I know you played a part in that too as to Bella thank you for that it was really entertaining it was really fun thank you so much I'm going to ask Mr Bishop to talk about health metrics so over the past two years during the coven pandemic

011we would report out to you monthly what our numbers were looking like um so I asked Mr Bishop to uh to take a look at our numbers our absenteeism rates and especially as we're hearing more about the respiratory virus that is out there along with the flu we will start giving you regular updates on the health metrics so I'm just going to turn over to Mr Bishop now to talk about what we see as our latest tracks thank you very much and always glad to be able to talk about students in school um a couple things that we that we're seeing so far uh just over a two week period so from the 10th which really the 11th uh up until the 24th um we've got a total number of 29 Kobe cases that we've

012seen across all of our schools which is in comparison to what we've heard in the past it's pretty pretty good for us um seven and trade the primary four at the Intermediate School three at the middle of 15 at the high school and that that is inclusive of of Staff Associated staff and students as well um so our numbers there are okay um when we look at average daily attendance across that two-week period we're doing pretty well the school is typically looking to have um you know five to eight percent um that might be out on it on a given day and and we're right within that Norm for us um even in a time when other things are starting to kick up right now so 92 percent that we see uh on average for

013Cherry Brook 95 for the Intermediate School 95 for the middle 93 for the high school although I will say on the on um there was one day we had a couple a couple other students uh who may have been out um at the high school and I think it was because they were already they'd already determined their college um but overall we're very good in across all schools we're at 94 I did talk with uh nurse Adara uh just to get a perspective on what are some of the things that may be occurring in the district right now and she said honestly it feels like we're back to normal in a lot of respects we've got headaches we've got colds we've got um upper respiratory issues with coughing and things like that um maybe a

014couple cases of influenza um but we're seeing a lot of the normal things that we have seen so far so all things willing will continue on in a really good Direction with that I will keep you all updated as far as uh the number of students and our staff as well there's holding steady really well for us not the same situation that we had left here at all so do you want to comment um the thought about the holidays and what that brings yes I was thank you for that lead info um so when talking with the Farmington Valley Health District they are not seeing any unusual trends at this point uh we're not seeing High rates of covid or the flu or the respiratory virus as of yet so we're in a holding pattern

015so you'll recall that chair Daniels at our last meeting um suggested we look into possibly extending our Thanksgiving break by two days depending on the health situation so I think if we wait over the next two weeks and see what the situation is we can revisit it when we meet again on November 7th if that makes sense thank you thank you John yeah absolutely um the other item I had for tonight is um as is just to alert you that um as you know one of our goals this year is to create a building project feasibility committee now that we have our enrollment study in and our projections um in the report that NASDAQ did for us last spring we know we're going to need to make some modifications to our buildings to support our

016growing enrollment over the next several years so one of our goals this year is to establish a committee to look at that Lou and I have approached um our CEO Bob Skinner and uh first selectman vessel and we'll be asking the board of Selectmen to appoint a temporary study committee to look at this and uh Lou and I would like to know which members of the Board of Ed may be interested in participating on this committee and even more importantly of community members that he was Board of Ed members may know they might be interested in serving on this committee please let us know and for those who are listening in to the public if you're interested in serving please let chair Daniels or I know as we'll be looking to form this committee very

017shortly please so I believe uh I think the way we left it is this is aboard a selected appointment foreign so we can only we will um we will make recommendations or suggestions on Busan and my hope is there will be a selection for the finance member for Board of Education member or two and then we'll go to the public at large yeah what what we don't have is and I'd like you guys uh to consider it um we need a chair and it may not come from the board but we meet somebody with some building understanding uh it's it's having served on or been on two building committees I know what it's like and the chair is really a critical component to that that helps uh Drive the committee uh on the information they

018need to hear so um as Kevin mentioned if you know somebody or if you wouldn't like to step up let's let's talk about that but we we will need a chair we'll make those recommendations to the board of selecting but it is a board of selection committee to report back to the board of Select but not necessarily to the board of education so how are we going to report to the public that they have the option to maybe you know being on the city so I think we'll get a communication out we'll put it on our website we'll begin to advertise for it um why don't we why don't we plan to say that we'd like to form this committee by December and we'll give them a start starting to end up date on what

019we think is reasonable to come back to the selectment and to the Board of Education it might even be a joint meeting at that point we'll be getting the information together any questions on that sorry thanks for playing thank you that's all I had for him tonight okay any questions for Mr Case anything it may not on the agenda now's your time to okay thank you all right so on the chairs report the one thing I do want to comment on is the uh um the search for the superintendent so we did put out a community survey um we publicized it both on the town site School site PTO sites Claudia's uh personal site we I mean Claudia put it out everywhere she could so I thank you we actually put hard copy out I

020saw that out in several locations so as we got towards the end date of this which was last Friday um I think on Tuesday I asked for a for an accounting for Marcus our consultant from Cape uh Mary Broderick and we were below we were somewhere around 22 47 somewhere around there so we put out a reminder Claudia was nice enough to put out a reminder the talent was a reminder so we got just shy of 400 somewhere around 387. if that number may have grown because that was as of Friday afternoon so she may have taken a few more so let's say 400. um on the survey which we're going to share those results in the next meeting in November uh on the 8th but so I I asked Mary I said should we

021extend this uh for another week I was disappointed with the turnout considering we have 220 staff we have students we have parents you know 1400 parents um and she said no she said listen she said you did probably as well if not better than any other District where we run the surveys so she said it's just one of those things so she said I think you take the data that you have and um she'll do the analysis on that for us and she'll be back to us on the 8th so we'll publicize that on the 8th to let the public know that we'll share those results of what the survey said characteristics of what we're looking for in a superintendent and then the board will then meet after that to try to um gauge what

022our next steps are from that point some some feasible reasonable everybody agree with that okay that's that's actually the only thing I wanted to mention tonight in in the report that we will on November 8th Mary will be seven I'm sorry it's actually the night tonight sorry I got a place in a lot of special meeting Wednesday November 9th just for the purpose that's right it's discussing the superintendent search so just to just to clarify I'll say it please absolutely we have our regular meeting on Monday November 7th which is unusual because Tuesday's election day so there's a meeting Monday night a regular meeting and then Wednesday night will be the special meeting to talk about the superintendent search and I did that specifically because I didn't want to bog down the regular meeting so

023we can stay stay you know to a reasonable schedule but my feeling is after we share with the public uh what the results were from the survey and we have a you know a very um open vetting of that then we'll go into executive session and decide next steps and that could take a a little while so that's the reason for the um executive for the special meeting on the 9th at seven o'clock is that here funny is that going to be in this room seven you said seven o'clock I think it is 6 30. didn't we set it as would you file for yeah for the special needs you file for seven or six hasn't been the event hasn't been done yet so I think I put it down for six thirties and try

024to get it you know in and out but I don't want to screw up the public what what's your what's your pleasure does it do you think it's it's uh it prevents the public from coming out if we say 6 30. I don't want to do that give everybody a chance to go to dinner since we typically meet at um seven I would say stick with seven just agree Peggy that's a good point so is everybody okay with seven yeah so we'll publicize the seven that we'll be sharing results on Wednesday tonight in a special meeting thanks okay so uh any any questions for me tonight on anything okay so let's move to public forum so this is the part where anybody in the public can speak or anybody online can share with us I

025I want to make a special pitch or uh before we get into public forum about the Trunk or Treat that's happening on Friday uh at CIS which I think our ptos I can't even describe with how wonderful they are and what they do so this is a pretty big event um I know there's inside and outside responsibilities for looking for a few more volunteers um but this is a great event so if we can plug this uh talk to your families talk to friends make sure they know about the trunk or treated CIS and let's give them a just like we do with everything else in this town let's try to give them a great response okay do you want to say anything more about the Trump Retreat it's candy it's amazing it's giveaway right

026it's pretty good it's old it's getting aggressive giveaway candy I mean it's they're a native parents to sign up Sign Up Genius volunteers to do cars yeah you know trunks decorate and faster are you gonna be there are you dressing up yeah are you dressing up absolutely yeah I wasn't even thinking about this okay Lou will dress up right if you hit 20 people yeah I am I am dressing up I'm going to be in Party City tomorrow my Joe's going to be there it's gonna be great Joe you're going did you say no all right game is a surprise all right let's go to public forum anybody in the audience tonight that would like to speak from public forum so we'll open up online anybody online that would like to speak for public forum

027s tonight anybody online that has anything for public forum just raise your hand okay I think we'll close public forum thank you which leads us on tonight's presentations you want to make any introductions on that please thank you Lou um so I'll begin and then turn it over to Mr Bishop and then our outstanding administrators so uh it's always at this time of the year that our principles come before you to talk to you about what the goals are for each of their schools for this upcoming school year you will notice that with school goals are aligned with the Board of Education goals good night Simone the Board of Ed goals all right Mr Mrs Mason serve as the umbrella and the um school goals are aligned with those District roles so you'll hear that

028tonight you'll also hear some baseline data as we conduct early in the year assessments of our students you'll be hearing about that Baseline data and we'll be happy to report to you later on this year on the growth our students had make have made compared to the data we hear about tonight so oh it's great to have Mr Andy Robin here tonight principal of cherryburg primary school and Mrs Rebecca Corto will follow giving her presentation from Canton Intermediate School both did a great job with a comprehensive report that you received with the agenda on Friday and they've both done an executive summary for you uh listing out their goals so each School each administrator could talk to you for a couple of hours about all of the data points and what they've really tried hard

029to do is to give you a thirty thousand foot summary of what's Happening but as always we can provide you with additional information if we don't have that information for you tonight so Andy will uh we'll present on what's happening at Cherry Brook um Mr Bishop will do the introduction facility in this case um and and this really is the the story of our our great administrators and the work that they're doing tonight but just to to share with you all um kind of the the introduction the Preamble as it were to our um continuous Improvement plans uh we've got um some boiler like some work that we are all carrying forward because it matters as a district to be able to to carry that forward for uh support in the work that we're doing

030care if you wouldn't mind going to the next slide all right so we lead off obviously with our vision and mission statement the things that we really describe ourselves to go ahead and go to them um and our values which we know next it's important to be able to always come back to our vision of The Graduate there's a lot of great work that's going on with continuing to shift the elements of what we're doing behaviorally academically into uh the coordination with our vision of The Graduate that's an important piece for us to continue to uh to work with and then wanted to be able to connect back with our areas of focus for our learning this last year and you approved some professional days for us to be able to do work in two

031uh particular buckets and it's that the area of learner growth and success of school climate and culture um and you'll you'll hear that through the the goals that our administrators have and then throughout the year we we're continuing to work on teaching and reaching each and every learner using data to support teaching and learning uh promoting helping School climate and culture and then effective curriculum development the next so then from these two areas we derive two theories of action and theories of action are if then statements that should really move toward what uh student achievement comes to because that's what we're all here for that's what we're about so in the first theory of action if we identify support development Elevate our student-centered learning practices then student achievement and ownership relative to canton's vision of

032The Graduate will improve so if we focus on effective learning uh teaching and learning strategies we will see growth in our students in the next uh students are at the core of our instruction by elevating our practices focusing on the major proponents of student-centered learning children will be more readily engaged instruction will be tailored to their learning styles which will yield deeper learning this is all about what we're trying to be able to continue to to Rally around as a district next slide please and then our second theory of action another uh if then statement if we create a school community that is inclusive and Equitable for all of our students and families then we will have a safe and engaging learning environment that needs the unique needs of each Community member thereby increasing student

