001foreign i call this may 26th meeting of the albemarle county school board to order miss carlson uh there mo is there a motion out of the closed session i move that each board member certified certified by recorded vote that to the best beach board member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the virginia freedom of information act and identified in the motion authorizing the closed meeting were heard discussed are considered during the closed meeting second movement calls in second by ms lee that we certify by closed vote that nothing was discussed during the closed session except what was authorized in the motion ms johnson could you please call the role dr yes yes ms yes thank you we have several motions from the closed session so uh ms osborne
002could you make the first a move that the school board authorized the purchase of real property a for an amount not to exceed the seller's current asking price second move by ms osborne second by dr akov uh that we purchased the property for no more than the current asking price current asking price are there any is there any discussion on the motion if not miss johnston miss lee yes ms yes yes mr page yes all right miss osborne okay i move that we approve the proposed personnel actions as presented second it has been moved in second that we approved the staff positions as presented to us in a discussion on the motion if not miss johnston yes [Music] this osborne i move that we appoint dr beth costa as principal of monticello high school second
003it's been moved by ms osborne second by ms lee that we appoint dr beth acosta as principal of monticello high school ms johnston could you please call the roll miss carlson yes yes yes mr page yes motion carris all right last one if you had a moment dr costa is here tonight okay if you want to stand thank you dr costa and congratulations ms osborne all right last one a move that we appoint mr michael craddock as principal of lakeside middle school second move by ms osborne second by ms lee that we appointment michael craddock as principal of lakeside middle school ms johnston yes thank you we will now um have the pledge of allegiance to the [Music] flag of the united for which states stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice
004[Music] as we prepare for our moment of silence um i ask each one of you and each board member to reflect on the tragic events that have occurred since our last board meeting in buffalo new york and uvalde texas in your own way i ask that you please ask for consolation for peace and for resolution for every one of those people who were touched in any way by those events in those two spots so we'll have the moment of silence thank you each board member for a microphone check dr kate acuff kate aycoff jack jewett district mr uh miss catrino carlson vice chair katrina carlson ryo district miss judy lee judy lee rivanna district ms ellen osborne ellen osborne scottsville district i'm graham page samuel miller district and mr dave oberg is online he's not
005able to attend the meeting tonight so we need a motion to approve of his participating via internet or telephone i move that we approve uh dave oberg's participation virtually second move by ms lee second by dr acuff that we approve mr oberg participating in tonight's meeting virtually is there any discussion on the motion if not miss johnston yes yes miss lee yes mr page yes we now need a motion to approve tonight's agenda a move will approve tonight's agenda second move by ms osborne second by ms lee that we approve tonight's agenda in a discussion if not ms lee oh ms johnson ms johnston right sorry about that exactly uh assistant assistant clear all right yes ms yes yes mr page thank you yeah miss it's an emotion scary all right the approval of the
006consent agenda i move we approve the consent agenda [Music] second move by ms osborne second by ms lee that we approve the consent agenda in the discussion if not miss johnston miss carlson yes miss osborne yes miss lee yes dr yes mr oberg he said yes i could take it can you hear me dave yeah i said yes um and mr page was that his vote okay all right so the motion carries moving to our next agenda item announcements i'm gonna give up my announcement time to use for acknowledging retirees good evening board members and our guests that are here tonight i'm claire kaiser assistant superintendent tonight we honor a group of educators who have been committed to albemarle county schools for for their careers and tonight we recognize them as they step into retirement
007or in a couple of days and weeks will step into retirement and i think about the the product the progress we've made in the school division and the the focus we've had on students and all the things that we've done over the years and it's because of these people sitting there in the room in front of you behind me that that is all possible and so from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of everybody else we congratulate each of you sorry to have my back to you um and uh we would like to recognize each of our retirees tonight so i'm going to read names as they come off of a up on the slide show and uh i'm dan redding our executive director for human resources is here who will be presenting
008a um a retirement certificate along with jenny stearns who has had a very active role in talking to each of these people as they've made this uh oftentimes very difficult decision to our retirees if you all would come up on the on the dice um to be recognized when your name is called um i would recommend not shaking hands but an elbow or a fist bump or a wave or a knot or some other way to be acknowledged with our board members would be very much appreciated so to begin i'm just going to say the names in their schools if you're here please come on up marianne baker from agner hurt elementary school bill bossom from the child nutrition program susan bannister from burley middle school burgess from woodbrook elementary school diane burris agner hurt
009elementary school brooke conover human resources elizabeth capolino from woodbrook elementary school loretta coughlin albemarle high school isabella kreitzer transportation [Music] lisa kreutzer jose elementary school william daly al morrow high school come on up please leslie davis albemarle high school diliana eddy monticello high school diane espinoza albemarle high school erin evans greer elementary school chris ferrari baker butler elementary school becky fisher henley middle school thank you for your work jim foley transportation dennis fuller transportation [Applause] thank you guys essential players stuck having a technical difficulty [Laughter] there we go thank you joseph gaines from building services lorna jerome human resources dianne goby post high program susan golden meriwether lewis dr bernard harrison community engagement [Applause] [Music] [Applause] cheryl harris lakeside middle school [Music] [Applause] lulu hawkins building services carol hernandez al morrow high school [Music] [Applause]
010[Music] [Laughter] carl jones building services dede jones albemarle high school john king building services leanne knox human resources leonard catassi maintenance shop dawn lane crosie elementary school [Music] [Applause] thank you sheryl lang building services chuck leather's transportation joe la terry building services sheila madison agner hurt elementary school krista matheny monticello high school dianna mccullough lakeside middle school marcie mackenzie agner hurt elementary school [Music] miss mckenzie i'm gonna take a moment and call you out she has been the teacher of my child for all three years that he's been in school she knows him perhaps as well as i know him and i am so eternally grateful for being able to have someone who i trust so much take care of him from kindergarten to second grade so his whole school career has been with her
011she texts me every day we've had meetings where she's gone out of her way to understand him not saying it's difficult but i don't maybe isn't easy thank you so much so so much [Music] [Applause] sherry mark murcord special services [Music] [Applause] thank you noel purdy community lab school judy roy special services mike russo transportation stephanie schellenberger greer [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] glenda schifflett transportation tracy's shiplet monticello high school deborah skolnick walton middle school judith spellman special services [Music] [Applause] thank you thank [Music] wilson sprouse maintenance shop lee stegman burley david stepp transportation patty stewart meriwether lewis deborah stallings egner hurt [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so thank you stutzman western albemarle [Applause] reese taylor transportation judy thurston henley deb tyson albemarle high school [Music] [Applause] bob warren albemarle high school jan white eggner hurt marcy williams
012murray aaron wise hackenbaum albemarle high school sheree witt brownsville elementary school larry the yancey western albemarle tony zentgraf burley we also remember two of our retirees who are no longer with us sarah healey from greer and calvin sewell building services we do want to thank each and every one of you for your dedication and for years of service to out to albemarle county public schools um so a big round of applause for our retirees [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh we we are uh remiss we do have one more person that i see uh coach velhovak from monticello high school come on down rick [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you very much to the hr team for putting together our reception tonight and i wish all of our retirees the very best in your retirement thank you
013dr kaiser for that recognition of our retirees and it looks like quite a few of them had already taken off because they weren't here tonight right so again thank you all for your services to almost county we will now move to um public comment vice chair carlson i think there's some other announcements [Music] if you will bear with me for a minute because i need to open back up my computer and pull up the public comment guidelines okay the school board invites and actively seeks the public's input in the matters relevant to school board governance and provides for time during its meetings to hear from albemarle county residents and community members before public comment starts i'm going to announce the order of the speakers we have i believe nine today so i'll just go ahead
014and announce them all so you know when your speaking turn will be each speaker will have three minutes to speak you'll be notified when you reach the two minute mark when you have one minute left that yellow light will come on and when the red light comes on that means your time is done speakers during the meeting or those submitting written comments should state their name and address our magisterial district speakers should limit comments to those matters that are relevant to school board governance are the operations of the school division although the school board does not respond to comments made during the public comment period school board members may address comments at the end of the meeting agenda under other business and i skipped saying um because we're no longer doing this electronically but written
015comments can be submitted to the school board clerk we got one today from the aea so um you can do that prior to the start of the meeting and those will be handed out to people so that's another avenue for comment so the speakers are helena clement liz conning cheryl knight vernon lechty catherine de atley aaron wise ackenbaum who just retired congratulations becca saxon bill moon caskey and john glass so helena if you are here [Applause] hi good evening my name is helena kleiman i'm a resident of the rivanna district and i'm a teaching assistant at red hill elementary school i am here this evening to urge the school board to form a task force that includes members of the school board who would work with the aea to revise the collecting collective bargaining resolution
016to meet everyone's needs a large part of the discussion surrounding collective bargaining the resolution has been focused on teachers but i'm here today to speak as a classified employee as a classified employee i support the development of a revised collective bargaining resolution because my co-workers and i deserve the ability to negotiate our contracts and have a say in our working conditions along with teachers we deserve the ability to live in the county we work in myself and many other classified employees do not currently make a living wage if i didn't have support from my parents and my partner i would not be able to afford to live in el morrow county at the last meeting the board noted that not many classified workers paid dues to the aea and i would counter that by saying
017that many of us are simply not paid enough to do so even while desiring membership in our professional organization and despite our efforts being integral to school success in the past our raises have not been commensurate with teachers all of this and yet i have been told time and time again by parents students teachers and administrators that the classroom i work in would not function without my presence every day i see how much the other tas the bus drivers the cafeteria workers our school nurse and our office staff do to make our school run we have a b based classroom at red hill and over the last year i've seen those students absolutely flourish because of the never ending support of their tas they're tas who are classified employees and who deserve a voice in
018their own contracts our schools albemarle county schools are great places to be a student they are a great place to be a student because of the classified employees who come to work every day and pour their time their efforts their love and their passion into the school and into the students we deserve the chance to negotiate our contracts to have things like protected bathroom and lunch breaks to be paid a living wage working with the aaa to craft a new and revised collective bargaining agreement would show all classified employees that we have their support of the school board our schools are great places to be a student let's work together to make them great places to be educators too [Music] thank you for those comments helena the next speaker is liz conning hi my name
019is liz koenig and i am a teacher at woodbrook when i started in the division i was grateful to be teamed up with an assistant whose good reputation preceded her one of those employees who everyone at the school knew and depended on a real team player well she left our division in november after the pay schedule and policies were changed without warning in the middle of a school year making it infeasible for her to remain in our division this unilateral change to how and when we were paid left many employees scrambling to prepare financially with the most negative effects burdening those least able to afford it in my classroom the loss of a teacher had a profound negative effect on my students who were already struggling with coming back to school after a pandemic learning
020how to build relationships and who then lost one of their trusted adults without warning they still ask about her today this outcome could have been avoided if collective bargaining was in place it gives employees notice it gives them a voice it gives them representation of their interests when decisions are made that affect their livelihoods this is just one story one out of almost fifteen hundred stories that were delivered to you each one of those signatures you received represents the story and the hope of a school staff member in this county and yes we knew exactly what we were signing you received those cards you listened to a steady drum beat of your staff members transportation workers teachers retired teachers parents retired board members and students themselves testify in support of this resolution and you said
021no [Music] it makes me wonder who was speaking to the board privately who could have been more influential than your own school staff and community we listened as you opted out because there were not enough guidelines not enough resources that it would be very messy and too hard and it was a gut punch because those are exactly the conditions we work under for these students every single day you are elected board members accountable to your constituents and employees listening to the voices of your staff engaging with us as equals accepting our right to bargain with you and gain self-determination dignity and agency is the right thing to do you have to do right things even when they're hard especially when they're hard you cannot be pro-democracy and pro-teacher yet anti-collective bargaining they are incompatible views
