2/1/2023 Special Board of Education Meeting

001foreign I am now calling to order the uh Wednesday February 1st 2023 uh Chico Unified School board meeting special Workshop um let's stand for the flag salute please salute pledge I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all this is the regularly scheduled workshop with the focus of reviewing cusd achievement data and Casp information and dashboard assessment accountability systems February's regular board meeting will be held on Wednesday February 15th uh so um item number two are announcements um are there any announcements today okay um item three is consent calendar um is there any public comment for consent calendar would anybody like to pull an item from consent calendar I think I'll actually pause

002and give our colleagues a moment to approach the stage all right I did ask for announcements but I'll call for announcements one more time just since we have everybody up here okay and um so far we haven't had any items pulled from consent calendar and it appears that that is still the case so I will move to ask for a motion on the consent calendar I move approval of the consent calendar all right we have a motion by vice president Robinson and a second from member Lando we'll call for a Voice vote since this is our first vote for the evening we'll start with uh Mr Lando Lando eye Tennessee Dolby I Robinson I can't I alrighty um moving on to our next item I'm the board Workshop so this is an informational piece it's

003a a review of Chico Unified student achievement data and cast information and dashboard assessment accountability systems for federal and state um with the presentation by Mr Tim Carris thank you for having me and good evening board and before I get started I wanted to thank board members uh konkin and Tennis for meeting with me a couple weeks ago letting me run by you the kind of the skeleton outline of this presentation and I also want to thank our Neil Dow staff members and our Bidwell staff members for joining us to talk about the great things they did last year Christy bankson will also be joining me towards the end of this presentation to talk about what we do with all this data and how we address the needs in Chico Unified so tonight um the

004goals are to familiarize the board and the public with the dash California state dashboard system it came into existence in 2017 and then we took a couple years off during the pandemic so it's a new look that I'll go into later and it takes a little bit of looking at it and talking about it to get used to that um we'll discuss our Chico Unified results and then talk about the dashboard results in relation to lcap multi-tiered student support system and program change so like I said earlier the dashboard is part of an accountability system that was put in place in California in 2017 to meet the priorities of the local control funding formula as well as provide the metrics as required by the every student succeeds act so the dashboard is California's response to

005both state and federal laws it measures the district's level achievement in 12 areas related to lcff okay the local control funding formulas the seven indic seven State indicators based on qualitative data are what we're going to focus on tonight there's also five local indicators that are included on the dashboard and these are approved by the board every June and they are essentially Chico Unified staff doing a self-evaluation of how we're meeting different priorities such as implementing State Standards okay and as well as working and engaging with educational partners so um if we do those we get met so we could be doing really badly in one of those and by virtue of filling out the form we'd get met so not much to talk about there we're standard Med in all of our local indicators

006though okay the dashboard itself is on is on a website publicly available it's linked here as well as at the end of our of my presentation um it displays our performance on each of those indicators I I discussed on the previous slide and as we all know it was put on hold for 20 and 21 due to pandemic related issues such as lack of State testing data so it's our first look at a Chico Unified dashboard since 19. the indicators on the dashboard the metrics are addressing like I said lcff priorities so under priority 4 pupil achievement we have English and math scores from Smarter Balance tests last spring we have English learner progress that that data comes from the English language proficiency assessments for California or elpac the previous two years and also included

007in this priority but not on the 22 dashboard is the College and Career Readiness indicator and that um is basically a measure of a variety of graduation outcomes including Smarter Balance tests AP tests call CTE pathway completion seal of biliteracy attainment so it's a mix of a lot of different measures and it's really kind of sums up why we're here Tim have the CTE completion rates been in the dash in the data previous to these yeah they have been they were okay they're somewhat hidden by the way the the state displays them but they're they're there the dashboard indicators for priority five are chronic absenteeism and graduation rate so chronic absenteeism is absent 10 or more percent of a school year or the days the students enrolled and high school graduation rate only includes a

008regular diploma for lcff Priority One the dashboard displays suspension rate which is the percentage of students who were suspended at least one day okay so a student could get suspended for 10 days and they only count as one student on our suspension rate we use the dashboard for a lot in Chico from the second it comes out or really even before it comes out we're looking at projections um based on internal um data that we keep and we've actually put on the lcap every year early release Smarter Balance questions and then once the dashboard comes out we really take a deep deep dive we've spent a lot of time over the last month pouring over these numbers and different looks at it and trying to find where our successes and holes are because we really

009do use it as the primary measure of how we're performing on our lcap goals and when we talk about programmatic evaluations how is you know Elementary doing in language arts based on the services we put in place this year do we want to continue those services do we want to add more a lot hinges on this data for us it is summative data so there's not much we can't do anything about the data as it was last year but we can use that moving forward to make any necessary changes and celebrate successes like we will tonight it's used in Grant applications it's displayed to parents at our educational partner lcap meetings and our parent meetings throughout the fall So This is highly consequential data for Chico Unified and it really should be for all districts

010the dashboard now in Fall 22 looks different than it did the last time we saw it in 2019. the CDE the California Department of Education is asking districts to look at this as a new Baseline okay we had two years off and in addition when we when we come back the academic measures and I'm going to show you the English and math are really different tests than the kids took in 2019 so it makes comparisons um iffy between the 19 data and the 22 data on academics also in the past we've been scored by the state on both status for example our suspension rate last year would be the status and the change would be what is the difference between our suspension rate last year and the year before so mixing those two together we

011got a color score a level basically statuses only status only is reported this year because we didn't have data going back and all for all the measures in previous years also like I mentioned the College and Career indicator is not indicated so this is what the dashboard looked like in in 19 the last time we saw it and this is pretty familiar with to those of us in education at this point we can see a little dial pointing to a color score in which blue was the best and highest performance and red was the lowest performance these colors are derived from a five point or a five by five grid and I'm going to take a second I think I have a pointer on this no can you blow it up again so down the

012vertical axis is our status across the horizontal axis is are the change ranges so the state would put us on for all students for example in 2019 we were a medium status meaning we were negative five to plus 9.9 points average distance to standard but we increased I think it was around seven points that year we increased between three and fifteen points so where that those two levels met on this grid was the color that we get we're going to move back to this next year and so I wanted to start familiarizing the board with this right now any questions about that okay this is what the dashboard looks like this year this is the simplified version of what you see when you click click on the dashboard website for Chico Unified the status levels

013are indicated by the cell phone bars one cell phone bar is the lowest performance five cell phone bars is the highest performance so we can see here this is what what's shown on the state in the state allows you to click around and dig into certain indicators and dig into certain student groups it's a lot of clicking and it's not um super fast and easy if you're not used to it but this is their effort in simplifying data for the public so before we get into Chico Unified results just wanted to explain some of some of the charts that you're about to see when we compare ourselves to other districts we're comparing ourselves to other unified school districts that have an enrollment within 25 percent of our so plus or minus three thousand so about

014fifteen thousand to about nine thousand in districts that have an unduplicated percentage within 10 percentage points of ours okay unduplicated status or socioeconomically disadvantaged status is a huge indicator of student achievement on these measures so that's why those two were chosen um just a little bit about unduplicated students those are students that receive Freer reduced lunch and that includes homeless migrant students and directly certified students who are receiving state aid through state agencies their Foster or our English learners okay so currently Chico Unified is is at 50 about 57.5 last year we were 58.6 percentage um unduplicated while the state didn't give us colors on the dashboard that I just showed you they gave us cell phone bars I chose to add colors to these charts so red is the lowest performance so that's one

015cell phone bar and blue is the highest performance so that's the five cell phone bars okay anytime you see a red box that means that student group has has performed at the lowest performance level for a given measure okay so that's how the comparisons were chosen if we get too fine-grained with race and ethnicity we end up with no comparisons so I chose the two most important factors in my experience which are unduplicated percentage and size of District so we'll start off with priority four pupil achievement and what you see here is Chico Unified compared to our 10 closest comparable districts and this the numbers that we're looking at when we look at English and math are average distance from standard for a Chico Unified student how many points does was the average student above

016or below standard in Chico Unified so Chico Unified our average for English language arts last year was 9.0 9.0 points on average above standard qualifiers set by the state yeah so there's scale score ranges for each grade level and they they differ they go up as the grade levels go up and there's a a line right in the middle that is the standard met line so it's how how close are those kids to that line and as we like look at this again next year and the following year and into the future as we build off this Baseline does that standard does that standard shift based on like the results from that year it hasn't in the past um other indicators have typically the State Board of Education is finalizing the nitty-gritty details all the

017way down through November right before the dashboard comes out so we can I expect to see that again in the future where they're kind of finalizing those cut points and things like that so you can see where um we fared much better than our our comparable schools and English language arts and I think that's um you're going to hear about one site in a couple minutes on in the great work they did on English language arts but I also think as a district as a whole we had a lot of momentum going into the non-testing years in English language arts and we had put into place practices that led to you know really good results prior to the pandemic and allowed us to maintain um during the pandemic yes uh Tim did on exactly what

