001okay Canada here Gladys Cooper here Lauren Daly you think she told me she could not be here Bridget gurton is here Julie here Ralph not here Albert is here and Louisa here okay great um I did not see an updated agenda item um I mean an updated agenda uh can someone confirm there was that was there was just a change of items There's No Agenda itself it's just okay um a suggestion to take the executive session discussion of the contract you're going to ratify and putting it at the end of the meeting along with the vote so that any public won't have to wait while you do that okay sounds good so with that I will give the floor to uh Mr Walston thank you thank you um and good evening everyone and thank you
002for taking the time to join us this evening um I understand I know number one we just had a subcommittee meeting finance committee meeting Mr Russo thank you but I also understand we we had board members in a working in a different capacity the Miss trucia so I just want to thank everyone uh for their work this thing um so we are when I say we talk about the cabinet I think also I think you're going to learn quickly uh there was significant Community feedback and involvement in our survey that we push out to the community so I'm excited to kind of share those results as well um for the board members who have been on serving for a couple of years now um they will tell you that we started this work these discussions
003uh prior to the pandemic and with the pandemic approaching this certainly was no longer a priority uh certainly the action steps and the priorities are still important to us um but the the activity of walking you through um the plan uh was not as important given the um given given the realities of the pandemic uh with all of that said uh we have um our strategic plan um our roadmap roadmap to achieve it uh that we want to review with review with you this evening as part of the presentation um I'm asking I think it will be most efficient if we save the questions for the end um I believe Mike has set up a Google doc um and Mike if you can also take that document and put it in the chat for the
004board members so they don't have to go fishing for it and then the team and I and the team and I we're all represented on this call can Circle back at the end and answer any questions that you might have uh previously I also want to state that the plan that we will be sharing with you this evening are the same goals that were that was shared previously it's just in a different format this evening different colors and you'll you'll you'll see that momentarily just wanted to make it consistent with some of the recruitment materials and some of the colors that you may have seen displayed at our kickoff to to begin the Year this year so it's just kind of more colorful more engaging and frankly just kind of more consistent uh what we're
005trying to do um so what I would like to do is re revisit the vision and Mission with the board with the community and excerpt from the equity and diversity policy and a reminder of our portrait of The Graduate just in terms of its our Focus as a district and then walk in and then take an opportunity to kind of walk you through the survey results feedback um and I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised at feedback from our community um in in terms of Engagement that we got from them I've endeavored to to to make sure that we've had a community plan um and so regardless of how the seats change how the faces change in the cabinet or and or the board um it was important to me that we have a
006plan that the community is going to embrace and I think we have some evidence between the last number processes now given the feedback for our vision and Mission giving it feedback and work from the board on the equity statement and the the community engagement on the parts of the graduate I think you're going to find um in many ways that this plan is can consistent with all of that work to help realize the vision and mission of the school district so without any further delay Mike I'm going to ask if you can share your screen yep one second [Music] foreign there we go oh great thank you I'll just give everyone a minute to adjust their screens but again um our strategic plan five year plan with um the way the plan will be laid
007out you will see our six um goals as a district with strategies to help realize those goals and then action steps to help realize those strategies as a as a process throughout the plan um the microwave to the next page and so the vision and Mission um through our work with getting feedback from Community parents students staff during the 18 during the 1920s school year we revised our vision statement to read Danbury public schools aspires to advance all Learners to The Highest Potential and we do that in partnership with families in a community and provide while providing transformation learning experiences designed to nurture thoughtful and prepared graduates Mike at the end of 2019 we approved a policy this board also Revisited this policy I began I believe that um at the beginning of this year
008or sometime before the end of last year reviewed the policy um and this board also felt comfortable with the language uh in the in in the policy this is uh simply an excerpt from that policy but we feel strongly this helps us realize our vision and Mission as well like and then here are the six priorities of our district Vision teaching and learning staff development Talent acquisition to school climate meaningful collaboration and resource allocation and I think teaching and learning is obvious just in terms of what that means staff development is about investing in trying to support the growth and development of our teachers administrators and staff Talent acquisition is another title for human resources and and recruitment of Staff School climate is about a number of things but it's about making sure kids feel
