Curriculum Committee 2-8-21

001tony teregini and faith yeah we have a quorum great thanks um so we have this is the meeting of the curriculum committee of the board of ad um if we rise for the pledge i think we have a flag coming so i pledge allegiance 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 okay so public comment and we actually have a letter um that was submitted that i'm gonna read and um it's from john bester a cheshire resident and said uh says since time is of the essence would it be possible to put on the agenda for mondays um eight 828 21 curriculum meeting agenda discussion discussion of consideration of a non-binding vote to suspend smarter balanced assessments

002in grades three through eight for the 2021 school year although you and the school administrative officials are bound by law to administer these mandated statewide tests that should not mean that you as an elected body representing and advocating for students parents teachers and citizens cannot discuss and make your opinions publicly known on this important and impending issue should you begin this discussion at february's curriculum meeting you could have a more robust discussion at march 8th meeting before you bring your findings before the full boe at the marge business meeting despite all the trials and tribulations imposed upon our students in this year of covet education you could make a difference by speaking out in favor of statewide test suspension that i believe is scheduled to begin in april it seems absurd to me to ask

003students to have their school lives disrupted even further this year in order to obtain a high stakes test score for which there can be no meaningful interpretation or understanding i look forward to hearing from you about this request um and again that's from john bester and um first of all i'd just like to say thank you to mr bester for writing in and i appreciate your concerns um i also know that this is an issue that the superintendent and assistant superintendent um annually apprise us of we have not had a report because we have not had scores this year but um i would like to ask marlene if you could just comment on the benefit of the test for the district especially during this time of covid sure faith i'd be happy to um the

004the smarter balanced assessment not only measures academic achievement but also academic growth over time so this administration of the smarter balanced assessment would give us an indication of how much students have grown since two years ago when they last took the test and would give us an indication of how much our students have grown during the pandemic the the assessment results are used to support our district's effort to make changes and improvements to our curriculum and instruction that's all i have to say on that faith you are muted i appreciate the comments and i appreciate the letter and i'm sure it's a topic that we will be looking at again shortly um you know in the near future so um so moving on um to the next agenda item um a review of the minutes

005of january 11th 2021 um i assume everybody's had a chance to review and um uh do we have yes miss harrig i moved to accept the minutes of i don't have the date in front of me i'm sorry january 11th 2021. thank you okay okay do i have a second i happily second that okay here's any discussion um hearing none all those in favor unanimous all right um then moving on um to item three we have a series of informational items we're gonna turn to mr hanlon and for an overview of the um curriculum council's el executive summary presentation thank you faith give me just a second to get up the presentation uh last month you heard two executive summaries for our music and our library programs that we reviewed at the curriculum committee those

006were presented in the november cheshire curriculum committee english learners was the our english learners program was the third presentation also done in november so giving giving a little bit of an update executive summary of what our english learner committee shared with the ccc uh you'll notice the date as with the other presentation says march 2020 because again the bulk of this presentation was prepared last year and we finally had an opportunity to share with the committee this fall uh one note before we dive in too deeply our english learners program is just that it is a program it's not a curriculum so there's not units of studies and a scope and sequence but rather it's a program that is um based in best practices that align with research to support our english learners and also

007any state and federal mandates so it goes through a very similar um curricular review process but really program review process uh once every five years just as our curricular items do but it's not a scope and sequence or unit by unit curriculum i thought i would take a few minutes just to share samplings of some of the goal reflections from their report english learners report this year and i should note uh major contributors to to this are uh pat castle uh kristen castellano and kristen pedals at our elementary middle school and high school who oversee the um eo programs in each of those levels and if we look back for over the last five year curricular review cycle or program review cycle rather there was a big portion of the goals that were around making

008sure that we had individual student plans with really clear objectives for each and every one of our el learners and as part of that that we've reviewed that multiple times a year to make sure that we're on track with any goals so the first two bullet items capture a little bit about that work that was done over over the five year period there were in the technology and resources section seven technology goals when we reviewed those a big chunk of those goals were all around providing one-to-one devices and digital text for our el students there are a plethora of um digital tools that can be very helpful in supporting our english learners um that goal those goals were all achieved and in fact because of some of the broader district shifts to one-to-one technology some

009of those goals were just part of the district transition to moving to one-to-one devices but all those technology and resource goals were achieved over the last five-year cycle one other important point of note is that um over this cycle we needed to make sure that our dually identified students so these are students who qualify as english learners but also qualify for special education services that their english goals uh and services were captured in uh their special education plans and through their bbt process so over the course of this five-year period period in the last cycle we made sure that we were following all the uh requirements for making sure that those goals were captured in the individual student plans i am sure that the those individual goals were were evident before but it's making sure

010that it's housed all in one spot and clearly identified as part of the ppt process um moving on a little bit a big chunk of the work had to do with making sure the resources um best practices showed up and were available to teachers in the same way the rest of our curricular documents were so we have a staff portal and over the course of the last cycle we made sure that teaching resources strategies things teachers were going to need for er identification and any required requirements for el students were all housed on a curriculum portal so it's a major accomplishment to get all of that work over to our curriculum portal some of the other work also in the area of kind of organizing for instruction and parent communication at our secondary level a

011good portion of the work had to do with consolidating some of our support structures for ell students and families at the secondary level and two examples of that one are placing our el students on one team at the middle school level and connecting all of our el students to the same school council at the high school level and here's a little bit about why some of that is important we're a district although we have a growing el population we are still a relatively low incident district in terms of the number of els students and families that we have so a good portion of our effort has to do with the professional development to make sure the supports and services we have for english learners are as strong as possible and a big chunk of that

012work and something i'll talk about a little bit further in a few minutes is most of the work for um successful language acquisition and overall performance for el students comes from what's happening in the classroom with the classroom teachers and at the middle and high school level kind of making sure that one team for example in the middle school has our english runners on it means that we can target the professional development the support the counseling connections uh to a more focused group and therefore we're really able to bring high quality professional development to to that team as opposed to having spread out across several teams in the middle school and similarly a lot of the particulars that are going to be important for el growth by having our el students connected to the same

013counselor and or social worker at the high school means that that counselor is really going to be invested and have a good understanding of all the things that are going to be important for our el english learners to be successful so that was a part of the work over the previous five years professional development over the last five years was largely provided with collaboration with aces that's our regional education center and they provided workshops at least three times a year it's just three times a year i would say it was at least three times a year to help our teachers and again our counselors and other professionals really be grounded in the best practices and the last piece of kind of this reflection backwards over the previous five years were really about providing teachers and

014staff access to assessment student goals and progress for health students so making sure that our teachers are aware of the assessments that are going to indicate proficiency and growth for our english learners and using some of that information to help craft out those goals so i thought i would use that as a segue to talk just a few minutes about this kelp rubric this is our connecticut english language proficiency rubric because this was a key part of a key part of some of these different categories over the previous program evaluation so at the top of this it says assessment and measuring student progress because that's where the slide came from from the full presentation but honestly this kelp rubric influenced um the professional development because we gave teachers a really good understanding of the different

