001um i call this meeting to order um can we have the roll call yes here present tony peregini perry genie okay and harrigan here you have a quorum um okay can we rise for the pledge do we have it no that's good enough we have jesus to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you everybody for being here our first curriculum meeting of the wow 2021-2022 school year um i'm going to open the meeting with public comment do we have any no public comment from the audience and no emails received okay thank you um okay next item on the agenda is a review of the minutes of the june 14 2021 meeting faith yes
002sir jack just uh i'm sorry i was muted earlier i just wanted to say uh as far as modifying the agenda you have to make that motion now robber rules are ordering for you so we don't get in trouble okay thank you um all right we it's been brought to our attention that item 3b um needs to be moved agenda or repositioned into the agenda as new business um do i hear a motion to move that item sophie right yes tony go what so can i make the motion i'm sorry yes so i move that we create a new item item five uh item three actually we need to make uh item for new business and move item 3a to item 500 new business and you know let's take a step back four should be
003new business and we move three b to item four and item five would be adjourned okay ann was that a second yeah yay thank you all in favor aye aye thank you so much okay um item two uh review of the minutes of the june 14th meeting you've all had a chance to review are there any additions corrections or changes minutes i actually have something and so i reviewed the minutes and i was not there at that meeting um but i noticed that it said that you had uh tabled the minute from may 10th meeting and so i was wondering if we're going to um these items are the tabled minutes are not on the agenda and the motion or the um item agenda is a review of the minutes of the june 14 2021
004meeting and that's what we'll act on so we'll need to add this to the next agenda to prove it [Music] minutes great okay and any additions we're going to move that to the next meeting yes um okay um all right we'll hear a motion to approve the minutes for the june 14th i move through the minutes of june okay do i hear a second okay all in favor okay thank you okay um item three is new business the flexibilities formally 3b of the flexibilities for implementing the connecticut guidelines for educator evaluations uh 2017 for the 2021-2022 school year so uh i think we're going to start with a the curriculum writing institute and i think flexibility is become number four under a new business okay so we're going to build agenda so we're on 3a
005the curriculum writing lesson too yes thank you okay um 3a uh informational item curriculum institute okay so thank you so much i um i know that some of you may have heard a little bit about the curriculum writing institute from our convocation i wanted to share since i had spoken with a couple of you i think we even had a board meeting on the day that i was headed over there and we had a wonderful turnout for our field running institute of over 80 educators k through 12 across the district it's well attended and more importantly the work that came out of that was extremely beneficial we were able to get a lot of curriculum writing done and teachers were able to work together collaboratively across grade levels and sometimes even across subject areas so
006i wanted to share this with you all being that you're like the cheerleaders behind the scenes for current kills and i wanted to show you um a little video that uh for mike finally gratefully thankfully put together for us so i'm going to go ahead and share my screen [Music] yes all right wow [Music] i would say it was a wonderful opportunity to i would describe the writing institute as an opportunity for teachers um across the district to have some pd on how to make authentic learning tasks we had time for a pd in the morning and followed by lots of collab time with gray levels to create a unit um that is updated for our curriculum it gives us a whole chunk of time where we devote hours just working on a unit unit
007as opposed to working individually at my home computer or working in my classroom having an hour on a tuesday afternoon and then the next time i worked on curriculum writing i would have to re-acclimate myself to think where did i leave off what i still have to do this is so beneficial one thing i learned i learned curriculum writing institute isn't so much so much it's something that's been solidified beginning point in which we can then look at other units in the future and know that there will be consistency across the grade level and throughout the district as well as making connections to grade 2 teachers in other buildings my biggest takeaway from the curriculum writing writing too is really really look at our curriculum and try and try and get changes and adjustments to
008better next year the most important things to take away from this experience is that we have time to work together and for years we've been asking for instruction on how to create curriculum and this gave us that opportunity and it's been awesome just having having um um a great great amount of teachers teachers that are from different different different subject areas and just bouncing ideas back and forth between people that you don't have a chance to see very often seeing everyone being with everyone and running ideas back and forth day-to-day with different people has really worked well also you work better with a balanced practice and you get a t-shirt [Music] you might have about the institute marlene could you repeat that we did not hear yes you know what i'm also going to grab
