001okay [Music] good evening everyone wow good evening everyone here we go time to wake up thank you for joining us tonight in person and also we are streaming live right now i will tell you you're going to be able to hear us just fine but taking a look we will have this presentation posted um i know people here are gonna be able to see it it's just hard to see uh from the streaming perspective but we'll make sure everyone gets it as i said i'm mike woods i'm the principal here at dot my assistant principal john paracino and i will be going through an orientation this evening the purpose of this evening is really just to give you guys just a 10 000 foot view basics of what dot is about first and foremost we're
002here to support your kids john and i both parents as well we treat our kids here at school as we treat them as our own that's one of the things about god that we take a lot of pride we consider ourselves a family um between john and i might you know ourselves uh we really don't take ourselves very serious but we do take the work that we do here extremely serious so it's the middle school years um i can tell you i'm a middle school parent as well i have a daughter who's in eighth grade anyone else have middle school children right now this is all pretty much your first first going through okay so pretty much anything we say tonight they're totally gonna believe us it's gonna be great um you're in for it
003i can tell you we're gonna talk about just a developing adolescent and those types of things over all the years that i've been here i know you're saying way too long yes um as much as i preached about having a middle school child having a middle school child the words i say tonight i'm like oh you guys have no idea what you're in for but um but most of all uh we want you guys to be able to ask us some questions tonight any curiosities you have about dodge the program those types of things i'm going on the uh thought that next year um obviously my hope is that we're back to pre-code conditions so we're going to be talking about that tonight pre-code conditions that we had including lunch ways bell schedules all those
004types of things if things change we'll make the changes okay so to kind of start us off this is our mission in vision this was something that was highlighted right actually right before the shutdown we were going through a process talking about our mission statement and what our vision is for dive middle school so most importantly we want to provide that diverse and challenging educational experience that addresses the needs of every student not just our high excelling students not our middle of the road students not our struggling supporting students every single student so i'm going to talk a little bit about that in some of the professional development that we've been doing and some of the exercises that we've been doing over the last couple of years uh we strive to be a community that
005values and promotes respect and lifelong learning that word respect i tell you right now is just telling my team leaders today we're dealing with you know kids and adolescents who have been obviously altered throughout this entire covet experience and we are seeing some of those effects we are seeing some kids who you know maturity wise i think just for the teachers this is not scientific but just teachers themselves saying the kids seem not as mature as they had in the past and so we're working on that we're reiterating some school rules we're not having these all out like one thing i can tell you we have more kids that spring in our hallways that we're trying to get a touch of trying to uh get a wrap on that was something we never dealt with
006the kids really understood obviously we're not sprinting in the hallways okay our lunches are not that good they're good not that good okay our vision and this is really something that you know as we started going through our division this is a this is a tall challenge but in order for us to empower all of our students with the academic social emotional skills to lead the world tomorrow how do we get that independence towards our student what does the gradual release model look like from us standing in front of the classroom with us doing some collaborative activities together for students to then independently start making some choices about their education and i'll go through a couple of things with that in a moment we also have our core values we call them our five c's
007you know these are the values that we promote not only to our students but i promote to teachers and i promote to our parents um so caring and collaboration our community that we're building being consistent in the communication all five are vital during the adolescent years not just here in the classrooms not just here at dot but also at home when we start talking about what is it that's going to be positive for our students what is it that's going to be positive to help our children grow some of this more than ever right now has got to not only happen at school but also we take a look at consistency what does it look like at home we talk about and give us the recommendations about homework um about structuring homework what that should
008look like at home how it has never really been an issue from before now we're seeing an issue where we really have to tell parents based upon what they're saying to us of how can i get my kids to do the homework your kids just all of our kids went through that independence period during the shutdown and then that following year of really kind of not having that really strong strong base for us to develop some of that organization uh at home when doing homework and those types of things so those are things we're going to partner with you on how we can best support all of our kids all right so as mike said i'm john paraceno i'm the assistant principal um just a little bit about myself and mike as well uniquely both
009of us are graduates from dad um john graduated way before i did yeah and it's actually pretty unique i was just asking mike about it he's at the tail end of seeing parents in uh in the crowd that he went to school with uh now i'm starting to see parents who went to school my brothers because i had other brothers in town and starting to see parents that that went to school with me i also live in town so i have two two children at highland and one hopefully getting ready to start at darcy and also as mike said really tonight we want to use as the opening of that that start of parent school and student relationship and starting that communication so really starting that dialogue tonight because that's probably the most vital thing
010making sure that that partnership is working to support your children and and making sure that they're successful we often will hear from a parent later on that you guys are so busy i didn't want to bother you with that we kind of let it go we let it go for a little bit too long we know how much you guys are doing that's what we do we take great pride in that it's having that communication and nipping things in the bud before they become the bigger issue is when we have the most success so please don't ever hesitate to get on the computer and send the email um don't ever hesitate to pick up the phone and call us i think like we love the phone call we love the fact that now we're getting
011to have that face-to-face interaction with parents and be able to have meetings again something that we completely lost with kobit but it's great we said the parents parents are seeing our face for the first time this is the first time other than our music concerts that we've had parents able to come into our building and so we're just really excited to re-establish that in terms of academics obviously our teachers are using powerschool as a means of communicating academic success they're also using google classroom on the day-to-day stuff and that's how they're communicating with our students and later in the month i'll give a plug to what we call preps for success we invite our sixth and seventh grade parents to come in and it's kind of a workshop model 20 minute workshops led by our
