001ready to order when we um and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice um so our first order of business is public comment and we do have a letter um from mr jeff bester and it does pertain to an item later on in the agenda having to do with um its item informational item at point a um what students are reading at the elementary level and what skills are they learning and so earlier today mr bester wrote they said in light of tonight's agenda discussion of what elementary students are reading it is also important to identify how much time students are reading on electronic devices digital literacy versus reading on hard copy printed books research is revealing that reading digital materials is very different from reading
002hard copy text the differences are found in attention uninterrupted concentration analytical understanding and critical thinking these points and many others have been made by dr marianne wolf a neuroscientist and educator in her book reader come home and by dr mary i'm sorry naomi veron um a linguist professor and educator in either of her books how we read now and words on screen i recommend them highly to anyone concerned about the state of reading and our schools and he followed up with two quotes from dr wolf's book it takes years for deep reading processes to be formed and as a society we need to be sure that we are vigilant about their development and our young from a very early age it's from page 38 and then what concerns me as a scientist is whether expert
003readers like us after multiple hours and years of daily screen reading are subtly changing the allocation of our attention to key processes when reading longer more demanding texts will the quality of attention and reading the basis of the quality of our thought change inexorably as our cultural as our culture transitions away from a prince-based culture toward a digital one what are the cognitive threats to end the promises of such a transition um so um that ends his letter and i'm sure that um some of these points will be uh raised when we get into that live that subject and our agenda so um thank you mr bester um yeah we do have okay so i'll summarize this a letter was from a parent ashley palumbo she currently has two pre-k students at darcy and was
004concerned about hearing that perhaps the elementary schools do not have the same curriculum and was reaching out to learn more about that so we um responded to her and have given her a couple different avenues that we can help her find out more about a k-12 curriculum once her kids get into kindergarten first grade we had another parent reach out who wishes to remain anonymous who had a similar comment you just elaborate a little bit on that in terms of the differences without going into life okay all right um next item on the agenda is uh review the minutes of october 18 2021 hope they were in your pocket and um hopefully we all had a chance to review them um do we have any changes the corrections to the minutes as we read them
005no okay um do i have a motion to approve the minutes of the october 18th 2021 meeting do you have a second i'll start okay they look good so all in favor aye okay um mr daniel stains all right moving on to um item number three new business uh we're going to hear a presentation tonight on mental health first date all right thank you miss ham and good evening everybody well that's the problem so uh anyway good evening a little something just wanna make sure everybody's awake here but um first of all i i want to thank the number of guests we have joining us this evening to talk about what's really an important issue and it's mental health of our students and i want to begin by just highlighting that you know again six
006years ago we identified social emotional development as a marquee goal of our school system one of two the other being complex thinking and i just want to underscore the fact that since we've tried to have a balanced focus on social emotional development and complex thinking our scores have just dramatically improved over time i can't say that there's direct causation other than to know that going back is is foundational a skill or foundational theory is maslow's hierarchy of needs is pretty well pretty broadly accepted that our students can't find success that we as humans can't really thrive until we have basic human needs met things like esteem and belonging basic human needs and health is taken for granted in that equation that you know you'll have your physical health but your mental health is just as
007important and so i want to just quickly revisit our social emotional learning goal that if the cheshire public schools consciously focus on the social emotional development of our students then school practices will demonstrate a clear focus on social emotional growth and students will demonstrate self-awareness self-management skills cultural awareness relationship skills and responsible decision making the program that we're going to talk about this evening really does speak to social emotional growth heavy reliance on self-awareness and self-management relationship skills and responsible decision-making and that's teen mental health first aid i mentioned that we have a few guests with us this evening and i'm excited to welcome our director of the cheshire social services mrs michelle picarillo who can tell you a little bit about what mental health first aid is about youth and team and why it's
008important michelle good evening and thanks for having me i'm sorry that i can't be there in person this evening this feels a little bit uncomfortable to me so um so i first just want to share that mental health has been a priority not just for our public school system but across our community and across the lifespan for several years now um and we have been i think really successful in implementing um training programs throughout the community at different agencies local businesses and whatnot to help educate lay people on identifying what a mental mental health crisis is and how to respond and what resources are available to respond so mental health first aid is one of those trainings the other training i'm just going to speak briefly about is qpr which is question persuade refer and
009that is an evidence-based suicide prevention training that has been widely delivered throughout our community and throughout our school staff um community as well um and so that that lays a wonderful framework and then the mental health for staying trainings are designed to educate lay people who are not trained clinically or necessarily support people to identify what a mental health crisis is and to be able to respond to it in the moment and get the person the help that they need and so youth mental health first aid trains lay people to identify that in a young person and then teen mental health first aid actually helps young people identify their own mental health needs identify mental health needs in their peers but also helps them to identify when they see somebody who needs help when it's
010beyond their capability to help them right so we have a lot of um situations where there's a peer-to-peer support relationship where young people find themselves trying to help somebody who is in a mental health crisis and they're not really equipped to do so so this teen mental health first aid program also helps them identify what their limits are and how to identify a trusted adult that they can go to to get support for their peer or their friend as well as to again help manage their own mental health needs there is no question that we are in the midst of a mental health crisis at this point all that you need to do is really try to find a provider um particularly in our area and i think across the state there there's there's no
011availability anywhere and it's really become um an urgent need to to provide more mental health support in particular for young people at this difficult time thank you very much michelle and you know to just kind of elaborate on what people are sharing the team mental health first aid or mental health first aid program in general focuses on five steps and of course i think by law now we have to have an acronym and there's this a-l-g-e-e which includes assessing risk respect respectful listening to and supporting the individual in prices identifying appropriate professional help and other supports so uh basically we in this program the participants learn how to identify as michelle crisis and get them to support that they need it's not any sort of treatment anything like that it's the the individuals that are
012trained are not responsible or expected to or even encourage to be that the person that solves this issue it's how to get them to the support that they need which is really critical in exploring this it was interesting to look at the peer-reviewed case studies that talk about students part of people who participate grow their knowledge of science symptoms and risk factors of mental illness and addiction can identify multiple types of professional and self-help resources for individuals increase their confidence in the likelihood of helping an individual in distress which is really powerful as michelle said we have you know plenty of circumstances mind you both kids and adults where you know somebody's in crisis but don't really know what to do and you kind of therefore paralyzed this helps educate those folks as well as
013the fact that those who participate in this show in increased mental wellness themselves so all really positive components that and of its own right i think is really important and a critical consideration in supporting our students with this this skill there's another side of it that i hate to even consider but it is a reality and we hear about it more and more every day and for that i want to introduce cheshire high school parent and our consultant for security mr tom debut give you a little bit of background on his background and then how this dovetails with school security thank you jeff good evening everybody i i know many of you but my name is tom vivia i uh i retired from the fbi's behavioral analysis unit in 2017. after that i started a
014security crisis management consulting company here in town and my the primary focus of my business is to build violence intervention and mitigation programs for schools and corporations um how i got involved with jeff was actually after the um the briefing that the school did post parkland um the parkland shooting to talk about safety and security and one of the things that when i when i work with organizations oftentimes the primary focus on dealing with an active outward violence and active shooter is to harden physical security features and the reality is they've 100 of the times in a school setting those speeches get bypassed and really when we talk about we we use the expression left of bang when you look at a timeline of events and the bang is the initiation of a violent act
015what we're trying to do with the programs that we're building is to get left of bang and get getting left in that timeline getting out in front of it i view an active shooter event the attack doesn't start with the first trigger pull it starts weeks before it's a process that an individual goes through anybody that engages in an act of violence whether it's directed inward or outward is engaging in the process of problem solving they're dealing with stressors they're coming to the conclusion that there's a cause for those stressors sometimes they attribute the cause to be either another individual a group of individuals or an organization and sometimes they place the cause of their stress on themselves and then we see kind of the blending of the two and so as we go through
016this what we're the truly holistic approach to safety and security of any organization shouldn't just be addressing the possibility of an act of outward violence it should address the health and wellness of the organization and honestly that's where as i built my programs for other organizations they tend to fit nicely into the hr program because it really is it's about addressing the wellness of the individual and preserving that individual and putting them on the right path and we do have a process currently for cheshire public schools that we use for identified concerning behaviors how to assess those behaviors how to determine what threat level they are and then have a mitigation and management plan which oftentimes simply includes coaching approaching the individual for you not using maladaptive coping mechanisms and where where the mental health
017first date fits in it really is the admit the missing piece that we've identified when it comes to this holistic approach we we have students that will exhibit concerning behaviors and right now we have students and faculty conditioned to report those behaviors if we're concerned that they're going to become outwardly violent meaning if it's going to harm us we'll report it but we also know human nature is currently we haven't educated the faculty staff and students as to how to identify somebody that might be at a risk of self-harm and they no longer pose a threat to us so we oftentimes it doesn't get reported and i think there's there's mul if that's multi-factorial much of it could be just not knowing what to do about it and so when we don't know what to
