001here thank you as we stand for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag it won't be the opening of school's meeting if the entire administration and staff was here today it's always nice seeing your smiling faces thank you for showing up tonight after i'm sure it was a very busy week um we have a few times the agenda is a very short meeting but a very important one uh before well actually yeah we're gonna go right into the opening of school reports so dr solem how do you want to do this get have a song in the audience or yeah it's up to you if you're probably more comfortable here it's pretty long but if you'd prefer to sit out there that's fine too um i'm just gonna go set up thank you right
002i'll set my all right well good evening uh thank you mr peregini and the board for the opportunity the this afternoon or this evening i guess to present uh our opening of schools report uh some of you who are more intimately familiar with the operations of the board no our chief operating officer mr maciana is not really good about taking vacation time and it was one of my goals this year to have him take more vacation time and you'll see he's not here this evening mission accomplished i'm off to a great start uh he's enjoying some time his uh daughter got married last week uh and so he's taking a little time this week so anyway uh mr maciana's operations team uh you can see the various uh departments there the the various services that
003they provide and they do a tremendous job appreciate his leadership in that regard and they've had really nine weeks over the summers this is their busy season preparing for the return to school that we experienced on tuesday really exciting day for our students our staff our community but over the summer they were engaged in a lot of work and most of the work that you saw or that occurred this summer is not stuff that's really visible to the greater community a lot of it's stuff like boiler improvements it doolittle and dodd or repointing bricks or masonry repair at the high school to to keep buildings from crumbling it's it's necessary to replace the masonry uh or the uh the i guess the putty between the the bricks uh the roof at dodd had become somewhat
004porous and there's a new 20-year roof that we were able to replace three large sections of the roof at dodd middle school what you are able to see is stuff like the parking lot at doolittle that was repaved several new parking spaces were added in that process to make it a little bit more comfortable in the parking lot there and re-striped as you can see we also replaced things like the basketball hoops at doolittle this is just a a shot of our painting and waxing that we've done across the district most notably the the replacement uh or an improvement at least of the gym floor at cheshire high school looks a lot more like our west gym floor at cheshire high school very nice surface for our kids to be in our community to be
005playing on this is the replacement of our scoreboard at cheshire high you may remember last year there was a a really serious windstorm in the late spring that took down the old board there and this is a much larger scoreboard for our community to enjoy at alumni field so with all those things in place we successfully launched on august 30th just a reminder for the board in our community that student meals will be free through state funding we project that to last through november but it will really be reflective of how many students are charged against the amount that we have but we like i said we have breakfast and lunch free through november at this point we updated a lot of technology throughout the district including flat panel smart boards and wi-fi upgrades again
006the wi-fi upgrade you don't see but it is a significant enhancement that our students and staff community will experience and then you know bus drivers uh have received a lot of attention over the last few years for the lack of drivers that a lot of districts have experienced i want to give kudos to our transportation team and the drivers that we have we're in great shape to start the year and we've had a very smooth start with respect to transportation another element that we're focused on is i know we've talked before about the mandated trainings that our staff have to receive we deliver a lot of that through a system called vector where our staff myself included log on and go through videos we have to answer questions throughout the video pass these different training
007sessions and these are mandatory uh and they're due by september 30th but we ask staff you know we give them a little time over the summer if they you know if you want to start now we release them in in august and already about 50 percent of our staff have completed all the maintenance mandated training videos and what you see there is only a fraction of them good portion but not all and it changes based on your role one of the new things that we're doing this year is extending our health and wellness resources i know that's a topic that's been uh discussed at past board meetings and how do we support our all of our employees in making healthy choices for them their family and it does support our bottom line with the insurance
008the cigna provider that we use they provide us a fair amount of money to provide little incentives and gifts to people who participate in these things like walking challenges and mindfulness activities and yoga and other health related activities that they offset gym memberships there a lot of different options for people and we do have a full-time health coach well dedicated to us and the town that we share so this year they unveiled a road nap to wellness challenge that as you can see on the screen has a number of different activities with the hope that you engage in this sampler of activities and find something that resonates with you and that you can continue and adopt bless you as a healthy part of your lifestyle and improve your health and happiness as a result those
009who complete this can earn gift cards and even a grand prize trip to a spa all again paid for by cigna as part of our insurance plan so other fun stuff that we have this year i have to show this or vin would be beside himself as the champion of our bowling league uh you see here you know bowl like a pirate knight cosmic bowling all these things that we've done now for seven years we've had bowling league through the cheshire public schools and it's a lot of fun we have a lot of participants that kicks off the 14th we also have a pinewood derby our third annual pinewood derby and uh kudos and thank you to tom leewock who facilitates that so staff members buy their own like wood derby set and some of
010us have their son who's into engineering build on their behalf but i don't want marlene to feel too uncomfortable so i'm just going to move on anyway um so different people you know win that we have a lot of fun it's it's live streamed on a saturday afternoon i think it's in like january february we do that so i'm going to pass it off to the aforementioned miss solano to talk about some of the things we did over the summer with respect to curriculum and instruction really sure i'll actually just speak from here because this will be short so this summer we had a lot going on in curriculum and instruction and one of the things that i think is worth mentioning is that in addition to the curriculum writing institute of which we had