009good about coming to school families feel welcome when they come to school and students also feel that they're safe in our buildings meaningful collaboration for us and again I just want to the quick definition of these terms it's important that you you know these things as we move forward is really about family community engagement for us those are the the big areas that we'll be covering but it's also about uh means meaning making sure that we engage our staff in meaningful ways to make sure they continue to be connected to the district while we also look to do that with students and families as well but our big investment certainly has been families um and and staff last but not least a resource allocation um we critical for us not only resources allocation about how
010we support schools in differentiate resources to schools that need the most but with that also there are strategies in there around working with our city to to try to leverage um resources for the school district while also trying to seek additional funds whether that's through Federal funding State funding or local funding Mike and so Community survey and we had I believe we had this survey available for two weeks we asked for feedback on every individual every individual strategy that I had just reviewed with you and so you will see feedback from every area and as we go through the next couple of slides I'm ready Mike okay so in total we had 683 respondents um this is uh pretty typical of the type of respondents uh we received previously when we had um our uh
011initial kind of approvement of the direction of the Strategic plan A couple of years ago so three percent of the responders identified as community members 83 percent over 83 identified as parents of family members uh close to seven percent for students and close to seven percent for DPS staff Mike so teaching and learning and so the way um the scale was broken down it was strongly agree or agree neither agree or disagree disagree or strongly disagree and the blue represents a gray um the kind of yellow light yellow uh represents agree or disagree neither disagree or disagree the lighter yellow um I guess we call that beige almost is disagree and strongly disagree is the kind of can you point to the strongly disagree Mike the color thank you and so in the blue you'll
012see um of our three um three strategies to help help us Implement our goals it's Implement and sustain pre-k through 12 instructional programs that realize the characteristics of the pog strengthen and make curriculum accessible for all students and include enrichment interventions increased opportunities improve the quality of service for all students and overwhelmingly we have families of staff and students are proven in the affirmative Mike and then you'll see similar numbers although a little less open staff development but we across the board we are getting feedback in the 70s and I think you're going to see something consistent throughout when looking at the responders Mike similarly with Talent acquisition and this one is a little lower so I'll make sure I take an opportunity to reach read this one enhance teaching administrative recruitment to promote a
013broader pool of culturally responsive and diverse applicants and so you'll see we had close to 70 percent of our responders there agreed um deep in the sense of community in which Staff feel valued and respected a little over 80 percent and then enhanced structures that celebrate widely to deep and diverse contributions of our staff and inspire a rich School climate and this is a little over 75 percent at 76.7 Mike and then School climate and this is again just going back to addressing those social emotional goals um that you've heard us talk about often uh promote social emotional learning opportunities for all students throughout the day um 80 agreed promote and enhance programs that create safe schools over 80 percent and further develop our infrastructure to support resources and promote positive School culture and restorative
014practices throughout all schools and again we are close to 80 percent meaningful collaboration again one of those Investments that we have made in these last couple of years I work collaboratively with schools businesses and Community to strengthen meaningful engagement through joint decision making this is very important work uh certainly for Danbury Career Academy work a little over 70 percent build and enhance the capacity of families and Educators to support student learning a lot of these things have started through our Parent Academy parent University programming at 82 percent and develop effective methods of communication with parents staff and students and certainly um I I think the board probably calls some of the strategies we have taken and you're going to see some of those things reflected on in our plan uh with parent square and our
015website last but not least resource allocation continue needs and now continue needs analysis with the purpose of finding efficiencies that will improve the quality of services um and develop advocacy and partnership to leverage the voice of school leadership elected officials and Community stakeholders and this begins to specifically talk about some of those strategies that we're hoping will will yield some positive results for us and then last but not least deep in Partnerships with City officials to plan for program facility expansion in the face of expiry relief funding um and of course we are finding ourselves right there right now with the financial cliff right ahead of us and so getting back to the PowerPoint itself um just kind of want to walk you through some of the folks who will be speaking this evening and