018do about it we do not we choose to do nothing and so this piece basically gives us another set of skills and the way the program will roll out ultimately within three years of the program roll out we would have three quarters of the high school trained in team mental health first aid youth helping youth and giving them the skills the tools that they need and the confidence like it lays out there the confidence to take action because now they've been trained to be able to take that action and like we said it's not to train them to be clinicians it's not the day for them to provide the treatment it's to redirect them get to get to a trusted adult and get them the help that they need because ultimately it comes down to
019the same thing where someone's dealing with stressors that we all are but we start to go through the process of what's what's the solution to these this stress and unfortunately some people get to the conclusion that it's either self-harm or or directing that violence towards somebody else and i think it may it'll make the safety and security of the school more robust um and ultimately it'll be even even more importantly it'll uh put kids on the right path and it'll it's going to preserve their mental health and mental well-being and that's ultimately the goal that's treating that environment you know obviously is tom emphasized the left of bang component here where we're in trying to provide a robust education response skill set around mental health and prevention i mean obviously as i've shared with the
020board before and you've heard numerous presentations on all the things that we've done to harden physical physical security you know in terms of man traps and cameras and things like that as well as alice response and things like that but you know obviously for quality of life and prevention is where we prefer to focus our energy so to provide a little bit of history about cheshire high school youth mental health firstly and a potential framework i'll ask dr gab to elaborate on that good evening everyone uh in 2018 january we had some training done with 14 staff in youth mental health first day which is a kind of a foreground for doing the teen mental health first aid where adults would be trained to then train students and so the teen mental health first day
021that we've been talking about today requires that 10 of the staff is trained we have about 211 staff members of high school so we need 21 to 22 to be trained to move forward and the training that would happen with students is delivering three 90-minute sessions to the entire sophomore class and so we would look at a framework where we would identify teachers school counselors etc who would be interest certainly pe teachers as well who deliver our health curriculum that those are some initial thoughts in that training so that they could then train all of our 10th graders and then annually that is the vision for the program that that would be done annually thank you so you know we right now we're still exploring this but felt you know there's superficially what we've explored
022so far tremendous value to ensuring that our students have these skills and in the same way we have all of our students educated in cpr this can equally save a life and provide tremendous support to our students some of the questions that we have as we move forward you know there's there's certainly a time commitment that's required to engage in this process uh four hours of training for youth mental health first aid and those that would actually teach students there's a three day training for that process so it's pretty time intensive to be able to make sure that our people have this sort of training financially there's a significant cost when you get to the number of people that we're looking to engage however you know i've recently had conversations with that area superintendents all
023who have expressed interest in participating and so in that case you know that the phrase a lot of the cost when we can have multiple districts participating and so we would definitely explore that route obviously grant funding is something we're looking at michelle has access to grants for that tom and i have discussed different federal grants for that and so i don't sit here today telling you this is something that we you know really need to move forward with i think it's something that has tremendous merit i think it you know at this point i would strongly advise we explore it further and i'd probably just share back with the board but i think we're far enough along that i wanted to make you aware that this is what we're we're doing and we'll have
024further conversations around this another thing that you know we're consider of in this process and michelle talked about qpr training and how that was more broadly available publicly i would really want to make mental health first aid training more broadly available publicly as well for people to take advantage of that families um in the broader community and probably partnering with sean for people like librarians and park and rec who interface with our youth to have these skills perhaps athletic organizations people outside the school system who interface with the youth should have these skills as well so that's kind of where we are at the moment and it's this is a a big topic to take in and a lot of you know folks that are working on us i don't want to leave rob anne
025out of the picture because she's been an important part of meeting with tom and myself and trying to examine this program and look at the benefits i know i don't want to speak for her but i know she sees tremendous value in it as well so i just want to open the floor to you if you have any questions or thoughts that you just wanted to share at first blush i have an easy here's question recommendation come for 10th graders and what's the right yeah so teen mental health first aid the program is designed for kids in 10 11 and 12 and as i think both tom and mary talked about we would like to initiate the program with 10th graders and do that perpetually so that they have that skill for the extended period
026of their high school experience okay can i follow on that um because i i have the same as um only the same question and um you do see in these violent episodes that oftentimes middle schoolers are involved and is there a middle school component to this is it does it merit taking a look at if you're going to put together a grant proposal or put together a program one that encompasses um say eighth graders uh because it's a rough time i mean that's probably the roughest time for students and yeah and it's a great question and something that we've considered the national council for mental health is the group that puts this all together the training for teens is relatively new two years old i've spoken like today i was on the phone with ashland
027um wisconsin who was talking about how tremendous it was for that kid they don't yet have a middle school module but they are working on that and so you know we'll certainly keep our our ear close to the ground for any sort of changes that exist there but right now the lowest they go down is 10th grade so 10th graders summer educators on the staff i believe right what about opening it up to uh to parents absolutely i mean i don't know rolling out all one shot's hard to do but yeah uh because oftentimes i think most parents probably don't know you know i had a look at what algae was being honest with you they did find you know recess learn courage etc but it also be good for parents too as adults also
028have you know things going on and may not know what to look for in their kids or ask questions so i agree with fade and if we're going to do the grant maybe a little more compassion so that when the potatoes are available yeah the other question is because you and i and mrs rosenberg is here too we were at conference last weekend mental health is probably the number one topic that came up and will be uh lobby for from kate on behalf of the legislature but uh his name from state parliament but he had talked about the fact there's a shortage of qualified mental health professionals to begin with number one number two there's not enough funding or any funding really coming down from state federal brands to offset something so how's this training
029being rolled out is there is it are these folks uh i assume they're qualified are they available because it seems there's versus shortage sure and i think you just hit on a really critical component tony and michelle talked about the lack of mental health providers i think in circumstances like we're experiencing right now it's really important to have all hands on deck and all people as educated as possible about signs and how to refer somebody who needs support um because right now we don't have access to as much therapeutic support as we would typically have if all of us are a little bit better educated about mental health needs including parents and people in the community as well to your point we're better at spotting who needs support and making sure that they get the
030intervention that's absolutely necessary for them so you know during this period shortage to have more eyes educated eyes aware of what's going on and be able to identify people who need support could be a critical you know support for that individual in our community all together but just in the in the different programming they have there's mental health first aid which is an adult program for other adults and more of a generic adult program then there's youth mental health first aid which is for adults to identify and support youth with mental health issues then there's teen mental health first aid which is for kids to educate them about signs and how to support you know find the right supports for your peers so that's kind of the different programming they have and we're hopeful that
031at some point that'll include uh down to the younger youth to seventh and eighth grade just not there yet yeah jeff i hope you don't mind me jumping in but you just i just want to say that um the mental health first aid program the one that is is focused on adults we in our community we've offered probably two of those trainings per year for community members parents and whatnot the tricky part about that training is you can only train 30 people at a time and max 30 people at a time and of course in the middle of pandemic it's all it's all been virtual which means that less people are really interested in participating but my hope would be that moving forward in partnership with the schools particularly particularly if we do launch a
032teen mental health first aid program um is that we can coordinate through the schools to get to parents to be able to offer more more of those trainings you know targeting 30 people at a time maybe making them school-based in some way or or some form so that we can we can get more people in our community trained um just to give you an example of of what work has worked really well um all town employees i think four years ago all town employees were trained in mental health first aid so every um every employee on the town side um participated in a summer i apologize um something terrible must be happening outside um we did it in a series of two three day training so split the town staff in half and everyone was
033trained and it was incredibly impactful and even people who were resistant to participating in the first place because there were people who didn't see this as a valuable professional development opportunity um following the training people were so incredibly moved and really found ways to apply the training both personally and professionally um so it was incredibly worthwhile and i see a lot of value to saturating our community with the with the adult mental health first aid as well thanks a lot michelle and to you know kind of build on that a little bit we offer these programs and recognize that when we brought michelle in to say we really want to talk about moving forward with team mental health first aid she was so excited and supported supportive of us to try and you know make
034this possible recognizing the benefits it provides today we had challenge day at cheshire high school and i was at the hockey game a little while ago and ran into a freshman and asked hey how are you doing you know how are things and he told me about challenge day today and he said i said what's your takeaway from challenge day what what did you and he stopped for a second and he said you know you don't always know what some people are carrying well you know some of the bad and it's pretty deep for a 15 year old boy who you know i've had a lot of other conversations with never like that you know never never conversation like that so you know the work that we do there is really important when we talk
035about social emotional support and i think this work can be deeply meaningful for our kids not just through cheshire high school but is a life skill of growth that they can take with them the same way we would consider cpr or the heimlich maneuver or other basic you know life skills and so we're excited to be here tonight to share this with you and we look forward to the opportunity to come back and hopefully have a plan to move forward can i ask a couple practical questions absolutely um what just what is what does the program cost it was like 45 grand to host a training for 20 uh it's a three-day training for the folks to be team mental health first aid educators which you know that's a big chunk of change obviously the