009the microphone up here because hopefully that will help us out so faith i was saying that if you have any questions about the curriculum writing institute we'd be happy to answer those i'm going to confess i don't know is it possible the microphone was on because there was a lot of reverberation oh you didn't hear it very well no we heard it but it was a double echo i think it was the microphone might have been picking up at the same time too but right now you're loud and clear so i think we're good yes thank you am i too loud am i blowing you away no no you're good thank you well i'm sorry about that i know tony watched that for for um that was his second time but faith i'm also happy
010to share that with you so that you can check it out without such bad sound quality great thank you um i i don't have any questions i don't know if ann or tony does but ann yeah so um would you say that like the biggest benefit of that curriculum writing institute was um the looking at curriculum from grade to grade and having some of that cohesiveness involved or was it more um update curriculum or how would you describe sort of i think the big takeaways from that were different for different people i think that the teachers really appreciated the time to collaborate as a group on a project i think from a district perspective and probably from the teachers as well it was quality time to update curriculum i think from a district perspective being
011that we're focused on acceleration as a strategy for learning that we really are focused on deep and engaging learning tasks and so this group was given um real good coaching and instruction around starting with an authentic real world task making sure it's attached to standards and then backwards planning so we definitely use that on you know backwards design planning to do this the collaboration was key the time the fact that they were trained in how to write curriculum came through and was a need that i had heard you know for the last couple years that i've been around and wanted to give them that training and then from my perspective i've talked with this committee about having a library of our curriculum that's easily accessible and so that was a giant step forward of having
012that all in one place so that was another benefit um the last one is the feedback so they did it all together so we were able to provide teachers with feedback so they can go back revise put those changes in and then we sort of take it and it's a living breathing document but we've still got it in the curriculum library now thank you i've heard good really good things from a couple of teachers out there who attended like you said we just appreciate being able to work with their colleagues yeah yeah and also there's there's something to have that time set aside just to work on that one thing yeah you know they started with you know nothing on the paper and then at the end of that week they had done so much
013work it was great to see it was great to work with them and you could see how many people attended because they'll have those red t-shirts on at convocation so it was nice very nice to see the question so i know one of the topics was acceleration and getting the teachers geared to update the curriculum around that is there going to be an opportunity to uh have another curriculum to check in somewhere maybe mid-year to see how that's going and adjust curriculum content depending on how acceleration's working for various teachers or is this just a one-time um kickoff or to be more sessions i would say definitely it was a kickoff and it's something that i'd like to replicate again next june as well and what we've had the checkpoints along the way are that
014they received feedback over the summer and then at that august professional development day each department chair each team member who was present shared that with the rest of their larger department or their grade level or their school so now that's being put in place and we'll have whether it's grade level meetings or department meetings or subject area meetings along the way to check in and see how that's going great thank you great okay thank you um next item is the um sba assessment data yes so i believe in your packets you have a link to at least some of the information so i will share that with you first nope [Music] hang on my eyes are no good from this distance so i'm going to show share it one more okay all right how's that
015looking from your end tony and uh faith it looks good i have my own copy too so i'm good if you don't want to share yeah great great okay so we're looking at our 2021 smarter balanced ela math and ngss science data and we had gotten school districts get this information over the summer it is embargoed until a certain point this year they released batches of it so what you're looking at here is our english language arts percentages of students who achieved bands one two three and four and then you have those her at or above goal which is that combination of bands three and four and then you also have at the bottom the district three through eight percentage at or above goal and what you can see there is how we've done as
016compared to if anyone in the back here wants it may be a little tricky to see you may want to look and see how we did compared to a non-covered year so this is just our district and you could see where we were in 1516 16 17 17 18 18 19. so i was pleased to see that the change was not drastic as you recall we had mass breaks we had hand washing we had later arrival and dismissal procedures and we were working very hard to make sure that um there was not a lot of learning loss and in in concert with that we were really working hard at acceleration to make sure that kids would have what they needed in the grade level to master the standards and so those those there are our
