001hours in the day and this is an acknowledgement of that. Uh and then finally we have guidelines and limits on required staff meetings and evening events. I believe the staff meetings are limited to three per uh month is uh is what we agreed to for our education support professionals. Wages are going to increase by 4.25% 25% per year of the contract. Uh it's a it's a larger increase than for our licensed staff call back pay um which is a situation where say in one of our schools um I'm not wishing this happens next week. I hope it doesn't but an extreme cold a pipe could burst. We have to call a plumber who's off their shift to come in attend that get it cleaned up get it fixed. They've already gone home for the day.
002That's a situation where it's call back pay. This sets a minimum guarantee that if you are called back, you will be paid for three hours. So, it takes an hour and a half to fix that pipe. You're still getting three hours recognizing you were home. You were getting ready to have dinner with your family. We changed your plans. Thank you for coming in. for working conditions. Uh the CBA will require some common SOPs to be developed department by department to ensure employees have clarity around departmental procedures, how to procure items that are needed uh say for custodial ordering procedures or things like that. Uh enhanced access or increased access to professional development for our teaching assistants. We will begin instituting paid 15minute breaks for our hourly employees. Um, and I think about with the weather
003coming in, how hard our custodians and building services employees are probably going to be working on Monday uh to ensure that our schools are safe for students to come back. They're going to need that time. Duty-free meal breaks, ensuring that they have those duty-free meal breaks. clarity on the process for temporary promotions and what happens when a support employee is covering for a vacant position is in is within there and refers back to the schoolboard's policy. uh some information some procedures around HVAC standards for when workspaces uh offices are maybe too hot or too cold depending on the season what should happen what's the required response time uh provisions for allowing people to relocate within the building and finally uh an SOP for training for new hires for office associates and registars to ensure that
004our current staff aren't burdened with, okay, do all of your regular job and also teach him how to do everything. Um, this will really guarantee that they have a good onboarding experience with the appropriate people to make sure they know how to use their systems. Okay, so what is this all going to mean? What what effect is it going to have uh for employees? It's just nice to have the clarity on wages and benefits for uh for a defined period of time. Uh it's once we get the scales into the CBA like we'll you we'll be actually be able to look and see okay here's what I'll be making in uh two or three years according to the scale. Um and it that can help with financial planning a a great deal. There's some security
005built into that. Um the guidelines protecting planning time during the school day and the work life balance I think are uh key again particularly for our elementary teachers uh as well as like those workload relief days. Um and there's just I think like I said a greater acknowledgement of the um kind of the unique nature of a of a teacher's job. Um the child care benefits um are huge. Uh, I think it's great for like I I think this is like a family-friendly CBA. There's obviously the uh the paid parental leave is the big one. Uh, but also just the recognition of the difficulty in finding child care. Having the employee preference program for ED uh I think sends a message that this is a a a good place to be if you uh are
006if you have a young family or if you're thinking of starting a family and the enhancements to the leave programs uh like I said there was the obviously the parental leave but also the the bereavement leave that Dan mentioned um the floating leave day uh there's just and ability to take um personal leave and hourly increments. Uh again, there's just like a bigger um I think recognition of just kind of the the reality of employees lives and and the occasions on which they might have to take leave uh for uh from work. Um and this I think accounts for that for the division. uh believe all of these provisions help us enhance the retention of our employees when they look at the landscape of opportunities when they're thinking about their work life balance. This these
007provisions allow them to feel really good about what they have here. It's modernizing and enhancing pay and benefits for recruiting. Um, we have not finalized the salary scales for the next three years, but the draft I looked at today hints that uh by fiscal year 2029, our teachers uh at year 32 in the doctoral lane will be making six figures. And that puts us on par with Fairfax, Prince William, Lowden um and compensates teachers with what they deserve. This really coordinates uh employee needs that workload relief time with division initiatives. The datadriven instruction specifically that's a huge emphasis that I think we're going to hear about in a little bit that data analysis and workload relief days create time uh where teachers and administrators can really dive in and do that work and plan to
008take action on data. I feel this is one of the most important things. Uh it affirms that employees voices really matter and that they have a voice in problem solving through the various committees, the healthc care committee, work site meetings and the labor management committee. Also importantly, it brings consistency across work sites so that a teacher at one school knows that a teacher at every school has the same time, the same benefits, the same opportunities, the same access. And we save the most important obviously for last, the reason that we're here for students. In terms of the uh the licensed employee agreement, um you know, we've outlined several areas, several proposals that will help keep teachers being able to focus on what they are doing or going to do in the classroom. Um you know,
009the less time that they have to um spend in meetings or be grading or u all these other things uh that take time that are important but still take time. Um the more time you do those things, the less time you have to do uh be prepared for lessons. Um and so now I think we've taken some steps in the right direction. >> Can we pause you for just a second? There's a really strong gas up here. >> Um >> I was >> I think we should apologies, but I want to keep everyone safe. Do you think we should evacuate? >> I think we should evacuate. >> For those of you who are watching, just want like if you didn't hear what we just said, we are thinking we smell gas. So, we are just
010going to leave um until we uh get the building cleared. So, so the snow wasn't enough excitement for us. Um, we had to do that. So, thank you. I think the our first obligation is to keep everyone here safe. So, wanted to make sure there wasn't anything else. So, apologies, uh, Mr. Reading and Mr. Clolobachar. Um, please continue. Um this is such exciting news and we want to make sure you have enough time to share it. >> I just had two things left. The first is pointing out the the last impact uh positive impact on students and this is because of both the ESP and the licensed agreement. Uh we're all hoping this leads to higher retention because we know that higher retention leads to just overall better experiences and um more consistent academic achievement.
011And so we think this CBA is a a huge step in that direction. Second thing I'd like to say, the last thing is uh I've been um asked to announce the results of the ratification uh vote that was held over the last two days and I'm happy to report that both passed obviously uh but they passed overwhelmingly. uh 99.5% of licensed employees voted yes on the CBA, 97% voted yes on the ESP side and we had well over 50% participation um uh across the both bargaining units. So that is good news. Thank you. >> Congrats. >> Congratulations. >> And so with that we will turn it over for any questions or discussion. >> First of all I'm sorry. Go ahead, Owen. >> I have a question related to the um data analysis and workload relief
012days. What are we doing now? >> And I'm kind of afraid to hear the answer, but tell me anyway. >> Um currently, uh principles uh would have to allocate out of their own budgets any substitute release time that teachers would use. I was at Woodbrook. I want to say it was Monday. It might have been last week. Uh but I was at Woodbrook recently and they were doing one of their data analysis days and they'd relieved a grade level team to dive into one of the quarterly assessments and then use that data to plan. Um and I don't want to steal Miss Dr. Mclofflin's thunder on this. Sorry. Um but that right now that's kind of does the principal have the funding available and how they engage in that. This actually sets budget line items
013aside for every single school to be able to do this. >> Great. Thank you. Can we get some updates as this goes along of how that's working? >> Absolutely. I think we'll we'll see a lot of that in the um the different academic reporting that goes on over the course of the year. >> Um I would just like to say congratulations first of all. I know this has been a long time coming um years in the making. Um and so congratulations. We're really excited. Um I was wondering if we could bring the rest of the negotiating team up and I just was wondering if they would be willing to answer um some questions. I'm just curious. Um I know Tim, you're kind of the face of it, but you know, this was a little bit
014out of everyone's comfort zone. I feel like um negotiating such a big contract and a big deal. And I would just love to hear, you know, how the experience was for you and, you know, what you learned from it and and, uh, you know, kind of what you took out of it, um, being able to be a part of this. >> Hi everybody. I'm Maddie Levy. Um, I am a K teacher at career. Um, I'm also the secretary for the union. Something I learned um, over this process was patience. Um, definitely it was a long journey. There were a lot of late nights. I think it was a lot more work than we all bargain for, funnily enough. Um, I think it was a really interesting process in that like as a teacher, I got
015to see more of how the division thinks and how they make decisions. >> Um, which was really interesting and informative um, for me and I think for my colleagues as well. Um, it also felt like quite the opportunity and heavyweight to be representing all of my colleagues. Um, and I wanted to make sure that I did them justice and that their needs were met and I heard what they had to say and represented them well in our meetings. >> That's awesome. Yeah. Anybody else? >> Want me to go? >> Evening. Uh, my name is Adam Florence. Uh I'm a bus driver for transportation and I also will be in a plow this weekend. >> Well, thank you very much. >> Uh there's that. Uh for me, you know, I've lived in this community my whole
016life. I grew up here. My parents went to school in this very building. And you know, if if the story they tell me is true, they got suspended for making out right up there. Uh so it's it's been a real honor for me just to play a small little role. Um when I started this I didn't know anything about the process and at this point I still only know a very small amount. Um but I'm honored to be here. I was honored to be a part of it uh just to make my little mark. So thank you. >> That's great. >> Thank you. >> My name is Jayla Crane. I am a school counselor at Montichello. Go Mustangs. Um, we're very well represented as we should be. So, I had obviously like everybody else, I
017had no clue what to expect. Um, but I knew that I kind of paused when they asked me to be part of it and I had to think like what am I going to bring to this? And what I knew was that I spend I literally get paid to advocate for people and things and I spend a lot of my time trying to find common grounds whether it's between students and their teachers, families, and what we do. So, like I thought that I at least had some skills that I could bring um if they were needed, but they really weren't. And I thought it was really cool that um everybody you're coming at it from different sides and you have different not priorities, but just different ways that you do um prioritize things and what's
018important for you. Um but everybody um was very like thoughtful in what they were doing and and the way that it was approached that yes, we have different um things that we would like to have happen, different experiences, different things that we would like. I think everybody approached it um with openness and not a lot of people can say that that happens um in this scenario. And so I think that that was by far one of the things that I took away the most. And I would echo what Maddie said. It was really difficult to kind of have the idea of I'm representing people because um it's I'm a licensed staff member but I'm not in a classroom. >> Um and I never want to take away that classroom experience and the value of it.