012school counseling department and they'll talk about how to navigate power school how to navigate google classroom other topics are building the resilient child so again another means of us being able to come together and open that line of communication as mike kind of made light of a little bit we are dealing with with middle school kids in the adolescent and so yes sometimes we have to throw logic and common sense out the window because it's we're never going to be able to to kind of explain that in some of their decision making they're a little bit more influenced by peers and so obviously as parents that's why we're always uh kind of impressing upon our kids the importance of who we hang around with who we surround ourselves with um and sometimes the values that
013we're teaching at home and the morals we teach at home sometimes with kids they take a back seat to those influences and so that's where it's our responsibility and where we want to be able to intervene and impress upon kids the importance of those high values those high morals that we know are being instilled at home and we know are valued in our community the parent and child relationship it really goes i feel like right now that my wife and i are the son and and everything is is revolving around us as the parents that love hanging out with us they are doing that for us but they come here and that that starts to change and that's you know that's difficult for parents but it's it's common they're kind of feeling their way around
014around the world and kind of discovering who they are and that's also a really cool stage some people think we're crazy for enjoying this stage but but it really is fun getting to see that mature development and really turn into young men and young ladies the consequences part some of the decisions they are making we want to prevent the lifelong consequences and that's things that we worry about i'll be a hundred percent honest that where we see that the most is social media usage and tele and phone usage cell phone usage you almost feel like parents are in a difficult spot we always say and i it's funny before my daughter got to middle school i've never given my daughter a cell phone i've never given my daughter a cell phone all of a sudden
015christmas is coming along his daughter's getting ready to go to middle school and complete cave at the woods house because you want to uh you don't want to ostracize your kid either and so you want them you know to have them parents either very valuable communication tools you'll see later on we offer so many clubs and activities and you want to know where your child is it's great for safety and they could really be great as long as we're we're putting in some kind of guidelines and rules surrounding them to make sure they don't have those those lifelong consequences the only addition i would add here is that please know that we understand kids are going to make poor choices those poor choices we know it didn't come from you we know you didn't instill
016these poor choices at the dinner table we know what people are about because we get on the phone with parents to say hey so-and-so did this gasps oh my i never thought they would do that i never it's okay we both know that this is a great community of parents parents are teaching their kids the right thing they're going to make some poor choices and guess what we want to make it a learning opportunity for them to make sure that they make the better choice on the next time except those of you that we didn't go to school with you by the way i saw a couple familiar faces attributes of a successful middle school student i would say these are attributes that we are working on developing and and this will not be something
017that is that they're fully there and developmentally understanding the adolescent brain and where they are their brain isn't fully developed to master these things so probably the biggest frustration that we'll hear from a parent or a kid that might be struggling is really executive functioning skills their backpack is such a mess there's there's some there's papers from september and we're now in march uh and that's typical especially if you have a boy time management sometimes for them so it's we build in things throughout the school day we have supports to try to help them work on building their executive functioning skills and then obviously at home helping provide those supports is definitely helpful i would say being in the district the elementary schools really do a great job of kind of instilling those habits and
018not much changes when you come to that it's pretty much that same we're emphasizing about 20 to 25 minutes of math practice and then also the 20 to 25 minutes of reading when they're at home and homework are there some more project-based learning things that they're working on and and things that might be going on in the classroom that they're also taking home short but we are not uh thinking we know their lives are busy we are not overloading them and overwhelming them with academic work uh at home middle school kid is still a kid and they should have that that time at home to to decompress and do some other things outside of school the most important thing that we can build in any of our children from an early age we know all
019that all the kindness campaigns that we do throughout the school district is obviously empathy as well and getting our kids to be empathetic learning teaching them to be good people i always say to my kids i could care less how they did on the math test and as true or not true as that is but the most important thing is i want my kid to be a good person and i want them to be empathetic and sympathetic protectors and we'll do those empty things throughout the year this past monday um at our win which i know is the next slide it's kind of our advisory program um um we had an empathy lesson in there and our empathy lesson really came around just so you know you know what we're going to be kind of
020still talking about next year are the masks i talk to the kids just like this in the cafeteria while they're eating the lunches just about masks are related to circumstances and we're using the term circumstances you might have a circumstance where you don't have to wear your mask you might have a circumstance where you have to wear your mask and guess what both are fine and so we're talking about empathy even when it starts coming out we would never want a kid looking at another kid like really you're still in a mass because that's middle school and kids will be curious about that so we're taking you know we took that piece i coached our teachers into if that you know we see that type of thing happening let's move the kids on because we
021wanted we wanted monday to be like any other day at god middle school and i can tell you talking with teachers and those types of things we've had some pretty good success so i've talked to some parents who i know who want their kids in math still i wanted to make sure we check in that no one will say anything to them we talked to parents who didn't have masks checked in with them to make sure kids weren't saying anything about that um and i think we did a good job so everyone had said you know that they kind of moved on um and we uh i thought we had a pretty good success bar on that um some of the things that we're working on as a community with our teachers our uh instructional
022assistants and those types of things just up here i wanted you guys to kind of see tying back to our mission statement tying back to our core values and our vision this is how we go through this so these past couple of years through the pandemic we've been working with the connecticut center for school change those who are in education i know they've been working with a lot of districts in this area as well and something that they call accelerated learning does it mean that we teach them faster it just means we have to get learning itself not pacing long-wise but learning we have to make sure kids are staying on top with how are they learning we worked with developing some deep learning tasks and scaffolding those supports as well to make sure that
