2/23/22 Danbury Board of Education Meeting

001[Music] rachel celestine yeah michelle colella here kate canetta [Music] kate is absent yes glass cooper lauren bailey here joe silva frozen raven jordan president catherine hodgson president albert russo explosive louisa britton here i do just want to say before we get to public participation that this is not a public hearing this is not an open forum it is a board meeting in the public public participation offers an opportunity for the board to hear your thoughts and concerns it is strictly a time for us to listen and not a time for discussion but we are listening we are reading your emails and we hear you loud and clear we are not voting on mass this evening just so everyone is aware it is not on our agenda we understand during times like these that emotions run

002high and that we all want what's best for our kids despite differing opinions this board as well as our community have a good rapport keeping things civil and having mutual respect for each other i hope that we can maintain that level of respect this is a volunteer board and some of us have our own kids our own grandkids in the school system and some of us may share some of your thoughts and concerns please keep sentiments on the issue uh we do have to conduct business this evening and our bylaws state that we cannot go beyond 10 pm um so if you could please be mindful of those things and lauren would you read our public participation the board welcomes public participation and asks us comments be limited to to two minutes the public may

003offer objective comments of school operations and programs that concern them the board will not permit any expression of personal personal complaints or defamatory comments about board of education personnel and students nor against any person connected with the danbury public school system [Music] so with that said are you our student representative would you mind just standing to the side so that we can have our published speaker uh come to the table with the microphone right that hopefully the microphone works yes thank you you can sit down if you like take a camera just take a chair with you there you go thank you okay so first on our list is colin widoti [Music] the bad listeners in my class are not listening as well because of the math and that is why i do not think

004we should wear masks in school anymore good evening um i know i only have two minutes so i'm going to get right to my point thank you um i would just like to say that i am here to talk about math choice for our schools and once again danbury is being left out of all the surrounding towns being the only ones to still have such holiday restrictions put in place new fairfield bridgefield brookfield even the preschools have already dropped this in the area and i know what we're going to say that we're not like those towns and then we have bigger issues in hand so i'm going to cut right to the chase and compare us to the towns that you are all going to mention you're going to compare us to bridgeport you're going

005to compare us to norwalk stanford new haven all of those towns have had a city-wide mass mandate or indoors up in place up until 2 16 was the most recent i'm sorry today bridgeport just lifted theirs today as of today as far as i could tell stanford you sponsored stanford norwalk you still have to wear maps anywhere you go indoors new haven you still have to wear a mask anywhere you go indoors danbury has not had that in place since october if you would like to compare us to those other cities then we need to ask bigger questions why is the rate in jamberry so hot that we have to wear masks in school but now we go to the grocery store and now when we go to thrills and now when we go to

006the mall and all of the other insanely crowded and populated places with our students in them they are the same students that are then showing up to school on monday and being told that there have too many germs and that they carry too much red and then they need to have a mascot the numbers don't change depending on what location in the town of danbury you are in so we can go since october through the surge in january and everything else without having to wear a mask indoors i think it's time to take the mess off of our children in school thank you ally you guys why gomez don't like masks in my school um i don't like masks in my school because i'm constantly being told that i have to wear a mask above

007my nose i find it kind of difficult to breathe with a mask on and especially in gym class when we're doing it indoors in the gym um it's very hard to breathe and i don't like it because um you know we're doing exercise i need i need to breathe and um like sometimes when we're we can take mask breaks while we're on our desks but when we're not at our desks our masks have to be above our nose all the time [Music] optional because some people believe that they protect that they protect themselves with the mass but some people don't believe that so i think it should be a choice because i think that people should be able to choose what they want to do [Music] today i'm gonna i'm gonna say why um i

008don't like masks often i do lessons with my teachers and i cannot hear them very well and why i don't like the masks is because i feel a little uncomfortable how how they be tight on my ears and that's what i'm going to talk about juan rivas so since i have two minutes i'll cut the pleasantries out and i'll get to my point so hello there we go i like to bring it to your attention and issue spreading my son who's a student at broadview middle school my son who is an honor roll student voice of brian and student council member was suspended on february 1st for allegedly using inappropriate and offensive language we'd call which caused another student to push and pull my son down to the ground as most of you know on

009this board know my family and i personally being a minority family and the work that we do in the community we would never condone or use this type of language in our home we believe our son did not say these things as a result of this incident we were made aware of instagram pages with videos footage recorded in the school in most cases a few in particular of the incident my son was involved in one of our main issues tonight is how this video was recorded and circulated through social media we also believed he was scarborough bully and targeted prior to the incident on february 1st all video and screenshots were shared with school administration an email sent out to the superintendent to schedule a possible meeting was sent almost a week ago with no

010response in return as a parent i'm concerned with my child's well-being and safety while in school it's disheartening to see instagram pages that are filled with over language violence all taking place at robbie middle school it's upsetting to see the lack of enforcement of the cell phone policy and realizing kids are being boldly recorded during this process we have asked for a policy handbook which we did not receive i have inquired about the arts as sro being involved in other measures that could have prevented this we have been left waiting for answers and android follow-ups i have with me tonight copies of my correspondence printed screenshots of such instagram pages at one point in time the video of my son's incident was viewed 146 times and with a and over 100 followers on that instagram

011page i'm here tonight to highlight the issue that we have in the school i hope this board takes this matter seriously and that we can come to a resolution of this matter to better safeguard our children and make school a fun safe environment thank you for your time i am also pro-mass choice please let the kids make that decision cindy a dodo hi i'm cynthia dodo i live at 17 ridge road i'm a parent of two children one current and one former student i'm here tonight to comment on the february 16th board of education committee meeting to discuss masked mandates first i'd like to thank theresa beauzei and michelle coelho for standing up for our children like i had said in the february 9 meeting children have had to unfairly carry the burden of coven

01219 for the past two years stanberry needs to end the mass mandate in its schools and let the parents decide in addition i was disappointed that there was no mental health professional on the committee zoom meeting last week kelly trushes did read a statement from a psychiatrist from yale basically stating developmental and mental concerns for children however it would have been more informative and meaningful if the person took questions from from the committee also there should have been local pediatrician on the panel because in fact we are discussing children's health having dr bed and er doctors speak and field questions from the committee only gave one side of the story the worst cases lastly i would like to comment on the results of the survey of the 339 people that responded it was stated that

01338 percent of those wanted the mass mid date to remain another 30 wanted to remove it and another 31 wanted the mass to be optional in some social distancing by no means should the 38 be considered the majority here the 62 the 62 do not want mass to be required meaning optional are the majority thank you for your time i'd like to remind everyone that we are still on a mass mandate right now so if everyone can please put a mouse on benjamin dodo good evening uh benjamin dutto cindy's husband um again i agree with cindy and i thank mrs buzayden um for standing up for the students at last week's meeting on the policy committee the um it was really disappointing watching that committee quite honestly with the word salads and platitudes about children's

014safety that we've been hearing for the last two years even to the effect that many of you were talking about injecting toddlers instead of removing the masks that was unbelievable um i walk away with this sort of an analogy of the boy the crag wolf where us parents are the villagers the students are the sheep and you meaning the collective you everyone enforcing these policies from the board to the school districts to the teachers unions to the professionals to the elected leaders here or the boy your decisions for the last two years have mainly been proven wrong your experts have been wrong instead of apologizing you continue to move the goal post and change the narrative we simply lost faith in you and we all know how that story ended for the sheep [Music] we

015ask that the mass mandate be lifted and just personally i don't know if i can ever forgive you the collective you for what you've done in the last two years thank you amelia gomez hi my name is amelia stephanie gomez i'm eight years old i'm in third grade and i go to hudson country montessori school i believe everyone should have a choice to preach freely and my choice is to breathe freely i miss seeing my friends faces i miss seeing my teachers faces i want to sing without my mask on i miss doing gym without my mask on thank you sophia gomez hello my name is sophia stefania gomez i'm 10 years old i'm in sixth grade and i go to hudson country montessori school i hope that all of you here tonight will make

016the right choice for children like me for their families for the community and for the whole world breathing is simple natural and we should not have to negotiate it yet for the past two years breathing was taken away from us how many of you had a concert where you sang played an instrument and danced while having to wear your mask how many of you played soccer dodgeball and with your friends all while having mouth and nose covered i want to breathe free and i don't ask for much i want to conclude by quoting the sheffield declaration this declaration was approved on january 12 1773 and this declaration led people like elizabeth freeman to their freedom this declaration stated that mankind in a state of nature are equal free and independent of each other and have

017a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives their liberty and property thank you very much um i have alexis i'm having a hard time random rhondelli raymondelli can you speak your address for the record please sure i'm actually a um federal resident i'm here supporting my niece and a bunch of other children here in the district if you want my address i'm giving my dress as well but i am here to express my support for the masses being optional in the danbury school district as you all are very aware that governor lamont's mandate has been lifted on our children school boards across the state have been lifted to mandate allowing for parental choice numbers are low and this virus is a 99 survival rate these are torment and they are abusive to every child

018as a health care employee i can assure you that these cloth masks do not work they are not effective for an airborne illness they are in fact only used i'm sorry regular masks are not even effective they are only used for droplet precaution n95s are also useless unless tested properly which you can youtube yourselves on your own time so the one you're wearing there is not helping you in any way in our entire yale new haven medical system at the beginning of this week we have 130 patients in the entire system with code now mind you they did not come in with coven if you test positive in the hospital you are held as a coveted number out of all those numbers there have been zero children because zero children are susceptible to this virus

019at no given moment in time should the board of education ever be the deciding factor on our children's health you do not get to decide what is best for our children or any of the children in this room i have witnessed first hand at what this virus done has done however we are not where we are were two years ago we are just not and we're grasping at straws with these cloth masks children are not pirates category and it is time that you take them off of them and let them learn in a fun-filled environment well they deserve that thank you uh dominic ellie also bethel that's my sister okay i don't have a fancy speech like uh everybody else prepared her tonight can you please put your mouth so i'm just gonna wing it

020i have two children one school one non-school yet and i don't even know what to say because you all know the truth we've been right the whole time i really don't have much else to say the numbers are out there these look at these kids they want to breathe let these kids breathe wow this is exciting okay the first thing i want to say is thank you to the members of the board of vet thank you for your time efforts and collaboration on behalf of our children in the danbury community i appreciate that you are working together and with parents and teachers to ensure our children have quality education while keeping their safety in mind secondly i want to express my faith i have faith that you will make a good decision here tonight i

