5/5/2021 Board of Education Meeting

001good evening ladies and gentlemen welcome to the May 5th is it Sy okay may fth um special board meeting Workshop if you could please join me in the uh pledge of allegiance to the flag thank you okay we have our consent calendar um oh we have announcements Madam Kaiser you must have an announcement so today to uh May 5th is the national day of awareness for missing and murdered indigenous women um the color red is the symbol of that day and um they are the largest group of women who have uh gone missing and since I have uh two grandchildren and four great grandchildren that are all indigenous uh I'm proud to announce this day thank you Dr Kaiser oh Mr Hamond yes announcements please thank you yes I have a a good announcement um

002the um results of the cuta vote came in um I just want to let the board know that um they voted on a number of things but one of them being the uh memorandum of understanding for full day um for next year and n it passed with a 97.2% approval rate um um so very good news so we are ready to go um based on the board's last decision of the last board meeting yeah we'll be bringing um the tenative agreements um forward to you that's a little different that's the tenative agreements will we come forward to you on May 19th but um this is an moou with um for the startup of school next year thank you yes very good news okay now is uh oh we have another announce M Doby uh thank

003you madam president um so I have just a two things um I wanted to uh follow up with uh Dr Kaiser's announcement on um today being missing and IM murdered indigenous women's day and um just take a brief moment of silence for those who have who who are still missing thank you and just hope that we can all uh encourage policy and um anything that we can to be change agents to bring those those women home and um I'd also like to recognize this is n national teacher week um and so yes national teacher appreciation week it would not be appropriate to have a a board meeting and not acknowledge our teachers out there so um for all of um my fellow Educators that are listening in or not um thank you so much for

004all the hard work that you do and for um being our boots on the ground and folks in the trenches and doing all of the good work with the you know the the the leaders of tomorrow so um just happy uh Teachers Appreciation week and thank you for all that you do and we do have a um resolution for that on the agenda so thank you for bringing that up because it's important to recognize throughout the whole meeting Dr Kaiser I call on Erica to announce the fundraiser for the PTA I can help out there uh the district 13 is having their honorary Service Awards in a different manner this year uh this year they are doing a drive-thru dinner um so if you are interested in being able to um participate the funds that

005they raise are for PTA scholarships so if you're interested in participating please contact either Erica or I and we can get you the form and get you signed up I just want to add to that um that this particular vendor providing the dinner is a personal favorite of our superintendent uh so just in case anybody wants to buy a superintendent daily at dinner that would be a great I already got one I was on it oh 13th District does does great work we've we've participated uh in years when we weren't having restrictions so thank you everyone for bringing those issues forward any other announcements looks like we're done thank you everyone for participating in announcements and now number three the consent calendar um is there an item on the consent calendar that anyone would like

006to pull for further discussion is is there anyone in the audience that would like to pull an item for further discussion no seeing none uh I would entertain a motion what's the board's pleasure I move to pass the consent calendar I will second that okay I have a motion by Dr Kaiser is second by U Mr landow um we'll start with a Voice vote for our first vote of the evening Doby I Kaiser I tennis I Lando I Robinson I passes five nothing thank you board okay Business Services was the the contracts were part of the consent calendar excuse me I don't need to go there okay our next uh item item number four is the uh main reason we're here tonight and the well yeah the main reason we're here tonight there's been a

007lot of thought and work put into this Workshop the board just for some history the board chose this topic last year when we gathered to um select our Workshop titles for the following year so it was important to us last year it was important to us five years ago and we finally have it on the agenda to to bring the board up to speed on what the district is up to and where we think we might need to go next so I'm G to turn this over now to um who's the lead on this Mr Marsha yeah I'm going to pass it over real quick but our board Workshop tonight is on addressing issues related to equity and biases in our schools our two board layons on this were Caitlyn Doby and our president Eileen

008Robinson and our two leads for ed services on this will be Tina Kean and John Shephard so I'm going to pass it off to them all right thank you John and I are really happy to be here tonight sharing information with you about um implementing our Equity based mtss and addressing issues related to equity and bias in our schools John and I are true teachers at heart and we hope we can provide clear information to all of you tonight so tonight's presentation is going to be divided into three sections the first one is understanding the overarching structure structure of the cusd equity based multi-tiered system of support you'll hear me call it mtss for for ease moving forward uh for our students and staff the second piece is to understand the current efforts underway to

009address our equity and bias in our district and the third step tonight uh to cover is understanding the future plans under development to address equity and bias in our district we were asked by one of our board members to supply a a a definition of equity we we hear a lot about equity and I I think there truthfully I think there are a lot of definitions that people have for it that are different so one definition that came out from the University of Southern California Equity now training is as follows stick with me it's a little cumbersome crafting Solutions meaning best educational or relational practices policymaking system design Etc that meet the needs of different groups based on their history and access to resources outcomes oriented and it's different than equality or sameness Equity deals

010with specificity that's where I think it does get a little muddy I know for for me it did really really learning more about this the simple version the way the way I like to think about it too is equity is ensuring that each and every student has access to get what he or she needs to move forward in a successful way this this is a graphic representation there are lots of them out there um this is one that just kind of speaks to me personally you can see equality is a little bit different than Equity here and um this this does give you a representation of The Wheels on the ground in one way but the Equitable way would be the wheels on the ground that all students are moving the same direction with what

011they need he or she needs you know one one thing that struck me too is I was looking at uh graphic representations is just personal examples of equity and and John and I had many discussions about this even I know raising my own kids and we or or family members we can all think about these things when you have a child that is maybe more interested in going into the health field as my daughter as she got older she's looking for things activities that help support her learning about going into the health field so an example is she looked at the hessie program which is a program open to high school kids to to do that to explore Health opportunities in the workforce then my other child a son is interested in outdoors and welding

012and and you know we go down the road of thinking okay what are some things that he's going to be interested in and needing to acquire so he can achieve what he wants to achieve too so we have those examples that happen I think in all of our lives uh and once I really sat down and thought about it I could see see a lot of those all right it's a big definition stick with me Equity based mtss California's multi-tiered system of support it's a framework and that's the best way to think of it it's a framework that aligns three pieces academic behavioral and social emotional learning and a fully integrated system of support for the benefit of each and every student mtss offers the potential to create needed systematic change through through our intentional

013design and redesign of services and supports and they quickly identify and align with the needs of each and every student I do want to point out too here we have a lot of gratitude moving forward for the board's decision to look at an mtss coordinator in one of the first pieces of approving funds that we're coming through that was super exciting I know to all of us ined Services uh that you reported that and did that for our mtss coordinator and our point2 toses we'll we'll hear more about that design and where we're going with that in a few minutes toes uh teachers teachers on special assignment yes thank you another acronym a little history about how Equity based mtss came to Chico many years ago bu County Office of Ed was invited to be

014part of a grant through um orange with Orange County Office of Education Orange County represented the urban piece of mtss implementation and bu County of course represented the rural piece of implementation that partnership still continues today with the two departments and uh many years ago when it when it came in probably six or seven years ago now I was a principal at a school here Elementary School at mcmanis and we were asked to be part of this implementation so that's that was my first foray into what mtss is and um had a lot of really great experience and learned a lot with that so I'm really excited to see it continuing here's a graphic that really I really like this because it does show the three pieces that we talked about how we were going

015to serve each and every student with academic support behavioral support and social emotional support to make up our whole child pieces it's kind of hard to see on here perhaps from a distance but there are three tiers in each of the circles and those three tiers are best described on the following page the following graphic as universal support being tier one those are the services we give all of our students that is for example reading instruction in a third grade classroom every student gets reading instruction the second tier supplemental support might be when our data shows that we need to to ret we need to pull we need to do do some different things to ensure that the that the gaps are being filled and don't widen if students need that and then the third

016tier is the intensified support so you can see back to if we flip back John to the concentric circles this applies in all three pieces not just academic but also with our behavioral and our social emotional we do know that tier one I'm sorry John to have you go one one slide forward these work in tandem the universal support is of utmost um importance because that's what we want to make sure all of our students are receiving each and every one of them and there are big efforts to to um make sure that we are consistent with that design and again you'll see kind of moving toward a a districtwide framework with mtss how that works in Matt I have I have a question thank you madam chair president excuse me um so where would

017a um a student that excelled you know say out there we have our little Beethoven or our um Albert Einstein hanging out here in Chico Unified how would we identify that person cut them out in the context of this I would suggest that that student is actually can be served in all three levels if you look at the different levels here universally they're going to receive similar supports regardless of their academically rigorous pathway if they're in interested in in challenging a more rigorous pathway they may need some supplemental support and obviously the the the 5% of the 5% um they may need may need some intensified support so for example we talked about uh during the summer uh we're fortunate enough to be able to offer an um an AP seminar for students to attend

018and in my opinion that would be an example of intensified support So AP and I know there's more on AP in the future of this presentation but um do we have a track let's call it track tracked for um people who qualify for it and then move into it or is this something that you know everybody can participate in if they want to everyone is everyone can parti can participate in advanced placement courses and IB so there will not be unique attention given to a student who is you know um or students who are are very well advanced in in the certain category when you say unique attention just um put that in context for me um a class dedicated to you know kids who are the best at this I they're going to be

019in an AP class which me puts them in a in a whole different category if it's AP Calculus than regular calculus that that's a specialized class if that's and in a unique class compared to a regular Calculus class or AP Chemistry versus a regular chemistry class is there a standard like you have to have a certain you know grade point within that within that field in order to get into that class or no there aren't any need there there are some prerequisites in terms of um preparation um for example most students to move into AP Chemistry or typically your higher advanced math students just because the correlation between the two courses um so those conversations thankfully those conversations come out in in um enrollment registration meetings with counselors and and and parents thanks um the

020last time that I was aware uh of how AP structure worked and entrance expectations was um mean given by the AP program which is beyond just our school district is and this is I'm this is a question to make sure I'm still understanding correctly that that um that the only real requirement except for maybe the previous course to build on to the knowledge would be the interest to be in that class um not like a standardized test that they have to pass or anything like that and is that this still the case yes and would wouldn't we consider that in the spirit of equity because there aren't hurdles that may have some kind of implicit bias that that we might not yet be aware of if if we're if we're creating a um a track

021so to speak that has um some requirements it wouldn't that be considered a a potential source of of implicit bias in um keeping certain students out of that track well I would it would be in context it would be in case by case I wouldn't want to assume that there' be implicit bias in every situation and so it's hard to answer that question in totality for every student you know who's interested in AP I think what's important when we look at this multi-tiered system of support is we're not just talking one piece of one system we're talking now about every piece of our whole system supporting each and every student and if that means supporting a student who may not be interested in an AP class but a teacher recognizes that that student should very

022well be in that AP class regardless um that's where bias might be beneficial right hey we need you to be in this class because you you've worked hard to be in a class like this so sure I think the context too that I was I was thinking it happens Mo most frequently with these types of classes even at the elementary level I mean we can take gate for example you know the Gate entrance requirements for gate um are typically passing a test in you know mid-elementary school not always I know that there's other ways to get in but um a lot of times it's the parents who have a special interest in their student pursuing the gate test and you know doing practice tests and things like that which would cause a a bias towards

023students who have more at home support to go into those accelerated programs rather than opening it up and and encouraging all students to either try to apply or to get rid of the gate program and just meet each student where they're at to help them accelerate in the way that each student needs to accelerate we're going to come back to gate to that process too that was just an example in context same thing with honors and AP and and all of those things um I was exposed go through the um equity and bias courses that Kelly and and Caitlyn and I have been taking over the last couple of months and a couple of examples that really hit home with me about um uh historically what has happened um is that um there's a bias

024in looking at a population of students like say our latinx population that that's coming into Elementary School and and that they aren't necessarily um expected to focus on a rigorous academic um placement forward um and that that in and of itself is is a bias toward uh a you know a whole population and there were there were studies and examples of how that historically has happened over the process of um public education um and it it made sense to me having been you know in the in the elementary schools for so many years of where it's not necessarily owned as in we don't talk about it we don't see it in ourselves but it's there and it happens um is what you're you're looking at in the Universal support making sure that that's not happening

025with any particular part of our student population um it the the examples were also students that um are at the lower ends uh economically and um you know may need uh not only extra support but a different kind support that matches their need are we are we going there to you're jumping ahead and getting right we're so excited that you want us to go there and we're going to get there because that's that is a huge piece of this and we need to make sure we do um yeah to Circle us back to the to the multi-tiered system of support it truly is equity based in its design and and by saying that kind of an example is what you just mentioned is is looking at all students and what what those students need and

026it may be different as we assist all those kids when we really started to look at the potential of learning loss coming through through this covid pandemic with the addition of a lot of monies coming our way time to connect all the dots together to look at that whole child to look at the academic support to look at the behavioral support as they come back to school to look at the social emotional supports they will need all I call it all of the the Stars just kind of aligned and we have this tremendous support with with the financial piece to help us get there so by starting to build well I'm not that at that slide yet before I get into that though to to support the fact that equity and mtss connect together Equity

027is again this slide came from the California Schoolboard Association uh presentation as well so there are some pieces to it that do explain a little bit more about equity and the challenges to it and how can we have actions that create it um there's a lot here in this slide it's a lot to think on and chew on I encourage you to do that it um it's it's very clear and very succinct just something um sorry thank you madam president um the the list on the far left um what does equity mean um intentional shifts in mindset policy and practice that prioritize the interruption of systemic inequities um how would th that value put forward there you know compete with um our objective of academic achievement for our students you know this isn't just just

028the idea or the school of thought that we should be in the business of educating kids and not focusing on you know prioritizing the interruption of systemic inequities I think the the last word is the focus of of that question that the inequities would need to be um addressed and we're going to get further into some some why here in a second from a data perspective and also from an experiential evidence perspective that will demonstrate some of the um possible inequities uh in the district but that key word at the end of that paragraph I would think um enables us to include the prioritization and can help move us forward and in short it's all about education it's about making sure all of our students get the highest level of Education possible and Achieve at

029the High highest levels regardless of the background that they come from so it is education it is academic achievement so as we as we mentioned we we know that there's there always needs to be a why there has to be a why Behind these conversations and if you look at the at this slide here there's some why built into this but uh we also need to talk locally about our why and so we've invited Tim Caris to uh discuss some data with us some of this has been shared in different formats in the past and there is some new data that's been requested by some by some board members so we're going to turn this over to Tim Carrison Tim just let me know when to move forward all right go go ahead John good

030evening um so I'm here to present data and throughout the presentation of the data you'll note that um we're presenting all student groups as identified by the state of California within the school dashboard system uh and the reason for that is when we talk Equity we're not just talking race ethnicity we're talking all groups of students each group of students has comes from a a different background um and has specialized needs um so we're talking about all student groups throughout this presentation um another thing to note about our slides is that the uh the wording on the student group the student group name comes directly from the California state dashboard okay so the first slide is our our enrollment in Chico Unified for 2021 uh we can see that our English Learners at 5.9% um