033achievement go ahead and then for each person to thrive in our school Community uh our school environment it needs to be a safe place in which each person's needs are met and differences are respected regardless of backgrounds uh we want for people to be able to feel connected to our schools uh and we we see it overall that continues to provide positive results in performance for our students so with these two theories these two major bets uh that are that are overarching for us this is the work then that our administrator is going to based on the performance that we see from last year and the performance that with the Baseline data that we have this year to be able to guide the efforts moving forward thank you and I'll turn it over to Mr

034Robin so I'm going to make a point comment sure if you don't mind me before you start so I I just want to say that um from the board standpoint um one of the key factors for us going forward and I'm going to emphasize this is the safety of our children and their ability to feel good and feel safe in the classroom and you know one of the things that I appreciate the things that should be put up on the board but for the most part um one of the things that the board I've emphasized through the board is that we don't run the schools you folks do but we got to make sure the schools will run well and when we are getting um notes and letters from parents that don't feel that their

035children are safe in our schools that's a problem so I'm going to lay that out right now to both our administrators that that has to be something that's addressed and it has to be addressed quickly and I think both of you have the expertise that our administrators have to fall back on when they're in a jam with a particular incident or problem at their schools whether it be Cherry Brooks CIS middle school or high school that's that's what you folks are for and they need to lean on you and because you have the expertise so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna make that statement because I'm concerned because we get calls like that periodically so I make the statement and I'll make the statement when the other administrators are in the room also I'm not

036singling anyone out but I just want you to know the board thinks that both of you have to make sure that the administrators are leaning on you and there's quick action there can't be you know parents that this is lingering for weeks there has to be quick action for our children so I'll just leave that to you both so and I think that goes directly to our our culture and climate our school climate work to make sure that people are continuing to feel connected we we appreciate the weight of that and the responsibility for that okay with that said Mr Robin good evening so I'm happy to talk to you about what our goals are for this year at Cherrybrook school I think it's important to kind of look back and get that running start

037because part of a continuous Improvement plan is just that it's continuing to improve so you need to it's now looking at just what's happened this year what happened before what do we see happening this year and what do we see moving on because he cares uniquely different um and we're fortunate at Cherry Brook to welcome 100 kids every year some of which never stepped but in the school or have any type of formal education so it's our job as was pointed out is to create a culture that is safe that allows them to learn that allow them to have fun that allows them to grow and then it's important for us to remember that every child has their own growth pattern and that we want to make sure that we're doing everything we can for

038every child to be successful so looking back in the 2000 um yeah 2012. last year last school year um I was I think I did my report in April so I wasn't able to have the end of your data that just kind of is a quick review we show a great Road in our students at when we look at cohorts by covert this was you know we always want to do better but seeing what we've come up the last couple of years where kids couldn't work any groups together kids couldn't sit within six feet of each other it's going to be in school you know this is what's impacting our children um so we had great growth if we go to that next slide you can see a graphic that kind of shows where our

039growth came from in terms of each grade level uh this is coming from a program called parkfront it's basically a data warehouse that's then you know we can analyze information we'll lead into this later on but if you notice um kindergarten's data is a little tricky because there is no ball Benchmark or yeah ball Benchmark but the notion there is that um emerald green is those who are above the Benchmark the olive green is Benchmark the yellow is approaching orange is what we call Basic and red is below basic the idea is to get more green less yellow less orange less good um you will notice the red creeps up with the longer grates because as students advance and they're learning you get a wider gap between perfect proteins but if you notice you know

040lots of green Improvement there for K and one and if we go to this next slide we can look at two and three again we're looking for increased students at full something to keep in mind last year was our first year doing the latest version of the dra so that was it's an interesting process to see what impact did that have one year's worth of Health isn't enough um we're curious to see how this year is the next year it's after three years we should have a better idea of how it compares to our passive data all right so that's bra um we also have standardized assessment called Dibble it is a research-based early literacy it's accept model and looking for students who need more support this is where the first year we've been Dibble

041the Beats that's the latest version um in here in the document has all the subtests I can explain what those mean if you want but I figured I think it was 30 000 things that are here fifty thousand thirty thousand um they went up and all areas can tend to 64. first grade which you'll see in the next slide there's an overall score we call the composite score so we'll talk about that just so you can see that a couple key indicators last year uh Dr merka our pupil Personnel Service director said there was two Tech that best pretended Student Success and that was in kindergarten letter fluency where we had 84 percent of kids full and third grade World readings accuracy so how many words do you read in that length of time and

042how many little words of accurate 95 percent of our student variable well those are two scientific measures that she held in Greater regard and research and support uh indicates the best potential for reading success we also know that if the child is close it used to be third grade by third grade that was when you felt it got more challenging to catch up if you were behind The Benchmark the researchers back that up to the first grade if you're not close enough to the emergency standard in first grade it is harder to catch up I'm looking ahead to next year I know we're kind of back and forth in our years we're adding a subtest called The Maze which is a reading comprehension for those old enough to be alive to have taken cmts do

043you remember the old DRP where you kind of fill in the blank in the 2.5 we're choosing one of the three words of 10 bounces but this gives a little reading comprehension and that now allows us two composite score for all the grades what does that mean we'll talk about that later on but the next slide you can see what first grade looked like in certain levels I'm sorry about fading out like not the fading optional part but again the notion is to get more green right so that emerald green that's beginning your first grade so that number up top when bidding for the kids who bet the end of year Benchmark at the beginning of the year and if you notice by the end of the year all of our yellow pretty much moved

044into the green area so anyone who's close at the beginning of the year with direct explicit instruction we're able to meet the goal and we reduce the numbers of students who needed a significant intervention so that's an example last year's first grade but this is the kind of work we're doing this year more in depth that's why I've not LED that into it next slide here sorry um so here's another graph of a trend line This is the average score in the first grade Dibbles based on composite score there's also a coefficient factor in terms of the proficiency I need to learn more about that before I share those publicly but we went from like 0.9 to 2.0 which seems great but I'm not really sure I got to get more information on that so

045that's why I went with publicizing the average score which you know as you can see from the trend line going up most of our kids were in the VM score when we looked up and we went from 355 Andrew to 509 writing we always can we go back to this one what does that mean so on the test in the fall Devil's first grade is the out of 540 points overall if you look at the overall score our average score was 355. so you take all the students average their out that's what and what goes into a dibble's test um depends what grade level but it's pretty much early early literacy skills so it would be letter fluency how quickly can you identify the letter to say those values phoneme segmentation fluency how do you

046break those words down um nonsense words so you get a word like I never think about this word nip thank you for marketing our music so you can see the word myth if you want some eventually just look and say myth but first we'll go next stage then that's blending then he said when you look at it so the idea is have you broken that code do you recognize that letter sound correspondent and are able to make that into work so there's lots of different self-testines that goes to that can I jump in just real quick one of the important things about Dittos is that's one of the recognized um screeners from the state of Connecticut for um for reading disabilities like dyslexia right so this is a really important one for us to be

047able to have to be able to use the data to inform instruction and be able to support what our what our program is like is it a time test there are areas of it that are type of of course others are not and do they take it over several days or they take it on one day uh they take it all one day it takes about seven or eight minutes yeah they're probably taking two days could be split up but they are a little um each subtestation about an end or two and there's usually about the range is on a grade level between six and eight and some tests thanks all right writing um this is a different type of goal setup the way the rubrics work you are assessing towards end of the year

048standard so yeah it clearly at the end of the year most of our kids aren't at the end of the year writing standards uh or by the end of the year they are so if you notice they're you know the numbers speak to themselves a good road that we've had the kids next to that all right now so math you know where it works when we've been using our bridges program the assessments that come with a kind of we're trying to analyze what gives us the best information on our student performance um what we're finding is the kindergarten and first grade do something called the north number corner so three or four times a year they take an assessment that goes over most of the standards that are being fought that kind of gives it

049a better overall picture second and third grade but we get a better picture from the end of the Union Sesame so the units on multiplication division we get a better read coming back those numbers so that's why that's broken up typically um again looking at our standards our kids are actually doing very well coming in at the end of the year but we are continuing to show growth kindergarten first grade above 90 according to that assessment so wasn't masked one of our reading points last year in what way in scoring weren't we down a little bit was it under smarter balance is that something yes yeah I can't remember the uh the past so is this an improvement year to year pretty much if you're looking at the cohort we we've taken a step back

050just like the nation over the last few years um I don't know if you've read the latest information about the native test yes where we dropped 10 as a nation right and math um and usually you know they'd say three percent is a warning and we're down 10 so are our numbers John historically from where we are yeah what do we attribute that to well we've had a different model for our student beers couldn't work in Partners until the end of the year last year if it could work with Partners at all the year before we don't know what our kindergarten's first graders and second graders experience was before when things got checked out so yeah our score is down overall over time yes we attribute that to the factors that changed our instructions a

051lot now that we're back we're seeing more growth so so this is an uptick it's uh so in in our score in our percentage of of growth or towards gold are we are we making progress I guess is what I'm asking from where we were yes if you look not from where we were if we look at our historical average we were probably closer to 94 for kindergarten and closer to 97 for grade one and then for grades two and three we're probably about four to five percentage points higher however when you take away a key component of the program which is playing math games and Partnerships when kids can't share things together we're not dealing with the whole curriculum that we used to have now we have that back so repairing the same so

052when you're back here in May that's where we'll get a real indication of things are starting to work absolutely yeah and if I could just jump in you also allocated additional Personnel some instructional coaches that are helping out this year and um so I just couldn't help but jump in and say thank you for that because we're already seeing growth in the math area because of the additional Personnel we have in both CIS and Cherrybrook and that will come in the 2223 gold previews and what's wonderful about having a new set of eyes the building full-time instead of two and a half days a week is this teacher kicked off today is able to work directly with the teachers more often twice as often so she's been working really hard with new teachers and getting

053feedback from everyone what's working what's not working why have we done this before this way what about the other way hey have we ever tried this part of the program for these things why did we drop that off she knows how this builds so we're able to start with a new perspective with more time it allows us to read things not rethink re-examine what's taking place there's literacy Tutors or other math tutors yeah who do the small groups yeah we'll talk about that when we get to what we're doing this year and just one other additional point with this that um students are only tested for the smarter balance test in third grade so that's really their first experience with that so we're using curriculum-based measures to be able to support this right now which

054is what Mr Robin is sharing with us um and we're we're piloting the star assessment for grades two and three to add an additional layer of information report us as well and that'll help to be help us to be able to see Trends was that star assessment being piloted in the middle school was that correct so now it's it's important yeah and you'll hear more about that from Mrs Corto a little bit later as well I think a point that John also brings up is the need for multiple assessments right um you know I would hate to think that we're giving six-year-olds finals in that book we want to see multiple assessments trying to delete the data and figure out from there what patterns are we seeing and that's the whole notion of having multiple

055exceptions um if you're all right we'll move to the this year because I want to be considering people's time so this year um I mean this right there is a huge change we have picture day where we got to take everyone's picture together last year was a composite picture where they put individuals together the year before I'm not even sure if we did picture that I can't even remember that so that's a change then we got Sparky the dog from our Canton Fire Department who came in for the first time in two years to do a fire assembly during fire safety that the only grade level that's experienced that was third grade when they were in kindergarten these are the kind of changes that are now able to take place so when things come up