021understand which was news to me that you're not making a final decision this evening but i'm sure in all of your minds you have decisions going on i believe without reservation that removing a mass mandate and giving children the choice to mask is the best thing you can do allowing the choice to remove masks will not put our children and the staff in imminent danger as is proven over and over again as they interact in the community and surrounding neighborhoods allowing the choice to remove masks will bring back at least one semblance of normalcy that is so very needed allowing the choice to remove masks will empower kids over their bodies and let them smile at each other again allowing the choice to remove masks will be consistent with our american values of freedom and

022liberty allowing the choice to remove masks will prove to the community that you hear our voices and care about our opinions in the surveys when you ask for them allowing the choice to remove masks will demonstrate the type of leadership i know that you are capable of and that we need right now as i close i thank you and everyone else here tonight for letting me speak my mind and listening to what i had to say you have my best wishes and support as i understand how hard you are working to do right by my children and the community i live in i wish you a good night and please keep my faith intact remove the mandate thank you thank you all right thank you i just wanted to say thank you to everyone on

023the board even people with differing opinions you know it's volunteer job and we appreciate your service you guys have been navigating us through very difficult times just wanted to give you a quick account uh as a dad i have a first grader and a fourth grader in the danbury public school system my first grader's learning has been severely hindered by the mask in school closure policy of this district he's never been in a classroom without a mask his reading and writing are significantly behind where he should be because of this because of these policies because of this my wife and i work with him very hard every night every single night on his reading and writing just to keep them up to grade level it's been very taxing on us as parents it's been very

024taxing on the children all of my kids have had copic within the last 60 days including myself and my wife everybody in my household for the kids it was a non-issue they've had colds that were worse and our doctors tell us that they had 90 days of natural immunity where they have nothing to worry about so why are they messed in fact i pulled the numbers off the state of connecticut website today in the zero to nine age group there have been sixty five thousand one hundred and seventy three positive cases of cobits and two deaths that equates to a three one thousandth of one percent death rate basically zero in the 10 to 19 age group there have been 93 527 positive cases and four deaths or a four one thousand of one percent

025death rates so the kid for the kids is non-issue so why are they masked and the superintendent's letter which clearly states the kids are not the problem due to low transmission rates uh and the low risk of serious illness i agree it's indisputable uh but you also mentioned that it's the staff members that we need to keep safe and those are the ones in the high risk area so somebody needs to be masked it should be the staff members not the kids in addition i hear from my kids they have to lean into plexiglas masks when they're eating at their desks please get rid of the plexiglas masks and let them go back to eating in the cafeteria and being kids you're over two minutes okay i'll help finish up but time has come for

026this body to lead and not follow and mandate freedom thank you um [Music] um [Music] so i'm not here to talk about math i am here to respectfully request that the board allow people to email their public comments i think kate put it up at a meeting recently um so that's really what i'm here for because i know um with coving some positive things came out of that and public speaking via email was one of them and i don't know why that was taken away so that's my formal request because parents work they have little ones the board always seems to ask for community input they want it but yes you took this vehicle away so i'd like to see that reinstated thank you chris bell are you in here i've watched it like six

027times [Music] i have two kids one of them used to go to great plane i wasn't sure what was going to happen this year so i sent them to st briggs um you know i couldn't chance it like pete said before i have kids that are behind he's in third grade i felt like he missed you know half of first grade most of second grade when every school district around us was in so i do appreciate the job you guys have done getting our kids back to school and i'm sort of shocked to say that after the break and went back to school because i thought that was not going to happen but in hearing some of the summer meetings and then when you opened it up for questions i heard a lot of people

028talk about remote learning and that scared the heck out of me so i wanted to make sure that i was speaking on the other side when it comes to math so i'm for mass choice i'd like to see um you know the kids like the other districts lose their masks i don't feel like this is doing much like this lady said i go to the gym three times a week nobody's wearing a mask there's a lot of high school kids in there so if they're getting coded they're bringing it right to the high school with it so i don't think they're doing much i agree with the nurse especially the cloth mask which most kids are wearing so um it does hinder their learning they can't speak well they don't see their friends my poor

029sixth graders in west side and can't see you know all his friends and they're all new kids so unless he plays with them after school or outside you know he's at a disadvantage so i just wanted to lend my support me and my wife um you know we're for the mass choice if you want to wear masks fine no problem i'm not afraid you know to send my kids i don't you know like pete my kids had coveted it was a cold for them no big deal and you know they're better back in school so thank you melissa [Music] chelsea [Music] hello everyone my name is melissa ligouri and i'm a danbury resident and this is actually my second time speaking here i came it was dr sal's last meeting i think it was in

030june so i'm talking to you about this subject once again um i have two young children i have a six-year-old who is in first grade and i have a three-year-old as you are aware governor lamont stated that he would be repealing the state's masterwide mandate as of february 28 2022 in our schools the decision now rests in your hands there's no more pointing fingers this is in your hands as it comes to masking of our children i ask you to please implement parental choice when it comes to masking and give the power back to us parents to make decisions for our children my six-year-old asks me all the time when he will have this when he will be able to stop wearing a mask his whole school experience this past two years has been wearing

031a mask it's time he tells me he has trouble breathing in them and doesn't like it because he can't see his friends faces my three-year-old is now required to wear a mask and i can't even find masks that fit his little face um and even if they were effective he's not wearing them effectively he's three years old i ask you to please please implement parental choice i know this is a hard decision for everyone but it's about time that we put this the safety of our children in the parental hands um i ask you to please unmask our children and i want to thank you guys all for your time and your service i know this is not easy for you and i respect all of you and i thank you very much thank you

032thanks god oh terry scott sorry hello thank you all right so i know a lot of people are here to talk about math mandates and that's not what i'm here to talk about um i tried to type something but um i'm just going to speak from the heart so last week earlier um last week my daughter had to endure some very challenging moments in her life that i am not satisfied with with the school district i did meet with the superintendent as well as the ap but as a parent i must speak out publicly and let everyone know so that we can work together as a community to solve these issues so one of the issues was that the spanish teacher addressed the class by the n word um which that teacher is still in

033front of the kids which i am very upset about um and so as a community i want to know what is the community doing to address these issues and hold these teachers accountable for what they say in front of our children um as a black family it's unacceptable um the majority of this population is very diverse however the teachers that is not and so we need to speak about these issues as a community to figure out what we're going to do because this is unacceptable um the second big issue that my daughter had to endure was in history class she was asked to take on the fight of her ancestors and write a a letter about being a runaway slave unacceptable that should have never been an assignment that my god had to do and

034so um i spoke to mr wilson we came up with you know we talked about some things but i didn't know that the teacher was still gonna be in front of my daughter um i'm not i'm not pleased with that um but also i just want to say as a community we have to do more to make sure that all of the kids um feel safe and in the school district they feel heard and their culturally sensitive curriculum put in front of them every single day and i don't know if my husband has anything to say but that's all i need to say okay [Music] good evening my name is cheryl rachelski as a parent of twins graduating from january high school in june it is my utmost request that the remainder of the school

035year be mask optional data is proving that the greater danbury area severe coded cases have significantly dropped and that the greater majority of our children have not been infected with the virus or at least hospitalized as a result of the virus in a recent periodical that was published online january 26 2022 they reported the following from recent studies and i quote that masking is a barrier to speech recognition hearing and communication and that masks impede children's ability to decode facial expressions dampening children's perceived trustworthiness to faces research has also suggested that hearing impaired children have difficulty discerning individual sounds opaque masks of course prevent lip reading some teachers parents and speech pathologists have reported that masks can make learning difficult for some of america's most vulnerable children including those with cognitive delays speech and hearing

036issues and autism masks make may also hinder language and speech development especially important for those students who do not speak english at home masks may impede emotion recognition even in adults but particularly in children end of quote my first experience as well first-hand experience as well is that the majority of these students do not wear a mask when not in school do not wear a mask when hanging out and socializing with friends or attending high school social events i have not heard that our students severe illness or hospitalization numbers have risen or if these numbers even exist those concerned about their safety should continue to wear the appropriate protective masks and like our neighboring towns that have made masks optional i'm not asking you to take your mask off but rather i'm imploring you just

037to let me take my children's mask off thank you elena smith is there anyone that's all i have on the sign up sheet is there anyone else in the audience who would like to speak can you state your name and address for the record you can come up to the i've right only a resident of connecticut um for another six months i'm from pittsburgh pennsylvania prior to this i lived in west virginia um i lived to 10 east pembroke road i'm a veteran of 22 years of a teacher at the prison in denver and i have two children one in ninth grade so he's new to this school system and the other one is in seventh grade and my i would like to speak about my older son in particular um he is extremely bright

038and he's always been extremely excellent in some social things um so everywhere he goes he observes for several minutes to an hour maybe the entire day until he enters the social scene and he always he's very aware he's always been very socially aware um he hasn't made any friends here since he um been here it's hard to speak with the mask on um but uh you know he sits at lunch in the locker room every day so maybe if he could like she spoke it just brought to my attention when she said about this you know social cues and the its facial expressions maybe he could relate to people better if they could actually speak to one another and uh [Music] is there anyone else who would like to speak before we move on to

039our our business could you please state your name and address for the record yes um my name is sharon ellington i live in new milford but my daughter goes to ganbury school and they have pieces that go also um i just wanted to talk really quickly obviously covet has been a very polarized subject for everybody i work in the healthcare field and i see everyone under you know being over it and being still very scared of it and that is fine everybody has the right to feel how they feel um i see my daughter and all of her friends and my nieces suffering in ways that i never really thought that i'd see her suffer and she doesn't really enjoy school the way that she does that she used to she can't really tell when

040her kid when her friends are joking or her teachers are joking she doesn't see those facial expressions that are so important and for kids you know those are the times that you're really figuring out how to be a human and how to socialize you're figuring out what's important like being there for your friend and showing them on your face that you care or that you're sad so you can communicate in other ways than just by words sometimes that's the most important way that we communicate i see my knee suffering from anxiety worried about if her teacher's going to say something if she needs a mass breaker she needs to get water because she has to take her mask down or you know what if she can't eat so long because her teacher's going to yell

041at her because she needs her mask down longer i have my other nieces are struggling because their language skills are not where they should be they can't see their teachers making the sounds of the letters i have a very bright niece and she she can't figure out sounds of words like i know she can and it's just it's hard seeing them struggle when they're so little they should be able to enjoy each other and their teachers and i i understand some people are comfortable with masks and some people are not cdc has said itself masks protect the wearer not the other way around it does not protect the other people so if you want to wear the mask that is wonderful that makes you feel better by all means where the mask i don't think