023we're not leaving any students behind all of our students in our classes want to make sure that they understand what the task is what the goals are and they're meeting those standards we've talked a lot about probably over the past four years now social emotional learning for academic success has been one of our district goals we took the opportunity for the last two and a half years to really focus in to ensure that we have success for the kids socially emotionally to be ready to learn social emotional i know it has been kind of a term that we're throwing around pretty broad we're not turning our teachers into counselors or anything like that but when kids start having those issues we want to make sure we're supporting them with counseling and those types of things
024this year is really the next two bullets and that's really about creating choice for engagement and scholarships so that when we develop these deep learning paths we're offering choice in there we want our kids to be able to connect to the content that they're learning how does it relate to them how does it relate to today how will relate to them tomorrow so we really work hard at making sure we get those choices that's a challenge i'm not saying that we're teaching this in one year and all of our teachers are masters at it this will be some long-term learning goals at the time period uh we have also we're taking a look at reflection on learning and choosing an academic pathway that choice instead of the teachers providing those choices kids are making choices
025so we take a look at i'll use our math department they have what they call what they call an oil sheet that is blue on one side and pink on the other and they have different levels of problems within that pink and blue what our what we're trying to do is trying to get kids to understand where their learning is so that they can start taking a look at you know what i really want to challenge myself and do some of these problems on the more pink side of the page or i want to you know i really need to get support a little bit more on some of these problems so i'm going to kind of take a look at these um problems on the blue side of the page our hope is that
026you get that student who says you know what probably was me always thinking the easy way out okay but how can we possibly take kids and say hey listen you know what i think you're ready for this and we're doing a lot of this type of teaching a lot of this type of really intentional design we're using language as well we're using motivational language for kids saying you know what i know you can do this we did this here and being able to tell kids that you have the ability to do it again we want to make sure kids are in that learning mindset we're doing a lot of this work in collaboration with an author consultant mike anderson he's an author from ascd he has three books uh learning to choose choosing to learn
027tackling the motivation prices and then what we say and how we say it matter how many people in here are educators any educators anyone been absolutely mind blown with some of their professional development or did we just kind of muddle through i'll tell you in all my years of teaching i've been doing this for over 20 years mike anderson is the first guy who i can tell you has taken my staff and really kind of elevated he is engaged with them he is energized with them i have teachers of the first time here knocking on the door hey listen i i had an appointment with mike anderson was here uh i cancelled it so i don't need coverage people are really starving for a lot of things that he's doing he's really been a great
028uh i would say a godsend for our teachers to make sure that they're supported through this time as well this is a hard time for teaching uh we wanted to make sure we have the right supports we're gonna have a few transition process and i know you just mentioned one piece but i forgot to so this is going to be a year-round process not only for students but also for parents so obviously this is our first engagement with all of you but we are still going to have discover daddy that's a pta sponsored event that we're going to have in may pretty much it's a massive i would call it almost like a a massive park event that we have out there with food trucks and kind of community uh based uh elements we're gonna
029have some tours inside the building to take people around it's really an exciting day not just because it's food trucks but it's really a nice day for us to celebrate we have all of our sports and activities out there with tables and booths we have community people coming in that really focus on the adolescent age student so that we can say hey listen this is not just about that this is also about the cheshire community and other supports and activities that kids can get involved in so it's a really great activity as well i leave the link one out this afternoon for the online course selection am i correct on that not yet then it might go out at midnight tonight then so um so tomorrow there should be a link to everyone's email that's
030in our system if you check that email there will be an online course selection students are going to register for the unified arts which we'll talk about that in a second those are your your music choices world language choices and then we'll put kids in our career in technical education choices as well in april um our curating group leads tours of our building to the sixth grade students so for the first time in two years we're actually going to have the kids come up here like we used to do so they'll come up here they get a nice little presentation and then off they go with our pure advocates it's a student-led uh tour of our building it's really an exciting time and then we also have a summer orientation usually happens the week before
031school we also use that opportunity as well every student who's coming up to us gets a brand new chromebook so we do our chromebook distribution and then we have another summer orientation where we have some of our staff and also our peer advocates um will also be around for a kind of a part two so that kids understand they'll have their schedule with them and then walk them through uh dot the school itself and you'll kind of get more of a detail but we kind of have compartmentalized um where kids are supposed to be soldiers seventh grade students are upstairs on the second floor eighth grade students are downstairs on the first floor and then we have our unified arts classes that are kind of tied pretty much all the way around the school mainly
032on the first floor with world language on the second floor um so that's our transition process and um oh god wasn't even just said prep for success i'm sorry practically success which we'll be putting out an email as well that's coming up pretty soon i'll do more on sports um i want to talk a little bit more just kind of some individual pieces that we have so obviously our biggest resource and supports are our teachers um teachers have well when i say i was talking about our team leaders today you know teachers have been breaking their backs all across here at don as well to make sure our kids are supported i could not be more proud of the group of professionals that we have here at dodd we have really a great crew this
033is my fourth middle school i've worked in um and i can easily say that this is one of this is probably the most dedicated staff i've worked with so i'm really proud of that um we do have a couple of supports in systems so uh we do have just like the elementary schools have we have a response to intervention system which when kids are not meeting benchmark or not meeting goals um we kind of put some we formalized some paperwork with some goals to track students and track data and also have some supports there as well that happens in the regular education world we also have two other areas that deal with students that have disabilities one is i'll stick to the bottom one special education students with individualized education plans those students who have