018were being measured by when when we talk about standards these are the California Department of Education standards that they've set and I I get the um the Baseline this where it says standards met at zero how do you generate one to I mean what what moved us to nine so before the um pandemic were 9.3 so what this what this is telling us is maybe 9.2 I'm sorry um but what this is telling us is that the average Chico Unified student that took the smarter balanced English language arts scored met the standard they scored nine points into that standard range of on their scale score okay and while you know this is it it's good to be ranked ranking well with our comparison sites our our districts we're always looking to grow and you'll see

019that reflected in our L capitals this year in the past it's typically been we want to score as the state terms increased so we gotta we got to get at least three points better every year as well as close achievement gaps that I'm about to show you yeah that change rate is one of the things I remember that we've targeted in the last four years I think we will cap and and so that's good to hear that that we've got that same Target of not just what to be scored but how much did we grow right right and and again like when we sit down to write all cap goals they will be written around that number right there how much do we want to grow okay so this is also English language arts data

020and the black line is still standard but this visual breaks our data down by our student groups as shown on the dashboard okay so the dashboard is very much focused on on telling us which groups of kids are excelling and which and who needs more help Okay so and we are held accountable for every student group and I'll get into that later and improving improving performance by student groups so what we see right here is the we see the blue all students the big fat bar that's because the bars are sized by the number of kids okay so as you get to the thinner bars that means that we have less kids in that student group okay it's also important to remember that when we talk student groups that students can be part of multiple

021student groups okay everybody's part of all students but we could have a Hispanic you know special education who's included in that you know Foster on and on and on so the these um so kids are most kids in Chico Unified are part of at least two student groups so we can see the at the bottom homeless youth Foster Youth and students with disabilities fell into the lowest category okay and that comes into play when we talk about accountability that I'll go through after after the data slides okay when we take a deeper dive into smarter balanced data one of the things that jumps out to us is the separation that we see in our district and in districts across the state between the performance of socioeconomically disadvantaged students and the performance of those students that

022are not socioeconomically disadvantaged it's you can see here that in the the actual numbers are aren't super important here the what I want you to see is the spread so the blue dots are our not economically disadvantaged students the green dots are socioeconomically disadvantaged students so we can see the the spread and this is um uh separated out by race and ethnicity across the bottom and then the the bubbles up tops again size for the population size show the separation in the achievement on English language arts and this is what Christy Banks and will be talking about when we get to to her part about how we are addressing this and this is data that was shown to our mtss and DLC groups and there's a lot a lot of effort going into addressing this

023Gap so when we get to the site level um we have had some great successes in every area in math or I'm sorry in English language arts Bidwell Junior stood out this is bidwell's comparable schools each bar is a school in California that's about the same enrollment and about the same unduplicated count and you can see they're they're right up there near the top okay so I invited holla sincero and Dave McKay to come on up and I'm going to tell you a little bit about how they did this you guys look like a couple of roosters strutting up to the podium there to you all um about why we think it is that maybe Bidwell was able to grow especially through a pretty challenging period of time and um I'm sorry I'm pretty nervous

024to talk to you all I can talk to kids all day long you just seem really excited you don't seem nervous about it seems super excited to tell us about this and I am um but I will say you know it's a question I've been asked a fair amount I feel like you probably have been to and I know it's a question um I've thought about a lot um stemming all the way back from last June when I wrote Dave an email and said with the finger cross Emoji Ela scores look pretty good right you know because I wasn't even sure was I really understanding this correctly because I was so proud of what our kids had able or were able to accomplish so you know in terms of trying to pinpoint something that caused

025this there's not one thing but I think it's reasonable to assume that collectively there are things that we've been doing even prior to the pandemic that just have have been working well at our school that we're really proud of and we'd love to share with you and then we just hope to continue to build on that momentum because um you know something we're very mindful of is one year does not a trend make and so we get nervous to be overly excited or nervous about how we did but we um kind of just came up with a laundry list I guess I would say of ideas that center around our academics and then social socio socio-emotional um stuff so we focused first on academics and by no means do I want to read everything to

026you you go can read but I would say that the first sort of chunk of items up here really addresses how we have tried to help students navigate the state test the S back and so prior to covid we as an English Department had worked together to look at how are kids being asked to express their knowledge and their understanding on the state test and how might we share that with all departments at Bidwell so that we can more similarly align our questioning and our assignments with the S um what we have found is that a lot of the passages are science based history based kids are writing about read what they've read in history and so really trying to just share that I remember a staff meeting in particular where we shared some exemplars

027from the state and I mean teachers were just blown away that's not good enough you're telling me that's not a standard met and so just really showing all staff here's what the state expects kids to be able to do and really spreading the focus of literacy and it being a shared sort of responsibility and so we've modeled some of our writing prompts after us back we've worked to increase kids familiarity with the interface our kids are tech savvy but s back is not it's not user friendly and so just really trying to show them how to navigate that system um so that's one area we have definitely worked on building our co-teaching program and that's where you'll have two credentialed teachers and in many cases one that is a Content teacher and then one that

028is a special education content instructor and working to push in as many kids as possible and I would argue that that's just upped the ability of both teachers in the classroom and the amount of time that kids get with teachers we have a fantastic success English teacher over at Bidwell who's worked with kids for several years now and she just has really great growth and progress with the kids in terms of targeted reading and writing that's been really successful as departments we've really tried to just tackle what essentially do kids need to know what are our prerequisite skills and how can we intentionally and deliberately teach that and then if few years ago it's interesting that Neil Dow's here we went to Neil Dao to look at the Lexia reading program they do have a

029junior high program and so early on during the pandemic we piloted and now are utilizing the program called power up kids love it but it's really good for them and so we've been using that as well a couple other things I would just lump the rest of this right in here to reading we have embraced literacy in fact the librarian shared with me that last year we had 7 317 checkouts in our library kids um many kids devour books and we at Bidwell have a reserve 25 minutes four days a week that we voted into our schedule to really focus on literacy intervention and um we also this year um well actually I guess this happened last year all the years kind of blend but we went to a model of asking kids rather than

030having to pick a book that was in their Zone if you have children that have done Accelerated Reader you know what I'm talking about and rather we've told kids find a book you like to read and just read and kids are required to read a book of their own choosing one per quarter the minute they're they do take an AR test that one test and then after that they don't have to test anymore they just get to keep reading and Dave graciously paid for Accelerated Reader quiz capabilities for our site when the district removed that program at the a secondary level so we've been really excited to continue to have that it just builds in accountability it's an easy way and the kids love that they only have to do one one quiz a quarter

031um so I think just creating time and space for reading has been really powerful and it's something that all staff members are part of um during the intercession between the AM PM this is kind of going back to covet I forgot all about this honestly we did a lot of you might have more to say about this but we had teachers working with kids in small groups in between the two sessions um with a writing who focus on um we call it icy but moving to claim evidence and reasoning and really just helping kids work to logically support their claims through writing is a very consistent Focus across the board we have our blast program we have a Learning Center our social emotional one thing I just would like to say about uh covid and

032I don't know that I'd call it a blessing but kovid gave us permission I think to reconnect with kids on a human level because when we came back and we were seeing kids AM and PM we knew we couldn't do it all and we knew that kids missed school and we knew that we missed them and I think that the people I work with um really just welcomed kids back and focused on connecting with kids on a human level and I really think that that makes a huge difference in what kids are willing to try to do even when it's hard which state testing is really hard and it takes persistence I think we have used funds can you speak to this how we with our counselors in Wellness Center I don't know as much

033about money absolutely kids are only going to want to buy in as much as they feel like they're cared about as as people and we really wanted to go all out and be intentional not just in how we were targeting academic support but also social emotional support especially as we were hitting the the pandemic even before that I placed a premium on trying to build those authentic relationships with kids and being able to plug them into a sequence of interventions and supports that make sense you know and so what's the criteria for a kid moving from hey this is what we do for everybody to the next step to the next step how do they exit that and what's the collaboration look like so our counseling team has really been robust we use site dollars

034and the Esser funds that we get from the state through the district to really add counselors that's what we do we added another full-time Wellness counselor on top of the 2.0 we were generously afforded we doubled down on the targeted case manager so we have like our in-house social worker making those connections with the families in the community working with our homeless youth especially Foster Youth and then we also added time to our guidance counselors our regular school counselor so that we have three full-time counselors there and so we work together as a school-based intervention team with our school psychologists we're fortunate to have a an excellent site five days a week right there right at Bidwell and so that team working together is really the the problem-solving team you know we get the kids

035and when they get to that point because they've been referred by staff by teachers and we identify we look at the data and we identify what's been done and what needs to be done to set this student up for success and we couldn't do that without those those human beings that are just bought in and focused to making that way for the kids and facilitating that connection which also has implications for behavior and disciplinary issues if kids are suspended and are sent home obviously they're not at school learning from a teacher so if we can find a way to actually deal with the root causes of those behaviors not only can we set that kid up for success but they're at least closer to school even if they're working in the counseling office on a