042there should be discrimination either way i think that children need to learn oh okay sorry i think that we just have to teach your kids that if if their choices to wear the mask great and if it's to not to not but if we could just have that choice i would appreciate that thank you thank you is there anyone else before we begin the rest of our meeting okay thank you all for coming and being here tonight consent calendar laura did you make that motion be absolutely thank you any promotion that the board of education approved the items on the consent calendar exists 22 um through 22-22-22-26 as recommended second moved by lauren seconded by joe is there any discussion no not hopeful lisa yes rachel celesti aye michelle solo hi gladys cooper yes lauren

043daley i joe the silva all right bridget guertin aye catherine hodgson aye albert russo aye lisa britton aye unanimous motion carries um do we have any staff representatives this evening i don't see anyone no okay and our student representative thank you so much for waiting [Music] please please do and yeah feel free to adjust if you want to sit yeah thank you or ken could you help me all right there you go okay um i'm speaking on behalf of uh nicole today i don't know how to pronounce the last thing but um good evening florida members cabinet and community members thank you for allowing me to represent and speak on behalf of the alternative center for excellence ace will be administering the 11th grade s.a.t on wednesday march 24th kyle churcola will serve as the

044s.a.t administrator on march 2nd sc sat proctors will participate in the sat training after school on march 24th all ninth and 10th grade students will have the opportunity to participate in an environmental theme field trip at white memorial park and lynch field the trip has been organized by chemistry teacher katya pierre gustini also on march 24th diana dinardo will be taking 22 graduating seniors on a trip to both novichok campuses students will participate in the nbcc placement test um ace would like to publicly recognize tyler sharer for the ace of spades award for hard work ace would also like to publicly recognize andrew latino for to be voted for being voted the ace of hearts for demonstrating care and kindness for other students staff and our ace community lastly we would like to publicly congratulate

045kristin brianna villani for earning the january student of the month award for consistently demonstrating the five ace behavioral expectations thank you for allowing us to share what's going on with our ace family down on 26th lucas avenue stay safe and remain uh a strong everyone thank you very much moving on to action items um i'd like to ask for a motion to table action letter a the january 2022 financial report i would like to make that motion section by al seconded by catherine uh sorry no you're good um theresa bosaid yes rachel chaleski hi michelle colla hi gladys cooper yes lauren daley i joseph silva bridge guertin aye catherine hodgston aye albert russo yes louisa britton hi it's unanimous so that motion has been tabled um presentation [Laughter] and while karen is getting set caravans

046is the director of data and assessment on behalf of the district and we'll be reporting out on superintendent gold one student learning and achievement college and career readiness indicators carol will explain how some of these educators were not able to report out on all of them fully this year as a result of the pandemic but i don't want to take away more presentation and there's likely no questions afterwards good evening for those of you who i haven't met personally at the paralyzer as mr walsh had mentioned i'm the director of data's subtitle research so as a part of um typically quarterly would report out specific data reports that relate to like the timing of release for the connecticut state department of education oh why not now so it is a little different this year so

047i will um i will just kind of revise some of the pieces that we've done in the task but also um when the board requested that additional pieces be added we modified some of the reporting charts so um as kevin um spoke earlier about the um superintendent goals basically we're really focusing on tier one and increasing access and equity for all students um and that would be goal 1a and 1b as a part of the superintendent goals in the presentation that the board received i think last friday is a result of being attached to the agenda what's included is our accountability index last week's growth graduation rates ap and dual enrollment course numbers as well as planning absenteeism and college entrance and and persistence so we'll kind of get down to a couple of those

048pieces but just initially as we look at some of the highlights of the report we do we have seen a increase in the ap enrollment as we've offered in 2016 we opened enrollment kind of detract at jamboree high school offered more access and equity to students since that time we've had about 21 increased enrollment in that area the deco program is another place where we offer college and career readiness to students um it is more reflective of the student population demographically which we will discuss later in the presentation the csde typically pushes out the accountability indexes time of year and i did include some of the pieces and the indicators that are included in that index we get an index accountability index for the district and each school this is the places where you've seen

049schools of distinctions in the past different categories that schools are placed in a kind of a tiered approach and we'll get down to a little bit of how that has changed over time and how it includes growth and proficiency um but it was suspended during the pandemic so as many of you know we reported out earlier smarter balance was administered the sats um and the ngss was administered last year but we were not tied to the accountability anymore so they didn't produce any scores associated with that we do expect it to resume this year as stated by the state um overall our cohort graduation rates increased by 1.7 for all students and 2.3 percent in january high school that yellow student population increased 7.1 percent specifically for that demographic we did see a decrease in

050african american students by 10.3 we'll talk about that a little more specifically we are as as evident by our meetings today engaging with every high school to look very deeply at that data to look at how students are persisting and staying on track um at jamboree high school um our six-year cohort graduation rate so that means that if you start your freshman year of high school that you would um not graduate in four but then by six years if you stayed enrolled what do those numbers like to look like for our high needs students those have increased 3.1 percent our high needs are students who would be designated as free and reduced lunch ell or students with disabilities you could be one of those students identified according to the state um or you could be

051offering so um just so you know we're going to use that term a couple times throughout the presentation um the last links growth sports which is also used in the accountability system we've seen a steady increase of that growth over time as we've initiated different strategies particularly at the k5 level and provided now a new eld program we are seeing an increase in the growth sports there so um as we will discuss as well places that we're looking more deeply at including our chronic absenteeism rate clearly that's an issue across the state of connecticut since the pantone and those rates are reflective of those challenges but we do have some intervention strategies um in place so um just as i spoke earlier the next generation accountability uh system is for um districts to really track

052progress help schools make improvement we use it very much to gauge how we're doing the student outcomes over time um it also is a federal state requirement so um and it really is a piece to promote transparency with the public to see how the district is doing with the indicators that the state provides so this is just in order for you to see where we um were in 2018-19 that was the last year that we had a full school year before the pandemic um so in those places the people who are veterans of the board have seen these numbers before the stars are places where we have exceeded the state average so essentially um when you're looking at these numbers it's a formula there's a system that the state gives us you can earn a

053certain amount of points where you hit the target um and so once you um once they look at the enrollment they look at the chronic absenteeism etism numbers the four year graduation six year they then say how many points did you earn towards that target and then you get the percentage we were in 1819 at 72.6 and then um the state's overall average was 74.2 so it gives you just kind of an indicator of where we were um in the fall i was here with you all um reporting out the testing report and and all of the student outcomes associated with the standardized tests we had available so that kind of takes care of a lot of the pieces in the accountability index which are down until about um 2e so i'm trying to fill

054in the gaps for the board so you can see really how we are measuring progress in times where we don't have the accountability index so that's what's following so um the one piece that's in addition to the accountability index is looking specifically at achievement gaps this is something jamboree public schools looks at on the regular basis of how we're looking at district data team agendas how we're looking at instructional leadership to say what does it look like with non-high needs outcomes compared to high in these outcomes so um in this case the indicator which is why we dive deeply into how students are remaining on track for graduation as well as graduation rates are to see if we do have a graduation gift so um in this case the last time we were reported out

055at the state level we did have um we weren't out layer for our gap for non-high needs students and high-knee according to graduation rates um so that is just something we continue to moder monitor um so the lost links growth which was where we talked about in the accountability indexes to e um and so we're looking here and for those who remember back to s back rows and talking about how students are doing over time from one test to another the lost links is a required assessment that's given um to our students who are um english language learners it's a state requirement um and so that's all grade levels um it it measures and you'll see on the next slide kind of all the sub-tests it's a it's an extensive test and what they do

056at the state level is look at how students performed from the one year to the next school year so in order to be on the lost links growth outcomes you need to have taken at least two test scores in connecticut so um for average target achieved there are different levels of english language learners and those students have different growth targets the growth targets are um dependent upon what level they are in so a loss level one student doesn't have the same growth target for a year that a last level four student would have so um that is all taken into account and averaged okay of where they got towards their target so in this case average percent target achieved it's pretty much measuring how far did everybody get to their finish line of their growth

057target so in this case for literacy which included which includes reading and writing on subtest as well as oral we went from in 2017-18 overall to 67 percent so we've seen instead we've seen a steady increase in the literacy components of the loss for the students in germany public schools in addition we saw similar growth a little over eight percent in the oral skills of the student and this is their english language acquisition right and so what are their oral skills related to that um 40 54 to 63 the other lower numbers that are slightly slightly lower about are the growth rate numbers those numbers are um how students how many students cross the finish line to their growth target and so um so that those numbers would represent if i was the last one

058student i was expected to grow 30 points did i make that 30 points okay so that would be 37 of in 2017 we see a similar number in 1920 okay and that's the last time they've been reported out for the growth scores um oops so the last one's achievement is similar to looking at how students do overall there's a proficiency and above and once you hit proficiency in certain areas and that's scoring a four or a five in certain subtests those students will be exited as english language learners in our district so in this case um proficient or above it's a lot to move right so you could be you could enter as a lost one student you need to score a four or five in particular some tests in order to exit which is

059considered proficient or above so um in these cases you can see the different levels of where students are proficient or above at the end of the 1920s school year we monitor those very specifically down to the school level and work um very closely with the department heads and the principals to look at those scores and who's making the growth and who's hitting the proficiency the next piece that we um that has also been a part of the accountability index is looking at the graduation rate time to transfer daily public schools you see the slight increase from 2017 to 18 um into our projected rate of 2021. i want to say that's a projected rate it is not the published or public brief um as from the connecticut state department of education so um that is

060our projected rate um so from 80.9 to 82.5 we see a steady slight increase there are areas where we are certainly digging more deeply um we saw kind of a leveling back to the 1819 for our black and african american students in 1819 at 78.5 during the year of the pandemic we saw an increase um in in that number and then we are now back down to 80.3 in general for 1718 to 2021 the hispanic latino numbers have increased steadily and then we also saw a dick in 1920 for english language learners and that's back up to about 59 um and then our high needs number has increased steadily over time so certainly we are looking very deeply down to the student of how students are earning credits and moving towards staying on track for

061graduation that's done from both the district level and the school level okay this is more specifically to jamboree high school so um the other numbers would include ace um these numbers since it's our largest high school the numbers are very volatile at least because the class is so low the class enrollment so um it's very hard even to say from one year to the next we're looking at a class of 25 students of what that would look like so more specifically a different high school you can look in larger subgroups and in case it's a little more challenging to do that and just really look very specifically at each student um at jamboree high school all students in general have been decree have been increasing um in 2021 our projected rate is about 84.6 that's