017ela scores and math scores if you look the column all the way to the right you can see the percent that we dipped on average from our 1819 scores so our largest dip may have been in grade eight for math i mean yep for math and for ela in the other areas it was you know two percent in in grades five and six and grade seven only a quick question uh other than being a coveteer we had a mix of hybrid and synchronous asynchronous learning what do you have an idea yet what drove that corporation at a great day was anyone single factor or was there a culmination of um perfect storm for that certainly it was a perfect storm we also had some things at play with cohorting because students were cohorted they did
018not mix up for classes and so they really were staying with the same group which we know is not a good strategy but our hands were really tied with you know trying to make sure that we brought all kids in but we weren't mixing them up and remixing them and having that the teachers moved from classroom to classroom rather than the students so that is one area but kevin did you want to i was going to add two things on that one that um there were some spots where some of the dips match might happen grade 8 was not that case however anecdotally from the state and in looking at some of the data there were districts where we had 12 and 15 dip in grade 8. there was 25 30 percent dip in grade
0198 in some other districts so i think across the state grade eight was a particular uh grade level that uh from a statewide view had some significant drops so i don't i do think a little bit of the perfect storm that you're talking about we're not 100 sure about why all those dips it wasn't entirely uh inconsistent with what was happening in other districts across the state got it thank i want to show you this other spreadsheet that i started to share with you before because i think that really shows a bigger picture when you compare where we were with where other districts were elsewhere in the state so i want to make sure you can see this let me know how that looks so if we want to first take a look at ela
020you can see where we were as compared to where a lot of other districts were so while we may have had a slight dip there were some other districts who had you know larger overall grade three through eight drops marlin can you explain what we're looking at sure sure so okay there you go thank you no we didn't see the headings oh okay okay this is a list of all the districts in our durg across the left and combined grades three through eight english language art scores and if we were to scroll to the bottom you would see that among our durg we ended up placing third out of the 21 districts we had 77.23 of our students were at goal and other districts did not fare so well their their gap was larger and
021if we move over to math eight three through eight combined you'll see the same thing and this row k is this year's data and you can compare it to last year's and you can go back four or five years and see the the percentage change is it safe to say that we had made quite a nice in the math the year before we did we did we had put significant energies and efforts into that math and had hoped to continue some of that work but cobin really impacted us being able to pull people to work together you know across tables across buildings and we do have plans to to do that particularly at some of the higher grade levels could you raise that up to madison or me okay so um they're one district that
022it looks like the only district that improved so um just it's just observation i read a story about it that they actually um somehow did that um i i i it's interesting to see us compare it against other districts but i am concerned about what's going on in our district and there are some other grades where we have 10 [Music] declines in performance um and i you know it a lot of factors going on last year um and i understand that i i know you guys are saying acceleration is the way to go um i look at these results and i'm a little leery i'm concerned um so how can we make sure that with acceleration we're on the right track um and that we're not losing importance important skills as we look to ensure
023that the kids are getting what they need without extraneous information so it sounds like you want me to convince you that our students are going to be okay i know they're going to acceleration work in our curriculum writing work and our additional collaboration time and our our new department chair at the high school and our new textbooks and the new um the new math inventory i think all of these things faith are are truly pointing in the right direction and i think they are what enabled us to continue to be fifth in the state of connecticut when you're talking about our scores as compared to the rest of the state i think that we've had i had calls today asking to reach out to to talk about what we're doing so um i'm i'm feeling
024pretty good about where we're headed i i am i do i like do i like to see a drop no but i have colleagues who have had a 15 20 30 drop so when you compare it to that i think heck we are on the right track this is what we need to be doing for our kids and i would not be doing my job if i didn't ask that question from all again i understand that probably the biggest thing uh you know the biggest factor was every single obstacle that was thrown in your direction but i also want to make sure that we are continually monitoring this and constantly asking ourselves are we doing the right thing and i uh right now it looks yes in comparison to other districts but you know i
025as i said need to ask the question trust but verify i think is what the faith is saying so so marlene i i think i'm going to try to sell faith on this but i think one of the reassurances i have is the fact that acceleration is identifying those gaps kids need to catch up on it's not trying to re-teach last school year and further behind so i i know based on the curriculum writing uh talking from the teachers they're they're pretty confident they get the kids caught up actually a little bit ahead so i know we're not going to see these results um for a while probably not during the next school year but it'd be nice to see some indicators um some checkpoints throughout the year to see how many from the teachers