015levels of proficiency so last meeting faith you asked a question about what is you know how much proficiency do students need to be able to english language proficiency do students need to um no longer qualify cl be successful as english learners and this kelp rubric helps define that for each grade level band so you'll see things in here like the difference between responding to single questions simple questions rather than wh questions to the next level up from that being able to respond to others and add on to the comments of others so this kelp rubric was an important tool for our teachers to understand assess students in terms of their proficiency to be able to set goals for their students about what the students next steps are to be able to monitor progress for the

016students english language proficiency growth and to be able to make adjustments to plans as needed so this kelp rubric was an important tool for the ccc work over the previous five years as students progressed up through those levels they would be assessed annually through the last links the language acquisition survey which are in the middle of administering that survey right now to students so as students move up on that kelp rubric in terms of their proficiencies that'll pan out in their performance on this last links and one of the reasons i'm showing this slide is to note that um the state is very much invested in making sure that we are paying attention to all of our learners including our english learners so in the most recent version of the next generation account accountability report

017progress towards english proficiency through that last links is showing up on that accountability index and it's it's one way for the state to communicate to us and we believe it wholeheartedly ourselves that the performance of all our students and the growth of all our students is really important and you'll see that our progress towards english proficiency both the literacy targets and the whole targets will show up in in future versions of state accountability reports so the state is very much invested in all of our students making growth and learning i i will take one um or take this moment to note that and i alluded to it before that one of the biggest shifts that happened over the previous ccc time was who was providing the bulk of the support for the english for our

018english learners and a lot of it historically had been through um uh english kind of tutors specific to to the students and why we still provide individual support and tutoring through some of our staff the bulk of the work and the growth for students happens in the classroom when students are exposed to an english language with good supports right in the classroom that's where we see the greatest growth and gains for student language proficiency and one of the impacts on that shift and services delivery model was in our most recent administration of the smarter balance assessment you can see that we pay attention to how all of our students do and then certain subgroups of students so in this graphic you see two ovals around the 2018 and 19 administration of our english language arts

019state assessment and you can see at the very bottom there we had um students on average make 70 make it 70 of the way to their growth goals on that state assessment and 54 of students meet their growth targets and that is very closely mirrored to our english learner population 69.7 and 53 and the fact that there's very little difference between our total population and our english learner population is a really good sign that our program is having a positive effect on overall academic growth for students and it's the first time on this administration that we saw very little gap there was no there's no gap in performance between our total population learners and our english learners on a state uh english language assessment and that's that's a pretty big accomplishment and the committee's reflection

020on some of the reasons why though note that that shift from the bulk of the support for students happening within the classroom was a was a major reason why we saw some of that gap with our english learners start to dissipate so that's a little bit of reflection about where we were our goals for going forward are really now that we're grounded and leaning on the kelp rubric to to really help understand where students are from an english proficiency standard and we have really good practices in our classroom to help support english learners our next goals really have to do with ongoing professional development in this realm so i think you've heard me say maybe some other than other meetings that because we're still relatively low incidence district you may be a teacher who doesn't

021have an english learner in your class for a couple years and then all of a sudden you have an english learner in your class so to keep fresh on the approaches and strategies that are going to be most important to help our english learners grow is really important so providing that ongoing professional development and knowing uh for ourselves who needs that professional development and how best to make sure they get connected to it is an important part of the work going forward i'll also note that this dual emphasis on our speaking listening goals and our academic goals is something that we found particularly important particularly with our youngest learners and if um we focus on equally on that oral learning target the species speaking and listening we've seen a lot of gains on that front

022so sometimes that's a step that's really easy to skip over because conversationally we hear um some language some good language but we need to make sure that we keep on keeping an emphasis on the speaking listening targets as well we have a plethora of tech tools that are available and supportive for our english learners particularly as they go up in great levels and if they're a relatively new english learner starting in an older grade level those tech tools can be really helpful when you're dealing with high level content and the the second to last bullet there uh one of the constant parts of our efforts of the professionals is to make sure that our student social emotional supports and family communication and i don't just mean one-way communication i guess we're really talking about family

023engagement with our english learner families is so critical and we have to be really thoughtful and conscious of all of the things that are going to help make sure that we have a really strong family partnership with our english learner families as we do with with all of our families um and there's some hurdles to jump over to to help make that happen and and they're very worthwhile to do and we just need to keep that at the forefront of the work that we're doing and the very last part of this slide is now that we have strong individual plans or have we have individual plans for of our el students refining those plans to make sure they're really targeted to the english learners specific needs and get adjusted over time creating a set of

024protocols to make that a little bit more streamlined and efficient is is part of the work that we're doing and clear so our um pack castle ended her part of the presentation with just a success story and this is a student who began with us as a second grader with no english skills whatsoever and what you're seeing is a snapshot of actually the student's sri scores so their ability to to read on english and the little br at the bottom of that graphic uh means that that student really wasn't able to demonstrate any reading at a at a proficient level on this assessment and this first snippet shows kind of the students growth over second and third grade and you can see that it's a nice kind of line going up then as we get

025to fourth grade stagnant stagnates a little bit and and this is one part indicative of a few individual circumstances that change for the student but also uh very much so the idea that very rarely is language acquisition a linear growth kind of idea that this comes in fits and starts and plateaus and i know one of the things that pat shared is they really puzzled around making sure that the right kind of supports were there for the student and they were really targeting great things and as that student went into fifth grade they really implemented those um and by the end of the fifth grade year that student was up in that green band which is all great level expectations for our reading expectations for students so in a relatively short amount of time a

026few years we had a student who came to us with no english and is performing at our grade level expectations um and beyond what you see on this graphic i know that that was true beyond just reading performance that that was true uh across all content areas so you know we really take the time to make sure that we're tuned into those individual needs and when we do it right and when we get those supports in place um with a whether a good approach we do see the results students make a lot of growth and are successful so that's that's a executive summary of our english learner program again pac castle kristen castellano and kristin pelz uh were integral in in the work on a daily basis and also preparing that report any questions from

027the committee if anyone tony quick one kevin i if you mentioned as i apologize roughly what what percentage or how many students in our enrollment fall into the english learner category so we have been running recent history and approximately 40 to 50 students this year we happen to have approximately 80 students i i do think we will trend up over time as has been the state has been the trend in the state um i think this year's bump is is most likely related to code related circumstances and the kind of movement that we're seeing in district that's a little bit of a um i don't have hard facts on that but it's a little bit of presumption i do see our english learner population going up over time but we've been writing recent history about

02850 students per year interesting well we've seen that bump this year current school year yeah we did see about this year oh i hope it's a good thing uh that folks enrolling into our school system take advantage of our you know education and it's awesome to see that progress with that one student yeah i'm sure there's more but i'm sure they're definitely pretty pretty confident too that they've achieved so much in a short period of time right right one thing that um that i know pat would want me to say about this is when you see success like the last or like the last slide that student probably no longer qualifies for uh services for the english program so that still doesn't mean that there aren't english language needs and family connection needs that that

