001Al, if you can help us out a little bit with leading that, that would be great. >> Yeah. So, we want to um we would like to nominate Lauren Dailyaly as the chair for the uh curriculum committee. And I just need a a yay from everybody. >> Yay. >> You got it. >> Thank you. >> Well, you're it, Lauren. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Okay, so I am just about logged in. I'm in my office now. I want to thank everybody for being available tonight. I think this meeting was the most rescheduled committee meeting of the entire year. When we first started to talk about this uh the content of today, uh we had an entirely different board. Um and uh you know we definitely were eager to share some of the results. So
002with that I'm going to turn it over to our team. Um our curriculum development team our CDC CD team consists of Allison Brea Johnson Cara Watson Wanzer um Kelly Truches also attends Christy Zelita. So uh these folks here are deeply ingrained in the instructional improvement work in the district. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Car Wanzer, who is our data guru for the district, and she's going to present our data for us tonight. Go ahead, Car. >> Thanks for having me tonight. Um, we just, um, I I know you received the slide deck in advance or the Canva presentation, but I'm going to go ahead and project while we kind of talk this through, um, and, uh, go over some of the accountability results that we received from the 2425
003school year. So, I'm gonna just move a couple things over here and hopefully No, that's not good. So, of course, this is when my computer starts to act weird. Okay, let's see if this works. present mode. Okay. >> Okay. You good? >> Yeah. Can you guys see the the um slide first? First slide. >> Yes. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Okay. So, I've changed the date several times of when this was presented. So, depending on which uh slide deck, but I have to be here now. And this is to go with um Carara's goal around teaching and learning and and specifically when we're talking about the accountability index, we're talking about systemic school improvement and district improvement and really trying to look at how are we supporting all leaders to be empowered to make evidence-based
004decisions to improve student outcomes. So as we look at these this slide deck um we definitely want to give you a little bit of context of where we are today. Um although these results of the accountability index at the front of the presentation are around the 2425 school year. But right now I just want to embed you in what our school demographics look like or district demographics. Our overall enrollment for this year as of our October 1 collection um from our freeze date is actually now 11,450. So what happens is throughout the year even though we take a snapshot snapshot on October 1st, we actually have several um other deadlines where we're cleaning up the data with other districts and things like that. So that number does fluctuate a little bit. Um but when that
005did fluctuate at by the end of January, we had an overall decrease of enrollment by 471 students from the previous year. So that is if I'm comparing the October 2024 collection to the one we did in October 2025, as of this year and as of today, we actually have 11,385 students. So that's as of March 12th. Um our high needs population, just kind of as a reminder, high needs um also consists of our multilingual learners, our free and reduced lunch um students who qualify for that. And then our students with disabilities. So that's often referred to from this Connecticut State Department of Education as high needs. So, if we're looking at our multilingual learners, we're at 37% of our student population are currently identified as multilingual learners. That does not count students who've exited because
006they've reached a level of language proficiency. So, that could that doesn't include um students who came to us as language learn uh multilingual learners and now are um exited from the program. Our free and reduced lunch number is at 56%. We get that number through students um whose families qualify through our SNAP benefits. So in the past we had people filling out forms and things like that, but this is students who directly qualify. And then students with disabilities, we are at an increase of 15%. So just as a reminder, our percentage overall, we have the highest percentage of students who are multilingual learners in the state of Connecticut. And our per pupil expenditure as of the last um published data from 2324 uh according to the state was at 17,100. So just a quick background
007of what the accountability index is. This is kind of our district and school report cards that we get from the state. So those of you you are new to the board and or haven't kind of looked at this in a while, um it's a comprehensive framework that they developed in order to measure performance at a district and school level in order for us to identify improvement areas. So they have their own um accountability measures at the state that they need to say that they're working on. So this is an opportunity for them to to really monitor what's happening at the district and at a school level. And it's a great way for us to see how schools are doing and how we're doing overall. So what we really focus on is that number three, identifying
