001good evening and welcome to the board meeting for venetia unified school district it's october 1st 2020. in compliance with executive order n29-20 and n3520 issued by governor newsom on march 12th this meeting will be live streamed and recorded being via the busd youtube channel linked here um there was an opportunity for you to post comments on the google link that was before that was posted for army but hopefully you are doing that now um at this point i'd like to announce that there were no um no decisions or actions taken during our closed session so we could now move into our open session of our meeting with that said i'd like to ask everybody to please stand and join me in the pledge [Music] ready okay i'd like to start with calling for a motion
002to approve the agenda as written please do i have a motion i move that we approve the agenda as written sally do i have a second second mrs thank you okay do we have any highlights dr young yes we do um we have some very special friends with us uh this is very important did you take the vote people in our system uh and before we go back to that georgina just let's have dr beetson uh we'll introduce everybody and introduce the um the highlight for this evening but welcome to our friends and she'll introduce everyone dr pizza sure excellent um can i interrupt you for just one second i'm sorry can i get a vote on the agenda please all those in favor say i i all those opposed hearing none the emotion the
003agenda passes we were so excited to get to the library i was skipping the vote good call miss martinez thank you thank you yes uh good evening everyone madam president um we are super excited and i think you're going to love this presentation by our district librarians um they have all joined us on the zoom this evening and i believe that miss taylor from joe henderson is actually going to lead the presentation and i think part of her introduction is to introduce all the rest of the librarian so i will leave that up to her but we are so blessed in our district to have such a great team of uh staff there to support our students so without further ado i'm going to turn this over to miss christy taylor well good evening everyone
004and thank you so much for inviting us we were really pleased that you wanted to highlight what we've been doing so i'm we have a little short slide presentation so i'm going to pop into sharing my screen and go right to the slide presentation so let's see yeah so hope all of you can see the presentation no no not yet okay let's try it again here this is uh this was my greatest fear well if christy i have it so if you need to let's let's see here hold on here we go there you go okay all right now let's but let's find it you have fun with that christy yeah thank you here it is all right here we go tada now can you see it yes okay so um i just wanted to
005start out by introducing everyone this is uh lisa sorry from matthew turner and we have um cha soto vigil from mary farmer amber kelly of course from venetia middle school and we also have megan siegel from benicia high school and our newest library media technician is lindsey jump and we're so excited to have lindsay as a part of our team so um as we were thinking about um [Music] distance learning we met several times prior to the shutdown you met in the park distance and wanted to figure out what could we do that could keep our program going in the midst of this distance learning environment so we came up with these three goals getting books in the hands of kids supporting teachers and students and also providing new and relevant titles so the way
006we are doing that is we started with our um weekly curbside pickup program that'll that all schools we're having it at all schools safety guidelines of course are were provided by the cdc so we are we're following those each school has a designated day when they come to pick up the books and they that they have reserved online so we've tried to help families out by scheduling these pickups at convenient times after school hours and also during teacher supply days so when teachers are providing supplies for their students so often we get teachers out there with us as well so that's that's been fun for the students and for us too so in the just in the short few weeks that we've been doing this we've already checked checked out close to 1400 books so
007that we have um we have it's been a success for sure another way that we are supporting our students we've created an online presence with our new busd library website and all of our schools are featured on this website so that's very very cool that's the first time so it's a one stop shop we've made google classrooms instructional videos on how to access our card catalog online we've get we've provided lessons on digital citizenship and information literacy showing students how to use online research tools and at the middle school we have overseeing homework clubs and other events so that's another way that we're continuing our presence also i love this this is kind of my favorite thing read alouds of course we are providing instructional videos read-alouds in-person zooms and class visits book talks bitmoji
008classrooms and and more and all our videos are on the busd site which every student has access to through the clever app and so as you can see um one of our our slide on one of the we've all posted our banned books um which is something that we would normally do this is banned books week and we would normally be doing that in the in the library so we've created this online present and when you click on the different things on our on our slides they actually come alive and so they'll take you to to a site so it's it was fun for us to do and again providing something that we would ordinarily provide in the classroom and last of all we just really want to thank our ptas and our ptg's because
009they've continued to support us as best they can during the shutdown and our lcat money that we received last year was a tremendous help it allowed us to add so many current and timely diverse titles to our collections and that of course represents our student population and our community at large so that's been great so um the and those books of course having a diverse collection is really what supports our lifelong readers and learners so that of course is part of what we believe in as our district goals at busd so with this that's pretty much it this is our snapshot we just want to show that busd library our libraries are important and they truly are the heart of each school we provide a service and a relationship with students that is it's unique
010it's really unique so that's our presentation we if you have any questions i just want to say welcome lindsay wherever you are i can only see certain people who know what i'm going to stop my share here and also thank you to all of you because um i used to sit in your shoes at a different district so i know the hard work that goes into being a librarian and you do touch every single child in the district so i i applaud you um and thank you for going out of your way to make it work during these trying times i really appreciate it thank you so much i had a quick comment i just wanted to point out the fact that i asked uh miss kelly our middle school librarian last year and i