036timeout that's way better than being at home on Nintendo or whatever and probably dating myself um but that so and we keep them in that in that Loop there to bring them back in so definitely um Dave is amazing as some of you probably already know and um something that really Dave has created is this idea of the Bidwell way and um we have a Bidwell way team and really the idea is just how do we take care of each other as human beings and bringing out the best in ourselves and each other and I really believe that that mindset is something that is um just you know it's contagious and so we talk about it quite a bit we have a great team of teachers that work to create activities and discussions around what

037we see happening on campus live in the moment so it's not a canned program but during our 25 minute four days a week one day of the week usually we're having some kind of conversation with our kids about what are we seeing what's a trend on campus that we can talk about why is this happening how does it make you feel what would it look like if we could fix this in some way way and so that's been really powerful in I think helping kids feel like they have a voice on campus and feeling like people care about them two random things we put on here but I would argue I think this one's a big one our schedule in previous years uh SCI or English and math tested the students and so the rest

038of the day looked normal which meant that you could be administering the test and the band is playing out in the quad and PE is listening to music as they're doing their circuit training which is fantastic but highly distracting potentially in addition kids were testing for maybe 45 minutes 10 minutes to get in the program 10 minutes to get out passing out materials and it just wasn't this really consistent focus on it and last year for the first time we tested for a shorter amount of days so I think we ultimately did six days we think um and we tested in the morning and kids tested with their fourth period teacher so every teacher was administering the test everyone shared in the success of it in the administration and it was silent on campus you

039could walk the Halls it was just highly focused and you know again I we can't tell you what worked but my gut tells me that that maybe had something to do with it it was a unique situation it felt good while it was happening it felt so good while it was happening I agree um and then food um so a lot of us sent out letters and said hey you want to donate to your kids to have snacks and um so kids had healthy snacks in many of the classrooms throughout every day of testing and I mean kids will do a lot for food um and then just in general how do we keep this going you know um a great program that my principal has also um created and spearheaded is we have students

040serving as Wellness ambassadors and this is a new program we started last year and we're building on that just to increase leadership in all types of students feeling like they belong at Bidwell and having to place at Bidwell we also have a student School climate advisory that is just students where they get to come and talk about what they're feeling and seeing and being part of the solution um staff meeting um the emphasis is ongoing but certainly continuing our focus on literacy claim evidence reasoning through speaking writing all that um and we've talked a bit about how do we how do we motivate kids you know how do you incentivize it but how do you also build intrinsic motivation make this test count or I mean matter to them and what that looks like so

041we continue to have those conversations um and then just of course continuing the testing format and working with accommodations and making kids really aware of what accommodations they have and how that could help them be even more successful and one thing to note with the cooperation of the district the common right which the junior high language arts teachers administer we actually this year used the S back interim which is a practice and so in many ways that's just another way where we're building in exposure to the platform teachers got in and scored within the platform which we've never done before which I believe will help as well and then just continuing to ask for money to support literacy on our site and the kind of it I you know I don't know what the magic

042pill was but it was it was great and we hope that we can continue to build on the momentum do you guys have any questions I'm sorry I did a lot of talking there happens I have a question you actually kind of answered it at the end because especially while Dave was talking I want to know I always want to know what can we do to help you reach your next level you know I know that that you all have a vision of leveling up so what is it that it's going to take to help you to level up to your next goals um and is there additional support that can be given by you know the school board and Ed services and I'll answer it now but there's something to something to get back

043to us on if we don't have it can't make any promises but it's always nice to advocate for yourself while you have the microphone we appreciate that very much I know I know it sounds easy and I know it's it's not um but the permission to be intentional and focused about a few High leverage priorities is is a huge blessing because most of us in education are people Pleasers so you tell us to do one thing a hundred things we're gonna go run off and try to do 100 things whether or not that's doable or not but one thing we've been able to carve out at Bidwell is intentionality whether that's working with students and our teachers and community members to make sure they have a voice people tend to support what they had a

044say in building and then also with some of the um the call meeting time that we have like we really structure it around teacher professional learning teacher professional development that's developed and promoted and delivered by our own staff right there on the spot in response to needs that have been articulated through our little in-house surveys and whatnot so it'd be great to have permission to continue to do that and maybe even as in other meeting times like working with other principals on how we can continue to refine that that process would be be awesome I know that that's not an easy thing to do it sounds simple but it's not not easy I get that but to answer your question I think that that would be the key to continuing to level up thank you

045thank you oh yes one of the things that um I like excuse me I like to see when when Innovation and and all of this energy creating you know something that's that's moving forward in a new way um can be draining on staff and what it sounds like you guys are doing is giving almost immediate feedback to your staff on how well what they're putting their energies into is working is is because that if you can see and feel the positive happening it makes putting that 150 percent in which I know they're doing um you know a lot easier because you got to take care of your people um both both the the little ones that are little or Junior High kids they're not little but take care of your P of your people because

046it can burn you out before you know it and um you know that's not what we need when when you've got as much Creative Energy going into what you're doing um you know just make here you make sure you take care of each other thank you I would say that um having a year like this where we get to see the fruition of some long-term efforts really it goes far and I think that there's a really positive energy on our campus and we do have some great new additions as well that have really brought some exciting energy as well and um I know everyone probably feels this way about their school but it is a family and and people really care and love each other and I think the kids see that and it's you

047know contagious as well thank you well Halls wouldn't say this but I think a big reason it was one of the bullets but the thing I wanted to leave with is uh related to collaboration and Wednesday morning I know sometimes we get questions about what's that for and um my assistant principal Lori and I we try to get around to all the different collaborations on Wednesday morning and really without exception the particularly the math and English collaborations are laser focused on teaching and learning like you guarantee you're going to walk in there they're going to be right in the middle of some conversation about hey so how did you teach such and such I'm doing this hey do we need to spend more time on this concept to resequence that and it's always like nitty-gritty

048I'm not saying other departments don't do that but English and math in particular and other curriculums and the tests are set up a little bit differently than the other subjects but they're really laser focused on that and I'd walk out of there smiling every time because I think that's the best way to get better right there on the spot and that's really the teacher's choice to do that or or to kind of phone it in and I'm really proud of the work and the teacher leadership that goes in to organizing that collaboration time and I think that's a big reason for the results too thank you [Applause] so thank you Hollis and Dave I just wanted to add a little bit about Hollis she is a district leadership council member and was a mtss site

049lead last year and what she does for English and Chico unified's secondary is amazing that Junior High common right up there was trained by her and her colleague and at the beginning end of October beginning of November it was a heavy lift and I think it's going to be a highly highly consequential training getting teachers going in there and she was also instrumental in the implementation of IXL for for English so thank you Hollis [Applause] all right so moving on to math um hold on just one second yeah I've been thinking about that presentation a lot um it's awesome the work's getting done over a bit well it really is um but one of the things we really need to look at is how do we build upon that for the rest of the district

050right um is it possible I'm sure it's possible can we set up some kind of um programmer which we track those students see if they continue to excel in ela The Bidwell students yeah in perhaps future years absolutely just now put a note out there would be interesting to see if that absolutely yeah thank you very much okay so math um we you can see up here A bunch of Orange so that's medium or I'm sorry that's low uh performance according to the state this year so none of us are happy about that that being said math scores across the state are much lower than English language arts you can see we're at the top of our comparables um which is great and and it's an achievement because it speaks to the work that that

051staff and students and families did throughout the pandemic and we fared better than most coming out of the of the pandemic however this has been a focal Focus point for Chico Unified going back to 2019 and a lot of work has been uh put in in identifying grade levels and courses where kids start to falter a bit changes have been made this year with the implementation of the block schedule at both high schools students in need are able to get a math lab course in addition to their integrated math 1 or math C for extra support so we're very hopeful with that also both high schools have changed the criteria for which they Advance students on to the next course so in pastures we have had kids taking this test who had never even seen

052the material by the time they get there um the both high schools have worked to change that and I'm very hopeful to see those results of that we've also added I mentioned IXO for English we also added that for math for students junior high up through integrated math one at the high school as well as some other assessments that are intended to show Readiness for the next course in the progression math a to im3 allow teachers to know what their kind of skill levels they're dealing with coming in possibly those results could be used at the transitioners to for placement into courses so there's been a lot of work and there's a lot more work to be done but I am like I said I'm I'm proud of the way our teachers and kids and

053staffs as a whole made it through the pandemic and we were all concerned about a big drop and in fact we did drop you know from 19 like I said it's hard to compare we did drop a bit but even before that we were kind of flat you know we never saw the big growth we had seen in ela so we are continuing to work on that with our DLC group and in that services and we're hopeful that the changes are more steps along the way for that but yes we do see scores across the state much lower than the English language arts I have a question about the impact of I don't know if it's called leveling or my concern is that we not um get that we don't put everybody that's at the

054same level in the class together and not have a mixture of kids that can move higher and faster that can help bring you know bring the others along I uh it seems as though we forget that kids are good at tutoring and helping each other just in the way they discuss what they're working on um uh you know help each other in small groups and things but I I don't want us to to get to the point where we don't have a mixture in our classes I understand that you don't want to put a kid in where they have no chance of success you don't want to do that because you know then they're out the back door and could care less about making it to the math class the next day but you know