008improvement areas. So we drill down is is able to be our primary focus to say like how are we supporting leaders in the district both at central office and at the school level in order to pinpoint areas that we need to focus on in order to improve outcomes for all our learners. Um we have a tiered level support that often happens at the school level and um this is way that we determine that often um as well as the the proficiency levels at at school levels. So our accountability index values we put schools into categories. We don't get a category as a district. We just get an overall percentage that we earned for points. But with schools, their points put them into categories. So if you're a category one school, your accountability index is falling
009between 85 and 100. Um, and then number two is if you're a category 2 school, 70 to 84.9, and so forth. At the bottom are category four and five schools that are often identified as focus and turnaround schools. This is how um it shook out for um Danbury public schools for the 2425 school year. So um we had one category one school, we had several category 2 and and category 3 schools. So when we're looking at these, there was um a miss uh there was a mistake on uh one of the category three I think uh list that had shelter rock under both there. It has been corrected on this deck. They are actually a category 2 school. They were a category three school the year before. So they did move up and were a
010category 2 school. From the 2425 school year, we had um an addition of AIS as a category 1. We had none the year before in 2324. There were no category 1 schools. We went from six category 2 schools to seven. and we went from 11 to 10 category 3 schools. So, we want to reduce obviously the amount of category three schools we have and have folks moving up. So, you'll see how that broke out. Our schools of distinction, which we're very proud to say, um we had four um as we did the year before. Um this year, King Street Primary was again a school of distinction. Um Great Plains School uh was a school of distinction. South um South Street and AIS and AIS was also the year before. So AIS and King Street Primary
011were both schools of distinction in the prior year. There's several ways you can become a school of distinction. So it's always you have to be in the top 10 percentage points um of you have to be in the top 10% of the statewide accountability index results. So there are four categories. One is overall performance. So having the highest level of performance um in the accountability index. Another is your growth for all students. Another is your growth for high need students. And then also overall improvement. So if your um if your overall accountability index increased from one year to the next and you were in the top 10% of that happening, you would be identified as a as an overall improver. So you can see King Street Primary was um great improvement in high performance. So
012they had two areas of distinction which is fantastic. Great Plain was identified for their high growth of all students in math and South Street was identified for their high growth in um for their high need students in math. And then AIS had several areas including high performance and high growth for all students in ELA, high growth for high need students in ELA and math. So that was a fantastic um even improvement from the year before and which puts them in a category one uh because their overall accountability index is is in the high performance category as King Street Primary is as well. So, um, just real quick, um, as we're kind of looking at these schools, um, and our schools of distinction, we for if we're considering the alliance districts overall in the state of
013Connecticut, you see here the number of schools that they have for school of distinction. So overall for Danberry, we had four and the only um district who received more schools of distinction than we did were was Meridan. Okay, these are the um accountability index indicators that we're measured on, right? So, we have academic achievement. Now, when we consider that all these indicators have different weights, so they're not all considered the same within our overall performance. So, depending on the district um and then the school level, grade levels that they serve may have different weights for their overall school. But considering this, these are the areas that they um that they have uh measurements for. So, academic achievement, and we're going to get a little bit deeper into that, how we're seeing academic growth, uh our
014participation rates, chronic absenteeism, which we're proud to say has been a great area of improvement for us, and then how we're doing with our post-secary preparation and readiness, as well as how we're graduating students. We have several indicators for that that we'll get into um as well as physical fitness and arts access. So to dig in a little deeper to what our score is, Debra public schools overall accountability index for the 2425 school year was 68.7%. When I say 68.7% there, that is the percent of our total possible points that we could have earned. So, we earned 68.7% of our overall points in those areas that were on the previous slide. Um, in the uh 2324 school year, we uh were at 66.2. So, we had an overall a 2.5 percentage point increase. We were
015identified as having an ELA performance index gap as well as a graduation rate gap for our 2022 cohort. So, when we have a 2022 cohort, that's our six-year graduation gap um that I'm referring to. So, when you have your highnee students, what they do is they break out highnee students and non- high need students. As a reminder, our high need students are anyone who qualifies as a multilingual learner, a student with a disability, or someone who qualifies to receive free and reduced lunch. You could be in one of those categories or you could be in all three and you would count as one. Okay. So, what they look at is how um students who were non- high needs graduated compared to high needs. If we were an outlier according to where the state was, you're