01180 teachers participating we also had some additional summer learning opportunities and we provided teachers with choice and the the crux of the learning was about embedding social emotional learning skills into academics and so we had a couple of options for teachers the first was to attend a two-day training by mike anderson who's an author and consultant nationally who use or actually internationally who you see on the right-hand side and that took place two days at dodd middle school for teachers who volunteered to sign up the second option was to take one of mike's online courses where you can select what grade levels and what topics you wanted to learn about and then the third was to do an independent reading or an independent study on one of these three books that mike has written and
012so we had 40 people attend the two-day workshop 40 attend the summer the online trainings and then 40 do the independent reading so all total we had 200 teachers participate in voluntary summer learning experiences through cheshire public schools so i we thought that was pretty impressive and are very proud of how our teachers are engaged in continuous professional growth and learning the next slide is a couple of photos from our curriculum writing institute you can see that we were at highland school and linda van wagenin who you've heard us speak of before was the consultant who both trained folks in writing curriculum from a backwards design perspective and also in making sure that the performance tasks were rich deep and engaging so there's our cheshire high school math teachers in what they set up as
013the war room and the faculty room of highland you could see that the soda machine there is covered in data and paper and all the walls were covered in that room they were glad to have that space to use for the week to keep their notes and and make some progress and then these last two are from dodd from the two-day workshop where you've got mike anderson at the front there and um it was not always that people were seated he had them up and around the library doing a lot of interactive and collaborative activities so there you go thank you marlene um so that was our kind of our summer recap and a lot of the work that we had done over the summer to prepare for the opening in schools which uh kicks
014off each year with our convocation uh this year we kind of did a playoff of stranger things if you've seen the television show and uh i thank you you could see chairman paragini there addressing the audience and we had a guest speaker as well coach darr and all of the speakers throughout the presentation really focused on um you know getting back to why we were here in the first place there was a lot of you know adjustments there were many adjustments that had to be made throughout the pandemic that were atypical and steps backwards if you will sitting kids in rows and unable to do a lot of group work and things that we rely on for students to push each other and engage each other in learning and problem solving and so we were
015able to make this adjustment and one of the things that i shared with the group was that last early in the summer we had our administrative professional development and it just so happened that the governor was in the neighborhood and happened to stop in on that and um talked about you know other states around america having their their resources you know they have maybe um some states rely on corn as their export or summer coal or um you know technology or you know that everybody's got some sort of different resource and in connecticut education is our resource we provide great education we leave lead at the country and educational outcomes and god bless you and everybody who's in this room whether bless you there be a parent administrative support board member administrator our students we
016have exceptional outcomes in cheshire and we really lead the way for our country in helping produce our students that are going to be the problem solvers for tomorrow and help lead our country uh forward and so that's really exciting stuff and as such we gave each of our our staff members a t-shirt and a special gift for our board members too who certainly play a critical role in that that process and providing great opportunities for our kids so we're thrilled to announce some award winners in this convocation exercise we do and jody dutchesson from doolittle school is somebody who gives all of her heart and energy to supporting kids and parents and our staff and we were proud to honor her as our para para educator of the year and our teacher of the year
017was uh chs english teacher don dimeo not only is she the cheshire public schools teacher of the year but she was uh just recognized in the days before our ceremony is a full bright honoree and so um we'll be sharing more information on that with the public next week so it's really quite an incredible honor having worked for with dawn for four years you know every day as principal at cheshire high i can certainly understand why she won that award and very deserving so congratulations to jody and dawn on their their incredible awards so our opening of school usually there's a little bit more runway between day one of school and the opening of schools report as i said school opened on tuesday so we know exactly who's showing up sometimes you're not really sure
018until that first day at darcy school uh it was it's always a lot of fun to see our youngest learners at darcy buzzing around with the sometimes wonder bewilderment excitement uh all the above and so they um we did see a little bit of an anomaly here in terms of our enrollment so we had projected three classes of 19 at darcy school we ended up of two with only two classes we made an adjustment and shifted the teacher that we had there uh to a school that had higher enrollment need i'll show you that momentarily but that's where darcy shook out chapman it was really thrilling to travel the district and you know see the upbeat students and staff and families that we had there's just so much enthusiasm coming into this year here we
019had a 20 classroom section scheduled with 366 total students as of tuesday we had 358 students enrolled so uh fairly close to projections there doolittle this is a really cool uh edition that we had it do little uh one of our families runs a business doing these really cool three-dimensional type signs that you can rent for your lawn or whatever and so a lot of folks were taking pictures to the welcome back to do little sign it was really cool um young man on the right in a bow tie looking really sharp for his first day it was very cool uh he called out marlene for being well dressed as well a little disappointed not to get a compliment out of him but say he's a better dress than the superintendent uh been helping one