029might be prevalent but some part of our our number staying low is especially with our younger students they they make a lot of growth quickly over just a couple years and often are no longer in the program that's great to see well i don't have more questions thank you that's great work as always thank you and your team and do you have any questions um kevin to follow on what tony has so we've had maybe students what's the dispersed dispersion of those kids are they mostly elementary are they across all grades yeah one area by far the largest chunk of our students are at the elementary grade levels and a little bit of uh of that comes into play in our primary grade levels for part of what i said if they're if english is

030not their home language um they are often identified as english learners early on but as they make growth they kind of they perform out of the program so that's why that's one of the reasons why we see our largest chunk of students not only the elementary level but really primary grades um and it it wanes as you go up in grade levels pretty proportionately um from as you get to upper elementary and then middle high school yeah okay that makes sense and then um you know i know that these are students with iep so my question may not exactly is there any way to uh you know in the past we have seen demonstrations of programs at there any way that we could see in english the english language program i work because i'm fascinated

031by it how you put an el student into the mainstream classroom and they function and and how do we do that and it's tough i won't be the one to uh definitely say when and how we do that but i can very much tell you that if that's part of what the committee would want to see at some point that we very much could give some insight demonstrations a little bit further insight into the design of that program why things like immersion work some of the things that teachers do to help support an english learner um at the various grade levels um i know we'd be more than happy to share that you know whatever point makes sense in in this i don't want to commit us to to that today oh no no no

032and i don't i'll do that for for others to decide but i know our um our folks who are responsible for our english awareness program would be able to to give a lot of good insight into how these programs are shaped up yeah i you know possibly a showcase of something or something you know just um but no i'm not asking you to commit tonight so you're off the hook but um okay any other we're good um thank you i appreciate it um next on the agenda is the um perkins supplemental grant update and tonight we're going to hear from sean mcewen but i'm going to hand it over to marlene to make the introductions and get us rolling thanks faith so if you all will remember about a year ago i believe it was

033february 20th of last year um sean mcewen who is the cte department chair career and technical education department chair up at cheshire high school came to one of our board meetings and spoke about a program a grant that he was going to apply to and wanted you all to be aware of what was happening this was a special sort of supplemental grant last february so i thought being that it was a year into the mix it was a good time to give you an update on where we stand with that grant and what has happened so i will turn it over to mr mcewan for his presentation well thank you thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening it's good to see everybody i'm going to just put up a presentation i have here

034i'm going to go through it pretty quickly i do want to offer some time for uh questions and answers afterwards all right so as uh marlene mentioned last january a a grant was released by the state of connecticut which ultimately i found out more about it's it's excess funds from districts uh secondary and post secondary in the state that do not use all of their entitled perkins money they put it all back into a pool and they make it into a competitive grant that grant was was uh presented to the board on february 20th on the 25th after some revisions i um hand delivered it to the state of connecticut in hartford and then on the march 10th some of us on this call right now came to the high school and we looked at

035our facilities in the current technical education department business cards were being passed around everyone was all buzzing about the future of what we're going to be doing and then on march 13th we were all told to go home for a couple weeks and that turned out to be much longer than a couple weeks but on april 13th dr solon was notified that we've been awarded the supplemental grant and the news was passed on to me and to our school's administration and then we started immediately moving towards uh some of the purchases that we knew were going to be safe and untouched and i'll get to some of that in a moment over here but in the beginning of may we initiated a purchasing for the machine you see behind me which is our prototrak nemo

036and then in june i i became more realistic that we are not traveling and as you remember some of the money that we put into this grant we were looking at traveling to wisconsin to go to the manufacturer of the machine that's on the other side of the camera and to receive a week's worth of training uh unfortunately that type of training was not available in this uh in this code environment so what we were able to do is take some of that travel money that was uh put away in the grant and some travel money that was in our yearly perkins grant and move it over to the company tormach and we got the actual the big machine not the second biggest machine so i was really it really kind of worked out better

037for the equipment but we did lose some of the opportunities for professional training underneath that lens and i'll get to what we're what we're doing on the back side of it uh july 15th we ordered our our big tormach machine and some of the accessories that needed to go with it and by the end of july we had a rigging company into our into our room bringing in the two machines and then one of the machines came pretty much all assembled and we had a company the company come and do some of the work but really through the month of uh august and september majority of myself and summery stash key installed every nut and bolt and everything onto this fully automated cnc mill and then also throughout those months we developed a five-course sequence

038that ultimately ends on these machines and we it took until september october for the electricity to be hooked up onto these machines and on october 1st what we did was we closed out that supplemental grant and we used money that originally tormach the company who sold us the mill who wanted to have us into their their training learning facilities um canceled all their their training and they still haven't they're still not offering in-person training at the moment and they were going to use us as a pilot program to use as like a distant learning package and then their business model changed and we kind of became collateral damage within that but they have um they're giving us their their training package it's just not going to be a guided practice like what they were doing

039before so ultimately we have that still coming but we purchased eight hours of flexible consulting with their computer manufacturing division so when we are getting to that point um we have eight schedulable flexible hours that do not expire that we can use at any time so i actually at this point somewhat prefer the self-paced training and then to have these eight hours of uh consulting with this company afterwards and then in october a gentleman mike who lives local in south maryland who works for track machine tools he's like their their educational trainer and one of their machine maintenance guys he came around he finished the installation leveled everything out got the machine up and running once electricity was into it and then on october 20th reese and i spent uh three of our eight hours

040with this company so we have eight hours with track tools we have eight hours for tormach and he came in here and spent three hours with us on a i think it was on one of our early release wednesdays and we spent some time working with him um in the afternoon and a couple couple details um some finishing details on these on these machines the track memo is fully operational we spent three hours learning how to use this and there's still so much more more to learn but i've actually had an opportunity to do some work on this machine for the district so rich clavet and victor sandoval have both approached me to help with some of the door issues we have in some of our agent buildings so i've machined some parts for them

041that they've given me some technical drawings for i've i've modified some factory parts and i used what we learned from mike on this front uh track on this machine in order to to make these parts it was actually pretty cool and recent i was super excited when they came to us and were like hey can you do this i was like most certainly we can so he gave us a drawing and we sat down and programmed the whole thing and kind of worked back and forth off each other we still have five hours left with track and emails um and we're looking to get another two to three hours in by the end of march but at this point it's just we really need to spend our own time on it to get to a

042point where we don't know the answers to the questions to bring mike back in here to give us those answers to those questions but he's at our disposal until we're done with these eight hours and he's local and they're helping us out throughout the entire week as well the tormach milling machine has a couple parts that still need to be installed like our some of the stuff within the cooling system and one of the uh the interfaces within the programming aspect of it i would estimate about five hours of dedicated work with reese and i to finish working on this but i was just going to say like once once we got grooving in through this school year i don't need to stand up here and say how difficult doing what we're doing this year