036training for the ten percent that's much much more reasonable it's like 150 175 that's something that we could easily do for fun people but the training to be a teen mental health health first aid educator that's where it's much more expensive but you know again between grant money between people um other communities who want to participate i think we're in a pretty good place though and so do you let's let's assume this gets up and running do you see this is taking place during the school year or is it going to be a summer training program do you think um i think logistically faith it's a fair question but there are just too many questions that are unanswered right now to be able to give you a thoughtful response i mean optimally we'd love to
037get people trained over the summer maybe potentially run this with sophomores in the middle of next year we're lucky but i really want um the community to experience it first uh and our obviously our folks need to be trained first so there's a timeline there for that and do you have you said you need 21 people roughly um you have any has anyone even expressed an interest and can you gauge where we are how quickly we'll fill those 21 positions uh yeah i could say instantly we will fill them yeah we had uh 20 i mean it's four years ago now that we ran this initially and had a bunch of people volunteer across the district that we're very interested in so i have no worries that we'll have that many staff that say they
038want to participate in this even even teachers yeah teachers i mean and i don't want to um limit this exclusively to teachers i mean you hear that that the town every employee i mean public works it's not just like law enforcement you might consider okay that makes sense everybody um for custodial staff we do we want to make it available to you know more than just certified staff so you can i have this conversation about my interaction with students one-on-one you know when you have a student breakdown and you know i feel very inadequately prepared to deal with those i mean we do have at quinnipiac university we do have um there's a care but as individuals you know we have much to learn all of us and you're an educated professional who is familiar
039with those resources if you're a 17 year old kid whose friend's breaking down that's a very hopeless place and a helpless place and so making sure that kids know those signs that this is more than a bad day how do i get this person help with what steps could you take to do this not that you're again you're not responsible as i said to carol today um just because you know cpr doesn't mean you follow me up the stairs you know but uh we're not responsible for this but you have the tools so that you don't feel maybe so helpless when your friend is sharing things that you know are of concern i think it's incredibly important and um i had a question about other communities are are we sort of out in front of
040this as much as and who are the other communities are there is there a good number i i only spoke to four who aren't doing this and would very much like to be a part of it so i mean in talking to michelle she said statewide there might be one district that's you know close to this right yeah um i don't i don't know uh specifically of a a district that's doing um teen mental health first aid but in sonia derby has started a screening program it's the only thing that i know of the color right now is um because teen mental health first aid is still relatively new but they screen all of their freshman students in adolescent expert to assess for risk for risk of substance abuse or mental health issues um every
041single incoming freshman um which i thought was phenomenal so um so that's sansonia derby which is is i think the thing that i found that sort of closest to something like this which would be kind of a blanket training for young people um but i i do also want to say that um if if you're aware of this that the qpr training was delivered to every single i believe every single school staff member um teacher lunch personnel you know i mean everybody was trained in qpr every single person and um and we had myself and several others were certified as trained facilitators and were able to go into the schools and train people so and and it was incredible the impact that that has had i think and so this type of blanket approach can
042be so incredibly impactful at reaching so many people um and i i don't think we should lose sight of the empowerment piece here where we're literally going to be giving young people the the sense that they can help their peers that they can serve their community that they can identify somebody who might need help and assistance um and and overall help people to be kinder and compassionate and more empathetic to each other which are you know qualities that we all want to see more of right especially um in across the board i think at this point so um i i think this is so incredibly important if that's not clear from how exciting i get when i talk about it but um and certainly the human services department is here to support this um you
043know i have access to some grant funds and i'm even researching some additional grant opportunities and my staff is here to support this as well so whatever we can do um we're here so thanks michelle quick question so michelle about this one obviously i i would say uh the mental health uh issue started before copenhagen we have something right exactly a lot of this a lot of things happening in and around us especially youth you and me here this evening um number one if you weren't trying to be proactive right and assessing needs but two i imagine we're also concerned about just the general state of mind of our adolescents and our in our town has there been an uptick in suicide preventions outreach from students is there something that's keeping you both up at
044night um about the state of mental health price of the cheshire or is it too early to try to measure if we're uh in the red zone being too many cases or how yeah i wouldn't call this a cheshire issue i mean it's definitely a global issue right now and the numbers that we track with respect to ideation or self-harm those numbers are on par with previous years generally speaking it's not that i don't know that this is um this isn't necessarily designed to exclusively address that um but i think it would help it and the the only number we want to see there this isn't like you know math or something where you're reading where you you understand that maybe not every student's gonna hit the top of the scale but we zero suicidal
045ideation and uh and self-harm is what we're shooting for absolutely you know again we're shooting for that in math and um in english but the stakes are a heck of a lot higher here and so so uh the uh they uh they gave a stat of you know one in two students one or two students uh four and a half percent i think in 2020 had some type of mental disorder so i guess as we probably don't know there might be some children out there struggling so i expect reports like this will reach out to those kids sooner or later so you might see more help but we're actually helping them get identified sooner uh empowering them to get help so uh i think this is very positive uh i i you know i'm not
046sure what a school district is doing because it seems like a lot of school districts uh boards are not blindsided by the mental health crisis but when i was trying to figure out how to staff up and where to start so cares to see how this this moves forward and gets reports back on for sure all right great jeff if i could just say one one more thing i think the early intervention piece is so important as well because we do want to get to kids before they reach a mental health crisis right and so this this will help that happen so i just wanted to highlight um what you just said thanks michelle i appreciate you asking if you could jump in but i know there's no saying no to you on the topic
047so just go ahead the floor is always yours so thank you for joining us sorry for disrupting your dog and your evening but i appreciate that thank you guys very much [Music] hey thanks you guys um next up with a series of informational items we're going to start um with a question um what are students reading in the elementary level and what skills are they learning [Music] so kevin and anne marie wintenberg and mary is a reading round specialist a really crypto instruction assessment specialist over at highland school and they're both here today to share information about what kids are reading at the elementary level so if you want to elaborate and let you know about what's being taught differently potentially between the schools i think it's a good place to bring that up with
048the kaizen is yeah i think that the letters that we got were from preschool okay from from preschool so i think that they were responding to things they had heard out in the community and were curious about our curriculum and if it's different in different schools um and so i think the things that anne marie and share today will really show that we have one curriculum and one curriculum for for all of our schools um also some things that i think were talked about at our elementary showcase relative to how we instruct for reading how that um how that ties into phonics how that ties into spelling how that ties into grammar so so a little bit tied into you know reading in general but i think this is more specific about the the content
049and the skills so beautiful yeah that helps tony oh just collaborate got it so first of all i appreciate uh emery uh coming tonight we often talk about our ram team and i don't know if recently we've had one of our rooms present here so um tonight we really just want to share uh based on some questions and for your information what are elementary students are actually reading what are they reading together as a whole class what are they reading individually and how that's shaped out and we often talk about the skills that they're learning or the standards that we're working towards so we'll actually walk through a little bit of a sample of what that looks like and give you a chance to look at that so i'm going to turn it over to
050ann marie first and she's going to talk a little bit about what our elementary students are reading and then i'll come in on the back end and talk a little bit more about the skills and statements and for that we've got some handouts so let me get those going in the right direction okay so if you think about what kids are reading in the elementary school it's kind of like three categories preps um the classroom libraries and radio levels so when it comes to the mentor text i'll start with kindergarten the kindergarten reading informational and literature standards all talk about the and support accounting and support these are our youngest resources getting started so they need that prompting and support the teachers are using high quality picture books many of them are caldecott winners or
051at least using notable authors excellent illustrations rich vocabulary and then the teachers use a picture book as a reader as a mentor text so they can model the teacher can model his or her thinking and how they're applying the standards and how they're understanding the story to help our youngest readers in grades one through six when it comes to the mentor text teachers are using the junior grade books as group mentor texts the junior grade books are a collection of the classics would be classic stories classic literature um classic authors these stories are known for winning healthcare medals newberry medals carnegie medals and among other awards the literature represents a wide variety of cultures experiences so that all our students see themselves represented in the literature in the characters or by the authors most importantly
052is complex literature and by complex literature we're talking about rich vocabulary um complex sentence stress a sentence syntax in other words they're not just simple sentences they're going to be longer sentences they have many clauses so with all of that being said the rich vocabulary the complex sentences the teachers are using our junior gradebook to for um to model again the standards to teach the standards using shared inquiry which basically just means having nice rich class discussions this enables all students to think deeply look into the mentor text as they read them and actually they're going to reread the entire piece of literature multiple times so that each time they're going into the into the reading they can go deeper and deeper into it the teachers are modeling and teaching the standards which kevin is
053going to talk about in a minute and the beauty really of the literature in these great books is that um the plot always has something unresolved so it really lends to an engaging discussion within the class i just brought one sample here um this is the second grade series so it groups the stories into in this case friendship responsibility and bravery and in your handout on the first page you will see two samples just just two random samples and again this is not the entire story it's just a page set from the first page is uh grade two miss maggie by cynthia ryland which is in the um book this one the friendship series and on the back page there's a sample of what it would look like from one of our fifth grade senior
