001and hurricane here take him here thank you and summer should we ask the club [Applause] the united states of america and to the republic which stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty um first order of business is a review of the minutes of me oh public comment i'm sorry my customer went all together do we have any comments okay now standing here okay um okay so first order is to review the minutes of the may 10th 2021 meeting um curriculum committee meeting which needed some changes amendments to the um yes to the minutes um followed by the september 13th minutes and which became the 10th meeting minute so um we've had a chance to review them do you are you okay with the changes that were made so i'll move to the vote okay
002just for the public so they know what happened was that there had been a discussion that ensued regarding um later school start times so that was omitted in the original minutes so we added them and to reflect the accuracy of the accurate reflect meeting there was a question raised in the september 13th meeting about that and um again the accuracy of the minutes so we postponed them or tabled them all till today um and for so we could update and um and then some kind of change in the other minutes something was added for september now and then the september 13 minutes would regularly come up at this meeting right for approval from our last week so do i have a motion yes okay a second and all in favor we're on there okay so
003that is great um under the areas under the heading of new business we uh have before us a um the 2022-2023 program of study changes uh for cheshire high school so i wanna talk to you more about this do you have the chart in front of you i do can we so we have a lot of new courses which is exciting i'll just run through them we have the ap research course this is the second part of a new course we offered last year called the ap capstone experience course ap capstone is for juniors the ap research is for seniors and it includes doing a research paper and i think it's to the tune of like 4 000 words or something so it's a lot of research involved and um just continuing that process of
004the ap capstone course eventually we could take those two courses and actually have a capstone diploma which we might be headed in that direction from the college board but at this point we're just offering this this course to seniors and that fulfills the national based performance assessment requirements the next course is the ap ece micro economics course so for years we've offered an ap ece macro economics course and students have we've also offered an ece economics course for ucron students have requested the micro economics course so we are going to put that forward so that we will you know we also have the one-year macro this will be the one-year microeconomics course and in order to do that we will remove the semester ece economics course so this kind of expands the offerings there so
005for the next one is the elementary discrete mathematics uconn ece course the math department wanted to offer an ece uconn course and they've even listed the indicator that that would pertain to it would be a semester course offered to grades 10 11 and 12. who is the economics course the business department the microeconomics course that yes if it's an early college experience it doesn't have to be associated with it or university important yeah that's sort of content because this math one says you can't yes oh the next one is health and education in urban communities so the cte department rebecca daddio who also those courses offer courses like adult roles um human growth and development child growth and development which are ece courses she wants to expand to offer health and education in urban communities
006it offers quite a bit of experience for students they actually take field trips to other districts like waterbury and have different experiences working with urban communities that's a semester course offered to grades 11 12. does this um how does this compare with state standards i mean is this they they all align with state standards um the math department actually put that into the description but all of these courses would align with any of the state favorites that need the de manufacturing machining principles de meaning dual enrollment with naugatuck valley community college and bcc so this is sean started last year a like an academy and last year he offered two new courses this is the next step in that academy so it will be the next step for those students who took those courses this
007year it's a full year course and it's offered to grades 10 11 12. the next new course is digital art it's a semester course for all grade levels and this um came from joe castardo is interesting in the curriculum um in writing institute this summer in his department i spent some time listening to what they were saying and there's so much digital going on prior to high school they really wanted to bring that forward to the high school level too so they've decided to do that in a semester course the mastery based performance class this is going to be offered to those students who have made absolutely no progress on their mastery-based performance assessment that is something they have to complete by senior year by the end of senior year so this will be a
008course that's offered in the fall of senior year for students who are just really struggling to do that independently semester course the next course is musical theater course and this is a music slash drama of course a semester long so taught by a music teacher and uh taryn shawnee does the drama course uh drama courses at school um so just a combination offering you know an opportunity for students combining those two areas um some of the description is up then sounds like it would be a great course action and the last one is the black and latino american studies grade nine ten eleven twelve which we began to offer this year it was put into the program of studies and um all students were made aware that parents were made aware that last spring when
009we decided to offer it this year we are just and it was put into the electronic version of the program of studies but this will be in our print version which comes out this year so those are that's probably the most amount of new courses that i think i've shared out in the many years i've been doing this um if you go down lower the the deleted courses we're going to remove economics 1000 ece because the microeconomics will replace that it would be um they would be offering the same type of curriculum the uh d e manufacturing and d e cad cam and d e manufacturing fundamentals those were the two semester courses that sean began offering last year as a game of the academy and he realized that offering them as a full year
010course instead of two semester courses makes it easier to schedule and more sense for the students because he has the same students in both semester courses why not just offer as a year so we're going to collapse that into just manufacturing monthly fundamentals so the same two courses but in a year-long course so it has to be the same students yeah and it is this year yeah it does because they're in this academy idea um it just makes it easier really all the way around to schedule and for sean programming um in the math department this we're going to remove this because continuously every year there's a lack of enrollment just because there are so many other courses we offer for example comp science course more students will take that then they do the programming
011so there's no need to continue it when we don't have the students who are requesting it and the last change is that accounting to de that's dual enrollment it has been ccp competitive college prep but it's becoming dual enrollment with tungsten so that's a change in terms of how will the ap research i'm going to just start at the top and go through the box okay how will it help facilitate this capstone so um currently we have the capstone junior year the capstone course right and captions a year long anybody who takes that is going to do all of their work really in that class and then just present at the end of the year the same thing is the case of ap research it'll be grade 12. so any student who takes that will