016considered to have a graduation rate gap. Um so that was the case. Our gap was 11.4 and the state was at 8.6. So because we're above that state gap as an outlier, then we um we we are actually considered to have a graduation rate gap. Our ELA gap, the state threshold, which was the gap plus one standard deviation was 16.9. We were 17.7. So that's putting us in having an achievement gap of how our high need students are performing compared to our non- high needs perform. and we can ask a couple questions about that later if if you have um any clarifying questions. So for academic achievement, what we have here is how it breaks out and what that looks like of how our students are performing on each content area. So in the first
017column, you'll see what our percentage of points were earned during the 2425 school year compared to the 22 I'm sorry to the 23 24 school year. And then you'll see in the third column is the change. Um, so when we're looking at this, I just want to remind you we're looking at the percentage of points earned on like the report card. It's not our proficiency levels. Okay? So that's a different um a different measurement. So if we're looking at ELA all students, we're looking at their performance index. that considers students who are in grades three through eight for their smarter balance performance as well as SAT performance for our 11th graders on the SAT school day. So this was our score uh for the previous year we increased by 2.4. They then break out our
018high need students. We increased by 2.6. Our math is the ESPA as well as the SAT for in grades three through eight and grades 11. We increased in those areas as well, a little over two percentage points in each of those. And our science, we did we relatively same the stayed the same for all students and we increased 1.5 for high needs. The next piece that they look at is how did students grow? And when we're talking about how they grow, students have to have had a data point from the previous year. So it would only include grades three through eight or I'm sorry four through eight because our our fourth graders would have had to have a data point in third grade. So what they look at is on ELA for us smarter balanced
019is how did students perform one year on their scaled score and then how many points did they increase the next year. So what they call that is the average percent target achieved. So what the state gives us is a target for each student when they take the smarter balanced assessment. They say if you got this skill score this year we expect you to grow 50 points say and if you got all the way to the target you were at 100%. If you got halfway to the target you're at 50. So what they're looking at is on average how far students are getting to their targets. So for those points, we increased pretty drastically in ELA at 6.9 um for our overall students and about 5.8 or six percentage points for our high needs. And math
020we saw four percentage points um increase across all students and high needs. The other category that we're measured on when we consider growth is how students are doing on the last links assessment. And the loss links assessment is what measures the language acquisition for students who are identified as multilingual learners in our district. So what they look at is students who are took an assessment first year they're with us and then the second year how do they perform? Same with Smarter Balance. On the last links they give a target of where students should be hitting on their next um assessment in the next grade. So they're looking at what's the average of students um growth in those areas. So um in this case we remained pretty much the same across both literacy and their oral
021language acquisition. So when we look at those scores that includes grades one all the way up to grades 12. You just had to have a previous score in all of the academic um areas for the accountability index. is for students who must have been enrolled with us on October 1st and then who also took the assessment with us. So for students who arrive, their per their scores still matter to us obviously, but they're just not included in the accountability index results. The next is chronic absenteeism. And so when we're looking at this again, this is the percentage of points that we earned when it was related to the amount of points that they would assign on this part of the report card for chronic absenteeism. So when we look at this and we're talking about
022chronic absenteeism, as a reminder, it's anyone who is absent 10% or more of their enrolled days within the school year. So, um, for the state, if we look at this, we were we've really done a tremendous job increasing, um, this past year seven percentage points and over for both all our students and our high need students. I just want to explain that's not our chronic absenteeism rate. Um, and that's what these charts were to help illustrate. So essentially on the left side um of each of the smaller graphs you see the state level data and so the blue um the blue lines are all students. Okay. So obviously in 201819 that was precoid. So um they don't even have 1920 on there because of how schools shut down. They don't compare that data. That's always
023taken out of the data collection when we're looking at trend data over time. Um since 2122 um personally we have um decreased our chronic absentism rate to 15.2 which is below the state average. Um now if we look at students with high needs we're significantly below the state average at 24.8% we're at 17.3. So again, that's taking kids out into into um all students and with high needs. Right now, as of when I pulled this original finalizing the slide deck, we were at 14.3% year-to date for um the 2526 school year to with the work we are doing a lot around is at the high school level. We're working closely with Dan and Meg and as well as the um folks who are the academy directors in looking at where students are um chronically absent