034ieps in sixth grade those automatically get carried up to seventh grade okay you should be starting to have some of your transition meetings at this time uh to transition up here to the middle school same with section 504 plans those four plans excuse me those support plans will also be transferring uh up here to seventh grade those students in those two areas qualify under the individuals with disability act um and they also have certain protections and those types of things if you don't understand what those are means your child doesn't have one okay you would have it would be announced you have meetings and those types of things so just wanted to give you those level supports some people have questions about that just know that your plans will carry on here social emotional supports
035we have our school counselors we have two school counselors we have um one counselor lindsay deangelo who's moving up to cheshire high school but we just had jessica tressel who will be this class's uh school counselor she started today did fantastic through the interview process we're all really excited to have her we have social workers and school psychologists those are really targeted supports mainly working working with kids with ieps and then we have chewie chewie is is our little guinea pig that we have um he's taken care of by staff down at pps uh and we sent chewie probably to our most sensitive cases it's amazing to see kids when they want to come down and see a rather large short-term rat as i call but really it's it's really an amazing thing to see
036how kids interact with pets um i will tell you when kids are really in crisis it's almost like you know um and really how kids are just you know working with um working with our pets um i will say chewy is the last of our pets that we had we also had two therapy dogs so we're look we're still in the market and taking a look at um um so for people that aren't in education or aren't in a middle school environment what we do is we use what's called a teaming model and so i'll just explain a little bit about what achieving model does our kids are coming to us right now uh kind of all over the place socially so some kids are navigating their social world and are very successful and come
037some kids struggle with them and i would say that they're you know kids that's very natural their social compass is all over the place i joke with parents some kids don't have a social compass some kids bought them at the dollar store some kids have some really good ones what we do to try to make that big environment these kids coming together now for the first time as a class of over 300 we use a teaming model to make it a little smaller so we have three teams and now we take that and essentially we divide the teams into three groups of one hundred and i'll explain this team c in a minute because we do something a little bit different because we've also probably heard a lot of the community about enrollment going up
038and that our enrollment is going up with your son and daughter's classes they are larger than the eighth grade that's going out so what happens is those hundred kids will share the same language arts teacher the same social studies teacher the same science teacher and the same math teacher so all 100 kids will have the same teacher and we pod them in the building so those four classrooms are near each other the kids don't have to navigate an entire building when mike was a student here when i was a student here it was called dodge junior high school and it operated almost like a high school your math department would be in one wing your history department and another and you're trying to navigate an entire building and it makes things feel really big so
039we try to shrink that down for the kids by using the teaming model and what it does is we allow time for our teachers to collaborate and they can say you know i've really noticed this out of johnny is anybody noticing something different out of him in their class and they can work together the four teachers that share the same student to come up with support so it's a it's kind of another safety net for kids that being said we want them to have a middle school experience where they are meeting new kids and they are meeting everyone in their class so when they're off team which are the unified arts classes like the musics the pe's the tech heads we we mix the teams together and we allow them to kind of interact with
040all the kids within their class so it's it's kind of a nice blend of pull and and it allows us to still try to make for some kids what seems like an enormous change make that feel a little bit small we have a six-person team and what that simply means is in order to keep class sizes down we have two teachers one teacher will teach two sections of math and two sections of science and the other teacher will teach two seconds two sections of language arts in two sections of social studies if we made them a team on their own your child would only have two teachers and wouldn't get the opportunity to experience what it's like to have four different teachers so we put six teachers on one team and we just divide more
041than a hundred for that team that team might get 130 kids on it and we divide the 130 amongst the six teachers so it does two things that allows us to shrink class sizes for kids down um and it it does save instead of creating a fourth team it saves money on having to have two more teachers so i won't lie in that regard but what it will do then is it kind of offsets that and allows for the smaller environment and by putting them as a group of six it still allows the kids to have four different teachers so we try to assure that a kid won't if they have a teacher for science they won't have that same teacher for math they'll go to the other math teacher and i know that for
042some people it may sound like i'm speaking in a different language i'd be more than happy to go into further teaching people they're thoroughly confused i'll just say now we do not have the big team upstairs in seventh grade it's currently in eighth grade so i know there are people who have been here before we get sometimes you know they are familiar with the teachers on what team color and those types of things we have yellow seal of a room upstairs when i put this probably looks like we're putting the team upstairs in seventh grade just taking a look at projection numbers um there is going to be a little bit of a shuffle with some of the teachers so it's not you know for those uh you know who may be watching who said
043oh i remember that that maroon team those teachers were unbelievable i might have to start kind of uh reshuffling the deck here a little bit so um just to give you a heads up on that that's probably one other thing i should emphasize in teaming the only classes where we use homogeneous grouping for is matt and mike will talk a little bit about math after after that social studies english language arts and science are kids are heterogeneously grouped there is not a smart team in a not programming all the teams will have the same programming on them so we we divide the kids up the kids that are heterogeneously grouped for math each team will offer that math track on it so we've done a lot in that regard we don't call them team a
044b and c because people naturally oh that's thc that must be that team must be the double team you get a lot of that back in the day they used to call them by jewels they were the rubies diamonds all the diamonds must be this much so we go like colors now to try to get rid of any of any of that line itself our daily schedule basically a student's schedule will consist of homeroom the four core classes that are on team that we talked about and they'll have three different ua classes their core classes are 52 minutes in a day and all this i can tell you our teachers can't wait to get back to this exact schedule because this is not our focus schedule but they uh you'll notice there's no last breaks
