001especially uh dr selig and dr mead appreciate you guys uh being here to help us learn about what's going on um michelle would you be able to take notes this evening i'm sorry i can't hear you you're muted i said today's not a great day i'm not in a great spot can somebody else take it i'll do it okay listen i'll do it thanks mrs cooper thanks sorry kate okay no problem um so with that i will turn this meeting over to dr selig and we can begin to go through this agenda here thanks so i'll start with number one and then um i'll i'll pass to ann who can talk through a few of the other um items one's probably the big item for today um and i do think kate will need uh
002an action on this one if everybody is is content with the the outcome so we put out a survey to the community a couple weeks ago regarding the school calendar for next year there were two options one and they were both very similar with the exception of the way we were treating our professional development days one option had 10 days that were early one hour early dismissals and the other calendar consolidated those early those professional developments into six half days so the the logic was you could actually get a lot more done some of those one hour ones are really tricky sometimes you um you have people that come in late and you know people that without with a who are at a late start school versus an early start school so it can get
003a little tricky and it really gets hard to sort of get any depth into a training with just one hour so the thinking was that by going into a half day you'd actually get more more productivity out of some of those days um but anyway we put it out there right and the other thinking was parents might prefer only six days having to figure out child care for an early dismissal as opposed to having those 10 days to try to figure out what to do with that extra one hour so we put the survey out and we had a pretty good response um we had 2238 total responses and out of that it was about a 60 40 split so 40 percent wanted the one hour dismissal and 60 wanted the half day calendar so
004it was pretty overwhelming uh uh to go with a half day calendar um and i don't know uh kevin or ann if you guys had any more insight into some of the the distinguishing characteristics of the of the the you know the two calendars i think from a parent's perspective um they like the fewer days where they have to find care and it's easier to take a half day off from work than just an hour off from work to be able to um receive their children off the bus and i will say that in the survey we had 137 students respond and so although we can't tell who they are we assume that many of them might have been at the high school and work after school and so this gives them a longer chunk
005of time to be able to work in the afternoon so that's it and one thing that was common to both and um this year we're going to be doing a kindergarten orientation for the first three days of school um the parents will set an appointment with the teacher the kids will come in you know learn where to hang their coat and put their lunch and all that kind of stuff you know how to get on the bus and then we'll also be doing uh a sort of general kindergarten assessment to just get a sort of baseline diagnostic reading for the teacher so they can start to think about how to calibrate some of the curriculum for the year ahead i may ask i just want to confirm with my understanding that the administration also felt
006like the half days would be more useful in terms of putting together professional development programs yeah i didn't want to really promote one calendar over the other but from a professional development standpoint the the half day calendar is certainly more beneficial it just gives you a better opportunity to sort of dig in and do something productive um and not have people kind of rolling in and out over the course of an hour and just sort of you know you know making appearances so thank you um other committee members any any thoughts on that or any um any comments uh i just think it's a good suggestion i'm sorry mike can you i had some technical difficulties there i don't know what's going on i i think it's a long time coming uh to look at
007half a days and i understand back in the olden days when we uh you know get release time for our early dismissal but it really makes sense as a parent and and i've been that root and they are it makes more sense to be able to uh do what you need to do for your child do it and instead of having an hour trying to reconnect your schedule and work and a lot of our people don't work full-time eight-hour job they do four hours over here and go somewhere else so it really makes sense to for us to move in this direction and then hopefully if it doesn't work and we might have to change we can go back and change to the one hour early dismissal so i i think it's a great choice
008great thank you i agree as well i guess flexibility is always good so yeah i think it provides that so i'm good thank you and so miss cooper to the point you just made and michelle the point you just made um i'm hoping with this one-year district calendar we can come back and kind of uh reassess maybe this time next year and then we can have a two-year calendar that the board can consider at that time so i appreciate your feedback this evening so um dr silly can i confirm you we're looking for a recommendation to to bring this back to the full board is that right that's correct make a motion on that um procedure i yeah i believe it is emotion um i'd like to entertain a motion that we uh make a
009recommendation to the board about uh going with the calendar that has a half day six half days uh for professional development on it please i'll second that i'll second it okay thank you all those in favor aye aye any opposed uh motion passes okay that was the first item there moving down the agenda uh the face update great thank you kate um it's great to see everyone again so i wanted to give a couple of updates on things that we're doing here in the community as part of our role in the family school community partnerships in the face center our first one is we have been able to leverage the work of correct the capital regional education council to do welcoming walkthroughs through the connecticut walk-through initiative for all of our schools and so over