043but it's hard to also find a five hour block of time to finish running plumbing and some data cables onto this machine to make it and make it start rocking and rolling but we will we will get this time very shortly and um back to the part the the training package that we were originally going to learn through a a week's class out there that is still 100 guaranteed to us tormach will send that to us whenever i call and say i'm ready for for your training package some of the stuff i do need to get and acquire before we can run that training package i need some tooling uh some probes to find edges of metal and we need some some coolant in order to run through the machine and then we're ready to

044rock and roll with that training aspect of it so before i get to the next part um essentially that's you know about a year ago i was um coming to you saying i would like your blessing to apply for fifty thousand dollars and here we are almost a year later and this is this is what we've done with our fifty thousand dollars we've we bought the track mill and uh that was there was no modifications on that purchase and i'll just turn the camera around here so you can see the other the other mill that's on the other side over here and here's our other cnc mill and again this thing came in a couple pallets and it was um completely unassembled when it came here and that was that's what spent that's what we

045spent most of our time on is actually putting putting the machine together and not necessarily um getting deep into using it at this point so that's where our fifty thousand dollars is when the machines are not cheap they're you know twenty twenty something low twenties mid twenties each and some of the training were about fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars between both companies i'm sorry each company is about three thousand dollars between each company or between both companies um and just to kind of dovetail off with this with some some curriculum discussion in october i came in front of this the same group of people and i proposed two new courses which students are signing up for right now um and those courses are in alignment with naruto valley community college and that program is called

046dual enrollment and what we have found out especially over the past couple months of having tons of meetings with them is what i am proposing which works well for our community and the rigor that we want to have for our students it actually bridges two sep two different certificate programs that they offer it it completely covers the manufacturing principle certificate and it starts to get into the advanced manufacturing certificate program so we're looking at um shadowing and kind of like mimicking what one of the waterbury public schools does through the um the initial certificate the manufacturing principles one but then also bridging in to the uh advanced manufacturing certificate with some of our machining and some of our cnc courses that are happening a few years from now so a little a little brief summary

047of how we all got to where we are with this um last last january i sat down with uh lisa dredger in her office at naugatuck valley she was the dean of academic affairs but now she's the ceo of nagatok valley and we met to discuss these career college pathways and dual enrollment opportunities for both naugatuck valley and manchester high school i coached them on some language within their perkins grant with the new with the new changes with perkins five and we really looked at two different pathways that would benefit our community and that they already had in line and those are your manufacturing and some of your digital design digital media design pathways uh we've had multiple conversations um sometimes weekly meetings with representatives from nagatok valley deans department chairs bridge college directors purpose

048administrators um their instructors their department chairs their former students so we are we are talking and we are in these all of these different conversations i had one this morning um over about six or seven different emails which is a follow-up from last monday and last friday's meeting um in october i came to you and i propose these two courses our dual enrollment manufacturing cad cam class and our dual enrollment manufacturing fundamentals course and remember those classes are in our course catalog right now and i don't know the signups of the movement but i'm hoping that we have that full interest that i'm looking for within our community here um so we are saying that this this i kind of mentioned that's the beginning slide that these meetings that i'm having and these proposals that

049i'm that i'm putting forward to them they are saying immediately this fits what we already have in place for a pathway there's nothing we need to change and they are adopting us into that program um it's an 11 credit certificate in the principles and manufacturing program and again it's the same thing that they're doing within some of the waterbury schools but what happens is when we get past what they call bench work which we get into our million machining and drilling and cnc work that's what brings us into the advanced manufacturing lens over there so once we're able to go past this um this this initial program this is where we're going to start looking at three to six more credits in the advanced manufacturing that's where we focus on milling drilling turning and grinding

050both in manual and automated environments here's what we're doing next all right so this is right where we are right now we're finalizing our dual enrollment agreement for next year just make sure everything's everything's perfectly aligned for all all stakeholders and coming in from the spring in the summer we're going to be develop fully developing the curriculum resources project pacing sequence for the two incoming courses that are starting next fall and next spring um throughout the the spring summer and next year's fall and continue to have the conversations with every every person i need to inaugurate valley to make sure that what we are the remaining course in the sequence which have not been fully proposed to you um align with what their expectations are and then we'll we'll be doing some new courses um

051in the fall 2021 for years 22 23. kind of a mimicky over here right so we have another another set of dual enrollment agreements for the next set of courses we're gonna have more curriculum developed for this next set of courses um and one of the things i kind of want to mention on here is seek i'm i still need to seek more and i need to tap into more of our district resources to to find more local partnerships um and this is not even just for this program right now but for my entire department and our business department at the high school where we need to find more work-based learning opportunities for our students students to go out in industry students do learn on the job and this is actually a requirement for perkins

052five is that we have those opportunities for our students and then furthermore in the fall of 2022 there's going to be the final courses for the years 2324 proposed so there's a ton of stuff happening the machines are here but there's a lot of curriculum work and a lot of things that are happening on the back end and really kind of one of the next big things that besides the the actual coursework and all the nitty-gritty with that is the the business partners in town and local and locally that are willing to work with um with me and with our students and i need to again tap into some of our local resources for them and i am done with my presentation and i would love to to entertain any sort of questions and anything

053that we have here from from everybody yes yeah yeah first of all sean thank you for um sharing with us your enthusiasm always always uh thrills me because this is something that's really hard for me to get really excited about but i'm glad to see that there's somebody who does get very excited about this so i understand with this um this new machinery that you are developing courses for the future and i think it's great that we're having uh that dual enrollment uh course or possibly courses with nagatok valley um what do we have right now at cheshire high in manufacturing what are like the prerequisites to all this good stuff that's coming up so right now if you look at what we would code in our manufacturing pathway classes we would code our one

054of our cad courses and the research and design class but what we've had to do and i think we mentioned this a little bit of the last meeting is some courses needed to be removed in order for our resources to shift into this new manufacturing world so what we're doing is we're recoding our engineering cad class back into an engineering pathway and this own manufacturing pathway is getting its own computer-aided drawing and drafting and computer and manufacturing uh programming course so when it comes starting for next year and this this these two courses will be the truest sequence of manufacturing classes and then two more in the following year and then a a full year in that third and that third sequence of 23.24 so this is all starting off like we are all we

055are all in the grassroots efforts of this right now great thank you i hadn't remembered um that from your presentation before but thanks for reminding me thank you tony sean this is a great update i uh i am one that can very much appreciate this and get very excited about it that being said um if you can produce performance car parts i got all kinds of projects for you you produce drawings my students can produce some stuff for you i'll try that's right that's some things of mine but that's awesome to see i wish uh i think if i'm not mistaken maybe it's wishful thinking i thought i i thought you someone showed us pictures when the rigors were there last year yep and that was pretty awesome to see very if i remember correctly

056yeah so they they came in it's actually really fascinating how they do this like though just to see these these two gentlemen work and what they do with a forklift and chains and like the units that i teach in my mechanical advantage units like what they're able to do with just two guys and some very expensive and heavy precise equipment um is pretty fascinating what what they came back was um the little parts and pieces on this mill that's not something that they do so that's how it fell back on me but the big giant base of it you know they're moving in and they're they're doing they move the lathe in the room and they did a lot of good stuff so yeah their craft is is what they do man it's like when