011think i asked um megan as well so what's the most popular book that the kids read at the middle i think i just asked middle at the middle school and i love doing that and then ms kelly said it's the hate you give that they're just reading it like crazy so then i got it and i read it and i thought wow what a powerful book so i read it also he gave me his copy when he was done the board read it and the management team we all read it and then we we use it as a discussion around you know the equity issues and the work that we're doing around that so uh we benefit with all the work that you do as well so i'll ask you guys that again like what
012what's the book that they're you have to tell us now but i always love to know that so thanks for your great work we really highly value all of you thank you very much sherry said everything really well the only thing i'd add is that um the your use of technology and really bringing all the different aspects of technology is so impressive yeah it's been a learning curve for for many of us it truly has well i think we've done a great job i mean we've actually even had fun all of us have been sharing your facebook's um blobs on posts online too because even those are fun to to read and look and go oh we gotta pass that one on it's great so and i do have a couple of little kiddos in
013my learning group that are enjoying the books that you're sharing so i know they're touching lots of children and that's absolutely an awesome gift for them so thank you well and one more quick thing when we are using that green screen there's there are a couple of videos where it looks like we're together we had to really work hard to figure out okay how can we look like we're interacting but we're not on the screen at the same time so we would film a little bit then we cut splice and put it together and that was something new that we had to learn too so so the next thing you're going to do is go into movie making we are doing that a little bit with our read-alouds using imovie and you can you can
014see that any of our read alouds you can see that on the busd um the the full busd uh website that we have that all of us are on well just as an idea i mean i used to love to go to the classrooms to read and so if you want to volunteer for read aloud i'd love to and i have some books i ordered for the elementary schools that i'll be sending to the elementary librarians fantastic and sherry's waving her hand she's like yes me too me too i think you've got a lot of people that would be willing to be readers for you if you guys we love that that would be great we love guest readers for sure thank you so much for inviting us all right well thank you great job
015ladies thank you thank you and gentlemen okay um that's kind of a hard act to follow so i think we'll leave that one up to the superintendent to follow very good being that it is a hard uh act to follow i'll be brief i just want to welcome everybody and everybody has an opportunity to tune in and watch us this evening uh and then a special shout out to our students i don't know if any of you take an opportunity to watch this but i just want to say hello to all of you i'm thinking as your superintendent thinking about all of you a lot and to let you know how much we deeply care for all of you all the kids in our system and uh you know as the adults that are doing
016our best to take care of the whole system and you you're always at the center of the decisions that we make so from the board trustees and your superintendent and the whole team students uh we're all thinking about you also i just want to thank the staff and everybody doing a great job keeping our virtual system going along the october 15th board meeting the staff and i are uh working very diligently to put together some recommendations and our our best thinking for some potential steps moving forward uh with our learning model and we'll be presenting on those on october 15th board meeting and having a a good and robust conversation then so for the public who's tuning in tonight that'd be a nice board meeting for you too if you had time to tune in
017and watch and see what our thoughts are and how we uh believe we would like to move forward based on where we are with the data and and all the work that that we're doing so uh there's that and we're working hard on all that stuff and just another thought about uh folks on another note that are dealing with the fires uh anybody in our district uh very mindful of that it's been very challenging it's very devastating in the air i think we've all been dealing with yet another thing to deal with unfortunately the air has been really bad the last couple days so just our thoughts and prayers go out to those those folks as well um and that's it so looking forward to the board meeting tonight it's not not too long we've
018got a couple interesting they're always interesting right so a couple interesting agenda items that i'm i'm looking forward to hearing about as well so thank you just a little tidbit for everybody we started our meeting with 22 viewers and normally as the meeting progresses the numbers go up so i think that's a great start for this evening so does anybody else have something they'd like to share tonight sherry okay um i you know as we get different things either in our emails or online sources that show up i came across this article about a benisha high school student named krishna mandal i don't know if i'm spelling it or saying right but i just want to give him kudos he got an honorable mention in the 2020 national association for music education for student composers
019competition if you haven't heard it you need to find it and listen to this because it was fantastic i was like we have a great music program and he is he is he is very gifted i can tell you that so i just wanted to shout out to our music program and all the kids that play music and the parents that support them so thanks great job anybody else have anything they'd like to share i just i just wanted to um give a shout out to to mr kaiser i don't know if everybody noticed your email uh mr kaiser sent us his copies his first three newsletters from his class and his program he is one of our cte track and very gifted teachers and his new i was so glad he did that because
020normally we would be making class visits and getting in to see the kids be able to participate in activities or projects that they have going on and i think that's one of the hardest parts about the distance learning is i personally feel very separated from what's happening in all of our classrooms in our district because we can't be there so for him to send that newsletter out i wanted to just take a shout out and say thank you so much there's amazing things going on in there i love that he shared um little summaries of each of the projects going on great opportunities for parents to connect with them he gave them multiple pathways to connect and then he also announced that several of the students were not only taking our phs classes but were
021also enrolling in the colleges to kind of do a dual enrollment so i thought that was also an amazing opportunity for our kids so i just want to thank him for doing that and you know please send them out to us by email if you have them out there because we are really um i think we're experiencing a disconnect or a distance that we haven't experienced before and we would love to know what's going on so if you have newsletters shoot them our way um we do we do we really do read them so i just want to say thank you for doing that um uh and does anybody else have any other comments okay so then i am going to move on and our next one is actually our comment comments from the members