026just to see how they feel the kids are doing it they truly are getting caught up and accelerated and they're seeing those positive changes happening but i trust it will happen which i think goes back to the question you asked earlier tony are we going to go back and and take stock mid-year and so again that's that's all i think all of the things and the questions that you are asking is that living and breathing every single day day in and day out work that kevin and myself and the math coordinator and english language arts coordinator and and mary and maureen that's that's this is what we live and breathe we're constantly doing you know those check-ins so i appreciate that you have an appreciation for those questions and that work which we do so
027that's good that we're all sitting on this curriculum company thank you okay um great all right um and i'm sorry i do you have any questions when you have one all right when you do we'll pass it over again okay thank you okay i don't want to miss um miss the ngss piece of that which was at the bottom of the handout that everyone has and the link so uh grade five eighty percent grade eight seventy three percent we really stayed about steady where we were we need we have some work to do with grade 11 which as you know the work that we had planned was not able to happen because of the virus and our work with the connecticut science center i sometimes wonder that you all are going to be very broken
028i'd be surprised that we had a meeting it didn't mention that i'm kind of exploiting it so it's actually a good thing thank you so um we certainly have plans for that i was at a instructional leadership team today where dr gad was really delving into the data of the ngss with her team we are working with julie barker and the administrative team and i have a meeting on thursday to further explore some of the improvements that we can make some of which are really easy and we don't think that we will see that number again and that is it for the assessment data okay um thank you for that um any questions on ngss from anybody just okay i don't see any all right um next item is an out-of-state overnight field it's just
029informational it's not out of country so therefore um we don't have to take action on it yes and and typically these field trips just because of the fact that we're in coven you might not see a trip like this because it's not for approval but being that we're just starting to get out of the woods with everything i thought it was important to let you know in case anyone in the community asked you like wow we're sending kids to florida what you know what's going on how do you feel about that disneyland yeah disney world even better with matt swanson that's gonna be a fun trip i know matt a little bit i'm gonna run this over to mary so you could hear her clearly and she's gonna give you a little uh inside scoop
030on the trip to disney good evening can you hear me yep my okay good um this is this is a great trip that matt has put into place and i'm going to start at the end where questions typically arise which is is there a plan for insurance and ensuring that if students sign up for a trip especially in these uncertain times is it covered and yes it is uh he has discussed this with the group destinations unlimited that's working to support the trip and organize not only security but also any kind of insurance and and returns for fees in the event of an of of a cancellation so i know that this is this is part of the the turbulent time question um so they the vendors would get as much refund as as possible
031that we strongly recommend anyone who participates to get the insurance uh so that they would get at least 75 percent of what the of what the outlay is so this is a trip for our students who are participating in the history through pop culture course and it's tied to a larger project where they're looking at pop culture through the lens of the way disney has portrayed american culture for decades uh and so they will be going to florida to sit with the imagi at the imagination campus and to work with the imagineers on theme park design and how they design and develop stories so that as students then retell some of their historical insights based on their work in the pop culture class utilizing different disney movies they're going to create their own story at
032cheshire high school by doing a mural down by the the assistant principal's office and so that's going to act as a as an installation demonstrating their year's worth of work so this is a way for them to learn from how disney demonstrates their messaging how disney's tell stories how disney utilizes uh and also commemorates shifts in american culture and how we're going to use that as a lens to understand american popular culture so this this kind of this full project is very interdisciplinary um they're going to be contributions from our art department our career and technical education department and also obviously our social studies department and our special education department so really bringing a number of students together on a number of talents together uh to tell the story of american popular culture through the
033lens of disney so that's the purpose of the trip uh there are 28 students attending so the student ratio they're looking at two chaperones so one chaperone for every 14 students they would be traveling obviously by by by bus airplane and motor coach between here and there and they'll be provided with meals some meals on their own certainly the day of the initial trip and there's also a security guard uh so that's going to be present at the hotel to ensure that the whole group is safe and the cost is 2 for each attendee right sounds like quite a trip and quite a project it's a it's a huge project that they've undertaken it's so exciting calling it the disney museum project i maybe it's i i i was gonna say uh i don't remember