012present at the end of or halfway through that that course and get received their nba credit for that and what is what this allows is for a student to get a a capstone diploma through the college board so this is a college board course that was developed for them to give students a really authentic collegiate research experience and that's it's a two-year course and so it deepens those skills in research and then the application of that writing paper during the presentation so it's a deep dive into those skills do you have productive enrollment for that i mean currently we have how many for the current capstone there's about 12 students so being that it's a new course next year ap research it probably will run about the same until it starts to catch on and
013then students realize they can't after the first year but i would guess about 10 to 12 the first year okay but next year they have to start producing all the seniors have to have it right so if they if they haven't they can take that class okay so there are a number of options for students so that we can ensure those who have not done the independent work of the masterpiece performance assessment have a really structured course one is to support them one is to give them that challenge at the deepest level yeah i'm just curious um it just i you know listen to leslie just almost pleading for people you know for folks out in the community to help with the capstone project and i'm just wondering if this could make her job easier
014if if this could um you know just it just seems kind of there's a lot that's going to pull on these kids do they and they understand this is coming up yeah they've worked through the process since they came in this freshman you know what would get them in there the class of 2023 and the parents and their parents we have a manual that we send to parents and students starting in ninth grade that outlines the timeline of every year and what they're expected to do okay so between this course and the master face performance yeah of course much will have everybody covered and nobody coming up short and many saying oh my gosh that's why we have these courses and we have a number of students who are well on their way uh maureen
015looked at probably 250 plus um proposals last year of students who have independently developed their their project so these guys are now mostly juniors yes they're they're trainers okay so some of them have begun that work already which is just okay all right and you say non-current english teacher um so so none of these have staffing applications okay um and i thought it was every part of this research search course would um it's being going to be taught by an english teacher whereas the other courses have a distinct department i think microeconomics is business department the math department the cte so um ap research could fall anywhere but and english teachers might need to teach it that's why i specified there okay great okay and then with the microeconomics i'm thrilled that we're doing um
016a solid you know really good and not that um the yukon ec economics class was not but um to perhaps that will get more kids um will there be a textbook associated with this or is it that's a good question um and actually um leslie didn't put in for a textbook so i'm not sure if they're still researching what they want to use but i can ask when italian about that because they're working with this and student okay um and then um uh computer science where were we um deleted do you mean the programming no joy yes okay i guess you're right thank you um how many kids are enrolled in those ap current science or computer science courses it's hitting the same audience yeah i was just i mean if we're not getting them
017and i would like to know that there are if we were offering two ap computer science classes then we're getting the numbers they both have 17 in each computer okay and then the last one i have a question on is the health and education in urban communities if this is just a suggestion um i would love to see instead of just field strips like field trips just real outreach to these communities can we set up um after school programs if the you know the schools the wise the other community organizations in these towns um could use the help to set up you know see if we can set up tutoring arrangements or you know some kind of real social interaction versus just a field trip and part of your competencies so comparing cultural differences and
018roles and responsibilities and parenting determine explore community resources that are available analyze the benefits of community resources and so you were going to say no absolutely it is i think field trips is a poor representation of what this is it's 12 hours of field work in an urban community and we have some partners like the boys and girls club in the ymca party um right now so typically if you're running this through uh the harford county schools you're going to what's called husky sport which is an urban center in hartford run through the uconn parker's branch and it's something that is very tight within the yukon area and they don't have that their waterberry ranch yet but they're super excited to have us on board youtube um maybe start a new program directly in waterbury
019through their uconn's campus so is it going to be peer-to-peer is it going to be working without you know older folks younger mostly younger folks so it would be either peer-to-peer or a high school student working with someone that's in a younger grade and it can be done um either during school hours during like a full day field trip to these places it can be done after school we're still discussing transportation and how that also works out for next year but as part of the course you need to have 12 hours of service learning okay okay good thanks thank you okay so um thank you doctor yeah i i actually had a question um actually i don't need to see it but um so we have ece with uconn and and then the business programs
020are starting to do that collaboration with tungsten community college are doing are we doing any other they're all regionalized so essentially it's the same same thing it's just the naga talks manufacturing program aligned with where we wanted to go and the business department line better workforce and i think the business department is starting to reach out to gateway too because i think there's some connections there so we want to give kids as we want to give them options that are as broad as possible to give them this real world and as post-secondary their points that they can as they want and to really expose them as much as we can great so how does one go about who does one contact at cheshire high school if for instance somebody at queenie you can call me
021and then they would figure out where that would fit and then we would bring in department heads and see which department these are the folks who would take take the ball and run with it okay we'll talk yes okay thank you you said a couple more no okay great um okay good um all right next item of business is what going to hear about two new textbook recommendations julie do you want to go first with the person sure thank you thanks so um we are proposing uh the inspire earth science book uh and resources so now when we are presenting to you a textbook we're really presenting much more than a physical blog so we looked at this resource the textbook and its associated online platform resources and really saw some strong benefits for the
022ways that it's offered supports for students to personalize our learning for them uh in the types of things that are offered through when students interact with it um with literacy supports that are in the online platform uh in addition to the way the textbook is set up and then also supports for teachers in aligning with and really integrating the next generation science so we've all been kind of waiting as science teachers to find textbooks catching up with ngss and at first they were just they said oh we're ngss aligned because they would give you a list of where their things in their book match the standard this goes beyond that this takes and integrates the instructional strategies the instructional approach along with the dcis which are the disciplinary core ideas the cross-cutting concepts and the