020of our new students to do a little to find her way they do a great countdown at doolittle uh if you follow me on instagram there's a reel there where the kids count down happy new year and go into the building yeah uh kristen is now texting amy about submitting that photo they all enter through the basketball court all the students that are walkers and parent drop off so do little this is where we had made the shift from the additional teacher from darcy and our enrollment is actually uh 15 over projected at doolittle school so uh we have pretty robust enrollment there highland uh you may notice there's a brand new sign out in front of highland school so that's been updated and looks really sharp again the sign a lot of fun and
021engaging activities to welcome our students back to school on tuesday some really cute pictures to share with families we say that you know we take what we do seriously but we don't take ourselves too seriously because school should be a fun place to be and i think you see that in some of the photos here is where we've seen our largest gain over projected enrollment 40 additional students we had to add a section in sixth grade in a section in first grade highlands they are over their projected capacity so we did take a seminar room out of the library and converted that into a first grade classroom so we are feeling it at highland norton school really popular oh there we go i'm sure that'll drive kelly crazy because she goes to no end with
022the uh the entrance there it's always so much fun streamers and kazoos and it's such a fun environment an exciting way to start your year at norton picture she'll regret 15 years from now but there was such a you know having been superintendent for seven years and uh school administrator for i don't know another 15 before that to this year there was so much genuine enthusiasm and excitement to be back at school it was like nothing i hadn't seen before so it was really cool to experience on that first day here we had a little bit of a enrollment dip as well where we reduced the section in kindergarten and we were slightly under projected here too it died middle school is a little bit of a different animal but still a lot of enthusiasm
023the projections there over uh where actual is over enrolled again but we're still doing well there pretty obviously very close to the projection like most schools cheshire high kicking off senior year the green shirts are our link crew the leaders kristen pells and a a group of dedicated staff at chs train our students to be a resource for our freshmen and if you have a question if there's something going on find somebody in a green t-shirt and they'll help you and anybody would help you but they have familiar faces because for our orientation the link crew leaders lead the orientation process and get to know some of the freshmen who maybe they may not have met already our cheshire high enrollment again very close to projected so our overall enrollment summary is uh fairly close
024to projection uh we had projected across the board 4 170 students we have 4 195 students overall and you can see in the far column the the net over or under projection which leads me to our strategic planning initiative this really shouldn't be anything that's new as um we began the process in august of last year but uh the mission statement of the district it continues to be preparing students to be inspired to be lifelong learners and providing service to others like i had talked a little bit about the way that we prepare kids to change the world is is really exciting um thinking today about katie stack morgan a recent chs grad who was designing the mars rover space mission as i was talking to julie barker the science department chair at chs the
025strategic planning initiatives uh really we started the process of designing strategic goals back in 2000 but the most recent iteration of the 16 goals was identified in 2011 and it was a 10-year plan and we realized in 2016 that most of those initiatives had been fulfilled we reviewed by the cheshire strategic planning initiative committee in 1617 and at that time the board decided to sharpen focus on complex thinking and social emotional learning and we revisited that process through we also had previously reviewed through the personalized learning task force back in 2018-19 school year our performance standards and made these revisions that the board had adopted that year so overall we reviewed that package this year some of the old taking a look at those old 16 initiatives that were identified the personalized learning task force
026work the um the uh complex thinking and social emotional learning work that we had done and met with stakeholders from around the district you'll recall we uh at the board level discussed this at a retreat last august then i met with every pto group throughout the district uh teachers parents students students at buildings during the year and ultimately the administrators to pardon me guys the goals the focus from the feedback was that we should continue the work we've been doing along social emotional learning but perhaps defining on an annual basis some clear goals so here are some of the strategies that we're using right now this year around our social emotional learning strategies marlene talked about embedding some of that social emotional learning into our instruction so for example um you know it's not uncommon
027to just tell kids to peer edit or work in a group um and hope they figure it out and there is some of that but some of those uh you know that peer interaction is a skill how to compromise how to do these things is part of a skill and so there might be a mini lesson on that before you say work in your group problem solving skills through physical education class marlene was telling me about a lesson she saw today in pe that really reflected this well where the teacher asked students at the elementary grades about where they experienced conflict give me an example and every elementary administrator will appreciate that the first um suggestion was playing kickball at recess right you know who was he out was he safe was she you know
028there before the ball all these things and they talked about different strategies to solve problems as part of the physical education activity that they were doing and it was integrated into the class and so you know trying to build in those skills uh to be better problem solvers and and uh self-aware and recognize that i'm getting worked up over this maybe there's a different way to solve the problem are some of the things that we're talking about integrating um so being conscious of teacher language is another thing that you know marlene highlighted from her summer work but that goes on throughout the year in identifying some of the purpose and learning tasks for example using intrinsic motivation over external motivators my friend and former boss don willowness you know would remind me that we're not