055let's at least allow our our kids to to come together and help each other through the process yeah so the the course progression requirements at high school will address that to it to a certain degree but in any case in any classroom as you're well aware you're going to have a span of students um we are sticking by um math a for all incoming sixth graders and that's due to the vast difference in in the way the standards are laid out the huge difference in curriculum and and the fact that we've seen achievement go across the state go down in those grade levels it's a big jump so we keep all kids together there and some kids have a harder time than others moving on to the seventh grade accelerated you know pathway so we're

056always examining those those types of things I had a question I feel I feel I don't think I asked this question specifically but when I hear the word standard or I see that there's a standard Mark like my question really is who sets that and why and how and based on what information you know why is that the standard when you see everybody so far below the standard the these standards are set um on on the S back ones in particular by the S back Consortium right sort of balance Consortium so I guess I'm just I'm curious and I don't expect you to have an answer to him really like what they base that off of what is their what is their reasoning to set that as the standard right they're they're looking at at

057this our standards common core standards all the s back um states are using Common Core and creating measures that in their minds and statistically it it shows up it that's where the standard is if kids score this scale score based on this measure based on these standards that's the standard but no I don't know the psychometrician's magic and all that that's beyond me and too when you think about standards like you I conceptually and I'm getting in the weeds and I'm sorry but you know think about 30 years ago what it the standard was and if you could eat like calculate not calculate translate that to now like are we expecting a lot more because the standard now a lot more for this age group than it was and why is that appropriate and why

058are we grilling ourselves about these this standard set by a group of people who think it should be one way based on what they think is the best research maybe compared to you know 30 years ago or 20 years ago even just right this is my food for thought and that maybe a little bit Glimpse about how I feel about standardized testing in general but here we are as a follow-up I think it'd be interesting and since we only have one agenda item really tonight it'd be interesting to see like uh a who's who of of districts that really are meeting standard you know in California or the world would be it'd be intriguing to see what those communities you know look like right right and I I have all that I'm not gonna do

059it up here in front of the front of the board right now but I'm tempted um but I I can take a take a peek at that I just want to say sorry Eileen one more thing on that right is um it's it it can be degrading for people who are doing a good job and for our kids who are doing a good job and so it bothers me that we're like trying to set ourselves up yeah and like I said nobody likes seeing the orange right nobody in this room likes seeing that orange you know what though sometimes life is about disappointment and realizing that there's other people out there who are doing it better better than you that's just reality well that's why the mission statement of the school district used to say

060that we were going to train up our kids to compete in a global Society but you guys didn't like it so you changed it to we were going to train our kids to merely participate in a global Society I'm just saying luckily my child has a growth mindset on that my my turn Okay uh interestingly enough um Mr tennis that subject was breached by a publication two days ago where they were looking at the schools that had been designated as uh what is that not outstanding schools distinguished schools huh yes distinguished California schools and they did that comparison you know the the SE folks are doing it well doing it well doing what what's the the common denominator and with every single one it was those schools had a much higher socio-economic base than the

061schools that were not succeeding that when you know when they were coming from high income families and neighborhoods they were doing really well may I thank you um okay I hear that and clearly uh suicide coming status has a lot to do with where students come into school but we can't just say oh these kids are in better neighborhoods are going to do better that's the end of it I mean teachers have an effect we're here for a reason so instead of saying oh that's what's going to happen we need to be looking at are there schools and I know that these are the schools I'm most closely compared to us but are there schools that maybe if you widen the frame a little bit more who have similar to me unduplicated is is the

062thing we need to track who have similar potential unduplicated kids who did better in math and you know can we go and raid their toolbox um I know we're trying a lot of different things we heard about all these programs that people's doing and one of the things I'm concerned about is do we have a framework in place for tracking whether anyone particular of these programs produces a bump if we get one like we would have it would just be judgment calls basically like kind of like similar to what holla said look at all the stuff that Bidwell did for English and a lot of that would help math too but um you don't want to if you're gonna improve schools as if you're going to run a study that would mean taking one step

063measuring it for a few years seeing if that affected it taking another step measuring it for we don't have that time you know so it is hard to kind of pull apart all the changes that happen in one school year and to put your finger on that did it or that had this effect on it or not and it really comes down to kind of judgment on the part of staff thank you I'll be happy to see next year's data because I'm interested in growth yep and comparing growth in-house as opposed to some standard right okay so this is our student group breakdown again you see the all students in the dark blue the big the widest bar we do see three above three student groups above the all students and that's our Filipino white

064and Asian student groups and then on the other end of the spectrum we can see four at the bottom so English Learners African-American homeless youth Foster youth students with disabilities sorry that's five so those are falling into the lowest category so the term that we use and then we use in our lcap is achievement gaps so student groups that are far performing far lower than the all student student group so our our intent and part of what we're held accountable for by the state is closing those achievement gaps what are those groups in need of at school that we're missing right now how can we add services and supports to help those student groups and Christy will talk about this earlier but when we add services and supports they are accessible to all students and

065every single one of these groups but by the nature of selecting kids for those services and supports it's more likely that the five students part of those five student groups at the bottom there are going to qualify and show the highest need but the supports are available for everybody again this is our economically disadvantaged in green and are not economically disadvantaged in blue and we can see a similar span and that we did in ela and um like Tom I think Mr Lando was getting at is we those economically disadvantaged kids are almost 60 percent of our school district so what can we do and that was a question posed to our teacher leadership teams what can we do we've done a lot already what more can we do to close that Gap so now

066I'm going to turn to Neil Dao and uh this is their their math scores and you can see comparable schools you can see a couple green ones up there but the vast majority are in the orange and that's what I'm talking about when you look out across the state we see math scores lower um Neil Dao obviously very very well compared to its comparable schools it also in the last six years has seen one of the highest jumps in unduplicated count percentage so the the population has changed it has risen and and duplicate account percentage and again it's a bad comparison but comparing it to to the 19 data they showed tremendous growth um in math and Ela but we're focusing on math today um and so I have invited uh the principal Kelly Steinbach

067the title one teacher when I think Kelly came in to Neil Dao a few years ago Stephanie Caniff who is now a uh assistant principal at LCC and Marisol Lopez who was title one last year and now as an assistant principal at Rosedale and then um Melinda and got all nervous I was like ah Melinda Hildebrandt who's the new title one person here so I'd like to also add that these are mtss and DLC members or former members so they've had leadership positions in the district for a while now and they put quite a system in place so I'm going to ask them to come on up thank you it's an honor to be speaking here tonight on behalf of Neil Dao but moo are importantly to have these amazing Educators with me to help

068me present it is not without them who I will have them introduce themselves in just a moment that this was not all possible so um huge collaboration over many years you have a whole span here and so I'll let them introduce themselves and then we'll get started okay good evening I'm Stephanie Caniff I am currently the assistant principal and DLC rep at little Chico Creek Elementary School and I joined Kelly in 2018 as the title one teacher when we were just getting the whole Learning Center idea off the ground and running good evening Board of Trustees I am Marissa Lopez I was a title one teacher last year I worked under Miss Steinbach who I loved working with and I am now the assistant principal at Rosedale and I love my position there as well

069good evening I'm Melinda Hildebrandt I am currently the Neil Dao Title One coordinator and mtss site lead and DLC representative and I'm hoping to be an assistant principal someday okay well um as I said we're so grateful to be here um we put together a slideshow for you a couple slides representing some of the systems that were put in place at Neil Dao over the last handful of years we started with a PLC process that was new to Neil doll we put into place a Learning Center supporting growth for teachers and a tutoring program so the PLC process the professional Learning Community we meet every six weeks this is when grade levels meet with both the title one teacher and myself and we go over classroom data as attached to assessments so I'm going to

070turn it over to Stephanie for just a minute here the PLC process was really really put into place with our collaboration through this process over the years and we become a data driven community of colleagues and we went from not being able to discuss data as a staff to now this is what our staff meetings are focused on so it's been um through the PLC process that we've had this change uh excuse me so when we started the PLC process um we plcs are like a vulnerable thing for people right because teachers really own their own data and they really take that to heart because they put their heart and soul into it so um we started the PLC process by trying to just make it like a safe place and that took a little

071bit right so just having our norms and being able to share and be vulnerable took a little bit of time to put that work into it from there we really just kind of guided them through a lot of our older more veteran teachers had been through like the defore training if I'm saying that correctly and so they understood what a PLC entailed and then some of our younger teachers or just teachers that hadn't done it in a while we just kind of did a review with them we had them set up their group norms and then we really wanted to work with them to tell them that we wanted them to identify a smart goal which is a specific measurable attainable realistic And Timely um in terms of hey this isn't all on you as

072a teacher to achieve this goal we're going to set up these systems at Neil Dao in terms of like an RTI type of model which was like walk to intervention where all the teachers share kids and we're going to support that smart smart goal by giving you AIDS to help get those group sizes smaller and also the title one teacher will be involved in that so they didn't feel alone in that process they felt like hey this is a team effort part of the smart goal is making it measurable right so you have to say like if I want to say cool I want to run a four four hour marathon cool that's great but I need to know how to make that like attainable right so I have to say okay if I'm going