022of the public there are no comments this evening so um i'm going to move on to number 11 which is our consent calendar um all matters listed under the consent calendar are considered by the board to be routine and will be approved by the board in one motion there will be no discussion on these items unless members of the board staff or public request specific items to be pulled and discussed are there any comments okay then do i have a motion to approve the consent calendar as presented i move that we approve the consent calendar as presented thank you mr miss alley do i have a second a second dr moss is giving me a second and this time do i have all those in favor please say i or raise your hand okay any
023opposed seeing none the consent calendar is passed is approved okay discussion items number student engagement and process and that is director rice all right share real quick miss uh miss rice as you're finding your position there i just wanted to take a moment that to congratulate you for your new title and your role uh from uh coordinator to curriculum instruction to director so congratulations center we approved that at the last board meeting and i'm i'm not sure if we congratulated you when you were there so congratulations thank you so much all right good evening um i am here to present on student engagement and i'm going to share our current academic progress our systems for monitoring student progress as well as supports for students who are struggling miss rice can i um just a quick
024interjection and the only reason i'm doing this because we all have a familiarity with with all of this stuff because we're staring at it all the time another little context piece to this presentation is this is a requirement from a legislative document that school districts are all required to work from called sb 98 and there's two sections many multiple sections of that one of them is this attendance piece then there's a piece uh around progress monitoring so there's a whole method to doing that and so just the context on that that it comes from that that legislation to make sure that we're keeping track of our kids so absolutely thank you for that dr young and it also comes from a place of us monitoring and wanting to see what we're going to do for
025kids so this first slide um represents elementary now just to remind you elementary are on the trimester system so um they have not hit their official progress report uh mark although teachers have communicated uh you know with families um so and and the other note to know for elementary is they're on a base grading scale so we are moving to um power school just like um secondary for grades and we're working on that this year um but with that you know it's not a flip of a switch so i robert wahl is working with lisa bolson and he's actually writing code right now possibly right now but currently so that we can have our elementary teachers using that grading system as well and the benefit will be a one-stop shop with that and report cards
026but also an ease for us to be able to pull data as a district so since they're not at that cut point yet what i pulled for you here is um this the number of students that we're looking at with our intervention teachers to serve so what you see here is our 2000 2020 numbers compared to our 2019 numbers and what i wanted to look at here and take note is if you look diagonally on the chart so for example we were serving 16 first graders in 2019 this year we're looking at serving uh 14 second graders so our numbers are not um significantly different from last year it's not a huge increase but one thing to note though is typically on a given year we do serve a lot less in that um next
027grade up so um usually we're having some students come out um a lot more significant than what we're seeing here in the middle school what you see here on the first chart is how many students are receiving those letter grades this was pulled on september 24th so we're not yet at quarter one or halfway through the semester for the courses that they're taking a half of a year but what was important that we were looking at is where we are now compared to where we were last year close to this time and that would have been quarter one and as you can see here with the percents it's not a significant statistic difference except for science so this is something that we're going to want to dig deeper into to see what's going on um
028but as you look at each different uh course it's it's very similar to where we were um at this time last year and then i also attached our sixth through eighth grade breakdown if you want to dig deeper into the data and then we have our our high schools and again the first chart is the overall breakdown of grades this chart here shows both bhs and lhs and again for bhs it's not a statistically significant difference it's less than five percent except again for social studies we've identified so that's again another area that we're going to want to dig into and get some more information on now when we look at lhs there is a definite statistical um significant difference and when we when we're analyzing this we're looking at our virtual program where it's
029working what students it's working for and this is definitely a concern and i'll share some information that um i got from miss lewis in a future slide i also have here a breakdown of 9th through 12th grade if you want to dig deeper there too as well so before i go into what they're doing at each site i shared with you last year about our nwea map assessment so that was the assessment piece that we were looking forward to using this year we started piloting um before we went out with covid and then coveted hit and we worked with the company and they were assuring us that it would be successful in this virtual state but we've definitely hit some barriers so i'm going to share those with you so our initial plan was to
030use that k-12 map growth assessment and what that is is it's an assessment that measures how students are doing on the standards it's norm referenced as well as they would take it three times a year so it would measure how they're doing according to their grade level standards and how much growth they've made at that time so you would get both sets of data and our original plan was to test all of k12 and then we were going to delve deeper into our struggling students where we would give this fluency assessment where it really pinpoint some areas that we can then support our students with and as we were working with our teachers and reflecting we talked with our k1 teachers and they just didn't feel like it was appropriate to give to the students
031in the circumstance we were in so we chose to pause on it for k1 and they agreed to use their data system esgi to give some common assessments so then we moved to plan b and plan b was that we would still give this map assessment to second through twelfth grade um and after hearing some more feedback from teachers we set up some supports by providing proctors for our seventh or excuse me our second grade and then also providing some live trainings and we were working really diligently with our intervention teachers lisa golson in ed services to do this and we ran up against um a lot of barriers such as internet connectivity that was huge and also they had to do something called device preparedness and they had to set their device to a