029training barking seals here um and so how do we support kids to be enthusiastic about the work they're doing and of course teen mental health first aid uh that is being integrated for our sophomores at the high school complex thinking again how do we really focus ourselves on supporting kids and teaching them to have complex reasoning inquiry problem solving skills and the exploration of ideas if we can help our students be good at that through the research we reviewed with the the ptos and uh the different stakeholders we know that our kids will be successful i mean we went back and looked at uh some of the mckinsey reports and think tanks that identify working with leaders from around the globe what skills will make people successful in the 2030s when some of our students
030will be graduating and so the ability to do these things are really pretty critical and how do we help teachers become better at that and we engage in learning walks which we're really looking forward to being able to have our staff re-engage in uh this year to see other people delivering hqi and that's an acronym for high quality instruction and so our our staff have worked on defining what that is and that's in our our packet as well and how do we make sure that there's consistency of integration of those things in our classrooms every day so the dividends of our work that we've been focused on you know social emotional learning and complex thinking and we're really proud of the success our students and staff have had we had the 11th best smarter balanced
031performance in connecticut for k-12 districts that was just released last this not friday this past friday but the friday prior um a lot of our folks in here all know the language derby that's different district reference group that's districts that are similar in size and community uh complexion to cheshire uh we were second there just behind greenwich uh and we're proud that our um performance for our students that are identified for support services is 12th in connecticut uh we had the third best performance in durgby for students that are identified for support behind fairfield and simsbury and so we're really proud that all of our students achieve at high levels uh in the on the s.a.t we went from 17th in durgby on the s.a.t last year to 12th this past year our niche.com rating
032you know that's not the greatest indicator but it is a tool that a lot of folks use to access you know how is a school district performing if i want to move here they look at the niche ratings and stuff well we went up about 100 places from last year to 345th in america so it's a nice acknowledgement and then we also i can't tell you who and how many because the information's embargoed until the 14th of september but we had several students identified as national merit scholarship semi-finalists now there are 1.5 million students who take the psat and 15 000 uh or so are identified and invited to apply for pretty nice scholarships and so we have several students at chs who met that criteria which is really phenomenal to have as many students
033as we did and i'll update you again once that information becomes public i mean certainly we have other really cool stuff that happens in individual accomplishments like um we had a student this week on um oh gosh what's the tv show marin america ninja warrior this morning we had another student who had coaches at his front door at 6 30 in the morning because he's the number one ranked lacrosse player for the junior class in the united states and getting offers from some top-tier colleges this morning so we want to be able to provide well-rounded opportunities for our kids and we're really excited about the success that they do i mentioned the mars rover it's hard to get better than an astronaut kind of thing at least a scientist at that level if not an
034astronaut so anyway uh student achievement at the high school this is just a visual representation uh table representation of what i just shared with you with darien coming in at the the top spot for their performance but um see cheshire was 26 there with our three through eight achievement um cheshire you know tying with madison for 11th uh greenwich just slightly above uh in ninth place two two districts team tied it ninth there so this is overall achievement i think one thing that's notable when you look at the school districts above us the average per pupil expenditure is about five thousand dollars more than our per pupil expenditure if you multiply that out by our 4200 students it's 21 million dollars in change and i know there's a fairfield county mark up there even if
035you call it 15 million uh six million dollars on our budget that's there and uh i say that is a badge of pride that um what we're able to do as a community um with the ample resources we have for our community is provide great results and so that's that's pretty impressive um again you know i talked about the success for all learners you can see some of the districts uh here and where they shook out with respect to the special education performance 12th again tied with madison and these you know reflect some of the highest rankings we've ever had so really proud of our our team and the success and it's a commendation to the board and the community uh certainly our students and teachers and administrators for the hard work that they do
036to to find that level of success so my recommendations with respect to the uh strategic goals that we've identified you know the the performance standards with the social emotional learning and complex thinking a few points that i would want to make there one is uh the you know in the past we had adopted a 10-year plan and i love the justin trudeau quote i know you've heard me say it before but the pace of change isn't will never be is slow again as it is slow again as it is today uh to paraphrase uh it's always uh increasing the rate of change 10 years was too long in 2011. five years seems to be more appropriate would be my recommendation the board and administration review indicators data and identify targets annually provided that the board
037adopts these these strategic goals our next step would be to put forth some annual targets for this year and how we will make strides toward those goals to then you know publicize to make public uh to adopt and to hopefully attain throughout the course of the school year so that would be my recommendation and that wraps up my opening of schools report i appreciate your attention as we and patients as we go through this relatively long powerpoint but hopefully it's even more exciting than budget powerpoint and i appreciate it and i will certainly answer any questions that that anybody has if like sorry go ahead tony i just can't see anybody behind the screen so mike will help follow up in a second uh quickly on the highland enrollment at 8 41. yup any of