073to run a four hour marathon I need to have like an eight minute 45 Second Mile and I need to build it up over time so we talked to them about coming up with a goal that they can measure the effectiveness of it at the end of that six to eight weeks so that was the smart goal so for example 80 percent of our students will obtain 85 or more proficiency on whichever standard they deemed was the most important for their students to to learn that content right we didn't pick that for them it's like what's the most important thing that your students need to know then we re-met we chose an assessment that based off of whatever concept that we wanted them to know and then we re-met like every six to eight weeks

074and we tried to time those with uh the like benchmarks pretty much so that we had fresh data to look at and then we analyzed those results with them and we celebrated success and if we if there wasn't success we had collaborative conversations what did you do why did your students obtain 90 Mastery when my students only did 60 and the conversations that came out of that were really rich and valuable all right thank you so one of the things that also came out of our PLC and collaboration process was the implementation of a Learning Center this was new to Neil Dao as of about four years ago we have explored um Learning Center with both Ela and with math and essentially what happens is using assessments either iready data smarter balanced interim testing results

075or math instruction which could be standard math reviews we would teachers would Target groups of children who didn't understand or were having trouble in certain key target areas and those students would then go in the afternoon for an additional 30 minutes of instruction based on their exact needs so we were really able to Target student growth and watch that happen and we kept the data in it we have a a really nice view of how that worked and I'm going to turn it over to myself so last year throughout the year I was constantly making sure that I was analyzing our school data so after each Benchmark assessment I would go in and pull the data and pull the kids that were below standard or approaching and I would reach out to teachers I felt

076the communication with teachers was very important and something that Miss Steinbach was really good at too is we would send out kudos to staff and letting them know that they're doing a great job and that also helped with our student growth throughout the year as well after each our math diagnostic I would pull that data as well and ensure that all the students were making growth and if they weren't we would provide a quiet setting in our Learning Center and we would pull those students and they would have a small group testing space and we would celebrate growth with our kiddos we had a um Rock the test assembly where we boosted their confidence and let them know that they're capable of making growth and that this is the chance they get to show us

077everything they've learned all year we provided the teachers with some care baskets with some snacks some gum and just motivational Little posters that teachers were able to put in their classrooms and I thought that that was the students loved that this year we started um our district currently has a system in place where all third fourth and fifth grade students are required to take four interm assessments throughout the year so that we are ensuring that the students are mastering their standards we to ensure that all students are getting the support that they need we have we created a tutoring system where we pull all the kids that are below standard or approaching to give them additional before and after school tutoring using our math pacing guide teachers are required to select a date of when

078they would administer this assessment they let their mtss site lead know when they will be administering this assessment the mtss site lead is also our tutoring coordinator so then once the grade level is com has competed in that assessment we pull the data to determine which students are below standard and which students are approaching standard then those are the students who are invited to these tutoring groups the tutoring groups vary by site depending on tutor availability but they are invited for morning 30 minutes or after school 30 minutes what we did is we took the cams and stamps curriculum which is already math curriculum the tutoring portion and we aligned it to our state interim and each session varies in length from four to six weeks depending on how many standards are on that interim

079the guides the tutors are provided with the guide It's a pretty much a lesson plan that will guide them through their instruction all week we have some Chico State tutors that have actually started already this this year and we here over at Rosedale I know that this has been successful because we're on our fourth round of tutoring and just for example we had a couple fourth grade students a group of fourth grade students who retested with the same state interim test and they went from below standard 2 out of 12 to 11 out of 12. so we know it's been effective and hopefully this helps with our math scores and hopefully we're just trying to catch all those kiddos who are not mastering those standards I apologize what was it that you gave them where

080they jumped ahead from 2 out of 12 to 11 out of 12. it was the same state interim test that they're given at the beginning so we are required to give Force State interim assessments we pull that data when they're they've completed that interim test if they're below standard they get four weeks five weeks six weeks of tutoring and then they're required to take that same test at the end of their tutoring round to compare to set check for growth and comprehension and these State interim tests are practice tests for our Smarter Balance are they a lot shorter or they are they're standard based so for example one interim could be going over two standards while another nrm could be going over four standards so when David McKay said that he gives students uh practice

081test questions how would that be different from what you're describing I think it's the same thing the interim that they were practicing it's there's interims for all grade levels third through 12th grade this is just an idea I had uh sitting up here that I would have asked about in our workshops Tim Carris but um could there be a company out there or somebody who would like just basically sit around trying to predict a version of what the test will look like you know like in its full Glory you know the the just just a just a preview version well weather forecasts so to speak of what this thing is going to look like for your kids that you could you know if you wanted to really geek out on this and teach to a

082test you could you know hit the kids with a basically an exact prediction of what they were going to get in in a couple of weeks um no companies that I'm aware of but smarterbalance itself does have a full length interim comprehensive assessment which takes the same amount of time as smarter balanced and it's a huge undertaking to administer smarter balance out of sight due to scheduling and you know it takes takes a long time these interims are that assessment cut up into little bite-sized pieces and so that we've seen that work well here we have um teachers using them in all different kinds of ways at all all different grade levels that's really the closest we can come I don't see anybody out here jumping up and down at the idea of us doing

083like a test run full length uh smarter balance test no I would I'm not comfortable asking anybody to do that thank you so most importantly I want to stress that we also know the importance of supporting our teachers they are the ones who are doing the hard work and doing it together collaboratively with their grade levels so um we have just some things that we do at Neil Dao to help support the items that we do in the classroom we'll have teachers push in and help during administering the assessments go in and teach i-Ready lessons have those data chats and then on the other side we have professional development that we have done at our site specifically to help our teachers really understand the programs that we've been using we have been using the ready

084math curriculum at our site now for three years and additionally um have you been using iready for much longer so at our site we are lucky enough have a little bit of time with the program and have seen excellent results we are I'm so excited about our growth and we're hoping that that continues we are certainly doing all the same things we have been doing um lastly we have a culture of growth on our campus that involves all of our students and our teachers some of the things that we have is we have a brag board we have achievement certificates assembly we started positive office referrals that's the background there the kids come up we take a picture we put it on the board and then we call home last week I made two parent

085phone calls and had two moms crying because their kiddos are the ones who don't normally get those kinds of phone calls home so to be able to share that with those families has been great most importantly we have a data driven Culture by all all of our students are engaged in their growth recently we just gave the i-Ready diagnostic the window just closed on Friday and students were aware of their their growth and were asked and shown their results and had the option to re-take the diagnostic which is no small feat um if they chose to so we had about 20 students or so on Friday morning doing it again and they wanted to see their immediate growth right afterwards and so just really having the students invested in our culture of growth has been

086um really powerful as well yes for those two 20 so students um was that definitely specifically student driven or were is there probability that any parents were like you will retake this kind of thing no it's all student driven it's all student driven and the teacher's taking the time to have that data chat and show them iready is I'm very nice and has it shows you growth so it will show them their previous scores and their new scores and how much growth that they have so it makes me think of you know kids are excited to grow physically yes I got taller I I'm stronger I can do more push-ups um so I imagine what the way I'm imagining it which it probably is the case since y'all are Elementary School teachers is is you

087know relating that to students look how much your brain grew that's exactly um Melinda this week is taking pictures of students with their growth on a uh abroad on a brag board and it's going to be displayed in the office and they're so into it you yes it hasn't been a topic for board discussion in a few years but one of the things that I've been in favor of is getting away from grades and sticking with what you guys are doing which is showing growth showing progress celebrating learning rather than you know oh I got all A's I get a five to you know five dollars for each a I'm so excited about what you guys are doing and the results that you're showing academically but I can imagine the social emotional charge to your

088kiddos has got to be evident in fewer discipline problems better attendance um just yay thank you thank you it has not been without the hard work and dedication of a staff those that are here really have been impactful but it has been it's been really encouraging the relationship building between students and staff as a result has been really powerful um that's our suspensions are down our behavior is down and it's been it's been really wonderful to be a part of thank you congratulations thank you and board member Lando you asked about kind of like filtering it out to other schools also and these guys have been the leads for it but the things that they're talking about right now are totally filtering out to their schools and their leadership they're they're on that DLC group

089The District Leadership Council so that becomes a pervasive conversation about how do we put these structures in place at other schools etc etc so the things that they have created and put in place now you're seeing versions of it maybe not quite as honed yet but these things are happening throughout all the elementary schools right now which we love seeing with those things as well I was about to ask about that thank you very much uh Tim before you go on to the next topic because I see we're going into kind of the Deep dive on some of the student groups um a question that I had that came up during that presentation is um I'd imagine it's hard because we're starting with a new Baseline but I'm curious if the interim tests are are

090turning out to be a good indication those formative tests are they turning out to be a good indication of how the summative is going to end up being the the interim tests are such a small sampling that it would be hard to say to call that an indicator of the entire test it absolutely does help you know staff and students get Mastery on a certain set of standards and also important is it builds familiarity with the testing system for both students and teachers yeah but it's really narrow narrowly focused when we get to the interims one two like I feel there is a a big value in the interim test because you can't it is it is you know formative and you can see growth and you can go back and you still are with