022we don't care if you say nice things about us during teacher appreciation week we certainly did not volunteer hours of unpaid time working to collect almost 1500 signatures to present to you just so we could get another questionnaire or survey we asked for and deserve the right to be heard and represented in the room where the conditions of our employment are decided process matters representation matters respect matters i urge you to reconsider your votes reintroduce our resolution and work with us to do hard things because it's the right thing to do thank you for those comments miss koenig a miss knight i don't believe wanted to speak okay so it's going to be moving on to mr electi and i have um i do want to say and it's not anything against your group it's
023actually so that we have a neutral based rule noise during public comment is is shouldn't be happening and we try to hold that across the line so i don't want to like favor one group and let them do that and not let another group do it if it's a topic that we don't agree with so i want to do that i'm sorry good evening my name is vernon lechty and i'm president of the elmar education association after hearing the discussion and the reasons the school board members gave to not adopt the resolution for collective bargaining i wanted to publicly clarify some points one of the concerns brought up by the school board was the cost to the school division to start implementing the process the collective bargaining budget that was proposed by school board attorney
024ross holden at the last school board meeting is not in line with the virginia education association and the alamo education association's expected costs for bargaining mr holding mr holden's budget tops out at 430 000 which is well above our anticipated cost of about sixty thousand dollars the source of this huge disparity is the belief that acps must establish a labor relations office in order to engage in collective bargaining those costs are unnecessary since collective bargaining will be with acps employees and can easily occur within existing school structures in these following documents that i have emailed to you and have provided hard copies for you tonight we outline the key differences between our proposed budgets and address some of the misconceptions around collective bargaining last meeting another point was brought up the law is vague and
025we should wait to see how other school boards handled this my question to the board is that if every other school board in virginia comes to that same conclusion of wait and see the inaction will be indefinite positive change has not come about through inaction on may 12th the albemarle county school board became the first school board in the state to vote not to adopt a resolution for collective bargaining which was brought forward by a majority of its workforce since the new collective bargaining law went into effect on may 1st 2021 your action of inaction has set precedent for other virginia school divisions public sector workers in virginia have been waiting for over 44 years to start collective bargaining change has to start from somewhere we want to work with you to make this possible
026the majority of your staff has told you they want collective bargaining the staff is the same staff that spends the majority of their time every day with over 13 000 students of albemarle county the highest priority for all of us is to focus on what students need addressing the concerns of those who work directly with students helps students working with them to improve their working conditions helps students learning conditions if you trust us to educate feed assist and transport students you can trust us to work with you to negotiate to improve our working and students learning conditions three weeks ago the charlottesville city school board unanimously authorized their superintendent to start working with the charlottesville education association on the specifics of a collective bargaining resolution the richmond education association also works with the richmond city
027school board to form a resolution these are the historical patterns from school divisions in virginia the majority of workers in el mar county want their benefits and working conditions guaranteed in a legally binding contract only collective bargaining offers workers a guaranteed say in their contract we invite you and the superintendent to work with us to form a collective bargaining resolution that would meet your concerns we can do this together our goals are the same work with us to make this change possible thank you thank you for those comments you guys must be teachers you know exactly where you are on the line when you're coming up actually no miss wise acquaint uh missed at lea might have been before you but you're going to switch places or okay okay all right okay um my name
028is erin why zach and i'm sorry about moving out of place i'm i work at albemarle high school and i live in flouviana i came 24 years ago from new york that had a union so immediately i felt the difference and i was young kind of back then and i didn't really realize what a union was or what it could do for me but now seeing the big difference i do i do appreciate your sensitivity two weeks ago mizeka aka fit about this mental health needs in our school um i wouldn't for a minute think that i could say anything about an elementary school because i've worked for about primarily in high school so for for the amount of people we have here i'm not saying you're not experts but i know that these guys
029know a little bit more about elementary school that i do you know that so they we need to give them a voice we need to give me you know me i'm gone next year but i've worked really hard for this for my for my co-workers because they need it we need sustainability we are losing it very fast in education and i see it over and over uh the rules this year and might be the situation but it's constantly changing you know you're asking people to do like stand on their head every day and then jump back and be good something that dara always says you can't be good if you're not good so we have to be good we have to feel good about our job we have to have a voice on research has
030constantly shown that the first predictor of students is sex success is teacher-student relationship and that's one of the precepts of el morro county i've always i came here and taught in fluvana for a year and i realized whoa i can't do this where is a good school and i came right to albemarle because everybody said this is a school that will go beyond they'll they'll tackle those problems that you talked about last week two weeks ago about hey whoops okay have a minute um that if you can't um if we have to we don't know what we're getting into we don't either exactly but we know that we need a voice um we need a seat at the table to be good it'll help our students our cafeteria workers our tas they make nothing you
031know what do they do it for i constantly think they're working hard really hard and and all of our aides we need them though in order to do our job the best we need all of the pieces we need a bus that actually functions that brings kids not an hour late not picks them up late i can't even believe kids come to school if they have to wait wait wait for the bus or these kids stay after school for an hour waiting for the bus to go round around now i know you have some really good ideas about having smaller buses and you know you wouldn't have to be cdl licensed but you know there's other ways i'm not saying that's not the best way but we really just need to listen to the guys
032thank you thank you so much for those comments miss wisekinbot mr adley good evening my name is catherine diatley and i'm a kindergarten teacher in the division and one of many golden apple award winners who were in support or are in support of collective bargaining when many of you voted no to collective bargaining one of the reasons you gave was it would be too hard well hard is a four-letter word that all of the teachers and staff in this county know very well because the work we do every single day is hard here are just a few examples of the hard things we face day to day heart is having to meet the social emotional and educational needs of all of our students with class sizes of 20 or more heart is trying everything we
033possibly can to help our most struggling students only to be told that it is not enough because they aren't meeting the benchmarks heart is having students who are denied sped services because they are performing to their full potential hard is on top of having to teach our general education stuff we are now having to take on the role of reading interventionist because the division continues to reduce intervention intervention staffing and the number of students needing extra support is too big for a part-time person heart is being a specialist teacher whose time has been reduced but is still required to the same amount of work while receiving less money and no vrs benefits heart is going into a class with students who hit kick punch spit throw things and even in some cases threaten you and
034what's even harder is having students with those behaviors in your general education classroom and having no help because there's simply nobody there to help heart is having to work with students who have experienced trauma but having no training to support them adequately heart is working for a division who says they want to close the learning gap but continue to take away the resources and support that are needed in order to do so hard is signing a time card that says i worked 36.15 hours when in reality i worked 80 hours a week heart is having to choose work over spending time with our own families and focusing on self-care hard is having to get a second job because the pay we receive isn't enough to cover our own bills and heart is showing up to
035the school the day after a school shooting even though you're scared and your heart is broken and hard is constantly thinking about how many kids can i hide in a closet or the bathroom and is that wooden door thick enough to stop a bullet from entering hard is despite having two-thirds of the acps faculty and staff say yes to collective bargaining many of you still voted no you have been voted in by this division by the people in this division to make decisions for the best of all of us yet what are you doing it's it's hard to the teachers are left feeling as though we are the ones who are always having to do the hard work and we need you guys to step up and do the hard work with us in the
036best interest of our students so thank you for your time thank you for those comments miss the atlee becca you're up next it'll be um becca saxon bill mcconcaskey you can correct me when you come up here i'm sure i'm butchering it and john glass hi i'm becca saxon i was going to talk about um gun violence and i'm going to leave my documents because i have a teacher here sue haney who did not get a chance to sign up and so i'm going to yield my time to her because i think it's important for you to hear the voices of teachers and not me that seems fine but i just want to check in our policies that's yeah it's fine hi um i'm sue haney and i'm a teacher at holly mead elementary school
037and i had a sign i was going to bring in and it just said cb and cb means we have opportunity to have a voice i know this will will bring healthier relationships with each other it will build more honesty openness and willingness to grow i have taught for 20 years in 10 years in albemarle county public schools if it were not for nea and aea i would not be here right now thank you to each person who helped me especially becca saxon and vernon lichtstein who helped me have my voice it wasn't easy i had my voice this year with albemarle county that has become so powerful that at times it doesn't listen and hear human beings that need to share a viewpoint this is a part of our democracy listening and respecting each
038other i come tonight to share a viewpoint and to grieve over the loss of children and a teacher and others in texas that wanted their voices heard too their life was taken i must stand today and i stand together with aea i hope the school board will reconsider and honor their word that they would consider cb and give it a chance just give it a chance thank you [Music] thank you for those comments miss haney the next speaker is going to come up and say his last name so i don't say it wrong one more time uh dear members of the board my name is bill munkacci and i'm a math teacher at admiral high school uh two months ago i sent to you a letter uh which a super majority of the math department
039at ahs signed expressing our concerns regarding the changes to the grading policy we have yet to hear back from you the superintendent or any county leadership at acps instead a mandatory meeting was set up with rick romelli to help us to implement the policy correctly when we voiced our concerns regarding students not doing their homework work solution was to inspire the students to do it by showing them that practice matters none of the concerns brought up in the letter were addressed by rick in any actionable way and the math department felt sidelined i do not consider inspiring kids to be an actionable solution to our very real problem from algebra to iep calculus students are not completing their practice work or homework i've spoken to teachers throughout the building and the change in policy has
040manifestly hurt student growth and achievement by not giving a grade for homework is extremely easy for students to rationalize the choice of not doing it every night students are confronted with the joints do they spend some of their night practicing for their classes or not the reward for not practicing is clear they have more time to do whatever it is they want to do since the assignment isn't graded and they can take the test if they do badly why bother our students are making that very understandable choice in droves rick loves to bring up the example of the kid that aces all of their tests and feels that they shouldn't have to do their practice i'm not concerned about that kid i'm concerned about the 98 of my students that absolutely have to practice math
041to be successful due to this policy they have no external motivating factors for completing homework and they're not doing it oh but if we listen closely to rick then we know it's actually our fault as are all things in education we simply did not inspire the kids enough what is amazing to me is that anyone thinks that teachers can simply inspire teenagers to do their homework and turn it on time because of their innate and desire to learn this view is extremely naive this year has been utter chaos students are not completing their work and grading assignments in a reasonable time frame it is very difficult to maintain class momentum structure and insurance understanding when so many students are behind we're now at the end of the year and the only enforceable den light is
042upon us and it's extremely stressful for students and staff alike students getting lost in a sea of no structure and no expectation without without having any ways to enforce reasonable expectations like doing homework practicing coming to class and completing work on time there are no expectations is that really beneficial for the students is it equitable i implore you to consider the effects of taking our ability to enforce reasonable expectations on our students through grading these expectations create structure and give meaning to students to take them away is not in the best interest of the students thank you very much thank you for those comments mr mukachi the last speaker will be john glass good evening i am john glass this is my third year teaching at albemarle you are a lot scarier up close in
043person so um you know that students and families are struggling uh you know that teachers administrators are struggling this year you know that our bus drivers our our cafeteria staff are struggling this year they want a school that is welcoming and safe for them we all want this for them um but unfortunately my experiences these past few years teaching have not been meeting that expectation of safety and welcome and i do feel supported by my coworkers i do feel supported by my department in the spanish language and foreign language department at my school but unfortunately some experiences at our school have led me to to know very clearly that administrators and despite all their their hard work and their labor and all they're doing do not have the resources or the capacity or the staff