038the way back to it okay what is the actual physical capacity of highland i it's more than 800 less than 841 i couldn't quote you on an exact number but i i want to say it was like 8 20. so we're essentially over capacity already yeah we're definitely over capacity i know that that's why you know i don't know scott do you recall the exact number erica off the top of your head right now no no the uh capacity number yeah all rooms at the end are full got it thank you that was my next scott's interpretation we even created an additional room which is now filled thanks tony yeah on the um on the school opening the can you get the the numbers overall i think we're up a little bit but specifically in
039kindergarten it looked like it was probably significantly lower what is that are you reading anything into that i mean we're talking about school modernization population increasing is are we way off the mark on that are we on target um based on what you know as of today which is only a couple days into the school year is there any trending i think it's uh it's a good question question i've certainly uh wondered about and looked at um but i think it's premature to draw any conclusions from it uh you know i i know of a number of houses coming online and we have other situations where some of our youngest students just how happens they're like out of the country not that many but it's some and i would want to wait until you know
040i think probably next year we would have a better sense of you know what what is the trend looking like because like you said right now we're above and a lot of our younger grades are still well above the projection but kindergarten was kind of an odd anomaly why it wasn't why that that one wasn't and we want to continue to track that is that is it possible that it's impacted in any way by the pre-k i'm assuming those numbers are kindergarten and not pre-k but i don't know exactly what it is those numbers were kindergarten exclusive okay our pre-k wasn't above the projection okay um which gives you an indicator of maybe the kindergarten rebounding yeah because you you've done this long enough to know too that sometimes we'll get an odd year and
041i'm wondering to what degree is this pandemic related but we'll get an odd year of birth rate issues and as i talk this through i haven't had time since tuesday to now to go back and look at the updated birth rate data that would correspond with this year so i can do that too but it is yeah it's an anomaly when you look at the other grades why that grade is is lower and i saw norton was low yeah i'm just curious is there anything in particular about darcy just because it's darcy and it's separate from doolittle is there is there any ever been anything like that that you've noticed where you've had it nothing okay not necessarily no i you know um darcy perhaps that can be a little tricky too because darcy um
042does definitely draw do little kindergarten families but as kim will tell you a lot of the the kindergartners there are siblings of children in other support programs at darcy and it's easier for the parent to drive them there if they don't have the siblings that could be a reason it's down yeah and no highlands up i mean it's uh i live a few feet away from the doolittle districts and tell you i would seriously have considered doing something other than darcy just because of our commutes to new haven right and where we live at the south and the town so sure i could see something like that i just figured i would ask okay yeah there's uh we definitely still have to uh investigate that issue a little bit more okay uh i i had
043a couple questions but they were after the street okay um you question on you would mention that we've spent about five thousand dollars less per student right so let's just say schools pass in november that's a quite a bit of spending does that get incorporated into the average student spending no the per pupil expenditure is a function of the money spent on the operating budget divided by the the pupil not capital budget money okay but so here's a question that i have do any other towns incorporate their capital their their schools or anything like that not into their operating budget it doesn't that's by um uniform chart of accounts you have to include these specific accounts only in your operating budget these accounts specifically in your capital budget so no that that question's come up
044several times before it's exclusively operations versus you know capital over here yeah by and large okay parts of transportation are taken out like for a district that is sending kids via buses to other districts and stuff there are rules around what transportation is included but certainly not uh building uh or improvements things like that so when you're but when you're explaining it to the public by and large those numbers are normalized there might be a little nuance to it but it's absolutely okay okay it's apples to apples okay thank you and then um you would put up you'd put up a couple of near the end of your presentation you put up a couple of uh rankings yep and i'm in one of our rankings that i thought at least maybe two years ago take
045covet out of it we were ranked fifth and then now we're 11 so we did drop down uh i'm just wondering if you could speak to that is sure anything significant yeah absolutely when you're fifth there aren't a lot of places to go um and we were out performing um half of durga that was spending that kind of money more than than we were the pandemic certainly impacted performance across connecticut to still be in the top handful of districts in connecticut still out achieving some durga schools and almost every single district in dergby i still feel really good about where we're performing there to go from 5th to 12th could be a matter of a percentage point within a ranking um so that was for the for that that was for the 150 or 170
046school districts not for the 20 in dirk b correct that's okay 11 out of everybody okay um okay so i think you know we're still pretty happy with that level of success okay thank you sure thanks tony uh so jeff if you could could you go to the last slide it just so i get my wording absolutely so we're going to um point to board and administration review indicators data and identifying um targets annually so we're going to set up the metrics by which we measure performance yes so and i don't want to say measure performance measure attainment of the goals okay because you know some of the goals may not be that we design you know some of the metrics may not be achieve x points on this you know assessment it may be
047you know that we've um i'm having a hard time coming up with one off the top of my head but it may not always be just performance based metrics as opposed to you know a number of engagements with the community or something like that maybe okay another measure i could see how we'd make we can create these indicators for academics i guess is there objective data out there for social emotional learning and how are we gonna yeah i'm not asking for an answer now but could you give me an idea of how we're going to go about measuring um that would be something that i would want to discuss with marlene with our administrative team draft those and return to you with here's what we're thinking and we could discuss them and discuss those different