019Um but I do obviously want to advocate for those people but and also the the folks like me that are not exactly in classrooms but have a big role in what goes on with our students. And so being a school counselor, speaking for a whole lot of us um at very different levels, that was a little nerve-wracking um at times. That's it. >> Thank you. >> I am D. Curry. I am an alumni of Monach. So I am going to say go Mustangs. >> Wow. >> But um I am a teachers assistant at Henley where I know Miss Spellelman's son. Um so I wrote some stuff down because I ain't gonna say much. tired. Um, >> excuse me. Can you bring the why don't could you bring the mic down? Thank you. >> So, um,
020tired days and I felt like it wouldn't come to an end. Um, like everybody else said, I don't have any experience, but I am a teacher's assistant. Um, I felt like I fought for what I think the TAs wanted, especially across the county. Um, and um, it that it was a give or take. um you know, you got to give some and take stuff away. Um it wasn't always easy and walked out of there some days feeling defeated like we didn't get what we wanted, but in the end we did. So yeah, >> thank you and thank you for everything you do for Lee. >> Hello, my name is Timothy Walker. Um I'm a custodian at Gree Elementary School. And what I take from this is when I first came aboard this, I really didn't
021know nothing at all. and to have a team like this to bring me aboard and just show me what to do and learn and listen. I took a lot of pride in that and it was great. I learned a lot from them and from Dan and his crew and I understand a whole lot more situational of the Almar County what their burdens are and I also hope they understand what our burdens are too. So, it was a pleasure. I can't wait to be started all over again. at least one of us. >> That was amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that and for your sacrifice. And I think all of us can relate to the feeling of representing a large group of people and feeling the weight of that and making sure that you're
022doing it justice. So, um I think on behalf of all of us, we just want to say thank you for the hours and the work that you put in. And obviously, we have a wide range of jobs represented. Um and it sounds like you did it really well. So, thank you very much. >> Other questions or comments? >> Yeah, just wanted to say thanks to Dan and your team as well. I I'm thinking back 29 years when I was teacher and coach at Almora High School and our third child was born and I got no time off. So, the fact that we're one of the few school divisions now that are offering six weeks of parental leave is really, really exciting to me. So, thank you for that that energy. I also want to thank
023Tim and and the rest of the team, Mary and others, uh, for the hard work that you put in. Um, some of which fair amount of which was unpaid. >> Um, and I I want to go on record to say, you know, I come from a a teachers background and I would advocate um for a larger wage increase for teachers. Honestly, um I would hope and and I may be speaking uh just on my own uh that we would grant teachers the 4% wage increase that um I think you all deserve. Um I know that Charlottesville teachers are getting a 5 and a half% wage increase. Um, and the ESP employees at at Charlottesville are getting a 9% uh wage increase. So, if we are in a competitive situation, in a recruiting situation, for example,
024it's tough to to compete with a division that's paying significantly more to both teachers and ESP. So, I've I expressed that uh perspective. Um, and I realize I'm coming into, to use the baseball analogy, coming into the game in the ninth inning, um, uh, not knowing everything that's been discussed. Um, so I I just toss that out there as consideration that I believe you all have been behind in terms of compensation for a very long time, even before I started teaching in 1990. Um, so again, thank you for the work that you've put in to this CBA, but also the work that you do every day. So I appreciate that. >> Other comments? >> I guess I have a question. I mean, as some of you know, I was initially reluctant to support um not
025collective bargaining generally, but because the legislation at the state level really stunk. Um it it gave no every all the guidelines were stripped out, which is why it took 18 months before you could agree to start agreeing. Um, and now I know there's several versions of collective bargaining legislation in in Richmond and something's going to get passed and I'm just wondering how do you have you looked at that? uh and how do you uh feel about I mean and there it's not clear what will be grandfathered or not and so the timing is um odd but >> I I have those concerns. We're definitely watching to see any legislation that comes out and whether that would trigger anything that could potentially require the school board to revise their resolution or require us to go back
026to negotiations with the union around either agreement. Um, we'll have to keep an eye because there are several versions and we don't know what direction the legislature will take uh and what any any final bill that becomes law would look like. Um but I mean if if that is what's required certainly we would go back to the table and make sure that our uh CBAs are compliant with the law. >> I don't know if you want to comment. >> I am u just wondering why the difference in wages between licensed staff and ESP. >> I can I can take that. Yeah. Um yeah, when we uh our initial proposals had um both bargaining units with uh equal um equal amounts in terms of an increase and that was mostly because that was that's kind of
027been the standard uh for a long time. But we always felt and we always had kind of had this in the back of our minds that, you know, as we got closer to settling on just an overall compensation package that we would want to actually have our ESPs uh get a bigger increase largely because they're our most underpaid employees and we feel that they deserve more. Um and so there there wasn't really there was no hesitation on the on the part of anyone on the on the team um when it came time to make that decision. And so uh I think as we were trading numbers towards the end, you know, our last several counter proposals included um higher uh increases for ESP versus licensed. And yeah, that's that's something we would we would do
028again. Any other questions or comments? >> If if I may, I'm also wondering what what happens if we have a great recession like in ' 09 again and we you know in the next three years the economy tanks and what do we do then? So the board's resolution has a provision in it that should there not be available funding to meet the requirements of the CBA, it would force the parties to go back to the negotiation table and make changes that the budget can bear. So that would be another uh time when we would have to come back together and revise the agreement and it would probably trigger I believe another ratification election and another board approval as part of that. >> Right. that that provision recognizes that we as a body have no revenue
029generating or authority. So we are completely dependent upon the county and um and how much money there is. Other questions or comments? Miss Osborne, you were here from the beginning. I thought maybe you would want to say anything about No. >> I'm just glad we're at the end. Um, so yeah, I mean I think that was the one thing I wanted to say is I I joined the board as this was coming to a vote um to even have a discussion about a discussion um and then was able to join Miss Osborne kind of on the resolution team um and then um and been watching this um with anticipation and I mean I would just say in my wildest dreams I never would have been able to come up with the extensive selection of things
030that you came up with um that support. You know, one of the things I always say to people who don't understand education is we have people anywhere from 18 to probably Dan, I don't know if we have anyone at 80, but in some school districts you have people, you know, and so how do you have a resolution that supports all those different um places someone is in their lifespan? Um, and I honestly think you guys did it. So, I mean, a huge thank you to to everyone who supported this um who spent long hours um tough hours in those hard conversations um to get to this point, and I honestly think um we're one of the best examples um for the state in this. So, thank you. >> It's also um it doesn't go unnoticed
031that all of everything that is in this uh agreement is stuff that you guys should have had long time ago anyway. So, I'm not really sure why took this long to get it in writing. >> So, thank you. Do you want to just remind everyone of the next step? >> Yeah, happily. Thank you. Um, so the board will hear this again on February 5th and uh at that time you'll have the opportunity to vote to approve it. Should the board vote to approve, this would be in effect beginning July 1. It's the 5th. It's a special meeting. >> Sorry. >> Did I get the wrong day? >> Uh, it's Thursday at 4. The the meeting he refers to is Thursday, December 5th. >> February. >> I'm sorry. Wow. December. Um, >> it's the gasing test.