031we do a significant amount of of work to assist that group um our highest of the of the top five nonr racial and ethnicity uh student groups is socio economically disadvantaged so those are students on pre and reduced lunch or are Foster and homeless or migrant or have parents with without a high school education as we move down into the race and ethnic student groups um we can see um white is by far our highest at over 55% and Hispanic is the next at 27.3% and I'll put this in perspective um comparing it to the city of Chico as of 2019 and our our staff as well on the next slide go ahead John so Tim i' just like to interrupt really quickly I just want to reinforce what he said so we have the

032the state uh descriptors and what aren't up there are some student populations that we have to always keep in mind for example our lgbtq plus population we need to be sure that we're considering all populations as as each and every student every student every day as we're uh working through our multi-tiered system of supports I just want to keep coming back to every student every day right so when we look at we we've talked a lot about uh Staffing in in Chico UniFi and John and Tina are going to get into that later in the presentation and so uh when we run numbers um based on Staffing as of a couple weeks ago uh student demographics this year and a city of Chico um census numbers from uh 2019 and I provided the link for

033the source at the bottom of this of this slide uh we wanted to get an idea of how how do our schools mirror our community and what we see with the African-American uh student group we're about uh half of the percentage of both our students in the city of Chico we're a little bit higher than our our students in the city of Chico with our staff at 1.8% were much lower in the Asian group and Filipino um data was not available for the city of Chico um but we are a little bit below the uh percentage of our students hispan in the Hispanic group we our staffing falls behind Fairly significantly very significantly from our students and fairly significantly from our surrounding City moving on Down the Line Native American and other Pacific Islanders were

034about about very similar to um students and the city and in the white category we are much higher than our students but right about on par with our city two or more races is significantly below both the city and our student counts next slide so when we look at start getting into academic and behavioral data um we can see some uh differences in stud what we're looking at is differences between the student groups below and the all students category which encompasses like the name says all students what you're looking at right now is California state dashboard data from 2018 2019 test scores comparing those scores to the previous year that's the last year we had we have data for at this time so when we look at that um we can see most of our

035student groups perform lower than the all students category green blue is the highest green is the second highest then yellow then orange then red so it's pretty intuitive with the coloring so overall we were green with all students and like I said all other student groups perform lower than the all students group with the exception of white two or more races Asian and Filipino Mr Caris uhhuh you're going to need to reinterpret for your board president I what exactly does blue GRE does it mean we're we're better than so blue is the best so in the Asian and Filipino student categories we're blue that's the State of California that are both blue for the Filipino category we were blue and then the Asian we were green and the next one is um green and all

036students are green that's the second but down in the white or two or more races we're also green right and that's you saw the percentage that of our student body that is white so that's reflected in the all students category as well so that lifted up the all students category so our students with disabilities is lower but compared to the state of California we're the same correct okay I get correct and overall compared to the state of California we're at the same level um we as a matter of practice uh over at least the past four years we've really tried to shy away from comparing ourselves to the state and counties and sites that don't share similar uh demographics with us um because it we're not happy that our students with disabilities are orange and

037the same with the state we want them moving up above the state if the state's going to stay at Orange as an example all right John move on to math yep here's math there we are all right so same idea here again just math reflecting 2018 2019 scores compared to the previous year and we see um all student groups in Chico UniFi performed the same or lower than all students with the exception of the Asian and Filipino groups any questions on Ma is there any research as to why Asians and Filipinos do better in math and English not that I'm aware of thank you I have a theory from a student at Pleasant Valley High School that was in class with an Asian [Music] student he has careful an Asian mother and knew that that

038mother checked Aries every day before that student got home from school and so that was the student's theory on why the Asian student was just acing it in that class was he didn't dare go home without an A so one one thing that that we also look at um and it's not displayed here but I wanted to point it out is is in when we get state test data we're able to to parse out different race ethnicities um into socioeconomically disadvantaged or nonoo economically disadvantaged th were able to get down to a finer grain level with this and that would typically do with our uh Smarter Balance scores in the fall all right this is a lot of numbers here um so I'll just go over some highlights but the state dashboard College and Career

039indicator um is meant to be a measure of how many Stu what percentage of our students are deemed College and Career ready upon graduation based on a number of criteria set by the state those so there's different ways that students can qualify as College and Career ready including um AP tests CTE pathway completion a to G pathway completion um State seala biliteracy and there there's more and I I will definitely be presenting that to the board upon the release of the dashboard data next year but um we're we're looking here at the percentage of students that are prepared and approaching prepared by any of the measures I just named okay so all students um last year we were 52.1% and we did see a drop from the previous year and when we look out at

040the state we see that similar pattern um for 2020 um Tim do you mean Mr tennis 59 small on my page what what percent did you say all students I'm sorry I'm sorry you're looking at the last year 2020 is 52.1 yeah and so we can see by easily by looking at the blue lines as we go down that many of our student groups are below our all students percentage and this is really a key indicator for us as we are here to prepare kids for College and Career yes so how does this compare thank you to the rest of the state and the rest of the country we are above the state average um State overall average I have those right here I'll pull those up so for 201920 uh like I said CH

041unified was at 52.1% the state was at 45.8% great thank you MH how about National do you have anything for national uh there's no National measure because this is a California specific metric thank you um Foster youth um that's bad that looks really bad um that's I did some math and in 2020 we have 17 Foster youth two of them are prepared for college three of them are approaching preparedness and 12 of them are not in any way prepared for college out of the 17 fost youth M can somebody tell me why that is so I mean we've talked about Foster this category before but but can anybody shed any light on this situation for me what I'd like to do is when we get to current and future efforts keep that question in mind

042and be sure that what we're um presenting to you um also affects that very significant data point and those are the kinds of questions I think we always always have to have in our mind when we're going through these efforts are we addressing every student every day each and every student including including Foster so I I'm hoping that when we um when we get to that part of the presentation that we can keep those kinds of questions in mind uh because there are so many contextual uh indicators uh C there's so much causality it' be difficult to faret it out for each population um what we're going to try to do is work through work through our efforts and address each and every student but I I do want to say you're asking exactly the

043right question that we need to be asking when students are not achieving and what is it we need to do in an equity based system to ensure that those students get to the level at least of the all student population so I me you're right on with the question right that is what completely led us down the road to look at the framework of mtss that's consistent across all schools because we did see those numbers tied up with gosh this learning loss tied up with this Federal money coming in now is the time to really create a system that is consistent across all of our schools that looks at the data and determines in a very quick time frame it's ongoing data look research uh to ensure that we can shift if we need to

044Pivot to um help a student group and I'm going to add one more thing when we saw this data two years ago and Mr suvin and I went to a Foster and homeless um Workshop the the districts that were not were showing better scores than we were we went and talked to them and one of the things that they had was a foster homeless leaz on and that's why we um created that position in our district and we're making um we test that advocate for those families and those students that are in that and we're hoping that's going to help that um but as retes would tell us that every one of those 17 kids has their own story to tell um that that is heartbreaking or you know or and hopefully at the end

045comes um a good story to tell but again we are trying to address those needs because we see that data um showing that we need to increase our support for those students okay when we when we look at suspension rate um I'm going to ask you to disregard the 2020 21 suspension rate because that's I believe is artificially low due to the limited amount of time our students are in on campus this year um the 1920 is the 20192020 is really closer to an average year but in the interest of space I I wanted to just show that one year in the past so when we see our 3.5% suspension rate for all students we see Foster significantly higher homeless significantly higher um socioeconomically disadvantaged higher we see higher higher higher right on down the

046road right on down the the column in many of our student groups um and this is another thing that we've we're looking at over the past few years and this presentation will will address the whole idea of MTS s addresses behavioral supports and socioeconomic or I'm sorry social emotional Miss Doby needs thanks I was was hoping that he'd be able to finish what he was saying before I interrupted um I have a question about the suspension rate data is is this broken down or disaggregated in a way that we can see what the suspension reasons were and um if there's any I mean do we have data on Trends in reasons for suspension per each uh student population group we do yes and I would add to that the sites on the site level they

047have all of that data and they're looking at it in their PBIS teams because that that Wellness team group of people does support things like suspension and the reasons behind it and how on a site they can improve that and help students yeah and where are we at with our suspension policy anymore because it's it's shifted in my experience in the last eight years with the district um when these students are suspended they are still suspended offsite or out of classroom or um what's the what's our policy there just in one sentence so there are both of those options are available uh there can be a two-day suspension uh still on site but out of the class and there could be a range of suspensions from 1 to 5 days five days is the maximum

048um there has been legislation to reduce the types of suspensions for example recently passed legislation um does not uh prohibit hbits uh schools from suspending students um fourth through 8th grade for just simple Defiance so there's been some steps Tak but if a student in a junior high through High School anywhere between three and five we have an option of sending them over to Academy for change for 3 to five days but like Mr Shephard said usually the one to two days we would try to keep them on campus for a type of M school suspension and when they're suspended over to um AFC um do do they so again in my prior experience and I don't know where we're at with the policies um do do those students just do whatever work is assigned

049by the teachers over at AFC I know that there's a mix but there was a lot of um inconsistencies in two years ago let's just call it two years ago because it's pre-co um you know where we couldn't communicate with the students um they couldn't they couldn't access their Chromebooks they couldn't get on their Google Classroom I mean they weren't allowed to do anything on electronics while they're suspended so there was really this um it was like a double hit on these kids who were already struggling academically if they got suspended off campus to AFC then then they were playing even greater catchup but they just it was like they were always drowning and they couldn't ever really get their head above water it it is a challenge and that's a cyclic thing you know

050if they're feeling that way then they're going to act out more and there's going to be more behavioral issues or more absences or you know more treny and it's a challenge we we do what we can um I know over at AFC and Cal the um the suspension let's just say suspension coordinator over there communicates with the sites with multiple sites with multiple kids depending on the season right it can it's a challenge and something we need to we we need to address um in some cases the some of the work that would have normally had been done in a classroom setting can't be done just because of the nature of the course and so in in that situation the instructor either from the school site the the suspending School site or Cal AFC will

051uh will create some work it'll be great to see sort of through the mtss and our social emotional um approach and behavioral approaches um in the next year where we have more supporting Personnel to try to really address the the academic inequities when students are suspended I I get that they're removed from the classroom for Behavioral reason typically um but that doesn't mean that they should be missing out on their academic growth and you know I'm sure that there's more solutions out there that that we could probably keep working towards just a shout out to Orville unified um they are making uh incredible progress along specifically focusing on suspension and expulsion and they have instituted some procedural and policy that um we're we're closely scrutinizing just to let you you know I absolutely support everything

052Miss Dolby just said about the the loss being a double whammy for the kids that are already struggling for whatever reason a and then they just get they feel so overwhelmed about even returning to school that it just it doesn't work I you know saw it year after year after year being on the processing side of suspension at the school sites I think this the numbers are a good example just to even look at you know our suspension rate of our foster homeless youth is is way higher than all the other groups and you know we also see that their um their preparedness is very low and I'm sure that there's a lot of of data sourcing that's gone into that so I'm really interested to hear what else um you guys have to share

053about that today thank you and again it's a perfect tie back to Mr tennis's question about Foster and homeless right and so the question then becomes why are they suspended what's going on there and we're going to try to go there too so again focusing on why we've presented some data Tim's spent a lot of time um making sure that we were able to organize this into presentable uh consumable fashion what we'd like to do now is kind of shift to experiential evidence what are our our kids and our parents and even staff experiencing we really want to focus on the why before we start to talk talk about what we're doing and what we're going to do so I'd like to um John Vincent's going to pull up a couple of videos for us

054that we've we've um clipped into Dave McCay and his staff and his Equity Alliance which we're going to talk about more um I keep saying that but I will I promise um have been working hard to capture how their students are feeling what they're experiencing what their parents are experiencing what some of their staff are experiencing and so we have a couple of Snippets here just to to draw attention to the why why are we having these conversations so we're going to start here with some students from Bidwell my name is they say I don't believe they don't have that's not can we increase volume like any father could just walk out like I don't know when I tell people oh um my dad's not really in the picture they like why I'm like cuz

055he passed away they automatically figured that oh he left me or like it's like whoa like where are you getting these assumptions from like last I Che my dad was in my life he just passed away couldn't be there the whole time and it wasn't even his fault like half of the time or majority some of the times you don't even know why that person is not in their life or even if they try to be like it's never like oh um your dad just left you cuz he didn't want you or anything like that it's just assumption that are being made and it's by not just white people not just Mexicans not just black it's by it's made by a lot of people even your own race will assume that you don't have a

056father because you're this race there was this incident last year with this kid that goes here still and he just kept saying the n word and I felt really uncomfortable not only because he was using the word but because like my best friend and so he was saying it so we just wanted to focus on that one One Clip they start to go into a really rich conversation about the nword and that conversation goes on for about 12 minutes um but it's it's it's worth watching just to to capture what the conversation with those students was about um really there we go was really about again implicit bias and what do people what do they bring to conversations and so to hear students talking about that in middle school we felt was pretty powerful the

057next clip is a uh couple one the person on the right Adrien Jimerson is a teacher and parent in Chico Unified with her biracial husband and she's going to talk a little bit about her own experiences coming up to the Chico Unified School District from the very beginning yeah I think mine was similar um I'm adopted um I was born in Soul Korea and I was adopted to a white family my dad is Italian and my mom is white but um I most grew up with my dad's Italian family so I grew up with a really big um loving wonderful loud Italian family and I think my earliest experience of racism is in school right when we were home when we were younger we're in our little Bubbles and we didn't really experience that as

058much well maybe even with some of our family too but um definitely I remember vividly in kindergarten for the first time uh being out at recess and just kids chasing me around and you know going like this and calling me Chinese eyes and flat face and you know they had like these really awful little Rhymes too I remember you know like it was it was terrible like it's not even me worth saying these little rhymes about it as well and so I remember that was my first experience of school and I remember crying and going home and crying every day and it not being a positive experience um out on the playground especially and then I remember yeah looking at my report card and having an in for Behavior which is not like me but

059um I wonder if that in was due to my you know difficulty with what was going on out on the playground and you know the racist Commons that were being told to me and yelled at me um I wonder if that in had anything to do with that what I was so again just examples of why we're having this conversation and uh trying to keep moving forward and uh we're going to turn I'm going to turn it over to Tina to talk more about our our Chico Unified efforts here I I just want to point out again that that teacher is reporting experiences she had in a Chico Unified kindergarten class not out of the area yeah as we're moving to the next slide I think it's really important to embrace the idea of of