016then again all of us will be available at the end of the presentation I might also encourage you if you have any questions please feel free to go to the link maybe add your questions in there it'll be a nice way for us to capture all of the questions at the end and make sure we answer everyone fully um and so uh Dr Cass I'm sorry go back Mike and so Dr casimiro is going to take us to the first two slides teaching and learning and staff development Kim Thompson is going to take us through Talent acquisition given her her portfolio and um Human Resources um Kelly tricious also she has a major responsibility in teaching and learning and staff development but for this evening she's going to cover uh School climate for us meaningful
017collaboration will be handled by Dr selig and resource allocation will be handled by uh John Stang um so Mike we're ready for the next one [Music] good evening everyone I apologize in advance if I have a little bit of a coughing fit uh it comes it comes and goes so I'm gonna do my best I have my cup of hot tea ready here uh in Waiting um so um most of you have already seen the the slides in the Strategic plan in the form of the um the broader goals um and so really some of the the things I'll outline tonight is what's kind of happening in the action steps so how do you take a strategic plan and break it down into uh chunks uh in order to achieve its intended outcomes and so
018as you know the first um the teaching and learning slide is a pretty weighty one how do we provide Equitable learning environments and experiences that are rigorous inclusive and culturally responsive that prepare learners for post-secondary Success um maybe a little bit later on we'll go through and talk a little bit about what that inclusive and culturally responsive actually means in the context of of academic settings and in the context of learning um because I think that um you know maybe identifying some definitions and clearing some misconceptions about that will be helpful for appreciating um how those terms are used throughout the entire presentation as well as in our own Equity policy that we've already adopted um so we can certainly Circle back to that and answer some questions but hopefully uh through the course of
019the presentation we'll be able to address some of that um so one of the biggest responsibilities in the school district is to make sure that we have a robust teaching and learning uh program and that our teachers are ready to teach that program so obviously our main goals and these are pretty common goals that we will Implement and sustain a rigorous program that realizes the portrait of The Graduate obviously the portion of the graduate is something that we've Incorporated that has been new um teachers in profession in our administrators are working diligently to understand our rubrics and to make sure that we're learning how to effectively weave in our portrait of The Graduate practices into our curriculum and into our lessons so that we're giving students practice practice and access with the things that we
020expect of them upon graduation um strengthening and make our curriculum accessible for all and basically that means making sure that all of our students have the same level of access and we do that in the form of creating supports in the Universal Design of what we do and increasing um interventions and improving academic outcomes there's no secret that we have a long way to go uh some of the setbacks of the academically with the as a result of the pandemic um something we'll be focusing on uh with this group in particular right now but for probably the next 10 years as we support um our students as they move through our school system so working on building up our resources for that which in years past we haven't had many the uh silver lining of
021the pandemic is that we were able to utilize a lot of the funding to purchase resources that we've never had before in the district so we're spending a lot of time rolling that out and teaching our teachers how to use those and then the last one is increasing opportunities to improve the quality of services for all students to be College and Career ready I think the academy is a testament in the development and action plan behind that work is a testament to the commitment that we're making in the College and Career area and so the action steps around these these areas are how to execute on these and so as you know this is a multi-year plan uh this is not a one and done there's a lot of work involved in some of that
022work May shift over time and will adjust over time but generally um in terms of the action steps and accessing the curriculum we are redesigning services to support our English language Learners so um our second language Learners uh their instruction their tier one instruction their core instruction is really about building um building language acquisition skills and so we've implemented some programs there we're going to continue to roll that out and Report out on that over the course of the next couple of years Implement and a comprehensive assessment system this is extremely important for us in order to get pinpoint where our students needs are it was important for us to build and robot and invest in a robust assessment system so we're learning about that new assessment system and we're working with our teachers and
023administrators to get them to understand how to utilize that and we'll be reporting out on that and the same is true the pattern will fall through with all of these we'll be reporting out on the various stages of implementation and rollout over time we'll be working on our curriculum and resources to support implementation that are both inclusive and culturally relevant Danbury is one of the most diverse cities in the state both socioeconomically and linguistically and we have an obligation to support all of our Learners not always does that include just it's not just about language per se but it's really about understanding our students as students who they are where they come from and understanding how to leverage those experiences to increase engagement one of the the Hallmarks of culturally relevant teaching is really about