023science and engineering practices it's all embedded into everything in the textbook into the resources for the teachers as well so we really liked how this provided support that our students needed and flexibility for our students and then also the materials and the supports there for our teachers as they develop their instruction so that was kind of what we really liked about it readability wise also we often run into struggles with high school science textbooks that the reading level is quite advanced um and in this book it advances throughout the book which we like because as they progress through the year they should be improving with that but it also provides a lot of literacy support so a teacher could actually on the online version decide okay i have a particular student who's struggling with this
024content let me provide them with a reduced reading level reading of that same content and see if that helps them access the material or providing lessons and reading supports where a teacher can assign a reading out of the book and it's a structured note-taking reading for the kids it takes them through it it will read aloud to them if they need that support so that huge variety of supports was what we really liked it really feels like they're finally coming up with high school level resources that really embed all of this together which was nice and then the online platform for it is very user friendly from a student perspective and a teacher perspective and also from the perspective of integrating with um with being able to roster the students automatically and so all of
025that was pretty seamless for this platform so i remember you [Music] um mentioning that that they were starting to catch up with with the um new standards uh new science standards so um is this earth this is an earth science course is it it's a full year for our our freshmen take earth science and and it's a full year course so a majority of our student body will take that class yeah um so it's not a course that's offered like ap or you see well this is for ninth graders so um we wouldn't really be expecting them to be at that level we do have additional opportunities for them to study similar material later on if they are really interested they might do ap environment or go on to some of the other ap classes
026there isn't an ap earth science class but there are many options for happier electives as well if they really like the astronomy hair science they can take these drawing class to go into more depth on that one topic so this is one of our core science classes that we have our students taking and on the ngss exam and the ntsm standards earth science is one of the core areas urban space science and then life science and physical science in the physical science look at both chemistry and physics our life science that's our biology classes and then her science with your skill sets we are going to propose going with a class set of textbooks for each of the teachers classrooms and then having the students have a digital access instead of the issue of having
027every single student issued a physical book we have been moving towards that with with most of our physics are our science book adoptions over the past few years it's more cost effective and the benefits of the online platform they get things that the physical book doesn't give them like the ability to read them or linking to the glossary and all of these other features that we find are very useful for students and this would be a multi-year license as well so they take it just to take me through take a third unit if i'm looking at the the flow chart so encounter a phenomenon so every unit is model that aligns with ngss instruction okay and so then the student asks the questions based on how much information is present i'm sorry but i'm just
028how much information is presented about the phenomenon before the student starts asking or is the student ask immediately like you'll well we ask immediately and then we investigate them and then we come back so it's a it's a whole process through the instructional process of teaching the whole unit um it's not just that they ask questions once yeah no and it's always just um so by by five you you know lesson five or stage five or question five you apply your evidence and your reasoning back so they'll take one of their questions and based on their research and everything will come up with an analysis or if they they might have to make a claim about something so they might have uh investigated about using resources um in a unit on minerals and then they
029might have to make some claims about whether it would be a good idea to um for a community to invest in mining this particular resource or what the environmental impacts of that might be okay so it's a lot about how how they're applying things in real world and we've always done that in our curriculum but what this book does is it provides sort of that structure aligned with that ngss so that um that's what we liked about it from a teaching perspective in helping us develop our curriculum even further to help us as we continue on uh wanting to improve with ngss you know is there again just quickly looking and i'll look at it more um is there are there opportunities for hands-on absolutely yes yes so yeah all of this includes all of
030the things that we would be doing hands-on as well so in planning the unit we now have a structure to follow and teachers can fine-tune and say okay we want to have them do an activity or a lab where they investigate the mineral the chemical composition of the minerals or look at the crystal structure of the minerals so all of that hands-on is embedded throughout okay and it's also provides a structure that we can take the things that we have been doing so successfully which is a lot of hands-on and inquiry-based things and structures it nicely into units for us to help us support that ngss style of learning and and making sure the students have a chance to practice those science and engineering practices that they have a chance to practice making a claim
031and then using reasoning to support that claim and providing evidence to support them those are just examples of some of the steps so um and then just stepping back a little bit not related to the topic but i guess the the method of delivery electronic resources um and we're going more and more and more toward in all courses so this i guess is coming kind of your way what are we doing i'll just start asking this probably with every new e-textbook to protect the students security or here to ensure security and privacy well regarding the digital textbook it's for us to ask us we are not putting our information into the book it's a resource for us to utilize okay and as as far as this particular textbook we already have a privacy policy in
032place with this company because we use other textbooks from the same platform our current biology book uses the same platform so from a privacy policy standpoint uh all of that has been already generated what i could do things related to that question is um perhaps for our one of our next meetings we could really spend some time explaining all the work that the district has done over the last five or so years regarding data privacy and our district policies every single digital web-based tool that we use has to go through a pretty rigorous policy for us to meet the standards that the state has set for student data privacy so we can we can talk about that in more detail but your question is a nice opportunity to share all the work that we've done
033okay that we've gotten is pretty impressive yeah um yeah i think in our notes for our next challenge yeah with um i just think with every new story that comes out positive negative or anywhere in between um you know it just raises more questions because these guys are you know like they're that much further ahead of us somewhere just in the game it seems almost like we're constantly in a game of catch-up with programmers and textbook companies and and so and probably the bad guys out there so i just want to know what we're doing to keep our kids safe that's all yeah and this particular resource it does connect with our credit portal so this is how the students are are getting into it they're not having to go to say another external site