032Um, it is Thursday, February 5th at 400 pm. It's a special meeting um to to do the vote on this. So, seeing no, thank you again, I feel like we should do a >> Sorry. Round of applause. Okay. No. Okay. >> I was think um we uh any other anything else? I think the next um thing on our agenda is a 10-minute break. >> Um Dr. Dr. Bernland, I just to make a note real quick. First of all, that was awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Um, the second thing is they're still filling the tank in the back. So, that's why the the gas smell uh hasn't stopped. Um, so I just want to give you a heads up that's what's going on. It's it's not continuing to leak at this point. So, >> thank
033you very much. Um, the next thing on our agenda is a 10-minute break. Um, I am looking at my colleagues. >> Charge ahead. >> Yep. Charge ahead. >> Yeah. Yep. Okay. Charge ahead. Um so uh uh item 9.0 um is our division work session and that um today is our midyear data review um by um Dr. Paclin Mclofflin um assistant superintendent for strategic planning and many many other people who I know are here to support this conversation. >> Yes. Good evening. Thank you uh uh Chair Berlin. Uh my name is Pat Mclofflin. I'm assistant superintendent for strategic planning. Uh, and I'm here tonight to give you an update on our midyear data review. As you alluded to, usually I'm flying solo, but I bought plenty of friends with me tonight to uh to come up
034and uh and help this work. So, we always start by taking a look at our vision, mission, values, and goals. And as we get into tonight's presentation, I really want to point your attention toward our mission. Uh the first statement, the first sentence of which states that working together as a team, we will end the predictive value of race, class, gender, and special capacities for our children's success through highquality teaching and learning for all. When I read that, I always think about our achievement gaps. And the and the reason that's in there is because one of our primary goals is to close those achievement gaps. One of the uh most significant metrics of whether we are doing that or not uh is our endofear so testing. And so tonight I want to update the board
035on our mid-year progress uh toward the end of the year with our spring testing and also take the time to highlight and celebrate some of the effective practices that are taking place within our schools. So just to uh to give a little bit of an overview uh within the division we have well there's more than this but three primary ways that we monitor our work. One are our quarterly assessments which we administer to pretty much all students in grades three through eight and then select students in high school uh based on the the course enrollments uh that they have. And we do that in October and December and March at the end of each quarter. Uh we also give our Val assessment to uh our students in kindergarten through 8th grade which is an uh
036an extension uh this year of those grade levels uh in September, January and April. And we have the Virginia growth assessment that uh takes place in October and then again in January. And I put these three up here because what we'll look at tonight is one data point and that's our quarterly assessments. Uh, and as we get that in, we try to look for consistencies or inconsistencies between those quarterly assessments and our Val's uh, literacy assessments and our Virginia growth assessments uh, in math and reading and see if they are aligning or if they're telling us something different because that might change uh, the way we focus our attention. So tonight we're going to focus on our quarterly assessments. Uh and specifically we're going to look at the results from students u who took the
037reading test in grades 3 through 8 and grades 11. Uh the math test in grades 3 through 8 plus algebra 1, geometry and algebra 2 and our science tests in grades 5 8 in biology. We chose those grade levels because those are typically the uh the grades that impact our uh performance framework uh what we used to call our accreditation uh in the school division. uh with other grade levels not having a a test that that impacts those. And just to go over a couple of of key terms, our quarterly assessments are generally assessments that we have built inhouse that align to our pacing guide or assessments that come with uh some of the resources that we have adopted. For example, HMH uh we use primarily their unit assessments. Uh KDUm is our new math
038program and we use KDUm assessments uh for that. uh but we we build our quarterly assessments specifically around our pacing guides so that when we give them in October and in u uh December and in March uh we should have been through all of the material that is on them. Uh the so I think most people are aware of is our our end ofear testing uh that gets reported up for the framework uh the performance framework and also gives us some comparators between other districts and the state. Uh and we'll take a look at the state average. That's one of the one of the metrics we use is that we always want to be we want to be as much as we can above the state average for um for all of our testing and
039all of our groups. And the final piece that I'll uh I'll touch b uh discuss briefly is a group called gap group one. Uh our primary some of our biggest gaps that we see and our most persistent gaps are for our black students, our students with disabilities and our economically disadvantaged students. Uh our economically disadvantaged students uh are that is a protected um category uh of student. We don't really get to know who those folks are. there's very few people in the division who have access to that information. So in order to give us a uh a decent um estimation of where uh those students are, we use what the state used to call gap group one, which includes any student who is economically economically disadvantaged, uh an English learner andor a student with an
040IEP. Uh so when you see gap group one, that's our kind of our best estimation at economically disadvantaged. So tonight we'll review our science, math, and reading data. Uh we'll hear from schools uh to celebrate some of the successes that they've had so far and then we'll respond to any questions from the board. Uh I'll be able to take any questions about the data itself. Uh Dr. Hayes from the department of instruction uh has some of her staff here to answer any questions specifically about the uh our instructional program. And then our um our guest tonight from uh from Woodbrook and Jouri and Mountain View. I'm sure be happy to uh to talk with you about their work. So let's get into it. Uh the first uh category we'll look at is science and that
041is uh grades 5, 8, and biology combined. And I'm going to take a little bit of extra time just on this first slide to kind of explain what we're looking at and uh and how we're looking at this. So the uh the blue bars on your slide are results from the 2425 school year. Uh Q1 are the results from the first quarter uh division assessment. Q2 the second quarter division assessment. The so is the division average uh that we that we ended up with at the end of last year and then the state uh designator is the average for the state last year. Uh on the purple bars uh the same categories but for our current school year and those stop after uh the second quarter. I want to be clear that that we are
042not at the point where we can say these are predictive uh right now. So, if we see that our quarter 2 was uh was five points lower than where we ended up with the so, we can't guarantee that based on this year's quarter 2, we're going to be five points uh higher than that. But we use this data to see if we're moving in the right direction. Uh and the way we help to determine if we're moving in the right direction is to do two things. To compare our results this year at the end of the second quarter to our results last year at the end of the second quarter. and then also to look at how we grew between quarters one and quarter two. So as an example in this slide uh you're going
043to see and this is a trend for science and our membership groups that at the end of the second quarter we were at uh 62.3% of students reaching a score that we consider passing uh on the quarterly assessment. Last year we were at 70.1% uh of students who hit that target. So this year we're 7.8% 8% lower. When we look at growth for science, we grew 15.1% uh more this year than we did last year. And we calculate that by looking at our growth from quarter 1, 48.9 to quarter 2, 62.3 compared to the growth from last year, which was actually a slight reduction from quarter 1 to quarter 2. So for science, the trend that you're going to see with all of our groups is that we are a bit lower uh at the