034or recall this trip this type of trip in the past is this uh something new or are there similar trips to different this is new in the country yeah this is new it sounds pretty exciting and the other the other question i had was um do we have uh for students or parents that maybe can't afford the trip are there any uh type of fundraising or other avenues that we're looking at i know we you always have a couple programs in mind when you when you do these trips mary yes and with every trip students can also do some fundraising prior to the trip so that's how we typically handle that great thank you sure great my pleasure oh that is april 7th through the 13th so over april vacation a while away great wonderful
035thank you sure okay um and then last item on the information under informational items is state assessment calendar yes if you'd like to take a look uh the state releases each of the state assessment calendar so i always try and make sure that folks see that in september we will set our district calendar usually somewhere in january once we have a better idea of snow days and can gauge how many weeks we're probably going to be in school well okay just taking a quick look at it all right thank you sure any comments or questions no yeah tony so just one quick question in the state assessment calendar yes more i have no issues with it i get it i i just wonder sometimes as you know we have uh parents that are worried about
036too much testing going on um and as long as folks understand that this is not for all grade levels or certain great levels i think even last year marlene uh you thought that someone asked the question how much time is spent actually preparing for the s back and i i want to say it was about maybe four hours in total it would be worthwhile to do something for each one of these tests so folks have an idea of it's not a lot of time it's a few hours here and there it's not going to take up the whole year just to put people's minds at ease what the that's all right just yeah no we did that and we also talked about um having a little fun with some of the test questions at one
037of our curriculum committee meetings this fall i'm ready so all right so after we plan that um real quest marlene could you quickly go through we all understand what the s back is could these other tests could you just explain what they're measuring sure bear with me a second i just want to pull it up so i'm looking at the same thing now those of you who are here don't laugh i know i just blew that up very much but i'm having a hard time seeing it from this distance i say i'll read it how about if i read it no i got it i got it faith so the ngss is the next generations right and standards assessment um that first thing is just so that if you needed to that's this is sort
038of a document internally as well that is the browser that we use to access the smarter balance and the ngss tests the connecticut alternative assessment is for special education students with a very specific line item in their iep that allows them to take a version of the science test i'm sorry of the regular test and then you can see this the second one the alternative science assessment the ctas again especially for some of our most impaired students the smarter balanced assessments that is the one for grades three through eight and then the sat school day which is only for our grade 11 kids okay thank you and that then that so really it's the it's sat school day for all grade 11 across the state the smarter balance for all the kids three through eight
039um the ngss for grades three five and eight those other two are specifically for special education students okay great thank you you're welcome okay um any other questions all right moving on to item four right yeah now do you all have a new business can you all access the um the slides yep yes okay so what i will do is i will walk you through them so you remember last year that commissioner cardona at the time had provided districts with an opportunity to have some flexibility in their educator evaluation plan and the reason for that was because of cobit and getting into classrooms and spending um you know too much time and having teachers out of the classroom for some of those more formal evaluations what we have typically heard from our teachers and our
040evaluators is that the informal evaluation sometimes can be much more meaningful because they're sort of on the spot they're not planned you don't know someone's coming in it seems to lend itself more to real life and to some really nice feedback so this year the new commissioner also has granted us an opportunity to utilize the new flexibilities in the guidance it indicates that we need to meet with our pdec committee our group of administrators and teachers who represent all different types of evaluations so teacher evaluation school counselors school social workers ots pts etc and they have said that we we can implement these new flexibilities the bottom line really is they're the same flexibilities as last year except that there is a final summative evaluation that takes into consideration the percentages as outlined in this
041document which were this were the same as before so i met with the committee last week we reviewed the new flexibilities dr gad was there um and we had some conversation and they said yes they would like to implement new flexibilities and so that meant that i need to present that to all of you in hopes that you would say yes we want to do that again for this year and we would bring it to the full board for um for agreement okay um good luck to see everybody um all right so do i hear emotion to accept the uh flexibilities for implementing the connecticut guidelines for educator evolution evaluation sorry 2017 for the 2021-2022 school year to full for full board consideration okay and no moves okay so oh go ahead sorry man let