056of what's different man everything's different you know and yeah we may have done it in 2020 we may have done 20 uh 2008 come together but that's what's different because we're and it's better because we know so much more we could not have taken that picture I was in the victory we could have taken that picture uh last year at this time because they weren't there so I just want to point that out and the Sunshine remember last week when the sun was up all right so our academic goal we got our theories of actions which I know Mr Bishop explained earlier um I'm not going to read them to you but our goals are we want to improve performance I know Mr Daniel's talking back you know we do have specific data goals which

057are laid out in the comprehensive report that we've developed for y'all I'm not going to go over each of those unless you have specific questions but what we've done is looked at um current trends Baseline data and kind of extrapolating where do we think kids should be one of the things I'm proud of Jerry book and looking at the numbers over the years is we used to see tremendous growth in our Dres 40 50 growth looked good on paper but the reality is that meant that we weren't alive because a kid leaving second grade at coach pretty much started theoretical at third grade we were seeing a job I'm attributing that to um I'm attribute now to the new version of Dre I think it's just a better analysis and then also the training that

058our team has wanted to administer it from Kathy Watson and Mary Tyler last year and their ownership of the teachers ownership to make sure that they're calibrated um so we got the tra Dibbles we're gonna we got a slide about that writing and then our math assessments but we have to specific goals so how are we going to make these improvements uh before when I explained about anemic awareness and phonics which is measured to the devil's assessment something else kids need to understand that letters relate to sounds kids need to understand that qualities or sounds are things you hear and can manipulate in order to make it works that so we really and I know the the buzzword is the science of reading that's coming those are skills that kids need to have in order

059to be successful we have a few programs that we're using for that foundation for Borderlands kind enough to search that for third grade which we're implementing this year um we use a similar program Teachers College which we'll talk about a little bit for k32 but we're also using something called hegarty which is a phonemic awareness of program in kindergarten first grade we used it halfway through kindergarten year last year um started in came one from the beginning that's that manipulation of sound so if I say the word bat what's the first sound you hear thank you oh no no that's the letter you hear what's it said if I change the color what word do I have thank you um that's firing off synapses and making connections and spring that's rewiring them for that about

06010 minutes a day it's been great so that helps deepen our understanding of these of the new substances that we're giving we're spending a lot of time to see that next slide and I know Mr Bishop probably talked about star which would be second third grade um and with that is that use of forefoot the slide to have before there so here's what it looks like right now for our Devils for our fall data um you know pretty consistent across the grade levels I think that second grade at 75 is a wonderful jump uh compared to past years but we've never really had this composite score analysis so what do you attribute that to me the instruction that our teachers were able to give in such a great last year the fact that we were

061able to adjust to the times when you can't do as many small groups there's more individual groups and more whole group so we had a deeper Reliance on some of the some of the measures that were individual based why would they carry forward then to all grades why so that's what I was going to go to so kindergarten's Baseline they haven't been schooled second grade that great group um third grade if you remember that's the one the board was wonderful amount to an ad in other section based on the needs of the kids inside the classes so I see a significant group there um in terms of why does it look bigger in second third grade the more kids hitting the Dibbles Benchmark because we have more sensitive tracks the code of breathing at that

062point so I'm excited about the green but I'm really excited about that red if you notice those signs are going down why is that last year we were able to uh with caffeine Watson and Mary Pat legere and then Mr continuing with Chris Woods we've been able to reconfigure our tutoring program more in line with what would be called the science of reading we're teaching kids discreet skills no not the screen explicit skills as to how to have better word attack strategies in the past look at the picture make a guess look at the first letter make a guess nope now you need to know what each of those sounds makes you can figure out what that word is and that's why we're seeing that growth and then in our red area um so we're

063very excited about that and continue that we've also figured out you know we have teachers that are out for a variety of legitimate reasons and we do not have a large syllable um so often we have to pull our amazing tutor out of their jobs to substitute in classrooms we've put in a redundancy system so that way it Rebecca and I have a group and I need to go teach a class Rebecca takes the group so the kids get their tutoring more often so we're proud of that idea from outside of Boston that's our first grade Benchmark and then if you look at the cohort comparison um standards go up as the year goes on right so at the end the kindergarten we had my eyes aren't working and that was before I couldn't you

064can see that the green shrinks why is the green shrinking well that's because the expectations increase for the kids again that emerald green Art Kids already met the end of the year Benchmark and then if you think about our past Trend in this logically saw that yellow group is going to slide into that hole but that's how we came up with our our um numbers I would say prop at least it is of those 25 students who are below basic I would likely yes about 20 of them are in some type of uh support program to get those skills and then those other five are being watched carefully that's one of the measures we used in Germany because again we want to use multiple measures changing my picture so that's the academic portion if you

065remember going back to John John's initial presence part of the presentation two buckets we got right uh academic achievement and I know I'm paraphrasing climate and culture so we have two goals related but we have a goals related to each we want schools and families actively engaged the more people are involved in school research supports more parents are involved the better the kids too the more people are involved in school the more comfortable they are the more they understand the routines of the room the more they understand the routines of the school so how are we going to know this we're looking at our attendance data um much more significantly and much more often than we have in the past our survey results and the only participation in school events now that we are able

066to open our doors we want the parents to come in and you know well that's actually in there or later on so some of the systematic methods we have we have Lunch Bunch we have lunch in the cafeteria let's start with that our third graders were the only grade level that ate lunch in the cafeteria so we had to re-teach K one and now we have 18 K102 number 80 with 95 of their best friends um and we have parents that come in for recess in London help out it's wonderful we have mystery readers again remember that where they put little Clues up when I get asked twice a week you know are you the mother of two kids no I'm not loving two okay you're not a mystery reason um have you climbed this

067mountain that's hard enough to climb stairs these days um you know that that's one of the things another neat thing that we've done we started last year remotely and how to continue this and this is through our dedication as a district last year for diversity equity and includes in the work we did there is we've learned a lot about how do we make sure that the students in front of us are represented in the curriculum another way that our kids feel safe and involved with school best way to do that we found is invite family then because you know I'll talk about my culture I and I had to the other I offered information while when the teachers were asking questions about Rosh Hashanah and yelling before what are these holidays is about what do

068they mean you know we have a kid who's talked about going to Temple can you explain that how it is such a more authentic experience when you have someone who is living through that experience that the kids know and understand and appreciate to share their experiences so that's what we're basing a lot of our things on um the Wally was Monday yesterday yeah you know we had a number of kids out of school which was pretty um we had some students who came in and clothes that they were there for their celebration we invite parents in to talk about it we invite families in that's one of the things we want to do if we can make that deeper connection as to who each of us are and it makes a stronger connection for each

069other and a deeper understanding of what we're all about here yeah having parents back in for um class parties on field trip uh you know writing celebrations and those things yep we were able to do some of those last year with the field trips and the celebration of the end of the year a lot was Outdoors which some will probably keep but yeah our parents going in for central time in kindergarten not yet which kind of leads to the first one of how do you promote a positive learning environment you know we spent a lot of time at Community are talking revisiting our district team of re-centered we're talking about reloading that charitable just kind of let's we have a lot of new staff a lot of news now since 2020. what are we all

070about so we spent a lot of time being here talking about responsive classrooms in the first six weeks of schools and the notion of creating a trusting caring environment way to do that is we need to establish routines for everyone and make sure that we're teaching everything and learning more about it that's morning meeting that's logical consequences uh now those are class news and how to go slow of quote Mr Bishop have it go slow to move fast because together we go far and I do that right with the Bishops this is close all right um and if it's very helpful the transition to school as we talked about before is difficult for some children um for some adults and we're doing our best to make sure that we've always come back to the positive

071learning environment um what else we do in this year whole school assemblies we've already had two great and we're very excited for Veterans Day it's the nine most nerve wrapping day of the year so I'm already getting the worries about that my I'm sweat just thinking about it and I think the Board of Education I think it was nice first year was the second year we had school at that meeting and for those of you who've been at church report it is just an incredible experience to watch 465 kids celebrate Veterans um we've served for over 60 70 years and watch those veterans proud for what they've done and feel honored and learned from our kids as we learn from them so I get excited about that one of our goals this year is communication

072you know we've learned over the last couple years we've emailed it was our job to put them out parents job to read them nope nine more our jobs to reach every parent in the passion that works for them so whether it's uh the real mind doubt that texts things whether it's sending photos whether it's sending out videos we are trying multiple ways to reach families what our success rate is usually pretty good it's families that we're not getting in contact to where we're really working harder um it's our job to reach out to them to let them know what's going on whether it's a phone call whether it's a visit whether it's a text I know I've been texting a lot more than parents than I ever have because that's how you young kids I

073still have a periods at the end I'm trying not to do that um I think we've talked about them and yeah and then a little bit we're continuing with our evaluation growth plan about incorporating student support social and developmental um diversity every teacher has told about that which I'm proud of all right here our priorities so this is you know our goal is like what other things Mr Case eloquently talked about the state study that existed um you all know from the study done left here that charity Brooke it works very hard at making the most of the space that we have um I know I believe it was last board meeting Mr Bishop gave you an update on the state of Connecticut's k-3 core comprehensive reading curriculum programs the state recommended six items um

074and I know there's waivers and I know there's things that have been changed but if the state of Connecticut is going to say hey these are six programs that we recommend we need to do our due diligence and make sure that our children are getting the best possible program so we need to examine those six programs to make sure that our kids are getting what they need uh important part of that comprehensive so remember before we talked about the awareness and phonics and reading comprehension vocabulary oral speaking writing encoding decoding that's what all these programs are about so we have a mix of a couple of things for those things can I ask you on space is the library in full use now again is the gym in full use you know every space well

075every classroom space is being used as it was designed originally we do have some uh offices that are being used in a manner that they're not designed for so our extra third grade worked out the way that we reconfigured the way the superintendently configured or do you work work waiting to reconfigure yes yeah so I was there today every space is beautiful it was just great to be in the uh the library to see it's being fully utilized it's uh it's a it's an attractive space a colorful space two classrooms were in there at one time today it was just going to bring to observe so thanks Andy for getting all of that to happen the cafeteria is all clear then Yes except for the eating tables yes and we that's where we do our

076two again you know the quote the capture is only used for eating between 11 15 and 1 30. so with that would be an example of maximizing some space our kids need to be tutored someplace the hallway was not the best place for me to be tutored so we're in the cafeterias tutoring about 9 to 11 and then Mr McBain our custodian it's all tailed down and then from 1 30 to 2 Mr McBain and Mr batan worked very hard at cleaning the tables cleaning the floors so we can have kids in there to apply for tutoring so we put the tutoring stuff there's no more tutoring in that hallway we try not to yes how is the transition been I mean obviously it's very exciting to have all those rooms open music and cafeteria

077return and Library how is the transition to like staff very excited happy because like they were having you know art in their classrooms they the students ate in their class everything to have that opportunity to have their classroom children it's hugely and the students transitioning beautifully or learning their routines how to get to the library and that's what we talked about with um establishing those routines students needed to be taught this is what we do in the music group is what we do in the gym I go to each room at the game here and talk about is it okay to run School absolutely not instructable what are you supposed to do in the gym oh that's right so recognizing that different places have different expectations per day ages so that's taken a little bit

078of time for the transitions good news is though we had to do grade levels so it became part of our first six weeks of instructions all right we talked a little bit about the school live celebrations um I know this car is excited to have some usable performances you've done she's been here for two three years she's done one musical informance last year in May which was a family called Japan I don't know if you came Ryan but that was the third graders learning reporter again or no are they doing something to supplement that Drummond Roman and singing is that because change and personal opinion Co and this card how it was better uh I'm out of my own there I have something with so far it's an element foreign last priority we want to