054grade folks the invisible child so there were three main categories mentor text being one of them second one is our classroom library so our classroom library has a question libraries and just have a couple comments about the mentor text just going back to one of the investors email about the introducing these physically or digitally these students have physical copies of these books in this case they're often on paper because there's a lot of thinking work that we're asking students to do so they can do a lot of marking up and questioning rather than we have the books but they're almost they're often doing it on paper versions of it so they're doing a lot of the thinking work on that so just kind of comment on that piece since it uh these books is this
055great book style work they can look up more information [Music] have so um great books who defines the great books i mean are they classically red classed as great books or are they great books is like the name of the series but the stories or the literature selected um goes through a vetting process but it is rich literature um award-winning authors so it would be like you know they want to counter continental let me bury my little carnegie medal the american library association metal so it is award-winning works of literature do you have some titles that just uh like well yeah however like afternoon and linen by shirley jackson is in the sixth grade story you know shelly jackson well-known author mm-hmm there is essentially a story per month per grade level of books that
056we're doing so this is um as part of our curriculum when we get to the standards part of one of these stories full stories that students are engaging with on a monthly basis with standards so yeah and we do have those titles where i don't have a complete list of a first-year sixth grade free tonight that's why you're trying to pull up a couple samples just to give you an idea and it's nice variety with these folktales too everybody else in the shoemaker so that's the mentor tech department yeah [Music] so the second category would be the classroom libraries the classroom libraries have fiction and nonfiction books they're going to look different throughout the grade levels in kindergarten about half of the library's decodable books and by decodable books a lot of them are handprints
057or pioneer valleys of the two publishers and i know everybody's used to a chapter book so i actually brought a decodable book with me so the decodable books are level levels a b c d going up and they're very um very controlled for the language in the books so they in the beginning it's you know the ball is red and the next page the ball is great and then the pictures are in color it's going to help the students right but then as they go on in two little changes this is a level e so it's still pretty early but just to kind of give you an idea you know mom looked in the color by the way it's mom's shoes and mom looked in the closet are they in here she said no they
058are not in here so now watch when we turn the page look at the picture is going to help us mom looked under the chair so even if you couldn't decode the word chair you got the picture crew to help you are they down here said mom no they are not down here there's a lot of similarity they are not in here they are not down here so it's very subtle differences so those high frequency words are going to be over and over again to help the students so that's a decodable book and they obviously as the levels go up um the the nuances and the changes are less and less what grade level expected that's okay so this is a level e book so mainly we're going to see it in our kindergarten classes
059where the kids are reading an ebook okay so do age or a true abc so typically would be a kindergartner now do we have preschoolers that can handle this probably do we have first graders still working on an e yeah you do so the book is all the books and all the levels are tailored to exactly what a child needs regardless of their grade but you'll have these books in yes and we have them we have them in a way so in kindergarten i was saying like half of the library's decodable books right and half of the early chapter books now when you move into first grade it's not a third of the library's decodable books right and then two thirds are gonna be the early chapter books on this handout we included like little
060pictures so what does this look like so i know it's hard to see in the picture but you will see the bins so you see over here the bins are labeled c d e f and in the beginning of the year the bins start like a b c you start moving and then as the year progresses and so we don't need those a's and b's anymore and then you notice this one starts with a c d e towards the end of the year now the c's get put in the closet because we don't need those so much we need some more levels um it's also good because we want to keep the library fresh and new and inviting right we don't want to get too staggered as the library progresses from left to right you'll
061see that now we also have the early chapter books things like appleton nate with great young kim jansen arthur series all of those that we kind of all know and grades two through six their books now are more of the not if the second grade or third grade teacher leads to book absolutely we have those in the building we have extras depending on student need but generally two to six they're reading like the chapter books you and i know of chapter books right and i just went around and just took a few pictures you'll see in this handout the next page how it's either grouped a lot of them are grouped by author so again you get a student hooked into an author they really love a book by gary coulson well look guess what
062all the books in this thing are by gary polson to continue with their reading um sometimes they're grouped by just a topic in this picture up in here in the corner you'll see um fiction so somebody gets hooked into a book with fiction animals all of the books in this bin right here are fiction animals or a series the a to z um mystery series you'll see those right here and again um bernstein bears or some of the groups together in a series so that would be the um grades two to six libraries now from k to six we also have in um in the fiction section a lot of high quality picture books also because those are those are good and um and nice to read and of course don't forget that the nonfiction
063books are in there now the teacher these libraries how are they used teachers are using them to help students find those just right books that's a phrase a term we hear all the time um and i gotta tell you that is an art form or form within itself because you know we don't want to find a frustration a book but we're not everybody frustrated with their books but the difference between an independent level book and a instructional level book is there are such nuances that's what i think is the art form so when students are reading at their desks with their books in their hands they're reading at an independent level so it's a book that they're comfortable with that they feel success with that they feel like yes i can do it i'm enjoying
064it i'm loving this book when they come for a conference for a teacher now the teacher is trying to use also their instructional level book which is going to be just a tad level because that's where the teacher is coaching the student to that level so what does that mean though during those reading conferences the teachers are using the books to help the students increase their book levels apply the informational and the literature standards um that can go through what what what has to entail to happen for that could be anything from coding whether the student is learning to decode with short vowels or long vowels or looking for the root words or reflected endings to fluency which could be helping the students speed but not to speak to read really fast but to read
065porosities use the punctuation marks to help you with the comprehension or it could just be well we need to learn some more vocabulary words right so let's look at the word and what's the root especially with our fifth and sixth graders you know a lot of those greek and latin roots all right let's see what the word means what do we know how to apply it how to help us um the third category i started with would be just read alouds right so now when you think about a read aloud this is your listening comprehension so your listening comprehension teacher can now use a little higher of a level book because what you listen to is going to be a higher level than what you can actually have to lead right so a lot of
066these are um newberry metal winners but they're also we also look at books as just character traits and you know look at the character and what can we learn from that character thinking about the first week of school in first grade um wembley worried and it's a little character's name is wembley he's just so so worried at the beginning of school and obviously throughout the book that he's not worried about school he falls in love with school but then the students can apply you know lively's experience to their own another popular book wonder um in the central message in that book you know that right just being kind to everybody right being kind regardless of whatever that person goes through or looks through so those are just examples of read-alouds now in addition to those
067character traits you know most read-alouds are just helping build that level of reading teachers again can use that read aloud time to model the informational and literature standards model their own thinking out loud um and it's also another opportunity just to have that discussion and share the english discussions [Music] so so you've heard standards referenced a few times when you often hear us talk about statements so we thought tonight we'd walk you through a snapshot of some of the skills that students are working on while they're reading so if we take a look at this last page as a small title top sample reading progressions information text and literature i thought to use this as an example to just highlight a few different things that are are part of our standards so first of all
068we heard ann marie uh talk about that there are standards for both information texts and literature so we are trying to make sure our students reading guide includes both a large amount of literature as well as information text um so one uh i'll point you to well so that's that's one idea um and we'll come back to that in a minute a lot of the standards are kind of bundled in three key areas and you can see on the left hand column there's a set of standards of three standards that are really wrapped around key ideas and details the next set of three standards really around craft and structure and the last set of well not glasses but the last set of three standards in this case are really about integration of knowledge and ideas
069so uh there was a quote earlier tonight from from a public comment it takes years for deep reading to develop deep reading skills and we would agree with that wholeheartedly the skills on here are deep reading skills for students i would dare to say that their each standard in and of itself is is complex and it increases on complexity over the year our general progression is we zoom in on one of these standard sets on a monthly basis so we mentioned that generate books are introduced on kind of a monthly basis and we're using that time not to teach exclusively to that standard but instructionally kind of zoom in on that standard so in the beginning of the year on that first row that's actually the first standard if i'm a fourth grade student instructionally
070what we're going to be focusing on in the classroom is really referring to details and examples in the text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text so that's a skill that fourth graders are working on in the beginning of the year just to orient you to this a little bit that same skill you can see what the third grade version of that looks like and what the fifth grade version of that looks like and this is helpful in many friends it gives a progression of skills in this front so if i'm a teacher working with a student individually in the fourth grader i'm working with anne-marie and she has already shown me that she's pretty good at referring to details in the text to to support her thinking
071on those things i now know as a teacher i can push you to the next level of skill and that's not just referring back to the textual details but it's actually pulling quotes from the text because the fifth grade version of this says quote accurately and you can see how that progression of skills um from year over year will help students deepen their um their own reading on the chart or deep readers i'll also use that as a line just to note that in this case um you'll notice under key ideas and details there's an ri and an rl and the number one and the number one is just standard but the ri is reading for information and the rl is reading literature in this case the standard language for both of those is exactly