044to actually back our staff and to back me for example this previous elite year i brought a student who was cheating all year round and reported it documented reported to parents and teachers in the end of the year the administrator asked if i could give them another test to see if they could try again and cheat again my opinion my professional perspective my judgment was not withheld upheld by my administrator this past year one of our teachers left and we were left with a teacher missing in our department kelly oxley kristen johnson gracie gambino and me we stepped up to fill in those classes we lost our planning periods to fill in for this teacher we were told we would be compensated and paid for it um unfortunately our kids did not get the best
045instruction they deserved because every one of us lost our planning period and when it came down to talking about being paid suddenly we weren't going to be paid thanks to kristin johnson and vernon electi stepping in having a conversation that changed i'm sure you all know all know these situations in our hallways in our classes are not ideal and our students and our and our teachers are struggling i need to know that we are backed that we are supported and that you have our backs i am not a member of the aea and that has been through decisions this year of whether i'm going to stay in teaching and thankfully this january i came to decision to had my coming to jesus moment and i want to make all my home and i want to
046stay here and i want to know that this community i'm investing in has the backs of my teachers and all of my students thank you [Applause] that concludes our public comment thank you [Music] thank you miss carlson we will now move to our work session unpacking the gallup q12 um dr kaza [Music] good evening again board members claire kaiser assistant superintendent tonight we are going to do a board session with you around employee engagement as you know within when you when looking at our vision and our mission um one of the things that is in imperative is that we have our we have employees who are engaged which will then lead to students who are better engaged and allow us to better meet the mission when you look at the words in the mission of
047working together of high quality teaching and learning for all of building relationships and knowing every student each of that begins with engagement when we look at our specific goals we know that goal three focuses on equitable and transformative resources and that first part talks about attracting and retaining and developing the highest quality staff again when you look at the word retention and there are retained that comes from engagement the more that our employees are engaged the better we are likely to retain them and that will definitely benefit our students breaking that objective down obviously we have a number of strategies where you'll see you as if you read through this you see that employee engagement plays a key role and finally when we look at our success measures we drill down to the second to
048the bottom bullet employee engagement levels will stay ahead of the national trends on a nationally normed satisfaction survey so that's what we're here to talk about tonight is that nationally norm satisfaction survey what we're going to do tonight is we are going to talk a little bit about why employee engagement matters and we're also going to talk about our work with gallup who we have partnered with on this journey we will unpack the data of a survey that was recently given to all staff members and talk about next steps so why engaged employees matter if you look at these two quotes that do come from gallup engaged employees are involved in enthusiastic about and committed to their work and contribute to their organization in a positive manner engaged employees have well-defined roles in the organization
049they make strong contributions are actively connected to their larger team and company and are continuously progressing when you have an engaged workforce that leads to higher productivity it leads to greater thought and greater and more thoughtful effort greater retention fewer safety instances and increased service delivery in order to figure out where we stand in these national benchmarks we know that we need to do comparisons nationally rather than just put a survey out there and say here's where we are when we're benching marketing against ourselves in order to do that in our partnership with gallup we have given all of our employees or asked our employees to participate in what is called the gallup q12 survey it's actually a survey of 12 actionable workplace elements that in just a few minutes you're going to hear a
050little bit more about and we actually added three additional questions that are also nationally normed that focus on equitable practices you will hear about the aggregate of how we compare to other k-12 school divisions and the one of the reasons that we wanted to go with gallup is because of the number of school districts that do work with them they have been working with hundreds of school districts and the responses that they have exceed one million responses in their k-12 database and the thing to remember as we did this this was important for us to hear about the engagement from all of our employees not just our teacher groups or our classified group but all employees all together tonight we have with us dr tim hodges from gallup he has actually spent the day with
051us and has done some work sessions today starting first with the superintendent's cabinet this morning where we started unpacking division level data we then met with for several hours with our principals and many of our directors this afternoon and tonight obviously you're going to get to go through a similar type of work session the topics that we've covered in some some at a high level and somewhere we had the opportunity to to dig into a little bit and really start thinking about what's next was really being curious about the data and i think that's one of the things as you hear from dr hodges he'll ask you tonight to do as well is to be curious about that data we really wanted to understand some of those benchmarks and we took a dive into that
052and one of the big things to realize is that we recognize this as the start of a process it's where we are at this moment in time and it's what we do about this information that makes it actionable so as we unpack the results with the groups that this this earlier today and as we'll do with you all and as we'll continue to do with our uh with our leaders and our school division employees it really is about how we start to plan for the next steps and really starting to think about some action plans along the way and so what we're going to do is we are going to take you through this protocol this what so what now what protocol as you listen to dr hodges in the first part that's the what
053as as he speaks and shares information and talks to you about the different types of questions and the benchmarks and the other data that is provided to you we want you to listen and we want you to think about the information that he presents jot down or in whatever way you want to remember some of the factual information that really resonates you with you after his presentation and you'll have a chance to ask questions throughout that as well we'll give you the opportunity to work with one another in the so what part where you will think about questions such as why is this information important what are your takeaways and what do you wonder about where what are you curious about that you saw tonight and then finally as we report out you'll think about
054what are the key steps that you've heard tonight that we'll think about as we move forward across the school division so to get us started we're going to start with the what of the protocol and for that i am going to introduce to you dr tim hodges from gallup [Music] thank you very much and uh yeah thanks for your service to the uh to the district and um on the school board my dad was a school board member the entire time that my older brother all the way through my younger sister were students and i didn't know a lot about school board meetings except that he usually got home after we went to bed and there were a lot of conversations that happened and as i've progressed to my career at gallup i've worked at
055gallup for over 20 years and have been to hundreds of school board meetings it's more fun when you get paid to be there i guess but i appreciate the service that you all have and really been impressed today throughout the day with the conversations we've had starting with the superintendent and cabinet this morning and then we did a three or four hour session this afternoon with about 40 of your principals directors division leads and including several cabinet members who stayed very attentive with the cameras on we did a zoom session so that even those quarantining were able to participate and for all of them to stay engaged throughout the day and breakout sessions and so on really does send the right signal it wasn't just i'm going to show up so that it looks good
056but to participate fully throughout the day was was very appreciated and not always the case when i work with school divisions and school districts around the country this is a baseline year we're going to talk a little bit about the the beginning of this survey we just collected the data a few weeks ago had over 2 000 respondents all employees were included in the invitation as dr kaiser shared and uh really excited that he had about 75 percent response rate which um is a is a good response rate for an employee survey um the the results are available at the uh the school and the team level and that's what's just being rolled out even today so we pushed results out this morning to any manager principal throughout the the district so they're able to
057engage with those results and that's that's part of our workshop this afternoon was to to help them understand what are these results and and why do we care so tonight i'm going to spend just a few minutes giving you the the purpose behind this um elements of an engaging workplace the state of your organization and then give you a preview of what what we did in terms of recommendations and support for the ongoing actions that will take place we talk about an action plan and i said let's be light on the plan and heavy on the action we use the term if you can't fit your action plan on a three by five note card you're probably thinking too hard about this this isn't additional work that we're asking managers and school leaders to take
058on it's hopefully a better way a more efficient way for them to do the work that they've been doing already in terms of creating a culture i don't want to come across with any arrogance or hubris about that we've answered all the questions about engagement and the this is all new information you've got an incredible talented group of leaders that that i've been able to spend time with today and this is a continuation of work that they've been doing there's some new language here there's some new metrics here but i don't think there's anything that feels like off the wall or this something you'd never thought of before but it just helps you put some edges around what what you've been doing and some objectivity as a baseline year and then the decision is where
059do we go from here um no one had a perfect score rarely do we see anyone any work group even a gallop where we do this survey on ourselves rarely do we see a perfect score across the board so there's always opportunities to dig in understand and continue working forward and even if you do have a perfect score it's not a bad idea to keep working at it to sustain that so and then we'll talk just a bit at the end about uh creating a culture of engagement so as was mentioned if you've got questions throughout please jump in i'll walk through a few points over the next few minutes and then give you some time to work with each other to dig in deeper so the first the first thing i want to share
060is really this and that's that engagement globally is not what it should be i think that 78 percent of workers not reaching their full potential is is kind of a difficult headline to say only 22 percent of the global workforce which gallup does global polling almost every country around the world we survey employees and ask them about their basic needs in the workplace and are those needs being met only 22 percent globally in the us it's better than the global story but not as good as it could be 36 percent is the number you see on the slide we've just released data in the last few days it's down to 32 percent um is the u.s level of employee engagement as you would imagine the last two years have been hard for everyone um school
061leaders and and all organizations have been going through just difficult times as we've transitioned through a pandemic and and all else that's going on in our world so to have just a roughly a third of employees engaged is not enough and that's kind of our our mission at gallup is to provide some objective data and say how can we make that better the next number you see is 48 is the average of our gallup client database so why are clients more engaged than the u.s workforce well i think that's because clients who who choose to invest in measure and make intentional plans about engagement tend to be a little better than organizations that don't care about it or don't measure it or don't pay attention to it our client database also has some pretty mature
062clients i've got some school districts i've personally worked with for almost 15 years and what i will say is not to put pressure on the results for next year but typically the baseline year is the lowest we ever see engagement because typically when you measure something and you pay attention to it and you work together on it it tends to get better over time that's not a guarantee i shared in the workshop this afternoon if you measure engagement and then you don't do anything about it that might be worse than not measuring it in the first place because now they know you know and and you're still not making it better but when we simplify and really make it work it it doesn't have to be that difficult and then the final number 71 percent
063that's a group of a few dozen clients that gallup works with that we recognize as gallup great workplace award winners we have had school districts school divisions awarded as a gallup great workplace award winner and that's when you've got 71 percent the average there is 71 percent engaged so imagine the difference when you've got 71 percent of your employees engaged as opposed to the more national average around 30 percent so that's kind of the backdrop and the mission behind this what we're addressing here is really culture um culture is the way we do things around here culture rarely is neutral it's usually either getting a little better or being challenged and getting a little bit worse and so we've got to put that intentional effort into building a culture and and being intentional about that
064so when we analyze the data we categorize employees into three categories there's engaged not engaged and actively disengaged and this is based on the metrics of those 12 questions that we'll uh we'll spend a moment on here here next engaged employees are fully invested in the work they're involved and enthusiastic about their work they love their job they're great recruiters even though it might not be in their job description because they tell their neighbors how much they enjoy working in the division they they talk about how much they love their job they just go above and beyond not because they have to but because that's who they are that's that's how they feel when they land that perfect lesson or have that difficult conversation that ends well or achieve that goal they don't keep it
065to themselves they share it with others so that it builds creativity and innovation in the organization and so they go above and beyond that's our engaged employees again that's roughly a third of employees in the u.s and nearly that that same number here in the in the district not engaged employees this represents about half of employees and most organizations that we study not engaged employees and that sounds negative i would it's more neutral it's okay but not great so they're not engaged they might not be disengaged either but there's just something missing they're physically present but sometimes there's something psychologically just missing um it's it's okay but not great maybe it's been a while since they've been recognized maybe they're not sure they connect with the mission um maybe there's some unresolved issues that they've