057you hire movers and they don't touch a wall you're like how'd you guys do that yeah they're so precise about it too so it's awesome to see but anyway congratulations finding everything set up and up and running and i'm sure uh students are excited to see that stuff there and music yeah they're very excited and it's it's unfortunate for some of these students who are leaving here this year that this is really all for future programming and that's like the the thing that's tough for me too is like wow i want to be able to run right now with this in my classes sure it could fit into some units in some of my classes but i keep looking at is like i stabbed at a grant to build a program for the future and

058that's what these things are here for is the level after the next level for one i mean it's not not like we're going to wait to use them until then but that's that's when the students are going to be proficient and you know walk right up to them and use them i think it's lost in a huge step for uh for our kids so thank you for getting this all set up and working through i know it's uh you know it's extra hours and time so thank you thank you i think um it's sean thank you so much this is i'm with tony um so i just how many kids what is the enrollment looking like and what kind of trends do you see um i know it's hard because yeah you're on a different

059uh it's just a totally different plane right now than normal but yeah uh yeah i was just wondering what yeah how many are you how many do you how do you count the kids i mean how many kids are in the class how many kids what kind of trends are you seeing there all right so our enrollment for this year is very similar to our previous year's enrollments department-wide um sometimes we're higher in some courses than others but you know we typically have around the same number of students for these manufacturing courses they don't start running until next fall yeah and of course the course signups are digitally happening like as we are speaking right now so i don't i don't have a piece of data that says how many kids have in decide to

060roll in these courses they still need to sit with their counselors i also have to say that there were a couple opportunities that got um taken away because of like snowstorms and stuff i had a meeting that was supposed to be with the school counselors to discuss my new courses and that got cancelled and it didn't get rescheduled and i was we're supposed to go to dodge with the same type of thing and that got canceled not rescheduled it was all in these it keeps happening like these tuesdays so i i really hope that people are getting the message of what's out there for us to take for next year um it seems like the course selection during a pandemic also got hit with a blizzard and i i just i hope that doesn't really

061trickle down into my enrollments for next year but if you want like a perfect picture of where i'm starting off next year i mean i cannot take more than 16 in this lab space covid rules can't take more than 12 in this lab space um you know if i have if i have 10 kids who sign up for the fall course next year i'm i'm ecstatic and we're you know we're running this course and those 10 and those 10 students are initially right into that advanced manufacturing or that principles and manufacturing certificate now remember if you are seeking that entire certificate you got to finish the whole program right or a sequence of that program and if you're starting off as a senior you're not going to have an opportunity to finish that but at

062least you can start it and you can still earn your dual enrollment credits through that through that institution and then how many credits total to get that that certificate that completes high school credits or uh college credits in college the initial one is 11 credits and the second one is 12 credits so our goal is to get those 11 credits and then to bridge into about six uh five or six of those um those next 12 credits in that next degree because some of the courses overlap between the two different uh programs so you know you don't need to do all 12 of them but there's but but i can like honestly and and like humbly say i can't provide the high school student in this district with the resources that we have in the

063space that we have with the last six credits of that 12 credit program at that institution that's that's theirs they need to keep that i'm not trying to take that away from them okay okay and um i think one of the most exciting things is the fact that that there are so many opportunities there's so many manufacturers in the area um in cheshire uh waterbury that it's i mean i think we all want to see our kids stay in town if we can do that so you know what you you said you're starting to reach out to local employers are you finding enthusiasm and what more can be done what more can we do um so there's there's two main there's too many companies in town that that led me into this um this what

064i should be purchasing and they were the people i was consulting when i first wrote this grant and that was marion manufacturing and micro tech so both both are really close to one another and mary manufacturing um you know family who runs them i taught there i taught tyler and i taught brandon who now works there he's a he's a naughty talk valley advanced manufacturing certificate graduate and he started working there as part of his work based learning through naugatuck and then he he actually helped me develop a lot of this programming and some of the course work and some of the stuff that we're doing so he's one of my former athletes and all that stuff so at the end of the day those two companies have already opened their doors to me and

065have already said whatever else you need let's talk um it just unfortunately like in order for me to have the best effort in saying like i want to be in this school as many days as possible i'm not i'm not knocking on doors around town at the moment right i need to have conversation with people but i'm not going in and out of plants that i know that people aren't doing this all day long so i i need to make sure that for our to do what we need to do every single day at this school i need phone calls emails um so ultimately faith i guess you're asking do we need i need i need to tap better into our school business partnership i need people who are interested in uh working through the

066the state department of labor's uh pre-apprentice program um you know and again this is like years down this is two three years down the road so this isn't something i need like tomorrow this isn't something i need you know for next fall dr guy you want to add to this yes that's exactly what i wanted to say is that uh you know this it it's you can hear his enthusiasm we i think this is so wonderful that we have uh courses that are aligned with uh with with the college um i love the idea that our kids are going to get this credit but we also know that this is uh this is a process so we are right at the beginning and and what sean is is talking about are the steps that are

067that we're going to need to put in place going forward so as we go along um i think that's going to be a key piece of how we uh how we continue to to develop the program connecting with kelly lens connecting with the school to business partnership um connecting with those internship programs that we already have in place and expanding on what we already have uh to then deepen uh this pathway for our kids so um it's exciting yeah and maureen i know that you've been working on the mastery-based learning criteria as well and speaking with kelly lens today not only in this area do we need more experiences for our students but more job shadow programs in general for all of our kids especially for those who have looked to the job shadow as

068a way to complete that mastery-based requirement i don't know if you want to add anything but i thought i'd just mention that for you yeah thank you yeah i would um just throw in a lot of what sean's talking about sean a lot of those students can extend their learning in your classes and use that as their mastery-based projects yeah i'm really excited about that that whole avenue as well is to have that that authentic connection whether it is leaving and going in industry and working in the community or if it's an extension of what we're doing inside here but i've always wanted to have that that kind of open project world where kids are you know working towards their own goals and finishing something that's that's important to them and also hopefully uh you

069know steers them into a quite rewarding and uh a very nice compensating uh career with not much cost of education right especially for giving or not giving but if we're able to provide for them some of those credits before they would learn more yeah well um thanks so much this was great thank you very much okay and i would love to have us in here like once things are a little bit more normal and i can have the whole board and show show around the stuff that we're doing here because this is it is exciting it is exciting like what what we're able to do with some of the machines that we have here yeah great fire that baby up all right all right well thank you for your time and you're here this evening

070thanks all right you're welcome thank you okay um next item is uh psat results for the psats take it away thank you great thank you mary's going to vent on this and i just want to sort of give it a little bit of um context in the idea that we've heard a lot of updates as to some of our elementary assessments and where our kids stand with those especially in light of some of the concerns about kovid last year and so we talked a little bit about middle school and so i'm really grateful to mary and maureen for being here tonight to share these psat results with that same end in in our thinking that same goal thanks mary thank you marlene thank you everyone thanks for having me to be able to share our