091that student but really with the the final end of year testing and you get that below or at standard you know that really rigid Mark um I'm just I'm curious if you know there's going to be we should be able to see a trend or a relationship when we as we you know attain more data in the next few years that will that will demonstrate that the growth translates into um exceeding or or growing overall with that standard marker right that makes sense right that is the Hope and that's what we've seen over the years you see where I'm stuck on growth versus like this like line to pass okay thanks um before we go on also um at the beginning of that discussion we looked at um there were some schools in California it's

092similar that did really well that a positive growth or that have students above above standard on average um have we reached out to those schools do we have any means of or plans to do so to find out what's going on over there at the district level we talk about reaching out particularly around suspension rate to other districts and that's that's coming um site principles were given this Viewpoint and they can see every school and they can see what schools are above them and what schools are below them so they're certainly free to do that um I'm unsure if people have contacted those sites I hope we could encourage them to do that in some way I know it's uh like I said the same way that classrooms are often kind of you know this

093is my my kids and my dad I feel like schools are often the same way for principals but if there's people who are doing it well out there already right principals have done that in the past I know I'm sure and I would expect got to continue okay moving on to the third academic indicator this is the English learner progress indicator so what this percentage is telling us so we are at 40 54.9 percent what that means is that of our English learners over half of them either grew one performance level on the lpac test over the previous two years or maintain the highest level okay and we are historically chica unified has had good performance on measures like this and also reclassification rate and we're glad to see that continue of course we want

094to we want to be blue um on all of these things but um we are doing well in comparison to other similar districts so now we're going to get into the priority five people engagement data and the first thing we're going to look at is graduation rate and on this one you can see Chico Unified more towards the bottom obviously than the the academic indicators and you can see us at the medium level okay this is lower than what we've seen in the past both of our Comprehensive High Schools our grad rates are good Chico highs would be in the green if they were up here they're not 94.1 percent and PV would be in the blue they're at 96 percent so where we see that grad rate dropping is that our alternative education campus

095with our Oakdale and Fairview classes of of students coming out last year um obviously there's a lot of talk talk about this and reasons why and that will continue one of the things that we we've seen is not necessarily an increase in the number of behaviors but an increase in the severity of behaviors and we will continue to support that that campus with all four of our alt-head schools with additional support staff and essentially do do whatever it takes to to support that team it's a great team over there of teachers and administrators and counselors and support staff and we'll we'll continue to support them and work towards bettering that so when we look at graduation rate by student group you can see all students up there in the Big Blue Bar again and this

096time we see Asian and white students above all students and we see Foster youth at the lowest performing level and that's actually very common across the state with that student group moving on to Chronic absenteeism it's probably no surprise that every District on her is red um that's the lowest performing level and the reason is quarantine essentially the rules around the pandemic Force students out of school more than I've ever seen and hopefully I ever will see it again you can see we're at 27.1 percent and a mid-range or a little bit above mid-range with our comparables but still very very high so that's uh probably roughly a three three hundred percent increase from from uh 19. it's a significant increase we see that across States or I'm sorry schools districts and student groups um

097it's no surprise our our attendance is better this year but it's still not back to normal so we we have some work to do there um a lot of kids sick this this fall especially and you can see here that all but two of our student groups including all students were in the lowest performing at the lowest performing level moving on to school climate a suspension rate is the only indicator here we saw a slight increase from 2019 here you can see we're towards the middle of our comparisons in the medium category we are seeing this overall you know year-long suspension rate go up and this year we're even seeing a little bit more of a of a continuance of moving that up so that's what I mentioned earlier about visiting other schools that are

098up in the green you know what what are they doing right now what are alternatives to suspension what are the practices that keeps kids from escalating to committing suspendable offenses so that's that's in the works as well this is our student group breakdown you kind of see all students fall down the list there so we have more student groups with better doing better than all students and other indicators but we still have our handful of student groups at the bottom and in some cases those are actually in this for this measure all of those you've seen before in the red box and other indicators and I'll talk more about that in a moment this again is socioeconomically disadvantage versus not and you can see the big spread all but one student group we see socioeconomically

099disadvantaged being suspended at a much higher rate than than not so overall the celebrations are our academic performance when compared to similar districts including that English learner progress indicator um and then site level performances such as Bidwell and Neil Dao who you heard here tonight but there's lots more successes Junior highs in particular were very strong in English it's just we could be here all night if we went through all the all the site level data but uh principals were given that data I think it was right after uh break a way to look at their comparables and things like that so some nice celebrations even on those celebrations we still have work to do we're always in a growth mindset like we need to keep growing and getting better and that's reflected in our

100lcap so challenges Rising suspension rate like I mentioned before we went up last year and we're still seeing it creep up not drastically year year to date this year compared to year to date last year but it's not going down so that's that's a challenge chronic absenteeism we expect that to be better but so far right now we we don't expect it to be back to normal pre you know 2018-19 numbers this year yet um math I mentioned we have kind of flatlined over the years and we took a little dip this year um and so so that's a big topic of conversation with our DLC group and Ed Services we said the graduation rate particularly at all dead we're looking for ways to address that and in general the achievement gaps between certain student

101groups and the all students student group and you'll hear more about all of that through the lcap process and the lcap itself so where accountability comes in for at a district level is through what's called differentiated assistance and I'm going to show you we are in differentiated assistants this year um and what that means is we have a county team come in and essentially make sure that we're addressing those challenges and helping us if needed they're working with I think all but two or three districts in in Butte County right now who are in differentiated assistants I apologize for not having Statewide numbers on that but I'm working on it right now I will say that the vast majority of our comparable schools are also in differentiated assistance and in addition if we have a

102student group that falls into differentiated assistance criteria for three additional years we need to write an additional lcap goal so this year that student group is um Foster so we will be writing a separate El capitol for how we are addressing the needs of our foster students so right here you can see in the student groups that met the criteria to put us in differentiated assistance these you'll recognize from the red boxes at the bottom of the student group displays on a number of measures that it's it's I'm not going to describe it and nor is it important for you to know but um there's there's a variety of criteria to qualify for differentiated assistance all based on very low performance for this year and then you can see the indicators that they perform very

103low on to qualify them yes Tim I don't remember seeing um I'm thinking about our all dead programs have we been able to break out their performance in English math that are separate so that we know where are their most significant deficits that that's what the staff does absolutely the staff is is highly data driven particularly they started off mostly with English language arts and they're they're watching their kids they haven't they have extra assessment licenses and they're very diligent about seeing where their kids are um and those kids you know bring challenges from outside into into the classroom but I I feel very comfortable that they are tracking those kids where they are and what they need and all you know aspects of school so at the school level there's a or let me

104back up to differentiate assistance again differentiated assistance is a state level accountability program at the school level there there's Federal accountability and there's what's called comprehensive support and Improvement or we call it CSI and that's Title One schools only also based on student group performance and then additional targeted support and Improvement atsi or just plain targeted support and Improvement those official identifications will come out mid-march so I don't want to make any projections because it's still a little mysterious to me there's something new they threw in there so um we'll have more news on that in March and so I just threw a bunch of data at you kind of a lot and really what it what it points to is the whole the whole child the whole student and how are we supporting them

105and the way we do that systematically is through mtss multi-tor system of supports and the building of that program from where it started years ago to where we want to go where everything is much better coordinated and we're documenting you know what interventions are working what interventions or not so I want uh Christy Banks and to come on up and talk a little bit about mtss she's our mtss coordinator sites as well as Tim this evening that there's a lot of passion in the room I think everybody here is here for students we want to provide the best supports with for our students every day and we know that it takes a team effort and so whether it's at Bidwell or Neil Dow or across the district we know it takes a team of educators

106of counselors of Title One teachers of Administrators that really work together to support all of our students with their needs that they may have on any given day or week when they're on our school sites um in my role as the mtss coordinator I work with a group of teachers on every School site the staff that you heard tonight have all been or are currently the mtss site lead at their site at their School site and their job really is to be that point person for data discussions looking at the data working with their admin working with their the team of counselors the targeted case manager the reading teacher if needed to really look at what is the data telling us how can we provide supports for the student they work with teachers to look

107at what are some practices that can be put in place for the classroom or a course they also help coordinate and run the school-based intervention teams so if there are students or is a student who needs extra supports it's pulling that team together and really looking at what is the data telling us and how can we best support this student so their role is absolutely integral and ensuring that the students academic behavioral and social emotional needs are being met and I want to point out just a few items on this image of the student's head the first one is looking at the staff as I just mentioned it takes a team it takes a team on our School site it takes all of us as a district to really look at the data what are

108our kids needing and how do we provide those supports I also want to point out the assessment actually the curriculum and the interventions one when we think about curriculum and interventions every single student has the opportunity to participate and receive that intervention and or curriculum it's really the data that's driving how do we support these students how do we support this group of students when I say group of students we're really looking at that data of the students and then speaking about the data you know the data we were looking at tonight was from assessments that were from last school year and so in Chico Unified we really look at the data that we have throughout our K-12 assessment plans to look at all along the way throughout the school year how are our students