060director Keane's insistence that uh we keep reinforcing a call in not a call out we're calling people into this conversation we want to be sure we're talking about as much of this as we can in in every conversation um every agenda that we are uh utilizing within our district that we're calling people in not calling them out that doesn't help us but really focusing on things that we know um are important to us again going back to prioritization so the the quantitative data that you saw for the Y combined with the qualitative data which was our experiential video samples here are those examples again that have led us to the equity based mtss idea and system I am a systems person I work I work well in in organization and knowing that that we can

061connect all of the dots to help us we have had a lot of great things happening we we have a lot of wonderful supports in place and and teachers doing things in their classroom and auxiliary staff and we'll go through that in a minute but we never had a way to tie it all together with a very focused approach and this is really that focused approach and it it's got a lot of research behind it and it does again look at the whole child I say that over and over the academic the social emotional and the behavioral working together to give students what uh they need each and every student what he or she needs this is an example it's not a live uh piece yet I call it the landing page for mtss when

062when we started to kind of pull all these pieces together we felt we needed to make some kind of concrete connection because uh we wanted to to show this to people and explain it and this is actually a live not here but in reality it's live and under construction because it's fairly new so so uh what you would see on this if we were to have the live piece is each of these backpacks obviously is representative of the three pieces of equity based mtss gives us more information about what those pieces are so we're real clear we have really common language that everybody is speaking that's important and then at the bottom if you were to click on each site has a basically a menue of what they are doing with the funding that we're

063receiving to move into the the supports on their campuses for social emotional support for kids academic and behavioral I tell you and we've we've said this before everything is just going gang busters with these supports right now as we're starting to prepare with with using the money that we've gotten from the state and federal government I can't tell you how much I appreciate and Ed Services appreciates fiscal and and Ed services are speaking the same language our our um our business services team actually has an Excel spreadsheet labeled with social emotional academic and behavioral I don't know anybody else that's ever seen that so great job to our business services that really is exciting to all of us but again it shows you the commitment to each and every student looking at those numbers how

064can we continue to have ongoing data to see where our kids are and how we can support them so look I look forward to sharing more of this with you as we get more uh advanced our building of it okay one more piece that we're able to do to help connect these dots is to look at our lcap we know that our local control and accountability plan is what truly guides all of our school districts it guides us with our goals it guides us with our financial pieces that come in and then we look at our actions and services and see if we're hitting the Mark if we're not hitting the Mark we need to adjust and see how we can do it a better way so we we have had typically in our lcap

065the five goals that are there in yellow we are shifting to three goals that represent our mtss framework now they're not just taking all the yellow out in fact all of the goals that we've had in our in our prior lcap fit into this as I said a moment ago we've been doing some really amazing aming things throughout this time frame and we don't want to lose track of those but we wanted to have a real focused Direction so we don't lose focus our schools don't lose focus and we're all speaking a common language on those three pieces to help our our our kids so uh Tim and I and Ed services are are working on our 2021 to 24 LC cap right now you'll see that coming your way in June two times it's

066pretty exciting it's a lot of work to put it all in together into into pieces now but uh we welcome that and we see things that are again those those actions and services that we've been doing that fit right into these pieces one other thing to note on that real quickly is while we have a district LC cap our schools have what we call a school plan or a sipsa if you've been around a while you you know that acronym and those will come to you in may they come every year to the board board for um a consent item but all of the schools do their own kind of mini l cap for lack of a better term because of timing they're in a transition I work with all of our schools and our

067administrators to get those those plans Complete because we haven't shifted completely to an approved 20 2021 elap from the board this makes sense that it's a transition year for our school plans and for the first time they are putting in actions and goals that address Equity that address implicit bias and their goals for what their sites are going to be doing with that and I've I've never seen that in school plans it is truly truly exciting mby thank you um I had a quick question about um the box that says inclusive academic learning um I was just wondering if if you could give us a working definition of that um and also um just maybe um a brief explanation of where those needs are not yet being met what are our growth goals there because

068I I have heard a lot especially at the elementary level that there's um that there could be some improvements when it comes to inclusive learning but I want to make sure I'm understanding the definition the same we're working on that definition literally as we speak Tim and I had a conversation yesterday afternoon about really digging into what these goals how they will read because we do want to make sure they hit the mark on what we want to say we're actually going to employ Liz mezer our grant writer to make sure that our language makes sense and she will probably add some things to it as she always does to make it more comprehensible and um and professional so we we're looking at what we've what we have done we took Community input from our

069community U meetings this year and also our targeted parent our targeted student group meetings with our parents we've had a lot of that input coming through um but we you know welcome things that's one of the reasons we bring the lcap as a public Hearing in June 1st because if there are additions and things that uh we need to look at in examine it's a good time to do that it's a big document it's about I don't know 80 pages in length so it's it's beefy and there's a lot to it and obviously funneling through five goals down into three is a little bit daunting uh so it will it will read a little heavy in those Pieces perhaps but we are committed to making sure we have the pieces in there that we need

070it also is important for you to know with the elap every year obviously we come back and relook did we hit those goals we go back to Tim's data that he shares and that's what drives what we do the next year so it's not a oneandone by any means we continue to use that that data when when could we oh John did you want to add to that sorry yeah just specifically if I can click back to a slide here this is the um College and Career indicator and let's just look at one of our targeted student groups um our students with disabilities so to click forward to inclusive academic learning what we're talking about there could be pushing in more students into General classes so that would be a a concrete example of that

071falling within um inclusive academic learning yeah it's my it's my broad understanding that there is more of a need of that push in approach um for more inclusive classrooms that I've heard from parents of students with special needs so that'd be really great to see that conversation up in center with our um Equity uh discussion for sure thank you for bringing that up and again that does coincide with the the mtss design as well which is great Mr tennis did you have a question yeah thank you just two quick questions where they I maybe they'll be quick maybe they won't be but um lcap um had a a name change last year in 2020 no oh I know what you're talking about you're talking about the the LCP the learning continuity and attendance plan okay

072different lcap totally different not my decision but it was the state yes so lcap stands for yeah this LC cap is local control and accountability plan all right and it is Define lcap for me if you would please you might have done it right the outset but but if you could do so again in a focused way our elap really I like to think of it as our business plan it is our it sets the goals that we have in place it puts the actions that we do and and maintain in our district to achieve those goals connected to the money pieces the financial pieces that go toward that we have the data in there as well so it's pretty comprehensive uh in in a piece and then we look at to make sure we're

073hitting those marks when the data continues the next year so as you said you said it it it truly guides our decisions um so where do the goals on the left come from and where do the goals on the right come from so the goals on the left have been in uh they've been in our l cap for this is going back how many years now yeah since the beginning they're mandated by the state those are the goals that the state gives us that we are required to address so the beginning is the beginning 2013 yeah there are eight State priorities that's kind of to go way back that's where it starts there are eight priorities that the state of California says You must hit I couldn't tell you all of the eight of them

074off the top of my head right now but but the five goals have to attach to those priorities um so moving forward to this one with the mtss framework those priorities are embedded in here as well uh but again like I said the the pieces that that we've had in the past with our lcap goals are truly able to fit into these three pieces of um the mtss framework again more focused I think it's really important to mention that parent groups are held and they have a direct input into what we're doing are you referring to this this year here I mean uh year year in fact this year the the attendance of our parent groups was better than it's ever been yes um and and part of that was pulling them into the five

075uh special areas and pulling those parents together um so that they were they were with the group that was their focus the only change we had this year is we went into a zoom format when we had our all Community own format I think um but we were able to hold iners ones when we did our um breakout groups I had a different take um with respect to the two of you I I thought that that our promotion of the elcap conversation if you will was basically non-existent I think that it was um in my research it was basically kind of an invitation only Affair and there was never any general announcement made um to invite people or involve the community in lcap conversations so so the imitations take place predominantly at a school site

076level and without a doubt this year we had a very big focus on getting our targeted groups together um because that's that's what we're supposed to be doing is making sure that those groups that are not achieving are achieving at the same level as our all student group so that was where our Focus was we met with a foster Youth and homeless as you pointed out that was a a group that did not score very well so we invited from each School site parents um of Foster and homeless students and uh again a very enlightening and successful meeting with that group and it was uh well attended we did the same thing with our English language learner groups and uh with our African-American student groups as well as with our special ed um and all

077of those I mean without exception all of those had excellent attendance at it reached the capacity that we could reach within the physical building where we were meeting so um from a a large scale you know across the board I I take that we can absolutely do Improvement there from the targeted groups I think there was a lot of Outreach and success with the targeted groups I want to say that when this started I had contact with a lot of different teachers and parents in different districts nobody was doing the level of Outreach that we did we provided food we provided babysitting we provided Transportation uh they were large interactive groups and uh nobody else was doing that that I know up it sounds like you're talking about things that happened in the past not

078things that happened this year well this year was pandemic you just heard well yeah I mean I don't want to be misunderstood I think it's very valuable to reach out to all the groups that are on the target list absolutely no question at all I support that 100% but I think that you also got to give du to the bulk of the people who were serving in the district and I think that we really owe it to them if this lcap process really is I mean the heart and soul of of the district it's kind of what I'm I'm gathering and this year it's a I mean it's see in the next couple years it's even a bigger deal than normal because we've got all this extra windfall of covid learning loss money that has

079poured in here I just think it makes sense to have a lot of CommunityWide buyin and um and I I feel that this feedback mechanism was was not available to the general or our constituents and possibly was even curated to bring us back a a specific message that we wanted at the very beginning um so so I will say we do have uh two public hearings that are coming up on the OAB so um we can push that information out as we do every year that those are coming up um and they are also the oap is also posted on our website where anyone uh can provide written comment and in fact um we have to respond if there are questions uh regarding the elcap so uh that is a open invitation for people to

080review the elcap to give questions either in a electronic format or to come to our board meeting when we have the public hearing on the elcap and just to kind of reiterate it I think in business terms the elap is really our strategic plan for schools so it is an important document I also want to add just one thing too is that the PE County Office of Education oversees our lcap plan and they have to approve our lcap plan and they've been with us on every step of the way every year we do it and especially this year because they're using us as a model um and how we've been outreaching our targeted student group families and she was also Janette Spencer is the lead for that for bu County Office education and she was

081on the zoom when we did the community um meeting meeting this past time too and uh again we talked to her afterwards about things that we can improve on we're constantly wanting to improve um our methods of doing this and doing the best that we can at this and Mr tennis we will um do uh take your suggestions and we will continue to improve on our lcap nights I appreciate that thank you um now if I I don't I want to know if this is going to relate to the extent to which this is going to relate to any decisions or anything that we're making uh tonight but you know if I look at this this form here um I identify with I mean or I guess I like the column on the left better

082than the new one on the right will that play into any adoption of this or or anything like that I mean was this given to me for information is this already occurred here in Chico Unified or or it might occur well this Chang you know I mean we're out with the old and with the new so the stuff on the left is gone and theu stuff on the right is is the way it's not gone I once you um I'll be anxious and anytime you want to sit down and look at it when we get to that draft form come on in because it's it's hard to put into context without it here in front of me but all of these pieces again that stem from the eight State priorities will be in here as

083well kind of like a few years ago the USDA got rid of the pyramid you know the food pyramid of how you should eat you know all the starches and carbs are on the bottom and then you got like vegetables and then proteins and then sweets with a little Capstone on the top and under the Obama Administration they got rid of that way of looking at how you should eat instead they showed a dinner plate and this much ought to be vegetables this much ought to be fruit you know is this is this kind of like that like sort of just a different way of looking at the goals that actually have not changed is it just kind of a different way of looking at them and emphasizing them it's a way of keeping everything

084into in the mtss framework that's truly in that's the way I see it we again we're all speaking the same language um we all consistently know across the board those pieces that that support that yeah so if you were to go back to your backpack graphic right there's the academic social emotional and the behavioral if you were to unpack those backpacks you would find those things in the yellow on the leftand side in that list you would you would uh not as extensive as the lcap of course because the elap really does look at all the financial pieces that go into that but the idea of that landing page is that yes schools can constantly add in hey we're going to add another um we're g to gosh what's what maybe they extend their Ki

085which is a social emotional learning program maybe they extend that a little bit then the school will put that in there so it's kind of livetime snapshot of what they're doing that that's a different landing page is kind of what I call it at a glance compared to going into the LC cap yeah I guess my point was just that we will find those things be mentioned underneath the three tiers of the new lcap goals in some you find some four yeah activities and actions that the schools have um definitely more comprehensive in the lcap form yes but but to specifically answer your question the board has to approve our ELC cap and if the board says no we don't want the uh three-goal format we want to go back to the old elcap the

086board has to approve the LC cap so ultimately the board has that decision thank you I I'm I'm GNA jump in um I think I have an advantage although Kathy may have been at the same advantage that I was when we got the eight State uh mandates and we had to work on um pulling it down into something that we could work with and identify with here in Chico and make it work for us in our lcap because it was so broad-based that we literally couldn't focus on anything and so we we brought it into what you see there in in the yellow and yet didn't lose track of all eight so like you say uh Miss Kean they were all there they they were just tied in a little bit of different wording I'm

087having the same trouble with going to the blue because I wasn't involved in yet and we will be because we do have to approve it in in describing what the yellow stuff now looks like in the blue and how we're attaching that to the goals and things we're putting money and services behind in order to accomplish the mtss singular student Focus do I am I close you are and I can share the slides from our last community meeting where you can see a visual representation a little bit easier on how those actions fit into the three goals now I I have the same concern that um Mr tennis has in how do you now go back and communicate this to the all student support system which are the parents that that all student group that

088hasn't been involved to the extent that the um the targeted groups were how how do you go back and explain to them how we got where we are I'm concerned too you know how are they going to know how they feel about what's there if they haven't had that that kind kind of in-depth involvement because this is not easy you know this this and we are changing for good because I I like the mtss all student Focus making sure that every student every day gets what they need I get that I'm just concerned as Mr tennis is that some parents are are not going to be able to follow the trail so please please keep those people in mind as we're moving forward to that first public hearing on the elcap in June of course

089absolutely one one thing that might help right here too to know is that our school plans are approved by School site councils and the school uh site councils have all done that prior to the May general meeting so that group of of parents has seen the school plans and they have been talking about this shift moving this way so if it helps the the conversation is is out there um I agree change change is um presents its challenges of of moving forward and and one of the biggest pieces is the communication piece of it we do as as uh Kelly mentioned we we will have it uh on our website as a draft form I also like to have it translated into Spanish to put on the draft form as well and through the through

090the month of June um sorry I to dwell on this I was thought I was done but something you said Miss ke made me want to respond to it and I actually did a lot of research into different sites um with people who I knew at various sites and I can tell you there was a lot of variance between how much this elcap process was um announced or promoted in any way um at the school sites there are some that had basically nil communication to parents about hey there's an lcap thing going on and we really you know want you to know about it and stuff like that um at other times you know you had the School site Council and then the PTO being kind of given a memo about it and that was