044second quarter than we were uh last year, but we're growing at a higher rate. If that higher rate of growth continues, we would anticipate that we're going to have a higher result. Uh but again, we we can't say that with certainty. As I mentioned before, there are three uh groups that we were going to look at in particular. These are the results for our black students in science. uh they were three and a half% lower than we were last year, but grew 19.9% more uh than the previous year. For our students with disabilities, we're 2 and a half point lower and grew 15.8% more than last year from quarter to quarter. And our final numbers for science uh looks at gap group one and they're 12% 12.4% 4% lower and grew 8.7% more. One other
045thing that I wanted to uh to highlight with you is that we've got some schools who are who are beating the average uh in growth for us in the division. And I think it's it's appropriate to celebrate their work. So when we look at these slides, you'll see our division growth rate. So uh we grew from quarter 1 to quarter 2 11.3% for our black students in science. Uh but Burley, Walton, Albamarl, Montichello, and Jurni beat that. Uh with Journey growing 33% uh uh so you're seeing a 33% improvement in pass rates for black students from quarter 1 to quarter 2. I think that's tremendous and that's one of the reason their science teachers, their eighth grade science teachers are here tonight to uh to talk with us. Uh in special education uh the division
046grew 7.7% and we had Albamarl, Burley, Henley, Western, Lakeside, Montichello, and Jouri uh again leading the pack uh with 31.2% growth. You might notice that we don't see any elementary schools uh on these. One of the reasons is because it looks at a single grade level uh and we set an end number of 15. And if there's not 15 or more uh students in that category in the fifth grade at those elementary schools, uh they could be identified uh if we put their information up here. So we have some elementary schools that are growing, but we couldn't uh include that. You will see some elementary schools in gap group one because that's a broader um category for science and they uh as a division we grew 7.2% uh with Walton, Western, Brownsville, Henley, Albam, Marlar,
047Burley, Lakeside, Holly, Jurnney, and Montichello. uh uh growing uh above that average. Uh I want to point out that Journey uh is at the top or almost at the top uh in all three of these categories. I think that's something to really be celebrated with them. And Montichello's growth rate of 32% uh I think is uh a great place to be. So when we look at our reading data, you're going to see a bit of a different trend that for the uh for for our overall data and for all of our student groups, we are performing at a higher rate than we were in uh the previous school year. And we're growing more for all students. That's 4.9% higher uh with a uh and growing 1.1% more for our black students. We're 9.1% higher than
048last year and we grew 3.8% 8% more. For our students with disabilities, we're 10.8% higher and grew 5.8% more. And for our gap group one students, we are 10.8% higher and grew 5.1% more. We also have some schools to celebrate here as a division. Uh, black students in reading grew by 1% from first quarter to second quarter. Uh but Albamarl, Cros, Montichello, Stone Robinson, Greer, Baker, Butler, and Woodbrook uh beat that average in that that Woodbrook number I think is really one to celebrate at 21.3% improvement quarter 1 over quarter 2. Uh that's one of the reasons our Woodbrook team is here tonight. Uh for students with disabilities, the division had a 4.1% uh growth rate uh with Journey, Stony Point, Albamaral, Mountain View, Brownsville, Ivy, and Crosse uh coming in higher. and Crosse leading
049the pack. And finally, uh, for our gap group one students, we had a 1.2, uh, rate of growth. Stony Point, Greer, Red Hill, Mountain View, Albamarl, Western, Woodbrook, Brownsville, Ivy, Baker, Butler, Crosse, and Brouswood all beating that average. And then the last set of data we'll take a look at is math, which is our third through 8th grade, uh, algebra 1, geometry, and algebra 2. You'll see again that we have a uh the trend is similar to what we saw with reading with our uh our quarter 2 results higher than the year before and our growth rates higher than the year before. Uh so for over overall our students grew 7 point came in 7.1% higher than last year and grew 5.3% more. Our black students grew 7.6 came in 7.6% higher and grew 7.4%
050more. Our students with disabilities were 6.1% higher and grew 2.6% more. And our gap group one students were 9% higher and grew 6.1% more. Our schools to celebrate in this category include Montichello, Albamarl, Woodbrook, Greer, and Cros for our black students. Stony Point, Baker, Butler, Holly, Red Hill, Agner, Ivy, Woodbrook, Brownsville, Montichello, Albamarl, Community Lab, and Greer for our special education students. And take a look at that Greer number. 33.3 uh% increase. That's uh that's a I think a great celebration uh for the folks at Greer. And finally, our math numbers. We had Western Burley, I'm sorry, our gap group one uh numbers. Western, Burley, Crosseé, Agnar, Woodbrook, Albamarl, Community Lab, Montichello, Ivy, Brownsville, and Greer. Uh, with Greer again uh at the top of that um uh performance increase with 27.2%. So, uh there
051is um uh certainly more work to do uh with all of this. The the reason we use these assessments is because they are formative and they uh and they serve to help us target uh our focus for the third quarter and then after the third quarter, for the fourth quarter as we lead up to the end of the year. Uh but one thing we wanted to do tonight in addition to just sharing the data with you was tell some of our stories uh about what is working in our schools. And the the first story that we want to tell is from Journey Middle School and with their eighth grade science results. Uh tonight we have Denine Lily and Steve Whitaker here uh who are their science 8 teachers uh along with Ashby Johnson who's the
052principal and uh just to highlight a couple of things with Journey Science uh they had a 25% pass rate uh 25% higher pass rate in science from quarter 1 to quarter 2 and I think had the second highest in the division which uh is not a place that the journey often finds itself uh there. Um oh that was my got ahead of myself. Uh they improved black student performance uh 31%, students with disabilities 31% and gap group one performance 25%. Uh and I'm going to turn it over now to Steve and Denine. >> Hi, I'm Steve. >> I'm Denine. >> We're eighth grade science teachers journey. I'm also the lead science teacher at the school. So thanks for letting us talk to you for a couple of minutes. We got lucky uh in a lot
053of ways, not with the data because that's really our students that we're celebrating and not something that we're doing, but we got lucky with a relationship that we were able to form pretty early on. These are a few things that Denine and I talked about this week as ways that we can encourage our students to do better and maybe feel more comfortable in our classrooms than in some other classrooms. We are both big believers in building strong relationships with our students from day one and getting to know each of the students individually so that they feel comfortable taking academic risks in our class. When they come into our room every day, they know that we have a very strong structure and expectations. They read the board. They do a do now warm-up exercise and they
054get into the academic mindset just about as soon as they come into the classroom. And we reinforce that on a day-to-day basis as the year goes on. So by about now, we feel like they're starting to get those habits mid year and they can come in and get to science instead of dealing with some of the overhead that goes with just getting into that academic frame of mind. We have clear expectations. Our classroom management is, I would argue, fairly strong, but very consistent. We're different people, but have very similar beliefs in a lot of ways about what a classroom should look like. Um, but students are also given the gift of two very different teachers, two different personalities. And I think that's something that's that's really um hard to overstate. Our school gives students quiet
055study time twice or three times a week. That's time during home room where they can come and ask content area teachers for some one-on-one support, remediation, reworking quizzes. Um and they come to do that with us. Specifically with our learning checks, our quizzes, they can come and work with us on a second or third attempt. And in those attempts, they're allowed to ask us questions. We can push and probe and find out what the weak points are. So, it's it's really individual remediation for areas that are tricky for some of our students. And I think we're both feeling really good about the number of students who typically aren't represented in that kind of remediation being a little more vocal and being more of their own agents this year to to ask for some academic help.