024and how we're addressing the needs of of them as well as their families. I have to say some of our um elementary schools are below 10% right now which is phenomenal. Um and our middle schools have made great gains. um you know really there have been very strategic action steps put into place of how to reduce this number. We know that nothing else will increase if we don't have students in school. So there's been a strong effort um in those areas. The next piece of the accountability index is post-secary preparation and readiness. So this is really about um students of what kind of courses are they taking at the high school level and how are we preparing them for postsecary experiences. So um when we look at the taking courses that's the percentage of students
025in grades 11 or 12 that participate in at least a couple of different things. You could have two courses throughout your high school experience. You could have had two courses in AP. You could have two CTE courses in one of 17 what they identify as career clusters or two workplace experiences. So anytime through high school, we get credit for it when they're 11th and 12th graders. So you can see that we earn 100% of that points. that's been huge around the CTE development that's been happening as a part of the academy work as well as students taking the the APs. Um the second part is the passing exams where we we do have a little bit of work to do and although we are seeing gains in this area and we're continuing this improvement work
026that's happening there. So that's 11th or 12th graders who did a could have qualified for a couple different things. On the SAT, if they hit both math and reading at a certain benchmark or scale score, you had to hit it in both. Same on the ACT, you had to hit a three or four on at least three out of the four exams on the ACT. And then if you scored a three or higher on your AP exam and if you earned three or more college credits during your high school experience. So you can qualify through several different ways. You know, as we continue our dual credit programs and things like that, our classes, we're going to see this number go up and and um we're already seeing um uh that increase happening. So the next
027piece is graduation and post-secary entrance. So this is whether or not you're on track to graduate as well as what our graduation cohorts have looked like. So when we're talking about on track to graduation, what they do is they take our ninth graders and they say who earned enough credits to become um a 10th grader. So when you're looking at what the graduation requirements are, you have to have at least six credits to be able to move into 10th grade. So this is how many students were able to do that. We have seen tremendous changes in this area. So we increased 11.1 percentage points. I know they're doing a tremendous job with the ninth grade academy of really looking at and supporting students of how they're passing courses and whether or not they're enrolled in
028the right courses and are they in school and all of that. So, as we get students ready to think about their pathways, they're also highly engaged in what the work needs to be for their nth grade experience. um what really determines graduation rates is if they are on track for ninth grade. So when we look at that number in four years if we're able to maintain that you know our graduation rates are going to continue to increase. So but if we look at our four-year graduation for all students which would have been the 2024 cohort. So this is a little bit tricky because this is as a result of the 2425 school year. They actually use the year before's graduation rates. So I did share later in the slides what our graduation rates are projected
029to be for the 2425 school year, but they're kind of always a year behind with this because graduation rates don't get published for a while. So um when we look at this we earned 80.8% a slight decrease at 2.1 and similar with our six-year graduation rate. So that was actually a 2022 cohort. So you go back six years right and so how many students graduated there. Um and post-secary entrance actually is how many students enrolled in a two or four degree program within one year of graduating high school and that was according to the class of 2024. So we had a slight decrease in that. This is always kind of one of those indicators that um that folks are unsure if it's fair or not. Um because whether or not students actually attend a university
030or a program um is is is somewhat outside some of our jurisdiction, but they still are attributing whether or not they attend to to our district numbers. The final area around um the accountability index is actually physical fitness and art access. So physical fitness is a part of a Connecticut physical fitness assessment. And on that in order for students for us to gain points in those areas, they have to score as kind of proficient or meeting standard in all four areas that they're assessed in. So um when that happens we have to have a participation rate of at least 90%. Um we had ours was 94.6 we went up by 7.3 percentage points. I know there's been a lot of focus with our physical education uh teachers as well as the department head of the