034to give their their logging information and things so um it is one that has all of that's already in place for this okay thank you all right so it's very um precursor to this for the next generation science standards at the middle school level so um since i'm just running for 12 i don't know don't what specific but something that we are doing i think across the board in the district uh and you can probably speak to this as well some more is that we are trying to update our resources so that we are looking at things that are aligned and not just the line but really integrated with the ngss standards um so i know for for us we'll be looking at chemistry and physics coming up as well and so that'll be part
035of our criteria to evaluate um and i i'm sure that ryan lopez middle school has been looking at resources as well right i'm just thinking of those students that come from middle school to high school and pass this test pass over this course um for more advanced science courses are how where are they getting the information that then they're so there's to be tested and we do make an effort in our advanced science classes to integrate the links to this content because they it the the content spirals so they've had exposure to the content and and they're practicing the skills and and everything throughout um so that's that's something to try to do continuity wise and you just need to think of this about the students coming up students going from 9th grade into 10th
036grade should we adopt this textbook they would have the same platform for their textbook from freshman year to south korea in earth science to biology and that provides a nice transition as well thank you um and just to make sure so the um you've listed the price at the cost to the district um this will affect this budget here it's going to be it is it could it it depends um if you needed to get them starting you should place those orders in the screen again yeah we usually place textbook orders yeah okay or just into the next school here but all right thank you um okay so the next thanks so much for the presentation and then uh i'd say let's do i think you should do them separately okay all right um here
037or you can make a motion so do i have a motion to move the recommendation to the full board the adoption of inspire or science second and so this will we will take this up with the board after a two-week review of the book yeah and the books will be available in the curriculum office in homestead thanks [Laughter] machine technology yeah thank you for uh listening to me this evening this is a book that is used by the navigator advanced manufacturing classes and it does transcend their their entire program so i'm looking to mimic that by getting the same exact textbook encryption as well i'm using portions of this book for my lessons in the cheer as well as a couple other textbooks that i got from cengage as well this one would work with
038the full year course that i am proposing to start next year and it would work with a full year course that is being consolidated from the two semester courses this year and when i come back next year to talk about the third and last course of the sequence this book also would work well for that class as well it works all the way from drafting and sketching all the way to layout on materials and bench work with machines manual machining and computer analytical control machining all which we are prepared to prepare for our students at the high school the book because we are partnering with the community colleges we are asking for them to purchase the first round of textbooks because that's something that they can do as part of their federal perkins grant and
039it's just whether or not they would be able to purchase all 32 of them because 32 is really 16 would be for the new course next year so it has to be for a new course so if you see the prices and what we're looking at over here it's not nothing nothing like the sparker's asking for but it's a different program um i i did a different number of students actually and i and i gave all the paperwork to the head uh at economic talk because it's something we have been talking about for two years so you know they are supposed to invest back into our program and most of the time they do that through through the textbooks so the plan is for them to purchase all 32 but we might be able to
040put 16 of them because the law says it has to be a new class 2020 textbook so it's all pretty recent this technology does evolve and change but there is a good chunk of this book of stuff that has not changed in 30 40 years it's pretty fascinating when you go through this and see the see the pictures and then the text in there but this is something that we'd like to have um hard copies and it also comes with the online learning platform this month have you uh review that online platform i've used their online platforms for other things it's a lot of it is the testing and the digital version of the book personally i find it a little bit cumbersome um it's i prefer just a pdf if i'm reading an online
041text this is more like a page flip type of interface but the test banks that are available for you and not only that but the projects that our with kids which is what nonstop is using for their students to show their proficiency with machining and when i went i spent the week there this summer with one of our other teachers and all the projects that they had us working on that they worked with their students with were directly both from this book and from the nims organization national institute of networking skills it's good that you just answered it before yeah and there's a ton mean you look through this it aligns very heavily with math and measurements yeah and which is manufacturing precise congrats yeah i mean you you look at this up in there
042and it's it's precise and semi-precise measurements the stuff that we started talking about this year in our courses you know we're we're measuring the thousands of minutes to start i think it's really great for students to just be able to read a chart or a graph it's a wonderful practical application of special work with science skills yeah i mean you look through here you're going to see a ton of stuff about material properties heat treating of metals alloys metals here's your map yeah trigonometry geometry you know it's called shot map but it's harder than some of the stuff that you do well you know that's interesting that raises the question so how many of these kids who are taking this course are in trick or treat that i would have i don't know ahead so
043i'd have to cross-reference their schedules but what i can tell you is i have nine through twelfth graders in this course this year and there is a very wide range of learners in the class i have some students that i really wish they were younger so they can carry on to the next level of these courses but i also know that they're really thirsty to take this up next year in college so they might they might move right into non-talk um and i have a student who's looking at industrial design and biomedical engineering he wants he wants to make body parts so he's in this class and the other day i told him or the design needs in he needs a hundred made and he's learning how they're made in this process this year he's
044gonna go somewhere and probably north carolina yeah but they don't count and your course doesn't come with a prerequisite of truth or not no it does not but so these kids pick it up i mean yeah they can finally pick it up easier than if they were in the classroom what i can tell you is next semester is all of the heavy math and measurements because we have we spent a decent amount of our supplemental parking ground last year on metrology equipment and what's what i find really cool about teaching that through that lens is there's all these tools and all these things to measure and to find your angles and set your angles and when you have something in front of you that's a practical application of your of your science code science even
045just just last week we were drawing in the computer drawing program and i had to re-introduce the tangent right so why is this line tangent to the edge of the circle and now let's not just draw a line that we think touches the edge of the circles but let's put a constraint on that line and tell that line you've got to get into the circle into the circle and then you start looking at parts and really analyzing how you draw that part and say well why waste our time drawing the other half of this part it's a reflected part on the y-axis so let's look at a reflection process of drawing only half of the part and then copying it over on that y-axis and now you have this whole second half of that part