072the same so that's standard whether you're reading a piece of information text or you're reading literature is really the same skill the next two rows standard two you can see that sometimes there's mirrored skills for information text versus literature so if we're reading a piece of information text one of the ideas is we're going to determine the main idea of a text and explain how it's supported by key details you're going to be focusing on main idea if you're working with a non-fiction a non-textual piece of informational text if we're doing that same kind of skill in literature it's going to be determining the theme of the story and the events and details that help support that theme so there are mirrored standards for both information and literature as you go down in rows you
073can see our reading standard 6 is under the category the broad category of craft construction you can see we're starting to get into comparing and contrasting point of views from different stories and again i'm pointing out that if i'm working with an individual student conferencing on that and i'm a student that's struggling with a skill at a fourth grade level i know where to go previously to help them build that up so if i'm struggling to compare and contrast that point of view from different stories i'm going to go back to thinking about oh my point of view as a student might be different than the authors and using that as kind of a leverage point to move a student up in their thinking i've already had that under under my belt i'm going to
074really focus in on then how the narrator's or speaker's point of view influences how the events are described right so we're seeing that progression of skills over the course of years and by the time we get down to standard nine you're really seeing the integration of information across texts so in fourth grade i'm really and this this one happens to be an information version of the standard i'm integrating information from two texts so that i can write or speak about it knowledgeably and as a fifth grader i'm going to do that but not just from two texts from a wide variety of sources so um we share this with you because we've talked about standards a lot and we thought a small sampling of some of the skills that we're focusing on giving you the
075idea that we're working both on information text and literature at the same time that we're zooming in on kind of some of these skills on a monthly basis one thing i have yet to say is just because we might focus on standard two in october we are constantly coming back to those skills throughout the course of the year with our students emery mentioned reading conferences it is a critical part of our reading instruction that those conferences are a spot where a teacher is really helping pull out where a student is relative to all these skills and giving them coaching opportunities opportunities for students themselves to set goals to keep on growing as readers a few other things that i think are important to point out in this first of all is our belief set we
076believe that kids learn by reading so reading high quality literature in physical books you're seeing pictures of our classroom libraries of physical books they were copies of of our junior grade books often every single day so just like you're going to get better at soccer by playing soccer on the field every day we believe that about reading it is a foundation in fact when a student is not quite growing as a reader in the way that we want the very first thing we ask is are they reading every day for the kind of amount of time that's going to make a difference the next thing we're then asking is great what are they reading because emory talked about this independent level frustration love construction level combination that we're working on so we thought by giving
077a little bit of a snapshot of what we're reading and some of the skills that we're working on a little bit of a picture about uh um so i love i love the library i really do it's just a little snippet i know it's um it goes beyond just teaching about reading and reading comprehension it's sorting it's it's recognizing that books can be put in categories um but i i look at this and and i i appreciate honing in on skills and trying to develop individual skills um i think perhaps one of mr best was concerned i i don't want to speak to him and not probably here and i hope he does respond to me here all of us but um do we take a step back and look at the whole picture because
078i i mean i'm wondering how do you get to these answers on key ideas is it with prompts uh you know um asking the uh let's go to refer to details and examples in the text from explaining what the text says explicitly and withdrawing inference it's like does the teacher ask a targeted question to get the child back into the book so he or she can answer that question and doesn't that in a way um kind of encouraged the child to look for the trees not the whole forest you know i mean to see the beauty of the whole novel and the progression of the character over the course of the whole novel and again i'm just speaking from the literary literature point of view but um you know to see um how events of
079the book have developed that character as well i mean that's that's the beauty of reading a good rich text do you i don't know if that makes sense no it makes perfect sense yeah go for it sure so if the balance both right we do want the student to enjoy the entire piece of literature that whole book right but when you sit in your conference with that student think about that book that's going to be a few conferences over time so how does the teacher or how do you know how to get exposed to this my first thought as you were talking was it's a gradual release so when a standard whichever one it is that the teacher is currently instructing on first it's going to start with the body let me all right let's
080kind of do it together and then we kind of gradually release over time until the student does it independently so that's the teaching of a standard now when you sit in conference with a student we do want them to fall in love with the whole book and and see the development of the whole book and how a character develops or you know the little nuances and um anna green gables and her witty personality and her vocabulary that she brings in and one of the ways that we help students really get into the book and understand it is hey by the way did you notice these details hey what's the theme of this story or hey you know whatever standard they're working on at the time so it's a combination of books and is someone that's
081done the whole class sure so so some of the some of the whole class comes from a whole class dive into a junior grade book so right so some of this is done by that shared inquiry with students paired with teacher modeling of their thinking and then on their independent reading there and through conferencing they're applying that so i'm going to teach the whole class with the mentor text but when i sit with mike in conference and i sit with scott in conference they may be reading a little different levels so that i will coach the same standard like on his level scotland [Music] working with a partnership class but that that individual coaching is at the conferences on the street as well and kind of faith the the progression of these down the page
082because we're often starting with making sure students are understanding the text itself and then working their way to deeper levels context so that's literally how these are you know i plucked a couple of them for examples here but that's the vertical regression stages one through nine on this it's it's taking let's start with kind of what's in the text and then work to that deeper level if i were to give you a broad brushstroke of like how it's laid out um so that's and we're working the standard that we haven't mentioned you have cnn 10 which is working on increasingly complex texts over time so within a grade level you're already working on a range of complex types you've heard ann marie say boy when we're doing reloads including some of these junior great books
083that's that's work that's up here thinking more advice i'm also going to be working individually right where i am in an independent and instructional level so we've got a wide range within a grade level what we're instructing well with for students and then as the great all those move up um yeah the text and and it has to so um the uh but if you look at row two candies and details um as a fourth grader i'm going to determine the main idea of a text as a fifth grader i'm going to determine two aware more main ideas out of a text students have to be reading texts that have multiple main ideas which is only going to come if you're reading more complex texts so we have to have good good books in front
084of students and you can imagine the that's the information inside the literature side of that like really dealing with multiple themes of stories multiple characters developing becoming um emory noted one of the qualities of junior great books that i would also say of other books that we're reading is there's so open-endedness to some of what's going to you know some of the literature that students are reading so really helping them do the deep dive into that so we have to have the books yes and the library um keeping the libraries fresh this these are actually from part of documents that we provide for teachers on how to organize their library so this is some pictures a little bit bigger but the text on those guides for teachers this is a constant refresh um within the
085school year okay we want to make sure these libraries are are fresh but across the school year so you can imagine when teachers are changing grade levels or a teacher retires or or someone has been in the room for for 15 years accumulation of luxury we have to keep these organized and visible and fresh in a way that they're going to grab students and that is that's not as easy work as companies it's a constant part of of what we try to do and the other one of the other challenges with that is um we really want students have really good rates literature we also want students have good informational text the informational text is tough to have a good robust set in the class that's current and is that's that's a constant um is
086there an interest that looks changing sure sure and just the volume of really good texts that have all the qualities that we want at their level is just not as not as voluminous as on the literature side so those are that's a lot of the active work we're doing um because it's important that we have to have good books in front of kids and and yes the vast vast vast majority of what students are reading um our physical books on a daily basis well and i think that has been a concern not just mr district a lot of others because they're just that i know my reading has changed because of this thing sure um and when you introduce it at a very young age um it's the electronic tests it's um i i'm not
087so sure we know what we're creating so to speak but uh especially as the you know the brain itself is developing so um the fact that they have those books and and um there's they're still current which is lovely but um and one other thing i'm concerned about and this is just an observation when my son was in first grade um i the big thing was the five finger rule you you know you had to identify five words on page or something and he couldn't and he's in the library and his teacher humiliated him because he could get only great and he made him put the book back and i wasn't happy with the teacher if he wants to read more a piece you're gonna let him but um i just wanna we're can without
088taking a lot of time how does the teacher guide a student who's probably picked above his level but with without embarrassing him because my son doesn't like reading anymore at all and it's unfortunate and i would hate that to happen to any child so that balancing of finding that just right book on a whole i can't expect it speaks to that one experience but on a whole it happens during the reading conference it's one-on-one private conference between the teacher and the student and when i said it was an art form it really is because sometimes there is a student who is like so motivated to read a particular book that may be a little challenging but that's why you need that professional judgment because if that motivation is there you want to capitalize on it
089um and kind of go with it but it's a gentle conversation sure and then i'll say one other related thing is students are reading a lot every day so if i'm working with emory and she's in the book above um where we're really going to make construction gains on reading because it's it's a struggle it's a struggle at this moment in time um i'm going to keep her with that book uh uh especially if she's like a good chunk of the way through it because i know next week we're going to be in another book and i'm going to hit my instructional what we're trying to get out of destruction at that point for those very kind of reasons right now if that's happening too often too much but if anne-marie's motivated to read this
090book and she's in it and it's in in a lot of ways it's a struggle but she's moving agreement on that that agency around reading is something that's really important to to promote um and to encourage so yes that's that's very much on their minds and we're not staying in these books for six or seven months right we're we're getting kids kids through books so every teacher in that classroom and and i have that situation then um especially if there's a motivation you're just there great we're gonna have at it but i'm also gonna make sure that i'm doing that coaching conversation next time around the world well rest assured it wasn't here it was yeah and sometimes unintentionally but you also notice that that shift to how the books are organized not once we