062a change 2.3 change from last year um areas reflected by denver high school and our district numbers are also black and african american populations and then the increase in ell and also the hispanic and latino students we've also seen an increase in the eligible for free lunch and reduced lunch as well as overall high needs with a slight decrease in special education students and just to be helpful so you can have like a kind of an idea of what that means for how many students that's what the cohort count is okay so of the students that were in the cohort of when they when they entered as a freshman these are the percent of the students that graduated that makes sense so this is our trend data and this is what we've kind of been

063looking more specifically at when we look at all students as well as the subgroups that we really are dig deeper into we've seen a similar trend over time there are places where you see some fluctuations of our students that have like in a lower enrollment count and so those numbers can be more volatile with the outcomes so we can see a quick change if 10 students might shift right so but in in overall the trend data looks very similar so i thought this graph was really helpful to see that like there although there are some changes and we are increasing overall we are the movement of the subgroups is similar so another piece that's really helpful for us to look at specifically for the fact that we do have english language learners entering at the

064high school and specifically at the ninth grade level is how do students do um first six year cohorts so meaning if they need more time with us if they stay retained after their um their twelfth grade or or they didn't like they got off track in in one of the other years and didn't earn enough credits to be promoted um what does it look like after six years and these are numbers that can help you see that the students in the high needs we are increasing their six-year graduation rate over time but also it's much higher than if we just looked at um the the the four year and of course that includes our english language learner population students with disabilities um as well as the free and reduced lunch population so early college opportunities

065at dps that's typically a part of the accountability system um so it's called college and career readiness and they look at the percent of students at jabra high school and ace that are enrolled in both ap early college opportunities our deco program and certain cte courses that ready students for career so we do get credit for these um pieces and that there are these courses in um in the accountability index and it's also a good measure of the rigor of um our curriculum so an overall um total kind of table for you and this should be familiar to some folks that we look at this over time enrollment ap means not the number of students but the number of students in courses so i could be there's um 868 seats in each section but i

066could be enrolled in three courses okay a number of av classes offered 23 and you'll see that but it means that additional sections are offered of one course and then the total ap students that's the actual amount of students that are taking ap courses in addition that's out of the total dhs students so this year in particular we were a bit down far at 14.5 um you know we are looking deeply at like who decided and felt ready to take possibly an ap course after the pandemic what are the other factors that could have been associated with the lower enrollment that we're seeing this year so that's been a discussion um students and increasing that diversity of students enrolled in these courses over time and working towards that the percent of students getting a three

067or above is the last um column of this table and uh that is typically where like would be considered a proficient level okay so would a college accept that it depends on the college um typically so we did see a decrease in 2021 at 40 but a little more in line with where we were at 47 percent in 1819 in 1920 it's really um important to note that during that first year where everything was closed that was an online um remote test taken at home so there was it was a completely different task that was administered um than in the past so um and then there were also some students who had a lot of difficulty and this was a vast issue um around the technology associated with it so even of the testers a

068lot of students were not able to finish right so that was so that was an issue that that many folks have seen so it was difficult they were trying their best to really give opportunity to folks but so they're you're going to see a swing in those numbers obviously 21 and 22 would be reported out after the spring so this is always something that people have asked to see it's a little bit it's a lot to look at so i know you've probably perused this already but um these are just the course names that are offered as ap courses um if you look at it from 2017 to 18 these numbers are going to mimic what just you saw what you saw in the last table but it also includes the number of sections so

069that means of these courses there are a certain number of sections that are also included um one thing we track as um it's probably the wrong words to use in that moment but not necessarily track but we really monitor is um the ethnicity of the students enrolled so and to try to ensure equity and access to all students does it mimic or it doesn't mirror the demographics of danbury high school in this case we see that in ap courses a higher level of enrollment of asian students compared to mountain goals overall in germany public schools about three percent less of black and african american students um about half of hispanic students multiracial is just one percentage point difference and a higher enrollment of white students compared to the overall enrollment at dhs so college credit

070courses as they relate to deco here is another table that will help you track the enrollment of these courses as well as sections um we have 338 enrollments as of this year these are a bit more in line with our demographics but but not completely um where uh asian students at nine percent black and african american at 14 hispanic higher than ap at 41 multi-racial at two and right at 36 compared to their overall enrollment 27. so we do see a better alignment with the demographics but not mirroring right so as we move into one of the i'm just how many more do i have um to say chronic absenteeism we've done a very good job in this district and we are typically over the state out or over getting accountability index higher than the

071state average and jamboree public schools um we monitor this extremely closely both at the school and district level kelly triochis is very involved with how the pps staff is following up with disengaged students chronic absenteeism is defined as an attendance rate or absence rate that is 10 or higher of your enroll dates so if you're enrolled only for one day or i'm sorry if you're rolled for say um two days and you're absent for one you're considered chronically absent right so it's a moving target um if you're enrolled for a hundred days and you're um absent from nine you're not proud of plans right so it's a moving target you don't have to be enrolled a certain number of days it goes by each individual student so in this case we've had an increase since

072the the pandemic certainly this year we're seeing high numbers as well but we left 2021 with 17.4 percent our high needs at 21.8 and our non-high needs at 7.7 um finally the post-secondary entrance trend data this is also an indicator that's used to really look at obviously college and career readiness for students as it relates to the percent of students that enroll in a two or four year college within one year after graduation okay so that would be considered the entrance percentage so we saw um we we saw a dip in 2019-20 but that's that is actually the graduating class of 2019-20 so that was during the closure and the state are the numbers below we also saw who also saw that dip compared to their 71.8 so um in general the persistence then is

073what we look at to say do they stay enrolled for a second year in post-secondary okay so this is something that is a study done that the connecticut state board of education engages in as a part of the national student clearinghouse and so we this data is public but we also receive a great study that really looks deeply at all the subgroups and and different components of their study so next steps it's a lot of data it's a lot to to think about and this is data we're looking at constantly as a part of a district data team as well as instruction instructional leadership teams across the district um and so what we really try to do is it's great to know all this stuff and then what do you do with this information right

074and how do you generate action steps associated with that so dr casamaro can speak of it to work thank you thank you for the preparation um just look at the board's knowledge and for every slide that you see here there's about 50 more slides back at central office that we work with care on to dig into data and trends um so we get down to root cause so when we do see something in the data that's either troubling or want to know why did we get so much growth you know did what we put into place um work wasn't effective do we replicate that and scale it or if we're not seeing the growth that we want to see um how do we change things up a little bit and alternate some of our interventions

075um so mr wallston's goals center on really improvement of tier one instruction but also closing the achieving gap which really speaks to kind of tier two tier three interventions and so um as kara mentioned we spend a lot of time doing data reviews but we also do something called instructional rounds and that's where small team administrators will travel into buildings to not just look at big slides but to cooperate that data with observational information um to kind of ground us what we're seeing in terms of instructional practice so we will be doing more of that as we kind of come out of the of this year some of that will result a little bit but just prior to the pandemic really digging into very deep data dives and matching those with constructional rounds to cooperate

076that information to help us develop strategic plans um so we're looking forward to really picking that work back up and gaining some more momentum on that in addition as you remember last year's budget that we increased some student support specialists um more intervention support into each of the elementary levels to help catch kids up earlier and quicker getting them back on track and so those positions are still in place so looking looking forward to maintaining those positions but also to really work closely with our teachers excuse me to improve their um their knowledge base we had professional learning communities started that's one thing that's very important to us they have that teacher professional learning time so that they too can dig into the same data to be able to change what it is that they're

077doing their practice to support kids in the best way and so we look to partner with them during those professional learning times and we're also working very hard with coaching in the district around psyop which is observational protocols and strategies that we put in place when working with second language learners which is a growing population in our district so all this stuff takes place over time multiple years um as you can see for the most part our data is incrementally growing we have some blips here and there that continue to work on um and i know he's really satisfied ever with what we see but we continue to dig in on that another point i'd like to make a little bit about some of the ap and the deco program um is that a lot

078of the opportunities we really pride ourselves on the high school to pride themselves in the number of early college opportunities that we have a number of advanced place courses that we have we offer i think almost every single one that the eight people ap college board offers and we train staff and we offer those here um but in terms of the dental program some of the early college opportunities we'd like to be able to spread that across the academies as we grow those out and so rather than having that live and just a program we're looking to make sure that we embed those kinds of courses and opportunities in each of the academies as we grow so you'll see that program more and spread out and we're going to try to scale that up across

079over the years that's it carol thank you so much for all the data just i'm sure there's a reason and you're going to know it right away just look at you were talking before about the four-year graduation rates in 4.6 it's a projected rate since it was last year we have the data why is it projected right so it's just not public so that's so when i when i say it's the projected rate it's it's what we've considered and have reviewed with the state but typically they publish all um data that's uh public on site right and they're just not at that point yet to push it out so there are some discrepancies that get cleaned up it should be about the same also different districts get credit for different things so if somebody leaves

080jamboree high school goes to another district and then vice versa right so we just haven't cleaned the noise up out of the day yeah it would be most likely minimal okay thank you i knew there'd be a reason any other questions for cara or cara just go ahead a broad stroke question about the comments entrance rate and the persistence rate being lower than the state are we mitigating that are we have plans to mitigate that the college anything you can do today he's asking about college rates as they compare to the state so you know that's that's one of the trickiest numbers um yeah sure to look at um there's a lot of factors on why students choose to enroll in college or not or what may be accessible to them and prevent them on

081the school side we do things like uh fafsa night and and and making sure that students are aware of all the opportunities that's really part of the counseling piece that comes with all of this in terms of why they may not return for their sophomore year um that you know there's a host of reasons why that may happen could be financial could be support to work not for me and so that's just a little bit of a harder number why we're lower than the state um you know i think we'd probably be best to look at ourselves in terms of other districts of similar size in the same dirt with the same regional economic um factors as well which may they look different than the state average um i'm actually not very curious to yeah

082as well so that's right and one of the other things to remember is not just it's not taking into account everybody who graduated within that your veteran roles you must enroll in this year after you graduate so we could have students enrolling after what um like so in 2018 if i then enroll in 2021 i'm not going to count these numbers if i had to work a year to make money to pay for tuition and things like that or before i was able to enroll that's um those would not be reflected and i would say like what what is very hopeful is similar alignment and even in 2017-18 the persistence rate in jamboree school district was actually slightly higher than the state those to me if kids can hang in there for their sophomore year