109doing because our goal is to be proactive and preventative so if we see a student who's you know needing the support or who is you know failing some courses or who is not doing well on a you know a third grade reading test how can we provide supports for them so that they can be successful and continue moving towards standard if that's the support that they need throughout the school year um I get to interrupt you anytime soon anytime anytime Christy um one of the things I see missing is who's helping to coordinate parent support and parent involvement in what you're doing at the school site because we all know that students that have good parent support do better and um yeah there is there what are the pieces family and Community engagement I think

110that comes from our administrators our teachers reaching out but also our foster homeless youth liaison and our targeted case managers and our and our counselors the targeted case managers I know are doing that reach I um when you talked about you know teams that are meeting to discuss what the student needs you know I hope that that that's going Beyond just the school site um uh because I know parents want their kids to be successful and oftentimes just don't know how to help exactly and so I think when we think about you know when teams come together there's a variety of teams so it might be a team saying hey let's look at our reading data how can we support this like Neil Dao mentioned through our professional learning communities that's a team of teachers

111and other supports looking at how do we support our third graders if we are looking at data and we're saying oh my goodness the student really needs some extra support we might pull them into a meeting and we're going to invite the family and or the or the parents because we want them to be a part of that as well we want them to be informed hey we've got this you know idea of how we can support your student and we just want we want to bring you into the loop and here's some things that you can do at home here are some things that we're doing at the school site and just continuing to keep that communication open and I use reading as an example because part of my role is also working with

112Elementary teachers Elementary reading teachers but when we think about you know supporting our students the the backpack image again of it could be an academic need it could be a behavioral support it could be a social emotional support it could be two or all three of those things for our students and so um over on the on the side of this slide I've just listed some of the supports and staff that we have to help support those areas based again on the data that we're getting throughout the school year and then also thinking about um you know how we provide these supports so when you think about multi-tier system of supports we have different tiers or levels so that that top tier is all students so this is what every single student in Chico Unified

113you know has gets to receive so that's the coursework classrooms you know the music PE all of those pieces every single student has access to that and then when we look at the sum and few students which is students who may need extra supports again that's all based on the data that we have from our assessments here in Chico Unified and again that team approach of looking to see how do we best support these students you know maybe this group of six students at an elementary example you know could work with a reading teacher maybe this group maybe needs some more intense instruction and maybe we support those students with you know this intervention and then how do we monitor that and that's a an integral part of our mtss site leads as well is

114continuing to look at that data is our data changing with the interventions that we put in place at our school sites I think another really big role of our site leads throughout the conversation tonight I heard was you know we've got really amazing things happening at all of our school sites and I think one of the powerful things about our mtss site leads and even our district Leadership Council who meet separately but also meet together is to share those ideas you know this really amazing thing is happening over at Bidwell Junior how can we we recreate it for marsh and or chico Jr you know this really you know for example a few a few years ago our Fairview site had created QR codes for students to request to speak to a counselor and um

115and so at one of our first mtss meetings last year the previous school year that was shared and how easy was it for several of our other sites to create a QR code just to hang up around campus and a student could walk by you know just click it and say Hey I want to speak to a counselor so it's those ideas that we have in our district of how can we continue to take those pieces that we know are working at our sites and level them up or you know create them and have them being used at our at all of our school sites to best support the needs of our students see and then again just the um the the staff on the side there who are there to support all of our

116students and really our mtss leads not just supporting the sum or the few students the students who might need extra supports we're really all supporting all different levels of students we're supporting all the students every day we're constantly looking at the data seeing how can we provide interventions for students is the student ready to move out of that intervention maybe there's another student who could move move into that intervention if needed and you know one of the pieces that we've done this school year is that top bullet is really focusing on the tier one instruction because we know if our students receive that solid tier one instruction in their class or in their courses that's going to help support um and you know be proactive and preventative for students needing to receive extra those additional

117interventions so really a big push this year with our K-12 to look at tier one instruction during all of our district five days and then we have all of these other supports that support in a variety of ways again all students down to students who might need those extra supports on our campuses did you did you want me to snuck up on her I'm such a little guy okay well thank you for your time thank you board members conken and and Tennis for your uh meeting a couple weeks ago um the California dashboard website is linked on your on the slides and also there's a ton of information about the dashboard on the CD website link there you can email me or Christy with any questions concerns etc etc but thank you for your time

118this really is kind of a not kind of this this data is a huge huge measure of how we're doing and it influences so much in Chico Unified so thanks for taking the time and if I can jump in here just a minute while we're talking about student achievement last year the board approved for Chico Unified the state seal of Civic engagement and here tonight we have two students that are actually working towards that state seal of Civic engagement in one of their requirements is to be at a board meeting so I'm going to ask them both to come on up and if you would tell us your name the school that you attend and the grade that you're in and we just really appreciate you taking this on hi thank you um my name

119is Riley Hurd I'm a senior at PV high school and I also went to Bidwell Junior High baby as well so just wanted to see your uh the work that you did as a board in action with our students here and thank you for being here um so the workshop's informational um I would like to invite the board to ask any additional questions about the workshop topic if we have any at this time I have questions for later probably but go ahead um it's it's not so much a question as a thank you to our team which is everybody in Chico Unified who have um become singularly focused on our mtss our goals in our lcap and the scene to it that we're you know we all have the our oars in the Water Rowing

120in the same direction and um this shows us that we have a lot of work to do in some areas and I appreciate the fact that we get to know that if if all the work that you did Tim and Christy to put this together didn't show where our problems were challenges rather than problems let's say it wouldn't be worth our time sitting through this so I appreciate the fact that we know where we need to work harder and I I so appreciate what everybody in this district is doing for the love of our kids thank you um I want to thank you also for the presentation I think it was very informative and um Echo what what Ms Robinson just said um my only other I think it's not really a question at this

121time but it's just an acknowledgment that um uh we we're going to need to take an a deeper dive on the on the students with the disabilities too and I don't think that we really talked about that enough in this in this in this space but I think that there is a time and space for that to to have um that conversation um so that you know talking about a lot of our students who fell in those under the the line and were in the red box and that came up every single time and I think that we it it would not be um to our benefit to not acknowledge that right now and to say that we will continue that conversation sooner than later um great um is there any public comment on tonight's

122board Workshop perfect we'll move on to our discussion action calendar this is item 5.1.1 under Business Services Fairview High School restrooms modernization and I will have Julie Kissel come on up hi good evening thanks for good everybody for being here for this presentation everybody did a great job sorry really I thought you were gonna I thought you were gonna have a crowd Julie I thought you were gonna have a crowd gosh they don't know how much of a comedian you are apparently thank you for the opportunity to speak with you tonight um I bring forward a request for Fairview High School to renovate their student restrooms and move the project into the master plan in the phasing schedule um the board previously approved shade structures for multiple campuses as part of the Esser spending a

123year ago and we've been working on the planning and the engineering and approval by the state for those projects when we got to Fairview High School we sent in our plan and they said no can do you cannot build those shade structures because you need to upgrade these restrooms as part of it so they will not approve our plan for the shade structures without us renovating the restrooms Fairview High School really needs the shade structures they don't have much room for physical activities that is covered during hot sun or rainy weather and they have a a very diverse um groups of students that go to school there so they need to be able to have two of them so they can have different activities in separate spaces Additionally the restrooms in question definitely need renovation

124like many of the restrooms in our district do I inserted some photographs of the boys restroom which is the really the biggest concern you can see that I'm going to talk really loud over here for a minute so I can point by The Doors and that's this occurs in the boys restroom and in the girls restroom and there's not enough clearance here for a wheelchair to go in and turn and then go into the restroom I'm sure students with wheelchairs have utilized this before and fit through there but it is not code compliant it was co-compliant when it was constructed but it is no longer so that is the main Ada issue as well as the urinals the urinals are too close together there's not clearance there's no room for private private Greening uh the

125principal reports as I said in my cover uh that the students refuse to use them so they'll queue up here and wait for that one stall and they and they have very short passing periods between classes and sometimes students either they're late for class or they just have to hold it until they get another opportunity um this wall is the back side of this wall so it has the sink on it so Fairview High School is currently in Phase five of the master plan we're in the middle of phase four right now we have enough money to complete McManus Elementary School and we have a little bit more the next project and the master plan would be one of our elementary schools because we're just working our way through them but we don't have enough

126funds left in measure e or k at this time to tackle one of those projects so I met with the facilities committee Ms dalby and Miss Robinson to discuss this movement of prioritizing this project and the master plan on January 13th so tonight we're bringing it forward for your review to request that you move this project into the master plan immediately for phasing and my current estimate is four hundred thousand dollars for the project can I answer any questions you might have can you put the picture back on the urinals this is a common installation this school is replicated a few times in the district some of them have a little more space between them but the in the floor um urinal is difficult because oftentimes we find asbestos in you know in the construction