079examine our current child's diagnosis intervention process I know that's something we're looking at the district as well how do we invest in your kids needs because their needs are very very different and they are changing dramatically over time and in very well the student to students from day to day so what can we do to best get them the support they need similar to what you asked about what you led in with Mr piano how are we doing our best to make sure that everyone is making the adequate growth academically social emotionally behaviorally in any areas they need to learn so so how's the year gone so far it's been wonderful uh we've got a great start welcome everyone back with our increased Staffing academic specialist we talked about this there's so much more partnering

080and we're seeing such a payoff um with teachers I neglected to mention that we have new reading units with Teachers College they put out some summaries that we're able to use right now and our teachers are very much enjoying the ability to sit down and co-plan in a clear manner it's been really helpful for our five new Platinum teachers we're also very happy and proud of our success of more boxing Community awareness buried that one already um and then the quick identification provision for resources for engineers and health we have we have some students who need very varying needs in varying different ways and we've been able to quickly identify those and Provide support for these students you know every timeline's different but we're very excited at the work we've done so far knowing oh

081well that we have another 150 days to build things together for our youngsters well there's some cute pictures I think there we go plus Safety Week by Mr O'Mara and there's another fire safety winner one of the things our special teams goals was they really want to communicate better they want to they felt they don't share enough with the community about what they're doing so that's why you're seeing lots of figures uh Mr O'Meara that said take a picture of this and send it out to people so a lot of the Twitter things have had things about wellness and if you're Bible school they have that spooky Halloween scavenger obstacle divorce these questions are you fully staffed Andy no where are you missing um yeah I just sent them update like 11 open positions uh

082eight are non-certified if I remember right seven eight or nine certified a couple maternity leaves that are coming up but now we are not fully's down we don't have any building substitutes we're missing five or six special edit arrows we have all of our tutors I know you're you're actively but so we're advertising in our community colleges we put a posting out at Central Connecticut States we're hoping that students who are in the educational profession uh as they graduate mid-year this is a way to get their foot in the door and say we are we are looking at every Avenue to try try to hire highly qualified staff the community to be going back inside the community to see what we can get and every applicant that gets interviewed probably within 24 hours it's usually

083raised across yeah it's cool you never know who's quicker um but yeah that's been a challenge so that has to have an effect right I mean not anybody not being bullied up yet I mean we have a staff of 70-ish we have seven days ten percent short and that's before you know life things uh so until it's out sick so-and-so has Cove and so and so you know because we can't fill the positions any other questions oh sorry I was just going to ask about this one page that was in this packet but not in this packet that we didn't I have why that was never really this is about the school climate um survey yeah the percent favorable so that's on page 14 of Andy's report that's in your packet page 14. it's not

084in this one but it's in this one and just just had some concerns about some of the percentages present favorable for the social emotional security and physical safety yeah I can talk to those okay so the last time the survey was done was before code oh okay so this is a total group our school connectedness should have been down way more than three percent because parents weren't allowed in school as opposed to exposed to your experiences there oh okay so how is this from this is from 2019. yeah yeah okay um respect for diversity I was extremely proud of it's something that worked very hard so to see such gains to me is beneficial um Social Security was down and again you can't be near that person when you hear that for a while that

085kind of registers with a kid then the physical safety I kind of broke down um and I'm excited to possibly read those questions those double negative questions a seven-year-old doesn't understand what's being talked about oh okay okay I just want to make sure we I didn't I I didn't realize that this wasn't like we're recent where are the recent ones so . right so on page 14 of Andrew's report you'll see the percent favorable this was from last spring so that is 20. so I'll answer a bit of that 2020 was in the midst of the pandemic we didn't have our survey was more about do you have what you need uh do you have do you have access to technology it was it was those types of questions then even in 2021 then the

086question was was more around what are the needs that you have um it didn't get into the same level of granularity that we were able to come back now to in 2019 because the models of models of learning were different so is this change reflective of 2019 to 2021 yes essentially yeah 222 . that's what we were trying to do yeah and then when is that how often is that done it's done every spring yeah the state requires um every two years but we we administer it every year each district does it a little bit differently we've actually been um working with Amanda Pickett from the state to be able to calibrate a little bit more about how we how we are what are the questions of asking how are we asking to be able

087to get you know increased opportunities to be able to find actionable battles but we we like what we've been able to use over time who administers it uh Panorama is the survey company so they they do it digitally for most folks but for our Littles at Cherry Brook they're able to do a pen and paper and teachers will read the questions and be able to mark that up they do them all digitally last year remember oh that's right forgive me for not knowing this but how do we uh survey the parents same way an email goes out to all the parents through Panorama I send out an email saying please be on the lookout for the information of the Panorama it goes directly to their email based on the rostering that we have of all

088the information in our PowerSchool and the participation in that survey is I'd have to go back and look it's it's okay and the previous year was not very good we were we did it later this past year was better but it's still we're 30 40 a little over a third I think which is good I mean it's good I mean we want we want 100 participation but when you look at as you were talking about earlier right Mr Daniels you know we want 30 to 40 as it could results and it's it's designed to have teased out areas of focus with individual questions within it to be able to give a sense of this is what this area means this is what this or an indication of you know School connect school connectedness um uh

089respect for diversity leadership there are several items that are laid out for each of those to be able to measure that and then several open response uh elements as well that allow parents to be able to learn anyone need to be able to put in whatever whatever this chart on page 14 here is that student responses parent responses are both both that's an aggregate of both okay I'm sorry this is stupid student school class so is there a separate chart for that the reason I asked that you know where Eric was coming from as well the members of the top are great and it's just if you have all those other things Leadership School connectedness respective diversity why wouldn't you feel safe at school so that's actually very funny um the first one is a

090lot of our kindergartners and first graders don't feel safe because of the playground that slide's really tall so I gotta remember five six three I'm afraid to go on one few months so there's some really you know what I mean like what kind of questions do they ask a kindergartener those are the same question I know John sent you a list of questions same questions and and I can I can share I can share those out with that I'm happy to give this out to the board for the the school um the student uh School climate surveys so those are different for Cherry Brook for CIS the Middle School in the high school as they should be based on the ages and stages the staff survey is the same for everyone and the family and

091Community survey is the same for everyone but then we're able to disaggregate it based on the school that they're responding it was actually surveying kindergarten students yes how are we doing that with it with the teacher and to answer the kids so that's a newer thing that started this last year so just to answer your question so 92 percent of Market is still safe in school when you look at that one question when you look at the four or five other questions that go with it those were very low because specifically I have seen students being hurt at school more than once 28 disagreed with them which means that so that's where the confusion comes anytime they are supposed to disagree instead of agree our numbers go way down so that's why that's why we're

092going to look at changing those bacterial effect because I'm very confused yeah and if you had the parents survey and the teacher survey well you get the same percentages for roughly the same percentages for all those categories would they be addressed the parent survey is much higher or lower our parent surveys are like in our lowest areas the rest are in the midnight we have those surveys and I think that would be meaningful at that point Rebecca her presentation didn't break it out so you'll see him Rebecca I think you broke it out students and parents students and parents I believe I just have a quick question too um Matt on age 17 of our of our you know under math and has um having a very first grade manager by the end of year

093but on second and third it has end of year or end of unit assessments is that a typo or is that end of a certain unit and so why kindergarten first grade um when we went over the last year's data kindergarten first grade those number Corner assessments are kind of ongoing throughout the year testing all the standards throughout and we found that to be a better reliability than the end of unit assessments because you know the kids because these units build upon each other for second and third grade the number corner and the end of the units don't quite match up the way they should or the way we would like them to be so we're looking at the end of the unit so that way we know on multiplication division this is how this

094group did so that's that's why it's broken out so is that why it's at like 75 because at the end of the unit after the end of the year for whether two degrees or more toward 90. so the end of the units we would take all those ends of unit assessment and average those out to get there part of what and I didn't go over this because of the time before what we're noticing too is a lot of the inspirable so we see 56 are great at unit 2 whether it's place value is that great multiplication and division third grade and then by the time that's retaught and extended upon for up to 70 80 right so we so do you have numbers on end of year for those two grades or not necessarily the

095end of year would just to jump in the end of the year there's no summative end-of-year assessment in bridges map I think like uh for that like accumulative if you were to think about it as you've got 10 buckets that you want to be able to measure on throughout the year what we're going to do is instead of having one measure at the end to measure all those buckets we're going to take the individual measurements throughout the year and average those to be able to say have we gotten to about 75 or better on all of on each of those components along the way does that make sense no it does I'm just curious like I I just feel like the kindergarten in the first grade as far as math goes into year they're you

096know at 90 over 90 and the other two are at 75 but it's not measuring the same thing it's not really apples to Apple so I'm just trying to understand where the discrepancy is for the from that yeah why it looks different I hear you the other reason for that is if you look at the growth we actually make more growth in the second third greater than you take one um and that's one thing we're looking at with our math program is are we challenging kids enough are we um are we using the best measures of assessment that's why we're curious to see how star plays into this um see if that kind of gives us another angled triangular data um you know our is our Intervention Program the right for things for the kids

097that we have so it's great you know with kicked off and I with the work that at least beltano and Ray started to have someone here full-time really examining it and asking questions why are we doing it like this why are we doing that we're just making a list and trying to figure out the best place to go from there just one more question quickly if I might there are a lot of good numbers here I don't need to harp on the ones that don't look great to me um grade three math what I'm seeing looks pretty weak is that accurate am I reading it wrong are the S back numbers they weren't part of this yeah um sample on page 12. yeah that's what I'm trying to see yes so if you look to

098page 13 though you'll see why those numbers look low that's that circling back that I just tried to explain to the Felicia so unit 2 is a 69 we teach it that's up to the hundreds we teach it and add more to the thousands we're up to 83 when we teach that unit but in terms of averaging like a challenge to 10 buckets analogy we got one we got a couple of ones that are cycled back so the first time around it's going to bring them down if we threw those numbers out I just didn't feel comfortable throwing ends of you and stuff and test upon a report that fact but you can throw those two out those numbers jump to you know probably mid 70s low 80s I'm sorry mid 70s for grade three

099below 80s for grade two retake here we take a test again you replace greater than the attitude together that's the whole that's a huge debate in other places are we teaching the math are you did standard are we teaching the average grades like that's when he gets Valerie but I just decided we'll just average them all out but what I'm hearing being shared which is a valid point is how can we make sure that we're actually um presenting our math numbers you know holistically we look at kid by Kid we look standard by standard but do we have that overall score and shouldn't be another question too you have some kind of an overall score courtesy of the state for third grade or third grade yeah and we'll we'll be using star to be able

100to have that better extrapolation of of a quantile score which is like Lexile Lexile is reading sport quantile is like a math ability score um to be able to give us perspective of where kids are at on the journey throughout the year so we have a better perspective of what the Consulting looks like so we'll be able to share more about what that information looks like at the end of the year and we're finding good correlation of that assessment to overall end of uh in the year student performance as well okay I have a couple questions sorry I'm sorry but um Andy here so um when people visit the dra like because you keep thinking I hear on the news like oh you know education scores are down and you know across the country so

101where like and I see all your current last year like where do you think we are relative compared to past years like are we down on percentages that we are yeah there could be a few reasons for that one you know two we're absolutely 100 spending more time on the building blocks of moving all that communicable awareness phonological awareness products so by spending time on those code Breakers we are not spending as much time on what we used to do with comprehension the love of reading um building volume but that's seems to will should portend for long-term success we're also not seeing the drop off between Brave and display that um you know we're hoping to get more resources that will support the way we are now instructed um reading a decodable books so instead