083of college then they are really feeling prepared enough to sustain that enrollment so i mean those it's really important the entrance rates as well but persistence rates and resiliency to stay enrolled in colleges but i think to cara's point there are a lot of other factors besides academic and that the school has control over that would lend themselves to reasons why kids don't enroll and dr casamaro if you can you wouldn't mind just adding um going to mr russo's question about mitigation opportunities um because i think we see the danbury career academy has a critical mitigation opportunity absolutely i didn't want to add one other one thank you for watching part of the reason why we want to scale those deco opportunities and continue to even increase you know those ap courses for kids and

084get more kids into the safety courses because even despite getting a three and getting that credit that initial credit there's a ton of research that says just being prepared with those classes it serves as a great foundation for for stamina when you get to college right it paces you through the type of content and some of the material that you'll see i've had both of my kids that participated in maybe classes some you know great scores and some with oops i did i get that three score in different courses but but all of those courses prepare them for when you take stats in college and you see that for the first time and you've never taken any stats class that's a huge difference and so when your child takes those courses and then sees them

085in college even though they may not have got a great score on the on the ap assessment um that background in preparation materials certainly comes really handy when you take take those courses biology courses things like that science majors um very helpful so the more that we can offer those opportunities and get kids into super high diverse courses um the light more likely perhaps that affects them and that's why this slide is so important creating an opportunity for access to these high-level courses because they're truly preparation for college overforces and so we may not always experience a successful good life in terms of um getting a three or higher an ap exam but it is really preparing our kids for a college environment and the rigors of college instruction yeah just real quick on the

086stats and the persistence you know just on the enrollment the persistence number is that any enrollment or is that only full time ago um i would prefer to look and verify that before i tell you um but i will absolutely get back to okay thank you it's not not the end of the world i think there's a certain number of classes they have to enroll in old enrolled in but i just want to verify that excellent thank you i'm sorry uh just curious about the ap course creds uh do you know if they're accepted at the college level as uh towards a major or just as electives so it depends and every college is a little different and even within our state system you know uh westcon made over uh for a three but yukon

087you would award for a four or five most of uh pretty tight with like fives um total it's right getting a five on the on the national test in order to get credit for it in some cases so for example if you are a science major and you and you get a five they may give you elected credit but not in your major if you're coming as a science major because they want you to take their science one way or another though you're going to probably get a five on the you know the biology eight people you're probably gonna do pretty well uconn's ap course um but you also get elected credit uh my daughter's very new friends you know entered into uconn and almost 24 80 credits um and really hit quite quite a

088bit taking care of them on the way in and allowed them to go even further and enter graduate level courses in their fourth year so it's great there's a lot of advantages to it um it's not the end-all be-all by any means but it certainly is it's one of the reasons why the state of connecticut counts it as it's highly in the accountability index as a factor towards um success so we do get credit for that okay you get both credit for participation and europe are they um are ap courses technically honors courses so in theory there are above honors courses there are definitely high challenge courses there's a lot of content that needs to be mastered and apparent fast pace and so you know it's not for everybody um but it is certainly open

089to everyone so every student in denver in high school there used to be a time when you have to have a certain gpa you don't have a certain average uh you know there's only 30 seats available and it was what i would call an adult driven schedule schedule so in other words we have 38 p seats in this class the top 30 kids get to go in it we've changed all that from the hardware high school and central office worked when we detract the high school and we created open enrollment and we say okay well we've got 200 kids that want to take ap psych guess what we're going to train four more teachers over the summer at taft and get them trained so that we can open up all of those sections to meet

090the course requests of the students who want to challenge themselves so we reversed it so we've moved away from adult driven scheduling to student driven scheduling um it probably basis your dog and nuts around scheduling time because it's a volatile process it's less predictive um but that's the work that the high school does every year to slot kids into those courses um almost by hand to make sure everybody gets what they need so there's a lot of work involved in that but the high school make sure that that happens and as evidence you can see that the we have great participation rates are the best in the state [Applause] something i hear about taking ap versus honors though is how it affects the gpa and overall student ranking so if the student is doing a

091lot more work in the ap but it doesn't really help them uh you know against a student who's just being honored with the less work and more so well it all depends mr donald has her donald is still in the room um it you know there's it's a combination of both so you know there's gpa is a weighted gpa of course is very uh important to students in yes um it also depends if you want to do post college and even the ap courses themselves there's different amount of rigor within those courses so there's some courses there that i have never drunk dreamt of taking in high school um because of the what it would demand and then there are other courses that are a little more accessible so even within ap and ranking there's

092harder courses like the computer science courses or ap the ap calculus courses versus like ap site um more so it really depends what it is that you want to do did you want to talk to the career academy piece um any other questions okay thank you thank you thank you so our first item on the our first item on the agenda for the superintendent's report is rob cody on behalf of westcon in our partnership with them culture all right um so on behalf of us [Music] so uh on behalf of western connecticut state university and the pre-collegiate access program you know i want to thank the board for having us here today um you know today we have a presentation to talk to you a little bit about you know uh what we've done over

093the last 20 years at westcon but more importantly over the last two years of the pandemic we've continued all our programming which i'm very proud of um it's because of the hard work you know that you know our assistant director uh jessica cornell has done and the hard work of the students being committed to furthering their education uh within our within our program so you know for that i mean i'm i'm very proud of all of you guys so that you know um i'm here to talk to you a little bit about you know sort of our umbrella of programs but the focus on our minority by little teaching pipeline and a little bit about our computer science pipeline first our excel program that's some really cheap our excel program um currently is serving about

09475 students that's graded seven and eight in all three of the middle schools right as part of raw view and west side middle school all these programs are educational attainment programs they're there to help guide first-generation low-income students to college graduate college go on get a master's get a doctorate be productive citizens in our society also our concat program currently services a hundred students contact overbound concave stands for our connecticut grant that we get from the department of higher ed the upper bound program is a federal grant you know written by outside western connecticut through the department of education in washington dc um the the key thing to recognize about our upper bound program is that grant once uh we we get that grant it is a four year or five year grant your renewal

095sort of tough work that we've been kind of grinding on for the last six months uh look at hello danbury high school and dr martens and mr donovan you know is to help us out with some of the data i mean a lot of the data that we just heard we use a lot of that data you know to get some of these funds so we're very familiar with you know national student clearinghouse at site you know all these services so uh we did just go through a renewal process it takes about two months for the department of ed and dc to review the grant and to let us know if we've been renewed um and we turned that in last month so we're hoping within the next two months we'll find out if you

096have another five years of renewal this will be my fourth grant cycle but we've gone through five um at russcon so what we're looking at at renewing that we're also looking at possibly applying for our upper bound math and science program that will focus strictly on math and science uh down below that um we have our minority biological teaching pipeline which started here many years ago probably about eight or nine years ago started as seed money in hartford and then as hartford typically does is you know they give you a little bit of money until you do something and then also the money's going we have to figure out how we run this thing you know without their money um what we did was we were able to partner up with the board of ed

097here as well as the federal and the state grants and keep those programs moving forward um and we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a second our minority battle teaching pipeline went so well in terms of recruiting students we typically have roughly about 11 to 15 per cohort that we decided to tap into computer science which was the hot field and so we are now working with the computer science department at western connecticut and offering a dual enrollment program through that department as well i've been meeting with the justice and law department uh recently we're going to try to add a jla for justice to law dual enrollment program hopefully by next academic year over on our college side we all we have our educational achievement access program we have quite

098a few you know danbury graduates come through that these will be students who either did sat optional and you know their grades just really didn't meet the mark to come in as a traditional student um they all one of the requirements is that they all had to pass algebra 2 with a c or better they have to take four years of math four years of an english english class including their senior year one of the worst things is i see some seniors you know where they're taking three years of a math but then you know their senior year they might take like eleventh map where they lose those algebraic skills and then they go and they take algebra in college and it just doesn't work out so we really look for those students to take

099some sort of applied math that their senior year um that program varies it can have anywhere between you know 27 students which we had last cohort and it can go up to 75 i've had you know in previous years um that program is during the fifth uh 15 week fall semester of the fall um you know they're getting uh that each student gets a mentor they all have mandatory tutoring they're on a student contract sheet uh you know and so they're they're watching quite well our uh promoting academically successful students was a pro grant another grant that we have rope within our department that program is specific specifically designed for minority students at western connecticut that either don't have above a 2.0 gpa or they don't have the gpa that that is required for the

100major that they want to get into so we help them get on track get into the major that they want to get into get the gpa they want to get into so they can pursue their their dreams and goals um and that's sort of like the big umbrella right so there's a lot going on one of the other things that i didn't want to add what was it so i forgot another thing that we did um but one of the main the main components here is that all the excel program which is with your students the concave overbound minority tc pipeline computer science pipeline they all have a summer component which we continue so the students again over the last two years you know they've all continued this program over the summer so there was

101like no stop gap in any of these programs uh so so i mean that's one of the another thing that we've been very proud of is that you know even after march whatever it was march 12th i think that's the one that's all ingrained in our brain right um you know we continue to recruit and have uh provide these services for all of our students including during the summer the last two years we've had more virtual programming in the summer this year we've already been approved through the university and we're going to have an on-campus in-person uh program this year for all of our programs so we're looking forward to that um so with that being said um what i'd like our students to uh students to do real quick is just introduce themselves and

102then i'll let mrs carnell talk a little bit about our other program and come around all right hi everybody it's andrew moore i'm a junior at dhs this i went to uh esl program throughout my middle school year i participate in the concave upper ground program inspector reviewing program and i did the minority part of the future science club canada hi my name is caroline newson um i am a junior at delivery high school i also was a part of the excel program and i was also a part of the hope of programming this is my third year um hi everyone my name is working pre-collegiate and access programs i'm currently a student at western united states pursuing a major and secondary education spanish i was in eighth grade when i was first introduced to

103the program where the advisor spoke to me a little bit about how to help me and being a first-generation student as supportive as my family was and as much as they wanted to help i always knew that they weren't going to help me and they were going to give me the help that i needed fast forward to three years later my junior high school when i was first introduced to the teaching pipeline um i thought that this was having said i mean it was a high schooler they were going to see if teaching would be something that i wanted to spend time in college trying out and not only that this course helped me in gaining hands-on experience teaching writing first graders at the time but it taught me also how to create lesson plans