045in there or uh anything like that so we really get to utilize the academic time in the classroom you'll also notice that there is like an offset of a 56 minute class there and that's generally that's hidden during lunch time for the kids and like john said i mean i'll tell you right now we're running six lunch waves the reason why we have to run six launch ways i can't fit more than one team in here i've worked in places where you can fit an entire grade in here which makes life beautiful uh but that said um six launch waves we go from nine just before 10 o'clock before 10 o'clock in the morning we call that brunch goes all the way to 1 30. so it's a band-aid fix we had massive tents out
046here that we had better you know better lunch ways we had four lunch waves in that um but without the tent without disturbing um pe classes and those types of things we went to this six lunch week schedule which hopefully we're gonna need soon we also have a altered schedule on mondays where we shrink those class times by about three four minutes in each class and we provide 45 minutes of the day that's something we call win and we do this on mondays to try to set kids up for success for the week so win stands for what i need other schools may call it an advisory program we've kind of shifted advisory takes place here but that's not what it all is so kids are hurt about about 10 to 11 students per adult
047we use pretty much every adult in the school to meet with the kids during that time we are our teachers meet and have one-on-one mentoring meetings with students they'll call power school they'll call google classroom with the kids they'll talk about where the kids might be missing assignments and they will walk kids through emailing a teacher that they're missing an assignment school assignment for we have obviously a great deal of kids that are very academically successful so we may sit with them and start having goal-setting conversations with them what are you involved in here at that are you involved in a club are you involved in a sport and trying to make that next connection for that kid to push themselves maybe socially if academically they're all set within that as well we take care
048of state mandated digital citizenship so we'll go over digital citizenship lessons with the students and talk about responsible use of technology the you know technology that's in their hands social media and also the technology we provide that uh here at school and then obviously mike had talked earlier about the empathy lesson so we'll have advisory lessons surrounded by empathy and kindness for students as well during that time all right so this is where the interest starts tightening up a little bit so two years ago uh canadian state legislation passed that if students took two full years of a world language it counts as a high school credit so in turn instead of starting cheshire high school or other high school well actually just goes to cheshire high school you would start with spanish 2 rather
049than starting in spanish 1. you can start spanish 2 sophomore year so there's print elements in which we take a look at but we start taking a look at our 7th grade offerings we have spanish french latin and german we have the same exact ones offered uh in eighth grade the difference in seventh grade you take a world language every other day in eighth grade you take a world language every day it's still in the unified arts block so those are still 42 minute classes um but from there students will then have a choice this will be up on the website so i see cameras coming out taking pictures we'll have this up there so you can kind of take a look and see uh grade nine offerings um you have spanish two cp stands
050for college prep ccp stands for competitive college prep those are the those are the uh levels of the high school so you have these choices here same exact languages and also there was an italian one like i said before two years of a language here at dot counts for a high school credit the next place where high school credit is also counted is in math now this gets a little more complicated so right now and again this will be posted tomorrow you can really take a look at it looks like that's schematic for train station um that said students right now in grade six are heterogeneously grouped okay teachers are accelerating kids based upon their performance based upon uh standardized assessments and just based upon uh their interest in math as well their ability to
051take on uh some accelerated paces in math so from those groupings what we get is i'll kind of start from this perspective here students who are being already advanced and accelerated your teachers have already been in touch with you that is our highest track it's also our smallest collection of students i can tell you our algebra one for high school credit and seventh grade um we probably have one section of about 25 to 26 kids those are kids who are not only showing aptitude and math or showing a passion for math math comes very natural to them very easy to them and those are the um those are the kids that go in those sections the next section is pre-algebra pre-algebra probably takes up um a little bit of i would say we're about a
05260-40 split right now uh 60 of the kids are in that three algebra track and all forty percent of the kids are in the grade level uh math track the biggest difference content wise it's all three algebra the accelerated pace is the difference between the two okay so where they might not get through the entire uh areas in grade seven excuse me grade level math they will have grade level three algebra in eighth grade and as you can see they can still go on to competitive prep college student college prep courses at cheshire high school pre-algebra uh they finished through that to take the high school credit algebra one um and then move to they have the option to take competitive college prep and then geometry competitive college and uh excuse me competitive college prep
053and college prep i can never live at the high school that said you're not set in stone kids when we start taking a look at by october kids who are sinking and swimming on this there's probably about a five percent move between some of these levels we want to make sure the kids you know our elementary teachers have done a fantastic job in accelerating the kids and preparing them and those types of things sometimes kids might be interested in something else they just don't have that math interest as much anymore so there is some movement in the beginning of the year probably by thanksgiving we hopefully have moved kids where we feel they need to be so there is some movement there okay if your child is not in the math you know the math
054component that they're interested in they want to be higher or want to be lower we talk with parents we work with parents but we also tell parents sometimes it happens a little bit later in the year so a student who's you know getting a b in the algebra one and parents want their child to have a uh more robust options of advanced math at the high school there is a way in which kids can take trigonometry and geometry um simultaneously at the high school sophomore year and then they're on the same track as everyone believe it or not in this track so even though you might be at a grade level you can kind of advance going through there's also a way you can double up and you're exactly back to the same path i
055would vision visualize this as everyone's together in sixth grade we're trying to take a look and see what kids are really performing well in math and then it kind of molds together back at the high school when some kids get math sooner than others other kids might get mad a little bit later in life i am still waiting for my opportunity in that we do take a look at some data points on this we do take a look at the sbac assessments we take a look at their grade six sopers map uh math scores we take a look at something called the map inventory that's a new one for us this year that replaced the ulsa test and then we take a look at student performance as well how not just you know my kid