091get out of those really early readers is an important part of a feature of our libraries for some of those reasons so question observation so uh we had our open forum back in october last uh we have some parents there curriculum and it was there was one uh parent who was wondering why uh i think her children are second grade why they had a chromebook and we don't give a quote books to early uh students in early grades the reason their childhood chromebook is the whole class was quarantined for coping so for those two weeks that i think went home but generally this is not an issue at very great levels there's plenty of textbooks besides that have you heard any concerns from other parents with kids in the school system that there's too much
092time on these computers especially in the uh obviously second grade up through the middle school level what's the feedback been beyond about use of chromebook yeah uh ebooks versus textbooks i don't have a lot of parent comments about chromebooks versus ebooks we have devices for all our kids as you'll hear when we move on to technology kindergarten up through but that was really more about this cold here and and having them available but our teachers are not um looking to to do more time on them yeah and by no means and again the 2021 school year was very unique because we were about learning hybrid synchronous learning so we did get chrome we didn't get the devices out as possible but that in no way is indication that we're on a path to replace textbooks
093with correct people just across the board that's just not happening so if i can add to that the students reading diet situationally may have had more digital over over the last year and a half especially because of that a point of emphasis with teachers in fact amber and i were talking today just about just about some individual situations so yes we our point of emphasis with teachers is making sure that wherever possibilities are reading a digital text or an e-book as opposed to not reading anything in the face of kind of the situations that we are dealing with we're going to have kids reading that and we have small pockets of kids quarantining and you know if parents can make it to the school we're making little packets not only with you know math materials
094and everything else they need but both take home with me but as a point of last resort yes if you have to you have to try to send help even to a quarantine kids send the books over but that's been a point of emphasis um for our teachers coming back and to make sure that that that reading guide comes back into the kind of on balance i like the portion of it well actually we use that a lot with you know that we want the reading to be a healthy diet yeah um going back to your point also the other extreme when students read books are too easy and too easy and too easy you know we talk about that healthy diet and sometimes this is a cupcake book so you want to have a
095healthy diet cupcake cook every once in a while it is fun you're not going to grow up unless you're getting to that stretch and you can maintain another bite does the annotating the text [Music] and the kids if they're really having trouble and they can't decode or use those skills independently they'll take their plastic overlay they take their whitening voice and they spot the you know spot the vowel is it long or short you sound it out and then they do their little so away from [Music] that is to say do all school districts i think going back in and finding the evidence and going back in and finding things in the text that support things is the way working through thinking about annotation but even just jotting their ideas or putting an explanation point
096what a question about this that's just helping students put their thinking on the paper as we're trying to help them develop that thinking you'll see a lot of times kids come in with their independent reading books on sticky notes all over it because maybe the goal that they were working on was tricky vocabulary words or maybe it was the main idea and so they will use that to mark it up other we got a still a lot to cover and i don't want to rush this and it's a great conversation but um so but i do want to ask and it may be a topic for later discussion how um you've only given us the sampling of the skills um and the standards but in terms of the actual structure so the grammar the spelling
097and all of that um how the teachers will use the books to then develop proper grammar proper spelling proper sentence structure if we could at some point revisit this um you know and at what point do we expect you don't expect a perfect paper out of a first grader but you certainly expect a higher standard out of a fifth grader um you know how i would love to come back and look at that and and see how we take what we use the the artist to shape the artist so sure that's a lot of bridge between our reading and writing we're reading everything right yes how we use the literature if we share um if we share out with other grade level bands in future meetings we can probably incorporate the ideas that it would
098apply to elementary too in in that conversation okay great thank you yeah sure yeah thank you you guys all said yes great thank you thank you for being here emery did a little juggling to [Music] all right um data privacy is another small topic perspective so i think you've met mike papa who is our technology director scott conway and tommy have i think the last time we had a meeting with all of you it was during token um and we were talking about devices and a number of other things so i'm really appreciative that all three of them here tonight to give you a real overview of both some of our history with data privacy and answer your questions related to tonight data privacy is a rather large topic um scott was going to start
099off by kind of explaining what the current state of law is what we do to comply with that law which we were way out ahead of it is it's a it's a very broad topic and the few materials that i've presented here for you really demonstrate a progression of best practices and what we employ here in cheshire public schools a little bit of history on this the connecticut data privacy law was initially supposed to be enacted in july of 2016. and about a year before that three of us were actually attending conferences at the state level trying to prepare for this and get out ahead of it and we get started really in 2015 with some very rudimentary tools i'll say it was really a spreadsheet it's how we were collecting at that point in
100time we could see the storm coming and so we started to prepare and gather our resources and hunters down at that point so we started to piece things together into just a very basic spreadsheet and the law itself was delayed twice it was eventually delayed to 2017 2018 and it finally went into into effect in 2018. so by that time we were already like moving and grooving and we had everything in place at that point i think we had already either taken on the learn platform or we're at least investigating and transitioning to the learning platform which is where we kind of house all our library of software and data platforms to prepare to be in compliance with and essentially we were in compliance at that point um out ahead of the law taking effect
101because we had two year head start three year rates so and unbeknownst to us the state was eventually going to adopt the learn platform as its state platform for uh public schools to maintain their libraries of software so on the back of this document there is a brief summary i'll say of the law because it's it's we don't want to get too much into the weed with it but it kind of outlines some of the major points within the law the fact that student record student information is not the property of the contractor it's really the property of the the students themselves that the board can take steps to request data be deleted if necessary um what the contractors are allowed to do with that information and how they can use it as well as
102outlining it and defining the notification of breach if something does happen what are the next steps and how quickly do they need to be taken and all the way to the end with data retention how long do we keep that data and what do we do with it when it's done and can the parents actually request to have that data either maintained or deleted because they can extend tasks if they choose to do so so i have a expensive id background but yeah i'm just defined uh contractor yes so the contractor in in this is the vendor with which we are providing student data and that could be anything you you'll hear the term personally identifiable information or pii for short and that could be anything from the student's first name last name email address
103that's it as soon as they have just those three pieces or one of those three pieces it's considered personally identifiable information if it's stored in their system it's considered student data and they have a right to maintain that privacy of that student um and so anyone that we enter into an agreement whether it be a digital or a physical written contract to share information that person or that vendor is considered the contract and this extends beyond software to contractors we have the company and provide services they have a list of kids they work with specific kids otp things such as that correct we have a very small list of meals as well yeah it's beyond just we're hosting some data in the cloud who has it who has access to it you know what control
104do we have over it goes beyond that to contractors so so one of the aspects of this is that we are required to maintain a very public facing library of the software and the platforms and the vendors in which we share our data and so that is done through the learn platform that is the second page you actually have a little bit of a screenshot two different views here one at the top is your broad facing public public-facing library you can go in and there's some search and some filter options that you can look at but as you look you'll see product names down the left the learn platform gives us a little bit of extra feature with the subject and the grade level that's not something that we necessarily do ourselves but the learn
105platform through its use of pulling this data in to their database they maintain for us but then as you move to the right the approval status and the privacy status is maintained by the district so the approval status is a product of a nine step process that we've developed over years here in cheshire public schools where we really thoroughly vet every aspect of the platform before we decide to utilize it and it goes from the initial person making the request to the application that they have to fill out to their teacher leader the curriculum office and then finally ends up with the technology leaders to make sure that it's viable in the district so that's the approval status and then we move to the privacy status during that process a privacy addendum a very specialized
106district privacy addendum is automatically sent out to the vendor and it says above and beyond your terms of service and your privacy policy do you agree to the cheshire public school's terms of addendum which is again saying that yes you're going to apply your privacy policy your terms of service but then there's a state law that says you have to agree to these key terms there was a boilerplate template that the state gave us back in 2016 that we have in turn given to our legal counsel who has kind of fine-tuned it and tweaked it over the years so we have a very specific set it'll look similar to other districts but there's a few key points that every district in this in the state has probably done just like we have to meet our
107needs and and what they feel is best practice so that gets sent out they can choose to either agree to those terms of service and sign it and return it back to us and if it does it gets tagged in and inserted into the public library if it's declined then it stops right there if they don't agree to the terms of service state law it's dead ended right we really can't proceed forward with that so everything on this list this this is public facing you can go onto our website you can scroll through all the software we use the only way they can get on this list is if it's data privacy compliant which means they agree to our terms or it doesn't contain pii so you will see some other more elementary software on
108there um that we use you know abc something or other programs just doesn't it doesn't require the kid to log in there is no piri and that's so fbi is not not personally in that file no personally identifiable so if uh if a teacher wants to give a link to an abc program and just not link and static list or a website that requires no login no personal identifiable information exchange and pii and so they get their own little separate color um and if you see we've do uh the second screen uh screenshots at the bottom is this code.org if you click on the actual resource you'll see a little bit more detailed view you'll see the actual privacy policy terms of service the addendum that we requested they sign is also attached here and