031importance of of developing these areas with our students. Um the second part is arts access. And so this is whether or not a student was enrolled in at least um what considers uh part of fine arts in high school. So were they enrolled in at least one dance, theater, musical music, visual arts or media arts in in the year. So we were at 90 we earned 91.2% points for that. The next slide takes a look at our overall accountability index. So this is the state overall average in the first um part of the graph. The second piece is the district level for Danbury public schools, the district level for Norwok and the district level for Stamford. So it also takes into consideration, you'll see what that has looked like over time. You know, every district
032was higher as a part of the 2018-19 school year and folks have been kind of recovering since then. We're in a similar um trajectory as the other districts um but we we vary greatly in our pupil pure pupil expenditures. So with according to the last 2324 we were at 17,100 where Norwok and Stanford were significantly above that with with a uh total operating budget that was significantly more than what Danbury public schools is operating with. Um, so just kind of side by side what that looks like and just to give you some indication of where we're going as far as our where we are right now and what is the most current data. This was these are our projections for where our students ended last year. It is not public data yet on um for
033the Connecticut ed site. Um but what we project and what we've been working on state on is this is where we are. Um so again previously I was showing you our accountability rate that was like our report card grade almost. This is actual graduation rates. So if you look at our 2425 school year compared to the 2324 that was in the accountability index, we've increased overall uh graduation by 6.4 percentage points. Our high need students went up by 7.1. Our multilingual lingual learners did a tremendous change and an increase of 17.9. Our free and reduced lunch students went up that qualify for free or reduced lunch went up by 2.5 and our students with disabilities went slightly down at 3.7. Another piece I know um some folks had some questions about where are we now
034with some proficiency level at this point of mid year and um I just wanted to give you just kind of a quick snapshot and what that's looked like from the beginning of the year to the middle of the year. So, our K3 students are assessed on the Dibbles assessment. That is a state requirement. We have to assess students using an approved assessment for um uh three times a year and we report that data to the state by student. Um since adopting um the new ARC core program and the Hill for literacy strategies that we've been doing a lot of professional learning about, we've been seeing some really significant gains particularly in our lower grade levels. So I just wanted to highlight that a bit. This is what it currently looks like. BOI mean meets beginning
035of the year. MOI is middle of the year. So overall you'll see red are the students who are well below. Um and yellow is below but progressing towards meeting um grade level and then at grade level is your green and blue is your above grade level. So if you look at where we are with kindergarten from where they entered, it is a dramatic difference by midyear. Last year we increased kindergarten proficiency. If you look at the bullet points on the right, we increased proficiency from 26% to 63% by the time they left kindergarten. An amazing job by our kindergarten teachers. They also reduced students well below benchmark in that red area by 26%. So, what's really hopeful about this year, and I wrote it down, is based on what we're seeing at midyear right now,
036we've already decreased students well below benchmark in kindergarten by 25%. So, that's a tremendous change. By the end of the year, that should be even more. So, we assess again for those um in in the end of April, beginning of May. So, our grade 1 students are showing a significant change as well. Um, typically by the end of the year, we went from 37% to 58% last year, reducing by 19. So, we're seeing a a good trend moving um the the proficiency level. Grade two decreasing there well below benchmark and increasing the amount of students above benchmark. Grade three is still an area with our dibbles that we are looking at deeper into how students are performing um on the subtest to identify areas where we need to provide additional support and that's what's currently
037happening at the school level. Students are also assessed with I Ready in grades two through eight in reading. There are some things that we get out of I Ready that we don't get on the dibbles particularly for our multilingual learners with dibbles. Um it is time it is a timed assessment and if you don't have the fluency you really they kind of stop testing at certain places. Our ready helps us gain more knowledge about students needs in grades two and three. Um so that is why they're assessed in both to help meet their needs a little bit more specifically. So these were our results in grades 2 through eight um from the beginning of the year which you'll see the lighter line at the ball is on the bottom is the fall of 2025 and
038where we are in the winter. So we're seeing some really great improvement placements in those bands. Obviously we want to reduce the the uh the red and the striped red areas which is striped is three or more grade levels below. Again this is everyone together in grades um two three. what we do with the principles is really drill down by grade level um and and their classes and see where students are. Um the second is K8 iss um all those grade levels combined. So this is what we're looking at for those students being assessed and where they're falling. We're increasing the proficiency as you'll see here. the this is pretty old data for this. um all tested grades um receive this assessment in December right before break so that we we try to space out