056got a straight a or straight you know they mastered every concept and those types of things it's also about how they are performing there how are they organized what's their you know what's the pacing like for that we just want to set any student up for failure going forward okay i will at the end just say i will send out an email to our math department chair tom toscano um if anyone has any math questions all right so our offerings we talked about our uas or our unified arts offering obviously i talked about our core classes but um we really value the arts around here and i would say if you talk to mr kuner who's the head of the music department for the district uh and we know about all the great successes that
057our bands have had at cheshire high school and i bet he would attribute at least part of it we know how hard they work at the high school as well but to the great foundation that's established at the elementary school and also here at that so we have a great band program great orchestra and chorus program in our visual arts as well in the career and tech ed fields we have kids that get opportunities in digital design and working on computers designing things and then they get to actually see with 3d printers and some of the stuff in the wood shop actually bringing that vision to light we work in robotics multimedia communications we offer an economics class uh in the second economics class in eighth grade as well engineering and design for seventh graders
058we have a research skills class that takes place in the library we obviously have our state mandated pe and health we know that in one of the things coming from the elementary school kids lose recess we also know you know through studies this is the age group where kids stop playing as much stop going outside and doing things so for while we lose the recess we offer pe here every other day for students so they're still staying physically active and we find a great benefit sometimes some of our kids that are a little over active we will schedule them daily we're not kidding i will say our pe offering too is way above the state standard so what the state offers for um what the mandate is for pe we are far exceeding that standard
059because like john said there is no recess and then the last thing we take great pride in is typically middle schools and people that work in middle schools will offer spanish and maybe french in other districts we pride ourselves that we're able to offer german spanish french and latin and that's something that we've and i know historically our board of education have really taken great pride that we prioritize that and are able to have those different offerings for our students yeah okay sports activities and clubs again i think um we offer a great deal of sports programming here at dot from our fall winter and spring sports and you know usually the ones that are missing here people will ask can we start a middle school hockey team or when we start a middle school
060lacrosse team or a middle school football team to truth be told there wouldn't be anybody to play because there's not other middle schools kind of offering those sports the other thing is we have incredible youth programs in those areas and uh kids are playing plenty of lacrosse and plenty of football in those sports to wear it really would not be great for a kid's health to be playing on a middle school lacrosse team and playing in the town wide lacrosse program which we know has so much success so those are our sports offerings it's so small it's very difficult to see and i'm not going to read your every club that we offer it is on our school website as well the thing that we try to impress upon kids is to get involved i
061think that's probably the most important message from this slide is we know a kid that is involved that feels connected to their school is also academically going to do better so we want kids to find something to push your kid to stay involved and get connected to the school it could be the culinary club it could be we'll make a plug for our our theater group and our play matilda that's going to be coming in in a few weeks it's always very popular in town but making sure kids feel connected and get involved and it also it helps them to get around like-minded students and to connect socially so if if your son or daughter are coming home and they are not feeling connected i think this would be the first page that i would
062go to and try to identify an interest for your child and let a school counselor let one of us know and we'll connect them with the advisor the adult advisor of that club and try to help make that connection for your child then i know what everyone's thinking these two guys have got to be to help the advisors for the health and fitness club but there really is a wide variety of clubs if we don't have something up here if there's something that another student is interested in right now i have two kids that are one of those fingerboard skateboards yeah they want to have a bigger board skateboard skateboard club i don't know what's going to happen in that club but they found themselves they found themselves an adult advisor they're going to make
063some half pipes and they're going to be fingerboarding we'll do it so some of the student ideas for clubs are fantastic but then it's amazing you put out an email to staff we're going to we have kids interested in a fingerboarding club and people run and volunteer the kids are interested in it and it's something safe and keeping them involved after school our staff is always willing to support it mr woods you created a pretty popular i did i uh we created the rc club and drone club yeah so fantastic idea it sounded really good i was thinking about it but then you start seeing these drums crashing so just wanted to show you really quick our web page all of our resources our tabs across the top and along the side um we're going
064to be putting up a couple more um additions to this that deals with tonight uh transition process and those types of things so with that all said john i would like to open it up to some questions from the crowd all right i got that yes so you said so we will offset it with the team to say that it's uh enormously larger it wouldn't be true yeah no but it's funny because this class we're starting to see that arrow going up a little bit it's not until yeah we started so when that class starts coming through we start seeing that you know 13 is not my threshold to start adding teachers to start making the teams bigger so we can kind of go with our uh six person team and we can still get
065it so we're probably roughly just over 300 uh probably about three to forty i believe is the current uh sixth grade number so any answer to your question on class sizes i would say math is the one that we obviously improved by but if you're taking all of them and averaging it right now they're probably sitting between 22s and 25s and if we shift that half team that's in the eighth grade right now up it's going to dramatically drop it in probably closer to the 20s and low 20s yes is the student along with an adult for the entire year yes yep so all of our ua teachers all of our core teachers um we have our pps staff all our school counselors and those types of things we have every adult possible um so
066that we can make those class sizes smaller we share staff with the high school a lot of uh we have four or five world language teachers um that are shared with the high school they teach at the high school in the morning they come here in the afternoon um that was a group of teachers that was like we have to schedule this in the afternoon so we have it on monday afternoon so that we can get those cool kids the class size is really low and we we still keep that by team as well so we'll take the let's say it's the three world language teachers and we'll add them to the team and so when you're in the win class you're in with kids on your team those teachers have a better idea of