056Um, we also use something an AVID strategy and wicker strategy is called total physical response where we'll give students four or five key vocabulary words with every unit and give them gestures that go with them. So this might be density, a way to talk about how tightly packed something is. And what's encouraging to us is as students are taking our learning checks or our end of unit assessments, we'll see them make those gestures to themselves. And so it's a nice way to get those things to stick into their heads. We also uh do something that we're lucky enough to be able to do, which is co-e. And we fully co-e. We combine classes from time to time. So, we'll be in one of our two classrooms with upwards of 40 45 students with one of
057usually taking the lead in teaching and the second doing the logistics, the one-on-one support, putting out fires, taking kids to the bathroom who need that. Um, like I said a minute ago, they have two trusted adults. We can leverage that teamwork by creating flexible grouping. So, there are some weeks where I will take groups of students into my room who need remediation. Denine will work with students who seem to have it and can do some enrichment. Um, I mentioned that we've got two very different teaching styles, but I think they're really compatible. And and like I said, we got lucky. We we struck up a friendship that's built a lot on mutual respect, but we also have a lot of fun when we're together. And I think it's great for the students to see a
058positive, professional, but fun adult relationship. There's one more thing that we do that I want that Denine's going to talk about because she's really the person that that developed this. So about a year and a half ago, we met with Chris Gilman, who is the god of data, and we said, um, >> our kids know the content and they're not doing well on tests, so it's we don't know what to do. And he said, one of the big things is having them be able to figure out what a question is asking them. So Steve and I developed attack that test uh one two ready and it is basically read it one time read it a second time rephrase the question and sometimes we even have a contest saying get it to as few words as
059possible how can you really hone in on what this question is asking examine graphs and tables. See what they're showing us. Analyze your choices. Decide which answers to eliminate. And then you've got this. You've got to go in confident. And so we've given you a copy of the one two ready system and on the back is a sample question. So at the start of the year we would go through this. It would take about 20 minutes that we would do this together and we would read it and we'd check the box and we would read it a second time and so on and so forth. And at this point now we can say you have a one two ready today. Pick it up and do it. And then we do go over it still of
060course but they're more confident with looking at these questions. And it's also a way for us to review sixth and seventh grade material. So that's it. >> Yeah. Thanks for letting us talk to you. If you got questions, let us know. We'd invite you to come visit us in our classroom whenever you >> guys did a great job. >> So a second success story that we want to highlight tonight is the work that uh Woodbrook Elementary is doing with its reading specialists. Uh and tonight we've got Jana Gatlin, a reading specialist at Woodbrook. uh Andrea Blount, who's our intervention and title one coordinator, and Christy Isaiah, who is the principal at Woodbrook. And I've had the the opportunity to um to spend a lot of time working with Christie this year and to see the
061evolution uh of the reading specialist role there that really has been um reimagined in a positive way. Uh one of the some of the results that they're seeing, I think largely because of this, compared to last year at midyear, their reading scores are 11.3% higher. Their black student reading scores are 18.5% higher. GAP group one is 8.7% higher. And so I'm going to turn things over uh at this time to Jana and Christie. >> Good evening, Chair Berlin, Dr. Hos, and board members. We are excited to be here at Woodbrook. Um we rethought reading intervention and what it may look like. So, an ideal instructional model should look like the majority of your students are being successful with their tier one instruction and smaller groups of students may require targeted intervention. At Woodbrook, however, that
062has not been our reality for the last couple of years and it is just looked different. A large percentage of our students have required reading intervention which signaled that our existing approach was not producing the outcomes our students needed. So, as an administration team during the summer, we thought, what could we do that needs to be something different? And it became clear that we could not continue to do the things we've always done. So, we thought outside of the box and we kind of worked with um Andrea Blunt and also Karen um who are ex who are just perfect. Uh they're just great to work with. But, um we worked with them to kind of think of what could we do that may look different that might help um our students. And so we shifted
063our instructional approach and changed how our reading and reading uh specialists work in the classroom. So instead of working across multiple grade levels and primarily outside of the classroom, each reading interventionist is now in partnership with a grade level. So we have enough reading interventionist that they're assigned to kindergarten and first all the way up to fifth grade. and they're embedded members of that grade level community versus working in a silo and kind of doing reading intervention over here, but in the classroom we have reading and it just wasn't merging for the students. So we have seen some success and we're excited to see that instructional shift combined with the usage of and implementation of our HMH reading curriculum and also our data meetings that we are also um focusing on um datadriven um experiences
064and I also have Jana who will is one of our reading specialists and she will come and give her perspective at from the instructional shift. >> Thank you Christie. Um good evening chair Merlin, Dr. Hos and board members. Like she said, my name is Jana Gatlin and I'm part of the reading team of six at Woodbrook Elementary. Um I'm here to celebrate our reading gains and highlight one of those key shifts that contributed to the um progress. Dr. Louisa Moes, a literacy expert researching, writing about, and advocating for science-based reading instruction for over 50 years, says teaching reading is rocket science. Although we're not rocket scientists, we have a deep understanding of the complexity involved in teaching students how to read, particularly the ones in our building. This year, our role as reading specialists had
065shifted from to focus on greater instructional impact by coach coaching and co-eing with classroom teachers, using data to guide instruction decisions, and strengthening core instruction so that fewer students require intensive intervention. So, we made the shift for several reasons. There was little connection to tier one instruction and what students were doing. We couldn't see how our students were were performing in the classroom. We lost a lot of instructional time collecting the data we needed to make instructional decisions. Um, you throw in some progress monitoring in a snow day and you could lose a week of instruction easily. Uh there were not enough reading specialists like Christy said to serve the high number of needs in our building with the traditional pullout model. So we turned to reading science for answers. And we know that the
066reading science tells us that strong tier one instruction is the most effective way to improve reading outcomes. Reading science also tells us that um reading specialists supporting classroom instruction reduces the need for intensive intervention later. So our observations and combined with the reading science convinced us to shift from a pull out intervention model to a pushin instructional model. With this new model, it allows us to push into classrooms to uh support core reading instruction. One day we may be co-eing HMH and the next day we may be pushing in to lead a small flexible group. It also allows us to model evidence-based literacy practices aligned to the science of reading and allows us to collaborate with our amazing teachers during instruction PLC's and data meetings so we can use that data to instruct instruction and
067target support um early. I'd love to share several reasons why this model has worked well for us. We found that it strengthens our instruction for all students, not just a few. Um, it helps us to see students in a variety of settings. We're mo more knowledgeable about both their strengths and their weaknesses. We may be working with a poor reader, but they're an amazing artist or athlete in other ways. Um, I recently had a a team member I was able to observe a team member team member being a worm demander and saying, "I've seen you do this in the classroom. I know you can do it here." Um, this new model has helped us build teacher capacity through modeling and coaching and it offers opportunities for co-eing. We know the terms they're using and we
068can use that to align our intervention with theirs. Um, it helps build trust and safety um, with our teachers around a common goal. Um, it also makes tier one and tier 2 interventions more um, effective because fewer students need that intervention. And we can offer continuity and reinforcement of those skills they're already learning. And it keeps students engaged in core instruction while receiving the support they need. It allows for real time reteing opportunities and scaffolding. Before I conclude, I'd like to highlight the impact these changes have made at Woodbrook. Um it's um improved reading achievement 22.7% higher than last year. We are ecstatic. This is the first time in years our numbers have trended up. Let's just let that sink into a little earlier identification of students needs. There's more eyes and ears out there
069and so we see those needs earlier and quicker in the year. there's a more sustainable uh schoolwide literacy growth and um we have contribution to PLC's. There's an awareness of those data pieces and there's accountability. I think my favorite um shift and most great impact is a mindset shift from this is my student or this is your job to what does this student need and how do we get it to them. Overall, we're excited about the improvements we've seen so far. We'll continue to refine our roles as reading specialists in ways that directly improve student outcomes. Our work is focused, intentional, and grounded in evidence because reading is a gateway skill that makes all future learning possible. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Can ask a quick question. >> Would would you like us to
070to hold questions? >> I think if we could hold We've got just one more and then um if we could hold them to the end, I think that'd be great. Yep. So, our um our final success story that we uh that we wanted to highlight is some work that's taking place at Mountain View Elementary School. Uh about a year ago, we had a a group of of schools primarily from our urban ring who was able to attend a workshop with the the Darden School Partnership for Leadership and Education. Uh and it was led by a gentleman named Paul Bamber Santoo who uh is has written a book called Driven by Data 2.0. And it was a two-day workshop on uh data-driven instruction. And every principal that was there walked out saying this is going to