010the last few weeks we have trained 77 people in the protocol under the guidance of the folks from crack that are the trainers for this this program was born out of the desire to improve family involvement in our schools the initiative makes families feel welcomed to celebrate the diversity of their school communities and set unique goals to improve how inviting their school appears to be in the community which ultimately if you have a welcoming school and families feel part of the school then students will score soar in their academics so the welcoming schools protocol goes through four different areas of the school physical state school-wide practices and policies how welcoming school staff is and written materials and so we've gone through the first part of this of training staff and so we had a day
011where we had all our family liaisons and then a day last week where we had principals assistant principals uh social workers secretaries um you name it principal sent folks out to take the training in total as i said we had 77 folks to complete the training they are now forming teams in their schools inviting families in to be part of that these teams and signing up on our sheet with the folks from crack who will be the team leaders in their school so we have been able to leverage these four wonderful individuals that are trained in this protocol to really be able to support the team walk them through the protocol itself debrief with them and then they will generate a report back to us and to each school principal as to the recommendations this
012is now a national tool that is used and so we feel very very comfortable in using it and um getting the feedback from our um correct folks as to what um needs to be done in our schools and so this will both support um how welcoming their schools are and improving how our schools appear as well as will inform these um school improvement plans as well um it's part of this bigger picture of how do we welcome families into our schools and so that that's one initiative we're really excited that we've been able to do that um this initiative has um we are part of the connecticut family network schools which is part of a federal grant that correct received and so that's where the funding comes from to do this program and to cover
013the cost of the crack folks and their report back to um this the school principal so we're really excited about that initiative um i wanted to give you a little bit of an update on the actual face center family and community engagement center as many of you have been aware over the years it was at 49 osborn street and last year we moved from there while they do the construction to 17 cottage street so we had to do a little finagling on how we were doing that but still making it welcoming still providing all the resources and the services that we offer our families um i feel that we've been pretty um successful in doing that for our families we certainly can tell by the doorbell ringing um on an average every three minutes of
014a family entering the building for whatever need that they're very happy and coming coming back to us and so um one of the big highlights of the center is that's where central registration is so families are registering online and then they're bringing in their paperwork they receive a nice welcome package while they're there and loads of different types of resources both in the community especially for our new families so they um you know are still trying to acclimate to danbury become familiar with the resources so it's important that we put these resources right in their hands we also have recognized that over the last year two years we did not have our play groups and so this morning moore street frc at moore street school began their play group and we will begin a play
015group uh next wednesday at 17 cottage street and the benefit of these play groups is we're able to support parents with children birth to age five identify developmental needs develop dementia developmental delays and help these families get the services as well as get books into their hand and songs and all those things that are the precursors to getting children ready for kindergarten because we have so many new families coming in and we know that there is definitely a shortage of health care services in danbury or or those that provide services have long waiting lists we've been fortunate to be able to partner with ritual vna health and we now run two health clinics a month we see anywhere between 14 and 20 children that need full health school physicals in order to start school what
016was happening is families were coming in didn't don't have insurance who couldn't leverage the community resources because of their waiting list where were all set registered and ready to go to school but couldn't start school because they didn't have their physical so uh the vna provides these services we're there usually we start about two in the afternoon and go to seven or eight at night they send in several registered nurses and a doctor so a child gets a full physical eyes hearing sight weight they receive a nice bag full of goodies to take home books and food they meet with a social worker as well so it is a comprehensive physical for these children and then we make sure that they receive their vaccinations and whatever else they need and are ready to start school
017so we're really really proud of that initiative another thing that we've been really working on is upping our parenting program programs to our parents i'm proud to say that we have 20 parents in parents supporting educational excellency right now and we'll be starting people empowering people at the end of april we also have zumba classes going on we have a positive discipline class that's happening all through our eop and our 21st century learning program so there's a lot of parenting program that parents can partake in at any time we are currently of course doing registration for our summer learning programs the sensational summer program is filled at this point we are taking more families on a waiting list but we always know that that program fills up fairly fast and then our 21st century programs