032certain system and that was a struggle for for students who didn't have the parent support i think also the fires also impacted our internet connectivity and that was a huge struggle so now we're on plan c so now we have put a pause on the nwea map growth assessment um we wanted to not um continue to cause any frustration with our students and with our teachers so until we can work on some of the connectivity issues get all of our students on our devices as well as make sure that this uh testing platform can handle the impact of so many people on and that that's where where it really came down to is i think a lot of these companies um are online and virtual but they weren't ready for the big impact that has
033hit them so we are currently now using a small component that fluency piece that we're still um using it for our really struggling students so we can really pinpoint and and isolate what we need to work on in support which is really essential now other grades it's optional for them to continue their assessment if they were having success with it and we're collecting feedback along the way um and then as far as the district office support what we're working on in ed services is um meeting with grade levels we're going to work with departments on creating common assessments and with that we're going to use our platform known as performance matters and we've had several high school teachers already training on this with our department and they have been creating assessments we're beginning to work
034with middle school and next week we will be working with elementary on doing this and then we will we're not um taking nwa map off the table um but we're definitely pausing and we'll come back to that later so with that we are working on ways to to capture data we're getting feedback from principals and teachers themselves to support our students and then they each site has a support system in place to support the kids so just to give you a little bit of insight on our what our elementaries are doing is the elementary teachers are offering a teacher teacher support time um during their asynchronous time in the afternoons they also are doing a small group instruction for for students that need that we are beginning our next tier of support with our intervention
035teachers and we will then be hopefully bringing on some reading tutors in the next couple weeks to also meet more student needs with that really targeted intentional guided reading and then they also are we also really look for curriculum that supported universal design for learning for example our mathematics program uh support this year is called zern and with that program students are working on their grade level standards but it also provides them opportunities to practice their fluency in different areas of mathematics exactly where they are so it's there it's at their level and it's it's a digital platform for that and then for our middle school they are uh monitoring their students and providing support um their counselors are pulling weekly uh reports and they are really honing in on those students that are really
036struggling or failing the courses and the counselors are connecting with the teachers they are reaching out to both the parent and the student and they're working on finding out what barriers are keeping them from being successful as well as offering suggestions from support for support one of the things they have for support we heard from our librarian team is that they're offering a homework club and that's monday through thursday 2 10 to 3 10. and the librarian is a part of that as well as students that are in the national junior honor society are providing some peer tutoring and then counselors are also offering weekly check-ins that students can sign up for and get support as well as social emotional learning support and then also at middle school they have weekly access so students have
037another teacher that they're assigned to they check in they go over the kind of the community events at the school some social emotional learning strategies and just have another area just to have a homeroom type of support and we are exploring the option of possibly offering a math lab or and or an english language arts after school lab so that's a possibility in our future and then we have at our high school bhs um also does weekly reports also overseen by the counselors um they are really um targeting in on the students with f raids and they're following up again with students and parents students that have multiple f grades they have what's called a care team they pull in like a student study team meetings to look at how they're doing across the board
038to get information there and to look at how to provide support finicia high school also has a period which they call access that they're checking in with another teacher as like a homeroom time as well as the teachers are offering additional supports on fridays for students that need additional help besides the time that they're offering during the week and then we have um lhs and lhs also has that um time that students are checking in with a teacher but it's daily and it's known as an advisory and every day in advisory they check in and the advisor reviews their individual learning plans so each student at liberty high creates an individual learning plan and their advisor reviews that with them and monitors their grades with that they're also working with the subject matter teacher to
039see how they can support that student with reinforcements phone calls home etc and then the teachers are off also offering additional small group or one-on-one uh support in the afternoon for students that would that need additional help when talking with miss lewis you know we were looking at the data and i know you know we were presenting attendance at the beginning of year and miss lewis principal of liberty high was talking about attendance being better than it ever has and now the grades coming in are not reflective of the student progress and as i was talking with her she said you know we had some supports in place they had their advisory set up they had their check-in with teachers um but she's added some other layers that she's starting to do to try to
040make connections and one of those things is connection to the principal so she said what she's doing is asking for the teachers to tap her into some of the assignments for example in one course they were goal setting short and long term goals and they had they were to write to ms lewis with their short and long term goal and the principal then replied back and cc the teacher so they have this triad of support and with that she continually monitor is starting to monitor and check in with them to provide support as well so i know they're working really hard over there at liberty looking at the numbers they're struggling with this virtual learning right now but they're definitely rallying around their students to see what they can do to provide that to support