071be a gamecher uh for us in our schools and many of them are are implementing on a on a small scale this year. Uh but Dr. Canard uh and his team at Mountain View said we're going to jump in with both feet uh with this. and uh he created a couple positions for Katie Gford and Sarah Kim uh that are unique to Mountain View. Uh they are the Mountain View math and reading curriculum specialists. Uh and they are really helping him be a pioneer in data-driven instruction. Uh compared to last year at midyear, their reading scores are up 15.6%. Uh their uh reading scores for their black students are 9.7% higher. students with disabilities 27.5% higher and gap group one students are 17.1% higher. Uh and I'll uh turn things over now uh to to
072Seth, Katie, and Sarah. >> Good evening everyone. Uh Chair Berlin, Dr. Hos, members of the board. Thank you for taking a moment to hear about the work we are doing at Mountain View. So last year we ended the school year realizing we had a few challenges we had yet to overcome. Um the first one was the everchanging state standards including the updates to ELA and math standards in 23 and 24 were complex. They affected different grades in different ways and as standards changed curriculum didn't necessarily change with it. So the expectation was that teachers would understand every single change in a standard and alter their instruction. At the same time, they're adopting HMH, which is an amazing curricular resource, but it is a deep resource and year three, we are still finding amazing components within
073it. Preparing to also adopt a new math curriculum, KDUm was overwhelming. We also look at a school population with a lot of transiency. Um, I looked last year at our data at Mountain View, and found of our students that did not pass one of our math tests, 70% of them were with us less than 18 months. We were having students come to us with higher levels of need than we were used to. And with that requires more planning, more in-depth preparation for lessons and more data analysis. And we were doing a lot of data analysis. We were testing and testing testing whether it be at the division level, whether it be the unit tests in H.M.H, the state so test. We weren't quite sure with what to do with all the data. We were sharing
074it with teachers but making the assumptions that in addition to learning a new curriculum and keeping track of all the changing standards we also knew how to disagregate this data and make instructional decisions. So after attending driven by data with Pat and a bunch of principles, I came back and discussed with my assistant principles what we can do. Looking at our solutions, we came up with the idea of building based curriculum specialists. And this is based on data. Um, and the data tells us that having an expert within your building, not only with the subject matter, but the resources you use to teach that subject matter in addition to the standards of the state that is readily available for teachers who can do model lessons and partner with teachers, walk in the classroom and say,
075"Let me show you how to do that." Or do you want me to watch your instruction and answer questions right away about is there anything in HMH that can help me retach this? Are there any stories for fifth graders that are fifth grade interest level but still teach those early phonics skills? To have those answers right away is impactful. So we created these positions through some creative staffing. And the idea was when we look at the learning curve, which is more of a cliff when it comes to adopting new curriculum, how can we help teachers get over that and the support necessary? So the positions that we created were ones where we expected someone to be an expert in the SOS as they change to be an expert in the curricular resources and the supplemental
076resources because no curriculum is perfect. Um to help organize and to aggregate data and help lead those driven by data PLC's alongside me. One of the challenges when we have data coming in is to organize it in a way to look for patterns. So when we sit down as a group, we can make decisions based on patterns that have already emerged and not take that time to start segregating and pulling up with patterns. We enter these things with that data ready to go because of these positions. These folks also conduct model lessons in addition to being experts in these things. They are amazing teachers. And finally, they coordinate with division level staff as part of our 90-day planning process and curriculum development as we take on KDUm and we refine and work with HMH. So
077to give you some concrete examples of things they have done, I'm proud to introduce Katie and Sarah. >> Hi, I'm Katie Gford and I'm the math specialist at Mountain View. When Sarah and I collaborate, we start with the PLC process. You can see from the graphic that it encompasses three specific sections of our PLC. We first start with previewing and previewing the beginning of the unit and also the assessment. On your screen, you could see an example of what it looks like when we previewed the unit five coming up in KDUm for first grade. The thing that we start with is always grounding our work in the standards. We read the instructional guide provided by the VDOE and we take note of any important vocabulary that we read and also essential skills that our students
078need to learn throughout this unit. After we discuss that document, we go to opening the assessment that is provided either by Kdum or that has been made by the county through the CAT team and we look through that assessment to see does this assessment match the skills that the state is asking us to teach and then that we need to measure. You can see here that we have highlighted for this unit in KDUm, it only teaches numbers up to 99, but our standards actually ask us to teach numbers to 120. So that alerts our teachers that we not only need to teach the stu the information in KDUM but we also need to supplement up to 120. So now we can have discussions as we're planning to how we can use the KDUm resource but
079also use other provided resources from VDOE and other places right then and there in our PLC meetings to guide teachers in their instruction. Following our unit previews, Katie and I model and co-e lessons in classrooms. Our proximity in the building allows us to respond immediately to the instructional needs of our teachers and our students. This step is crucial in supporting our teachers with high quality implementation of curriculum and standards. Finally, we compile assessment data and look for trends. We utilize the data analysis and action template from Paul Bamick Santoo's Driven by Data Work. Here's an example of a data review with our fifth grade mid-year reading data. A key moment from this data review was identifying that students really needed more practice in um specific right. So we right away chose the resource that teachers
080then implemented back in their classrooms. These immediate action steps are transforming our core instruction. So, while you can't necessarily see the work that we're doing on a day-to-day basis, the heavy lift that Sarah and I are teachers at Mountain View of under on the standards, but also the ability to provide resources and strategies immediately has been appreciated and valued by the teachers, teaching assistants, and the administration. Our data continues to improve thanks to our strong PLC practices, the trust our Mountain View teachers have in the two of us and teachers dedication to improving learning they're doing during PLC's. Thank you for listening and for your support in our process. >> Thank you all. I've also had the opportunity to um to sit in on a PLC and and watch uh the process in action and
081it was uh it was really um wonderful to see and and it's really a gamecher for the school. Uh so as we start to wrap up uh the presentation, what's still to come for us is our growth data and our val data. Uh that should be uh wrapping up here in the next week or so and we should start be a start being able to uh see if uh what we're seeing as trends uh from the midyear assessments or if we need to put a focus somewhere else. All of our schools have also recently uh come together to create what we call 90-day plans uh which take that data and uh and the principles identify one to three priorities that they think are going to be most impactful uh for their schools during the next
082uh marking period. I'd encourage you if you're ever out at our schools to ask the principles about their 90-day plans uh and what they are are focused on. And we will um certainly open the floor to questions, but I really do want to uh to thank again uh all of our schoolbased staff who came out tonight. Uh they've been working since uh probably 7:00 or before uh this morning. Um and it's uh it's been a long day for them. Um, but I know they were happy to come here and and I'm really uh excited that we got a chance to celebrate Mountain View, Greer, and Woodbrook tonight. So, we will open it up for any questions or comments from the board. >> Journeys. Good. Um Pat, quick question about I noticed on the science scores
083unlike the other test scores a pretty uh significant drop off from last year Q1 to this year Q1. Is that a different which didn't seem to show up in the math or reading? >> So I'm going to invite Katina Dudley up who is our uh our math our science coordinator. >> It's a gas. Oh yes, colors are the same. >> Good evening. I'm the science coordinator for the school division. >> Um there's not much of a difference in our assessments. We keep them the same year to year. Um but I do want to speak to two things that I think um would be driving. I'm going to actually pull the data up really quickly because it helps me to speak to this work. Sorry. I'll also say really quickly while I'm doing this, I go
084into Steve and Denine. I just show up a lot in the mornings to talk to them about work and if their students suspect that you're looking at them or observing them, they get very defensive and tell you how much they love them. It's so funny. They're like, "Just so you know." Um, okay. So, here's our science data. Our middle school data, if you were to look at that just as middle school, you're not going to see much of a difference from last year's to this year's. So, that blue and purple data would be the same. Last year in elementary we paced our science curriculum to the HMH curriculum. There's a lot of science embedded in the HMH and we thought that it would be really great for our students to see the science before they
085did the curriculum in HMH. >> I will say that we made a really big mistake. Um the theme in fifth grade is actually energy transformations. Um, and that unit ended up like next to last in what we taught. And we need that to be the first unit that we teach because one, it's a very challenging unit for our students and two, it cycles throughout the year. So they get energy transformations when they do sound, light, electricity. Everything they do is around energy transformation. So for us to put that at the end was really a pretty big mistake that we didn't catch. So we redid our pacing for the curriculum in fifth grade. But I am confident that what you're going to see here with that purple growing from Q1 to Q2 to Q3 that we
086will continue to see that in fifth grade as well at the high school level. We are actually changing our high school course progressions and I think this is really important and I'm actually still very excited about the decisions that we're making. Previous years our students had the choice to take earth science or biology and this year we added physics to the nth grade curriculum. Physics has been proven through research to be a strong foundational course in both math and science. A lot of school divisions do not do this because we don't have enough teachers coming out of programs to be able to um reach the needs for our students. Um we had great success in hiring teachers and we've we're having really great success in that particular course in 9th grade. But what you will