048targets and modify is necessary uh the the we don't give an sel test right i mean i don't know how you ever do tests really exist so there are assessments but um not that we've incorporated so you know we would have to to look at that how do we gauge whether we're making progress so for example did we provide the um teen mental health first aid program to all sophomores that would be a target this year for us that you know wouldn't be an assessment um but a goal that we would want to attain is evidence that we're furthering our ability to deliver sel support to students so that's an example um but i again would want to talk to our team to identify other indicators that we could put forth for review okay thank
049you sure any other questions on the superintendent's opening schools report that we have none up here thank you dr sullivan all right thank you i just want to just notice something on our uh printed agendas uh versus what's published online the audience uh components missing is number two so my apologies is caught that but since we did publish this on our board website number two was audience but if they already members audience that wish to speak to the board you're certainly welcome to do so you don't have to okay it seems there are none we're going to move on there's no old business uh before we get into the new business uh all board members got i think an email from doctor sullivan regarding the strategic plan uh i we don't uh i recommend we
050don't affirm it tonight but have a general discussion uh i know some board members uh i have not looked at it since sunday prior to that i did not look at it since june although i'm very familiar with it um sam was not here in august of 2021 would it be off-site she came on board a few months later so i know tim has some questions so i suggest tonight that we just have a you know general q a without the selling the team and perhaps not the next board meeting in the 15th we can affirm it that being said um dr sullin back to you on the firm on the uh strategic plan overview sure i mean it would in essence be kind of a rehash of what i shared in the powerpoint but
051we have designed district goals the the first page of the document kind of outlines uh the process and the two marquee goals that we've been working with since roughly 2016 complex thinking and social emotional learning we've identified several indicators of success so you know faith when you talk about you know how where are we going to derive some of these goals from i think this these are the things we're looking to advance here and how do we uh in our work identify targets to advance our growth with respect to supporting students to become better social emotional learners and complex thinkers the vision of the graduate was worked on for the accreditation process that we went through at cheshire high school several years ago and worked with the personalized learning task force did a tremendous job
052working through that process a lot of adam i remember you were in a lot of those meetings that we went to at cheshire high school um and can vouch for the amount of time and research and energy that went into the process of uh identifying uh trying to promote students who have a strong sense of themselves as thinkers and learners a strong capacity to work with others as collaborators and a global awareness of how we can shape our community in positive ways and then there are numerous uh several performance standards that were adopted by the board as part of that process back in 2019 what is relatively new is the work that we've done as a school system to define high quality instruction and i talked a little bit during the presentation about um what
053we're looking for when we go into classrooms what teachers are looking for when they observe their peers is a way to support their growth you know i said to our faculty at our convocation session after i had taken off the hospital gown i shared uh had a little bit more credibility at that point and shared that you know one of the reasons we are successful is because we're always working at becoming more successful the best players the best musicians the best art artistic talents in the world they're always working on evolving and becoming a little bit better and and this is our craft education is our craft and we're working on becoming better superintendents and assistant superintendents and principals and curriculum coordinators and teachers uh through that process so focusing on collectively defining this what
054does high quality instruction look like what are we aspiring to in the classroom and then trying to support each other to uh really exemplify this in the in the classroom is what we're focused on so that's really um the gist of it and i think what was important and what has been important um at least from where i sit as the superintendent um since i became superintendent in 2016 is to have documents in in guidance that is visible and incorporated into the everyday activities of the school system um i think for the time this is certainly not knocking anybody who was involved in the process in 2011 i may have been involved in the process of 2011 but to define 16 goals that nobody can recite and don't have anything to do or don't have
055much to do with our daily practice we've evolved since then and we have two goals that are very much a part of what we do every day part of what you do as a board when we evaluate the budget we've been very good about that and aligning our resources to support these goals and again i think the the suspect the success speaks for itself in that process and so when we talk to stakeholders within the community they value the goals that we have and see value in those goals and of course we can nothing stops us from continuing to evolve in three years if we hate it um but i think we're going to continue to try and aspire to hit those targets and become better and hopefully get to a point where we don't
056need the we want to move beyond it so that was my tried to be brief but maybe long-winded review of the packet the goals i know you're gonna put your hand up before you put it up so i was looking at you anyway go ahead thank you jeff i appreciate it the so i haven't i haven't gotten through this whole thing um today but the one thing that jumped out at me and i'm just curious if you could speak to it you know this is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine it's the state assessments so i'm looking at the i think it's basically the first section on page two when we've when we've discussed this in the past um measuring student performance it's what i recall these are my words nobody else's
057assessments are they're part of a bigger picture that's reviewed and so that just jumps out at me and i'm like uh i'm just wondering if you could speak to that absolutely absolutely and i would invite marlene certainly to add on to anything that maybe i i over you know i miss but um you know i think what we've found is that the assessments that students are given from the state have evolved to be a better reflection of complex thinking it i'd love the curriculum committee or other meeting to just have you guys walk through a couple of questions to see exactly how challenging and rigorous they are it's not recall you need good problem-solving skills to be able to do them i do not believe they should be the anchor of what we do in