039our testing particularly with more heavily tested grades who get the science assessment as well as um as well as the um uh let's see what else science uh nagleary we administer in third grade um you know there's just a lot of testing that happens in the spring. So, we're really trying to be intentional to not have test fatigue for students and that they're not overwhelmed. So, this all tested most tested grades um receive this in uh December and and then will again in the spring. Um this is the 912 uh projected reading proficiency. This is where they were in the winter. So about 45% of students are considered this is correlated to the SAT and PSAT. So those bands kind of um are looking at where are students um with those benchmarks in mind. And
040so we're looking about 45% of our students in grades 9 through 12 at being proficient in reading and ELA and in math about 18.1% by the winter. So Cara, I don't know if you want me to answer any questions now or just kind of go into next steps with Allison and Christie. >> Yeah, I I would leave a a moment for for some questions if I know that's a lot. It's, you know, we always try to present the data in person. That just didn't seem to work out in these last couple of times we've scheduled. So, um, you know, we know that this is it's a lot to digest and you probably, especially for new board members, heard terms that might be unfamiliar or jargony. Um, and so if there's anything that you know, you
041might not even want to ask right now in the moment because you're still digesting it. Um, certainly you can give me a call. Certainly we could talk offline. Certainly, you know, by the next time we have a meeting, you have some questions and you want to digest it, I'd be more than happy to explain or or uh unpack some of the data for you. So, we know it's a lot. Um, so, you know, we we just uh we'll we'll take it as it comes. But, um, and if there, you know, if there's any questions, we're happy to answer those. Now, >> I just want to ask a question. Um, thank you, Carol, for all the information and uh it's very encouraging. there seem to be in the elementary schools a concern uh about the students
042as far as moving ahead with reading, writing and math. So I'm quite sure that all every all our schools are on the same level as far as teaching. So have you heard or are there any concern uh from uh the principles or staff or whatever concerning reading, writing and math and how do you or how do the team work together to improve that memory? >> Sure. That's a great question, Glattis. Um so we have a a a process where we um intentionally support and select a couple of schools who seem to need a little more focus than others. And so um we do things called instructional rounds. And instructional rounds start with a process of a data review. The data review looks at very explicit data by grade level, by teacher, by school. We look
043at how are the attendance rates going? How what about chronic absenteeism? how are students doing on both of you know formative and summitive assessments across the year and then we say is this a school that um with some additional support we should be able to move and so the team makes some strategic decisions about where they're going to spend a majority of their time across maybe four or five schools and then some schools who are maybe in better better shape uh if you will statistically will support them uh with with >> more typical support and so in that process process. We go into every single classroom. We uh observe and observe instruction. So, we triangulate the what we're seeing on paper and test data with what's happening in the classroom. And then we debrief with
044the principal and sometimes some other um folks that are in the school to see what's going on, how do we increase the rigor of what's happening, and then how do we better support the school? We have a limited amount of support staff. So the the folks that are on this screen are in schools like almost like you know three four times a week and the these processes are extraordinarily consuming. So they they take hours uh to do. There's an there's prep that happens before that. There's hours in the school and then there's debrief and action planning that takes place afterwards. Um, and so again, we take our resources. There's not a lot, you know, we've uh we have some of our supervisors and a couple of coaches and we'll deploy them strategically to do coaching
045cycles with teachers, coaching cycles with principal. Um, but we, you know, we could stand to use some more of that staff for sure, Glattus. So, it's a great question. There's not, you know, we we have to choose because we don't have enough to do all to support as everybody in a deep deep way. So I would say that um many of our schools can benefit by uh deeper levels of engagement with central office uh and co instructional coaches um to help support and we know that where we've applied those strategic uh supports schools uh we've helped schools improve um but really at the end of the day the the the courage and the and the will of the principal drives the outcomes in the schools and our job in central office is to do everything
046we can to support them and to and to increase their level of uh understanding but also help them increase the level of understanding with their teachers as well. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> I did have a question Cara that was great data. It was great snapshot. Um just to second glattis question was um the accountability index values. I was wondering how was the category 3 schools supported when it comes to PD for staff um or even summer programs for students? How are those areas kind of you know those supports being added >> for pre for preschool? Did you say >> no for category? >> Category three schools. >> Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said preschool. I'm sorry. I category three schools. >> Yeah. So I would say like similar to what Cara