087see if you were to dive into our numbers is that our honors biology course used to be over a hundred students more taking that class. We had a lot of freshman honors students taking honors biology and this year we are down because we have a lot of those students taking honors physics instead of honors biology. So like you see with any new implementation, we're going to see a dip in that data and I do think that we will still see a dip in that data even with the so possibly. So I want to I just want to be trans that is a decision we made. This is where our students are. What the research shows though is that over time students do better in their science courses and their math courses and more students take
088higher level math and science courses. And I'm really excited to see where our students go with this projection. So, while I think that is going to impact our data year one, I do think that we'll see better data in years to come as a result of physics being a first year course for our students. I'll also add that while it's a strong foundational class for both our science curriculum and our math curriculum, it's also a very foundational class for careers. And I think that's really important. In the past, about 20% of our students enrolled in a physics class in Alar County, and that's heartbreaking to me that so few students take such an important science class. So, I still really strongly believe in the decision that we've made as a school division, but I do
089think it's going to impact our high school data in year one. >> Can I just say I really respect and appreciate you acknowledging a mistake and then or a misstep or whatever you want to call it and then put what you're going to do to fix that. I think it's refreshing and I just want to say thank you for >> You should have seen my email last year. >> I just I really appreciate the transparency um and and the honesty. It's refreshing. So, thank you. >> Thank you. It's just really where we were and I hated it all year last year, but by the time we got the year started, it didn't make sense to change it. So, anyway, yeah, here's where we are. >> That's great. Thank you. just on just on that that
090kind of science question. I don't this is just a one thing I was thinking is you know if you know we look at this data in uh Q3 and it's falling kind of this question of what are we going to do then right like like right now we're kind of looking at okay you know it looks like while it was pretty low you know you know one in two school one in two kids are not kind of me you know or below that benchmark But it's trending up. If it's not, if it begins to trend down, I think that's one of the questions I hear from the public like what are we going to do, right? Like are we waiting for another year or what can we do in the moment, you know, kind of
091particular science or math or so that we can correct that going forward because it's a it's a hard thing, but it's an >> all of this is formative, right? and uh and it's not a a contest to see who can get the highest or or things like that. So, so the the these tests are are valueless if we don't uh come up with a plan for what we're going to do after we get that information. And so, as part of that 90-day planning cycle, uh this tells us the what, right? Uh how many kids passed, how many didn't. Uh during 90-day planning, principles really dig into the why. They look at performance results by question, by standard, by teacher and they try to identify the areas uh where where students were underperforming so that they
092can shore those up in the uh in the third quarter. That's one of the heart uh that's at the heart of uh driven by data uh where uh where the um uh we're doing this this teach and retach cycle uh based on what the data is telling us. So, we hope that uh that it's all higher uh and that we've had some success, but at the end of each quarter, we try to pinpoint that and move forward. This, I believe, third quarter of the year is the most important one for our students academically. Uh when we were doing 90-day planning, I likened it to moving day at the masters, right? uh it's the it's the day when folks start to separate themselves from the field and really determine whether they're going to be uh champions
093or they're going to uh to be uh lagging behind in the pack. And so I think that this that all of our principles feel that sense of urgency to uh to make sure they're they're pinpointing instruction. And I think some of our 90-day plans are really uh nicely focused on that. C >> can I ask a question then kind of piggybacking off of that? you know, you were sharing um the science from Journey, which is super impressive. How are these shared across schools if it's working so well at Journey? I heard you mention PLC's. Is that the standard for sharing this stuff? Because I would love to move away from this siloing where we have something working in one school, but you know, maybe Henley teachers don't know about this or or you know, Walton.
094Um how do we share that information so that we have the most success for these students? Yeah, I I don't think there's a formal process uh to that. Uh most of our of our uh principles can access all the division data uh and access it um by school. We we we have these leadership team folders where they can go in and kind of see things. I do know the the middle school principles meet on a fairly regular basis uh and and imagine that's part of their discussions uh that are there. But I think one of the other things that helps is that we've got our at our 90-day planning meetings, we've got our curriculum coordinators there uh and they are able to to uh to see what some of the issues are and talk with
095our uh with our teams about what we might do, what we might prioritize if we see this area of weakness uh within our students. In fact, that's one of the things that the uh the coordinators at the end of each quarter uh come to a cabinet meeting uh and and kind of give us a broad overview of where we are in reading, math, and science and what we think we need to to put our focus on uh moving forward. >> Yeah. Yeah. I just I think it the sharing of this information could be really powerful. Um and there's no sense in recreating the wheel. And and as much as I hope that people are watching this meeting tonight and learning about this stuff, my guess is that not all the teachers are watching tonight. Um,
096but I I you know it is super impressive and when we're getting something right, I would love for that information to be shared >> and that and that's where district support comes into play. So as when we've got our coordinators uh directors and uh I notice Dr. Libcom in the back, but they're they're part of all these meetings. They they sit in on PLC's. They learn what's going on and then they pollinate the other schools. >> Great. >> That was a great observation. Thank you. Um, I have a few more questions, but I don't want to Did you have a few more? Did you want to go first? One quick one in specific to the Woodbrook team. Congrats, Christie and Jana and Andrea. Um, Jenna, you mentioned earlier identification of student needs. Can you expound
097on that at all? What What does that actually look like? >> Hi. And so um I can give you two examples that we're doing. The one you know the valves is our major testing. So we are immediately looking at that data and we're looking at what they did not just in their scaled scores because it doesn't really that keeps moving and growing but we look at what they're doing in those the val offers progress monitoring. So we can progress monitoring those areas where we see they have indicators that are critical for them to you know for a lot of our woodook friends it's letters and sounds like which kids do not know their letters and sounds in first grade yet so that we can get that solid before we move on. So and the vowels
098is really helpful with providing that progress monitoring for us. Um another way that we got eyes on something early was a friend that had a speech issue or we suspect have a speech issue. So we um I was able to sit down with a teacher speech just came out with a a screening form, fill this out before they can get screened and we got to sit down for an entire planning period and say do you see this? Yes, I see this. No, no, I don't think this is applies sometimes. No, this is never. So there have been opportunities so we can you know they're not siloed and having to make all these hard decisions with so many students on their case load that we can sit down with them and say yes I see this
099no I don't using vows using um the resources in the building and our um support staff is amazing. So >> great thank you. >> Yeah. >> Um Dr. Mclofflin you mentioned the val and the growth assessment data hopefully in the next week. Um, can you just remind me when and how we get updated on that information and what sort of um information we're given to compare it with the data that you gave us? >> Sure. Uh, uh, typically that hasn't been something we we've made a specific presentation on with the board. But, uh, but we can certainly work with uh, Andrea and her team and and Craig and uh, and India and my team to put together a report that that gives kind of an overview of what things are looking like midyear with both
100of those. We'd be happy to send that to >> Yeah. I mean, I don't want to speak for the rest of the board members, but I think it's something that um most of us would probably feel is important. >> Absolutely. I'm excited to see it, too. >> Awesome. Thank you. Um I'm curious about um the use of like reading software um as an intervention method. And I'm not sure who can speak to that, but um how much we're using it and how effective it is. And um I'm thinking especially as we're getting into budgeting and and things like that just you know what's working, what do we need to be focused on. >> Hello, I'm Andrea Blunt. I'm coordinator for intervention and title one. Um so we have now for the first time an approved
101list of resources. So before the Virginia Literacy Act, it was kind of teachers were finding whatever they thought worked best or they were using what worked for them. um now that we have a more condensed list of resources um they can choose from those. Okay. And so um if a student is showing that they are in need of intervention, um software is one of the choices. Okay. Um so if that's what worked best for them, then they can choose something like Lexia. Um that's what you're referring to. But um sometimes like um Jana was talking about with progress monitoring, we find that software is not the best intervention for students and so then they choose to use um a face-to-face intervention. >> Okay, great. >> Um and do you think that that software has played
102any role? I saw, you know, our reading numbers are looking better than um last year and and seem to be in an upward trend. Do you have any insight as to if that's playing a role and and things we should consider? >> So, we're teasing that out right now. Um, I think there are so many things that play into what's happening right now. I think one of them is probably Lexia because it can serve so many students at once. Um, but we also have a lot of other great things going on like the collaboration between tier one. Um, I also think it's um that we have a strong tier one program now. Um so that is also playing into the effect that people are doing. Um people we're seeing this trending upward but um we