091it you know um and uh and with others they they seem to they put it in their their General announcement like not pH jar because I think that goes to everybody right but so um there was a lot of differences from from school site to School site but I want to remind everybody just as somebody who's kind of in some ways off the street into this world of of Education policy um meeting since you know the beginning of this year or late last year this is boring Arcane stuff just so you guys know this is this is dry stuff here okay people aren't aren't like eating this up you know and waiting for the LC cap to come hot off the press I mean if we want people to know that this is the heart

092and soul of the school district you know this is what how we're going to spend our more than $170 million a year you know for the next couple of years um we're going to have to do a really good good job letting them know about it and and and how we're thinking and why we're thinking the way that we are sure I totally understand not John and I have ongoing discussions about how exciting this this is I love it yes she does but point point taken yes okay so shifting uh to looking at this large contingency of staff that we are so fortunate enough to have here in our district and I I don't want to start looking at these pieces of Staffing without mentioning our classroom teachers they are as as um was pointed

093out earlier the boots on the ground supporting each student um every day but we also have in building this framework we also want to make sure we include those folks that are working across the board in in our Behavioral Systems in our social emotional and as well as our academic and you see we've got quite a an extensive list of people the pie in the sky and the plan would be to include all of these folks to for for their expertise in their areas so we can ensure that the the mtss plan going forward does indeed address all needs that each and every student needs and what does that look like how do we we pull data from that so we're in process of of really getting down to the nitty-gritty of how this group

094of people along with our Point 2 toses I think they're in there yeah the mtss coordinator and the point 2 toses that have uh been added by this board will be pivotal pivotal to move this framework forward so uh we're pretty excited about this group okay so we're going to shift to the next phase of this conversation and talk about some current efforts and uh we just want to highlight some of the um some of the supports to start to drive this mtss um drive it home we've heard from a few of our groups that our hiring practices are are something we need to consider so as you think about um the slide that Tim presented uh the the Staffing ratios for example um and and again we're not just talking race and ethnicity here

095we're talking about all of our um all of our student groups and we thought it was important to consider how we're reaching out to Future staff and and again we're not just talking about teachers here we're talking about all staff so we've been doing some work to recruit and to start conversations with um with our with our partners here in the area so for example um Ted suvan and I participated in a zoom um culminating uh course a Capstone course at the elementary and secondary um placement or credential program um it was the very last class of the of the year and it gave us an opportunity to have conversations with candidates about this this shift in um in belief that we're hoping to to um to further we asked for some feedback from the

096candidates we had them complete a survey to really give us some concrete information about their perception of chica unified and why or or why not um they would decide to stay in the area to teach for us or to work for us so we're having those conversations we've been looking at our job descriptions to be sure that equity and bias are included in those um and interview questions reference checks anything that we do as we're trying to to um to elevate this conversation about equity and bias in our district throughout the hiring process is really important so this next step is really critical for us to consider um when we first started and we're going to talk more about Equity Alliance here in a second when we first started talking about um equity and bias

097and and some things that we wanted to do we started to reflect on how much training our staff has received and we all kind of looked at each other said you know we we've had training in in siloed um environments but we haven't come together and ex and shared our experiences and been LED down a path that will be sustained in relation to bios training and so the challenge was where do we start and as a team we sincerely appreciate superintendent Staley's insistence that it starts with leadership it starts with the administration it starts start with district office staff so fortunately um about a month ago three weeks ago we received our first session in implicit bias training and uh Tina has some Partnerships that she's developed so we appreciate that and that we we'll

098follow up with the second session in a week our intent and this is a extremely um inclusive conversation is to train all of our staff all three unions CSEA um cut and Kuma and then anyone who's walking on our walk- on coaches um will be trained in implicit bias so it's a huge goal but we're developing a professional development plan to make that happen U sorry thank you um I was curious about um how we can as board members be included in those trainings because if we're you know the rubber stamp on our policy making it it's probably really important that we all also are looking at you know these policies through the same lens as you all are developing them so I did not pay board member Dolby to say that I am so

099excited that you are interested in that board member Doby because that would be a major goal for us to reach um I can tell you um in Orville High School Unified District their board has been trained and um that would be fantastic we'll make sure that happens i' I'd extend that also to um just because I've had some of the trainings that I know that like trauma informed training would be really helpful for board members to to um see through that lens as well and just you know anytime that we can figure out how to maybe extend an invitation for trainings to board members I think that'd be um really great and especially if we all could you know do our do our due diligence and make sure that we are seeing uh everything through

100the lens that the that the district is is practicing all right so I'm going to keep clicking through here before we go any further there's one more bullet I would like to just quickly reference the Harvard implicit association test if you have a chance um take that test a few times uh you'll you'll find yourself wanting to beat it you'll find yourself wanting it to represent what you think you you believe um and my suggestion is if you have a chance take that association test multiple times and um reflect on your results because it's definitely um it's definitely enlightening so just some more effort current efforts um we started a conversation earlier about diversifying our enrollment demographics and specifically for our acceleration programs so you can see here we've shifted from just subjective metrics um

101to objective metrics now there's still our conversations with teachers about students um but we're not just primarily relying upon that teacher recommend recation for placement in in Gator honors so as you can see here the first bullet um and I I know Mr sv's here if anybody has any questions directly about gate but we've been shifting to the an equitable site representation of the students who are placed in Gate um with our honors placements again there is still some teacher recommendation um involved here but we're utilizing object objective metrics like I ready scores esac um grades and local assessments and just to reiterate advanced placement is available to every student and I'm going to have Tina Keane talk about the league of stars before we do that can I go back to the the advanced

102placement um I don't remember I was as a kid in high school I thought I wasn't qualified to get into AP English which I was so jealous of everybody who was because it was all the super intellectual kids which um I wasn't but was there a requirement like some sort of grade requirement for English or something like that to get into that class or was that just a figment of my imagination this would have been 1990 so I can't speak specific to Chico Unified at that time but I do know that this has morphed overtime and by all means there have been uh very strict U things that you had to do there used to be IQ tests that you had to take to get into gate there used to be um scores that you

103had to score at a certain level uh to get into certain classes including honors classes and AP classes and that was very common across the state but what it did is it really did show bias and we were seeing that by we were not getting a wide range of students enrolled in those classes so it was kind of self-perpetuating and um the state has taken it on to say that you know we cannot we cannot deny access to any student any course to any student if a student wants to be in that class then we have to allow them uh that opportunity in our AP classes they we have to allow them that opportunity to be in that Gate's a little bit different in that there are limited spaces which is why we are trying

104to uh put into place Equitable mechanisms by which to um allow students to be into the gate program um a constituent on this topic actually brought to my attention just this afternoon um that the California Department of Education is actually moving toward getting rid of some AP classes do you know anything about that like for for certain levels like calculus possibly for high school there's some talk of getting rid of that altoe um nope not aware of that familiar okay um I think that this kind of thing just so everybody knows and this could come up in in our future decision-making process I I want people to know that I think this is a kind of a dumbing Down of the public school system you know I think that there really should be um you

105can call them exclusive if you want um I didn't qualify for all of that stuff but I I think that um to create environments where kids are really excelling in a certain subject area I think has value and I think that for us to have transitioned away from that is not a good thing I'm not sure what we've transitioned away from you said that over time we've morphed from the standards that I that that we were talking about no I didn't say we morph the standards I said that we allow all students access so um you know it's not just students that score at a certain level on a test if there is a student that um this would have been me you know I am not super bright but I am really hardworking if

106I want to work hard and do the work and put in extra time to be successful in an AP class then I should have the opportunity to do that and at the end of that I may very well score just as well as somebody that technically you know is much brighter on a uh some test that they took so so the standards have not been um dumbed down for any of our AP classes and I think if you talk to any of our AP students or AP teachers they will tell you they are very rigorous but we do want to allow anyone that wants to have access to them to have access and you feel that the the academic integrity of those classes has not been compromised by by those people coming in I absolutely

107believe that well I'm open to that if I can just add to um when I was principal of Chico High School I would strongly encourage um anyone and and everyone that was interested in an AP course to to enroll we don't set the standards for the the test the AP test those are national standards so we didn't look at we we were more interested in the pass rate so we tried to get the pass rate up as high as we could um at the same time allowing as many students as possible into those classes that that wanted to so so even if they didn't pass the the test they were exposed to some very rigorous um academic work in order to get um prepared for that test so so um I felt at the time

108and I still feel that way is that they um had the opportunity to experience those classes that were as probably as close to a college type class as they could get in high school because of the level of the test that they were going to take at the end of the year so um so we didn't the test is remains constant no matter what and we continue to look at the the Pass rates and and our goal was to raise those Pass rates every year Dr Kaiser so I uh was head of GE for the CSU um and the community colleges participate in our committee um and then we would several of us would then participate with the uc's uh approach so the test are nationally constructed tests by selected faculty at universities across the

109United States they are not premedicated by what kind of a grade the student gets in the class um a student could potentially get a c and still score a passing grade and then they would get college credit and they would be recognized as AP a student could get an A in their class not score high enough on the test and they would not be recognized as AP so uh and IB has similar contexts with some different participation aspects to it but um I think you have to back up um the first time our country really uh whipped a foam up about this was when the Russians beat us into space and Eisenhower flipped out and eisenh Howard then said no matter what they look like at that point I think gender was the main issue

110if they're smart we have to have them in science and math and that program was funded for over 20 years now Florida was segregated as were most schools in the south at that point but the context was it didn't matter if you were male or female if you scored you were in it and the faulty piece to this program was besides of course segregation was that they thought if they funded the summer extracurricular so they were sending me to college between my uh sophomore in my junior year between my junior and my senior year they thought the high school would change its courses that I would come back with quote unquote an accelerated course that didn't happen but still you had that background that preparation so we have done different kinds of things trying to

111get students with talent to have exposure so they could go on and Excel um I was dyslexic nobody knew what that was and nobody gave a freaking ass about it um there were no services and so you know it's like I could get an A and everything else but not in English um just how it was I mean those are the contexts so I think that in each of these cases we're trying to make sure that we don't lose students we don't lose them out of things they might be interested in they might excel in and sometimes that's changing how we represent it to them you know um if you're going to be a female in high school school and kick the ball out of the park with math the guys aren't going to be

112particularly excited about it but if you have support you can do that and so I would like to point out that uh pey has a female kicker that kicks it like insane and that's football I think that's a good segue to M director Keane talking about the mentoring program that would have been helpful so about two years ago a year ago uh a mentoring program began I think uh John has shared this with you before the men of Chico a mentoring program that that connected Chico State bu college and Chico Unified together this year I was honored as was Kelly and some other women in Chico Unified to be part of the the league of stars the women of Excellence program which is a mentoring program for young women in Chico State bu colle college

113and Chico Unified even with Co we we made it happen it was truly a highlight of my week every time that we met in this I could be heard laughing one minute and uh they didn't know tear tearing up the next minute behind my closed door we had our last group meeting of our mentees with the other captains in my in my um Team yesterday and I asked them for some feedback to to share with you tonight because I knew this is on the agenda that and the young ladies said this league of stars um helped them to connect the the league of stars encouraged them to to create goals and to complete tasks they may not have done that before we talked a lot about goals they talked about motivation and they wanted to

114make sure next year with the group that we had to include not only academic goals but selfcare goals I celebrated that I loved that that was one of the times that I cried they expressed that it wasn't just a teacher student type situation it was a family it was a safe place we talked a lot about educational goals we talked a lot about experiences things that they can do and I look forward to connecting with the program every year U truly truly loved it I think it's got a lot of potential for growth and I know Kelly was involved as well if she wants to add anything Yeah we actually did we started Ed off um with some personal care goals right off the bat that's where we started to kind of ease into it

115um and it was a great way to build rapport because I certainly had my own Fitness goal that I was trying to achieve as well so it gave us that common ground and things to talk about but as we went on they became more academic and career um in orientation and to the end that we were getting two students ready for a physics exam which certainly was not my area of expertise but helping them work through how they were going to set up their goals and the same thing um you you you build that Bond um I have a feeling we will stay in contact after but there are just some amazing young women that are going to be coming up and out into our world in the careers very shortly so again thank you

116to John for putting this program together and expanding it to include the women of Excellence it was very rewarding yeah I'm listening to these testimonials and and I have to say it was a little more challenging for the boys because boys just are quiet on Zoom I don't know what the deal is there maybe that's my implicit bias coming out there but I can tell you we are so excited to get these kids back on campuses and be able to invite them to pizza and sit down with them and have this cascading mentoring happening from Chico State to BU College to the high school kids and then eventually moving down to middle school and there's so much opportunity for connections and growth there um and our our money is where our mouth is I'll be

117I'll send out an invitation to anyone who's interested from the board in joining us and you I think it's May 18th we're going to get together with some kids and eat some pizza socially distance of course and talk about next year so it's going to keep going it's going to keep happening okay so I want to focus a little more on um how we are pushing forward and utilizing site experiential evidence uh District level um evidence to try to coordinate our conversations um about two years ago we started we had some grant writers Liz Medgar and Kristen La were involved with Chico St state in applying for a grant to address a problem of practice and so Chico Unified gathered 14 I think it's about 14 uh district and sight level staff to address an

118immediate purpose to identify and deconstruct polic policies and practices that contribute to in Equitable student outcomes resulting in the empowerment of students and staff to address equity and bias in the Chico Unified School District system I don't normally read slides to you but that one is extremely important as we move forward and most importantly to us is inequitable student outcomes as we've seen from our data so what that looks like I'm going to ask John Vincent to pull up a couple of graphics and I can't thank rcio French and and Erica Smith enough for helping us with the graphics so we tried to capture the structure of the district level Equity Alliance and you'll see the immediate purpose captured here at the top and then as we scroll down you'll start to see some gaps

119that as you've already seen in our data we see the evidence there and some possible factors I want to reinforce that the initial problem of practice for the NorCal ELC from a Chico Unified District perspective was on um that idea of race and ethnicity what is starting to happen now and if John will scroll down a little further is these conversations are developing at the site level so this first yellow gold box is the um District level Equity Alliance the 14 member team I ref referenced earlier so out of that conversation developed an understanding that we needed to have these kind of equity Alliance cohorts on every site so as you can see in this graphic there's a there'll be a team of students parents and staff joining together to facilitate the work of that

120initial problem of practice deconstructing policies and procedures now what that looks like for students might be what might be different than what that looks like for parents right but having those conversations at the site level is critically important so the next step for us and I want I want to I want to pause here and just uh make sure everyone understands this is in process under construction um it's really important that people understand the funding for some of these um efforts were just approved in the last two board meetings so it is under construction but the backbone is is here so for example if uh John if you could click on Hooker Oak Okay so we have the principal here Emily Mullins from Hooker Oak she's going to come up here in just a second