067what's going on on team and to be able to help guide kids yes can they study two world languages or just don't have that capacity at the middle school um we had looked into that pre-coping um it takes away from it depends upon what the interest is we can tell you that if you are selecting music for your child that runs the schedule a lot when it comes to unified arts so if they are taking music because they have an ensemble section and then they have their individual lesson sections so it does kind of take up a couple of different sections for the students um but we do have a schedule that makes it work out so that students can still explore uh our career and technical education courses as well but they could start
068german first time here so first time the other thing with if we did offer two world languages when they get to eighth grade it's daily and in their schedule they only have three blocks where they could take the unified arts offerings and so would it be daily that would take two of them state mandated pe and health would take the other one so they would never be able to take any kind of music classes any kind of tech classes or things of that nature and whatever language they choose are they supposed to do that for the whole time we carry for the two years you can take two years of german and say you know what i don't like this i want to try french or vice versa um and kids can make that change
069up to high school yeah thank you it's all kind of a there we go yes um [Music] it's an online the really when you click on um the link for it it's going to walk you through what you need to do it's a google form so i will say scott conway who who develops the form for us really does a nice job walking people through so it's going to be done at home the kids aren't going to do it at school yeah we can take a look at that i'm also that's one of the things we typically tonight would also have some of those offerings and the teachers here we're just trying to limit some of the exposure so we're going to put that on our uh on a website for people coming down here
070to our you know robotics and engineering and those types of things don't hold me to that because transportation is the driver for when we start in the middle because we have high school buses that come and then we have elementary buses that come so right now we're at like 807 we're running it right now so but i'm trying to go back to that previous schedule all right yes how does health work is that every semester both like or is it every other day yeah so it kind of it varies for for the two grade levels for seventh grade health is offered for a half a year every other day and once uh kids are in eighth grade it's once every four days for the entire year but it's required both years what criteria is used
071to split up the class of 300 students is it a brand new lottery or it's not even really random we do have constraints that go in so we do have uh from teaching to administration at the sixth grade level we have kids who might have certain classes that they have to take according to their iep um so there's different special ed classes so we load everything into constraints that need to be loaded so kids have any special requests for anything and that type of stuff then the schedule the scheduler pretty much randomizes from there it will make sure that we have requests in so that we kind of block off those kids first and then we fill the kids based upon that you have match levels in there you have music options in there you
072have a lot of things so it tries to balance it out as best we can and then you know taking a look over the summertime we'll go through those schedules individually and then making sure that kids have that balance okay yes yep it's going to be randomized there as well it is going to ask what your highest preferences are it's going to do that for world language as well what is your first choice second choice third choice um and then also with the uh career in tech yet now career and tech ed you might have engineering as your first choice but you don't get that until the third marking period you're still gonna get engineering you may not just get it day one school so i think in a couple of things just to clarify
073on the unified arts selection process is we are trying to get kids their top choices right there are also times where a kid may not have chose something but there's an opportunity in their schedule to fit it and they will get that offering in their schedule as well so we try to fill out their schedules if they're not in bed if they're not you know in orchestra something like that then we will fill out their schedule and give them another ui but we try to honor those choices that they have and like mike said we try to honor the world language one as well but there's obviously so many seats but again it's randomized right anyone where i was uh yeah so how many ui once they choose that it's just for seventh grade because
074we'll be going through the same exact process for eighth grade as well so those choices is is more or less preferences but what we do is just to fill the sections but you can we offer engineering which is only a one-quarter class so that same class is offered four times in a year so you may not get it in the first marking period but you'll get it maybe in the second third or fourth part okay so for the those career and technical education classes most of the kids get all the offerings of that okay have you seen the link i've never seen how many they have them puts all of them oh yeah over here yes um so if you're part of the club or uh um it varies but anywhere from you know some
075of them might be a little bit quicker than others so anywhere from like 3 45 to like 4 30. um i know the play stays really late um that's more of a little bit of a later one uh board game club gets a little pretty quickly so [Music] and there's no penalty if we don't do it tomorrow but is there a cut off there is okay and it's going to be on that google form i wonder if it gave you guys two weeks or was it just uh just the one week yesterday [Music] interested or band interested or orchestra interested once you select that the form will actually go to three different versions based upon that so it will tell you what you can so then so then the door has a pendant there is
076in the cycle of lessons that we do every other day lessons and we will compile that with our uh tech ed courses as well okay will they have every single tech ed course not every single one so if you live in a little bit yeah but you will have at least one section where you can fit for those classes so i think how it works out in the scenario you're proposing it would be for the kids i think it works up to four electives throughout the year they're banned or in seven well that's in eighth grade in seventh grade they'll get a few more they'll probably get like five or six offers but once they get to eighth grade if they continue with the band it comes it comes out to four that's how and
077then we offset two world language is only every other day so on those off days as well there's an opportunity potentially for some uh career tech ed choices as well yes absolutely they can take art those types of things as well again it's going to depend upon you know what their preferences are so the if i took a look at when the randomizer does it and you don't have art as like a top choice it'll probably put you in something else other than art if you are taking a paper class does that answer your question when you see the form you get so what i would say though is like if you didn't select r but there's an opening in your schedule at some point in the year we want well-rounded students and we're not