041and support them so that is where we are um with engagement wise um just kind of at a glance you stop sharing are there any questions or other things you might want to know miss rice i am really concerned about those d and f grades across the board because even if the percentages have not changed much from last year that's still a pretty large percentage um and it's not just liberty it's some of the other schools um so i want it's a it's kind of a two-part question did have we gotten all the computers that we have ordered and does every student have their computers we have not yet received all the computers that we've ordered um that you know isn't um on our end and it is very disappointing um i know we um
042i believe we and maybe leslie you can jump on this but i don't know if it was this week or next week that we're receiving only the first batch which i believe is like 400 computers um that we were going to work on getting out to students um and yeah we don't we don't have all the computers yet dude i do know i can add um that mr padawan our director of i.t anyone that had requested a computer i believe they did follow up with them and many of them had they had access and it wasn't necessarily on a device but they figured out and many of them he said have ended up going out to purchase their own as well so at the very beginning of the year we did a lot of access
043checks and so we we felt really confident that while it wasn't everybody got getting a usd device people did have access and so it wasn't necessarily an access point now one of the other problems is connectivity um and and again and i think we might have talked about this last time um families have internet but it the internet gets spotty and it doesn't hold uh the connection that well again probably because so many people in town are trying to get on there isn't really a whole lot we can do about that piece that is beyond our control we've offered to families that have qualified or needed it to sponsor them for internet service if they didn't have internet i know hot spots were another option but mr padawan says that they're not necessarily as robust
044as a true internet connection into your house which we could do but it became more about how many people are trying to get on and how much um i just think of it as the pipe and i can't remember what it's called it's like that traffic jam in there and and that's beyond what we can do at this point yeah the schools the school districts ability but it's such a sad um thing that we're having to deal with and did did we did each of those schools reach out to every d and f student has everybody been connected with a person uh by phone so that there is some we're not missing anybody because it seems to me not just liberty because liberties those numbers are not great but do we have a connected by
045phone to each of these people uh as far as my understanding is yes when i was talking with uh ms dalski miss kleinschmidt and miss lewis that they have kind of a tiered system set up where you know they're running their reports weekly and then uh the counselors are taking the lead on kind of breaking it out on on who's making the call whether it's them teachers are following up but it's calls and emails and as as far as i know both the middle school and the high school are trying to connect with both the student and the parent um to talk about one what are the barriers why are what are the barriers to success on one hand and then two you know these are the opportunities we have for support can you participate
046in those so that's kind of like the first okay it's just concerning it's just i see the numbers and it just it's worrisome no i agree with you sherry i think you're right um do we have an idea what the number of kids are that do not have computers yet and then just to get back as a follow-up to sheri's comment what are the common barriers that we're coming up with when the administration is reaching out to all these kids because it is an alarming number goodyear bad year d's and f's those numbers are very alarming especially at this point in the school year so that i i'm finding that to be a concern so i don't have the number yet of students still waiting for devices for a busd device but i can get
047that information for you um the other thing and we'll have to bring we'll have to look again at the end of the quarter this was about four weeks in or five weeks into the semester um and one of the things that i do believe uh uh miss kleinschmidt said is that oftentimes things will still change before that quarter ends because kids will start to dig themselves out of this hole and so i think it would be important for us to look at those and i know they're doing it all the time again in another couple of weeks when the first quarter ends to see where are we because we're looking at last year's grades are the end of the first quarter so they were further along than when we pulled the grades uh back on
048the 24th we will bring that back to you yeah i i would like to hear more of that because we actually had this discussion at last the last trimester because we were distance learning and we were all concerned about the grades and where they were in the numbers of d's and f so it's pretty disheartening to see that many starting the school year again that that we've got so many students that are being unsuccessful and the other thing i'm just i'm just wondering because i think it's just hitting me or but if we've got the first wave of computers coming in and that's at 400. that i'm assuming that means there's way more coming in than that and that means we're well over 10 or 15 percent of our students are not connected yet with
049the device and i guess that's that's a much greater percentage than than i was thinking for our students i i didn't expect the numbers to be so high so yeah i would like to hear more about that sure and so we ordered 1500 devices um so that we would be one to one and we did that as soon as um we received that that that funding and we knew that we were going to be virtual learning um so i think our students have devices are just not all school issued devices well that's okay i guess the question that i want to know and i don't i'm thinking that's what sherry was asking so correct me if i'm wrong but i think i know what i want to know is how many students do not yet
050have a computer of any computer have any i mean you i i'm fine with parents have some parents have purchased their own i i know lots of parents that have done that and that's great it's a it's a personal choice they were able to make and successfully do but i want to know how many kids are still struggling with maybe a phone or not because that to me is an alarming number okay so that would be great if we can get that breakdown and with the number that dr wiesen was just sharing too it wasn't we need to get that number but it wasn't for to give it uh we're going one to one but it also was to refresh some of the computers that we have out there so um yeah i just think
051steph that we need to have that clarified i think that would really help us because i think we're all trying to wrap our arena our brains around this and and i think the fact that it wasn't what i was thinking that there were that many kids but it's kind of sounding like there's possibly more and that that to me is a concern yeah we think i could speak for everybody when i say that that that was yeah we're not hearing i'll i i will get you the number but we're not hearing that people don't have a device um so but i will get you i will see if we can we can peel that apart and part of it is depending on how many people respond to us but we did those surveys way back