121and talk more about this but I want you to see that this template will be available to the public as soon as we're able to um to uh to I don't know further some of these actions and and list them this template will be available so for example if a if a hooker Oak parent wanted to be had interest in becoming part of the Hooker Oak Elementary Equity Alliance he or she could contact either Emily Mullins through email or Stacy C Calderon or Megan groody really quickly and say hey I'm interested in this tell me more about it so the goal is to have a common template um we're going to work with Erica Smith to um to make sure there's access to the public through our website so I'm gonna have um oh I'm

122sorry I was remiss actually we're gonna have Miss Mullins walk us through this Tina do you want to introduce Miss mulls sure thank you Emily millins for being here tonight she is our principal at Hooker and we wanted to invite her to share a little bit about what her Equity Alliance is uh has started and is the direction they are moving so it's all yours Emily awesome thank you good evening so um you know I was a little nervous when Tina asked me to present because I you know as John mentioned we're really in the beginning stages of this and I felt like well gosh we really haven't done much but just sitting through this and listening to all of the uh this presentation I'm I'm actually really excited because we actually have come quite

123a long way already in such a short amount of time and I'm really pleased to see how hooker Oaks how what we've been doing is really in alignment with um Chic Unified School District and I think that's kind of the goal of all of this is that we really are connecting the dots and when we have this Equity based mtss it makes it a lot easier for all of us to connect the dots and all of us as individual School sites to really work under this common framework um and you know kind of put all of our systems and supports in place so at Hooker Oak we started this process um with just a a very open conversation in a staff room uh we talked specifically about Equity because I think it's it's absolutely important

124to start with the definition of equity what does that mean what does that look like and um so on our School site you know I think that we uh you know of course right off the bat identified that as um you know ensuring academic Excellence for all of our students for all students and then it kind of goes back to you know when you talk about all students what does that really mean and um going back to Tim's graphic or his uh looking at the state dashboard reports you know we always have all students to compare to and I think a lot of times we get comfortable when all students are doing well if we see that all students are in green but um you know in my opinion we shouldn't be content until truly

125every single subgroup is doing well too so even if all students are doing well you know I believe we can continuously improve in making sure that all of our subgroups are reached and then even going beyond the dashboard I think it's important that we're really looking at who are all of the students at our school and they're not all represented on the California state dashboard as uh I think Mr Shepard pointed out so an example of that um is and I'm kind of skipping ahead here but um you know one of the things I think that we do in classrooms a lot as especially in primary classrooms is we do projects that involve family structures um we do student of the week we do um Mother's Day teas or Mother's Day projects or um timelines

126of um your your life and we do biographies about your life you know all of these types of things that are really um geared towards a traditional family structure and so that was one of the first things that we kind of started talking about was how can we s how can we make sure that all of our students regardless of their family structure um feel supported by these assignments and or supported by these projects and are able to have Equitable access um you know specifically speaking of foster students or students you know who were adopted if we're asking them to do to bring in a baby picture for example for student of the week and uh you know maybe they don't have any baby pictures because maybe they weren't adopted until they were three and

127so that right there could be something that could be alienating to those particular students and so that was kind of you know I said a a starting point that I think all of our teachers could really wrap their heads around because we all do those types of things and it's one of those things that I think you don't even think about until you are forced to think about um so we uh if you want to scroll back up for a sec I think I like I said I skipped ahead to there but uh another First Step that was kind of easy for us to look at was our classroom libraries how diverse are our classroom libraries and so we had um quite a bit of el cut money that we had allotted two um books

128which was great so we used that money to to Really diversify not only our school library but our classroom libraries as well and I had than thankfully just um teachers who had already created wish lists of just diverse titles that they wanted to include and so now we finally had the funding to be able to fulfill those wish lists so that was a first step and then we have these uh display cases in our hallway so once all these books started coming in um in February which happened to be african- American History Month we displayed a lot of those books in those display cases in the hallways and um and then the next month we displayed a lot of books um with for women's history and so that was kind of another step too is

129as we've got the books we're displaying them teachers are reading them we're encouraging um students to check them out and read them and just really you know paying attention to our specific to the literature that we're using to to to teach whoops Miss do that's okay um so I just want to um commend you for those efforts and um point out maybe for anybody who's listening in or the audience that um a Next Step would be to put those on display all the time not just during a specific month you know we want to make sure we're weaving this through every single thing that we do we what we are doing here is putting the new lens on the way we do our operations the way we present our ourselves in our in our work

130um and I think that the quote that you just had the things that we don't even think about until we are forced to think about them those are the biases and the inequities and those of us who have grown up in the in that uh majority you know category we haven't been forced to think about those things so we don't even think about them as inequities or biases because we don't even realize that they exist and and just using you know even um Black History Month as an example we we while Black History Month is very important it's important to celebrate um black history and the black community all the time for example so I really appreciate you bringing those up and I'm sorry for interrupting your your no not at all that was actually

131I mean perfect segue because we had that conversation that that came up during Black History Month why are we just focusing on this for a month and that was you know we we of course displayed the books during that month but again the goal being that those books live in those teachers libraries now they always are there they're not just pulled out in February um and I think that's really important you know and I always say that during teacher appreciation week we shouldn't just have one week that we appreciate teachers it's it's all the time and that's the case for you know I appreciate that we have specific months that are dedicated to you know really um recognizing certain groups but I completely agree with you that that should be and that's I think what

132the whole point of this is is that we are constantly examining how we can be better for all students and you know kind of going back to Hooker Oak again we we look at who are our students and that's why this will look different at each School site um for those of you who are familiar with our demographics we are not one of the more diverse schools in the district so that was kind of another starting point for us is how might we get there what are the barriers for some of our parents that make our school of choice not as diverse as it could be or as we might like it to be um and so you know we we kind of started that conversation too which will continue to be ongoing um and

133talking about how might we be able to recruit families to be able to come to our school who are um you know to represent a more diverse student population um I think I heard this talked about earlier but um it's really important also you know if we're if if this effort is to be successful all staff all students all of our stakeholders need to be part of the process and so one of the things that we just started was um this month I'm doing an aid Academy after school on Mondays for classified staff and this conversation is is going to be is part of that Aid Academy as well too so we've been having these meeting having these conversations during our staff meetings with our teachers but if we're not bringing our classified into that

134conversation as well who often get left out of those conversations because they're not part of our teacher staff meetings then you know again it's going to be hard for us to meet this goal so that's another thing at you know hookero we're really trying to figure out how do we make sure how do we create conditions so that all staff can be part of this conversation and then the next step for us right now you know we've pretty much held this conversation at the the staff level um but you know obviously the goal next year will be able to include students and parents in these conversations and into our site Equity Alliance uh my when we were working on the sipsa I had the opportunity to sit down with Tina in the very beginning of

135the process and I was very excited to work with her to really look at how we could uh rev revise our sipsa to reflect some of these new priorities and focuses on equity and so specifically speaking in in uh goal one the old goal one the yellow goals uh we added language that ensured that any new teachers or staff members that came to Hooker o that we train them in these initiatives are important such as PBIS implicit bias and other uh site initiatives because I think that's often a missing piece as Staffing changes and we assume that everybody uh has received that training and um especially this year we're bringing on a lot of new staff members so that's something that we need to be mindful of and uh then making sure that we are

136developing and refining a consistent practice and how we teach about social justice and equity in each grade level an example of that um Miss Doby as you were just speaking about is um black history month so right now I think it's kind of just been you know just just it varies so much amongst teacher amongst grade level about how that may or may not even be taught in their classroom so we want to get very specific about what that looks like at each grade level um you know what literature might be utilized what themes might be discussed at each grade level so that we are you know being a little bit more implicit as far as like how our students are receiving that education and those experiences and do you want to can you would

137you mind scrolling down a little bit thank you the other big big thing is is really making sure that we're including representation from all of our subgroups on our parent teacher organization and our School site Council and any other parent committees we might have a hook roke that is definitely an area of growth for us right now our um our PTO and our School site Council currently do not have members from our students with disability subgroup um Or Hispanic population so that's definitely going to be a goal is recruiting and retaining those um you know a div a diverse student po student group student representative group on those committees and then we will be an active participant in of course of the cusd equity Alliance um our our Equity Alliance at Hooker o leads and

138facilitates conversations around Equity during our monthly staff meeting time uh our instructional practices and curricular decisions are viewed through an equity lens and modified as necessary to Foster diversity inclusion and equity for all students so again we wrote that directly into our cpsa um I'm definitely a principal who brings out those goals and brings out those strategies and actions frequently and share them with parents uh share them with all of our different subgroups share them with the staff and so you know I'm very excited that we have this language and these the specific strategies written in to reflect the work that we're doing with the equity Alliance and then as I already spoke about just you know an ongoing conversation is going to be identifying uh barriers to enrollment at our alternative school and we've

139already just talked about you know um one of them being Transportation uh parents are uh need to to provide transportation and so that of course right there is a barrier so how might we be able to uh get around that and then recruitment what can we do to go out there of course you know as you know um hooko and Rosedale we hold our lotteries in January so if you weren't on the ball and um had your application in you might end up on the waiting list and so how might we be able to go out into the community in December and make sure that anybody who wants to apply to one of our alternative schools of choice is able to do so and then I already spoke about the last point and that was

140just looking at our projects renaming them and um making sure that they are inclusive to all students I'm going to chime in once more on behalf of some of the things that were mentioned that there there is another group The LGB btq group that you know don't ever lose sight of the importance of of that group because it isn't listed as one of the subgroups by the state but it should never be forgotten here I I couldn't agree more and that was kind of the example that we were talking about with the baby pictures uh you know even as early as Elementary School we have students um who are identifying as trans and so that's that's something that if you are asked to bring in a baby picture and you're represented in that baby picture

141as a gender that you are no longer identifying with then that can be very alienating for those students too so I completely agree with you absolutely okay okay um we've been two hours we'd like to take a 10-minute break and then move into our next section okay we have two slides left uh could we take the 10-minute break and then do the two slides please for interrupting but no I'm not sorry for interrupting we needed to take a break and I do appreciate your uh willingness to disrupt and and start again yes I I have mine on on purpose um uh no I I'll save my question but go ahead continue please okay thank you so just to move let's see John can there we go uh again we were focusing on current efforts and

142now we'd like to shift to Future efforts and some things we've been we've been talking about recently and I think this came directly out of a conversation stemming from attendance at the Saturday um casbo um csba conference a conversation about an equity statement and would we want that statement to be strategic and measurable attainable realistic and time bound so that's a conversation that's started and we'll continue that conversation uh we've been talking about diversifying curriculum and I want to reiterate here that again we're not just talking about race we're talking about uh all of our student groups ensuring that as we look through our curriculum that our students can relate to our curriculum that our teachers um are excited about where the curriculum is placed where it's levelized so I think that's a really important

143conver ation and um we just Tim Caris and I were involved in a conversation today with the district lead Leadership Council for the secondary English teachers and having conversations about possibly moving some books around and adding some some novels to our department libraries and what that could look like so those conversations are happening and we're interested to see where they're where they're going to go we talked a little bit about further developing oh sorry Mr has question um I want to talk about that because literature is a serious serious passion for me um I mean books have changed my life so profoundly for what it's worth to anybody in this room but uh you know there's certain books that I think kids ought to read um 1984 by George Orwell you know I mean that's

144a really really important book to me and uh I mean a lot of Classics I love the Classics are we going to be getting rid of Classics in order to make room for books that um I mean I'm not saying they're not future Classics but you know maybe they're not the best um so what's your thought on that do you have any are we are we making room for you know diverse books by getting rid of stuff that kids really do need to read because they're the best I think the key word Mr tennis is Choice it's choice and ensuring that we have choices available to our students um the phrase getting rid of I think that's a a really loaded phrase for us and I understand why you'd use it because we want to

145be sure we're careful about that um what's going to be important as we have these conversations is do we have choices available to our students um that that represent the diversity in our district and again that that's every student every day each and every student so that would include you as a young man it would include me it would be every student uh in our district so I want to uh I want to ensure that we're focusing on on Choice why would the student choose the book that they want to read rather than the teacher no I think uh you're misinterpreting my use of choice I what I mean is we would um have conversations with adults with teacher with teachers with um with leadership about what what um representation we'd want to be sure

146is in our in our literature not having students just walk in and say I want that book for this reason but having thoughtful conversations about how we're representing all of our students I think I hear what you're saying and I think it sounds like you're saying that we might not have the classic of literature going forward to the same degree I we need to have conversations about the wise behind all of our literature and I'm not saying sitting here right now on May 5th that we're going to get rid of anything I'm not saying that we're going to add anything we need to have the conversations and it's been my understanding for for a long time that some of the conversations have happened but they've happened in isolated pockets and we need to coordinate those

147conversations and what I mean by coordination and I apologize member Doby be brief we want to be sure that we are um having conversations at on sites and also at the district level for example the district um Equity Alliance is having that conversation and some of the the two-way communication between the district Equity Alliance and the site Equity Alliance and then adding into that mix the district Leadership Council team members and then adding in on from from this angle our School site Council which is made up you know of community members and students so all of those participants in that conversation are important and one of the other and I mby just real quick we've had many conversations in the last few months with our district um Leadership Council with our English um department on

148this and so we we talked to the junior high and high High School um English um DLC members they go back to their site English departments and have these conversations as Mr Shepard right has said we have not made any changes of any of the model uh novels that they will be teaching but there is discussions of ones that we could add um to diverse our um books or novels that we are teaching in our classroom um so again we don't make these decisions um myself or John don't make these decisions or or Miss sty what we go through a long process when we want to develop or bring in a new novel into one of our classrooms I think the challenge Mr Ten is to be just real direct for us is the is

149the term the classics and just what is what is the classics right and what that looks like for everyone and so having a conversation about that right what maybe the Classics for you might be different from Miss Keane or different for me and so we we need to have that conversation for our students not for the not for the parents interpretation of the class EXP but what is representative of our students and that's got to be the focus for us every student every day I was gonna say something similar and just that again we when we're talking about Equity what we really need to be focused on is learning how to see the the dynamic of the system through a lens that is different and acknowledge that there are lenses that are different from our

150own so what's the classics to you or what may have inspired you as a student growing up might be different from me for my experiences you know we all have different lived experiences so different books are going to speak to us in different ways and to be able to express to our students that we want them to have the choice to to deliberately choose what they read so that they can be inspired by the things that they are passionate about and helps them grow in the way that that they see um that themselves identifying with um so I think it's it's important to to just reiterate or Echo that we're not talking about or we're not you know considering saying oh we're not going to deal with these books anymore those books are still important