058the school system but i do believe that if we support our students with these two goals i think they'll be well positioned to be successful on state assessments or anything else we throw at them there's a a certain level of intellectual agility that comes with being a very good complex thinker that allows you to be successful i'm not suggesting by any stretch that we are drilling kids on on these and coaching them like you know a sat prep class or something like that but i think we still is a school system and a community want to remain aware of our performance on these state assessments and i think we'll do well even if we don't focus on them but we want to stay aware of them from my take marlene anything you would add to
059that in terms of the complex in terms of the there's a complex sticking that i'm talking about this section here i'm just wondering if uh the other things that we had discussed that might be more qualitative are those baked into this here because i don't see it sort of jump out at me but it might be if you could just so like something like uh creativity um is a part of complex thinking that we want to foster i think that would be part of when we design an annual goal how are we noting progress toward that but it sound like you wanted to jump into i was just thinking that there's so many things that go into a successful school system you know when you think about the culture and we have surveys to look
060at the the culture and the climate of our buildings we have um data points on discipline right and so and then we can further look into what types of discipline was it and how are kids treating one another and are they being kind and are they being responsible uh how are kids managing their time you know um how how is the decision what is their decision making like so a lot of this comes out in in surveys that we do it comes out in work that that students do it's sort of reflected in some of those characters characteristics of successful learners that are yeah they're baked into at least our elementary report cards so i think there's room there for us to certainly grow and and look at that but i would never want to
061see us just latch onto to one thing so is it the stuff that you just mentioned is that sort of baked into these bullet points here yes okay yes so like looking at key just keep disciplinary incidents low so that's one of them and then another is using our district leadership committees so we have data team committees that are are looking at all sorts of data are kids coming to school what does our absenteeism look like that's an indicator when we meet as a safe school climate committee and look at disciplinary incidents we're looking at where are those happening why are they happening you know are there proactive things that we can do so there are there's programming that we can put in place some some of the things are small some of them are
062sort of medium lifts and then some are really structural where we need to make big sweeping changes but all of those things really contribute to the whole so i think looking at those district leadership committees looking at access for all of our learners and you know is is what we're doing inclusive of all of our subgroups our high needs students our free and reduced lunch students making sure we're really looking at that full picture and having indicators of all of those i think will help drive our success and you know if there is an adjustment to be made here i i would say that this this these indicators of success aren't meant to be um exhaustive or exclusive yep that they're meant to be you know uh guide posts if you will not sure the
063full story or not only these things so you know when we look at we want to establish goals and targets that demonstrate i mean the the litmus test is if we do better on this indicator does it help students become better complex thinkers and social emotional learners whether that's training staff in a certain way or looking at certain data points are we demonstrating growth in this area and so you know that's really the the goal here is to advance these goals and adopting a few meaningful goals on an annual basis that reflect that and you could hold the same goal for three or four years but at the end of the day do they move these things forward and that's kind of how we design budgets now too over the last several years does this
064budget help us get better at these things and that's you know real key consideration for us so just one last one last way to look at this so we're i was asking about the assessments all these things i think they're valuable uh but let's just say the student is really really nice and they don't do well they're going to be measured in some way like do they do their homework do they get good grades on routine tests rather than this one test in the spring that regardless what the schools do other kids might be building up to it and they get nervous and they don't do well yeah so does this incorporate things like just routine grading and routine school work yeah we don't um we're trying to assess the progress of the masses okay
065through this document gotcha we're we look at individual progress through a report card okay that does reflect those things particularly you know in that k-6 level where we're looking at what sort of progress are students making them and we're also very sensitive that doesn't mean at the high school that we give a test on tuesday if you didn't do well tough cookies you know we're not about ranking and grading we're about teaching and learning okay and so if there's a reason in from the why you didn't perform well on this assessment we want to know and we want to support your mastery of that and some people will say well that's not how college does it um but that's not their university route 10 either it's cheshire high school and by developing the skills to
066be successful we're giving you a better opportunity to be successful at college or wherever you go thank you thanks doctors uh i never with my uh us they're graduating enough with my kids i've gone to cheshire public schools i never felt that spec was ever something that they studied for necessarily nor something were measured on i you know i using reports and to me you know that was uh just an indicator at a point in time i i will say i it's i don't know if everyone has the same experience with cheshire high school you mentioned about the tests i will say our last both my daughter's going through high school i've noticed that you know if uh if a kid or a group of class group in the class didn't do well on a