052when um we got out as many devices as we had and then as it followed up with folks that had requested and and we were not able to provide one at the time um the responses they were getting but i just don't have the exact figure was that they had they had figured something out in the meantime it wasn't just a school device but i will i will see if we can uh follow up with those folks again okay that would be great dr moss and then i'm sorry dr hogan and dr moss i'm sorry go ahead oh no i was just gonna um ask i know that there were some um some other accommodations that were being made where students were being provided with copies of you know materials or whatever if they didn't
053have the devices correct right yes and just to give you a little glimpse it still doesn't answer who's using a phone etc but um our our online platforms which is uh most of our curriculum say in elementary is housed in clever um and so we ran a report to see how many students have accessed that and all grade levels had a hundred percent except for kindergarten we're digging in there but some of the things we're finding out is they're also doing packets um not having the kids go on that online piece and then we had it was like 99 i think in fourth grade and um as i was digging into that um they've been working with individual students on things or there's external factors not that they just don't have the device so just
054running that we just started that running that in elementary they were act they were able to access the curriculum digitally okay under whole grain i just wanted to follow up because in listening to this discussion i have a disconnect and i don't have the the presentation slides diane would you not mute you oh i'm sorry i thought i was i don't know the presentation slides in front of me but in my reading of the slides that that dr rice said director rice presented what i saw was that our grades are no worse than they were this time last year except for in two areas one area and one area at high school yes so that's what i was going to loop back um at as well um i know we were presenting last year some
055of you know this data and we had concerns with our our d's and f's f data last year as well during time so um when you look at the numbers it's not statistically significant like we don't have a huge um gain in f's at this point and like dr beetson said it will be interesting to see when we actually meet uh the quarter mark which that's where i pulled the 2019 data from where we land but it's it's not a big difference so yes we're concerned absolutely always concerned with apps but as far as comparing virtual learning now compared to in-person learning last spring last fall sorry last fall it's it's very similar yeah and that's what i wanted to clarify because it's not that i'm i'm not concerned when we have some lower grades
056but we are not in any worse situation than we were a year ago when the kids were in class in person correct except for lhs except for yes you know some very specific cases yes okay i just wanted to get that across because it seemed like there was a little bit of a disconnect there thank you for that any other questions i think i think the follow-up to that statement though is like great applause to our teachers for being able to put this all together and keep our students learning i mean that's really impressive that they're able to continue to get 100 engagement at their levels and keep the students on task and getting their grades so thank you very much to our teaching staff and our administrators who are supporting that yes thank you
057for that too and just one last little note before i'm done on that note i had some feedback in our district curriculum council from one of our high school teachers and she was sharing a silver lining and all this too is she has some students that would not have been sitting in her class for different reasons possibly due to anxiety and not being able to be in the class to participate or she had one student that wouldn't have been speaking up and they are she said they're just flourishing in this environment so with that we have some silver linings for some of our kids being able to learn this way anybody else have any other comments i think as always thank you very much it's it's always kind of interesting to see how our data
058is is pulling out and how our students are doing that's that's what we're that's what we're here for and that's what we're supposed to be looking at so thank you for your support okay and we are going to move on to our next item which is social emotional learning and update and that is miss corona please good evening good evening everyone thank you for having me um i am let me see if i can share my [Music] can you see my screen yes okay well thank you um this update is just going to talk about what student services has been doing and district-wide to address self-care to address students social emotional well-being and in addition to that what levels of support uh the district is working on putting into place so over the summer my
059team and we have been working diligently in making sure that we have different resources for our students so this presentation is going to cover most of that information so we have um had a partnership with uh solano county office of education when i first came in november i believe i attended a meeting brand new meeting was was not aware but um luckily our uh mental health coordinator she had been involved since the beginning jessica garcia and we received a grant to develop uh wellness centers at every uh school site we were able to uh bring in those materials and furniture uh given with that uh grant that we received and this these wellness centers is mainly to support our students um give them a safe place um not only students but staff family um when
060they need when they're feeling um you know having those big feelings when um they're needing coping strategies so that wellness center will serve for that purpose um unfortunately right now our wellness centers are closed uh we're in distance learning so with this grant that we received we were able to purchase furniture which everything has been delivered it is still in boxes at every school site we were able to purchase materials everything was delivered in august um so it's it's not uh being used everything is still uh closed however um jessica garcia our mental health coordinator has done an uh phenomenal job in creating this virtual wellness center so there is a link to to the virtual wellness center and what this virtual wellness center does um it she researched different resources on how to provide
061for our families given that we were going through these uh difficult times um you know she so she created a website and developed the virtual wellness center this is uh available for staff for families for students it is also part of our clever um the the one app that we that students use to sign on to different programs so this was created and it's currently being used in addition to that grant for the wellness center we are partnering um with county office of education in getting two interns and this is still a work in progress uh the two interns they're free for us um they would be running the wellness centers um we are looking at placement for two different school sites we haven't determined yet which school sites um but they would be running