018will provide after-school care in the schools yet to be determined for students that are going to summer school as well in those 21st century schools our liaison project is almost filled that we've been able to have a liaison at every single school they too have been trained in a welcoming protocol and we meet every friday morning to do further training around community resources and the feedback from principals have been very very um positive they like the bridges that the liaisons are creating between home and school and helping our families to understand the expectations of schools but also to make parents feel that they're welcome in our schools the last two years um didn't do us a lot of good in being able to get engaged with families in person and so families are happy to
019be back um but we're also or and we're also doing some major training upcoming with teachers as well to help them be able to better partner with families our newsletter is just about ready to go out we have been working with mr walston to do a monthly newsletter activities that and i use three e-words engage empower and educate our parents their workshops that our parents have asked for so we have one coming up on talking to your child about drug and alcohol in the home another one on safety internet concepts um or safe internet safety so that newsletter will be coming out and by the end of the week that does go out in three different languages through our robocall system in parent square so we're really excited about that i think my our biggest
020news today is we heard from stop and shop charities that they are funding our for food pantries um at four of our schools in the amount of twenty thousand dollars so we know that food is still a big need need for our families um and so that will go a long way in helping help our families put food on the table okay we also got a pollinator grant that part pollinator garden grant for great plain school so and the community a community agency match that grant so we have a nice thousand dollars to be able to put that garden in so being a gardener i'm really really excited about that and i think that's about it i encourage everyone to come out and visit the center and take a walk through there are children there
021um every day there are our preschool special ed classrooms our school readiness classrooms are in that building it is a fun happy place um to visit so um do do come out lastly i'd like to just quickly talk about our k bridge visits that we did um last fall we were fortunate to use some of that i think it was cares one money or s or one money one or the other two um or that we recognize that we couldn't have those in person um come walk your kindergarten class come meet the teachers but we still needed to we felt we still as a team needed to do something for our families um to get them acclimated to what kindergarten was and so there's several different national models out there we looked at a home
022visiting lawn um but we came across this kindergarten bridge visit and it has been used very successfully here in the northeast as well as in connecticut and so we had 745 visits conducted by our kindergarten teachers and so this was data that was collected up to um december of this past year and so we had 99 of our kindergarten teachers participate they called each incoming kindergarten student introduce themselves and then set up a um about a half an hour the call averaged um call zoom meeting or a google meets meeting to ask just one question of the families what are your hopes and dreams for your children and that just opened up the door for parents to talk freely with the teachers about their child it enabled the teachers to ask questions the parents to
023ask questions of the teachers as well as get an idea of the children that were coming into the schools you know get to know what these children are what makes them tick what resources the families need needed and so i will share this with the committee in written form it was really great to see the feedback from all the surveys that we did um and how on and how the teachers would love for this to continue on so um that's all there's probably a bunch of little other things that are going on our as i said that doorbell rings constantly um people just show up they call there's three of us on phone lines um during the day all day um and the bilingual staff i have do an absolute wonderful job in meeting these
024parents in their native native language and make them feel very comfortable when they uh arrive at the building so that's it so that's beautiful and i'd like to yeah that yes um and there's always a lot going on in ann's office and thank you for that update i just wanted to share with the board and anyone who's might who might be listening won um i just added in a chat for everyone and as you were speaking just like i did on monday night um i i pulled an excerpt from um the crack welcome in schools page just so the board i mean the committee can get a little better understanding of the connecticut welcome schools initiative um and then for anyone who might be watching at home www.creck.org backslash welcome in schools backsplash black splash
025backslash is the website our families can go to to learn a little bit more about the work that's happening but i just want to applaud anne my family liaisons who have been amazing engaging in this work and for appreciate you and for your leadership and the principals who have really taken an amazing first step in this work um engaged in professional development last week every single school was represented in the training um and i think it speaks volumes about our our principles and the liaisons and and and how engaged they are and how committed they are to making sure that their schools are welcoming for our parents and for our kids so ann thanks thanks again for your leadership in this i just add something we're very um fortunate to have this this crack group
026and our connecticut family school partnership because they everything we do through them we're able to send them the data and dave beckel is our evaluator and so we get great feedback from him he looks at the date everything that we send him in the form of you know pre and post surveys and things like that but i just wanted to follow up on what kevin was saying just just five different things really really quick on the summary of the workshop evaluations from the principals uh principal a said how this can help move our school forward the actual welcoming protocol opening about what we thought was welcoming that did not include a lot what was mentioned and these are all principles for uh vice principal comments how to view our school is welcoming it gave me