066not been heard about and and that causes them to to be not engaged and then there's a percentage that are actively disengaged this is roughly one in seven employees nationally that are actively disengaged they're frustrated about something um they feel like their opinion doesn't count they feel like they're not being recognized or not being heard there's a challenge that goes with that and the challenge isn't just that it's hard for them to experience that active disengagement but there there's others who receive that as well and they they're kind of being recruited the not engaged employees are being recruited in both directions the engaged employees are really trying to bring bring their colleagues up a level the actively disengaged employees oftentimes bring employees down because of that negativity so we want to address the needs of
067the actively disengaged and the non-engaged and the engaged employees across the board why do we care about this well there's there's a lot of metrics that that we point to in terms of why we care being this is the baseline year we don't have our moral data to include in this in this story but i'll share a little bit of our meta analysis meta just means many so when we look at many studies we've been doing this engagement survey for over 20 years millions of employees thousands of organizations hundreds of school districts or school divisions around the country what we find is when in when work groups are engaged when they're in the top quartile on engagement versus the bottom quartile there's a drastic difference in metrics like turnover productivity absenteeism and safety and there's
068other metrics too we look at sales or profitability or or different different issues in different industries but when we think about that the turnover i live in nebraska omaha public schools is just down the street from me they're a similar size school district about 700 teachers said they're not coming back next year that's a lot of positions to fill in a market that's really tight there's not 700 applicants on the market right now in the omaha metro area so how can they retain more employees manage that turnover absenteeism is expensive and it's a disruption to student learning certainly safety is an issue whether you're a bus driver you work in a cafeteria you're working grounds and maintenance or even in the classroom when we think about safety it can be physical safety as we've unfortunately
069been reminded about again this week it can be physical safety in terms of a pandemic which we're being reminded about again these weeks but it also can be psychological safety do i feel like i belong do i feel like i'm i'm here and i'm cared about and i'm invested in a way that that's worth it and so when we have high engagement we can manage through hard things differently and better than when we've got high levels of active disengagement so that's kind of the background i'll go through the the elements of an engaging workplace next but let me pause there are there any questions about what i've shared so far i'll make sure i don't get too far into things without addressing your questions i do have a question do you find a difference in
070engagement in public employers versus private employers so the the chicken exit answer is on average they're about the same there is a range but there are incredibly well managed and highly engaged public organizations as well as private organizations and there are some that are really struggling in both camps big numbers in our database tend to act alike we do we do work with some highly engaged federal government agencies school districts and so on as i mentioned we've got some school districts that are as engaged as any organization in the database we've got others i worked with one one college actually higher education out in california earlier this week 29 percent engaged 29 percent actively disengaged that's a difficult place to start you're in a much better spot than that so there's a large range within
071the data just aren't clear it doesn't seem like whether you're a non-profit for-profit public private is a determinant in terms of whether you'll be engaged it really comes down to those local the relationship you have with your local principal with your local manager and and whether your basic needs are being met thank you yeah i have a question please i don't want to put you on the spot because you may not have this data with you but um since you've looked at school divisions across the united states is there are there studies that show that divisions that have unions or recognized unions score higher on the engagement scale than others so again that the data on that are mixed we've not we've not looked at that specifically and published that but anecdotally i've worked with
072dozens of districts and and i see a range in both but there's also a range in terms of the the relationship or what role the union really plays in some states a union arranges birthday parties and others they're very they're very involved in day-to-day decisions so there's a range within again i don't think being a member of a union or not being a member of a union determines whether you're engaged or not i think what determines whether you're engaged is whether those needs are being met and and employees play an active role in that it's not the manager's job or the principal's job so embedded in that i mean there's a level of ownership that the employee has to take but there's employees who are members of union who unions who are incredibly engaged in
073their work and there's organizations that don't have union environments where the same is true so it's i wish it were cleaner than that i'd give you a straight answer but it that doesn't seem to be a factor okay let me let me share then the the elements of engagement um so i want you to think for a moment about how you would describe uh the division when uh when it's thriving you know when when things are really going well what's happening i asked this question of your cabinet this morning i asked this question of your your principals and and directors this afternoon and i heard things like it's fun it's engaging they said engaging i said well that's kind of reading ahead but okay um but they they said you know they're you're tired at
074the end of the day but it was worth it we had some people mention flow which is that state where you're you're highly challenged and you're highly supported at the same time and they say it's that exhausted okay that was worth it glad it's over let's do it again tomorrow um there's there's an energy about what's happening next there's a there's a mission about serving people and and really feeling feeling like that matter so those are the kind of things we hear when we talk about a thriving workplace or a highly engaged workplace there's basic needs that we're working to address and and as i mentioned earlier this week i worked with the higher ed institution out in california worked with a john deere dealer in the midwest a hedge fund out in in canada
075regardless of the type of organization or the role you play within the organization we all have some needs that need to be addressed in our in our work so even thinking here in the division whether you're whether you're a para whether you're a counselor whether you're a teacher whether you're an assistant principal regardless of your role all these needs are are on your radar screen and important so we start with basic needs and that's just knowing what's expected and having materials and equipment we need to do our work right and that looks different in different roles but the basic need is there then there's some individual needs am i known am i cared about does somebody help me see my value in terms of recognition do i have opportunities to learn and grow as i
076discussed earlier one of the most difficult things in the human existence tends to be just loneliness and feeling detached and sometimes when we're when we're really not feeling heard or seen we can act out just to get attention and it often is negative attention but students and and even adults would rather be disciplined than ignored and unfortunately those aren't or thankfully those aren't the only two options right if we can get ahead of that and help people know that they're a part of something that matters and and recognize them appropriately it can help alleviate some of that then in the lower right hand corner you see the teamwork needs there's four needs that we address on the survey with this as well it's that having opinions count you know being heard having someone help you
077see your importance and and have some pride in your work and then a culture of trust where you can share things with people in that matter to you you can be real we've seen fluctuation in terms of uh well-being in our organizations and across the country in the last few weeks and and years here these last two years in particular so being in an environment that feels psychologically safe and and where there's trust and people assume that you're doing well in and asking if if you're not right that matters a lot and then the final two are really about growth and this is having some appropriate challenge and and opportunities to review contributions we talked with the with the leaders this afternoon about this that doesn't mean you just got your evaluation filled out but
078it means that you had a voice in terms of what you want to contribute how good you think you can be what you want to how you want to be challenged in the year ahead so it's a two-way conversation not just an evaluation but something you actively participate in and have an active stake in your career so we take those 12 needs and we map those across the 12 questions on our engagement survey so these are the 12 core questions on your survey um as dr kaiser mentioned there were three additional questions that we asked i'll i'll share results with you here in a moment and there was also one question that said overall how satisfied are you with the division as a place to work that's kind of the warm-up question to help you
079get your mindset around it being an organizational survey the the 12 questions that follow are really about the employees relationship with their job this is not a principal evaluation or a manager evaluation there's only one question that actually even references the supervisor directly and and even that one that's question number five it says my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person which uh spoiler alert was one of the two strongest items on the survey here in the division relative to our database so employees do generally feel that caring environment and they also are feeling like their associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work question number nine was another one that stood out relative to the database so while the whole report isn't uh isn't where we
080want it to be yet um i think it's a good place to start and so we'll dig in we'll dig into that next you you do notice there's some there's some elements on this survey or some items on this survey that have extreme language the recognition question says in the last seven days have you received recognition or praise for doing good work that seems pretty frequent some people take that literally and they'll look at their calendar and nope that was eight days ago it doesn't count most people say if i have to think too hard about the last time i was engaged it's been too long i've received recognition at times in my career that that mattered so much that every time i think about it almost gets to count again and so you know
081we have interactions like that but the specific language is there because it works um the other question that gets a lot of attention is question number 10 um i have a best friend at work now there's there's organizations i worked with a bank earlier this week that said we actually had a consultant who said you should never have a best friend at work it's bad for productivity what if you have to have a hard conversation you don't want to do that with your best friend what if they have to fire you all this kind of thing and we our data just reject that conventional wisdom that say you should not have a best friend at work when we ask people to describe their best friend in life they say things like i trust them i
082enjoy being around them i look forward to that if i don't show up today they'll wonder how i'm doing and they'll check in on me they remember that i my mom's going through cancer treatment they remember that i've got a daughter with a ballet recital so i have to leave as soon as the bell rings things like that and and those are the kind of things that we ought to have in a healthy workplace as well so when we ask a question like do you have a good friend at work the scores are a little bit higher but the data don't predict performance nearly as well so that's why we ask do you have a best friend at work if our job was to help you feel good about yourselves we could ask easier questions
083and add fours and fives together as if they're the same thing even though they're not so so what you see might feel a little bit a little bit more of a hard to accept report because we ask hard questions emotions are difficult things to manage but they're worth it and if we can do that well it really does make a difference moving forward so that's kind of the questions and why we why we ask them in the way they do we want to make sure that the questions are actionable that they're observable at the local level and that they link to performance improvement so we don't ask questions about is the food tasty or is the parking lot well lit or things like that you can you can do that but we don't we don't
084uh bother 3 000 people with a question like that if you wonder if the parking lot's well lit just go outside at night and you can you can tell without it being on the survey we really want to keep the survey efficient and we want it to be a list of things that local teams local group leaders can make a difference about without any real additional time or money so a thing like recognition that doesn't mean everybody has to get a 50 gift card every time they do something nice it might mean they get a handwritten note but you can put it on a piece of scratch paper and drop it in their mailbox it doesn't even cost you a stamp and it can really address that need or you can facilitate that students or
085parents or peer-to-peer recognition is happening and again it doesn't cost anything it just takes a little bit of intentional effort to make that happen this uh this graphic really landed well today and i think as we go through hard things together it's important to remember engagement is not something that leaders do to employees or even do for employees we've got to create the conditions as a leadership team to to help make engagement a thing but you know principals managers supervisors need to play an active role in that teams need to play an active role this is not something where the the leader is supposed to see their results and make a decision about what happens next unilaterally and then implement some new strategy that wouldn't be horrible but the most effective way to do it
086is to be transparent about it with their team to say here's the results raise your hand if you think this is good enough okay nobody does let's keep getting better what are we going to do to make this better and so every employee has a choice to make about that just like we all gotta we all had to decide this morning if it was worth getting up out of bed and coming to work and you know it's been a hard week and yet we're here and we're doing hard things together so it really is about supporting people in a way that causes them to have a level of ownership for their career for their peers for the students they serve so it's not just a top-down kind of initiative we really want to um we're
087going to involve everybody in the conversation so that's uh that's kind of the the what we're measuring why we measure it the way we do let me pause again are there questions before we get into your data uh that i might uh i might address as we as we roll through this please it's just i just because i'm a notetaker um we'll have access to this after right because i know we don't have access to it now yeah i think it's yeah it's in the yep okay thank you just glad you said something worth remembering all right let's get into your results a little bit here then the the story i'm about to share with the numbers for those who like numbers it's not about raising the numbers my job is to help organizations have
088higher levels of engagement your job is not about engagement your job is about helping make sure that there's what was the twelve thousand safe miles driven by your buses every day or there's twenty some thousand hot nutritious meals served daily or that you've got every student prepared for college and career by the time they they leave the division those goals don't change this isn't about how can you get your q12 scores up it's really about how can you use this information to make further progress on the things you were about before you even knew gallup was a thing so it's really not about the numbers as much as the opportunities that come with this as we go through some of these results i want you to think about what are the high scores what are