127it's it's encapsulated it's not a hazard but if we start to dig into it and do demolition we will have to Abate it so making Minor Adjustments is just not possible so if I was to look at those urinals and say in my opinion there's nothing wrong with them you're telling me that that from an ada standpoint there's no problem with those urinals they do not have the clearance between them that is required is that right correct for new construction for new construction yes um what is required do you know green so privacy screen for Center of urinal to privacy screen so I would say 34 inches minimum and there's no privacy screen here correct there's no room for prices right it was an elementary school before remember and that we do have this at

128elementary schools it's not as much of a privacy issue with the younger children still an issue certainly still an issue but definitely issue with older students at Fairview so um I've traveled a lot in developing countries and so my standards for male urinal a accommodations is fairly low I can just intervene and say it does not even just mail urinals in some countries it's any any toilet so is there a like the the doorway that leads to a stall right that's narrow yes too narrow right and that's obviously you know a concern um significant concern if somebody in a wheelchair can't get to the bathroom right and that is the case correct there's not like right next door a a bathroom that's that's suitable for somebody in a wheelchair no and so and there's not

129a way to it looks like that might be a supporting column there on that doorway also like maybe you can't just uh take it out yeah the entire wall I don't imagine that you've priced that out to see what it would cost to just do that the state will not allow us to just do that we don't have to bring the restrooms up to ADA compliance everywhere within the room and the doorways in and the thresholds going in and out and what's the price tag on this remodel well we haven't designed it yet asking for permission to move it into a priority in the master plan I've taken some recent historical information from other districts that have did projects for restroom Renovations and doubled it for boys and girls for the estimate for today but

130it certainly will come back to you after it's designed and we have a more accurate cost estimate four hundred thousand correct um and there's nowhere just to confirm if somebody was in a wheelchair that needed that extra space to get in is there no accommodation for them on the on the Fairview campus right now no there are not um current code compliant accessible restrooms for students on the Fairview campus right now how short Justin we'll give me this one more Caitlyn um how short are are we on that opening right there do you know how many inches it is versus what it's supposed to be I don't know exactly but it's supposed to be 60 inches and it looks to be maybe four feet so it looks about a foot short and I do want

131to add in here the driving factor that got us here is not being able to do the shade structure as well correct correct okay I've answered I mean thank you thank you um so my question is just this is kind of forward thinking now at this point is the intention for the for the the remodel on the boys restroom to add stalls also toilets with stalls not just spread out urinals we're not sure yet because we haven't got into design but it would certainly be a material a material similar to the the stall material that goes in between the urinals and it sticks out from the wall enough to create privacy for the individual but no additional toilets it would only be urinals it would it would remain with one toilet what we'll have to

132do is take a fixture count on the campus for students and make sure we're complying with the number of fixtures for the number of student occupants on campus so there'll be a study completed as part of the project and then we will comply with the needed fixtures it seems almost like an equity thing to me more than a an ADA compliance I know it's ADA compliance thing so that we can do the extra construction but there's another layer of this which is an equity piece and that is making sure that everybody has sufficient and respectable facilities to use and so I my personal preference is to encourage you know as many of the fully private toilets as possible for all people and so I just I guess I just wanted to put that little little

133tidbit in there in my comments I guess thank you for that and and we agree completely um when the state looks at a shade structure they consider it a building and even if it's out in the middle of the field it's considered a building so it triggers these kinds of upgrades from time to time when we were notified of this instance where this was triggered we said well this is a big need at this campus we just as a part of doing the master planning we visited the site we walked with the site principal this was identified as a big issue so we said we don't want to cancel our shade structure project because they really need it and we know that their restrooms are a big need as well so we decided at that

134time to bring it forward as a master plan project my two cents worth I I agree with what member dalby said about needing to provide um what's normal in the world um but I'm remembering back to what we just looked at in the way of statistics on what school is pulling down our scores and it's our all dead program and if we can't show our alt-head program that we respect their needs and provide what we absolutely understand is a need shame on us do any other questions for clarification or technical questions from the board what's the relationship between the this bathroom project and the um the shade structures why are they linked together we submitted approval part of that is an accessibility review the reviewer at the state level said we will not approve your

135shade structure project unless you also upgrade these restrooms to ADA compliance thank you sure um do we have public comment on this item folks um so um uh this time I will call for a motion on this on this item just really do I move authorized to have to continue to planning phase and let Julia do what he needs to do um all right we have a Motion in a second any discussion any additional comments to make my conscience is telling me to abstain on this and just because I I do we have a picture of the um the shade structure a mock-up of the shade structures to see I get a sense of how big they are or what I mean I'm sorry I didn't include that I will share it with you after

136the board meeting tomorrow but there are two large um shade structures that have six posts and they're large enough to put a pickleball court under meat so that the students can do Court activities badminton pickleball those sorts of things say about one pickleball court per and there's gonna be two yes so I'm gonna it's just the point of discussion say that the reason I'm gonna support this why I'm in support of this and encourage you to bring this item to the board is because not only is it a compliance issue to make sure that we're ADA Compliant so that we can provide this structure for our students but it does demonstrate our willingness as a board to set our alt ed students as a priority and knowing that especially seeing the data as member Robinson

137pointed out that that our graduation rates at this school have slipped it seems maybe to some people like a menial thing a bathroom how does a bathroom correlate to a graduation rate but bathrooms are really important facilities to make students feel like they are respected and that they are in a learning environment that they are comfortable in and I think that this this should become a priority and and that we should continue to look at our bathroom facilities at all sites to make sure that our students are feeling like they're in a learning environment where their bodies are respected and if we don't want to use their restrooms or we can't get from class to class how are we supposed to focus on our academics or feel like we should even stay at that school

138site so that's that's why I'm in support of this piece yeah I'm sorry to interrupt I wanted to mention one more thing I kind of covered it but I want to say it one more time so Fairview High School is currently in the master plan in Phase five when we get to phase five with Fairview High School we'll be renovating their entire campus and this restroom would be a part of that renovation so I'm simply asking to Move It Up in priorities so it can be tackled sooner and rather than later because it's a definite need and we can get the shade structure project approved as well yeah thank you I'm going to say that we have to do this somewhere anyhow it's a compliance you think we can't build anything at Fairview without this

139triggering again and coming up so we might as well just bite the bullet and get it done yeah and again of course I'm supportive for all the reasons that I was going to say that's yeah biting the bullet just to get it done is not the attitude that I want to take with this I know I know but you do it at some point it's demonstrating a yes vote here demonstrates that we're prioritizing our all ed students and their comfortability on their campus yes thank you all right um we'll do a voice note because we haven't voted in a really long time so let's start with we'll start on the other end we'll start with Rebecca it's all bi tennis eye Orlando Eye all right unanimous great thanks thanks Julie all right moving on to

140we are at number six board member request to agendaize an item so are there any board members who would ask to have a topic that they would like to bring forward for consideration as a future agenda item at this time um I have one so um this is something that was already brought to my attention um and it was a good reminder and then during this this presentation another good reminder that um it would be great to have an update about how our Outreach is going our engagement is going with our special education parents um so I know that last year we asked for there to be more recurring meetings with parents for engagement on our special education program um and so I would like to get an update on how that's going and ideally

141maybe even have some of the the participants parent participants involved in those to be part of that discussion as well just informational but that's that's my ask Sarah a second yes I will second that absolutely do we need a read back on that from anybody for clarification on what we're voting on here it's an informational item s okay an informational item for a presentation on how how the engagement with our special education families is going the the engagement in these in these more frequent meetings with our special education families are going up an update on that thanks sorry I don't sometimes I just don't know if I'm talking clear enough I just yeah it's been a couple hours without a break too so I start to get a little fatigued um great is are there

142any questions from staff or concerns I've got a question about how long would it be about the the I don't know an informational item an update on how it's going probably you know yeah that's kind of what I was thinking too okay um and I mean and it would also be open for for public comment as well so however long you know the public comment can take and I would encourage any of that as well I asked my question just because I want to be mindful of how long our meetings are I think it's a valuable topic but um we do get updates annually on the sped program and so so yeah I would support that [Music] um okay so those in favor please say aye aye any opposed fantastic any other items to agendas

143I don't think so I think it was just an S request for an estimate that's that's a good question there yeah yeah it was to give me a general idea because if they said oh it's going to take an hour and a half then I might vote no because we have you know lives and yeah and in that case we could have uh you know we could have amended it to to set a specific time limit yeah no yeah no you're good um and it's decent timing so any other items to agenda is for folks nope all right um with that we're moving on to item seven closed session um if there's any public comment on closed session items now is the time to step on up to the microphone before we head out to

144closed session all right so I will come back out to announce if the board has made any actions in closed session um otherwise we will see everybody on the next third Wednesday just forget which date that was February 15th oh thanks I'm not ready all right um the board has uh concluded its closed session um the board voted three to two in closed session to compensate a former staff member for back wages that excuse me were 2 348.50 less that required by the collective bargaining agreement and the California Education Code I have no additional actions were taken during closed session and that concludes the meeting for February 1st 2023.