027a new perspective on what it means for my school to be welcoming practical applications to improve our practices and systems and then lastly they talked about uh looking for some plans on how teams and schools can meet to have better transitional stages in student education especially between like that fifth and sixth grade on to um you know elementary under middle and then middle to on to high so um we're on to something new here and um you know anything we can do to help build the capacity of the schools and build our families that's what it's all about we know that those two components are the major drivers of student student success thanks again dr mita i just wanted to ask you a couple of quick questions if i could um you mentioned the sensational
028program the summer program that runs um how many how many spots do we have available in that program we're at 130 right now students that registered in three days and so we are looking to still recruit more staff if i'm able to bring in more staff then we'll be able to open up more spaces for that program we have about a hundred families on a waiting list right now and that's the full-time program and that's and that runs uh for part of the summer or the whole that runs for six weeks in the summer starting the last week of uh june through the first complete week of august august and and just to play on words it really is a sensational program and i can understand why that there's a waiting list to get in
029um i i mean i walked through that program last year and i called in immediately because it's the same program i would have been fishing for for my kids when they were that when they were that age from tennis to game to board games to team sports i mean the kids are just having fun and being bounced from activity to activity um it's it's a well-run program and this year it's going to be a little bit different we're still going to include all those things that kevin said but last year the students were able to spend one day at new pond farm in redding experiencing farm life and this year by grade each grade will go for a week so they'll come in the parents will drop them off eat breakfast they'll get on the
030bus with their counselors uh by nine they'll be on the road down to reading and then they'll come back around three or three thirty and so they'll partake in the activities of the farm so they'll learn how to clean out stalls and milk cows and in the whole milk thing you know how milk is processed yogurt and then there's a new weather station down there they'll be able to do some of the native um american things that they have going on um there'll be all kinds of arts and crafts so they'll get a good week down there experience in that farm and that suggestion came directly from families that they were very excited having that one day could we expand on that so that's phenomenal wonderful partners there yeah um as far as uh this
031the staff he talked about trying to recruit more staff to are those typically teachers that that um apply to to do that work or are we recruiting other folks from the community or so for the summer camp so for the summer we um encourage staff that's with us during the year to stay but then some key points of the program uh we do use the scholastic lit camp program and so we do have teachers that are there as well because they're looking at student scores um towards the end of the year the most of the students that are in sensational are not required or asked to go to summer school but yet they may be on the cusp of still needing you know more reading and you know we don't want to hear about summer
032loss we want students to continue on so using that lit camp curriculum um that that scholastic has written they're able to do all kinds of activities so we do use teachers for that and there is a tutoring component or a real strong you know for children that parents want more for them during the summer too yeah thank you i know there's a lot of demand in the community for so many programs so that's wonderful absolutely committee members do you have any questions for dr mead hi just one quick one is it possible to get one of those welcome packets um is it the fcc relation but when you first go into register like is it in different languages is it possible to get our hands on one the welcome package for the district yes yes
033yeah absolutely um and so we um have all kinds of different things in it and one of the things that the principals passed for last week is a sheet for their school so we are now in the process of working with school principals to develop a sheet so if you come in and say i'm a new family i know i'm going to go to ellsworth school we give you the packet and then we give you the sheet for ellsworth again we're trying to create that bridge from brand new here's your your district welcome package has a great letter in it from kevin has the calendar um community resources heating fuel medical all kinds of different things in it but then we're able to give them we will be able to give them the sheet from
034their school too so there's that bridge to their school yeah great and there's like sports information in there or teams like that like if they wanted to like really have an interest in that in a connection with that absolutely so our resource list is two pages it's pretty comprehensive of all the different things going on in danbury organizations sports uh our pal our park and recreation our mental health providers all kinds of things like that yeah thank you yeah do come see us i do yeah uh any other board members have questions oh okay uh it looks like we can move on thank you dr mead for that comprehensive update to the strategic planning okay so i'll be quick with this i know um superintendent walleston's updated the board um he sent a letter out
035last week and then there was also some um a little overview given it i think the board training a few days ago um but i wanted to make sure we we spoke to this committee about it because i know when the the original strategic plan the pre i'll say previous the current strategic plan uh really started being formulated around 2019 and at that time superintendent wallace spent a lot of time out in the community talking to you know town halls and community forums and making sure to just get a lot of feedback so the community really saw themselves in the document the high-level document that has the sort of six major goals on it was the sort of i guess the road map for the strategic plan and that that really got finished up right