089the lower scores the biggest opportunities for improvement and i'll give you both the mean scores as the average scores in terms of what your employees said as well as how that relates to our global or to our national database and to our databases school so you kind of put the numbers in context because some questions are easier to say yes to than others these results represent a snapshot in time this was back at the end of april most of the the first wave of employees everybody got the invitation on april 25th and we always see a big big response the first day maybe 40 percent responded that first day and then responses kind of trickled in we sent a couple reminders you actually extended the survey by a few days to to boost that last
090bit of engagement um with participation anyway and uh completed on may 14th so but even that was a snapshot in time life comes at you fast these days even in the last three weeks there's been a lot of a lot of things happening in the division in our world that that matter and can impact engagement so but it does represent that end of april early may level of engagement i wanted to create a sense of urgency today with your principals and managers to share their results soon even before the end of the school year i'm not pretending that anybody's got an extra couple hours for a staff meeting before the last day of school but there's some ways to share the results and and build some anticipation for what what's coming next and then do
091some planning over the summer and as people are putting together their school improvement plans and and getting ready to launch in the fall these data will be available to them we do encourage people to pay attention to the first six questions on the survey the the basic and individual needs if our basics aren't being met then some of those higher level needs feel a little bit hollow so we've got to know what's expected we've got to um you have the materials and equipment we need and so on before we're ready to move into some of the rest i i really reinforce that we want them to think about the goal for their team or their school engagement is not the goal but it can help you get there and then the last point says interpretations
092can vary i'll just amend that i mean uh interpretations do vary you've got two over 2000 respondents on the survey they all kind of looked at that question and thought differently about what's that mean for me and my experience which is again why we encourage that local level um the local level conversations in action so my three summary points before i share the the numbers here it's a baseline year it's a good place to start okay i don't know was it were the results higher than you thought lower than you thought i don't know if things are better or not as good as they were a year ago because we weren't here a year ago this is a little different survey than maybe you've done in the past so i really look at this as
093the baseline year and and the goal is where do we go from here do things get a little better the things go down a little bit next year we'll have trending data to share with you but this year we're going to focus on it as baseline and and just make sense out of that current results largely mirror what we see when we do our tracking polling in the evenings we call people and interrupt their dinner and ask them questions about their job and their politics and everything else right that's gallup and we do a lot of web polling and things and nationally representative samples your results are very similar to what we see nationally about a third engaged about half in that middle category about one in seven that are actively disengaged and so um
094no huge surprise from my standpoint not knowing your context real well but again it's a it's a good spot to start and there is a range across the 12 elements of engagement of those 12 questions as i mentioned question 3 and 4 are a little bit challenged right now opportunity to do what i do best and recognition we're lower scoring items relative to the database and higher scoring items where my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person and my coworkers are committed to quality work so again i'll have database comparisons for all but everybody has two at the top and two at the bottom that's how we calibrate the reporting but we want to draw your attention to different things that might might require some action i'm sharing district
095overall or division overall results here but the the principals and managers see their own results and and that's really where the action happens you can imagine the difference between working in an elementary school versus a middle school versus a high school versus an operations role maybe you're in technology maybe you're in accounting there's very different roles and so different needs throughout the organization but a common language the same questions same reporting and support for that so here's kind of the the big numbers if you will the average overall and this is on a one to five scale strongly disagree to strongly agree so 3.73 is what we call our grand mean so that's the average across those 12 questions across the 2010 employees who responded to the survey and so that that response rate was
096about 75 percent which is really good for this baseline year my guess is that'll probably go up a little bit in the future we typically can see around 80 percent response rate i think the first year the timing near the end of the school year can raise some like i just don't have time to click that link right now but 75 response rate and some teams would have had a 100 response rate um but overall that's where we're at so how does that rank relative to our database well it puts you at the 25th percentile of our client database as i mentioned it's about what we see on our average tracking pool but our client database includes schools and other organizations that have been working on this for a while and really intentionally building a
097culture of engagement so that's a pretty high bar to start to jump against but but that gives you the context of where are you relative to other organizations but that's before you started intentionally working on this and that's where we go so 31 engaged 53 percent not engaged 16 percent actively disengaged gives you that 1.94 to 1 ratio so that's just 31 divided by 16. that's just a quick kind of rule of thumb um as i mentioned i had a client earlier this week with a one-to-one ratio they had 26 engaged 26 percent actively disengaged i think it takes probably three to one before you really feel like you're hitting stride to have three positive employees three engaged employees to help neutralize one actively disengaged and i work with some clients that have a ten
098to one ratio where it's a four or five percent active disengagement and and maybe it's 40 or 50 percent engaged so i know that's possible and over time i think you'll be there as well so that's the big numbers where is that relative to the database well when we look at your overall you're the 3.73 overall our k12 database the 50th percentile is a 4.0 so if you want to say what's a what's an average score if you can get to a 4.0 that would get you the midpoint of our school's database again including many districts and divisions that have been working at this for a while first administration tends to be lower than the overall database so 3.91 is what we typically see among our first administration clients um so just a touch below
099that and then our overall client database 4.08 would be the midpoint of the database so so next year we'll compare you to the 50th percentile and i suspect you'll be you'll be right there the year after that you'll probably be above the 50th percentile so we'll start comparing you to the 75th and and then the 90th so it's fun to go on that journey and see things really improve over time brace yourself this is the eye chart of the presentation tonight there's a lot going on here so i really just want to point out a couple of things one is not all items are created equal so there's some items that are just more difficult to score well on than others typically question number four seven and ten so recognition fourth from the bottom there
100that's a tough question overall it's hard for people to feel like they're recognized in workplaces question number seven at work my opinion seems to count that tends to be a low scoring item as well and then question number 10 that best friend at work is another one and it's funny because people act like having a best friend at work they'll get dramatic about the wording and they'll say i have one best friend she lives in houston i'm never given that one of five and they act like it's a yes or no question but if you look at the breakdown of of ones twos threes fours fives it's as evenly distributed as almost any other question so we act like it's a toggle switch but when you look at the survey results people have a way
101to say it's a two a three a four and so on we look at the percent fives that dark green section and put a little extra emphasis on that um there's a difference between a four and a five so we anchor the end points on the survey strongly disagree to strongly agree and sometimes people will will kind of arbitrarily assign that four must mean agree and three must mean neutral and two must mean disagree we don't label two three and four and our average score is about a four oh so a four isn't a neutral a four is and it's not a positive it's almost a soft no because if you know if i ask you have you received recognition or praise in the last seven days and you say well maybe not man it's
102been a while but i'll give it a four you know i get recognition every once in a while that's different than saying yes if you'd have been with me yesterday i could have showed you you know this interaction i have with the student that is going to hang with me through the summer so you see a difference between a four and a five so we encourage people in conversations with their teams to to share the data and then say what would a five look like what would it look like to strongly agree maybe our 3.9 is okay maybe our whatever is okay but what would a five look like and when they talk about what those days that they strongly agree are like you can start to catch a glimpse of what's possible and work
103more towards that so again the the highest scoring items lowest scoring items we've got the mean scores as well as a percentile rank your overall percentile rank is 25th percentile several items above that a few items below that but overall that's kind of where we're where we're starting and then i mentioned we also had three additional questions on the on the survey these are the three questions that we built custom for you um we have i shouldn't say custom they're maybe semi-custom not every client answers these questions but we do have enough that we can give you a database comparison on them as well so um the first question around pain incentives being fair in comparison to the job market for people doing similar work that's a really tough question to get anybody to say
104yes to you could pay somebody three times the money and after a year or two you know we'd all be like well i earned that now i should get another raise you know it's they talk about the management literature is pay is more of a is it a motivator or a hygiene factor it's motivating right when you receive the raise but we kind of reset our standard of living accordingly and then we all want to make progress the next year as well so that's just a difficult topic a difficult question as you all know but your 2.82 average on that puts you at the 25th percentile which is roughly where you are on the on the other elements then we've got two questions around diversity inclusion and being treated fairly regardless of background or differences
105those two items the first one around diversity inclusion issues are openly discussed 39th percentile stands out in a more positive direction than than some of the other items on the survey the the one about everyone being treated fairly regardless of background um came in at the 19th percentile so if you compare those two items we had a conversation about this with cabinet this morning um it feels like you're doing a a better job of having the conversations about diversity and inclusion but still have some ground to make just like everybody does in terms of everyone being treated fairly that's a tough question the way we word it that everyone is treated fairly now i might say i'm treated fairly but if i have a friend who got passed over for a promotion and i think
106i know why i'd have a hard time giving that a five so um anyway it's a it's again good baseline data to to build from when we look at the the breakdown on those so the focus of our our training and the focus of our support is really around those 12 questions because that's where we've got the expertise we've written dozens of best-selling books and and consulted around this for decades but these additional questions are helpful you may choose to ask these questions again in the future you may want to ask some different questions as additional items many of our clients during their second year will ask some questions around like did i receive feedback on last year's survey did we put together an action plan did we follow through on what we said we
107were going to do those are nice kind of manipulation checks to see did people just treat this like another survey or did they actually plan on something and follow through on it so we'll talk more with your with your team about that as we prepare for the next the next wave so those are high level data i'm going to give you a couple of demographic breakdowns and then we'll uh clean up any questions you might have at that point so the next week we were able to look at the the survey results um with some demographics in mind so we did not ask employees to declare their race or their gender their age or their length of stay with the organization what they did is they logged into the survey and all of this was
108uploaded behind the scenes so it saved the employee from needing to answer all those questions it makes the data more accurate because it mirrors what you have in your system we don't report data if there's less than four respondents in a category so you see a few of those at the bottom that don't have data we do want to protect confidentiality of all employees i don't even know as a gallup associate what individual responses were so we don't accidentally share those with you either so obviously each employee's response matters but we share it all back in aggregate form which gives employees a chance to be real and honest and and share what they share how they feel so the race breakdown you've got different sample sizes here 1657 of the 2010 respondents are white so
109many more respondents were white but when you look at the data broken down by race white employees actually had a little bit less engagement than than other races so asian highest hispanic latino black african-american two or more races were each slightly higher than your white employees so what we like to see on these demographics is that they're similar and if they're not similar we want to make sure that the the opportunities are not being held back from from certain people groups and and from from this standpoint uh feels like you're uh you're doing a good job of creating a culture where race doesn't determine your engagement let me just say it that way so every every employee seems to be at least as at least as likely to be engaged as the majority race in
110this case which is white the color on these the the yellow red green that's just based on where that score would be in the database so don't don't read too much into that color at some point 100th of a point you know it changes color but just draws your attention to certain things the next piece we kind of buy was tenure so this is length of stay with the district and you've got some some incredible employees that were celebrated earlier tonight and um what we tend to see when we look at engagement data by length of service or by tenure i don't mean tenure in terms of like teacher tenure but just how long you've been on the payroll is really what this means so your most engaged cohort of employees are your newest employees
111that's a good thing if your newest employees are not engaged then we got we got some challenges ahead of us so the fact that employees have joined within the last year are the most engaged is a good place to be what we tend to see is kind of a u-shaped curve as it relates to engagement and length of stay with the organization so there is kind of a honeymoon effect for most new employees where they they like their new job somebody took them to lunch you know everything's great once we get into that kind of three to five year five to ten year period things tend to kind of sort out at the bottom we have hard days we got you know didn't get a promotion we wanted or got yelled at by a student