071results i'm going to share with you the uh the results for this year grades 9 10 and 11 and if you'll indulge me i'll just explain a little bit about the the suite of assessments that our students can take so we have offered for many many many years the grade 11 psat which is also the qualifying exam for the natural national merit scholarship that's always given in october also the grade 10 psat which is not the qualifying exam but is the preliminary scholastic aptitude test uh and then grade nine which the first administration of that was last year in october of of 2019. so we're able to provide our students with uh multiple opportunities to understand the standardized test its requirements and the kinds of questions they receive so these assessments increase in complexity so

072the grade 9 psat is not the same test obviously as the grade 11. it has two sections evidence-based reading and writing and math the eight nine math concepts focus on the heart of algebra and problem solving once students transition to grade 10 and 11 it becomes a little more sophisticated heart of algebra problem solving with a focus on geometry now in the 10 and 11 and then toward the 11 algebra 2 and trigonometry concepts are part of that assessment which is part of the passport to advanced math and additional topics in math which is where you may get questions uh around trigonometry in the evidence-based reading and writing class uh test class assessment i mean um students as as they pass through these three levels of testing it increases in passage length certainly the complexity

073of the language used in the passages but also as students are doing evidence-based reading and writing they need to look at text and analyze text and also interpret more than just the written word but also graphs so in addition they're they're assessed on cross-cutting skills which include science and social studies so the topics uh are are typically covered in um it's not imaginative literature it's not fiction they're looking at non-fiction and it can be a scientific subject it can be a social studies subject so that's just a little overview of what they do and let me talk to you a bit about the results so the great this year's grade nine class of 2024 in each of the assessments the college board sets a benchmark and that benchmark represents uh college and career readiness so

074from this point in a child's high school career if they reach that benchmark it's predictive that they will be ready for college level work in that discipline earning basically a c in an introductory college level class so in grade nine the benchmark for evidence-based reading and writing is a score of 410. we had 255 students out of our 306th 9th graders this year take the assessment that's 83 a little lower than we typically have and the average score for our students was 486 and the math benchmark is 450 and their average score was 472 so and a nice uh you know nicely exceeding benchmark in the oh i think i passed over grade 10 in grade 10 we had 313 students out of the 326 taking the assessment 96 of class evidence-based reading and writing

075benchmark at that grade level is 30 and our students earned on as an average 513 and the math benchmark is 480 and they earned a 484 as an average score and then in grade 11 345 students out of 371 so that's 93 percent of our population the evidence-based reading and writing bench is 460. they scored 532 is the average score math benchmark 510 and they were a little below with a math average score of 492. so part of what we look at is you know how did they do in each year just isolated but also because we have these tests we can then begin to look at cohorts so our just to take a look at our our juniors who will be taking the sat um when you compare their psat score so they're so

076last year's performance to this year's similar number of test acres 348 last year 345 this year and last year on their grade 10 assessment 508 was the average score this year it was 532 on evidence-based reading and writing showing an increase in 24 points the math average score 471 in their the grade 10 492 grade 11 with an increase of 21 points and that significant uh because i looked back at uh what what are the average increases in our derg you know are we are our kids increasing at the same pace as other kids uh how do these scores look um kind of across our our comparative group group of schools and the average increase from grades 10 to 11 and i was able to look at comparative data only for 20 19 2019 2020

077data they don't of course the current data isn't in isn't uploaded in the um state system yet so when i looked at that at chs our average increase from grades 10 to 11 was roughly 38 points and the derivative was 35 so our our increase is is a little bit ahead of we're increasing more from one test to the next and in math 35 points the durg average is 30 and then interestingly from the psat 10 to the sat11 so psat 10 remember is given in october the the the psat 11 is given in october and then the 11s take the sat just just uh you know half a year later in march or april and at chs the average increase for evidence-based reading and writing from psat 10 to 11 is 73 points math

07896 and it's so it's ahead of the dirk the dirk average in terms of are the gains that our students are making um as they take the assessment so overall uh our our next steps really just just to give you a short overview of of our psat results our next steps are really to look at uh do a deeper dive into college and career readiness around individual groups how can we support teachers uh to ensure that students who are right or close to make meeting benchmark or just behind what can we do in instruction to really move all students to be sure that they're making those gains across the board so that is the long and the short of our psat results from this year a little bit of comparative information blended in so i'd

079be happy to answer any of your questions tony no i i don't have any questions and just uh feedback it's great to see the progression uh especially the year year-over-year um trend that we show between 10 and 11 students progressing in both categories that's huge um i should know this so uh my daughter's junior i know she took the kids he hasn't won if they've taken sats they are taking the sats on march 24th that is the s.a.t school day assessment yeah is there anything um i saw some communications about this a little earlier in january but uh is there any changes to the way sap has been delivered or other changes yeah it's not and and we had wondered would there be some kind of digital component now with the with the ap examples

080coming up there is going to be a digital component uh so you can and they're they're offering them there's a certain chunk of time when you can do it in person in a certain chunk of time when you can do it digitally and the the college board is dictating that for the advanced placement assessments um but not for this the sat school day and i and i have not heard that either for the sat that's given on saturdays not not the school day uh and we've done in-person administrations for the sat in school and our psats we're all in person okay that's good time you know it's can't believe it's already marches around the corner it's amazing um but but thank you got to get out any feedback i i found this every year as

081always to see that you know our kids are progressing and um closing that gap i know is there anything that you would do differently to help bump up the the treasure high school math to the to the um average target or below on one grade level i mean is that just basically what you talked about earlier is look at the core of the students and perhaps you know adjusting the curriculum a little bit or focusing on more areas that they improve i mean i i don't know how you target you know that yeah we have a group of math teachers that will be meeting with to talk through okay when you look at the when you look at the uh the problems that that students are confronting if we can drill down into some of

082those details we don't always get as is as granular a level of feedback as i would you know all of us would love on those assessments so but you can you you can see which areas students demonstrated strengths and which areas they they showed some some individual struggles so teachers in their own classrooms can really target that support and that really is the next level of work is really utilizing the assessments to really in inform instruction and uh that was our work um prior to covet and and we're we're moving you know back into that that arena of of database decision making yeah good well thank you again abigail it's great to see that and for our kids so thank you my pleasure i'm proud of them and did you have a question okay um

083so i was just um i guess you um dr gaddy just answered this question so where the looking at the the 10th and the 11th grade scores and you see the diminishing well the uh they're just not as strong in terms of how they compare to the benchmarks as as the ninth graders so are you you can at this point identify which concepts the students are having problems and that's that's what you're trying to assess or are you can you begin to see some of them oh yes and i i could let you know what some of those are although it would be likely very different for each individual student i you know but i could certainly give you more information on which areas they're struggling but that's really the instructional piece that teachers need

084to look at that data and then determine how they're going to gear their instruction and and how they're going to manage you know the different needs within their classes and so that's that's part of that instructional core work that we need to accomplish okay um and so um all right and then these results um and again i how do let me see what am i trying do we see any covet in them i mean is this is there any coveted fallout that we're looking at here i'm seeing a pretty consistent overtime set of scores um these scores are not dissimilar from scores from 2017 to 18. uh we had some similar you know you know a 508 and a 482 if i'm remembering correctly i have to go back and check my data but you