109being published as well as you can go right to the resource and you can see the privacy statuses and what they've pledged um throughout some nationally ranked programs so that is the learning platform that kind of helps us maintain that it's again a piece of the process that allows us to kind of maintain a catalog of platforms that we that we utilize across the district and it's extended from a conversation tonight we're talking about data privacy but there are millions of resources out there to use software we're looking at it from the standpoint of data privacy but we're also looking at how it fits into the czech recruitment there are resources out there that we've specifically may have the endeavor for but we don't use because the curriculum doesn't fit we also have certain software
110platforms that we've denied because they don't sign our contract and if they don't send a contract our staff does not use them we're talking about the standpoint of the curricular piece in the classroom but also special education software and data management and other resources that use all that's important so is this everything is this comprehensive no that is that is one snapshot of of applications that are on here and um the public facing one primarily shows those that are approved for use if you see the internal one the ones that our staff can look at and use as kind of a conversation startup well do we have something that meets these needs or can i use this application we encourage them to start here their view is a little bit more graphic than this meaning
111that the icons are a little bit larger and they have some links that they can go to directly to kind of you know look at the stuff they'll see it's a stop light green yellow red yellow is pending i mean someone's already ahead of you and we're looking into it green it's good to go red it's already been reviewed and denied so we kind of keep that at pace where they can kind of review it first uh this is good or it's not like so are we talking hundreds of thousands hundreds hundreds and has an application brought to you is that it do they do you get a sales person or do you have a teacher comes in driven by the teacher usually driven by the teacher right they'll fill out a form they'll probably
112start with a conversation with either another staff member or their department or grade level depending on where they're coming from and it'll start with them they'll submit a form with a google form where it all starts and that google form has a multi-page application process and from there the document goes to their teacher leader first so it could be a department head it could be a school principal a division leader they give kind of the first level of review and if they say yes it looks good curricularly it meets with this you know the ideals of the school or the grade level of the curriculum then they're going to push it off to the curriculum uh supervisor at that point they could be kevin marlene maureen uh and they'll take a look at it from
113a holistic approach across the either if it's at the elementary schools is it good for one school it might be good for all maybe this is a broader conversation that we should have um and then from there we'll actually get turned back over to us so that we can look at the viability with regard to can we offer this digitally um is it something that we can push out through the google apps platform or does it need to be pushed out through the ipads and we look for the viability on the network and our system resources and cost is obviously filtered in there as well if there is a fee and then once all that comes together and the approval goes back out to the teacher the teacher leader and everybody that was involved in
114the process we wanted the equity if there was a great resource out there that works for second grade we want to make sure it wasn't an island working in one school that every teacher that secretary level could benefit from it but also to make sure it was vetted we didn't want people going out to a dinner party or conference or talking to a friend or friend or cousin and coming back and wanting to use a resource that next day we want to make sure that it's vetted from the privacy standpoint from a curriculum standpoint from the cost standpoint as well as the software we have for the district also i think it's really important that the connection between technology and the coaches and the curriculum office is like this because back in 2018 we had
115to go out and make sure that every teacher in our district knew what pii was what they had to fill out in order to start this process and we had to educate everyone on the law i think the training that went into this and the ongoing training for any new staff is critical and those trainings that we did in each of the schools was to help impress upon those people the important you hold a lot of critical data about these students you are you are the guardian of that what you know while you're working there obviously there's a technology we have in place to help that as as well but you are entrusted with a lot of data that needs to be protected which is why we it leads to other best practices such as
116not sharing your password yeah is there are any of these just um like either faculty or administrative information or passcodes and not student not specifically student tasks if a teacher is using that resource and having students log into our homework assignment or a class assignment limitations just instructional software stuff that we use for plus or whatever spin all needs to go through that through that same process there's a lot of operational software that we use yeah there is a question in the process that asks who will be utilizing this what is the audience and if that's at that point that we catch all right where where is this directed is it the director that stu the staff all of them both of them because we have a wide variety mike do you want to speak
117to some of the vector training additional training that folks need around yes yeah we moved our our training mandated training for the staff online things from sexual harassment training all that stuff i think man i i did manage to get included in there three mandatory technology trainings that people think there's a password security basics there's a web browsing and there's an email one which lends itself to you know fishing and things like that so all of our staff does watch those um each year it's it's it's a separate it's a step in the right direction there's really only so much that you can do yeah secure [Music] our entire staff to see who we click on it and because you had k12 cc west emails you did probably yes real phishing emails come daily and
118we see them and unfortunately because of this training a lot of the staff members will now take a screenshot for you know fortunately not forward as the emails but they'll take screenshots of it and say what do you think of this and i love that because they're really skeptical and they're starting to recognize this doesn't look right so it's definitely working i mean we're seeing the fruits of the labor uh in that regard so i look at cloth drop communication is for everyone crosstalk empowers people to make their voices heard to me that just sounds like an open invitation to like spread no in reality some of the names said these are no but i'm just in terms of the intent of the website it's to get your voice out which means that you're going
119to so that actually is a special education software for students for communication purposes okay so not only is a regular led population connect with this we also look at the special education software that our ots and pc's are using yeah we write down to students that are non-verbal and use devices and i would dare say a high volume of some of our approved software is for a really targeted small number of students so one of the things that we talked about we yes this was comprehensive i said no it's just the seas there's a lot of very targeted small individual or small group software that's approved for use on it because that's appropriate for that student or a small group of specific students but we're not using it for broad use so oftentimes we look
120down here it looks longer than what our bright population students are actually using so context matters and that's right yeah and that's the original purpose of learn platform is not just somewhere to store all the titles that you use to prove that they're compliant with data privacy practices we look at that software and we can figure out how many licenses we have a particular software and how much is being used so we know can we scale back on a license for this or what's going on with this why is this being used do we need more professional development or we may see something that wasn't getting used it's now getting a ton of use because we went remote right we never thought but that's a great application for remote money so we can see all
121of those trends through learning platform which is the original purpose of the software itself if you go there when you do a top ten google docs google sheets powerschool where you're gonna get all the all the usual suspects that we use all day yeah on the other side of the coin we did have a piece of software that wasn't approved and that allowed us to have that leverage because more and more teachers were looking at the benefit of how the software was a phenomenal piece to use in the classroom and other school systems and finally that gave us leverage to work with the state of connecticut to speak with the vendor and eventually to get them around to assign it to them so that would be eventually clear so this is an ongoing process this
122isn't just a snapshot of time that's done we continually look at what's being used and how it's being used to do the best for our students in the classroom and i'm going to say our state edtech commissioner has been fantastic and helping districts with this we'll reach out and say there's three or four districts we're all trying to do this they will get into a conversation about why it's important to sign the the data privacy event and they also took care of the deities for us they got power schools we don't have a legal team to reach out to those people but they start wanting to modify our contract yeah so they've done a fantastic job casey the state specifically had really headed this up so so we can be pretty nimble if we have
123to get something quickly we went fully remote in two days with a device in every student's household you can't get more nipples so you guys actually read that we do [Music] more than several years ago i would say 10 years ago the town and the board started a joint technology steering committee that's i think it still means but by and large you guys are using apex solutions way early on but they'll get infrastructure while it's networking and a pet a really high-end uh secure prices that this team's been running with since uh for a long time now so i'm glad i'm glad it's gotten to this point here you get your uh processes almost mimic what we're doing utility level yeah you know against fishing tax security friends that being said uh with president biden's
124infrastructure bill i know connect is set to receive some money and the at least with the utility energy companies pushing for companies to ask for funding for cyber security not just like t but whole team technology so i was wondering if uh if if uh cps is for vincent's gonna be looking into tapping into some of that finally potentially shore up what you guys are doing around securities and price yeah yeah i don't think you're behind on anything but just curious i can't speak for a video on that but i'm sure that has been defined yet but it's kind of when it gets down to our level that we take advantage of a lot of this whether it be for security funding uh ecl funding i applied for this year to replace a bunch of
125our chromebooks so we're we're very there could be physical tournaments in there correct correct yeah it could be more training there are a lot of school districts of our size that haven't gone out and hired a cyber security professional on staff do you think that's my biggest concern is the big [Music] there are yeah there are certainly different um elements to google for k-12 education versus higher ed versus enterprise there are different standards within google's world if you really understand them and see them for who they are there are different there's disparity among what you can do in certain areas you know there's certain uh services that are held um they say there are core services that we don't get because we're in k-12 population and and we're cut off from those so we're not
126even supported to use them which means we don't they also just recently released this past june more stringent recommendation requirements with regard to students under age 18. we had to go in and clearly define who falls under that category now excuse me was 13 and we decided to put it right at the top level so even our seniors senior class and now they're considered all 13 and under which means they lose access to certain abilities within the platform and it's kind of just a better best practice at that point to say let's lump them all in and try to maintain two different tiers so they are releasing more measures you know as they can as they're sought after and we're obligated to comply with a bunch of other federal there's coppa which is the japanese