024um having being going Beyond teachers just knowing their content but they know their content they know their learner and they know how to teach that content to the learner it's good teaching practice to understand your students experiences and to make connections with them to build relationships there's a tremendous amount of research and Neuroscience research on the brain that when you build trusting relationships with your t with your students and they feel that they are understood and they're making connections based on their life experiences that achievement increases um and and their their engagement also increases as well so that's something that's time tested research based um and is in uh vast amounts of literature uh which is why you'll see those terms throughout our presentation here not just in our school district but just about every
025school district in the state so um very important for us to be working on our craft in those areas okay um Monitor and provide uh feedback for teacher and admin training we're continually working with our teachers as we've been rolling out our our phonics program at the elementary level so we'll be working on that we'll be creating uh more district and school-based teaming to engage instruction around and feedback Cycles so how are we doing with the work that we're that we're rolling out um what does it look like in a classroom and how can we improve our craft so we partner together to do that work um identify coordinate and Implement research-based interventions as you know just in the last couple of years we were able to add student support Specialists to our budget which
026is very important that helps with our tiered intervention and they are critical uh critical staff member in in our buildings to help students who are falling behind and are more than a few grade levels below their academic peers so we'll be looking to continue to support that create systems to evaluate current before and after school systems and and and make sure that we incorporate the feedback from our state holders and we'll be partnering with Ann Mead and her Center to make sure that what we're offering after school is relevant um and supportive of our students and our families and let's see here make sure I didn't skip one oh evaluating outcomes so one of the things that is going to be really important for us to do is as we shift into uh moving shifting
027literacy programs we could speak a little bit more about that in the curriculum committee is that it'll be important for us to assess how is this going is this working and what adjustments do we need to make so establishing a system to evaluate our own work and to push ourselves for a continual Improvement and then the last one is to develop support systems to ensure students graduate college and career ready with either a four or six year high school cohort and so um lots of things go in into improving a graduation rate um attacking things on the side of absenteeism making sure that our students know that we want them in school and that it's important that we're communicating that with our parents and the students themselves making sure that we students are on track
028for graduation and that we're able to provide the courses that they need and the time that they need them in order to do that and to make sure that if a student is a second language learner or student who's coming in who's perhaps maybe overaged and a bit undercredited that we find a way to help accelerate their learning so that we can get them in our six year cohort to make sure that we all of our Learners are graduating and are successful for post-secondary opportunities and I'm not sure do you want to do questions on a slide or do you want to come back at the end Mike do you want to go through the whole presentation the whole presentation camera oh okay I will do that okay I'm finding it very difficult to um
029go through this it's like on speed um the information being provided is it's such a fast rate that it's um I'm not finding it productive I just thought I would make that comment okay would you like me to slow down on the action steps or or honestly I the second slide that Kevin presented with the mention statement that was not read out loud and was approved you know I guess that's the first place that was some time ago and the information being provided now is like so fast that um it's it's it's a problem for me I don't know if anybody else is having the same issue I did want to make that comment right Michelle I don't know what you mean about the vision it's mission statement you didn't hear the vision and mission
030statement that I read uh I didn't hear you read the the second slide I believe it was I think you ran right past it and then went right to the breakout of of the different uh you know action steps or whatever it was that the graph it's just very fast there's no time to absorb the information it's it's it's almost at the speed that I'm speaking right now if y'all slowed down a little bit and to wait till the end which is what we've been doing all this time for many sessions um and then waiting after an hour of a presentation does not allow the individual to actually literally dig in and ask questions or remember what the content was I just needed to make that comment okay so I Rachel I don't know if