047said earlier, we do have a tiered system of support depending on typically the needs of the of the of the school. So we do look very deeply at the accountability index. Um you know at at the beginning as soon as it's released, uh Dr. Alita and myself met with every single principal to review where they are in the accountability index, looked at what was um identified as an area of maybe improvement or an area that they're doing quite well in and and how do we continue that work? I mean there were places where we saw great gains and you know we said to the principles, hey like how did you do that? Like have you identified like what you think was the biggest indicator for that? they were like, "Oh my gosh, this was one
048of my decisions. I got to make sure I keep doing that." Right? So, there's like both identification of like what's going well and what's a real challenge. So, getting them first to understand the data so that they can make evidence-based decisions because sometimes this is a lot and so many indicators go into it. So really supporting the principles particularly in category three to understand the data and where they're situated in it. And then what is it that you have to monitor throughout the year to see like so say we're come up with an action plan like you know really it was your fifth grade data that is showing places for that and we have some tiered system of support as we said with carara with instructional rounds which we will talk about with our next
049steps but then we say like okay here's ways that you can monitor it now to also see if it's making a difference that's where the growth reports for like I come into place as well as star and other things like that. So what's typically identified is like where do leaders need support from central office maybe from departments from particular content areas and then where do teachers specifically need instructional support from coaches. So that's what we'll identify if there's a category three school where it was a particular grade level. We might go in and have a coach work specifically with those teachers to improve like some of their strategies in the classroom. Then also we're developing a plan with the with the principal around how to address the other components and then getting departmental support. They're
050also getting coaching from Drs. Zelita as well. >> Thank you. Any other questions related to data or just anything that you've heard so far? Okay. Um I'm gonna kick it o over to Allison and Christy to talk a little bit about some of um some of the other components of the work that we're doing particularly around PLC's and professional learning and then um some additional items that are you know part of the work ahead. >> I don't want to be too redundant. I think both uh Dr. Casemiro and Carowanza uh went into great depth around the instructional rounds process um and how schools are selected for that process. Nonetheless reiterating that all schools get some form of support um through the data meetings. Um but schools who based on their data need uh a little
051bit more of a touch um engage in the instructional rounds process. And again, um, based on what comes out of those meetings and really looking at the data really determines how we allocate, um, our resources, uh, to be able to effectively support schools. But nonetheless, we ensure that every school receives some form of support. But the level of intensity of that support varies based on leadership. It could be a brand new leader who may need a little bit more support um versus a leader who may be a bit more experienced or based on the performance of the school. Christie, do you want to talk a little bit about the PLC's and professional learning? >> Sure. So as our team which is the teaching learning team that car um mentioned as well as our CDT or
052our CRC folks this team is our role really is to provide clear expectations for student learning to all stakeholders and then support principles as the instructional leaders of the building to align um their work with what's what they need for the teachers in their classroom. So with the alignment is we're talking about professional learning that's what rather that's the afterchool time that they have or the inschool PLC times when we can we have our cadre subs now K5 to have a cycle in 6 through 12 they're built into their schedule and so we want to align these professional learning experiences and PLC's to our district priorities so that we can support our teachers in their with their classroom practices making sure that they have the highest leverage most impactful strategies in place way that we've
053done this is to create these collaborative learning structures for principles. Um we've been holding principal PLC's and in those sessions most recently we were talking about teacher PLC's and in the sessions we modeled for principles um structured we did structured structured uh conversations. So we modeled for principles by using strategies that they could use with their teachers to help um build this dialogue between teachers around student data as it as it um relates to the the data they're seeing right now and the and the strategies they're going to use with their students. So these sessions align also to our professional standards for educational leaders. So at the same time that we're building um their capacity, it's also um building their capacity to support the capacity building they're doing for teachers. So it's kind of this