112or a teacher or something right we get into some of those hard days and we got to make a choice are we going to stay or are we going to go do something else and if we choose to stay and we work through those hard years and and we start to hit stride then as we've been there longer and you see that 10 plus year tenure group which is 661 employees that's a huge percentage of employees you see it start to climb back up again so again we tend to see a slight kind of u-shape but it's good to see that there's not huge range in your in your engagement by tenure then i have a client earlier this week where i had to tell them that every year you're with the organization you're less
113engaged than the year before that's a hard message to deliver so i'm glad you've got that jump back up at the 10-year period which again is kind of kind of what we tend to see then we look at gender this is a really exciting slide where you if you squint you can actually see a difference i love it when when we don't see differences based on gender in our inner engagement again it suggests that everyone is equally likely to have a opportunity to be engaged there's no in-group out group as it relates to gender and again this was this was drawn from your system so the way things are coded in your system currently is binary male female there may be some that that aren't included in that number if you add up maybe it
114gets to everybody so anyway there's generally no difference there rounding error we get a hundredth of a point difference and then we've got the this last slide on age group um again we want to make sure that uh employees are equally um able to be engaged based not based on their their age right um many of your newest employees probably are also in that 18 to 25 year old as you hire teachers who've just completed their certification and joined or new employees that that are starting with you your most engaged group are your youngest employees your second most engaged group are your oldest employees and so again it kind of mirrors that trend of younger newer to the organization as well as more tenured uh more length of service with the organization so unfortunately a
115few of those that retired may be in that 65 older crowd so we'll have to make sure the next crew follows them closely behind but but essentially the other groups are 3.74 3.72 i mean barely a difference as you look down the list so nothing real dramatic in those demographic cuts but i like to share it when it's normal because then that feels good too when it's dramatic we have to have separate meetings about it but you're in you're in a good spot as far as that goes so i look at these kind of data all the time that's kind of what stood out to me so maybe let me give you my summary points here and then then we'll pause and questions about the data and we'll talk about what happens next so my
116recommendations are kind of high level observations there is a lot of range within the district every team every location has a unique story we want to make sure action planning happens at the local level now i've worked with enough school dish by 40 of the 50 largest districts in the country and many others that are kind of mid-size and smaller we see almost always a trend where elementary schools tend to be slightly more engaged than secondary schools in some places middle high school are about the same but there's almost like this gradual this gradual difference between elementary and high school and and it really mirrors our student data that we've collected over the years when we look at student engagement about three-fourths of fifth graders which in many places is the end of elementary school
117about three-fourths of fifth graders are engaged with school in middle school it's only about 50 percent in high school it's only about 33 percent and so i don't want to say that student engagement's what's driving teacher engagement to be down a little bit at the secondary level but certainly that's that's a factor that we have to think about parent engagement's different i've got my kids just finished school on tuesday but i've got one i've got to think about this now because one of them just moved from middle to high but i guess i have two high schoolers now one middle schooler and an elementary schooler my relationship with a middle school or an elementary school is a little different because once they turn 16 they drive themselves to school they don't think it's cool if
118i show up anymore that kind of thing it's different right high schools are also bigger organizations if you've got one principal and 100 staff members that's a different management assignment than one principal and 40 staff members and i'm not saying elementary school principals have it easy but it's different by level so it's helpful to think about the results at the local level support everybody but help them to make their own decisions about what to do next i did say let's let's make sure we identify some of your some of your schools and teams that are exemplary in in their engagement and your leadership teams just just seeing the results today for the first time but it was interesting to see their expressions and their excitement about certain maybe a new principle and the results look
119really good or or things like that so there's faces behind the numbers we want to make sure that less engaged teams have the appropriate support so they don't stay there we want everybody to have an opportunity to get better and be supported appropriately and then maybe the one word i would hope that people remember today is the word curious maybe i could say inquisitive it's it's tempting when you see results that are less than perfect to be defensive um to feel like this is my team saying i'm not good enough or whatever and and i tried to to show support to your your principals and managers again this is not an employee value or a manager evaluation survey if a principal or manager goes into a conversation about their results and is defensive about it
120it's going to be hard to make it better but if they go in and they're curious and they say these results aren't as good as i hoped they'd be i want to know what you think about it you know and and if they say somebody says well this item's really low well what would it what would it look like to make it better and ask some good questions and draw people out to say what do you want to do we don't want this to be the manager's job to to carry it all forward and and even in the action plan we said don't put your name next to any of the actions because then it's one more thing they're counting on you to do for them we want somebody in the room to volunteer and
121say i'll lead that initiative if so-and-so will help me and then and then we run with it so that's kind of the the data if you will i'll i'll conclude in a moment with the um kind of where do we go from here but before i go there questions about the data or any of what i've anybody shared at this point could you go back to question five again on the first slide showing the results uh let's see this one yeah cures yeah so my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person the fifth from the bottom there your your mean score was a 4.06 which puts you at the 34th percentile of the database so overall 25th percentile but that 34th percentile really stands out and then the quality
122uh coworkers committed a quality work is at the 40th percentile that was the highest relative to the database so i'm say those are the two that you're doing the best on relative to the when we grade on the curve if you will co-workers committed equality and supervisor cares about me those two stand out so now this is like most surveys right the five is the best best score five's the top yeah there is a don't know or does not apply option and we'll see that occasionally sometimes we'll say has someone talked to you about your progress in the last six months and maybe they just started a month ago and they probably don't answer that one but yeah and you'll notice that the ranking of the percentile and the mean column are not the same
123so on some items you might score higher but it's a lower percentile rank that's just just like on any standardized test there's some questions that just have a lower hit rate than others so the the percentile rank column is the one that we really want to calibrate your attention to because that's grading on a curve otherwise the tough items would always be the ones like oh we have to work on that well maybe relative to everybody else you're doing okay on that one so each of the scorecards have some recommendations about here's two strengths and here's two challenges that that you might consider as you move forward in action planning and each each school each team has a unique scorecard in that way so i guess i just want to make sure that i have
124a question but also just to make sure so the first year that you do this gallup poll you anticipate doing it three years the fir first year you're comparing us and saying if we hit at the 25th percentile that's about the average of someone who's starting this process yeah the the average first year client would be lower than the 50th percentile for sure because our database includes more mature clients who've been working at this for for a period of time so yeah you're just slightly below what our typical first year would be so the 25th percentile is picked as a benchmark because that's where first year clients tend to be around the the 25th percentile is just reported because that's where you are right now um this this the first administration three point nine one
125would be the 50th percentile so the 25th is our average and then that chart that was just there is showing where we went under that and where we went over that but below where first year people tend to be right okay um and you you ask about three years i believe the the contract uh was a three-year contract um so you've got opportunities within those three years to do the survey um annually you can also use our platform to do some flash pulls in between if you want to but our anticipation would be there'd be at least an annual wave where we collect and and next year we'll have less conversation about the database and more conversation about change over time really the best point of comparison is where are you now compared to where
126you were last year well we don't know where you were last year because we weren't here but next year we'll know which segues into my next question which you probably do not have an answer for but maybe you do in what ways in your if you look at the aggregate of data across i guess other clients or customers that you're serving has covered had an effect like there we yeah would you anticipate that the results you're seeing right now might be lower than if co we weren't i don't know i'm just thinking it would be better if there was no covenant yes i agree with that um i guess when you say when you say that a first year client is typically starting at whatever it is let's say the 30th percentile you said we're
127slightly below it you probably told us exactly but i don't remember um is that a typical thing or has that been in the last three years that you're seeing this is like the start off of yeah so it's a three-year rolling average and um yeah some of us remember when it was 15 days to slow the spread and we'd be just go home early for the weekend and we'll be back um two years later we're still dealing with it so our database is starting to recognize the pandemic so about half of our database now includes you know data that are post post the beginning of the pandemic because 2020 and 2021 are both included in our data now so what are we seeing as a result of the pandemic researchers always like to say causation
128doesn't equal correlation so asterisk there but anecdotally i think what we're seeing is it it's a it's hard right our national data are bringing the bringing the numbers down a little bit is that because of covid partly i suspect is it because of cost of living increases or you know inflation and stock market changes and and things like that i mean if somebody looks at their 401k or their 401a and it went down well maybe that affects their engagement for the day as well unemployment trends tend to have an impact as well um i guess i was just curious to draw it to our specific things because satisfaction seems like it looks good but then it's actually at the 14th percentile that sounds very low yeah and i don't know if that's like you know
129i guess hopefully that can improve as it goes i guess the other question is because we don't see it is are we gonna have access to what level of this are we gonna have it sounds like there's can be a lot of granularity beyond this do we as school board members have access to that or no or or who has access to that who doesn't answer that question currently i can see each of the principals or managers as of 8 o'clock this morning has access to their own local level results and they can look through and make sense out of that but how it's shared beyond that's really is really up to you is brody coming down okay on the on the pandemic question one thing we are learning is around remote work which some
130roles are easier to do remotely than others it feels like fully remote is not necessarily that's what i was going to ask because i was like with the granularity you did point out that you had different debt like a corporate versus a public version you said there wasn't a big difference but with remote work there's there are people that are now have a completely different work environment and teachers are unfortunately not one of them they have a very similar work environment with a lot more stressors added on yeah hard to do hard to work the grocery store remotely hard to be a security officer remotely there's some roles that are more difficult to do remotely what we're seeing though as it relates to remote work for those who who could possibly do that what really
131seems to drive engagement is so people who work from home 100 of the time are not as engaged as people who are in the office some of the time i think that's the myth that people think it's oh if i could work from home i'd be so much better off yeah in the short term on a few things when it's not safe to go to the office but as it's safe to go back to the office the most engaged employees are those who are in the office two three or four days a week and that they have a little bit of say about which days that is so i think it's more about autonomy than it is about am i in the office or not a lot of individual differences there but once we get
132to a place again where you don't feel unsafe being at the office there's something about being alone that's just not healthy over the long term so we can do it if we're all doing it for a season but it feels like it's really coming back to where if you're not in the office regularly it's hard to sustain engagement over time so it's more more to be determined bro do you want to answer the question about uh results being shared brody downs director of uh human resources so we do have uh the ability to get into the system and and pull information by by department and by school um you know principles were shared and department heads are shared the information uh earlier this morning so we've only seen the data for since 9am i guess
133um so we do have the ability to pull that information out so if there's something specific um like most surveys we can do our best to you know go into the system and pull it out to answer questions should there be any help it sounds like you just answered one of my questions about stratification of the data by job type did you collect that data i mean so we do principals or teachers or so the way that it reports up it reports up by um organizational hierarchy so we do not have the ability to pull it out by job title we upload that information but we don't have the ability to pull it out by job title that i'm aware of again i haven't gotten into the system that far yet it could be added
134back i don't think that was one of the concepts okay it does have location demographic information um that he's that he's shared location department as well so for example a customer department for example correct yeah so we can't break it up by department but um that's more what i was asking about anyway um any other questions since you're here what ways do we plan you said this should be shared with all all employees can see the results so do we how are we doing that are we giving principals guidance i don't know i imagine it could be a little hard to go on like an elementary school level and and discuss these results yep so like you heard today was really the first day that this information was available to us what we're doing is