046without having to do all the dirty work two different times so i'm also teaching them how to be incredibly efficient as well wow it's exciting for me i'm halfway through my career and i'm starting over with something that's that's uh not necessarily brand new to me but related to our community here and something that i've enjoyed doing for a while and i'm learning not necessarily with them but um um i'm learning a lot through this process of doing the professional development and how to talk and and preparing to teach these kids and the equipment that work that we're getting is is really exciting to walk into that lab space i don't see something like that you know i've asked you in the past are you what are you seeing in terms of enrollment trends we're
047full um what i can tell you is next year year two won't be as full because we're graduating some of those students right so as i said i have students who are nine through twelve in the program we didn't give reference to the to the younger students in order to have that enrollment for next year but i i cannot take another student in that lab this year and it's gonna probably take two years in order for that second year to be full because next year we'll get a new crop up students in and there will probably be one or two seniors in that in the first year of course as well next year um but once we start getting more of the ownerships we might even just come back to you and say we can't
048take 12 fairness in this first year anymore because they've got to be taking it the next year they got started i just went through the kids really quick their math their math ranges from algebra 1 cp to aps includes modeling with method it's it's all over the it's board and i can tell you i i originally started i was going to be a math teacher and i found techet for my first semester by just really listening to my high school tech teachers in the shortage area and i can still do my math it's just in a much much more practical way [Music] well you are a great steward for this program because your enthusiasm has always come through quite a clear and it's contagious so keep it up all all right so yeah i knew
049that we send the precision machining technology third edition onto the full board for approval uh a second kevin's going to write that up so that it sounds a lot better taken care of no problem all righty so all in favor aye it's a fruit thank you all right thank you guys for listening thank you very much for being here tonight so this really is just to make sure that everyone is aware that we are planning to go to washington dc again or i should say that eighth grade class is planning that and they are working with mora esposito to make sure that there are enough safety measures in place so that this trip can run again this year as it did at the end of last year the trip is scheduled for [Music] the may
050may 25th through the 27th you know they leave at 6 a.m on the 25th and they come back late at night on the 27th um they see all the you know great sites in dc and they have reflection activities when they return it's a really great trip and that's all there is to report but it all turned out very well right yeah really do you feel like you're going to do a lot of extra they did they did they were very careful in the planning and making sure that the students were safe before they got on the bus and you know they had to take a lot of precautions but it was unrelenting and we're doing most of those precautions again i think it's too early to tell yeah okay testing it every year yeah
051i think after the new year when we have a better sense of what this spring will bring but we are making parents aware of it because if there is a cost associated we want to ensure that you know people are prepared and we don't give them plenty of we move on to the notices institute so the coaching institute is something that we have wanted to do for a number of years and i think um at the end of the year is when those registrations happen when we always found ourselves you know looking for just that much more money that we could sink into this it was really nice that with um some of the esser funds that we were able to spend the entire team this year through the connecticut center for school change they've
052changed their name now i believe they are ed leadership something i'll get you the new leadership partners i think it is um so anybody worked with two coaches from the center who um worked with myself and kevin plus five administrators from school buildings one at each level and one representing each of the elementary schools and then we took 13 teachers so our brands at the elementary level plus the math and ela culture that was approached from the elementary level we took our math coach from the middle school plus a division leader in math and ela so in middle school we're really targeting english language and math and then at the high school we tapped into three teachers one ela one math and then a little bit of a reading map and then in well speaker
053who is one of the librarian specialists and so we figured that we had this real tailored coaching along the lines of the subject areas that really help our teachers as well if you've got a chance to see convocation we know that we had a guest speaker come who was a coach who comes from dartmouth and spoke a lot about that you know that process and we're really hoping to again with this extra fund really raise everyone's talents and tap into the experience of the people that we have in district by i wanted to give you an update on that because we went for three days and now concluded last week support within the district kevin and i have set up monthly meetings to create a community of practice for the coaches across the district so
054that they can come and both learn more about the acceleration model and have partners to work with around the coaching sphere so we're very excited about this and are hopeful that um it will be successful we've got an amazing team of people really grateful so then they're serving as coaches to their peers so this is going according to a plan that you've set in motion a year ago good stuff so when we spoke you know you are funding this with us or funds and we talked about it maybe you could just you know fill in and about um you know those esser funds don't last forever so what what's the long-term plan for this so the long-term plan is that we are investing in our own people so that we are building the capacity of
055those teacher leaders within the district so that they can now have this training now rely upon the community that we've created for them within the district and they can continue to build on those skills so we intend to go to one more training in the spring to sort of wrap up that work but that is the same now the coaches are all our own people we did not hire coaches from outside we are simply building the capacity of the people that we have within that answer yeah i think we you know i had asked i think does this become a budget item going forward and that was i guess where you know that was my question yeah just ask that um no because in other fees none of these people who look at this are
056new hires on our existing staff yep okay so thank you um and now we get an english learner's enrollment update thank you uh october 1 every year is our psis date the day that we capture our enrollment for the year so it's a it's timely for us to take a look at our el population our english learners and um some of the trends that we're seeing this year are not entirely unanticipated you'll know this let me just orient you to the document that top chart shows now the last six years the top row of that chart shows the last six years of our total enrollment based on october 1 numbers so you can see that in 2016 and 17 we started with a population of 38 english learners in the district and we're now at
05793. last year when i gave a similar report we had a bump from kind of in the 50s up to 75. what we weren't sure about at the time was how much of that was um related to kind of situational copied uh related enrollment how much of that was related to the general trends that we knew were going to continue um and it looks based on this year that we're continuing to trend up on that front um just below those numbers you'll see the top five home languages for each of the years and the numbers next to it just indicate how many students have that language's home language so you can see that in most of the years spanish has been our highest home language but not in every year and you'll see an interesting