054this snowball. So as we support teacher or principles in their learning, they're going to be able to support teachers better, which then in which we're all here for is to support the students in the classroom. So we also have some outside partners that come in. Hill for literacy has been doing administrator training to support them. So when they're doing walkthroughs um whether it's by themselves or with one of our CRC folks or one of us that they know how to give meaningful feedback in time to teachers, teachers are also getting coaching cycles through Hill. They have an online module that they're going through with Hill that's structured. We've had two different cohorts. Cohort one is in their second year. Cohort two has started this year. And even with all that dog on snow, um these
055these modules are coming and the modules are aligned. They go through a module. It's like a three-hour. We've been doing them on the half days and then the coaching cycles come in with the hill for literacy people. The strategies have been amazing support to our ARC um core implementation and have really helped uh teachers know when to use the strategies which are all evidence-based. Um really our our ultimate goal of the professional learning for principles is to strengthen that support as I mentioned before that they're giving to their teachers. Um, we really look at it as a way to equip them in facilitating more meaningful PLC conversations, providing that targeted instructional feedback, supporting teachers in using data effectively. I know carows mentioned it that we support principles in learning more about the data, improving their
056data literacy so that they can bring it to their teachers and also aligning the professional learning with the classroom needs. All of this really is intended to create a multiplier effect for in we're strengthening this instruction across classrooms and we're going to see improvement in students as we as demonstrated by especially our our early K12. Does anyone have questions about any of that? Lauren had to step off. So, um I am not sure if there's any other questions. Again, we know this is a lot and you know, this isn't the only time we we talk about curriculum and programming. It's the heart of the work that we do. I know I spent a lot of time with Glattis um as chair talking about a lot of the improvement efforts and I'm sure um you know
057for all of us it's nice to see some of this come to fruition from a lot of the work um from from last year but there's a lot of work to go uh more to go on this. Um we're not satisfied. We love the we love the bump up. We love seeing more green than than any other color on that slide deck if you um you know take that away. But um no one's resting on any laurels here. There's a lot a tremendous amount of work to do. Um over the course of this last year, you know, our our community has been a little bit traumatized, if you will, right? A lot most of our kids have been going through it and in class and, you know, we're going to, you know, we're working through
058how, you know, uh mitigating some of the effects of that um in terms of their ability, you know, to to dig into the work. Um our staff is working extremely hard. Our teachers are working very hard. There's always ways to get better at what we do. there's always ways to get more efficient and there's always ways to bring more coherence and alignment to the work that we do. And so, um, we're an organization that continually works on improving that. Um, this team here is, uh, there's no harder working group, uh, than some of the folks that you see on this call. And, uh, you know, hopefully this time next year, we continue to inch along with this. This is, uh, this is a marathon, right? Race, you got to pace yourself. It's not a not
059a sprint. um you know over multiple budget cycles we hope to improve as we're able to bring in more resources to support the kids at scale. Um what I know about the team is that we have a lot of expertise to apply and to support. It's scaling that having enough people to do the work um over the course of the year is is at the heart of kind of where we'd like to see this go. Um, so again, more not the first conversation we'll have on curriculum or programming or the work that we're doing and and certainly not the last this year. So, um, you could certainly follow up with with myself or anyone else. Um, and more than happy to help more than happy to help unpack some of the data that you saw
060today. Okay, Al, as a since you opened, I might look to you to to close us up if you're okay with that. >> If there if no if no one has any questions, uh I'll entertain a motion to >> Well, I would just like to I would just like to say that uh the present >> Oh, you went on mute, Glattus. >> Okay. That uh I said earlier the presentation was great. It's a lot of information to um of sort if you're a new board member anything and I would encourage our new board members to really read your material and not depend on the answer that someone else gives you your in your minutes everything that you needs to know want to ask a question and you can always call someone and I know that
061they always take your telephone call and answer your question read your material so with that Oh, did someone take minutes? >> Take minutes. Anybody take minutes? >> Oopsie. All right. So, we're going to have to figure out We're going to have need some minutes for this, I'm sure. Um I'm sure we can help with some of that. How about that? >> Yeah. >> Okay. All right. Well, I'm good. If you're all good and >> good. >> That's the case, then. Good night and thank you. >> Thanks everyone. Thank you.