031you had something to say but I I can just sorry I I think that I'm pretty sure you read the vision and mission statement am I did I miss I I definitely read it uh okay well maybe later at the end we could go back and read it because I'm trying to listen Maybe you know I'm not feeling the best but right now the the speed in which we are going it's a lot of information um and you know I just I need to make that comment sure thanks thanks Michelle if if we could just I know Cara you're very passionate you know this in an inside and out but if you could just slow it down just a hair not a problem um we're having the presentation the the um the document is my
032internet okay my do you hear me okay okay the document you can type in questions as we are as the as the presentation is going on um it's in the chat yeah I get that okay the presentation is so fast that by the time I'm finishing writing the question we're on to a different section so if we can just slow everything down then I might be able to maybe just me do both and absorb the information thank you I could definitely do that and you know the trick with these is always being respectful to not read at folks um something that's already written uh and to find ways to you know help make the connections between those two things um and spend more times in areas where folks had questions which is um I think
033Dr selick sent the questions out in advance so I happy to slow down I definitely talk a little bit um fast when I get going with these things so um I I appreciate the feedback and I will slow down for the next slide okay thank you okay thank you okay so we'll go to the next next slide Mike thank you so this one uh centers on staff development um as you know it's extremely important uh in order for our students to be learning our teachers need to be um at the top of their game and that requires a tremendous amount of attention to how our teachers are developing uh as professionals and how we're supporting them as people in many cases um and so the overarching statement is and goals that we're going to develop
034and enhance the skills of our Educators and the competencies of all District staff so it's really not just teaching staff but how are our paraprofessionals supporting the teachers in the classroom are their skills up to date um how how how are secretary staff uh greets the families when you walk in the door and makes them feel welcome so part of that is are all part of what makes School culture and climate and are very important that we're constantly paying attention to those and we're making sure that our skills are up to speed in those areas again the idea of cultural responsiveness and reaching all Learners you'll see that it's a common theme throughout and again all that means is that we get to know our families really really well and we leverage uh what we
035know about them to help them grow and to help their children grow and that means that we're very thoughtful in our approach and that we're constantly working on building those relationships to understand um you know the diverse the diverse nature of of the needs of our families and our students um so the the three bulleted areas to the left um in there's a tremendous amount of research on the role of the principal in a school and so when we talk about um some high leverage strategies and efficacy of how things play out in a school we know that the role of the principal has one of the highest highest rates of of supporting student achievement in school and so in in turn we are focusing our energy on our principles this year uh in in
036a ways that maybe we haven't been able to to do that before part of the commitment with that is to be able to have uh our two new uh chief of schools to be working directly with principals to provide ongoing job and vetted support um and to work on data data Cycles with principles to help them dig into their data help them understand the Learners in their building and help them uh work together both on one-on-one but also as peers to develop strategies to move their schools to the next level and we've had some great successes in this area we've had some Blue Ribbon Schools and I can tell you um you know some of our PLC work that that had begun over the last couple of years has been instrumental in principles having light
037bulb moments um that that led to um strategies and methodologies to implement action plans to take their buildings to the next level so um improving the the the skill sets of our principles is extremely important um we strive to provide um very robust professional learning so we don't have a ton of days that's always seems to be an issue that there's never enough time to implement all the things that we want to implement here in Danbury in terms of being able to support with additional professional development where we want to do that but we do our best to balance out the needs of the system uh with the time that we have uh in in the form of professional development time and also after school meeting times so those are that's very important so we're
038constantly looking to provide that learning so we could build the capacity of our of our staff members um for continual Improvement and then the last one is about increasing collaboration with teachers and administrators uh through practice uh through the lens of equity and high expectations and so that goes again centering on who are Learners in the classrooms in front of us and what are their needs and is in our what is what we are teaching um is are they ready for that how do we raise expectations around our academics and how do we drive Improvement through really really deliberate practices so this is a really important one and so making sure that there's an open relationship between the teacher and the administrator and that they have time through data teams after school time and through
039PLC were