058mix of languages throughout so it's not we really do have a wide number of different home languages in the district representing this population that's important for programming on that front the other two graphs in here give you breakdowns of similar information both by school and also by grade level and in thinking about the grade level it does run tend to run that our elementary english learner population is the highest and this makes sense to us in a lot of ways because as students are in school for a period of time getting um getting both in instruction all day long and also support as developing english learners become proficient in english and no longer qualify to be english workers so it makes sense to us that our highest numbers of english learners are in kind of
059the primary grade levels one of our most of our buildings back on the front page did see uh increases uh the largest increase actually was last year at highland had a significant number an increase in the el population one of the things that i feel really good about though is this is not unanticipated for us so we have been they have had we have things in place we continue to have them in place to make sure we have the right supports for our english learners through our teachers in programming and so on um we did re-establish a support relationship with aces this year we had a one-year pause on that we have people internally who can give that training and bid last year um and there's something beneficial about having the outside person who's got
060just that next level of expertise provide that training her name is maggie stevens she has been in once um to support teachers who have english springs either for the first time or for the first time in a long time because there's a lot of the supports for english learners that some of which are counter-intuitive like we tend to want to translate everything and that's not really going to be the best approach for in all situations help develop an english learner situation maybe translate but not always so some of those things it's good to have on the expert training from aces and maggie has actually also provided us a really good resource we've added to our resource catalog this year a book that has any language that's spoken in connecticut by 10 or more students is
061represented in this book and it tells you the typical grammar sounds syntax errors that those learners are likely to meet which is really helpful um to know where does the object show up in in that sentence how are those where does the modifier show that where are the typical sound that a student's going to have a hard time picking up and reading so to really she's a really good resource in this this additional resources also we're also consciously supporting um getting more of our existing staff t-cell certified and tesol as the certification that we can directly support english learners so we have uh two people in the process to additional people in the process to get that certification this year um so there are a lot of good things in place to help support our
062english communities and also the addition of the that i know we've spoken about and we approved at a board meeting recently um brian murphy our family and community engagement coordinator helping connect with us with you know families our numbers are trending in the the direction that um we anticipated we weren't quite sure what was going to be happening with that bump last year um but we have good things in place to support our growing young population kevin we don't get el ninos and how many um teachers are peaceful so we have um we actually have two uh t-cell certified teachers right now one is only one is actually operating or teaching under that certification but we have multiple people with two cell certifications we have two additional that are getting trained now so that will
063be one tesol certified teacher at every grade level bands someone else elementary something like middle high school and they just move from schools so elementary level yeah yeah pat castle is the elementary or person who oversees that so she's really helping support um support the people who are helping their english learners whether that's a classroom teacher or a literacy support team tutor so she's overseeing that kristen castellanos at the middle school she in that well oversees supporting teachers and also provides direct support and now russell in high school serving similarly to supporting teachers and students so most of our um english learner families are moving out and these this is a reflection of families moving in district yes and um clearly they're moving into this highland area um well highland just has more it does
064have more students but do you is there are they are they identifying highland as the school of choice or is it just the patterns that i i don't know for sure um what we have seen anecdotally sometimes is that's pretty significant i would say our significant year that bump was last year [Music] their increase in the oil population this year is more in line with percentage-wise the most of their building increases but last year they did um they did have a they doubled yeah so that was a significant and we did um provide some more support there because that was not we weren't anticipating that many students at that school so we did provide some direct additional support there well highlands had like a 4.7 rate of english learners on that rate 4.7 enrollment chapman
065had 1.8 doolittle had 2.7 so yeah but i don't know i don't know if i'd be able to say that families are choosing highest doesn't matter okay yeah and then so where we see declines you know some languages falling off the chart is that are they have they graduated out of the program or multiple reasons so so some is because as students exit the program um because they pass the last links um that and some of our decreases in uh home language identifications from that process i thought you were getting at these are the top five languages we have representation of over 20 right right and um but for example urgent urdu would still be there if it were nine yeah yeah it still shows up on on there and that's one of the next
066ones down it just happens to be a few less through both students passing the loss and some moving so it's me i didn't realize mandarin okay well thanks i love your charts yeah that's thanks it's good to see it it's good to see officially yeah so okay um next up is approval of the charts and graphs so this one is something that at our last board of education meeting the full board had agreed to adopt the flexibilities for teacher administrator evaluation he put into the state for that and they approved it to close the loop on that and give you that update okay okay and then now the um sat overview for the high school yes so i'm giving you a sheet that has green and red on it i'm not trying to jump to
067another holiday what i've given you is a five year summary of where you are and i'd like to talk a little bit about some context so just let me take you through the charts you know this is all the grade 11 school day s.a.t the 2021 administration which this year seniors when we were juniors took place on march 24th so it's typically a mortgage test so this is the 20 so in 2017. those do that's the junior class for 2017 junior class for 2018 19 20 to 21. so you're not looking at a cold comparison you're looking at a single test date for a single group of people so we do look for trends but it's hard to compare because they're different groups of kids one strange part of the chart is what you see
068are percentages so you see the percent of students in each column erw is evidence-based reading money and math the percent of students who reach benchmark or better a benchmark score for erw evidence-based reunion is 4e the benchmark for math is 530. so for example the first column 88.3 of the amount of students hit benchmark in evidence-based reading writing and 79.1 percent did not 2017. so that's what this chart shows and gestures in green everything is listed alphabetically for our comparison you want to see so the fourth column 2020 is different that shows the actual average score for the two subtests because we don't have those data indicating what percent of students my benchmark because there wasn't an average number of students who took it students could elect to take the makeup exam in 2020 so