151but you know those books were chosen by certain groups and classes of people uh historically in a system that was Ran by A very specific group and class of people being we were told these are important books rather than here are many books from many different backgrounds many different cultures and authors um and here's why all of them have a a good um uh lesson to be learned or a great structure of reading to learn how to diversify your your knowledge base whatever it might be student Choice should be based on what what is the full range and full spectrum of what's available and what speaks to them to inspire them to read Because if it's not going to be inspirational for them they're not going to want to read and they're not going to

152develop those skills um as uh efficiently um if they were told what to read thank you so just continuing with future efforts we talked a little bit about further development of the league of stars mentoring program and and what's exciting to us is hearing that Chico State and bu College will most of their classes will be in in person next year so we'll be able to continue that mentoring um in person U make those connections we hope as I said before for it to Cascade all the way down through Middle School would be would be ideal um we are going to continue to improve our Recruitment and hiring practices I neglected to to mention earlier our Outreach to other universities and other um teaching credential programs in the state so far I've attended six of

153the hiring Fair all virtual hiring fairs from six different um communities for example San Jose State University of San Francisco I've just been attending their their hiring opportunities or their hiring fairs to um to engage with their candidates we've been talking a lot about our Equity Alliance cohorts on each site and I do want to to emphasize um reaching out encouraging our our our um various student groups participation in CTE our Career and Technical education programs um it's a it's not a metric that we've discussed so far tonight but it's important that we understand that um these program these these CTE opportunities are available to all of our students and it's it's a major emphasis for our for us and it is a part of the career Readiness so it will help us in that

154regard as well thanks yeah I was trying to understand how that related this particular Bullet to the conversation about equity and bias well I'll give you an example so uh okay we just going back to Dr Kaiser's um mentioning the the Russian Challenge and opening our eyes to ensuring that all all students regardless of gender had an opportunity to further um in I guess not just further dominate in Aerospace and there is a recognition then that we needed women so that's the same conversation that are happening right now that we're having right now with Career and Technical education that we need all of our students to understand that this is an opportunity for them um and to continue to emphasize that those doors are open and will continue to keep them open for all of

155our students I can add that through communication with our bipo parents a year ago at our first meeting with that student group right before covid hit they didn't know the parents expressed they had no idea what the CTE program was they didn't know the pathways they didn't know about the classes and coursework that kids could take and um this year we were able to Pilot in the junior high a an exploratory program so kids could start to learn about careers could start to learn about the classes that we offer in Chico Unified CTE program so we hope to continue to see that grow we're actually going to get some feedback from the teacher that taught that and um heard loud and clear that that that just was wasn't um that wasn't as obvious as we

156thought it was so we needed to make that better all right so we're see we're missing a slide here I don't know what happened um in your paperwork there should be a slide about the ethnic studies did it go no okay so just for the public you're unable to see it here on our on our viewboard but included in the packet is a conversation about a California state board adopted uh ethnic studies model curriculum guideline yeah it's just not coming up here okay well we I'll just keep describing it it's just not coming up on our viewboard for some reason maybe it's it was made now we'll see if John can find it here it may have um there we go okay so yeah it must have got moved around maybe during break I must

157have messed with it so the California State School Board in January adopted the ethnic studies model curriculum guidelines and I want to reinforce guidelines these guidelines have been prepared to assist um local educational agencies such as ours to develop um ethnic studies courses so for for Chico Unified we could design new courses or we could modify existing courses uh these these These are these guidelines have not resulted in a graduation requirement um or in a specific course they are simply guidelines to um help any Lea any local educational agency such as Chico ifed to design new courses or modify existing courses it's kind of interesting because it is uh a mandate uh for the universities required course uh only four areas and it has to be a United States based uh curriculum so um it's

158interesting in that context yes we'll be closely watching it to see if it evolves all right and we'd like to close with I know it's on here because I saw it a quote from Linda darling Hammond the president of the California state board of education and it's a long quote uh what's most important to me embedded in that quote is keeping open the right to learn uh keeping doors open keeping Minds open keeping conversations going and moving us forward so that's our presentation yes thank you um something that Mr tennis brought up earlier has been sitting here swirling around and what's left of my brain at this time of the evening and I am and it's the issue of bringing everyone that hasn't been intimately involved with this process and the elcap approval so that

159they understand what's there what's going on what it means um um because I was involved at the ground level in in 2013 with you know the change to lcap and and all of that consolidation of stuff I I understand what's going on but for the general public um whether they were involved this year as one of the subgroups or not that's not where they are so here's my challenge to you when we begin to take a look at at preparing involvement of people that haven't already been intimately involved I think the first question should be what do you feel you need and want in the district what's your interest and then translate that to where in the elcp that group or that person's interest is already highlighted because my experience with our elaps is we

160don't miss much it's pretty much if you want it if you think it's important if you think it needs to be delivered to our students it's in there it's just that it's hard to see if you're not already intimately involved in the creation of the elcap so please be mindful of how to bring along people that are interested enough to raise their hand and say hey I want to know how this 80 million 150 million you know lots of money is going to be spent on your mtss the lcap the all of these things that are being thrown out to them and be able to point to the areas where those things are high highlighted and documented and also show if you if we can get to that intimate kind of discussion the other thing

161that's very important at least it has been for me with the elaps is showing the the other half of the page next year or or in the ones that we've been able to show what we did and how we evaluated how well we did what we said we were going to do I think it's important for our our public our parents our people to understand that we get down to that close a scrutiny of whether or not what we said we were G to do was successful and if not what are we going to do about it and we do do that we break it down to that level every year and and so I think just being able to let people know how close to every single issue we we are involved in massaging

162this approval of how to move forward this next year is there's there's a lot there and the site the site based accountability single you want to talk about that t the school plan for student achievement yes the Sip up yeah those are amazing too they they you know there are a lot of reading but I have good glasses so I spend a lot of time with my nose buried in those things and they're amazing the specificity and detail that are presented in those school plans are um noteworthy we're chuckling because she keeps emphasizing with our with our leadership team with our principles that it's an organic document it's fluid we can add to it we can change things as long as they' been approved by the school site you know we can have those conversations

163because that that that is where the work happens yeah and it's evident you know I've I've I've been here a long time and I I keep reading their stuff as a couple of schools found out last year when they left some stuff out and I noticed so to your point um and this is kudos to our ed services team for recognizing that as Mr tennis pointed out it gets very very dry and uh in the elcap meetings this year the question started with when we looked at the different areas what are we doing well what do you like about what's happening at your school where are we lacking where do we need to have Improvement and kept it that simple so that it truly was in a parent and student friendly language and we did

164the same thing with our students um and and their language is very real uh we have to adapt it into metrics that are acceptable by the state but it it is refreshing to hear it on that level president president Robinson there is one parent um yes no that's I was just uh letting you know that we are to that point where I'd like to reach out to our our one speaker that uh asked to be contacted okay I'm calling terce Lee I am calling in today to strongly oppose the implementation of the equity based mtss program in our school district our children have been out of school for over a year missing pivotal educational times that they will not be able to make up however instead of focusing on critically needed issues such as returning

165our students to school full-time developing comprehensive summer school programs tutoring options or curriculum to bridge the ever growing Gap in their education this board has continuously disregarded the needs and wants of the stud students and parents they are to represent in order to promote their own radical agendas you have voted to keep our children out of schools while trying to offer those same sites to house the homeless you've espoused on the mental health needs of our children while trying to implement a thinly veiled critical race theory that will teach them to distrust each other and view themselves as victims or oppressors even though you tried to very quickly gloss over your equity and education Slide the mtss program shown in your presentation promotes a racist ideology which characterizes and encourages a person to identify as

166victim or oppressor based solely on the color of their skin it promotes the division and segregation of our students based on their race and teaches them that racial identities are more important than any commonality or unifying status you spoke of diversifying and changing our curriculum and the ethnic studies model curriculum from the California Department of Ed which you referenced has been widely and publicly denounced as anti-semitic and encouraging of anti-jewish behaviors it has been found to be actually and historically inaccurate in its representation of our country's history and include dubious framework for the training of our children to become social justice Champions our children are not born with nor do they have inherent biases or racist views but this program and the curriculum you are wanting to implement will teach them to judge themselves and

167others not based on their actions or beliefs but solely on the color of their skin as you talked of equity it was not an equity of opportunity that you are seeking but an equity of outcomes as you stated in your slide Liv in fact many of the programs and opportunities that you have placed an emphasis on for creating Equity already are utilized in cusd early intervention behavioral and educational support counselors special education Specialists Etc are all a part of the existing cusd model but the Marxist belief that everyone should be provided the same outcome regardless of effort and skill is harmful and creates a false narrative that our children cannot and will not succeed in life they have perfect example Was the removal and opening up of the AP classes for all regardless of if

168their skill and development is there this MPS program does not encourage or promote diversity or equity in education rather it promotes discriminatory thinking which blames divides and promotes racial biases as a parent I firmly oppose the implementation of this program and the corresponding ethnic studies model curriculum thank you thank you okay board um we are finished with our presentation and we'd like to kind of think about do we have anything that we need to put in the way of a motion for action or do we um uh accept this uh Workshop information as informational only Kaitlyn I have a question first this came up in my notes earlier during the presentation so it would have been a better time to ask then but do we have a timeline for developing that Equity statement or do

169we want to set one and that's an excellent question um when we were going through our uh Equity workshops on Saturday there was the csba belief that that's the first thing that we should do is have an equity statement in talking with ed services the uh concern came up that if we come up with an equity statement that is developed by five people eight people then we're not really getting input from our full community and especially our targeted groups so um I really appreciated them you know saying okay that's that's one belief but maybe in the development of this we need more input so we're looking to direction from the board in uh moving in that direction do you want one that is reflects just the beliefs of the board or do you want us

170to go out and get more input and if so what is that timeline in which you'd like us to do that Dr Kaiser I think that was an excellent um question and it would seem to me that um if we stay true to the process that the state started back in 2013 and been evolving ever since is really I would think that we would like to in the lcap process get solicit comments from our school sites about how the school sites perceive that statement to reflect where we're going with our lcap and so I uh I don't feel a need to make a statement now today I think we we ought to let this um I don't know what you said birthing process or development process uh go on a little bit longer one of

171the things that I got out of the um direction that was being set by the presenters of the school boards Association uh was that um we are all meaning the districts that they are serving in this North section that's that's in this um process we're all at such different levels of development of this process that it was a way of I I believe having them direct us to focus on where we are as a district each one of us and one of the things in our discussion you know Caitlyn and Kelly and and Tina and I in in what we is that we we're much further along than it sounded like most districts were because there were many districts on those Zoom calls that you know they're they just were now beginning where we were

172able to show we've been doing a lot of this work for the last seven or eight years we just hadn't pulled it all together it like Tina said she likes um systems well we didn't have a system we had lots of little silos of this good work going on so I agree with Dr Kaiser that it's we need to wait and watch this process develop and um just begin to to draw some ideas together and and we'll know when we get it I mean it's it's like uh I think as we we've gone through these seminars you know when the right statement is in front of you for what you're doing it'll be I would agree with that except for maybe not so passively and I know that ed services is working on this and

173will be soliciting input from stakeholders um I just I think if if our lcap and our mtss is essentially our strategic plan that the the equity statement is is is a part of what would be our mission statement that deres that strategic plan and we can't really have that overarching theme or that lens through which we look at every piece of our our um lcap in our um mtss plan without having that Equity statement I agree that it should be massaged out throughout the district and our stakeholders from our different schools but there shouldn't be a different one for each School we're I I I I know I'm just I just want to say it you know we we we want that input you know from each community and and each um subgroup but we

174want to make sure that that we have that set and you know that's our launching place and not not an end point Mr land off um thank you so on that note and I I do agree it's kind of a chicken in the egg thing right we want this statement to guide the lcap but we want the input from the elcap um how quickly I recognize that most sites are still building their EA cohorts um how quickly can we get some feedback from those organizations well I can speak to that so we thankfully uh many of those positions we referenced earlier have been approved um School sites are working to identify their point2 mtss coordinator on their sites in addition to that you approved the equity lead on each site so those teams are being

175built for the most part those folks have been identified and I would say by the end of the school year they will be knowing that we want to have those cohorts um staffed to start the school year I think June 1st is the is the actual goal for the district level Equity Alliance to have those have those identified so I don't know um how aggressive you want to be with um getting input but I do know those cohorts on the sites would in my mind would be the natural mechanism for those conversations about that statement so if initial statements were were um presented to to th that group right those Equity Alliance groups and had and those folks who are invested in that and again I want to reiterate that we're talking um students parents

176and staff that that that would be a natural mechanism for that conversation to occur I agree with that and I to follow up I've heard a couple of things about um not and not just today about uh how we do our Outreach to get student input and get parent input um and I'm not sure what the answer is but I think it's something that we need to be kind of taking a really solid look at because it does seem like a lot of times we're kind of passive and if you know about an event then you know and if you don't then maybe it popped up in your are's email once and and that's it so I'm not sure what the answer is but I really want to find a way to empower these uh

177Equity cohorts to really have all the tools they need to to be really active in engaging with the community and their uh schools like communities and neighborhoods right away and getting feedback from them thank you so I'm if I'm interpreting consensus um correctly we're we're looking at down the road approving um an equity statement I yeah my my first answer still hasn't been or question still hasn't been answered which was what kind of timeline are we currently looking at getting getting that Equity statement done again it comes back to how much input you want uh I know for sure that those Equity Alliance cohorts which again I think would be the natural mechanism for the conversations um we're hoping to identifi we should have those identified by the end of the school year um but

178if we want to expedite that we can again the end of the school year is not very far away um if we wanted to come back if you wanted to wait until August could wait that long um by we would you know we have those conversations I I do think I like it as a organizing foundational conversation for all of those groups to be a part of right it draws them again a Callin um so I think that would be a a good start yeah I I am just concerned that if we really want to have the amount of input that we're talking about as we are now earing you know getting close to the end of the year um September you know getting and and knowing that our Equity leads really won't be in

179place yet so I this is a question of the board do we want to start with um some of the draft sample ones that we've had and just recognize that they are a draft and a work in process and know like everything else we will have to develop it over time and it may Morphin change as we get more input and I think it depends on do you want that you know Wonderful perfect one right off the bat um if so that's going to take a lot more time and a lot more input or do we want to start with something that states our intent this is what we believe this is what we want to do but knowing that we may not have the wording exactly right right off the bat so um I

180I think the timeline really dictates which of those that we're going to have Dr geyser I feel like this is uh as a former college coach this is a great team practice to pull the team together and that uh these uh groups that we are establishing um they really don't know each other yet and they're their leader and their so you could let them chew on that and come back to us you know with their response to just sort of the bare bone statement that we have as a as a a sought after goal that doesn't mean that it will come back the way that got initially presented but I do think it's some it would help them get started on sort of the bigger picture of what we're hoping happens and so I'm willing