062those wellness centers we are developing a process um on how to provide those resources and then what to do when the student needs additional support the um like i said the virtual office hours have already started school sites are doing some check-ins with students and those those are going well right now now what types of wellness uh is in place we this year we were fortunate that we were able to purchase curriculum we do have the social emotional uh screeners which are universal screeners and then the tiers of support also self-care for staff the curriculum that was purchased this year uh for social emotional we have second step and many of you have probably already heard it we have special friends they use second step but we did purchase this for uh elementary and middle
063school to be implemented so elementary uses the social emotional learning time every morning and the middle school it's an optional class but it's done during advisory some stuff uh staff members uh teach this advisory and also counselors so these uh programs are being implemented k-8 at the high school level we are piloting school connect which is another social emotional program um curriculum and high school is piloting it at get focus stay focused and lhs is is also using it during advisory so these are uh for new programs that are being implemented this year and uh with with the hope that we are able to work with our students and address those different levels of support that each student needs now this year was the first year that we did the screeners the social emotional screeners
064these are universal screeners so basically these screeners um it was it was done at the high school level approximately um 1200 students 1300 students took these uh screeners and basically the questions that um are asked from these screeners and they're not um students do not put their names on there or anything like that but some of the questions there are 25 questions and usually the student would answer uh dislike or or like or so the questions that are asked are effective early early skills uh student learning on self management on decision making and also the other component to this is that is very important is now that we have these um universal screeners now we have this now what is what is it that we're going to do with the results so that's an important
065piece that we're working on that we are looking at that tier level support an important component is we gathered the results from the high school from those approximately 13 students that took that we disseminated that those results analyzed those results now we have a tier level of intervention team to look at those results and determine what type of levels of support these students need um they different students scored at different levels we some scored at a you know red some green so we're looking at that component to make sure that we address those levels of support um depending on the student that is something that is part it could be part of pbis but it's it's the the tier intervention system and it's crucial to have it in order for us to have a good
066outcome and utilize the results of these screeners so here's just um you may you you're probably very familiar with with this pyramid and these are the the tiers of support we look at the red which very few students would fall under that and then the yellow some students would fall but the main component is that we have those universal uh interventions we have everyone's conducting and implementing in interventions um at you know school-wide to look and implement evaluate what happens and then that men maybe that small population that tier uh team would like a tier two team would be looking at those results and then disseminating and identifying what type of supports we would be offering so this is still a work in progress we're still working on that one of the goals is to
067develop a district team leadership to look at those expectations and then determine how these uh tier groups are going to be analyzing the results for our screeners now the self-care for staff this this was a phenomenal idea that um miss jessica garcia uh thought about because everybody we were all you know under stress we were all thinking you know trying to work uh more than than usual to see how we could best accommodate our families and our students our priority has always been our families and our students and she uh developed the this um self-care series and and it i always think about um she always says this you have to take care of yourself in order for you to be able to take care of others so this is something that's being provided for
068um any busd employee and she started doing this uh september 11th i think it ends in uh in november so she does she has two sessions every friday and it's meditation and then it's just that self-care uh to make sure that you know we're we're we're taking care of ourselves so we can take care of our students and the link is added here if you want to get more information or if you want to join one of these fridays in addition to that our behaviorist our district behaviorist uh miss jen baker has also uh created different levels of support for parents she did start with parents who had students with autism that group was a very small group so she decided to meet individually with the parents um to give them specific strategies with with
069their child uh to support the distance learning and this be this uh behaviorist office hours uh is parent workshops and she has those every week it has been a great success sometimes she has had to accommodate because parents can't do it during the day so she's doing some uh evening workshops and it's basically you know dealing with behavior the rules of distance learning and and those things so there is a link here that will take you to that flyer and that was shared uh earlier in september uh with all families administrators sent those out um the office my office sent that out to to families as well and in addition to that uh we're also miss jessica garcia is also presenting in october at the uh community advisory committee and this is for uh parents
070uh to help uh how to address uh parent stress and she's going to be presenting there uh coming october the other uh pieces site ptg they're offering parent presentations as well so she's working hard in making sure that we are providing the resources and the tools for coping strategies and self-care and well-being of students and staff and family and these are just additional links that are added to our website the suicide prevention it's added to our website we're working on the student services website as well and then we have sources of strength this is something that has been ongoing in venetia unified school district and this program in particular works with any social emotional program but it focuses on the suicide prevention and also um it also impacts other issues such as substance abuse and