103are trying to tease it out. So what we do as reading specialists as a group and the question that you asked how do we share this is we have DPLC. So um you know the science teachers are getting together and talking about what's working is working how can we capitalize on that. Um we do the same with reading specialists. So um we look at the profile of a student and say this student is making a lot of progress. Why are they making progress? Let's look at what intervention we're using. Does that match? You know, because sometimes we were mismatching what the intervention was. So, we we sometimes tend to focus on fluency all the time, but fluency might not be the intervention that's needed for that student. So, what we're trying to really tease out
104is here's the profile of a student because now we have a universal screener, we have um formative data, we have lots of data that comes with HMH. So looking at specific needs of the student and then matching it to the intervention. So we may find that yes, it's one one intervention works for this profile but not so much for this. >> Okay, that helps. Thank you. I appreciate that. >> I want to make one quick correction uh uh in the spirit of Kina correcting my mistakes. Uh last year when we did our midyear review, we did have mid-year data, Val's data, and uh growth data. Okay. Uh because of the shift in the calendar this year, but we also didn't come to the board till March uh to to do that. Uh because of the
105shift in the calendar and when we gave our quarterly assessments, we wanted to come in earlier to present this to the board even though we didn't have the other two uh pieces. >> Yeah. And I would love to get that additional data once we have it. Um, and then I just had two questions regarding um, math and one thing that jumped out to me, I know there's been a lot of talk about KDUM and um, the uh, frustrations that we have encountered with the roll out. Um, and one thing that jumped out to me um, and forgive me, I'm not sure which team it was, but they were talking about the curriculum not matching the math standards. So, it goes up to 100 or 99 and and the standards are to 120. So, we have
106to supplement that. And that's concerning. Um, for a number of reasons. Um, one, I feel like it puts a lot of extra work on our teachers, and two, we should have a curriculum that I think we all thought was going to meet our standards. So, um, I would love a little more information on that. And then I have another math question, but I guess that's first. >> Okay. >> And I'll invite, uh, Craig to come up and, uh, talk through that. >> Craig Normer, executive director, curriculum assessment instruction. and I'll uh step in for an elementary math coordinator tonight. Um I would say that finding gaps um in the curriculum to the SOS is something that we're working both on the content advisory team with and I think individual schools are looking for. Uh the
107PDOE first approved KDUm as their primary resource. They felt it was the most aligned uh curriculum to the Virginia standards. Uh without getting too kind of in the weeds, I would say like most math curriculums are written for the common core standards or they were um several years ago. Virginia's math standards have always been um have always deviated from the common core standards. Uh the most recent Virginia standards are the most aligned. Um and KDM was the first curriculum that took basically their common core uh version that they use in every other state and realigned it for Virginia. I think there are still certain um I wouldn't say tiny there are certain places uh like when we're talking about 299 or 220 where they are misaligned uh because other states the standard is 299 and
108so that is how um illustrative mathematics and therefore kum kind of build that standard out. Uh we do have resources provided by the VDOE. Um we also have Zern which is also provided by the VDOE and so we are trying to create um an Almor County math curriculum uh that incorporates multiple resources. I think as we uh move forward with this project uh getting really good at being able to use each resource um instructionally will be important in improving the math performance of our students. >> So I guess that kind of goes into my next question about math specialists. I don't think we have very many of them, but um I'm wondering if that's something we need to consider um as we're going into the budget and also if it may help with our science
109scores as we were hearing, you know, the math is such an important foundation um for science. We're talking about physics and things like that. So, um with that early intervention with math, I'm wondering if that might help with science as well. So, I'm curious, is that something that we're considering? Is that something we need? um especially with the issues we've had with KDUm. >> As a former math specialist myself, I will always advocate uh for our usefulness um in Elmor County Public Schools and in all schools. Um I do think that schools that have been able to use their tiered services staffing or their title one staffing like Mountain View did to create that position. I've always seen success with it. Uh it is often just um well it's always a difficult choice that I've
110also been the principal who's always ch how much reading intervention, how much math intervention um and sometimes maybe a lift up from the board or in the budget to help get a few more positions started. Uh we can see whether or not that kind of has uh impact in getting the ball rolling. >> It it is in the mix. Yeah, I would say, you know, from I think the board I said I remember my first sort of like my first budget and we this was before the changes in the LCI and we said I'm looking at Dr. AOF we said okay first reading specialists next round is is math specialists because of the budget um uh cuts from LCI we just were not able to do that and so I think that is probably something
111I'm looking at my board like we we haven't done an official conversation about this but I definitely think this is something we want to see and actually just in being out in schools this week um more than half of the principles like when I asked them very specifically what do you need the number one things they they said was math specialist no matter if it was a high school or a elementary school or a middle school. It's interesting. >> I do think the instructional coaches at at the elementary level have um really do dived in to help with some of that math implementation. But you just see um even with HMH implementation, having both the coaches and school-based reading specialists kind of tag teaming that kind of problem around implementation can also help kind of
112lift things as far as modeling lessons and spreading practices across schools. I think instructional coaches are another key piece that see things working in one school and are able to talk uh to other coaches and implement change across schools a little bit more rapidly and help break down silos. >> Awesome. Thank you for all that information. Appreciate it. >> Other questions? I'm cur I I don't want to put you on the spot, but I am just curious from you know your view as a student who've you know gone through testing throughout your um your career just thoughts on what you're what you're hearing today and what you know has meant the most for you um or your peers uh you know kind of as you've come on on the other side of testing and when
113you felt like you've been struggling. I think over my years, especially like over co, I kind of lost some of like that foundational skills, especially like in math and that and even now, especially with like simpler like >> calculations, I'm like, I really wish I could go back >> and do something more. But what everybody's like showing tonight, especially how even Miss Filman asked about like how like technology is playing a role in it and just how they're finding new ways to learn. I think it's very important and I'm definitely seeing seeing ways that I didn't know teachers like had to do with all like the data collection. Like whenever somebody is teaching me, you just don't really take that into account that teachers go through all of this data and find new ways to
114teach kids. So, I think that's really cool. >> Thank you. Thank you. And I think you you lifted up something that's always on my mind. You know, unfortunately, for the next 18 years, we're going to be having this conversation, but so all of our students, you know, no matter where they are, except I think if you're kindergartener right now, all were at some point affected by COVID either as a an infant, you know, with childcare workers wearing masks so they couldn't see mouth movements. uh third graders trying to learn reading online, math, you know, math students in fourth and fifth grade trying to to learn um complex um math uh multiplication online. And so this kind of foundational piece was is missing at different places and it starts to you know you start to notice
115it at different points in a student's career and we're going to continue to see that you know for the next uh you know 10 years. So, >> other questions or comments? >> Just a brief comment. I want to thank all the school staff that were here tonight and I know it's getting late. Um, I was struck by how seriously you take the data, the really granular data in doing your work and also how important collaboration seems to be um in terms of um creating a synergy to empower your students and I I greatly appreciate that. I just want to share how how proud I am of our educators and our district staff for this herculean work that you're doing. And I know that uh we we had a conversation with the student cabinet today, Maxmillian,
116we were talking about as a group, you know, are are students prepared, you know, when they graduate, are they prepared for life? We talked about um we played a telephone game with a quote from John Dwey where he talked about um life education is life itself and what we talked about was that our our students they are preparing but they're living their lives and this this is their life and it's when educators work hand inand with them and make their daytoday experiences where they walk out of school happy that they're accomplishments. They can visit and they can see their own progress and know what they need to do next. They're living their lives in the schools with our teachers. And I know that's what motivates the teachers. We want we want we want to be
117happy. We want to be proud of the academic success of our students. We want to see that growth. We see those numbers. But two notes, one note and one question. So I had a note that we want to see the val's data um and we we can we can discuss if that's going to be agenda item or just a report. And then my other question is do we typically do a review of the third quarter data as a presentation to the board? We have not in the past. Uh but again, if it's the uh the consensus of the board that you'd like, we can either prepare in publishing the consent agenda or do another uh uh presentation. >> Okay, we'll talk amongst the board and and and kind of let you know um uh uh
118and schedule that out. Thank you so much. Thank you again to everyone who stayed so late um to share your your amazing stories and the work you're doing with our students. >> Thank you. I just have a couple of appointments to announce. Um I am appointing Diana McKielle as my the Jack Jew representative to the school health advisory board. She informs me that's how she started even before she was on the school board for 16 years. Uh so she will be my appointee there. I'm also Bruno environmental sustainability or those new people who have appointees. They all started at the same time because we started ACES four years ago and everybody's term ends in March. Okay. So, um I was going to reappoint my person, but our bylaws requires us to repost and then appoint.
119So, uh I guess Judy and Ellen and and and Rebecca and um Allison will have appointees I guess uh to aces. I may be wrong, but uh I know that Christine will inform everybody what's anymore.