135we're asking our principals and our department heads to take their information really take a look at it take a deep dive into it and then really start thinking about how they share that out with their staff and how they get feedback on it and how they use that information to really start thinking about what we're going to do going forward so thinking about our school improvement planning for next year what are some goals what are some metrics that they may set that's one of the reasons that we wanted to meet with them now so that it becomes a little bit informational this year but definitely very actionable going forward so they will be sharing this information with their staff at this point they are just in the digestion of that and we have not had
136the specific conversation with the here's the the when the how all that type of thing let me give you a glimpse of what of what happens next so here's the um here's really what we shared with with the groups this afternoon so again we reinforce that it's not about just have higher q12 scores because if you want to have higher scores on a survey just buy donuts on the day of the survey and the sugar rush alone will bump your scores up right but we talked then what are you going to buy them next year steak and eggs and the year after that you know just gets better and better but really we want to focus on this as a additional information that gives you some focus on what needs need to be addressed so
137i won't go through this in a lot of detail but high level we introduced a thing called the state of the team tool and that state of the team tool has four steps first we say identify what's a goal that you have for your your school or for your division so if it's transportation it's how many miles safely driven in a year's time or what percentage of pickup and drop off or you know whatever the case whatever the goal is so we start with that goal by doing that it makes it so that engagement is not the entire conversation but the conversation is nested in why are we here in the first place so it's making sure all of our high schoolers are college and career ready by you know by graduation day that's a
138great goal let's start with that then when we get into the data and we look at our results it helps us to think which one of these elements of engagement can help us make progress towards that goal that we just talked about then we get them to hone in on one item that they would focus on you can't really work on all 16 you know there's 12 core questions plus the additional you can't work on 16 things at once it's like sis was pushing a rock up the hill you just make a little progress and you slip and you start over so we say choose one item in conjunction with your team's input and and decide what you're going to do and then follow through on that and then review and recalibrate so something as
139simple as we're going to be more intentional about the recognition item i suspect several of your teams will choose to work on recognition well somebody might say we're going to we're going to make a traveling trophy you know the maintenance office might have the rusty wrench trophy and and for whatever reason they think that's funny and they pass around this every month in a meeting they pass it around i understand there's a traveling pencil trophy already in in the district and so some of those things come local maybe you decide the first five minutes of every staff meeting everybody gets a piece of scratch paper on the table and you tear it in half and you you write one note to somebody in the room who you work closely with that you want to reinforce
140and maybe write one to somebody who wouldn't expect to get recognition from you but they've done something you've seen and so again that cost 50 cents worth of paper five minutes worth of time and and it can really make a difference so that's what we're asking people to do is identify what you want to work on what that looks like and then actually follow through and do it so light on the planning heavy on the action and if you do that and you feel like you did it well then come back and and work on something else so to create that culture of engagement just to bring it for a landing couple of final notes organizations that make the biggest improvement are the ones that take responsibility for creating a culture of engagement again this
141is not all about the principal or the manager being in charge of everything but it's about them creating the conditions and taking responsibility for it bringing others in and making it happen we do see a cascade effect of engagement if your leaders are not engaged it's challenging for your principals and managers to be engaged if your principals and managers aren't engaged it's hard for them to create the conditions for others so investing in leadership is really important in this um the time they spent today i think the i mean everybody on the call for three or four hours is a big a big commitment to to get things started and and to keep your leaders engaged throughout that's really important um we want to we want to focus on the the behaviors um having these
142data are helpful but we want to make sure there's an action plan and there's follow through and then it's not again not just the manager acting like they're in charge of everything in the in the shaded box there employees who work for a manager who involves them in goal setting at work are 3.6 times more likely to be engaged it's easier to say here's your goal for the year here's your goal for the year here's your goal for the year it's harder it takes more time to invite people in and say what do you think your goal could be this year how good do you think you can be and then kind of work that through a little bit and employees tend to set higher goals for themselves than their manager would which is what
143i think we see here so a final point is just if as a leader um your your leaders don't take responsibility for creating a culture of engagement um probably nobody else will and so that was our our kind of concluding remarks um with the team today so again i'm really encouraged by the conversation we've had throughout the day today it's been a long day i was able to go back to hotel and get a workout in this afternoon but we some of you didn't go home today so maybe change your shirt i don't know but but it's been a long day but i think a real great start um to what i hope is a is an ongoing um conversation that that really happens these last few days of the semester through the planning in
144the summer and and moving forward so that's what i want to share with you tonight um do you want to take over for the the so what thank you very much dr hodges before the so what or the now what i guess the so what first do you all need a little break yeah i would like yeah it would be good let's do about a 10 minute break then get some more engagement um bring in the gongs i think everybody's mic is off yeah prior to the break obviously you all heard some very interesting information from dr hodges what we're going to do now is give you a chance to unpack that a little bit and since it's a small group tonight we're just going to go ahead and do it as a single singular
145group discussion with your with mr page's uh recommendation there so what we're going to do now is give you all an opportunity to think about the things that you heard and talk about you know why this information is important some of your takeaways and really going after that curiosity about some of the things that you wonder about it's just an open conversation um we have with us obviously dr hodges but also dan redding and brody downs from human resources if there are any questions that we can help to clarify the way as you uh have that conversation so um we're going to spend about 10 to 15 minutes on this part depending on how the conversation goes so i'll just start it off and that is why is this information important i i mean i
146think it's pretty clear it's it feels pretty self-evident why it's important well i think it's particularly important after the past two years of massive disruption with covet and teachers being asked to do a lot and i'm not surprised that disappointed but not surprised that we scored pretty low and so notwithstanding what dr hodges said i mean i think it's hard to compare year one in the universe with the end of the pandemic scores but i do think the scores are the scores but um it is definitely a i hope is our baseline others i think one thing i found really interesting was the ability to get granularity with the data something that we've talked about on the board is a lot of times when we have information coming to us it's division wide and ultimately
147a lot of what goes on is in a school building a very specific school building and so i'm really kind of excited to see where principals take this while being cognizant of the the presentation saying that this isn't all on their back so i guess one question i would have is what help are we going to provide um our principals and and schools so that they can take away from this and grow um i guess is a question i have like are there division like when we say recognition do we want principals to be in there like inventing the will coming up with the wrench to a wrench traveling wrench award and various things or can we help them by doing like a division-wide thing i guess those are kind of questions i have also
148seeing your face is making me think in what ways is our new hr department going to incorporate this survey and do things with it i don't feel like it's necessarily our level to like tell them what to do with it but i'm curious and i'm excited um i know if i was a principal it'd be kind of neat it'd be hard but it'd be kind of neat to see how things were going in my building in this way yeah i'm curious if there will be a standardized way that principals can can roll out this information because it would be really awkward if one principal was like really into it and gave out all this information had these discussions and another principle was not that much into it and those teachers or other employees would not
149have as much engagement so are we going to provide some sort of standardized template of or directive talk talk to your employees about this or you know that's where i'm going i'm just going to be a listener now rather than an answer so i'm just going to be a listener for a few minutes rather than an answer are we on takeaways takeaways what were your takeaways okay related to dr akov's question um compared to like most places we fell into almost like uh average with the amount of engaged actively engaged and not engaged for first-year plays right yes and what was their real percentage did i write down the right thing was 31 of us engaged 53 knot and 16 actively disengaged that is correct okay other takeaways it wasn't oh i'm sorry i thought
150it was interesting judy i'm just going to say i think we're having a hard time hearing you because for whatever reason you're michael so it's like hard to tell when you're talking uh i think it's interesting to me um to look at the percentile rankings for the various things like our top two are our co-workers are uh interested in quality doing quality work and um someone is caring about my development i think was the question and then our bottom to our satisfaction which i mean the questions are presented at the same level but obviously satisfaction is a much bigger question um so that being the 14th coming in the 14th percentile is a bit discouraging to me um even though i know we're not supposed to just look at the bottom numbers and then um
151someone cares about my progress which seems kind of the same as development but i can't really tell the difference between those two things but one of them did really well and one of them did very badly but so uh but i also find that interesting that the satisfaction is 14th but the pay is fair is 25th which is around our average so um that to me was just an interesting takeaway that that's not necessarily tied together i would have that we're just talking i guess not doing responses i would have to add on that it's a little hard to conceptualize the survey result in some ways because you know we're like when you say employee satisfaction is 14 percent something in your brain is just like oh my gosh that's like terrible but it's not
152that it's 14. you know like it's it's on a ranking of a curve i just when you were saying that it's something i guess the point being that so i'd kind of be curious looking into it because it can be a little hard so it still feels pretty bad to me i gotta say oh i'm not saying it's not 86 i'm not saying it's not bad i'm just i guess making the comment that i appreciate him giving the presentation on how to take it in because it's a little bit like we're talking about rankings on a curve on a and i guess i'm also need to be cognizant so that i don't you know go lay in bed and cry that like it actually was the majority of employees are satisfied it's just that the
153the ranking is such that we're pretty low comparably so i don't know it doesn't need to be just that one either that i'm pointing to just like all of them that's worth while looking at other takeaways it wasn't really a takeaway i mean it i mean i'm struck by the well the data i guess we just touched on uh tended to be the least engagement in high schools and that's where we see the least engagement of our students and we've known that for a very long time that piece and you sort of wonder how that can be changed i mean that you know these are the students it's like after being in our system for you know a gazillion years and they're getting ready for college and workforce they're the least engaged they've been in
154the whole time they've been at el morrow county public schools and that's the least engaged our high school teachers are that that seems to be an enormous wasted opportunity for improvement i took a note that um the engagement by age gap just just seems to me real life as we get older although i just had a great conversation with dr harrison who's anticipating a fantastic retirement so there's hope but i don't think i feel like if you surveyed me you know like right out of college there'd be a lot more excitement than there is um now but all that to say the causation and correlation i am kind of curious how we peace out how to make some of these things improve because like recognition which he pointed uh to as probably one of the
155first ones people will tackle i imagine because it's probably one of the easiest we can see very tangibly how you provide people with additional recognition but it's harder when it's like your students aren't like that's like a much harder issue so i'm kind of curious and it sounds like they're going to have tools and resources and obviously they've walked companies through this so i'm wondering what those things will look like to help those other scores improve tell me how to be happier as i get older i'm trying to say we'll work on that one well i mean i guess one of the comments was like the rusty ranch or the pencil i mean i just wonder it would seem to me recognition would have to be meaningful recognition i mean you know i mean yeah
156i can jot down great job on a piece of paper but that um seems a little flimsy to me so what what constitutes meaningful recognition in this environment i don't know one of the things that we heard loud and clear today was the importance of talking with our employees and engaging with our employees about what exactly what you're talking about you know what is meaningful in recognition how would you describe what a five is you know it's it's you know one of my takeaways was that it really is you know it's not the leader of the the school or the department or the organization saying this is what um recognition is it really is involving the employees with it and one of the things you know obviously the board directed us to come back with
157a plan around meet and confer this is the type of thing that we would obviously be talking with that group around as well to really get some feedback uh too that you know we we foresee that as being part of the plan not the whole plan but but a part of the plan what are some things that you're curious about or wondering about or any of these questions so one thing that i remember he's a doctor i'm sorry i'm blanking on the name so i just keep generally referencing the area in which i think he watches dr dr hodges said was it's important to um create the conditions to support these initiatives and so my question would be what supports does gallup provide i mean i don't know like what supports are you providing us