181to wait because I'm afraid if we adopt something put it out there then they'll all go remember most of them are brand new oh my God this is what we have to do and they won't mature themselves over that directive you know another way to look at that too though is that this is a um it's really a broad Mission Vision type statement it doesn't get down into the specifics the inequity statement the ones I've read anyway do not so if the board adopts an equity statement that is very Broad in the beliefs that the board has then our Equity leads then our tasked with developing how do we get there um and the more specific goals that fall underneath that um but that's just one way of doing it um the equity statement could

182be much more detailed in um smart goal oriented as well we have um let's see June is is uh our two lcap meetings um July we spend a a lot of work on looking forward uh for naming our Workshop topics and some other issues um and and we'll pull together our EA folks um you know with the beginning of school why don't we look at um putting something forward to the board uh in July so that that broad Equity statement is there as as we move forward through July into August and bringing our EA groups together does that time frame so I will say the board has a lot on their plate for the one July meeting and um this certainly needs to be you know equity in my opinion needs to be an ongoing

183Workshop that we continue to have and continue to review um but again if we are looking at July to bring this forward and we want our Equity leads to do that that um is going to be very difficult for them to get out to all the contacts that they have yet to make since they've just been appointed to the position so it would be a more generic which is fine um but just asking for that direction from the board if we want something that has a lot of input will need to have them in place and get that that time to do that if we want something more generic um at least as a starting point then we can definitely have that by to life a generic starting point works for me Caitlyn uh I

184was just going to say I think that I would prefer to see a generic starting point more uh upfront with our lcap hearings um just so that we can keep that direction that we're going with as far as equity and bias goes um in mind as we're reviewing the lcap and having those hearings in June right those are in June June yeah the last last two weeks in June two Wednesdays and so perhaps we have a broad um working statement that is not our final statement it's our it's our starting point um for the June hearings um and then uh maybe have the full statement worked out with our stakeholder input by the September meeting I don't I mean is that that timeline a little bit more I'm looking at John but yeah I think

185that is a much more workable timeline ab and there is a mechanism for that as well we we just hired mtss full-time coordinator we have um we have a meeting scheduled for Monday so we'll make sure that it's on the agenda um as part of that conversation and we have Equity Alliance uh meetings bi-weekly so that can happen I would support that too and I would ask for uh two members of the board it may be the same two that were on the developing this Equity um board Workshop or it could be two different ones to uh help us take a look at that in the development stage somebody that we can continue to run that pass before we bring it forward to the June uh elcap meeting I really feel like Eileen and Caitlyn

186should stay on track with this they've been putting a lot of time in yeah we still have a couple more um csba presentations to go through before the June meetings I I would be willing to accept that appointment if the rest of the board concurs that Caitlyn and I continue to work with the superintendent and Dina on uh Angel do we need a motion for this decision or okay yeah go ahead a motion is appropriate okay um well I move that we put together a broad Equity statement uh for our June lcap hearings and set um on the agenda for September and Adoption of a full um Equity statement after getting stakeholder input second I have a motion in a second um board you under understand the direction in the motion yeah but I've got

187a little debate about it when you got a second yes Mr Lando and not so much debate it's just a point of clarification um well I understand where we're going and am generally in favor of it the idea of putting any statement out there uh is a little risky to me in that people inherently will compare anything they come up with with whatever broad we've got out there so as we do this we can make it really clear I mean really clear to our lcap stakeholders and our EA groups that this will be replaced with something else um I just don't want this to be something really overly Broad and kind of boiler plate to end up there because nobody wants to interrupt it later on interpreting it as a fluid statement is always the

188best way to go as we have demonstrated with our five goals that we've had they've been fluid every year too with connected with the LC cap so I hear what you saying um uh everyone is here that will be working on it we all understand Mr land's Point uh any disagreement there with making sure that it's a fluid document and that people understand where it's a starting point are you comfortable Mr Lando okay okay Mr Dennis to a different point from Mr L um I don't feel there's a basis for moving forward right now I don't feel there's been adequate Community input for us to even produce a draft statement um I would point to the lcap process in my earlier comments and how I was dissatisfied with the the public engagement that we had

189um I think that uh I'm not thrilled with a lot of what I heard tonight um I don't like how this new lens as I've heard some people refer to it as seems to devalue um excellence in education um instead you know it's focusing on wanting to bring every child along and I I understand that value and I think it's important and I can understand how um there might be problems that need to be overcome in order to address that that important need um kids need to feel safe they need to feel valuable they need to feel um like they have opportuni to learn and grow and uh but at the same time I think that we need to keep the main thing and focus personally and um for me that is having an awesome

190School District that does a great job educating um all of our kids um but also celebrating Excellence uh through things like um AP classes and um and I I just really think that's very important to just uh take the best of what um academics has to offer and all the major categories and and esteem those is very very important and I guess I see here uh sort of a a changing Focus that that doesn't include that and that concerns me um literature I would point to is kind of a case and point I don't like the idea of bringing a lot of um um new material let's say in in the teaching of English I like uh to look at things that we already know are uh excellent and and are are time tested and

191have tremendous value for generations of people and I think that we need to continue to bring our community together around those works of art and literature um and um so I'm will probably be voting I will be voting nay on this Mr tennis if I might inquire um what would you suggest we do in our process of proceeding meeting that might solve your concerns what what else would you like to see I appreciate the opportunity to to answer that and provide an answer there um I think there should be I mean there there's a lot of literature and uh background materials specifically on the development of a an equity statement is so so this is coming to us from Sacramento I mean that's how I I perceive this I I think this is you know

192um Sacramento has has put this body of work out there to guide us and we're responding to them we're not responding to what our community has said that they want um so I feel like we're we're following the lead of you know people who who are not involved invested in this community are not a part of this community and honestly if I look at the lcap goals the previous cap goals with the ones that we're that we're moving towards um I I like them better I think they're more specific I I think they give more more information to the um to the reader um as I said earlier I think that this stuff is not going to be deeply investigated by by most if not basically all the people in our community they're not going

193to engage with our LC cap on a deep personal level they're going to go to the the page that has the three backpacks on it and and they might not get much farther than that most people won't even get there these will be be things that will be used internally to guide how we present our program and the services that we provide for the most part um there will not be a lot of community engagement with this stuff it will just be the basis upon which we hire people the basis upon which we choose books for English classes and so forth um and and I I see it coming from somewhere else I I don't see it coming from from here and so so I'm kind of concerned with this this new Direction Kelly so

194I think maybe we have not done a good job of explaining because when you say you want excellence in academics that's exactly what we want here and we want it for not just our all student category that is in the green but we want it for our English learner students we want it for our foster students our homeless students our socio disadvantaged students our students with disabilities we want to see all of those come up into the green category and to do that requires all these different supports that we are talking about putting in place mtss I need to clarify is not a curriculum uh mtss is a support mechanism and I know we heard earlier referred to that it is curriculum or it's critical race Theory never has any of that come up in

195this discussion that is not ntss mtss is support for our kids for academic social and behavioral growth and all of our kids need those in varying amounts in regards to the lcap I could not agree more I struggle getting through the entire lcap but what that lcap does is Drive what our schools do and that's what our parents and our students should see I don't expect anybody to sit down well maybe those of us here present and read through that whole lcap but what is in that LC cap should transform itself into AC at our school sites kids should feel it parents should feel it staff should feel it so um maybe we're focused too much on the actual document itself as opposed to what we will see on the school sites and maybe we

196need to frame it more in that way but um I I it hurts me to hear you say you don't think we have the um the goal of high academic excellence in place I want that for every kid our entire District I would be thrilled if you look across the state and people say hey Chico Unified for all of their students has high academic standards so I maybe it's a communication I mean it worries me that maybe we're just not communicating this well in terms of what we're trying to do okay uh we're to a point where I'm going to call for a vote um and Mr tennis encourage you as the uh the document comes before us if it's approved tonight to move forward as as the motion is indicating to continue to weigh

197it against your feelings and thoughts and give us continuing feedback thank you you know one question of clarification I don't know what sort of point that would be but who are the the the members of on the board for the lcap we all are we we all are there's not a committee and sub thank you okay yeah okay it's all of us okay I'm going to call for the vote um and we're clear that this is a a timeline to bring the uh statement to us uh at our first lcap hearing meeting on the third Wednesday in June with a followup to have it ready for approval in September correct Erica 2 okay okay okay um I'm going to call uh for uh individual votes Miss Doby the Doby I Kaiser I tennis nay Lando

198I Robinson I thank you board okay our next item anybody want to stand up and stretch or are we good okay we can do this oh Caitlyn you can stand up and stretch in place yep okay uh thank you uh the State Testing uh Mr Caris are oh there you are um the uh State Testing and uh Chico Unified for 2021 go ahead Mr Caris all right thank you there we go so so I was asked to give a report out on the status of State Testing in Chico Unified for this school year and I'm here to do that tonight as you're aware uh Chico you can find how it's modified our state testing plan for this school year only uh based on guidance by California Department of Education which received guidance from the US

199Department of Education next slide I ask a question yes it seems seems really early right um could do you have um on hand just clarification of when the dates of those the of that guidance came down for us uh I have some rough dates on here I'll show you okay I think that it'll be good for us all to hear like exactly when that guidance came out for us yep thank you and so first of all in during normal years uh State Testing uh when when State Testing is operating as uh as originally planned out the bulk of the testing is done through the California assessment of student performance and progress you'll hear me referred to it as Casp and that umbrella that Casp umbrella encompasses the following assessments the smarter balance Assessments in English

200and math those are given grades 3 through 8 and 11 or esack testing the California science test G given in grades five eight and once in high school um also known as the CST the California alternate assessment in English and math um otherwise known as the C for our more severely cognitively uh disabled students that's given also in grades three 8 and 11 same as as smarter balanced the California Spanish assessment currently we administer that at rosale and we've had a handful of high school folks uh choose to give that over the last couple years that's offered in grades three through eight and once in high school so the RO rosale in the past couple years has given that as well as as well select uh High School classes next Slide the English language proficiency

201assessment of California or elpac uh there's two tests under that umbrella and that is the initial lpac which is given to all students uh with a language other than English spoken in their home upon an initial enrollment in a California school so the bulk of those are or transitional kindergarteners and kindergarteners the summit of elpac has to be given every year to all English Learners and then the physical fitness test is administered to grades five seven and nine next slide so this year due to the pandemic and the conditions that the pandemic brought about the California uh Department of Ed or CDE under the direction of the California school board applied for a series of waivers related to State Testing from the US Department of Education this was this was following a letter from the

202US Department of Education in February signaling that they'd be willing to um accept certain waivers meeting certain conditions uh amongst these waivers included the suspension of state and federal account accountability measures tied to state test results so what this in effect did was freeze everybody where they were as of the last round of State Testing so if you were fa a district or a site facing uh federal or state accountability measures you would effectively be frozen there until the next round of State Testing so it didn't wave any accountability it just relieved it from this from this school year it also um uh suspended the 70 the 95% participation rate requirement during normal years we are penalized on our state test scores if we fall below 95% for any given student group Next slide in

203response um the US Department of Education determined that we could have um flexibility regarding uh testing based on the conditions within each individual School District based on the viability of giving the test under the current conditions Uh current conditions listed by the C CD did include um instructional time reductions amongst other things so if in effect if districts are a are if districts judge that state tests are not a viable option they can forego administering um smarter balance and cast and in their place administer local assessments to measure student progress and still report those results to parents and the public as we do every year with our Smarter Balance tests or all our state testing for that matter um so so in effect the local assessments are our state tests this year okay additional information

204about these waivers is in um in November the state board approved the shortening of the small Smarter Balance tests making them different from any previous year or future year and granted the ability for students to take the test remotely which is has never been done before and will likely never never be done again unless we find ourselves in a similar situation next slide okay decision-making factors that went in to thought processes and discussions um around this issue with various groups that I'll I'll show you in a moment due to the shortening of the tests the suspension of the 95% participation rate and the fact that a number of students would take the test remotely test results could not be compared compared to previous or future years which we rely on them yearly to do um

205we would also be unable to compare results to other leas across our state okay in effect I'm not saying any District would do this but we could look back at our our Smarter Balance scores and two years ago and test the kids that got fours I mean that's there's no penalty for participation rate and on top of that the tests are are different okay next slide so Ed Services um and the district leadership as a whole um met primarily with our our leadership team various leadership teams uh educ Elementary and secondary principles and all the different bodies of DLC we also heard feedback at the targeted student group meetings that parents at those meetings which is a very small sample size acknowledge that W wish to foro testing this year um in addition we talked

206to our Monday teacher leaders leadership or teacher Advisory Group and then individual site students via elcap feedback meeting so when we went out to talk to the students the overwhelming was desire was to not test next slide also we do have access to local high quality local Assessments in place for grades three through eight that will allow us to measure learning loss and report to parents and the public as I mentioned before uh these assessments are star reading which we've given for years and I ready math um these local assessments take significantly less time to administer allowing for more instructional time which is at a premium this year if we were like for I'll throw out an example for um a elementary school like a a third grader might come to school five days in

207a week and probably a minimum of three days this year would have been testing if they tested from the beginning of the school day to the end um just for English and then the same for math um so I already in I math and star reading will take significantly less instructional time um and also the local assessments are what the teachers are are used to looking at to inform instruction um throughout a school year they're already beginning to scheme on grouping kids for summer t for tutoring and summer programs um state test data is not that kind of data it's summative data it's not a formative diagnos cannot be used in a formative diagnostic way the turnaround for the results are are too long and the reporting that we get out of it could not

208drive instruction in the way that we need it to anyway for our summer and tutoring programs next slide on on the other hand um 11th grade esack results play aug huge role in um early Assessment program which drives initial College course placements in English and math as well as as a criteria for the state seal of by Literacy for the class of 2022 so we could not take those um opportunities away from those 11th graders um and be because of those implications we have kids that have worked basically their entire School career for that state seal of biliteracy we have a number of kids um well a large number of kids needing that score to be placed into an initial College course okay so we could not take that away from 11th grade and so

209that's why we're are still administering that we do not have a suitable alternative for the uh C test um so that's why we will still be administering that next SL Slide the timeline um starts off rough and then gets pretty specific uh November the state board approved the shortening of the tests and the ability to test remotely February is when CDE or the state of California received the letter from US Department of Ed regarding waving waivers for State testing requirements February and March the state uh both meetings um the State Board directed CD to P pursue a VI variety of waivers that already mentioned next slide on April 5th was the opening of the previously planned Chico Unified assessment window okay so typically we have a a site or two that will start that early