102of reading level text where kids may not be able to read those words on the page either decodable textbook that match where the kit is in terms of breaking the code so if you looked at data from like the past six years you can see that even on dimples all of our scores are still the percentages are lower than there were like four years five years now Dibbles is going up because we're spending more time focusing on that um yeah but these are I think we're in a current dip when you look at the last four or five years but where you look at the data from 2006 2007 when we were at two thirds you know we're actually we've moved things incrementally up you said there was new dra new Devils test do you

103think that new versions are having any impacts or hard to say hard to say that after one year it's hard to tell um and I know in the past we've talked about like a certain grade level uh is there one grade level that you're like I is on that they're needing more support academies and that was the second grade you mentioned last year yeah and we're very appreciative of the fact that the Board of Education recognized the needs um to have the class size within the Board of Ed limits do you think foundations Integrity is uh helping and an improvement are you seeing that or that's still early to tell too early to tell foundations well no that's not true foundations has been extremely effective for our students who are getting readings here um they

104are clearly missing those the skills they need to help them break people and I keep using great programs it's been a huge Improvement and being able to implement that last January um with first grade and then that answers that question about a lot of first grade was so hot um our secretary of so high this year and then second and third grade later on was free and we're seeing that in kindergarten Integrity last year first grade this year absolutely those are making a big difference with my last question okay I promise I just want to jump in real quick to just you're asking a good question of what is what is the historical perspectives look like for grades over years and at a later report I'll I'll help to be able to paint the picture

105of what the state of you know performance over time kind of looks like for Canton um in conjunction with the the principles are doing um social emotional security that's you know was lower on that school climate like what are you doing what's going on to like balance out you know is that we're still play-based learning and I know the math program has a lot more games and Hands-On and you know game Planes the curriculum and lending itself but do you are you getting back to like what are we doing social emotional to support kids who you know did lose so much for Cohen you know playing together working together problem solving Behavior there's got there's a lot of instruction around what makes a good Community member and some kids are well versed in that and

106we're absolutely seeing it impacting others who may not have the same experiences you know and the survey was lower because you know Don't Go Near it you're gonna get close it's like that was a young mind kind of thing um but we have a number of kids that need we have a number of kids to be explicit instruction in a number of things whether it's reading whether it's math whether it's how to be a good partner you know how to stand up for yourself and you know we're seeing that we still have like play-based learning kindergarten centers and stuff yeah yeah okay um I would just conclude with this and thank you for your presentation if you feel that you're more under a microscope it's because you become the foundation it all starts with you

107and if we don't get it right with our with our students if we don't get a ride with our parents if we don't hit it right with our teachers and our staff then that crack grows um from year to year so that's why the questions tonight to make sure that we're doing all the right things to make sure our schools are on well from the board of education's perspective so thank you for your presentation thank you for your comments so one last question on a scale of one to five five being the highest where do you see Cherry Brook primary school right now generally I can't blame answer that every kid's experience and every staff member I'm asking you as the principal as a leader of that school where is that school right now on

108scale one to five three we have you know that's a great number where we have a solid foundation but there's areas there are things that we need to do with some of our students to help them out there are things we need to do with our teachers there's things we need to curriculum wise there's things we need to do facilities wise um you know we don't have everything we need to um Norse does any place have everything they need and we're doing the best that we can with what we have so I'll take the three today and I'm hoping when you come back in May you're going to tell me it's a fourth minimally okay and on heart I want it to be a four and uh yeah all right excited to see the rubric

109for that all right any we'll move to Rebecca thank you Andy thanks for the presentation and Rebecca you can take all the time you want the most important thing that we do as a board of education is meet with our principals to hear what's going on in our school so don't feel rushed take all the time you need we want to hear from you now and please jump into questions so before we move to you Rebecca um just came I just have to add on to your excellent question about social emotional learning um we purchased as Kim I know you know this um from being on the Early Childhood task force we purchased hundreds of dollars of play-based materials for our primary grade classrooms this year and I saw so many of those resources being

110used today so I just wanted to mention that again thanking the word for all of your support and teachers are trained in the responsive classroom approach and uh from our emotional intelligence Academy the teachers many teachers have gone through our Academy and I see them applying the strategies in their classroom so I just needed to add on to that because I'm so proud of what we're doing in the area of social emotional learning and I also want to say I'm so proud of the work that Andy and the entire staff what they've accomplished at Cherry Brook Primary School I want to acknowledge um Mr Daniel's comments earlier about some challenges we're facing now and we're not the only School District in Connecticut facing challenges um we have students entering kindergarten as Mr Robin stated many

111students have not been in a school before and this is immediately following two years of non-socialization by students so we have some behavior issues in kindergarten that we are dealing with right now uh Mr Robin and our special ed department and I are working collaboratively to support our students in any way that we can we've hired behavioral interventionists um who are who are at Cherry Brook School on a daily basis to assist us in that support so I just want to let you know that's ongoing I spent the day at Cherry Brook today supporting staff and students and again working in collaboration with Mr rap we're seeing the same thing at Canton Intermediate School as students transition to fourth grade it seems to be those transitions so we do have students with behavioral needs that

112we are supporting students who have experienced trauma in their background so all of our staff we're learning about trauma-informed instruction how to best support our students their social emotional learning their mental health so what you said Lou is so true earlier on and and we do work collaboratively to support our students so in spite of all of that when you look at the academic results of our students I'm really proud of our teachers Andy thank you for your presentation tonight okay Rebecca thank you for your patience now we'll hear what's happening at the Intermediate School and like I said before I jumped in at a new point when you have questions I just want to point out in our picture here I've been seeing them in the corner um that there is quite a bit

113of landscape work done for custodians and some other landscape groups came in and gave CIS a nice facelift in some areas so we have a nice outdoor dining area in the front of our Courtyard is pretty beautiful and has some wonderful tables that we eat outside of we do a lot of learning in our Courtyard area and the flooring project was completed over this summer as well in most of the parts of the building we have just one part of this lab so a lot of work happened on the interior and the exterior of the building this summer and I think it looks good may I just asked first question Donna maybe you can help me with this the container the containers that you have at uh CIS are they going to be moved are

114they getting out I mean what's in there the containers for the Bears well the large trailers that you have the storage trailer storage containers are they necessary because when they open up Cherry Brooks it was all moldy and everything had to be thrown out anyway oh everything has to be thrown out there we tried for an insurance claim too so they're they're emptying it out and we're working on finding a place for it do we own that trailer I can't remember I think we owned that one yeah that's why we they have to move some things around down there as well those are not good places to store Furniture we've now learn okay you can use the additional parking I thought you were talking about our dumpsters because of the number of code yellows and

115record setting but Mr Richardson was able to secure us some dumpsters with metal tops and we've had no bear issues since then for checking things off um so like Mr Robin I will start with a review of our um our data and our performance from last year um we use S back as one piece of that data snapshot but we also rely on Star we use star three times last year in the fall in the winter in the spring um and as I'm doing this year last year was also the first year that we focused on for our academic goals looking at students and accelerating growth for students who are below Benchmark not every student who's below Benchmark who accelerates their learning achieves Benchmark so those students unfortunately and all of their hard work isn't

116always represented when we look at percentages so I just want us to keep in mind that in fourth grade we had 60 percent of our students who were below Benchmark in the fall who gained more than a year of growth last year and that's a lot of hard work on their part and also on teachers 52 percent of our students in fifth grade for Math and 42 in sixth grade um so we do uh have some dips in performance when we rely on the aspect data Alone um not unlike other schools at our level and our schools in our area particularly in fifth grade when I look at the star assessment one of the things that um I'm happy now being able to look back over the course of the year is really how predictive

117um the performance is from the Star data so if you look at our winter performance on the star which is that middle line and compare that to the svac summative assessment the scores are incredibly close um we took our spring star after the S back so we do still continue with instruction even after the S back test happens I mean we still continue to see some growth when I when we look at that bottom row um the 12 the one the eleven percents those are all students who fall into the category of having accelerated their growth last year they grew me on the one year that you would expect the student to in a school year um digging in closely to the strands on the s-back assessment and looking at our strengths and some areas

118that we wanted to focus on this year in our fourth grade class we're strong in reasoning and problem solving um but Concepts and procedures was an interesting strand for us in that it was our greatest strength but also our greatest weakness so we saw a large disparity in performance for students and that Concepts and procedures is where you would see students number sense coming out um which we had identified through Star as a challenge for ourselves over the course of the year so knowing that our most struggling Learners are struggling with number sense and that basic numeration um I will talk further about some strategies that we're using when I get into that part of the visitation Nation last year's fifth grade students we saw the same pattern in Concepts and procedures so again going

119back to challenges with number since so we've implemented some things in both worldly and fifth grade this year that will globally address that on the next slide we look at the English language arts performance um accelerated group again though slightly lower than our students in math but we had 63 percent of our students in fourth grade became who needed to gain more than a year of growth and they did um about 30 in fifth grade and 41 in sixth grade you can see when we look at the guided reading levels that's a different type of assessment so s back and star are computerized measures whereas The Guiding reading level is where students sit down and talk to their teacher about their their reading and their comprehension they read to their teacher versus digging into the

120strands on the S back our fourth graders last year were equally strong in their listening and their reading comprehension as well as their writing and reading comprehension was was a slight strength fifth grade reading comprehension was our greatest strength um and our listening comprehension is where we saw the fewest number of students struggling on the weakest skill overall was in the area of writing um so that'll be a cohort it's now in sixth grade that we watch closely and with our move back to three-person teams in sixth grade the number of minutes in our writing classes has increased so that will be an interesting cohort to watch as the year goes on to see if that increase in writing minutes is up in the way that people fit everyone um before I go to the

121next slide again just as we're thinking about the alignment between Star screens and um I'll just have you if you don't mind we'll take a look at the numbers um for the svac performance the 66 66 63 and 72 and then when we go to the next slide um almost identical numbers with our spring like style level I share that because the Lexile levels through star demonstrating growth but it's also we rely on Star especially having used it all of last year it provides teachers with for each individual student a summary where their skills are at it breaks down every skill and shares with the teacher we should be working at a second grade level for this skill a third grade level for this skill or they're above grade level for this skill so it

122allows teachers it gives them a tool to develop some really individualized plans for all of the students who aren't at goal That's the basis for our conversations as we're doing goal setting conferences this week and next week is really digging into what are our plans for each and every student who's not at grade level um so I'm happy to see that it is closely in line with respect because that was a question of us last year so so do we run an errorism in star or is it necessary at one point do we go All-Star not as back or well I could talk for hours about my philosophical beliefs about svac I think that svac is mandated by the state I think it's one snapshot it's one piece of data I would never want to

123rely on just that one piece and that's why I think star is such an important information because we have data in the fall the winter and the spring um if I could jump in real quick too I think it might even be it's very valuable for us as what um what Mrs Corto was sharing was the actionable data that you receive as an educator and as a teaching team with Star by having it at multiple points throughout the year you can go into deeper levels to be able to make determinations and provide support with us s back is required by the state we value multiple measures over time that allow us to be able to then celebrate growth too and I think she that's one thing that you're doing a really nice job of of