104as well as the teaching portfolio which will help me next year when i am applying to student teaching as well as real-life jobs and not only that this course helped me in facilitating my decision to further on pursue my passion for education but it also helped me exciting that i do want to come back to my community and help them um i was a part of the minority bilingual teaching pipeline and i was first brought informed about the program by miss cornell and mr podi my first i didn't know what i wanted to do like what major i wanted to be i was thinking of counting and kind of economics or teaching i always like thought about the teaching ever since i was little but i never really got to exploring so uh i'm taking

105that class the teaching pipeline class i got to do exactly just that and and i actually learned the value of teaching the good um i actually i learned what made a good teacher and also what made like um not so great to you and and my professor mr hectoris uh he explained how um um growing up he was like a low income low-income student just like me he struggled struggling in school but he met a teacher in uh junior year who changed that and showed him the value of education and i feel like every student they have that one teacher who has done that for them i have mine was a 10th grade teacher 10th grade teacher or she was an algebra teacher and she did just that over covert do it was difficult to

106learn over kovid because you know we were on screen and we didn't get to form a connection with the teachers but what she did was she strove to um cut connect with her students she taught me so much i i never really excelled that math but because of her i was able to get like a hundred the whole the whole quarter and yeah and uh for the assignment for the class was that we had to interview a teacher so i picked her um and through that i got to learn about her personally her personal life how she balanced teaching with um her own personal life and it was truly it was fun it was like it was amazing um i truly like would consider um teaching as something i could do when i grow up

107and yeah also in the program we also learned about so many stuff we did countless projects countless um like annotating um different like sources on how to become a better teacher and i we learned about the cultural competence teaching pedagogy of social political um competence and an academic achievement and through that i was able to learn so much um and this is something i could consider in my future doing hi um so i took the computer science pipeline of the summer i was first introduced to the idea of like some other colleagues in the program and i was further talked about it by discord knowledge coding over the summer when i took it we obviously had to do it over web x because of covid and even though there was a bit of a struggle

108with that gap we were still able to learn very efficiently and get a feel for what college class is really like it was very interesting learning what the day of the life or again life of a computer science major looks like we were able to build websites and do projects that really demonstrated how we could use those skills in a real world application it was very very fascinating i was even able to use some of the skills that i learned in class at work and in school which helped me succeed overall it was a very very good experience i learned what's called css we learned html and also javascript which are website building languages which we were able to utilize to demonstrate our knowledge on websites that we actually built which helped help me really

109learned how to how to interface with websites using using these languages that we were taught in this class good evening everyone my name is jessica coronel and i am the assistant director of the collegian access programs as well as a 2010 alumni of denver high school as you can see our programs like the discussion earlier many of them is just to give them the exposure to college what is college about right what is um taking classes whether it is through enrollment or even pushing them to take the higher levels or honors in ap classes especially as the stacy mentioned their first generation low-income students like myself i was also an alumni of the program and you know going even some college trips taking classes during the summer still having the education to help them prepare

110is very important and right now we're actually recruiting for the program our applications came out february 1st they're due march 25th and um they have to you know either get it from their counselors we have great communication with all the middle school counselors as well as the republican school i mean they were high school counselors um so they can find the application there they can find our website uh they can even come to our office at western and get a copy and we go through an interview and due to the little response that we have we do you know go to a committee to select the students um but i will welcome any you know efforts that you can help us to recruit more students we do have spots available and yeah thank you for

111your time so um you know i want to kind of open this up to you guys any questions comments concerns i've got an education degree so um but before that the one thing i didn't remember is we've also you know we partnered up many years ago with the after school program too so one of the other things we helped support here at danbury high school is the after school tutoring program and twilight with some of the bossing and things like that so you know we're really you know connected to you guys um questions comments so rob if i can i'd like to start with no one i want to thank you and jess for joining us this evening of course the students it was great to hear your story particularly your inspiration from your algebra

112teacher thank you so much for sharing that um and stacy just so you know we'll be in touch with you to make sure you don't get away to another district when people are ready to graduate so to begin with rob uh if you can you and jess the excel programs over the summer and i'm curious i'd love for the board to know how many students are you typically working with i love the word that jess used to talk about exposure to college um and so you know certainly the inspiration that comes from that experience uh probably pays huge dividends for us we have some of that evidence in the audience tonight if you guys can speak to them yeah so i'll just tell you real quick so and then i'll just kind of come in

113and so we have a uh called a site advisor each one of the schools that works with uh the students after school um they have meetings like once a month once every you know twice twice a month where they'll meet with the students uh we'll go on i'll let you talk about the program so we do have representation in the schools right and so it gives the students a connection one of the key successes so the upper bound program and excel type programs which are similar to talent search if you've heard of calendar search in the past is that you know sort of the philosophy is to hire teachers in the school so the kids develop that rapport with the teacher and they have that connection going on but they also worked with them in

114the summer so we had the excel program overbound concave all of these programs including our college program i mean one of the important things was the mentors continued working with the students during the summer so if when the fall semester ended it could continue in the spring semester but once those college kids went home they still had that mentor to talk to right that continuity um and the similar fashion the excel program concave being upper bound you know when you're done with you guys here at the public school during academic year i mean they're coming right to us right so we keep that that wheel spinning we do give them a little bit of time to go off in their nursing home um but just talk a little bit about the yeah so we um

115so we've tried to recruit 25 students for middle school um we do tend to have a lot more students from west sides everything because it's a smaller school a lot of students you know are there um but we do chew for 75 in total and that's due to a little amount of funding we would love to have more um and it's not just summer we have it throughout the academic year as well so they started in the summer time but they are with us good and academic year where we have meetings you know we have meetings twice a month right now we do like a virtual meeting with all the three middle schools and then they stay in person in their own discussions with our advisors and then during the summer time they come to

116our campus we were doing virtual for the last two years hybrid last year but then hopefully now we can come on campus again and they come and take classes that help them for the next year so for example they take uh they're gonna take my days and they take students like an introduction one day during our summer and the good thing about our summer program is that we hire teachers from those that were public schools so they know the curriculum they know what they you know what they're going to need the culture you know who works here the high she teaches your math classes as well as communion so we have different features at the schools that come and work for us during the summer plan and then during academic year we have advisors uh

117um you know help them with meetings checking out their grades keeping track of them which is also important so that's what that's for your question thank you you know another thing i mean listen we do so much i'm gonna say so we have academic contracts that the advisors have of all the students after each marketing period where students set their goals you know so they can you know they know what goal that they can achieve or what you know what they want to achieve um we use a curriculum called uh dream catcher where they talk a little bit about college of choice and what it's like to be a first year student they talk about financial aid you know we work with all of our departments on a college campus whether it's whether it's financial

118aid or it's academic advisement and those students kind of get to hear them come in prior to covet happening we would have a college fair on the west side campus at western connecticut where we would have all the similar programs from the state and this is when you know i would call on like everybody at westcon you know all come out and you know each one of those departments would talk to the students about what the college is like now the important thing to understand is that you know the majority of our students in our concept overbought in the high school program you know they will come to westcon but they're not mandated or required to go to westcott we have students at northeastern boston college yale yukon central eastern southern temple you know i

119mean it just goes on and on we've been around for a while and just that's one of our goals here we go on college trips so we go all around the states as well as out of state and even as middle schoolers we take them too not many colleges like to take middle schoolers but they feel like it's too early um for post and yet um even though university we go and take them and we expose them because even as a seventh grader you know the earlier you start learning about learning skills that you're interested in yet you know they get closer to that so that's one of our you know i think our video about taking them to different colleges and seeing hey who can make just one more statement in question uh the

120statement number one we've had an opportunity kim and i selfishly but very happy and excited to be able to hire three teachers in the last two years as a result of this pipeline and look forward to more great candidates that can serve as teachers in our school community but i'm also very curious when the board and i can be invited to a poster session and hopefully in person so that they can get to see these students and hopefully more to like their end of year posting session that you guys have done annually good thing that you asked we um our our teaching partner is summer and fall so we already had it in december and i did send an email but it was virtual so i think it was sometimes hard but we hopefully this

121year that we're going back in first and we'll continue to have another poster session and you're welcome okay thank you guys yeah well you know some of the stats listen uh being a teacher now guys it's very difficult to recruit right the pay is not great the job environment has been very tough you know um you know it is a tough job for us right now you know um and i i applaud you know as casey here before continuing that path but one of the things that we realized well there's the minority by the teaching 500 computer science five one um the simple fact that uh these guys have taken a college course and kind of figuring out like what that's like right whether they want to be a teacher computer science major they're winning

122no matter what right um about 21 yes right that have gone through a program have pursued an education degree after high school so that's what that number looks like right now um you know i think a lot more has to happen not just in danbury but i mean the salaries got to go up for people who want to be teachers i mean i think you know we have a lot of students that want to be justice and law majors and uh doctors and nurses and you know sometimes they start here they start to you know go down in terms of the the pay rate um but you know what i heard stacy say you know earlier that she wants to come back and make a difference in her community those are the students that we're

123looking for to put into these programs so you know anything else from anybody theresa uh just one question you were talking about mentors from west platte are they full-time professors no so um the mentors are actually students who have gone through the program and have graduated through the program and so they have similar life circumstances what i like to use right so we match these students up with students that are interested in the same major um forwarded like i said they've gone through similar life circumstances right so you know um sometimes it's very sometimes we go through a couple men's work before we get the right one right you know so uh but that that's who they are they're all students foreign i i want to ask the questions that i asked probably about 8-10

124years ago when you came before the board and i think at that particular time you had 25 students in your classes i could be off a couple of numbers and my concern at that particular time as you bought the students or graduating class before the board and you did your presentation that out of 25 or 30 students he only had one african-american person so my question would be how do you attract students and get them in this class besides staying within a certain category because we all know that now that most of the the places around us that are hiring teachers they're trying to diversify their staff so as we as we have been talking about this pipeline for quite a few years i'm i'm just concerned that if you have 25 students you only

125have one african-american student and i you know you can use the word diversity or not i'm talking about out of 25 students you have one american african-american student so how do you need some type of help and support to get other youth involved in this program so one of the things that we did three years ago is that it's not just students that are like um we actually open to the whole high school juniors and seniors and with the help of dr um martin as well as the counselors they send it to anyone who's interested in that you know being an education major we even changed before we used to have like our flyers in english and spanish that might have attracted some of the hispanic population more right so we stopped that and we

126actually make sure that we put the education piece first so even our flyers say are you interested in education are you interested in becoming a teacher even if they don't fit like a minority bilingual piece we try to make sure we connect them with other um programs as well we do community service the territorial partnership which the majority of them start working on black and african american students and we actually promote our choir there we also go to the churches i've been to myself i've been to a lot of different churches uh the main population is you know black african americans with women we talk to even um aids with some of their students as well to see maybe they're interested in joining so we try to we try to go for nothing without getting