042me jump back and forth between and and your c uh so c i have flashbacks to four five six seven years ago when then governor malloy and the sd putin put in fact that very uh detailed seed evaluation system that was pretty much rejected by every teacher group in the state for a number of reasons looking at this i know this is a different is this different than that seed i i would say yes because it's much more concise and to the point and i noticed that there is a one measure that which is nice to see because i think this was a huge contention point with teachers four or five years ago which was that teachers can determine one related parent goal um and get stakeholder feedback on that which i think is a
043great thing i was kind of curious is the teacher going to receive feedback from parents on that how would that work that one aspect so that's a really good question tony so um that piece is similar to the original seed evaluation plan what they've expanded it to is student engagement or principal advisory committee and then the teachers at large decide on a couple of parent feedback goals so that everybody could be moving in the same direction and rowing the boat in the same direction and so mary talked today about um well mary do you want to share mary talk today about some um nice parent feedback goals that they were thinking about over at the high school i'll let her explain yeah so we review our survey data and we analyze what the parents shared
044with us and we look at how when we see we start with parent data we see where uh the biggest concerns were is that mirrored in the student data and then what if it's what does the teacher data on a similar item say and so we articulated two goals one in the area of helping parents and students understand that there's an anonymous way to report concerns and that that those concerns get responded to and so how can we do that by teachers setting up and this is part of what we're working through teachers setting up in their classrooms very clear expectations and then sharing out when they see any kinds of concerns emerging sharing that with their with their team looking at instructional strategies to support any kind of concerns that they might see or
045if needed reaching out to administration or school counseling and then ensuring that that parent communication is a piece of that so that's one one area of the feedback from parents that we were looking at and the other was that some that the parents and students reported that some students may not feel as included depending on what their involvements are and so how can we drill down into that a little bit more so an example through instruction would be how do you group students are you ensuring that everyone feels that they're there that they're participatory um and so that's so so we're in the development of those goals and then the specific indicators for how would know if we're making progress on those based on the survey data and then when we resurvey we see if
046that has improved we've done that in the past and what we looked at regarding the parent and student feedback data is we have made progress on communication goals those were our those were our specific and stated goals for the past couple of years and that the the responses we had from parents were were very strong on on those data points that we had been working on so so that's how we developed that piece of the parent uh peer feedback goal i i think that's huge i uh and especially with the parental involvement we have in our town i think that's going to build very well but it also sounds like that feedback would also help the teachers right away but i quickly address those needs so i i'm not excited about it because i remember
047when the original seed was trying to be done there was a lot of pushback particularly from teachers because the the parent feedback wasn't really clearly defined at least in a way that didn't give them the opportunity to help set what those goals were but i think it's important so i'm a big fan of this i will support this 100 it just seems much cleaner more simple and elegant um so look forward to the results of this thank you for working on it right anyone else have any questions okay so the motion on the floor is to accept the um flexibilities for implementing the ct guidelines for educator evaluation 2017 for the 2021-2022 school year um for full consideration by the board all in favor looks unanimous uh tony we got a unanimous vote and we
048saw that anne made the motion we just didn't catch who was the second that was me it was tony yeah right followed by discussion yeah the thumbs up from mr hanlon thank you thank you okay all right um that brings our meeting to a close hey bob before we adjourn uh and i i'm sorry i didn't catch this uh before being sold the the meeting minutes that ann uh needed updated uh when you have them early if you don't already send them out to everyone yeah tomorrow i'll make sure we have the next agenda so we can tie that off that was may 10th go ahead you actually can see them on um if you go on the june meeting they're actually a link to the gym you can actually see them right there okay
049we'll send them out the right way as well oh yes yep thank you yeah and uh and take take comfort knowing that uh you weren't there and went to see update so we said let's make sure ann gets a chance to review these before we prove them so you have time to go in and yeah we're yeah most definitely i really appreciate you guys moving that item up to uh or down to new business thank you for doing that i appreciate it happy to oblige all right um we are that concludes our agenda do i have a motion to um adjourn the meeting madam queer i move to adjourn the meeting thank you do i have her second second all in favor think it's unanimous thank you everybody