085know not dissimilar uh so i'm i'm not seeing why wild swings and i'm also seeing when you compare the cohort where they were when they took the assessment as sophomores correlates to where they grew to when they took the assessment as juniors yeah so they they demonstrated a similar level of growth um as we would expect so is it is it as much growth as we want do we want to see the you know the the the the scores the average score increase absolutely but in terms of um making some movement they they did make movement yeah i is this something that's going to require a whole this may sound extreme but a whole new math program or a new textbooks new um what do you you're speaking of textbooks i think um could probably

086jump in on some of the work we're doing uh i know that our algebra ii uh team is looking at a new textbook uh looking at resources that best support our students but it's also targeting lessons and targeting support we also have a team of teachers who have been working on infusing their instruction daily with sat and psat related questions so but that's not teaching the test i mean because i know that was a huge concern about no no no these are these are translatable skills this is this is an assessment in time one one day in time of a student's proficiency on specific math concepts and reading and writing concepts that are part of our curriculum and that the college board has determined are critical for it's their measure of how they how the

087level of success they'll have once they hit college so this is really predictive of college and career readiness and the psat is the preliminary step to the the s.a.t which you know and our sat results um were pretty strong for last year uh and and and so were our advanced placement results so you know these are these are growth measures with the psat and and these these are the measures we can use to then intervene so that when they hit the sat we've we've made we've made some strides okay so answer that question before too you know that we've we've got a new math program a couple of years now at the elementary level we had purchased a new textbook a number of years back and did work really outside of the textbook to align

088to standards at the middle school that work had begun it was done for algebra one it had been done largely before covid for geometry the next level of work is in that algebra 2 course where not only are they going to be they're currently examining multiple texts to decide on our resource because we are in need of a new text for that course but then this summer during our curriculum institute there'll be a focus on then writing that curriculum for algebra two so i think you're seeing that if we look at multiple years you're seeing that change start at the elementary go to the middle school and now we'll continue that level of work at the high school okay i think ann had a question also um yeah so as you know i couldn't get

089my colleagues on the board to agree to put a math interventionist in the budget for this for the next year coming up but i'm wondering if we could do such a thing we could use coveted relief money that may be coming our way could we use that first for such positions i'm thinking of both the high school math coach position and i'm thinking also of the elementary technology coaching positions i'm just brainstorming here i should mention that anne because that is a conversation that i was having with vin and jeff last week after a webinar about the use of the new cares new edition of the cares funds act so that is something that we've been talking about and exploring great i'm glad to hear that actually okay thank you okay um any other yeah

090i guess we're we're good thank you dr gad for that and um thank you okay um and then um the last item is um sel update social emotional learning update yes give me a minute here i'm going to present my screen to you all and can you all see that we can okay thank you so i thought it was important that we sort of circle back to talk about the work that we've been doing on the social emotional learning front you know a few meetings ago we had representatives from cirque who have served as our facilitators here to our curriculum committee meeting so i wanted to sort of put this all together so we can see what it is the district is working on so as you know our two focus areas for the district

091are complex thinking and social emotional learning and a number of years ago our social emotional learning theory of action was created and so i'll read it for you if the cheshire public schools consciously focuses on the social emotional development of our students then school practices will demonstrate a clear focus on social emotional growth and students will demonstrate self-awareness self-regulation cultural awareness and empathy and i think mostly about the cultural awareness piece of this theory of action i want to talk about social emotional learning and the connection to equity and the connection to our castle standards so everything that we do in cheshire public schools is grounded in the standards whether it's english language arts standards math standards science standards the same is true of our work around developing students social and emotional skills and castle

092is the collaborative for academic social and emotional learning and tonight i'm going to talk about specifically those standards that you can see are related to equity so the first of the standards is self-awareness integrating personal and social identities identifying personal cultural and linguistic assets and examining prejudices and biases now these are castle specific also under social awareness taking others perspectives identifying diverse social norms including unjust ones understanding influences of organizations and systems on behavior the other two are relationship skills and responsible decision making so we're talking here about demonstrating cultural or cultural competency standing up for others rights learning how to make reasoned judgments after analyzing information data looking at social problems personal problems reflecting on one's role to promote personal family and community well-being evaluating personal interpersonal and community institutional impacts these are some

093pretty complex skills for kids to learn through through out their school careers so when we talk about equity i like to think of this this picture this graphic on the right hand side of the slide it talks about equality and equity there are a number of um variables to this slide and some show offense and kids not being able to see over the fence and and taking down the fence so that everyone can see no matter what the look so the goal of our work is to address educational disparities right we want to look at ways to foster long-term change that create bias-free environments we want to look at organizational institutional conditions that might manifest themselves in inequity and we want to remove that so as you know and as you heard from our circ

094trainers we have been engaged um engaging two of our groups through training with circ and one of those is what we've called our group here in in cheshire is our our cspi our cheshire strategic planning initiatives team and that's really our what we refer to here as a district equity leadership team now that group that committee has met four times this year it's made up of teachers from across the district parents from across the district administrators and also some of our non-certified staff our administrative council made up of all of our administrators including our pupil personal services director kevin as our curriculum coordinator all of the building principals all of our assistant principals and our special education supervisors we are not as far along just by the way the calendar happened we've met twice this

095year we have another meeting coming up the objectives of that circ training you might be curious are about introducing the practice of courageous conversations engaging in reflective discourse on equity on racial equity is specifically in education becoming familiar with key concepts about race and its impact on us personally and collectively and when i talk about um those sorry when i talk about those um courageous conversations uh what i mean about that is learning strategies for systems for our organization of the school system to address racial disparities through effective dialogue and having authentic conversations about this so the outcome of this training will be a equity policy that would be presented to the board for consideration um and also thinking about a transition plan and equity transition plan and so the equity transition plan will have

096four parts one will be what are the leadership shifts that we might need to make or be aware of as we address these issues the second will be teaching and learning so what are the practices that our teachers need to be aware of what do we need to look at as far as our curriculum and the resources we use in our curriculum the third will be engaging our families in these types of conversations and giving them voice and hearing what they think about this this progress and the other is student voice [Music] when i talk about student voice an example of that is um and mary and maureen can certainly speak to this as well our circ facilitators will be holding virtual meetings with about five percent of the students at cheshire high school to

097hear more from them about this topic as well and get their feedback and their feelings and that will be done with those facilitators without um a lot of listening ears from uh from any any of our you know teaching staff so that they are able to you know really share things most of which i think will be uh voices that have been heard through the rams against racism group that have already shared with a number of our teachers and administrators so i thought i'd also add some other work that's being done in this area we have partnered with meridian public schools as you know on a couple of venues and they offer an affinity group for their teachers of color and have offered to have our teachers of color present at that as well to