124celebrating and highlighting with this and one of the things that the middle school will see is they begin to implement Char is that you will see students grow in history going all the way back to Cherry Road and we'll be able to see a student's trajectory so the more often that students take that star assessment the more reliable it comes becomes um but again it's not just the tool for looking at and measuring um like a final growth number it also allows to for instruction and we can base some of those instructional decisions on that data um like Mr Robin I did not include any of my climate data in this presentation but it is in my report so I'll reference that now and then there's questions we can chat about it um from our

125family engagement and communication data from the parent survey that was completed last spring um all strengths but when we break out the teacher communication which was I guess we'll find a relative weakness at unfavorable there are eight questions that go into that question or into that indicator and the one that we most teachers are choosing to focus in on as their role is the question I talk with teachers about my child's schoolwork we push out a lot of information but recognize that talking of the parent is not the same as I'm just emailing or sending out a message after your test so thinking about how do we engage in conversation with families on a more regular basis particularly those who may not reach out to us but we want to start that conversation with so

126many teachers are choosing that particular question as their goal for evaluation purposes in the student climate data um also from the student survey the two that stand out to me are physical safety and the social emotional security so physical safety at a percentage of 73 favorable there were there's three questions that go into that um I feel safe at school we were at 99 I feel safe when I'm at the bus stop was 96 and this same question that chairs were recognized as an area of her growth was the same for us I have seen students being heard at school more than once while we cut it in half really that percentage from a few years ago we have 24 of our students saying that that was the case so that's something that we continue

127to keep my close eye on social and emotional security has four questions um and the one really that we need to spend our efforts on and arguing so through some measures that I'll talk about later is that there are groups of students who make others feel left out um so that that feeling of being connected to their classmates being connected to their school is something that we we see as a need in our addressing so I think maybe I'll take a breath there and see if you have any questions about our performance and our review of that performance from last year and you have to go back a few slides back to the academic questions how are you um planning this Peggy Steinway hi um how are you going to address or what do you

128think a solution is for trying to get more Community for the kids who do feel left out and they left out at school outside of school do we know um and if you don't mind that's very directly related to our climate goal and we have a number of strategies um so I'll share those when we get to that goal if you don't mind no no that's great thank you definitely address that though so we'll start with our academic goal um much like uh the goal at Cherry Brook is to improve standardized measures and reading and in mathematics and we really have two pieces of data that we're going to be looking at for that one is that we want all of our students who are at Benchmark in the fall to be benchmarking the spring

129that we don't experience regression for students over the course of the year and that for students who are below Benchmark in the fall we hope to see that 50 of them have accelerated their growth so that they have they are closing the Gap they're closer to Benchmark if they don't meet Benchmark again we have some students that are significantly below Benchmark right now and so for them making more than a Year's worth of growth may not still get them at Benchmark but we close that Gap and if we can continue to do that every year then they will eventually be in that Bandit with their hard work they can be a benchmark can you give me some examples of treatments that you would apply to try to move a student from below Benchmark to equal

130to or above again um and there's some of our strategies that I'll talk about on the next Slide the first is early in the year at our last PD session we had teachers who reviewed and first started to think about who are the students in their classroom that fit into that category that they're not Adventurer I don't think that that's always been our practice um it started last year narrowing our goal focus down to the to the students who are below or well below um we create individualized plans for them so much so that for some teachers it's by it looks like a folder like I have a concrete action plan for each student in my room and that's what we're talking about at our goal setting meetings is what do those events look like

131or some students those plans look like individualized work through Freckle or through star or through Learning Ally that students can do asynchronously or at home but we also have a tremendous number of students who are in intervention so during our Flex block we have both reading and math tutoring that's going on most of our reading tutoring is in the area it's in Wilson or just words that aren't really on that can you make awareness and that phonics instruction we have some small groups that run for lli which is comprehension but are a more significant need are more of those basic reading skills um we took a gamble last year by increasing our number of flex groups and the trade-off for that as I had shared with you at the end of last year was that

132we couldn't have Recess by grade but it allowed for us to really double the number of students that were in intervention um and we saw a tremendous amount of growth for those students in interventions so we're continuing that that because here um and our tutors also push into or have sometimes pull students out of academic classes to provide direct instruction at their level so I'm I'm thrilled and even with Andy you know the amount of time and resources that we apply to those students that are below what do we do to Fan the fire for those kids that are accelerating what do we do to keep them moving in that direction and actually going further and Beyond that's a great question we do have an enrichment specialist this is Juliano um this is her first

133year um yeah thanks again to your support we were able to have a halftime certified position so that was our request that I made to this room last um budget season and that went through so she um we identified students in fourth fifth and sixth grade we made the criteria for being talented and gifted um she runs groups during Flex time for for those students so we have kids are everywhere during the last time summer with special education teachers some are with tutors some are with Mrs Giuliano for enrichment and other students are in the classroom working with the classroom teachers in very small groups because we have so many places for students Mrs Giuliano is also working with sixth graders um during our specialist Block doing some interdisciplinary um extension activities in both areas

134of science and social studies so those are the ways in which we keep those students motivated those are well that's one way and we run math Olympiad with Mrs Giuliano and Mrs Roy so so then the question so the question we if you take a red yellow and green red yellow and green the accelerate what do we do for the kids in the yellow how do we get them into the green how do we move them from at Benchmark to getting in with Mrs Giuliano a little bit more and would we be able to track that so would you be able to tell us in May that we've had x amount of students here and we've just pushed those students we pushed x amount or Y amount of students into the into that area I

135can I think actually I could probably give you a sense of that even now because we use the olsat test um to identify students who are talented and gifted we give that in the fall to students in every grade once a student is identified for talents in a gifted programming that doesn't go away you can't lose your giftedness but we do add students every year and so it may start as a small group in fourth grade but by fifth grade now the number of students who qualify grows and then it grows again in sixth grade so those would be numbers that I could provide would you say we put equal amount of resource into each one of those areas into below Benchmark Benchmark and I know we don't use gifted and talented anymore but really

136to that area are we putting equal amount of resources into each one of those areas no no and what where are we putting most of our resources the students who are below Benchmark okay which I think is appropriate um that's also where we have the largest the larger number of students right um but I do think that through extracurricular opportunities through the extension and through the enrichment we're also meeting the needs of students who really need that question to be able to excel just to add with that as well I think one of your questions about that that yellow ban and how do we how do we see the Growers versus the sliders with it a lot of it too is enriching what we call the tier one instructional program which is the day-to-day instructional

137program so you can see that growth by doing exactly what they're doing by focusing in on the explicit elements that need Improvement and then continuing to focus on that with instruction and see the growth we can see those Growers with that and then continuing to support the instruction to deeper levels deeper levels deeper levels is another way to be able to see that that strategy grow for school-wide enrichment as well so I'd like to see that though in May I'd like to see how that sure that works you know because I I think that that says a lot that's a valuable metric for us as well okay good yeah thank you um so using that number of 50 of our students that we're hoping to move from below Benchmark to Benchmark is where in the

138next several slides um our targets are are from so what we did not do is write our targets as we're hoping to add five percent or we're helping to add 10 um we really look very closely at each um band of students so students who were below Benchmark but were near how near were they students who were below how below are they um and looking at what does reasonable growth look like for them it's still accelerated and how for how many of them will that push them into um meaning Benchmark so what we see here in red is an anticipation that students do not regress and 50 of our students who meet acceleration well um we'll we will look at the S back data but that of course doesn't come up the test is in

139May we won't get those results until the summer um so for our purposes as far as designing instruction we'll rely more on the star um where you can see um that the second row on each of those charts is where we were for the fall and our targets are in red again the percentages vary depending on where students performed when they look how closely they were how close they were to Benchmark versus great equivalency or the English language arts schools were done in the same way you'll see in the guided reading levels specifically we have some lofty goals we're looking to have an increase of 16 in 43 and 19 in fifth grade and that's because we just have a lot of students who are really close and so we feel really confident um that

140we can set an aggressive school like that because with the right instruction not always through intervention but also just through the the teacher's construction we feel like we can really move a lot of kids in fourth and fifth grade in their leading level up to being at benchmark fellow our star reading assessment server for the last year so those are our academic goals our strategies on the next slide um we will continue to rely on high expectations teaching um and thinking about leveraging the the teaching strategies that we know are proven to help close gaps for students so when you think about it the growth profile that we use as a district for purposes of teacher evaluation there's probably 30 or more um elements within it there are some that should be leveraged more than

141others there are some that are just proven through research um to impact the success of students in classrooms so that's where we focus our attention during PD um and practicing those skills um and that's where Mr Emery with the math department Mrs Johnson with the language arts department on thinking about are we clear with our learning targets for students are we clear about our learning goals what is the type of feedback and is actionable and as a useful and meaningful to students right in the moment those are two of the most high leverage um bang for your buck if you will if you're if you're a teacher and you're going to focus on improving one one thing those two instructionally are great places to land we're reading culturally responsive teaching in the brain which is

142um helping us all think about the ways in which we connect to students and How Deeply we know our students and what their needs are um so when we are putting much thought into the relationships that we have with students and making sure that they are available for Learning and that we're reaching them in a way that their brain is wired for we started that PD so sometime earlier this year and we'll continue on November 8th we're doing a book study and that includes all staff certified and non-certified staff um we had our first launch session with our teachers College reading and Writers Workshop um coach where we thought again our kind of main question during the launch was how do we use the workshop model to build positive relationships with students how do we

143help students create identity maps about who they are as Learners um thinking about the power of conferencing with students and what types of questions we could ask them such as when does writing feel good for you and learning about students to a much deeper level and then it all goes into the relationships that we build with kids but then how can we use that to inform our instruction teachers were able to walk away with again leverage practices that can hold them in the classroom build on memory but also build on just some of those the skills that we look to to to address in reading Rebecca I'm impressed with um all the extra things that you do to and Andy too on what you do for your teachers to help them in with their continuing

144edit where do you guys get your continuing ahead where do you get your Concepts and ideas what what helps you come in with I got this idea yeah um um so we collaborate with each other uh last year I was supported by this District to return to UConn through their educational leadership executive leadership program and being around others um Roundtable conferences with other administrators that are in the area um I've shared with this group before that I really believe strongly in research for better teaching um so I've attended PD through them that kind of keeps me feeling in the loop with things but I will also be honest that working with teachers in PD is one of my favorite parts of the job as well so I love our PD plans I'm I'm Mr Bishop

145and Mr case's Case early in the spring because I'm always eager to look at what our PD plan will be for the next year I'm protective over building use time sometimes to evolve but I think that that time is incredibly valuable with teachers sure we invest enough in in your professional development is there more that the board should be doing for our administrators conference wise Forum wise webinar wise is there anything that you guys see that maybe we should be considering or should be in a budget I've never once looked for or wanted a professional development opportunity and not been able to participate in it it's good to hear I never say no it's a great opportunity it's great I mean investing in computer professional development gives us dividends Beyond so I appreciate it um

146so thinking about when we looked at the strands for our svac data um we did we are implementing this year some number sense and language conventions lessons in both grades four and five um those lessons are planned collaboratively in the math and the language arts department meetings um Mr Emery and Mrs Johnson Model A lesson once a week again they plan them together um but it's meeting a definite need that we had in number sense um and then the language conventions or read aloud time to address some of that comprehension skill work that showed as a deficit in aspect testing we will use Freckle Lexia learning ally as a platform to provide um I would say supplemental work for students at home I don't want kids learning on Freckle but it is when parents ask