127population but at the same time they have to apply we have to make sure they bring in the application they bring all the documents our application is not you know it is expensive because we do have certain requirements like their taxes you know the worship difference sometimes the parents have to be involved as well but we offer we sit down with them we do uh recruitment sessions and um mrs cooper i would love to you know see what other places you know we can go we've been to new hope we've been to some of like you know the bridge uh programs here um event pathways we have a connection there so we're trying to recruit but it's it's tough when we're competing with jericho we're competing with other programs they're doing similar services like us

128but they tend to serve you know that population more but we do a center we don't invite them we try to you know create a partnership as well so the only thing on the flyer that we talked about at the college is that you know trying to find different ways to recruit students to be teachers right so a lot of uh superintendents started as a teacher or coaches you know you want to be a coach be a teacher uh you want to be an administrator you want to be a counselor a principal you know some of these things we would put on the fire because they don't think of that as being a teacher but we all start somewhere and then we work our way up we get the old 92 and just keep going

129right so we try to find other ways not just say hey be a teacher but hey you can do all these other things with an education degree as well so thank you jess rob thank you so much for joining us this evening students stacy thank you for joining us thank you so much thank you jess so i i have principal dundee up next and i want to make sure he's here [Music] good evening thanks for having us we didn't start out with nine but now we're only left with four because as we heard ap work is hard and they had to do something so you know i will ask that uh the board the superintendent when you're making the agendas we could have kids go first in the future just to get us out of

130here i know tonight there's a different story than usual but these uh these troopers held on and i had to make a video saying they were excused from the first period so we're here to talk about our voice of change project um this was a awesome thing for a principal because i got a letter from superintendent email that said hey dan look at this this is awesome grant process type project thing that the state's putting on we should really look into it and i'm thinking all right who am i going to tap on the shoulder for this one to get it done two hours later i get an email from miss lorenz who turns and says hey i noticed this jamboree's not on this list for eligible for the grant i just went forward there

131you go and she was like yes i'll run with it so they're doing some great work i'm going to turn over to ms lorenz and they're going to run through this because they're doing all the work i just pretty much forwarded an email so here you go mrs lorenz thank you miss lorenz thank you all right thank you um i am supposed to have like a student colleague for me it doesn't have a student with me doing this together but uh it'll all work out just fine these are real troopers so [Music] these are my students that were here to present uh four of them are still left um and they'll introduce themselves as they do their section um the prepares for change project is a state initiative that was to try to get high

132school students to develop um policies to address problems issues that they see in their school and it was to gain twenty thousand dollars of state education money um to run with the run with the proposal that they came up um these were the funding priorities as i know you're well aware of these are the funding prior priorities that their projects had to align with um and this is kind of the roadmap right now we're at three they introduced it the students um engaged in a whole bunch of activities in my classroom to get ready to write a draft um they here edited those drafts they got feedback from me they wrote final drafts and they submitted those proposals we are actually still awaiting as of today um indications as to whether or not all of

133those proposals have been deemed eligible to compete and what i mean compete on right now unless a date gets pushed on march 11 students in all of dhs are going to be able to vote on which should be the winning proposal there are an additional five um projects that can win at the state level that the state commissioner of education gets to choose so there's always a possibility that we might actually have two members um and then at some point in the spring the state department of education will announce the winners and then the funding will be provided sometime before the next school year so a lot of my kids in my classes are seniors so it was like well what do we do about that so some of our teams are a mixture of

134seniors and juniors but we are also told by the state that if i they're graduating seniors that the next year's ap gopro class government of optics can run with the program and make it happen or the juniors that are in my class this year can choose to help me make that happen if they're not the winning proposal so i was left with that okay this is awesome this is great public policy okay how do i get 16 17 and 18 year olds to the point where they can actually write a public policy and so that's where i had to step in and start developing um scaffolds and to structure their learning because the state didn't provide any of that they provided a way that they were going to submit their proposal they provided this is

135what it had to align with but there's nothing in between um and for those schools that did it without running it through nap government politics class i don't know how they did it i mean so some of the ways that i scaffolded their learning through this was to first start by activating their deep thinking having them brainstorming having them addressing questions creating questions meeting with mr donovan and meeting with other experts in uh the school or the school district to try to get answers to their questions about why is this this way and could we do this and what are the obstacles for that um the students then took all of that with their brainstorming they started forming groups based on interests um and they uh then also made sure that the prop the idea

136they had aligned with the csde priorities at least in one way many of them had two and there were even a couple that had three priorities that they aligned we i then provided graphic organizers to structure their research so that they could identify and explain the causes and identify and explain the costs associated with the proposed projects among other finally i also provided graphic organizers and exemplars to assist students in visualizing what a public policy looks like when it's written um and then breaking it down chunking it into parts that was conceivable for them that they put it together we wrote first drafts we peer edited them i also assisted them with feedback and tweaked it and eventually we submitted it so thank you um this was and then student generated ideas which i think

137is really important for you to see what the students came up with this wasn't their final project but these were ideas and concerns they had about dhs facilities for example on this page and on this page and i can provide a copy of this to the board if you'd like to read any more and then they also have concerns about student needs and family needs so i am a huge believer that if you talk to to students they can their bee line for telling you exactly what needs to be done and so i'm so thrilled that they have the opportunity to to talk with you even for just a quick few moments tonight to show you the work that they have done these were the final proposals and you're going to see two of them

138one deals with facilities so to speak and one deals with a new initiative they also happen to be two years in one group so if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me at any point but i think they're better communicators as i am so this is the hatter hill science funding projects um and i'm haley and this is here and we're your teachers at dhs okay so um our proposal has two parts so the first part is basically to refresh the science equipment and increase the funding for the science classes so a lot of science classes they don't have up-to-date technology and the things that they have to work with are the things that would allow for the best learning so we would increase the funding so that all the science

139classrooms are able to have what they need so that they can have the most enriched classes and then the second part of our proposal is the greenhouse system so we want to build a greenhouse on the hatter hill which is in the front of the school near the science swing and these greenhouses will be able to connect to a bunch of different science classes as well as special ed classes and culinary classes things like that so it could be really a community project that would increase the learning of so many different areas of school this project and our proposal is necessary at dhs because there's so much uh so much that we lack especially in the science department with the funding and all the different science classes aren't able to get the full experience that

140they can get from their their teachers because the teachers don't have the things that they need um so our proposal would help this so that every student can get the best opportunity and the teachers would be able to teach what they to their best to the best of their ability with the materials that they can so the priorities that our purpose aligned with is learning acceleration academic renewal and reimbursement so basically this can provide a lot of immersion for students they can provide new clubs it can write new lessons for teachers and other extracurricular activities and it can the other priority aligns with the strategic use of technology staff development and the digital supply which basically means we're providing new technology for the students because they're current that can't be updated is the last four

141years ago um so the greenhouse location is on the howard hill with what we might call it and it's adjacent to the science classroom and our budget so we went around to the dhs size teachers and we asked them what they needed and basically we put about 40 of our budget towards the greenhouse and 50 percent of our budget for equipment that's about 17 000 and we have about three grand left for like a cushion in case anything's more expensive or something goes wrong okay hello everyone so our project is called hippo which hatter's is program opportunities so my name is matthew matthew i'm a denver high school senior and i'm in miss lawrence's lovely u.s government politics class um and i'm viviane flores okay so for the voice of change the biggest thing that

142we're trying to do is identify a problem in our community and draw a solution for our high school seniors and students and what we did is we critically examined our community and students and we understood that we really needed to understand and acknowledge the crafts and the foundations for success and the biggest thing after researching intensely was the fact that there is a lack of enrichment in career oriented services for our high school students as they transition over to out of school into adults so our idea was the idea of implementing high school internships and the importance of internships is because it provides professional opportunity it provides early exposure to career forces which is really needed for high school students and statistically it enhances a young person's resume and as well high school students can

143be able to explore you know work conditions and environments that they feel comfortable being a part of and we can see this in other districts local districts that are near to us such as richfield and fairfield and also in terms of social economic status we want to be considerate of the population from germany high school that this opportunity would be the only opportunity for them to have an internship in high school and also have the ability to you know network with professionals out in career fields outside of school when they're in high school so this is a quote that i researched and it says that many high school students saw engineering as a college pursuit and many also focused on a traditional paying job so we see that when high school students they take internships

144in high school they take it very seriously and they understand that this is a really great way for them to explore what they want to do in the future and more and more high schools are adding this these internships as are optional even as a requirement in their classes uh so term in terms of what actually hippo is so these were the two priorities that our project aligned with so learning acceleration academic renewal and student enrichment obviously very version of students learning by putting them in these real world situations and professional environments and then family and community connections um you'll be working with local businesses and such and also families to have them in place for um so in terms of how the actual program would work so we start at the end of your

145junior year it's going to start on being informed about the program um beginning of having a committee of teachers um that are interested in participating here at danbury high school and before the junior class and then pulled the lottery um so there would be a 3.5 gpa requirement and of course you have to be on track to graduate um but then we made it a lot because we thought it would be the fairest way to select out of the um class um and then you would be notified if you were randomly selected and you're thinking of having about 30 students participate um so then from there you would be assigned a mentor on committee um so these are measures that are helping you um develop professionally kind of implement those skills that you need to

146go out into the real world and uh hold a real job or in this case an internship um so then you would be matched with your internship so like i said we work with local businesses and organizations so that students can go to be clear that they're thinking about studying college or going to work in a post-high school graduation and then from there the students would be fully responsible for fulfilling their position um and of course they're still working with their mentor if they need any guidance but it is up to them to work with the business or organization that they can hold their internship with so in terms of budgeting there's four main areas really so um the teachers that are participating in the program we would treat it as an overage um so

147there would be a small amount based on that um and then you need money for attire and materials so of course high school students especially in every high school you might not have business entire business college clothing and whatnot and then other materials like backpacks briefcases and other uh stuff that they might need um and then pe learning materials or resume paper and guest speakers their professional skills and then pathway specific materials so the biggest example that i could think of were like medical internships you might need very specific materials to go into that field okay and then the final thing we wanted to discuss is the impact so what will it provide students and these are the three major things which is the first one fuel fueling career passions so giving students the opportunity