098join them and that way we can decide whether our teachers would like to have affinity groups here in in our district and affinity groups are just gathering opportunities for people who share a common identity they provide opportunities for people to connect with each other who share the similar aspects of their identity especially in situations where their identity is a minority in in a particular organization so certainly here in cheshire we do not have a lot of teachers of color and so an affinity group we would hope would support them to help us to better reach out to additional minority groups in addition to the dealt that group of parents and student parents and teachers and certain not certified and non-certified staff that are coming together for that training and in addition to our um our

099leadership team our administrative team we also had the opportunity again through our partnership with meridian public schools to explore racial equity with teacher leaders so meridian had started this work um previous to us and they were working with a facilitator named dr david cormier and they trained some teachers so david and his teachers um came to virtually to our district last last week and the we worked with about 25 teacher leaders elementary middle and high school and our objectives were objectives were to develop a shared meaning of key terms related to racial equity that's important as we're talking about these things that we have a common understanding just of vocabulary we engage in personal reflection and demonstrated an openness to learn and grow in this area and increase our levels of racial consciousness and understand

100the impact of race and racism as our practice as educators i think one of the most beneficial um the most benefit the most powerful impact of last week was those teachers from meridian who came and talked to our teachers they had first-hand personal experiences that they were able to share i think that was very beneficial to all of us as a group many of you know about our other efforts to recruit and hire diverse candidates we do advertise in the national minority report we actively recruit through southern connecticut state university we are currently exploiting minority teacher recruitment through the rests aces being the rest near us and we are recruiting at college and university job fairs we had plans to be at a number of those last march and april but due to covid were

101unable to so we are eager to see what we might be able to do in that area this coming year lastly you've heard us talk about the peck jones grant and helped us to approve that last year we're looking there to incorporate diversity in literature both at our elementary classroom libraries the dodd library the chs library i know that at dodd they have created some social issues book clubs and at the high school our librarian there has done some salons on a number of a number and variety of topics regarding our curriculum we're looking to do an equity audit starting in the elementary with some of our read-alouds and our anchor texts and i know mary has been working with teachers at the high school to do this as well some of that work had

102started over the summer so what are our next steps with all of this well our first step would be to craft an equity policy for the board's consideration then we would be working on an equity transition plan um we have plans to do equity audits of our curriculum and then just of our physical space developing our school equity leadership team so this year we have a district equity leadership team we'll begin by branching that out we have parents and teachers who are very eager to create those at the school level but we wanted to make sure we had training in order to do that well at this at the school level maybe next starting next year we have a summer book club planned for our administrative team the topic is of the book is unconscious

103bias in schools a developmental approach to exploring race and racism i particularly like that and know dr gad has read that as well because it really looks at this with a growth mindset not as someone is either racist or they're not but rather along the continuum of what can we learn relative to to race and um and biases that we all have this summer's curriculum writing institute will also along with you know looking to improve our curriculum making sure we look at that with an eye towards equity again making sure that our anchor text etc represent a variety of authors and and perspectives looking continue to look at our hiring and recruiting practices continue to implement responsive classroom to respond to the individual needs of our students and grow their social emotional learning skills we

104continue to learn about and implement restorative practices at the middle and high school we see that that rams against racism club will continue to run next year you know we have a lot of enthusiasm around that at the high school level and then of course next year our two wonderful teachers don dimeo and aaron griffiths will be teaching the african-american black puerto rican latino studies course and we'll have ample professional development from the state and circ around that to get them ready for that course next year so that was a lot of information in a short period of time but i want to open it up for any questions you might have on our our you know um our efforts thus far and can board members be part of the summer reading group i'm glad

105you're interested in i am interested it's a great read i have to say that's all i have thank you tony no i was going to uh pay you back to uh ann uh asked us if there's uh i i know uh cave uh i've been attending some of their workshops uh diversity equity inclusion they actually have uh an equity toolkit for boards and uh looking to see there's something that um we could think of angela board get more insight in some of these topics because i know a lot of groundwork and working the trenches those speaks being done through circa those training sessions where they're very tailored to our educators but i don't know the same thing in this toolkit you're showing that more take advantage of my guess is more from a perspective but

106you know if there's something you like us to read or attend or watch i'd be happy to do so tony it's it's so um interesting to hear you say that because there are a number of my colleagues who have gone through this training with their board of education and i know both david cormier and our facilitators from circ would be more than happy to conduct some training sessions for for us as a board um that would really be beneficial so i'd be happy to look into that further no i agree that's great marley and you know as long as we're not taking seats away from educators i know we have you know 400 plus stands to go through this over uh a period of time but i think it's worthwhile because not the cape stuff

107isn't helpful it's um you know it's more from a policy i guess approach and i i'd rather you know for members they're interested to get the same feel that our educators are getting so that we actually see and hear and learn well we're actually doing our own district you know if you can so but i can i can really remember who might be interested but i'd love to see that i think it would probably be um very helpful as we look at something as serious as an equity policy that folks had sort of that understanding and mindset as we look at you know particularly the words used in that policy i know adam had brought up something the other day on making sure we all had a common understanding of what some of these terms

108and things mean and i think that could only help us as we move forward yeah i like to have one source of the definition the truth of this thing so we're also you know we're all as you know there's so much um so many different perspectives and definition interpretations even my inbox i might trust your uh email account i get these uh invites from some so-called diversity resources and groups and it can be so mesmerizing if you're trying to get um a good perspective on this so to extend possible yeah when you have time whenever that is it's checked out you have any time left these days but if you have some things the bush look into i'd be more than happy to talk about the board and see if things could take you out

109on that but thank you yeah marlene do we have a snow day tomorrow for instance um tomorrow we have a remote school day i think dan's going hey let's use a professional development day and you know we'll uh we'll participate as well right i'm just uh marlene to go back to the the slide with the two committees that you had that you put up i noticed there uh there was no board representation on there and when you had parents you had teachers you had um leadership um why is that well most of our most of our internal committees do not have representation from the board the communication channels are really through all of the different board committees so we bring that information to you through curriculum through policy through what are the other ones personnel

110okay i just um i i don't know it i i understand that and um but i just was wondering you know we are ultimately the authority over the schools and um even if we're there as listeners more than participants i i just think it would be worth considering um the potential of putting a board person on there um so we could certainly do something like that as we move forward the um the groups that have started are underway so it wouldn't be a good fit but i i think that we could this isn't going to be the last set of training that we have so more opportunities i mean it is just such a vital issue and it is going to shape our schools for decades to come i mean it's going to probably transform

111our schools and um i i personally um i know i'm new to the game but i think that there's a place for the board there but other than that um i thank you for the presentation it was enlightening and it was good thanks um anyone else have anything to add this is a full meeting for sure uh there's so much good stuff going on it's great to i feel bad for all folks tonight that have these long you all have some very long days as it is and i appreciate you spending time tonight to walk us through all this details is very helpful though so thank you everyone yeah well we're really happy to share it so thank you all yeah i can see the excitement in everybody's eyes that's great they're saying ann's got

112a birthday cake to get to so um where at the end do i hear emotion to adjourn thank you ann happy birthday and do i hear a second thank you tony favor hi we're good i