067test it was not oh oh well you didn't mesmerize it memorize it came over it was actually an ability to find out what you fell behind on learn it and prove the teacher so i i've seen that i know it's come a long way um you know by share i'm sure most members you know don't want to see the assessments being the end all beyond that's not the case the only one that is on page four i like how um the attributes are broken out by topic as uh you know faith medicine earlier when we talk about indicators and you know kpis maybe it might be a good idea to list out you know and i know it's evolving but how how the indicators tied to these sections in addition to the attributes that way
068it's you know we know and i know it's going to change some more qualitative some quantitative but it gives us a better understanding and how the district is looking at tracking because that's all mr gripper thank you um luckily i had a doctor's appointment yesterday so i uh had a few minutes to kind of do a first run through the the uh standards here and um everything felt familiar because you know spent a lot of time with this in years past and you know it seemed in line except for one part um under a collaborative and cooperative learner um it seems like under attributes that uh frey i'll call it a phrase a and phrase c seem to conflict with each other because all the other ones seem to kind of build upon each other
069but this one i i couldn't quite figure out the context of how to be how to equity can equitably contribute to something but then you know demonstrate effective interpersonal skills and challenge someone respectively so i wasn't quite sure how those work with each other and so i i thought you'd be just asking maybe that's the i'm going to respectfully disagree with you mr gripper to i think um with respect to the first one to be able to contribute equitably to group success means i'm reading what's occurring in the group process and i'm not sitting there you know trying to figure out today's word all when everybody else is doing their thing and contributing i play an equitable role here and that i'm pitching in and providing support c phrase c um is more about if
070you're you raise a point like i think that the argument should be that we should take this argument for capital punishment and we're working on the same project but i disagree i think we should take a different point toward why capital punishment should be in place let's say uh hypothetically how do i what skills do i possess to respectfully discuss that with you and come to a solution that's the evolution of i think i was safe on the kickball game and you think i was out to a more adult sort of disagreement here and how do i respectfully and appropriately express that to you in a way that's productive to the group um and that's where i see those you know the nuances between those two uh similar sounding actions so so phrase a then
071in in context is more meant to to say that we want you that you should be participating am i pulling my weight right pulling your weight okay so i i didn't i wasn't understanding what that meant okay sure thank you any other questions yeah please um i really i can appreciate this and i really again like the indicators of success and the complex thinking and social emotional learning to move forward i think what i would like to see you know you have theory of action therefore what are the action steps and and we saw it in the powerpoint right you're already starting with bringing in mike anderson so i guess moving forward what are the things we're doing to get to those uh indicators of success i think you know we have the same vision
072here in the sense that that's where we're identifying those goals are like indeed our action steps um what are the targets here it's almost grounded in that theory of action we believe that you know working with mike anderson if we can get x number of teachers engaged in that that we support our overall ability to you know mix gains with sel um because to faith's point there aren't there's not an easy litmus test for that but we know that there are certain strategies that we want to try and employ like giving many lessons on how do i respectfully disagree in a group blessing before i jump into it um that we know support kids making those gains so i think we're on the same page with respect to those um steps and that'll be part
073of like the team in the audience here um including this gentleman if you'd like to join us but uh come up with uh you know our indicators and goals any other uh comments or questions you're thinking and i was waiting for you yeah no i um excuse me i i i know we're going to take this up at the next meeting um and i too am somewhat behind and really diving into this and i hope no offense is taken but but can we raise some issues because i'm seeing some things where i'm kind of just trying to puzzle it out and if you're all waiting for me tonight it's going to be a long time yeah sure i would ask you know certainly send me any questions you have or call me or you know
074or marlene and we could walk through it um and i could send information out to the board okay that would be great thanks sure yeah i'm just gonna say uh the next business meeting is the 15th there's a curriculum meeting on the curriculum committee meeting on the 12th maybe i know i'm not i think the agenda is finalized but you know if there's still questions uh you know you want to cover there maybe we can have time to cover it there i don't want to look at marlene as i know it's a packed agenda but in the meantime keep communication flowing to marlene and jeff and um yeah let's see what happens again i don't i i personally want to rush this through uh i i i get it been through it but uh also
075i'm wondering if it's possible to um let our cbs community know that we're looking at this and those they probably have not looked at it for a while and let them know that this is coming up yeah that's kind of the i mean certainly i can send it out that's kind of the process we went through last year by um you know going to the pto meetings sharing this with them getting their feedback um but i'll certainly send it out again yeah just as a reminder uh anyway that's all i have on this i'm not trying to pull on the menu i'm just trying to be respectful everybody's time and what's coming up uh before we adjourn just a couple reminders uh next business meeting is the 15th curriculum committee meeting is a 12th uh
076it is in person is there a planning committee being on the 13th or we haven't decided that yet okay so that's not been published yet when that is ready we'll put that out there so the next quarterback meeting will be curriculum on the 12th and followed by the business meeting on the 15th uh before i break i just want to i'm sure everybody's read the news that town council last week approved the school monetization referendum to go to the voters this november so i just want to i know some of us were there i just want to thank the town council uh for unanimously putting that forth it was a lot of work so uh i'm glad to see that it's out there let's see what happens uh that being said i'm gonna ask for
077a motion to adjourn mr grippo so moved seconded by mr white all those in favor unanimous thank you everyone this meeting is adjourned thank you you guys can go home now