036around um late 2019 early 2020 so it never really had a chance to sort of grow the legs and get sort of baked in to you know into action plans and all the things that come when you're doing a strategic plan it never really happened just because of the pandemic so it basically got put in a drawer and you know sort of these ideas around you know big thinking ideas long-term planning all that kind of stuff just went on hold during the pandemic because we were just so busy triaging the issues of the moment so last few months we've been bringing that back out and we because it had so much community input in it we wanted to preserve that original document that was made in 2020 um but we're going to be restarting it
037now as the 2022 to 2027 um strategic plan so it'll have a five year arc to it now we sat we had a little cabinet retreat about two weeks ago where we had a moderator dr john ramos from the connecticut centers for school change and we went back through the document and we made some very minor tweaks to it and that was intentional we did not want to add goals we didn't want to turn anything upside down or rip it apart so we made some adjustments with an eye towards what's changed in the district there's some new realities now that we have to pay attention to in light of pandemic um and also just some some economic and budget realities that we wanted to make sure we accounted for so that document got sort of
038a i guess a scrubbing i guess you could say um and that will be shared out with uh the full board in a um workshop that's going to be happening on april 28th uh from six o'clock to eight o'clock and that will also be moderated by dr ramos who who moderated our cabinet retreat so just a few critical dates that i want to run through so march 24th to 25th was the cabinet retreat um on april 12th we're actually going to be meeting with our entire administrative council so all the principals and and um and director level uh positions to go through the document to make sure that everybody feels they have you know they they see themselves in it that's you know you know the the important uh work that their offices is reflected
039in the high level goals so they'll all be on april 12th um and then april 28th is going to be that board workshop with dr ramos and then we're going to be at putting out a district uh survey right around that same time too to make sure that people who aren't able to come either to a workshop or on the administrative council that teachers and other staffers are able to see just what what the plan is and offer any feedback on it that they want and then we're going to go into doing the hard work of really building out those high level goals into an action plan that really just says what are the things that we're going to do everything from um you know fixing facilities to rolling out new curriculum to all those
040different things and making sure that we have that all very clearly laid out and then we'll be working with the principals so that they can put make sure these goals are baked into their school improvement plans and have them ready to go starting in august so a lot of that work's going to happen over the summer and then we expect the full plan to be completed in early fall where we bring it back to board hopefully for a an action for approval uh sometime in september okay thank you very much um in in speaking about this actually jacked my memory about something that dr mead was talking about as far as uh you know getting feedback from uh parents of the kindergarten you know incoming kid in class um is that information being funneled into
041either the strategic plan or to the portrait of a graduate somehow to to sort of you know take that feedback and incorporate it yeah that's that's actually a really good point um you know what we're hoping is that a lot of the the you know the feedback mechanisms that we've already put out there that have have a lot of that already pumped into the plan but then also through the surveys that we're going to be putting out and then some of the rounds that we'll be making in the next few months we're hoping we'll be able to solicit all that make sure it gets it gets included right and and and kate um we we will also as part of the feedback loop originally we thought we quite frankly thought we had enough feedback without
042including students um but we're we're gonna include students as part of this process um and i think i had updated the board recently um i know i had updated the board recently the new board members that had made them aware you know we had engaged quite a few students as part of this process middle school i'm in high school included but as part of our survey process we will also make sure students are part of that process and we'll see if we can get some of our principles to to help us with some structured time for feedback um to see if this can also happen during the school day as well great thank you sure thank you uh committee members any questions uh about the strategic plan no will we be getting um the previous
043version i think teresa had mentioned that and then the updated version of the original plan i think that was a question her last meeting we will have a side by side uh for sure michelle um so that the board can see the updates wonderful thank you you're welcome any other board members have any questions all right well well thank you so much for providing all this wealth of information and letting us know how you guys are communicating um you know with with our school community um i certainly look forward to those updates and and to that meeting on the 28th to learn more about the strategic plan that's being developed um i will uh ask if there are any other questions going once going twice uh then a motion to adjourn please if i could
044get a motion to adjourn uh looks like michelle's making a motion there can i get a second please yes then uh mrs cooper i don't know you just blinked out so i'm i'm gonna second that motion uh all those in favor all right bye all right thank you so much for joining us this evening thank you