147what can we do at home that's a great answer because it can be individualized and teachers can push out practice problems that are right at a student's skill level in their mean we are we've doubled the number of sit meetings that we have in a week so that was a scheduling concern that we had so this year already we've held 20 sip meetings which is our student intervention team so those are for students who have academic struggles and also behavioral struggles that's the team that pulls together and um it includes myself Mr Johnson Mrs Mrs Johnson Mr Emery our school psychologist um our special education staff our social worker our school counselor um so twice a week we all gather to make sure that we have the right plans in place many of those meetings

148include parents and we've been fortunate this year and we hope the trend continues that every time we've invited a parent in-person meeting they've made themselves available um so I feel like we are part of a very supportive Community who also wants to they want their children to accept us as much as we do we'll continue to have an increased number of flex groups we ran what we call like a mini launch cycle based on S back and spring data so we service 34 students in the area of math 39 in the area of reading we are starting our first flex cycle in about a week those numbers are increasing to 36 students for Math and 47 for language arts so we do use the flex time and other times during the day for our tutors

149to work with students who are below or significantly below benchmark surprise and hit my breath but those are my my academic goals and strategies welcome any questions we'll move on then to our school culture and climate goals um mine are very similar to Mr Robbins just I broke mine out into one of her students and a separate one from parents but we're really looking about at looking at students being actively engaged in active versus participants in our school community and we know that to be engaged our students have to be physically present so attendance will be one of our data points that we're looking at specifically the students who are chronically absent and we had 23 students who met that criteria last year chronically absent means a student who has 10 or more unexcused absences

150um you know attendance during covid was it was challenging we had students who were out for illness which would be excused we had students who needed to be out because they were isolating or they were quarantined they were close contact um some families who at times depending on what the metrics looked like there's they kept their child home we saw that beginning to decline last year and we really are at a point this year where we need students in the building um so like Mr Robin we're looking at attendance data very closely working with families through our social worker making sure we're understanding the reasoning behind students being interested we know the amount of homeschool students we have it's CIS did or not do we know so I I have that information but I do

151know is um we enrolled 32 new students over the summer to CIS which is high for us and many of those students not many um more than usual um of those students were returning to public school from homeschooling okay we also hope continuing to look at their students who are chronically absent we want to decrease how absent they are our average is 17 on excuse absences are so are any of those parents who like take a trip you know or just something I know you have that not for us but the information they give it at the school like is that part of it or small portion of it and see if that's a stop okay and we talk to parents right like um you're approaching your 9th absence that we know that you're on

152a vacation you know we appreciate the communication and if they're in contact with us and help us understand why a child is absent and that goes a long way towards preventing The Chronic absenteeism but regardless of the reason whether it's a trip or an illness or um a school avoidance time outside of the classroom and not at school impacts performance and so it's things that we we need to address but perhaps in different ways we will look at participation in school events our Behavior data looking at how we recognize students in a positive way but suspension data and referral data will be a part of that look and then of course our student surveys and then our next goal is thinking about parent participation and how active they are in our school community and so

153we will rely on our survey results once on their attendance at school events school events meaning things like fright night perhaps or parent conferences but also coming to a Sit meeting that is hard it's during the middle of a work day and then sometimes to hear news that is difficult to hear that your child is struggling and sometimes for us to say we're struggling to figure out why you're trying to struggling and help us work together so when parents when when we have 100 participation at Sydney meeting Senate ppts um that shows me that we have parents who are actively engaged in their school Community we want to confirm so our strategies for helping kids feel connected Peggy to your to your question a while back and how do we help kids feel like they're

154not being left out um we'll continue holding practice of the morning meeting and closing Circle those components of responsive classroom that we increase time for during covid and maintained I'm building that whole school assemblies for the purpose of community building and this year we're implementing an advisory program so our advisory groups meet twice a month everybody all certified staff including myself have an Advisory Group we meet with anywhere from eight to ten students those groups are across the grades sorry you know two or three from each grade and it gives our sixth graders a chance to be the leaders of the building and be role models and a chance for our fourth graders to see that fifth and sixth graders are people too and help us all kind of build that sense of community across

155the grades we use one of those advisory meetings each month as a circle um to be able to get to know each other to share about ourselves and as the year goes on to be able to talk about the things that CIS that are challenging or that we would want to work on together to improve and then we use the second advisory meeting as more uh and something of an activity so start with hello week for example we we did an activity during advisory we did we have advisory on Friday and in our groups we will be brainstorming what a family crest might look like for our small advisory family um brainstorming that and we will build on that and then we'll have an also assembly at the end of the year where we show

156off our completed crests in the month of November before Veterans Day assembly we will be learning about gratitude in our advisory groups so it gives us a chance to connect some advisory groups have developed handshakes so when they see each other in the hallway now they don't just walk by each other but they have their secret handshake um and it gives most students their advisory teacher is one that they don't have so it's another adult in the building that they're connected to I mean that they can go to in a safe space if they need somebody to to talk to or they need help we are expanding our extracurricular offerings and activities which has been very popular this fall um we're working on a school-wide mural and I have a picture of kind of an

157unveiling if you will um at the end of my presentation of what our mural will look like we have um a commitment to continue to look at the classroom libraries that we have and the books that we have in circulation in our library and make sure that they continue to represent all students GIS again when we Implement High leverage teaching strategies so that every student can learn they feel like they are seen in their classrooms um so good instruction also allows for students to know that they belong because we're reaching them with the strategies that they need and then from a parent perspective we will hold meetings in a hybrid format some parents prefer in-person meetings and others prefer virtual meetings so we want to be accessible to parents um I people continue to message

158with parents um sometimes it's weekly sometimes it's multiple times of movement sometimes it's not when I have something to say I say it to parents um and a goal of mine is to increase my social media presence that's not a natural skill of mine to be on Instagram um but I'm trying and I have I have some followers so way to go there's more data that I can report at the end of the year through this company I'm wearing one these are the ways that we hope you know we're proud of the things that we do at CIS we want to share them on our next slide are our priorities all of this work that I talked about tonight all falls within our strategic plan within our strategic plan we talk about curriculum and instruction

159um advisories so students feel connected engaging with families so with every all of the work that we're doing is still very tightly aligned to that so our priorities if I were to have to choose four would be to look closely at our teaching strategies and keep that as a top priority accelerate growth for the students who need it will be a part of almost every conversation that we have for students who are struggling build strong connections to the school community Through advisory through extracurricular activities and to do that also by some school-wide Gatherings so big things that happened already this year that we've not done for several years kid governor was an election process with all the fifth grade in the cafeteria we haven't done that in several years we had a whole school assembly

160to kick off this school year and it's just nice we have a tradition where we clap in our fourth graders so our fifth and sixth graders come to the gym and they clap and welcome our fourth graders and it's just a nice moment that we've been able to have for a few years it's really cool um within our strategic plan I also do just want to share that teachers also create their own goals um around advancing our strategic plan so in addition to my four priorities we have a lot of curriculum work going on this year particularly the social studies and grades four and five but also training our department leaders to be able to perform some Equity audits so that we have that expertise within our buildings so that we can apply that to

161existing curriculum but also as we're piloting and we come to the close of piloting a curriculum that we have we know that we've embedded it and looked at it through that appropriate lens we have some teachers who are passionate about responsive classroom um we were able to train one teacher over the summer who donated her time to attend that training but we want to continue to make sure we have resources available for new staff who get to be trained on responsive classroom and then we have a larger group than we had last year who's looking at a code of conduct and looking to develop a code of conduct that we think memorializes our philosophy around restorative practices and decision trees but also makes it very clear to parents and to students where expectations are for

162Behavior and what we can expect um as far as supports go from the school but also consequences if they need be and then lastly our successes to date we've had a positive start this way where we have several new large initiatives right so we have advisory the language conventions the numbersense lessons and the increase in sit meetings those all Impact teacher time um and so I have to shout out the teachers who um with all of these large initiatives starting at CIS this year not a single complaint not a single teacher saying we should be doing this nobody talking to Union reps that this isn't the right thing to do for kids these are time intensive initiatives but everybody is doing them with 100 of their effort because it's just it's what's right for kids

163um and any change that impacts your time is not easy for teachers and the teachers at CIS are fantastic and so they they deserve a little non so that's when um early in this year we have had seen the need for some quick identification and intervention for students who are in need of support um you know 32 new students into a building in addition to a fourth grade class those are all students that we are getting to know sometimes we've planned for students and sometimes they're brand new to us and we haven't and we have to adjust and we have to get to know those students and their needs very quickly and I think that we have done that and we'll continue to do that we've had some nice community building events already fifth grade

164had or sixth grade had an Empower experience we have fright night coming up this week lunch in the cafeteria Veterans Day will be more traditional assembly versus the parade that we've had over the last couple of years and we have seen High participation in extracurricular events this fall we have pictured some students who we were able to celebrate as being our top readers in the summer reading program we have chess club and we also speaking of parent engagement we're running um you know an opportunity for parents to celebrate their children's birthdays because as we get older we're not doing parties in the classrooms um but about a third of our families um responded in wanting to be part of our birthday book program so that was nice it's a nice way to celebrate their children

165and to support our library our extracurricular activities um participation is high when we add up everything that we have going on in this fall um there's about 295. students staying out there now of course there is some overlap so that is our next conversation is who are we missing who are the kids who aren't able to participate in an extracurricular activity and what are we missing some of these are activities that run all year and others are activities that we're running on a six-week cycle um Dungeons and Dragons club and chess club came from students who advocated for the need for that club we have a desire from some students they've met with me and they've pitched the idea for an engineering club and a theater Club so we will continue to meet the needs

166of as many students as we can and give them an opportunity to do something at school where they feel connected to school at maybe outside of the General Ed program and then lastly I just want to share a little bit about our mural project so all of our students um through the hard work of Mrs Costello brainstormed um themes like one word themes that they might want to have this mural represent we put those themes together into statements and students voted and the winning statement was at CIS we grow like Rising Stars we grow as students Learners creative thinkers and friends with positive character so given that theme that students chose just they started a student sketched on what they thought that mural should look like and we were able to send those sketches to

167our artists in Residence who's supported by our Canton Arts Council and that artist from The Hot Spot um looked at patterns and sketches and how could we represent as many sketches as possible so this is not one individual students sketches pieces of many student sketches but this is a draft of what our mural will look like when it goes up in our cafeteria later this year is it a banner or is it uh actually it's a mosaic so it will be three large panels um that will be grouted and every student and staff member at CIS will lay a piece of tile into the mural that's great and then it will be hung in our cafeteria pastel has done a lot of work you have a yearbook I mean that would be a great cover

168for everything we do the sketches in themselves concrete like the book I mean these sketch is so beautiful and it just um it shows you what CIS students feel CIS is all about and we've tried to capture it in one mural but they're beautiful sketches um we're although also collaborating with the American mural project so one of our sixth grade teams went there today and over the next couple of weeks um every student at CIS will go on a field trip there to see this massive neural installation and see the the authentic side of the artwork as well okay questions for Rebecca I have a question um and speaking of field trips as you just mentioned the American mural project um do you know how many vehicles are scheduled for each class like fourth and

169six and then are there other ones that we're building upon I know we're still looking at the not even classroom but the trip but similar to the YouTube classroom yeah um so we're in the exploratory phase for a couple of things so all of the classes have the American mural project um trip fourth and sixth grade will go to um what is our our field trip um Hill said I can think of Homestead the hillstead museum um for their for their day there fifth grade is going to the Old State House um early in November we had tried to go to the Native American Museum in Washington Connecticut during our Native American unit they are fully booked but we've hired two Educators to come to us and they're bringing some artifacts which is a big