210most people start mid April but we like to give sites flexibility on what works best with their schedule schedule they have a lot of moving factors to play in because the administering the state test is a huge huge disruption to schedules he Chico High's gone to block schedules in the past um it's a huge disruption so we like to give them as much time as possible to schedule on April 7th um the CDE announces that the waivers have been approved approved um they literally announced that the waivers had been approved and didn't give us any details on what those waivers meant okay nuts Sy bolts of what we could and what we we could not do over the next week um on many meetings uh with the CDE and other bodies that I'm a part

211of down in the Sacramento area we did get clarification from the CDE that the FI the what I presented you today was in place and it was a go shortly following that and we had all been talking about this um in in leadership and DLC Etc leading up to this and we saw the writing on the wall so soon after the CD announce made the announcement we were good to go we made the call to switch to the plan I'm about to show you and notified parents and staff of the plan April 15th after that uh or right after we announced it to the parents CD released frequently asked questions regarding waivers so there was a ton of of confusion around the district uh many districts are going in a similar or exactly the same

212route as we are um my sense is due to the amount of confusion at a lot of the smaller districts that uh a lot of folks were under the impression and I I got phone calls to this effect from some smaller districts of they they thought there was no possibility of not administering um smarter balanced so they they went ahead with that plan and um I can see why because the tight timelines uh everybody was everybody's going to start testing around April in general so they they kind of that's my suspicion on why some districts that are testing are testing uh next next slide so what was announced on that day in early um April was that U we would be administering the smarter balanced assessments to grade grade 11 and we'd administer I ready

213math and star reading to grades 3 through eight we would continue to admin the California science test um we're able to forego um which is especially crucial at the high school due to limitations on endof thee activities including AP testing um the California alt alternate assessment because we didn't have a suitable alternative We are continuing on with that next California Spanish test uh was off as well elpac were still required by law to administer all initials and summatives um and then the physical fitness test was actually cancelled in September so that's kind of old news okay any questions thank you Tim uh I know the the questions that I asked got this started and I do appreciate you putting it together because it was um it was critical to understand why we ended up where

214we did thank you for sure the explanation Caitlyn I think more of a comment than a question or just a I don't know anyway um uh thanks for the explanation um it was really thorough um I know we saw some explanation come through in an email but I just think that it's really important for us to make sure that that's just being conveyed to um the public and our stakeholders about why these decisions were made um and also just that um you know this is the type of thing that is handled in house and doesn't require board Direction necessarily um and so um that's you know as a board we make sure that there's great staff because those are the kinds of things that the great staff handles it's not our job to to give

215directive necessarily when it comes to that kind of thing so um just clarifying once again that this wasn't a board decision and if it had been and you would have presented this to us perhaps we would have been totally on board and agreed to it and perhaps not but that's that's not the way it goes so um thanks for clarifying all of that again and then um I guess I do have just like a minor question and this is just for my own knowledge looking forward but um next year as we talk about progress and student learning loss and and mitigating that these are the numbers that we're going to be looking at that that are continuous is that is that the anticipation Okay cool so we'll be able to look at like preo and

216during distance learning and um pretty much all the way through um the next uh distance learning the local assessments were disrupted and altered that's right um it's a blur for me yeah so especially at the end of last last school year we do have try to data Dr Kaiser for the 11th graders this year when what is the date when they their esack will be administered uh it varies from site to site and even from classroom to classroom but they're okay uh I think pb's a little farther on than Chico high right now it seems like from the email traffic but they're both in the thick of things but the students and parents will get clear notification of they will the the notification is the state uh indicated last week that they're going to hold

217off on the releasing the results longer due to the need to check the V uh validity on the new change tests I just think the sooner the more help we can give to the 11th graders and their parents about this because right as you pointed out it was an incredibly confusing swirl and right it was a very significant decision component in all of this was they realized they couldn't they couldn't police remote test so um oh yeah sorry go ahead okay um and also just timeline wise you you ended up answering my question for the most part in that in that slide is that um all of our discussions about you know learning models and amm and all of that all of that took place and those decisions were made before we knew anything about

218this the the testing changes okay thank you okay thank you Mr Carris sure okay we are now on to business services um oh no a tree removal who's is John here or so we have Dusty copper one of our managers of M operations to answer any questions but we I wondered who'd been sitting out there all evening hi Dusty how how we doing we're good yeah so uh I I don't know if we have any slides on on this tree yes we do okay perfect so so this is a tree at inem the Wilson school it's it's a I would say a juvenile tree it's probably seven eight years old but it uh suffered some uh pretty dramatic damage uh you can see on the side of the tree the cambium layer is pretty much

219uh destroyed and the long-term out out for this tree is not not good so we're going to recommend that we take it out um it'll be replaced immediately you said replaced immediately yes okay that that's always better board Mr tennis is this a health safety issue it it absolutely is it it's if you look at towards the bottom of the tree it's starting to rot um yeah you know I want to get it out ASAP it's a a good win might take it down so moved yes second get it out off with his head I have a question first Miss Doby you had a question um what what happened to this tree why is there such substantial damage well uh to me it looks like it could have possibly got hit by a piece of

220equipment um I really couldn't tell you for sure that would be my unofficial uh assumption also yeah um just my knowledge of tree growth uh yeah just for all of everybody out there don't don't weed whack near your trees cuz that's what happens to them be nice and gentle with them yes luckily it's a small tree so we'll put one in and it it'll catch up to it real quick so okay okay I have a motion in a second um we have no one out there who wants to talk about it so I'll take uh we need to I just have one more comment and let's I'm this is just for wasting time um we're definitely not going to replace it with one of those ash trees that we just took out from Chico high

221right okay no so so so that tree is it's a October Glory Red Maple and which is a a very good tree and we will replace it with an October Glory great thank you okay okay because the last vote was not unanimous we will again um take this vote by um I think Dolby I tennis I Lando I Robinson I was that John Carver talking to us hello board I am here I was just watching my U buddy there Mr Dusty copper present this tree uh issue to you and I appreciate everybody's input thanks John it was a great presentation thanks Dusty okay thank you sorry you had to wait so long um thank you board we are on to Appreciation Week for certificated staff um let's see who's presenting that would be me that

222would be you thankk you Mr hanman so each year we bring um this resol resolution to the school board um the state of California designates the first week of May as um teacher and certificated staff Appreciation Week um we have um recognized our staff this week in Vince Ando and the nutrition services and made some goodies for for for our staff out at the school sites and and celebration um and um our board meeting happens to fall right in the middle middle of um of appreciation week so we're bringing you to you resolution D21 and typically we do read that into the record um and then the and then the um board will vote on it at that point to adopt it or not so Mr hanman would you like to do the honors of

223reading it absolutely record so whereas a strong effective system of free public school education for All Children and Youth is essential to our democratic system of government and whereas the United States has made considerable progress in the social technological and scientific Fields due to our system of free and Universal public education and whereas much of this progress can be attributed to the qualified and dedicated teachers and certificated staff entrusted with the educational development of our children to their full potential and whereas teachers and certificated sta staff should be accorded high public esteem reflecting the values the community places on public education and whereas the Chico Unified School District is keenly aware of the importance and impact teachers and all certificated staff on children and whereas it is appropriate that teachers and certificated staff be recognized

224for this dedication and commitment to educating students therefore be it resolved that May 2nd through 8th 2021 be proclaimed teacher and certificated staff Appreciation Week in the Chico Unified School District and urge all citizens to pay tribute to our Public School teachers and staff furthermore the teachers and staff in the Chico Unified School District should be thanked every day for their dedication professionalism and for the services they provide to our students that's it thank you Mr Hamond board your pleasure we have a a resolution before you I move resolution 1535-1545 sitting here in this room tonight thank you all of you I know youve most to yeah all of you and just to clarify we are not leaving our classified staff out we will celebrate classified staff uh in two weeks yes okay we have

225we should have a board um policies on our we do hit the right buttons here yeah okay we have one which we did discuss um briefly at the first reading and I'm stalling because I'm having trouble getting it to pull up thank you okay um do we have any additional questions or um discussion from the board on this policy my my initial feelings are that it doesn't feel good um there's something that doesn't sit well with me with this policy change and I think I maybe need to explain to me a little bit better do you have any suggestion for wording changes or want to express what your concern is I think I can I can give you a little background on it if you'd like yeah um you know we uh recently had the

226really devastating experience of losing a student our second student at Chico high school and in a meeting with the students talking about their feelings it they asked the question Point Blank do we have a memorialization uh policy and um it was really buried within the naming of the facility policy and so we wanted to pull that out and be very clear that we did have one but also through that process we learned from um our expert Stan that was there that you really don't want to um be in the habit of turning your schools into cemeteries by having permanent physical um memorials on the campus that you really want to be doing things that are more living Memorial so that if you had a student for example this example he gave that um really loved

227to love the mountains and love to hike that you do a memorial that was a day dedicated to cleaning Trails for that student or that if you had a student that was very active um in Animal Health and Wellness that you do a fundraiser for the uh local shelter but that they not be um you don't want to go back to a school and see the whole school circled with benches is that are dedicated to people that those students that are there now do not even know so um really putting into place a policy that states that clearly and that was the intent here board um we do need to um approve or change this recommendation to uh the uh board policy and the number is 7 310 Dr Kaiser I'd like to move uh

2287310 if I get a second then I can speak to it I I will second the motion okay um the university um used to do this for typically faculty and they've stopped the process they had Ventures and stuff and it sort of the same kind of thing you start you know re recognizing that aspect right now Chico high is in the process of doing their uh Veteran Memorial and it's still being developed but that's that's for an entire classification of people it's not individuals and I think that you know when you think about it you want uh education institutions to be celebratory and not um dealing with things that um might be causing ongoing grief to people that knew them but also confusion to people that never knew them so um anyway the university has

229stopped this and U I think that um recognizing the loss of a student or staff member in a different way rather than setting up something in concrete is very much appropriate any additional discussion then I think we're ready for a vote we have a motion and a second to accept um 7310 as presented tonight all those in favor I I I I Dr Kaiser did I hear you vote thank you it's unanimous thank you Erica okay I believe we're now on to discussion of uh agendize items on uh upcoming times dates months anything that anyone needs to suggest okay see Caitlyn yes Miss Alby I I still haven't really figured out this process because it it it's feels clunky and kind of uncomfortable for me because I never know how to word things properly without

230being able to like explain what I'm trying to say so please bear with me um so before tonight I I've I've had a convers ation um with one of our staff about um data collection and particular surveying um our families and how um we our passive surveying methods um might not be reflective of the whole of the body statistically speaking um so if we want significant results we're not necessarily surveying in a way that might be statistically significant um Mr Lando also brought up tonight something similar similar um about Outreach to families and making sure and and actually this was a concern for you and Mr tennis as well just um that we know that the Outreach to our families is going to elicit a response that is representative of the population and representative in

231an equitable way as well so we we have been doing great Outreach to our targeted groups um and if we wanted to do Outreach also to our all groups um that we have a way that isn't just going to elicit responses from people who have very strong feelings but but people who have the range of of um opinions or or buyin or feelings about it um so what I what I would like to ask is if it needs to be this this is where the gray area is for me I don't know if it needs to be a board motion that like I would like to say we need to research and develop a a an a targeted service surveying method and Outreach method for our families rather than the passive send it out on

232Aries and hope for a good response method essentially um I don't know if that's something that can just happen or if if we really need to like set it into motion as a board and say this is a policy that we need to actually put into place and and develop over the next few months as we're doing really important Outreach work not only with the equity piece but also with our our reopening plans and and our um and are um you know uh recovering from covid essentially okay I yeah I was just going to turn to you um Miss Dy because I think I understand kon's concerns if if you could give us some direction on how to accomplish this for all of us so I think this is a much bigger conversation than just

233surveying it is you know the Outreach how do we hear the voice as Mr Lando mentioned earlier from our students how do we ensure that that we're getting the voice of our targeted students how do we ensure that we're getting the voice of parents that maybe um want to be involved but didn't you know for whatever reason did not know um so I think that I will say I need help in understanding other ways that we can do Outreach I'm very familiar obviously with our current Aries with our School site methods of getting information of sending out surveys um Erica does a fabulous job with getting information out on social media but um I think I would like to see this with board um agreement that this be something that we put in as a

234board workshop and really spend some time looking at what is a comprehensive communication plan that can Target all of those moving parts and I don't think it's something that we can do um you know in the next two weeks I I I really think it's going to take a lot of uh I didn't think it was going to be for next Bo meeting but yeah for and I'm going to need a lot of Education too I think this is going to be something we all need to do some research on so if we could um bring bring this up as a workshop topic and certainly get some board member participation to help steers Us in the right direction and I think we have some people that have some expertise in that area so that would

235be great and we we set our board Workshop talk for next year in August or July July in July um so uh put this down in your little note paper that we already have a topic and we'll we'll select the month and the Liaisons at our July meeting Caitlyn does that meet your need yeah I think my only concern is that um in the next few months we're going to be doing some of that Outreach like for our lcap and that Equity statement and I just want to make sure that we're we're ensuring that all groups are being equitably represented um I don't want anybody to feel like anybody's being unheard you know whether it be from one end of the spect to the other so that's just my only concern about that timeline I

236mean that yes that would be great to to do that I just I'm a little bit concerned about sooner than later there isn't a statistical significant way to do it without quite a bit of planning I know I get that I just wanted to put the issue on the table Yeah so the lcap is already in its draft form coming forward so there um the changes that would take place at that now would be at the board meetings coming forward um so I don't know that it would play a big part there it certainly will play a part in um getting the equity statement developed so if any of the board members have some suggestions and expertise they want to shoot my way um shoot Jay's way we certainly are happy I mean Eric is

237really our communication expert as well but we um communicate with her so always open to ideas communication is one of those things that you can never do too much of um and it's never completely done and this is just a definitely well not just it's part of this is has come out of all the surveys that we've we've seen this year so it's that that quantitative data collection piece as well and I do know through some uh prior research that a district such as Oceanside for example does have a person who uh works on their team that is specifically working for parent engagement I don't know on on what level but it's worth looking back at that and seeing okay thank you okay any other suggestions are we to the um motion to adjourn yes

238will be adjourning to close session so moved uh I'll second the uh motion to adjourn all those in favor we're headed to close session we will announce any actions uh when we return and I'm going to throw something out there to the board um in checking with Jim there's really uh nothing new on the negotiations side so um that is not something that's urgent the next meeting there will be Theus that are coming forward so the negotiations part is wrapping up and then on the superintendent evaluation I still need to meet with Eileen and Tom uh to set a timeline and some goals for that so unless the board has a need to meet on their own I don't I do not have anything that we need to have close session for it looks like

239Kathy's you do okay Kathy let's we we want a a few minutes enclosed huh you were joking my my granddaughter says I am one of the most gullible people she has ever met you have just confirmed [Laughter] that