069it was involved it was a very odd year i put that there and what i did was i found i didn't say what the average scores were and did a comparison there so that is not as scientific as the other columns that are tied to when the state releases those data regarding benchmark achievement okay for each of the the junior classes so what when we when we got our results and when i shared this with the full faculty i first shared with the instructional leadership team and then with our full faculty and to say we were just conservative uh for 2021 we were and what we all felt was a disconnect between what we see every day in the classroom and then how it translates to standardized testing for that year especially but as we
070look more deeply we see sort of the flat line um in 19 through nine in both both tests 15th in 2018. fourth in math in 2019 and i'm sorry fourth and eight brw 2019 and 12 and math in 2019 and then this year 15th in evidence-based reading and reading 17th in that so what does all of that mean well what it means is to contextualize 94 percent of the derby schools showed us a math score drop 83 percent of derby derby schools saw erw drop in 2021 so i think that is that i would ever think that that's a co-big impact um but we also want to be sure whether it's an assessment whether it is the amazing content you saw or two teachers presenting no matter what is put in front of our students
071we want them to succeed so he said about it making a plan to move forward and we've looked deeply and are continuing to look deeply at higher level tasks what kinds of tasks are they asked for on this assessment how does that comfort with what we're getting data and looking at how we're meeting standards and looking at how we are supporting our students to be able to succeed in whatever material is putting from him in math and english we're analyzing data we're continuing to align curriculum we continue to provide support in math and writing workshops and we know thankfully he did get an additional position for a manager a certified math intervention teacher so that and we've been asking for that and we could could have it for a couple of years and so we're
072thrilled that we have that additional position to support our students that is being represented as fully pushing in um pull out support uh and we're also able now to offer support to students every period until three and i'm sorry both writing and mathematics um and so that's how we're we're supporting embedding both daily tasks looking at our assessments aligning curriculum and making sure that we are sticking with our acceleration practices which do have a strong impact ensuring that the content that students need is the content that they're getting do you are these uh the 480 and 530. is that consistent across yes okay so that's that's that's right that is every single school that every single school takes the sat that is set by the college board let me explain what that means what that
073means is that score of 480 and 530 needs 75 percent of students who achieve that support and get a 75 or veteran equivalent college course it is predictive of college college policy programs and then are there you know they they test so many concepts in both subject areas um are you finding weaknesses in particular that's what we're analyzing right now where is it that there's a disconnect did you spend too much time on x instead of y is it is it a tweak that would allow a little more practice something we did find already is reading ensuring that students are comprehending the kinds of questions that they have these are very complex questions that students are asked to deal with on the sat are they able to really read the question are they rushing through
074and so that's something that we took a look at um you know where where are the distractors so there's really a two-pronged approach it's both it's it's the the content that is already embedded in our standards ensuring that we're focusing on what students need and then seeing where they might have some difficulty with vocabulary or certain kinds of reading tasks both in the math and the evidence-based reading learning assessment piece and that if that's what both departments are digging into them now you have a new head of the math department yes we did and didn't you you said you were looking you are changing the program the text aren't you or the we're looking at some of the core some of the core math texts are being reevaluated um and so in the um you
075know just the whole curriculum review process we're not being adopting a new text to be like pulling it out of sequence and saying we've got to we see we've got something we've got to deal with we're going yeah there's a there's a couple of things that play there some things that we had wanted to look at during covet could not happen just simply because of logistics right so that is happening and then i think the other the real big thing that's happened is with the new math department chair how she's been very strategic about um looking at how we support students using the math coach and using the approach that i referred to before and how we're going to change that so we've got partner work happening for each math course during each day and
076support for students so they split up their periods and half of the period the teachers collaborate and have the period they deliver support to students you know they determine the first of the second half depending on me i think the future is right for our students for math i do not think that this is a score that we will see moving forward i think that's the last time we will be in that category no are you um also going to some of these other schools i mean yes okay and seeing what absolutely conversations yeah because i you know when when jeff's presented in september just it was kind of startling to see um and i know you had just gotten them that day or the day before um but what struck me was how do
077we go from performing so well in eighth grade and then within a very how did this cohort of students perform when they took the psja when they took and what we do see with this cohort of students is it is in comparison to previous years and i think some of that is copic related but there but there there was not the extreme it wasn't as extreme looking at their cohorted data so that is why we focus on the psat results look even more intensely now to see where is it that when students took their tests in october we don't get the results until december january and then what can we do to support them between them and the next set of psats if you're a ninth grader or a tenth grader and then then eleventh
078grader what do you mean between them and the sat in march and this current group of sats they were the first group to take ninth grade psats so that's just kind of a new process for us at the high school too and today trying to analyze grade 9 to 10 10 to 11 for the psats leading classes as you just said um so so you know and i'm just thinking i'm thinking that too some of the numbers come in that you had where remember we was a couple where we saw the third graders had a dip in their performance now i'm just wondering you know was that there when these guys were in third grade and i can and i may be totally off the wall but i mean should we start looking at these
079young kids now to ensure that yes so that is that's what we do that our data team does yeah as a matter of fact mary and i have a meeting with naviar department chair fermat i met with her last week and she's been very diligently looking at both every course every sat point and backwards looking at where those students came from so all the things that you're talking about are actively happening and when we look back and i can't let you speak as i look back to you know when we implemented eureka i think we've seen so much success there i know that as our students are coming up their math minds are different than they were seven years ago when we were teaching from different methods [Music] i wasn't going to add too much