170part of that unit so we'll have that experience um fourth grade is in the process right now of exploring Sturbridge Village um which is still tightly aligned just when we think about Regional history to the curriculum that's in fourth grade um and sixth grade is as you mentioned exploring what do we want to do as a as a spring trip um so teachers and staff have been surveyed as well as parents I'm thinking about some different options um I wouldn't say that I'm at a point right now where I could say which one thank you and just to follow up with that too just for for the board to know as well we talked at the curriculum subcommittee as well about being able to have a sense of what are the what are some of

171these key experiences that are extensions for our students outside the classroom to be able to uh participate in so Rebecca thanks for sharing some of those we'll bring that back to the subcommittee to talk a little bit more and bring it back to the electric wood other questions so just a couple oh I'm sorry go ahead for recess um you started the three classes out last year and then well um you see negative and positive you know there's they're not all together with their peers and there could be both negative and positive results of that um I mean I've heard from parents over the years too like they're not you know they're not with their friends anymore you know it's not the whole grade level together um will that change will you will there be

172like one day a week where they're all together as a grade level because now covid I think a lot of people thought that was to the coven but it sounds like it's for academic reason yeah which makes sense because I know you're trying to you know increase academics but like socially emotionally like I don't know I don't know how you do remedy that how do you get them with their peers so we have um warning recess time depending on what time the student arrives to school so morning reset starts at 7 35 and we come for the building at 7 55. um it's not um lunches by grades right now um and your right recess is half a grade at a time um right now with a number of students who need intervention I would

173not be able to service all of them I would have to cut it in half if we didn't have recess on the model that we have right now um so that's where I'm placing my priorities on the academic support for those students now as we get further away from covid and as hopefully we see you know through changes in curriculum and tiered interventions that we have if that name declines I mean no way opposed to the full class signing recesses it's just not something that we've been able to figure out from a scheduling perspective to be able to have in place the reason that it's five days and not four is purely just a research-based interventions or you know at least half an hour for five days a week and then trying to maximize that

174intervention time that we have with kids yeah I just wondered if there was any way to make it you know happen every now and then or something um and I just want to say kudos to your band teachers Mr B and Mrs D because they've put out you know instruments for two grade levels and starting in students on that which is you know probably never happened in the history of camp we have to outfit two grades of students so I just wanted to say good job and cater to all of their changing Minds for the student who thought they wanted the tubo but now they want the trumpet um and they're being incredibly flexible and helping all those students find their way but they're they're teaching two beginning band classes this year and if you

175listen to them you never know these are so fantastic so any other questions I have a couple are you fully staffed I have one vacancy right now um which is a posting for a special education teacher which is posted kind of a need that we didn't realize we would have and until the school year started otherwise I am fully staff prepare Educators I have two building subs and I have the two or something Andy I meant to ask you this question too soon you can chime in on this but what can the board do for you what can we provide what are we not providing what's kind of on your wish list that we can maybe help you with and then Andy I'll go to you on that um for me um when we were

176experiencing the need for more behavioral support and special education staff and I brought that concern to Mr case and he was able to support me with that posting the challenge is not every posting results in applicants or someone who's qualified to work with our students um but that is that is the way that I feel supported by this board is when I have a need for staff I feel like I always been heard and that need has been met Mr Emery is now full-time at CIS and Mr Robin has a full-time counterpart to Mr Robin or to Mr Anne-Marie at his school um the enrichment position um so those are positions that I've advocated for that it's important thing more that's great but how about now this this special hosting is one that I need

177to fill we will continue to look at the behavior supports that we have on base for students it's a it's a small group of students but making sure that we have the right Social Work support to me to meet all of their needs and I do think we are right now but I also would not hesitate to reach out to Mr case if I felt like I needed more anything that you need anymore we can provide you know Staffing is important and you know being flexible to meet the needs that are in front of us that we may or may not have anticipated uh one of the nice things that we've had this year and I know we've got cool injury is the amount of time with early release days that are open for our

178building the more time our incredible keeping staff can spend together right focused in on something together and you mentioned PV before just to sit in a room with a team of teachers that's extremely powerful and to remove through distractions from them and allow them in time is just really fantastic the last thing we'll need it shared working we're in the process of figuring out is um and I think I talked about that was the quotable tax for kids so they can apply their foundational skills and the literature that they have okay thank you thank you so I'll ask you the same question ask Andy on a scale one to five five being the highest where are we at CIS what's your feeling I've been thinking about so I had the luxury one more time answer

179to that um and I I think it wavers by day um depending on which students are needing support from us but I think we're at a high floor closer to five I think we have we are meeting the needs of both great majority of students at CIS our teachers are doing a fantastic job of getting to know new students kids are happy we have the advisory groups are just fabulous ways for first of all to be able to connect with kids when I am able to be working in my office at the end of the day and see 25 kids playing disc golf I'm going to build that makes me happy so I think we have some nice things happening um we are certainly challenged at times um but we have a process in place

180to work within the systems within our building and also with the parents or students who need that support and we have those that plan is is working thank you just in case you have anything you want to have thank you excuse me one second I'm all choked up um really Rebecca thank you so much for your outstanding leadership that's CIS you know the mural project is just one great example of that um you're very humble you won't give yourself the credit that that's due um Mrs Costello's our fabulous art teacher but the project wouldn't have happened without your support your leadership so that's just one example of arranging for all of the Intermediate School students to go to the American mural project to be able to see the largest mural in North America that happens

181to be so close by and then to be able to put this mural together just one example of the great things that are happening that you share tonight so thank you so much I'm so proud of the work that both of you are doing um I'm sure you as board members are as well one thing that really impresses me is that if I were to ask Mr Robin or Mrs Corto about any one of their students they would be able to talk about that student that is so impressive when these administrators sit with their teachers to develop goals for the year they're talking about individual students and developing individual action plans for students that doesn't happen everywhere but that happens here in Canton so thank you for knowing ours students so well get them to

182reach high levels that's impressive Grace and I like the idea that we know our students uh and I think our students know you guys as well I know in particular the students talk about Mr Robin always being out there in front and reading them saying hello to them and I know you do that too but uh we appreciate that so thank you for your presentation tonight we look forward to great things for the rest of the year when we get back together in May we'll be excited to hear about the progress thank you thank you thanks for spending so much time with us today part of that's my fault I apologize to the board for the questions and keeping it here we're gonna we're gonna expedite the rest of the meeting um and I can

183I can tell you we'll be out of here by right before 10. I'm sorry for late since late evening okay um we're gonna go to uh we have a HVAC indoor air quality that you want to talk about Donna uh yeah this is a grant um the state is about 150 million dollars uh allocated for these grants it's a strict turnaround due on December 1st um and they did that so that there's basically two summers to do the work for most schools it really wouldn't affect us because what we want to do is um give it a shot at getting some of this money for the HVAC system at the auditorium for that at the high school um it is a pretty competitive bid and um it's not a great reimbursement rate it's based on

184statute so I found out today it's about a uh a 27 reimbursement rate and we can't use any arpa funds it has to be uh basically Town Fund CIP funds so we can work that around we were doing that anyway though right yeah it's not a change yeah it was it was 150 funded through arpa so if we get this uh we would then have to decide how much um that we want to start the funds and then move the remainder to CIP and the town is okay with that I've already talked to them about that so um it's just kind of a technicality moving right around so it's not a big deal uh but basically we just need your um approval to apply for this grant tonight to install the air conditioning um and

185uh we'll do our best Tom Richardson and I and and uh Arnold are working on it together so so is it over two summers or you will you have we'll do it in one summer so we'll be ready for September or that's the idea yeah that's great yeah okay so we'll take that off again right so tonight thank you so much Donna thanks for your hard work on this um tonight um we're just asking for you to authorize me to submit this grant by December 1st because the grant proposal necessitates that you make a motion exactly sure thank you thank you okay um Mr Bishop you're gonna we I think you've heard an awful lot from me tonight so I'll go ahead and table myself for the moment thank you we'll give you more time

186that's great let's go to the consent agenda though Mr Case okay this evening for the consent agenda you have the approval of the minutes of the regular meeting of October 11th and also we have two maternity leave requests one for Kelly dimartino a special education teacher at Cherry Brook primary school and one request for Jennifer McDermott also a teacher at Cherry Brook primary school so both of these leave requests meet the contractual guidelines so I would recommend that you approve those requests this evening so absolutely and I've written their letters for FMLA but so is uh Andy reported tonight there's no subs what do we do for these two spoons so as soon as you approve these um we leave the requests we I mean these um vacancies for a long term okay okay any

187questions on the consent agenda and one is a special ed teacher so we worry about that yeah sure okay um so I can I can move the consent agenda at this point right yes okay we have a motion to approve the consent agenda thank you Felicia thank you Joe first and second any further discussion on the consent agenda all those in favor aye aye thank you that's a unanimous on the consent agenda thank you okay so the approval of the policies that we read the last time they were in your kit if you saw them I think we had a pretty good vetting on each one of these so any highlights you want if you want to mention on any of these I think we took care of that last night right any questions from

188the last time is there anything lingering okay so we'll take these one at a time they have a motion to approve the reporting of child abuse neglect and sexual assault in the minutes will show it's p5141-4 thank you Ryan second thank you Erica and uh any further discussion on that one all those in favor aye opposed thank you Peggy okay for sexual abuse prevention and education program p 50 5145-511 we have a motion thank you Felicia thank you Kim any further discussion all those in favor aye you voted yes correct yes correct okay so uh P 5144-4 physical exercise and disciplined students the revised policy motion thank you Joe thank you Erica any further discussion on that all those in favor hi okay and the final one is the minimum to be free lunch periods

189for teachers uh that's p41 13-12 I have a motion thank you Ryan thank you Kim maybe further discussion all those in favor aye aye unanimous okay and then finally uh is Don outlined the approval to apply for the HVAC indoor quality grant for the uh Auditorium we have a motion on that thank you Joe thank you Felicia any further discussion all those in favor aye aye and that covers it any board comments for tonight again I apologize for being this long but I think these are the you know the meat of what we're here for so uh it's important that we give them the time and the vetting so again I apologize we went wrong any other comments for tonight's meeting anything you'd like to see for the next meeting anything we missed any critiques

190everybody's coming right all right hope to see you all there yeah I would just like to um I would just like to add that I that we took your feedback um this summer as we talked about the administrator's presentations I hope it showed that we listen to your feedback and tried to apply it with some visual colored graphs with a couple of you mentioned that would be helpful in looking at data and then also the executive summaries I hope that was helpful if you have feedback for um Mr Moore and Mr dipepo as they're putting their final touches on their reports and summaries just let me know that and we can tweak that and why don't you you mentioned how you're going to Aggregate and do a comparative in our December meeting you want to

191let the board know that right so one once you hear all of the importance what I like to do in December those of you who've been on the board of wild no I'd like to give a state of the school district report where I will give you the trend data for various types of data attendance data School discipline data as well as academic data which uh Mr Bishop will go over and that also aligns with our Equity policy where I need to come before you um a few times a year to talk about the different types of data as specified in their Equity policy as to how our various groups of students are doing so that'll be December perfect preview of Coming Attraction excellent okay anything else all right motion to go to Executive session

192thank you Erica thank you Ryan this will be quick uh any further discussion you're just inviting me oh we're inviting just the uh superintendent to be with us that's it all in favor aye opposed bye thank you unanimous this will take three or four minutes like I promised you before thank you Kira thank you Donna thank you Claudia