148to see the career they want to possibly choose in high school allows them to swiftly transition out of school into a career that they enjoy and explore themselves another thing is ensuring future success um students will be better prepared for college and workforce and building skills obviously having an internship has many positive effects in terms of enhancing their skills and for these major skills are adaptability work ethic communication and time management and yeah that's the good thank you if you have any questions you can ask teresa um be internships are you looking for paid internships or just the experience sure so i think that if you are reaching out to local businesses it would be up to them if you want to get there in terms of if you usually of course the paid internship

149i think could be an added bonus but we're really focused on developing our students professionally and then getting them the work experience anybody else questions for students do you want to talk about prayer academy now [Laughter] if you do have any other questions about voice for change that i can address i'm happy to do that but i think i think you see how incredible um our students took this on and really just developed some wonderful ideas innovative ideas came up with how they're gonna pay for it um and so yeah i'm just gonna once again encourage like talk to the kids they know they have ideas and and they're really great advocates for their fellow classroom colleagues so thank you so much for your time and effort this evening awesome thank you thank you uh

150so if i can i i do have one more item to see miss carter superintendents update um one let me just start with we are very excited when i say we are on behalf of the cabinet leadership team quite frankly i i'd like to thank the entire danbury school community very excited to be in a position another step closer to putting the pandemic behind us and and and part of putting the pandemic behind this is really starting to make decisions uh that the families are asking us to make uh tonight and and so respectfully i would like to ask chairperson celesti and the board if we can make a full recommendation to the board at our march 23rd meeting prior during that window the leadership team and i will be reviewing the recently released guidance

151from the state that was released about four or five days ago within that guidance and just to give the board and the community some things that will be covered um some decisions that the district has to make and that is uh reevaluate reevaluate our school environments such as spacing and ventilation in a lot of our classrooms many many in this in this room and folks who are listening might recall these are a lot of the challenges that we had for not opening in the first place during the 1920 school year so this is this is not as if this is new for us um but it will be important for us to initially revisit those challenges and make sure we're ready um to d-mask whenever that decision is made another thing that would be important

152for us the leadership team and ice consideration for students with underlying health conditions and so we will have to figure out ways how we can protect that community and these are again things that the team and i will be discussing over the next couple of weeks and certainly report out to the committee to help inform your decision as well and just a couple of more items certainly we will collaborate with the local health department and ask for carol hunty's assistance and any decisions and recommendations you'd like for us to make to the policy committee but then of course there are other things like school trips and what does this mean potentially for sports and chorus and music programs what happens when students meet in the nurse's office particularly in in a more risk riskful environment

153and so there are a number of different questions we will have to answer if we didn't position where we're not going to mask and again the leadership team and i will be working on some of those answers um as some of our neighbors are as well um you know with the pending february 2018 and i just want to make um your chairperson celestia aware these are things that we will be working on in preparation for um our next policy community that's it for tonight's report okay and um ryan bingham i was not able to join us tonight but uh my understanding is he will be at our next meeting that is correct yes so my report i'll just add on to that i'd like to hold the policy community maybe meeting on march 16th at

1546 30. um and query for you about remote meetings versus in person are we still allowed was it mid-april that um i think we're still allowed to do it yeah because i think there's actually some changes and kim can correct me to foi that allows us to do it anyway you don't need a pandemic in order to do them okay whether we decide we want to do it live or remote we can make the decisions we get closer to the date and to just figure out which way which way we think is better but i think we're allowed to do it either way okay so let's let's um tentatively schedule a zoom meeting then a virtual for the 16th the zoom definitely allows more people to watch what's going on they don't actually have to

155come to the meeting in order to to view it so there is that added benefit to doing it by zoom yeah okay great um a couple other dates to throw out there how to keep it civil on tuesday march 8th at 12 noon it's a virtual webinar hosted by ccm and cave it's free um and then our citywide pto meeting was moved from march 7th to march 14th and then there are some committee meetings that are scheduled in the google calendar during spring break i'm going to ask kara to reschedule those hopefully the week prior to spring break um and then minutes i just like to add ask that all members be hands-on when when we have our committee meetings um to take minutes so that doesn't fall on the same people over and over

156again um so if you'd like a template i have you know all sorts of templates from prior meetings that i can share if anyone needs um and that's basically it for me i will open the floor for any other board comments questions committee updates we have the superintendent evaluation committee on march 1st at 6 30. yes and everyone should receive their material and please come prepared thank you so dsabc has been meeting regularly um they are looking for mentors actually um actively so if um you're interested in being a mentor or know a place of business that can get a group of mentors please let us know dsabc is also starting um fundraising um hopefully doing like dining and restaurants throughout the community and raising funds that way um the first one is march 7th

157at texas roadhouse go figure um but so um you know they're very active right now with a bunch of stuff going on so that's great um and then kevin i just had a question for you um i know we've been talking about parent square forever um and i just wonder where we are with that because the robo calls to check your email are getting a little frustrating um i i'm going to ask mike to help us out with some of the logistics and mike can you tell us where we are with some of the logistics sure so we're starting to roll on we've got some training coming up for the schools and principals it's probably not going to be the on off switch because schools are going to sort of go as their comfort level

158grows with it i'm hoping to make that go a little bit faster with with training and just get their upper level up to it so i'm hoping you'll start to see more and more switch over over the next month um we really expect it to happen right but it is my understanding that i'm able now to start to communicate through parent square i think my understanding is the challenge is for families to begin to accept whether they want to receive this information in a catalog in a weekly catalog way whether they can change the ways on how to receive it in terms of languages they actually have to sign into the system in order to accept it in different languages and really access the different options um but i am able now to start communicating

159in parent square okay and and so i will okay and i'm hoping that will push some of our families to now start to activate download the app etc okay i feel once parents realize that i'll come back maybe on phone calls they'll be asked to do that thank you thank you sure yes go ahead just for a possible consideration looks like you have a slicing facilities meeting on the high holy day of saint patty's day just saying that i just don't even know what to do with that it is an excellent point i just want to know if he's irish no but i've played so many irish songs saints only i use players as a youtuber okay it's part of my adopted heritage [Laughter] anything else from any other board members go ahead so i'm

160just going back to the march 16th policy meeting and i understand that there's a lot of issues that want to be reviewed but can we get an idea of when we're actually going to be voting on the on the lifting of the masks and i asked that based on everything that happened here how are we communicating what our schedule is moving forward when our parents can expect to unmask i understand that there's nurses and you know social distancing although we've already met those requirements as far as i know the three feet so i understand that we want to look a lot of things and possibly change policy and make sure that we dictate what that policy will be moving forward but i don't really see any kind of address on when we're formally going to

161vote on lifting the masks and i think that's what people really want to know right so right i'll just um i i'm respectfully respectfully asking the policy committee to meet which i think i heard rachel say would be meeting on march 16th and respectfully asking for the board to make it for the committee to make a recommendation to the board in time for the march 23rd board but i i cannot say what the board decision is going to be but i'm asking and then in that time um the leadership team and i will have some responses to some of these questions that i just posted so you'll formally release that information somehow to the to the public other than just i mean by streaming it like this or is there going to be some sort

162of letter that goes out to everyone right we will summarize before the before we examine tonight in terms of what the families can expect in terms of the timeline we've already started working out okay and then that way if they have any comments or anything before hopefully we meet on the 16th all that can be addressed as well like what the public's input is going to be based on the fact that i guess we're looking to extend it to the sec 27th of march 23rd right in the end we're not really extending anything our existing policy is in effect unless and until the board were to vote my expectation would be we're likely recommending coming out of the policy meeting we're lately recommending that the board terminate the policy on the 23rd that would be

163my expectation of that meeting so if that's the case it would be great if we could communicate that to everyone out there it's hard with without meeting first to formally make it just we can't speak on behalf of you know yeah just something that as you mentioned what your what the issues are that you're addressing or the concerns as well as hey you know what if everything kind of if we can do what we're looking to do this is the dread you know drop dead hopefully date but i think that um everybody needs some sort of line in the ground that they can at least try to put yeah i would appreciate that thank you yeah mr russo i was just echoing the point that after the policy meeting this whole mass issue may be

164concluded on it on the meeting of the 23rd with the board right that's all right delay until the 23rd for consideration of this policy or why did we reach that particular time frame i think would be helpful i understand there's reasoning sure and i think making it uh public might help people understand the delay yeah compared to other towns right right so in addition to the issues that kevin mentioned um it was brought to my attention it was a recommendation of thought and idea by a pediatrician actually that we had a we had a vaccine clinic schedule set prior to the governor throwing out arbitrary february 28th date that made there was no basis for that date um the the vaccine that last vaccine schedule the second dose would be given on march 8th that

165would for i'm talking about for our five to 11 year old age group um that's just newly eligible for vaccines so they would be fully vaccinated by march 22nd which is you know it gives them an opportunity to for families who are planning to have their children fully vaccinated by that time before the masses come off um what else do i want to say to that rich having listened to many many calls with the state department of ed and the department of public health we were told that we were we would be receiving specific criteria on how to make the decision and then and then what were the protocols well i mean the guidance came out right friday night or lack thereof um and so i mean that was part of the delay as well

166um i think i i don't know what the cdc has come out in any i haven't seen anything from the cdc yet although we're told it's coming one of the other issues that i talked to rachel about before last week's policy attorney and then even after number one we didn't have the state guidance number two we didn't even know that the order was going to come down because remember special act 22-1 allows the mass mandate to be terminated terminated as of february 28th it does not require it actually extended the mass mandate to the end of june subject to it being terminated by the uh commissioner of the department of public health she actually issued that order tonight while we were sitting here we didn't know that we didn't know when that order was coming

167down we couldn't act really without that so at any time they did act was acting in derogation of the state guidance before last week and was terminating in the expectation they were getting that order from the state we literally literally came into my phone while we were sitting so we we only got that guidance today we obviously had a chance to look at it so then you're saying that it can be lifted without the policy stuff going through now like through the state is that what i just understood no well in theory we could vote but i think what kevin's saying is there's a bunch of moving parts we need to make sure that we have lined up in order to do it that's all which is the part about having a policy committee on

168the 16th followed by this the policy committee has to oversee policy and make a recommendation to the board that's just right that's the regular order set forth in our bible the procedure that we have to follow enacting a policy is even harder right right right because that requires two readings correct correct right withdrawing a policy would really only require a recommendation of the board metaphor right so that's the theory behind that that delay in addition to all of those things that kevin mentioned in addition to you know we can't even open windows in this g-building and i mean there's there's a lot of factors it's multi-faceted criteria that we should consider all those in favor okay you