080more than that other than um you know particularly for third graders it was a the first time they were taking the assessment so we have some idea how they were performing over multiple years because we had some internal assessments they didn't necessarily perform quite as we predicted but also not only that balance we're predicting um and i know really paying attention to well pertaining to all yes levels of learners right right of course but for the students in the grade level bands where it doesn't match kind of what we historically have seen you know we know that there's a connection to the environment that we've been in the last 18 months that still doesn't change the work of we have students who we know are capable we know that if we put the right instruction
081in front of them they can not meet great standards and people like in the mass isolation nelly our math coach 86 and on the reading site pat castle at the elementary level of really finding tuned into exactly where were some of those gaps um where were some of the things that didn't match what we know that we typically see from our student performance similarly at the middle school kristin castellano and kristen chandler division leaders on them are now getting to some of that financing and understanding themselves looking at cohorts of students coming through is not brand new for us it's just a different level of kind of attention because there are just some things that have been different from our typical experience of the last year and a half so we have to look at
082it even a little bit more closely than we so do you think any of this because if you only like dealing with rankings um then you're not dealing with you've taken out the coconut except were we less successful at taking care of our students other needs besides academics um whether it's social social emotional or more successful it seems like we have more fragile students what if you look at these right i wouldn't associate score with emotional fragility necessarily i would associate that with content um with practice with structured focus and an exposure to complex concepts that are aligned between the standards that are in the assessment standards with alignment between those two things so the scores themselves are are fairly strong it's just the number of students who didn't hit them by 30. right there
083there were a good cluster of kids who were 5 20. just didn't get that 5 30 not to minimize at all um but again we we didn't we are not it doesn't trap with where we see our daily experiences and that disconnect has to get right i'd love to know how sean's kids do because with practical math i wonder if nicole is getting chocolately a number of things we're looking at a number of ways in which they you know they're using it practically and it may have made sense i would all these questions an instructional trick too is how students understand the same concept but if it's worded differently that's why i was talking about how reading is has the college board changed its test in 2015 the college board aligned its test with state
084standards so they made that very conscious decision to do that to make the test more aligned with what we teach rather than the more abstract concepts that were being tested if they removed analogies from the uh the reading test they removed um a number of topics from the mathematics and focused more on trigonometry and um higher order higher level map on gm which takes a very small portion of the saturn it's on there but it's not it doesn't have any questions that was prior to this 2015 is when you have to change the date yeah so this is the same test that they're getting assessed on the same test and it is the sat is the cycle nutrition's dream it is it is absolutely normal referenced and the kids that take it they're all competing
085against themselves and not english that's how their ranges are set and the questions stems are tested okay and then is the approach with the sat similar you know our kids are testing are working within gssm three three three well no no okay totally different thing yeah um okay initially one more change which the sat will be now online so that's a change for this year okay so that could be a little bit of a challenge but they're pretty adaptive um testing but we'll give them and they've been online testing now for years yeah they've been doing that to us but you know yeah you know i just think we have to be honest with everybody with the community if they ask questions just yes i just don't want that but there's so you're right [Music]
086okay well um i'm wondering do we um you're thinking would it make sense since we're talking about future topics for meetings to bring who the new math specialist is or the new math right now it makes sense to have her come in i don't think so no i don't think so i think that this is an internal process that we need to continue to look at i fully confident in dr gad and her team in working with the math teachers there that they are on the right track i think what they will do is they will bring you the next level of data once psat data is in and they will bring you any benchmark data that is available so that they can keep you apprised of that but the specifics of all of those
087strategies is day to day and in classroom work that we are we are committed to so i think mary's really outlined the plan as it stands for this year and i think it's pretty pretty detailed but i appreciate where your head's at well if there is anything that we need as far as curriculum resources new textbook funding for resources etc i know that that dr god will bring that back to this table thank you thanks yeah unless you break down and find if you just even just not meeting topics but just keep a surprise of where your weaknesses are and yeah so we're there and thank you address concerns we deal with it all in curriculum good to bed that's right okay um thanks guys thanks mary thank you all right and then last item
088is ngss alive india professional professional development update uh last spring i believe we shared i think at our june meeting that we were reestablishing our relationship with the connecticut science center to provide professional development so just a brief report that we've had um two sessions already this year uh one at the elementary level with our rams and we're doing a coaching the coach model with them so our insult is working with our rams and we're really focused on we actually have a resource at the elementary level um but maximizing that resource be just just what you saw in the front cover of that book phenomena based in structure leading to questions and you're finding through modeling and experiments and those kind of things so um our consumers worked with our grams once already and low
089again next friday one of five or six times in the year for elementary and we also had a middle school session and that design is with our entire middle school division we had a full day pb re-watch of kind of our work to get everybody back and back into work and their process is actually going to be monthly department meetings after school department meetings for small chunks an hour at a time for um six additional sessions on the year so close to monthly between so we shared that we were restarting that relationship uh last spring monday to know we've had one session each at the elementary middle school level our second session is coming up soon and i believe two of her subject areas biology biology and her science and they will be doing a
090lesson study where they will be developing lessons according to the ngs framework the center will come back they'll observe each other seeing how this lesson worked they'll come back rewrite and therefore we'll be running all of the different courses through that protocol so that everyone can learn that alignment process and how to write the lessons so we're just so glad that we can have people come in the buildings again or at least come here for that kind of pd i know julie is really glad to be getting this back on track as as are we all k through 12 to get this ship moving again so we wanted to make sure we gave the update since we seem to talk about ngss a lot because it's been over such a long period of time we're
091back at work at it great thank you all right well that is the last item on the agenda so um sure okay hi we're done