071violence so um and this this is something that uh we're looking forward to and it's being implemented used at the middle school in high school and i think that concludes my [Music] thank you any questions dr corona have you and your team seen any particular increases in areas that you're concerned around or trying to address that are different from a regular year i think that anxiety and i shouldn't say anxiety but something to that effect i'm not a clinician or anything like that but parents have have mentioned that behaviors have uh increased uh tremendously we have uh i've been in contact with some parents parents have been emailing and behaviors have been uh have they they have increased at home something that was not happening when school was open and with some students uh that
072have disabilities yeah it has been that um now we had um like at liberty high school we had students that were in independent study because of anxiety or depression and that worked well i've heard that that this distance learning is working well for for some students but for the main the majority uh they are having you know the social emotional it's like that interaction with peers that's what's missing i uh i also just wanted to add that um thank you for sharing that i appreciate it i just wanted to know you know what differences our team is supporting um but two things really have struck me about the things that you've been doing this year one dr hogan you're not you're a little quiet on your back is this better yeah okay um one i've
073really appreciated and i've heard in the community that people really appreciate the focus on supporting parents and caregivers knowing that those folks are under more stress having to work with their children at home for school and so i just wanted to share that with you that your team is really garnering kudos for that and it also in the timeliness changes that accommodating some after hours programming came up as a very positive thing in a discussion i had recently so i was excited to see you on this list because so that i could share that with you the other thing i was going to share with you is that i was in contact with a former student who's now in college and uh in phoenix and u of a and um i'm sorry asu shouldn't get
074those wrong huh and and a situation occurred and he handled it and i was talking to him about how he handled it and he said he learned in sources of strength what to do and so that was very heartwarming to know that they carry those skills with them and um you know that program has really made an impact on people so thank you again for your team's work this year thank you i'm very fortunate to have such such a great team thank you really well done thank you very much um any other comments before we move on all right again thank you very much for all your presentations this evening we're going to move back to dr gill um she is going to share a discussion item regarding first meetings of some um actually uh
075actually uh miss miss frucchi i can i can tee that one up and then uh usually the way we do it i can do that and the dr gill can fill in uh if we have any details on that if that's okay so just absolutely just a reminder so we have the as a process we have the board policy review committee that meets once a month two trustees serve on it they meet with uh myself and uh my administrative assistants ms martinez and then uh why dr gill is on here because a lot of these some of these board policies will hit on one department um um more than another so she was quite helpful in all of these because they they fall into the largely into the world of human resources so the process
076is once a month we continue to get updates on our board policies from legislation and so they come to us with these edits and these changes we push them out to all of the related departments they bring them back to the board policy review committee we look at them and then make the changes make sure that we understand and then maybe push them out to the trustees and have you take a look at them and then we have the first reading which is tonight and then if there's no questions then we bring them back for approval at the next board meeting and the items that you see here and largely all of these board meetings fault board policies rather fall into the category of um clarification around largely around procedures uh postings the ones that
077you see here on the uniform complaint sexual harassment deal with again procedures and clarity around terms some differences in the investigation process i did not find that there were whole scale changes in these but important ones and some some um changes and practices around investigations so just want to put them out there for your um reading pleasure if you will i'm sure that you poured over them before the board meeting and uh do you have any questions for dr gill or myself tonight uh then if you don't we'll bring it back next on the 15th for an action item any any questions for us one of one of the things uh just to let you know that when we get these board policies the we make sure that dr gill is so skilled at so
078many things that we make sure that the items that um are applicable to throughout the system and they are that we train people and so they know so it's not just here they are thank you for the approval and then we shelve them and we make sure that people know what are the important items in this so we are putting them into practice right dr gill right so there it is any any questions from the trustees no but i do want to say thank you for that clarification because that actually was my question is there anything we're going to need to make sure that we touch staff and train them on so i was going to throw it out to the team since i knew everybody had read it so thank you for clarifying that
079anybody else have a question for dr young at this point okay then could we call on dr gill to share thank you you're on youtube sorry good evening president uh madam president um governing board and superintendent young so dr young actually gave a beautiful summary um i will just add um that for these specific board policies that would be brought to you they're all aligned with the new law that came up at the federal government level title nine there have been some changes in it and so the language and majority of these board policies i want to separately all of them has been impacted in some shape or form because of title ix uh there will be other policies of course we will be bringing forward for other reasons but this set of policies came
080together because of that reason so dr kelly they are approved once uh uh once we receive them as a final document from gamut we will actually not only train uh staff we will also be um sending them to um all employees district wide as well via email so that they are familiar with them that these are the new policies um because some of them we are required to send in uh via email to employees by law so we'll be doing that as well great clarity yes any other questions thank you dr gill nice clarity thank you thank you okay so being this is the first reading there's no action on our part tonight they will be coming back again um on our next board meeting i believe on the 15th we'll see those again so
081are there any other final comments for the good of the order cute sherry okay we are at the end of our board meeting so if there's no other final comments then again i'm just going to stay stay safe and be well and we'll see you on the 50th good night and have a great evening right thank you