078penalizing kids for not being picasso so we'll we'll put them in an art class because there's an opportunity for them to to kind of engage with that course yes are kids with 504s pre-placed no no preference given all other than the fact that their accommodations have to be met about the language and did you say it might be that they not everyone gets the language that's their first preference or i can tell you i would say 99 of our kids are taking a language i can say that the kids who don't take a language um are typically students with ieps if it's in their iep not to take a language yeah but they should get get what that selected as your first choice oh if you don't get what you select for the first choice
079yeah that's that's a possibility i would say we're pretty good at uh placing kids in their first choice um i will i mean i'll be upfront and tell you spanish is the most popular with a french latin kind of close neck and neck second place german has given some great numbers as well but i can tell you like when you have spanish i have three spanish teachers but i only have one german teacher okay so that section for german is you know so there's four sections she has four sections in seventh grade um to fill because it's every other day um and then she has the same amount of sections going to eighth grade whereas i have multiple spanish teachers multiple more seats for kids to take um spanish if something like that if you're
080in that scenario typically what we say we can never guarantee a schedule change right so yeah you want it sounds like german i don't want to make the assumption but it sounds like if all of a sudden your child got spanish and not german then we say reach out to us because what we'll do is we'll house that and we may have someone else in the room where his child got german and they they wanted spanish somehow that's the way it went and we'll just make the swap one for one and make a win-win okay sounds good thank you we'll start in front of our way to the background when they get their schedule you'll see uh q1 2 2 2 3 q4 for those classes um schedules are typically around august 15th um yes
081there are scheduling uh scheduling parties that kids have um we have you know parents that will say you know if there was one story the classic story that girl was playing soccer uh yelling to her mother on the side like pull up my schedule what team am i on you know it's the big team reveal um so uh it's around on or about august 15th is when we uh we'll have the schedules so if the student is not interested in music and they have more time to be able to choose between two languages than all languages or we are tied with so even though your child may not be interested in art or music they still might have an art class the music one if you're not interested in music there's other pathways in that
082but they still might have an art class because that's that class may get tossed in the mix for your child to have something we cannot use this time you said that you may have a card to do it and use it for another language or timeline no it's just it's just the one line the one world language okay and then we're good um and then it's going to have what the options are for uh courses and art that we include in that as well okay yes man yeah we have parent teacher conferences um we typically are about the end of september beginning of october we have three sessions so we have a half day session for people to come in the afternoon and then two nightly sessions yeah so they meet so they'll do it
083as a team with four or five teachers in the room so now understanding that there's a hundred kids and so not not enough time slots within the night that we have them so if you requested a parent conference if you didn't get it we pride ourselves on then we will have a conference with you and scheduling during the school day at on another date so if you want a parent conference for your child you will certainly have a prepared conference for each other yes i had heard that i thought that you have a study hall or i walk as one period right is that just like yeah so iblock is um so we don't use the word study hall it's like the taboo in education so we just call it eyeblock it's a little bit
084more of a controlled study uh controlled study hall in which we encourage our teachers to make sure like it's it's typically a student that they have on their team so similar to wind if they have you know in the afternoons our eye block sections are a little bit smaller so you might have seven or eight kids uh we do some independent reading time during that time kids can go visit another teacher during that time teachers can also collaborate with students taking a look at same thing they do and win missing work let me take with your power school how are things going and those types of things so it's a little bit more controlled do i have to talk to teachers about you know this is not a frat party absolutely um but you know
085for the most part um it is a controlled time for academics for kids yep it'll be built into their schedule sometimes when you start taking a look at all the options that you have sections might be full so eye block is kind of that filler where other forces could not be filled for that child so not every kid not every student has an eye block either but if you're if your child is really struggling and we're thinking that that might be an intervention to have one of those for your job then we may take a look at the ua offers that they're having at that point in time it may look to add an intervention block instead of the the school counselor myself and the team of teachers and obviously as parents we'll have that
086conversation and yes and thanks for asking the question because usually the statement i heard that so generally that would be worked out with um i would talk to the elementary teacher and they would work that out with the our director of our band as well and kind of have a conversation around the student um to say that it's not been done before it would be a lie there there are multiple times where we have done that for students there will be some questions about you know them coming in our kids aren't coming in playing instruments at the ground level so it would be what's their experience with the instrument they're changing to kind of seeing that crossover and if the child who doesn't want to play the instrument anymore you're sick of the drums other
087questions back there regarding that because in the first half on youtube sure so regarding the registration and you know choosing the languages of all these things i think you're going to get the link at midnight tonight so tomorrow the link opens all right i'll double check with that and here's the thing i usually am emailing you guys directly as sixth grade parents just with parent square i don't have that access so i'm gonna start emailing like your elementary principal sent out my message i'm gonna send out another message probably tomorrow the next day just to make sure that the link has gone out okay any other questions no sorry one more time you can put them on the same team so if you you know you have some choices with other questions about twins can
088you some people want them separated on two different teams some of them want them on the same team that's one of the things that we talked about when i said before constraints so you just have to email you can email me and just let me know um and then what we'll do is we'll put that in the constraints to make sure whatever your wishes okay on the google form well i have descriptions there yes it really prompts you about the descriptions that will instruct you what you have to do and again hopefully within the next day or so i'll have something up on our website it's our pretty much our uh uh handbook that'll have descriptions of all the classes all right i think the number one thing they all learned tonight we are so
089much better right so again if there's anything else i'm going to send out a couple of emails that's going to have the math department coordinators email address if you have any more specific questions about math and math pathways and those types of things uh if there's anything else please feel free to email me or if there's anything that we can do to help support you guys through this transition process so thank you very much for your time everyone tonight um [Laughter] okay [Applause]