127online privacy protection pacific compliance so we have tools in place that will meet all those requirements meet and exceed i should say i think our security here i'll put it up against any other district from the state and we're constantly reading you know and and staying abreast of what's new and what's really you know relatable out there what can we do to further enhance what we've already done so we're on top of that as it's hitting or at least before it gets us over out ahead of that you had some questions on the phone when we talked about devices and how we protect kids once we hand them a device did you want to ask any of those well i had two more that i wanted to go and i i'm just i'm cognizant of
128everyone's time so my guess is i know we have them here and now i know again just pretty much we don't want to get a chance to talk to you which is unfortunate and i'm very proud it's a relatively easy process so that's spelled out in the handbook as to how to access data you want to access their students data yeah what's your request it's just a request yeah it's just a request to the board event developer i'm assuming before we're further guidelines yeah i guess it depends on what type of data you're you're talking about because we're talking about a lot of different kinds of data like there's the data and information that's in their file there's their assessment data there's you know the parent doesn't apparent until at a certain age of the
129child have access to all that yes but depending on what you're seeking you know the first thing i would ask you as a mom is yeah happy to give you any of that data what what are you looking for i just want to be specific yeah if it's related to the learn platform and the software that we use and they're asking well what does this application share on my student we can go in and we can say based on what we do and how we roster this platform with our student information system i can tell you that they're getting your first name the child's last name and their email address 90 of the platforms are getting those three things that's really all they need to be able to know who the child is by first
130and last name and their email address to grant them access and then that also ties the student to the teacher right so they're they're they're scheduled together in that student information system so those three pieces of data tie that together and maybe a student id number that's kind of in the back end so four pieces of information most of the time if a parent called and said what does x platform share you know personally identifiable here's the four details we can go in and we can tell you exactly what's being shared at any given time on any one of these platforms or if we need to we can reach out to the vendor we can read the fine print because in that fine print that's exactly what they're saying okay so you're talking about personal
131identification at this point how many times my kid is accessing this site or that side yeah no we don't necessarily have those metrics um we could potentially find some of those metrics if we really needed to um we don't necessarily have access to all those metrics but with regard to the law it's a parent can request what type of information is being shared between cheshire public schools and that vendor and we can tell them either from our own experience in knowledge or from the fine print right because we read that by and when that student turns 18 they're allowed to maintain that actually that their data in that platform so if we sever ties with that platform with that child and they go up and graduate the parent can actually write for the law to
132the vendor and say i'd like to maintain uh you know for x number of months or years after as long as you're allowing and the vendor can do that do we're talking about students have a school now all students from school so they're not ever using their well we should clarify that all students have a an account right uh grades three through twelve have an email and and on top of that only grades three through uh ten have internal email access only grades 11 and 12 are allowed external for the purpose of uh college applications and internships so not everybody has an email address it looks like an email address but it's actually just an account username that looks like an email address so when that kindergartner reaches that grade level then they too will
133have one but for middle school purposes especially with google classroom the teacher can email students and students can email the teacher because we're in the same domain yep and notifications automatic so it's a wall it's a walled garden scenario and that's both ways emails in and emails out the external does not occur to grades 11 as well yeah because i mean because you do have high school kids who have other accounts yeah but they're not ever used for any of this stuff right if they choose to use their channels right it might be for naviance which comes in as an external even though it's an internal application it's coming from an external source so we need to allow access to that we'll let that tunnel in things like that but they're very controlled and a
134very viewing number and so you know it's been a three or four years since we actually covered this topic but being that they have an email address in our system uh at least when they're logged into google classroom or here on the network or device it goes through firewalls and philippine device know filtering software so you know you know things like that um you have a question like when they're given a device we might as well we're yeah but yeah but it's true i mean you they these emails are filtered and monitored and well carefully monitored it's not like they're reading emails but in terms of monitoring and traffic [Music] human intelligence for instances of questionable content critical situation yeah so it scans more than just their email it scans their draw anything within the
135google apps for education world so that could be drive docs sheets slides it could be their activity on youtube it could be gmail if they're in their classroom um and yeah it starts with an algorithm that's looking for keywords and key phrases and then if it gets flagged it gets stepped up to hume interaction human interaction then gets to a tier two um and then they'll determine whether or not it meets one of the criteria for a four phase you know notification protocol um and it could be just an email to the student at the higher grade levels hey we've noticed you've used this word within the context of your writing just be you know level one warning there could be a level two warning um and then there could also be escalated where it
136goes to an administrator um or it's the highest level it could go to the cheshire police department first and then come right back to the board event notify that there's a possible student situation something that might be of imminent threat and danger mm-hmm so it's and we're reviewing that data each year at the end of the year to see where we are as far as are we improving certain areas what grade levels may be an issue or whatever but we have disturbing instances that were picked up on there so anything on that firewall thing about kids and using their yeah i i just you know and i think you've gone over it before and we do have policy on it but just the use of the phones and i know you block access to uh
137or kids they're blocked you don't block anything on the phone only on the current device right they're on a a data plan by a communications company that we can't that's that's you can't get into that well she's logged into the wireless network at the high school and yes traffic is monitored so okay and we have going back foreign we could go see everything that you've gone through in the last 60 days we hardly ever get we'll have a case where we're kind of we're mandated to do it for whatever reason the whole thing about the the security and safety of protecting kids from whatever's got everywhere everyone's walking around the internet in their pocket and we have no control over that you take that you turn it into a hot spot you use that as
138you're wearing those connections now you're not filtered you can't really stay ahead of that taking our phones away correct we have some software allow teachers to to push out websites to students for lockdown homework or mock or some other content and i think a lot of this the one key piece we're missing is there's also those conversations that happen too you know we put as much technology in place too but our teachers are also having those conversations with students abroad appropriate technology and balance of time and staying on task how to appropriately you know be themselves on an internet based device that's the biggest things you want that to progress from kindergarten through grade 12 so students leave here and they become good citizens it's not the technology that's protected only that's also what our
139teachers are doing in the classroom to help benefit that also and that starts in the upper brains right it starts with our teachers and our librarians our school counselors who are having these discussions and very planned lessons to make sure that they understand all the benefits and the dangers of what's out there did you teach digital citizenship can't start can't start early enough well and when school was just invented when i started so you know but i mean the technology consisted of nasty notes passed back and forth i mean it happened although we did talk about it during the public shutdown was that it might be maybe the best suited to to talk about this but we're handing everybody a device the same way we hand them the textbook that they need and that device
140is set up do you want to speak to that a little bit for the board numbers devices home one to one the ability for us to manage those remotely not that we want to look and see what everybody's doing nobody has time to look at all those logs but we have control over those devices and we can easily maintain them we have ipads at the kindergarten level we have a piece of software that is able to manage those push out adjust the software they need take a bunch of stuff away that they don't need so it allows us to target it for target the the device for each grade level so that it's appropriate whether it's a tablet or it's a touch-based device or if it's a device with a uh or if it's a
141device with a keyboard but as far as the the chromebooks themselves a piece of software that we put in place that's made a big difference which tom just referenced called go guardian is uh and this was in regards to requests by teachers i have 18 kids coming in they all turn on their chromebooks i can't see what everybody's doing they switch windows faster than right now now they can set up what's called a scene so if i'm going in and i'm teaching i want you to read this article there's some other research on this tab and then you open up google docs because you're going to write a response to it when you go into that teacher's class and you log on those are the only three tabs that you get pushed to you that's
142it there is no search window there is nothing it gives you a little more control over the environment so it's evolving that's all i can say but here's the reason why why we want our own devices so the kids bring in their other devices we don't have to we don't have those monitoring tools and we don't know what else is on their machine and we're only allowing them on the guest network it's slower it's more filtered we provide a device for every student it's an essential piece of your education here no they're not on it all the time but it is essential for you to get to get the job done let's face it there was no remote going without this we fast forwarded these last two years it felt like 10 years certainly felt
143like that for me i can tell you that but um i think we're at a point now we've done it and we have controls in place now and we've established more controls that we are we're bringing it forward the way the way that it used to be as opposed to just giving a kid a device and saying that thank you thank you for hanging out yeah thank you [Music] you can stick around and listen to field trips and that happened in between our last meeting on the 18th and the last is that um there is a trip for the winter guard regional competition and that will be in salem mass in early february so how we've been handling it is for any field trips that come up we are working with maura at jaspercot to
144make sure that given whatever the status is at the time that we're following the right protocols but our kids remain masked no matter where we go we've also been able to bring some events here versus bringing our kids out but as we talked about last time we still have washington d.c planned but we're not making all the details for that because we don't know what what the spring will bring hopefully it'll bring a lot better news so just if they go into an area that does not have our mass policy do they have to follow our policy or their policy that's a really good question but at this time any place our kids are going they're staying masked they're masked on the bus because that's what our school policies are okay great well we could
145wish them luck yeah [Music] you have an 18 tech group here yeah we do yes obviously coming from various districts they always talk about mike always like he's the number one guy in the states if i if i could [Music] um we didn't get any emails um [Music] oh danger