158to to help us do this intermediate i don't want to answer all your questions but um but i will if you want me to the uh so the support we provide so i walk through at the end of my presentation the identify a goal work on an item you want to select an item you want to work on determine what your plan will be and then review and recalibrate there's a tool we call the state of the team tool that i provided in the chat of our workshop today and is available as the principals managers log in where they can see that for uh for and it's a writable pdf form or they can we talk through different strategies about how do you roll out the results and then how do you just how do
159you engage your staff in deciding what to work on and there's some real simple ways to do that like one we talked about was just have everyone look at the list of 12 questions not the score card but just a list of items and say which two of these matter the most to you personally and then collect that information and decide as a group not just based on the scorecard but based on the conversation which items matter the most to them what do they really want to work on and then you can kind of vote you know vote on which one you want to work on and take it from there the website is interactive so they have access to videos they have access to questions they can ask their team suggestions for taking action
160not every suggestion is going to be relevant for your context but it's i find it's easier to edit than to start from scratch so we give them a there's two pages of of fine print on each of the 12 questions so once they identify what they want to work on there's a lot of resources available for that so yeah and there's and there's just a lot we published and we've been doing this long enough there's a lot of things even on youtube there's videos about each of the 12 questions and and things that they can pull up without even logging in that that can help with that there was an earlier question i want to address on overall satisfaction and engagement and is there a discrepancy there usually what we'll see is the overall satisfaction
161with the district and the i keep saying district but anyway you know what i mean division i'm spending enough time in virginia this week but um overall satisfaction can be different than engagement which feels a little bit more local and that question came up from what i think a principal today and they said what if someone's not satisfied with the district but they love their school and my response was wouldn't you want to know that and wouldn't you want to help bring those worlds closer together and if there's something they don't like about the district can you address those concerns can you help them understand what is within your control and and bring those worlds closer together because if they i love my school i love my job i love my kids but i'm frustrated
162about this or that okay well how can we deal with that and how can i make sure your opinion counts and i'm hearing you in that now it doesn't mean you're always going to get your way no i mean that's there's a lot of debate and a lot of things and people on all sides of every issue but if there's tension between how we feel locally and how i feel about the district or some state policy or some federal policy the principal ought to know that or the team leader ought to know that and work with the employee to kind of think that through and then come to the place of like you don't always have to agree you're not going to change somebody's mind but to understand if that's bothering you let's talk about
163it don't just keep it up because the voices in our head are almost always worse than the reality so if there's tension figure it out talk it through and maybe you won't agree but at least you're you're getting closer to the same page so i felt like the in the discussion groups and breakout groups today really really dug into that more so there's a lot of support about that about what happens next and then but we didn't prescribe like you have to do this and you have to turn it in by such and such a day you could do that if you wanted to if you were going to say we want to hold schools accountable for something i would say hold them accountable for doing something not tell them they have to get their
164score to a certain point by a certain day because then you get gaming of the system and things like that but if you say the expectation this is really and i don't even think your cabinet's had a chance to talk this through yet but if the expectation is that every employee in the district would see their results before school lets out in two weeks okay maybe you could do that maybe that everybody has a conversation within the first you know week of the school system of the school year in the fall and decides what they're going to work on and maybe they report back to hr and say here's what we're going to work on and then there could be some support but i wouldn't be real prescriptive at a leadership level i would just
165expect and encourage local leaders to do something and then follow through on that rather than you decide here's what you have to work on because every every team every school has their own story i don't know if this is for you or for claire within our 15 elementary schools i guess i'm curious about the range of scores and if there is a significant range what we and what ideas we have for looking at that data as it applies to that school in terms of maybe leadership turnovers or i mean i don't know what it could be but assuming they didn't all get the same score how big was the range and at what level would a big a at what level would it be concerning and i'll be honest with you again we just got
166the data today so i haven't had the chance to really dig into the schools this is your home it is my it is definitely my homework um but we've definitely spent a little bit more time with the division uh information um but but i think the one thing that i would want you all here to hear is the commitment uh for us to keep this on the forefront um you know one of the things that i heard dr hodges say three times today uh is that it's it's you know if we're just measuring this and we're just doing the survey and not doing anything with it that's a problem the fact that we know where we are we've got some baseline information uh we can you know there's a there's a lot of opportunity here
167um the the reactions that many of you had um were not dif we're not much different than the reactions of the leadership groups as they look through the data um today for the first time and so you know i think we we're really looking at this as opportunity we're really looking at this as we really now know a starting point i mean dr haas is the one who said to us you know we really need to look at how we compare nationally and look against national norms because until we're doing that we really don't know where we stand so now we do and uh and uh you know we we know that there's a a lot of work ahead and it's something that i think that we can embrace and tackle and uh to your
168point dr acuff about the the student engagement i think that you know um i i'm not by any means a statistician or anything like that but my guess is my hypothesis would be that as our employee engagement increases so will to our student engagement i think there probably is a causality there so um we'll have to see that might be a little study that i do down the road but um but but i do you know i i know that you're you're feel i'm sensing the angst when you're looking at the scores and and seeing how we did and and really curious about the even the the deeper breaker down um and so that is something that you know i you know i commit that we will focus on that uh somebody asked a question
169about the the new hr department uh this is you know this can be some leading work that we do in that um as especially as we've added to the um the town where we will continue to work to add to the talent team and really be able to to really do a deep dive into this but it's not just to human resources just like it's not just the leaders of the schools and the departments it's a it's in all of us together all of our employees working together on this and and that's going to be a very clear focus for us additional items especially the third one um is that 19 percentile correct there because it's really pretty bad but with other numbers it doesn't look like it would be that low yeah it's uh
170let me let me check my notes here make sure i'm not fastest way to get fired at gallops to make up numbers so i don't want to do that um yeah so a 3.67 puts you at the 19th percentile compared to others who've asked that question it's a smaller database than the other questions but yet i candidly i wonder what's happened over the last two or three years with the database on that item too as we've had conversations around um diversity inclusion george floyd um critical race theory i mean it's all those conversations are kind of raw and kind of happening differently in different parts of the country so i don't think we've seen the impact of all those conversations hit this database quite yet so i don't know maybe uh yeah maybe maybe those
171numbers will move around a little bit but that's that's the current state again that's a three year rolling average so it it includes i guess two years ago when with george floyd and since then so and not that's a totally new issue but the conversation as you all know has changed and hopefully in productive ways yeah but that is one of our worst categories on the whole survey but then probably a second where's oh tad yeah yeah and then also the one about pay and incentives being fair is not very good so it does point out some of the things that we need to be working on as a division as a system yeah i understand there was a pretty significant pay increase over the last year and the numbers are still pretty low so
172that's a hard one i mean everybody wishes they were paid more and you've got to answer to taxpayers and you've got a budget you're accountable for and yeah it's a it's a hard issue that's one of the ones where it just is interesting the percentile versus the portion yeah like that what people are actually saying because like the pay is seemingly better how people feel about the pay is seemingly better than how people feel about everyone treat being treated equally but then in the act that's because it's ranked against everyone actually though like a lot more employees are unhappy with the pay than they are about people being treated unequally um and i said partly because it's more data on pay as compared to um being treated fairly i think it's just that nobody likes
173how they're paid regardless of the industry or the year or anything that that your scores are really low but it's still at the 25th percentile so there's a whole lot of people who are even worse i mean people are just generally that's traditionally an issue that everybody struggles with is do i feel like i'm compensated well plus the way that question is actually worded i mean we had a a teacher pay consultant a few years ago and said every single survey he's ever done the teachers have always said that they're not paid enough and i absolutely agree but compared with in this survey it's not clear i mean it says people in similar situations it's not clear to me that they would necessarily say other school divisions they might say i work twice as hard
174as that engineer down the street and you know they're getting twice as much money as i am so i don't like sorry but i do not like the how that question was drafted it was not crisp thank you and how was the satisfaction question asked i didn't see that in the it simply says overall how satisfied are you with albemarle county school division as a place to work however we worded it so overall how satisfied are you with as a place to work i see okay and that one's on very dissatisfied to very satisfied same one to five all the others are uh strongly disagree to strongly agree okay thank you for the now what i guess one thing we can consider it's not a key next step that i heard tonight but um as
175we do like the meet and confer process i think this is information that's valuable to share out and get input about what items are most important absolutely to teachers other other ideas or key next steps i think we started having that conversation in the last part of the conversation but just want to make sure i specifically ask for that i know that dr kaiser told me that you know we as we developed the strategic plan that there's strategies in there around employees and she said after seeing this data that they're going to go back and revisit those strategies to make sure they match up with the engagement data that we have rather than just saying well we already made those strategies so we're just going to keep going ahead with them so that's a key
176step i think definitely looking at making things more actionable anything else that you just want to make sure that we hear from you just it seems like a lot of material to digest and um with this being the very end of the school year i would probably do some digestion before sharing it out and figuring out how it matched with a strategic plan what kind of action steps could be done i mean it's not yeah and maybe have that part of the first week in school or i don't that's your decision of course miss dr kaiser but [Music] it's just everyone's super busy right now yeah there was some conversation about um is there a seasonal effect of engagement in schools the answer is yes and this is not the best time to get high
177scores as you might have imagined i mean you get towards the end of the year in the spring and people are tired and especially after the last year or two so i'm not i'm not saying we explain away results we don't like because of the month that we did the survey because other schools do it in the spring as well most probably do it in the fall um what's the best time to do a survey if you work at gallup every day is a great day for a survey if you don't work for gallup there you could make an argument for doing it in the fall instead of in the spring and you've got the ability to do that i know that contracts take a while to get through procurement and and that that may
178have been a delay for this year um ideally maybe you would do a survey in october or so and then get results in november you want to make sure you've been in the job long enough to have an opinion which would be at least a few weeks but that would allow some of the action planning to happen during the same school year doing it now is helpful because it helps you have a sense of how did we finish the year but then you've got 18 teachers who move from one school to another and some new people and and so the results don't feel as fresh in the fall as they do right now so it's a trade-off but whenever you do it our recommendation is try and stay consistent from one year to the next
179so that when any change we see isn't because we change the items or it isn't because we change the month it's just that the the actual observed engagement change so you may choose to change it in next year you could do it in the fall instead of the spring and that's those are conversations you can have but and if you figure out the the issue about how to engage high schools at the same level as elementary we're going to take the show on the road because that that's not unique to to the county it's that's a national issue i don't maybe it's a global issue but um yeah we the way we do school in high school is not working as well from an engagement standpoint for students is i mean we tell little kids
180we try and get them to you know talk and roll around run around and be loud and then they get older we say sit down and be quiet well same kids just a year older and they're not always learning well by sitting down and being quiet and so that's a that's a challenge i just wanted to point out that's not that's not unique to this school that's a national issue we have and i i want to figure it out but you crack the code on that let's let's write a book or something okay one other question dr yeah without local questions or additional items that were added in you mentioned that you had some materials or that your firm does to help you know plan or to work on would you have the same material
181material for those additional items also a little bit a little bit less because we haven't collected them as long and we haven't written books about them and things like that there is some additional information available on those but a lot of that's going to come from from your teams in the conversation so we've got some good questions asked to dig in deeper but we've just not built as much expertise around those there are you know probably a hundred additional items we do have database comparisons to we just recommend you keep that list pretty short we want the whole survey to be five minutes or so so you may swap those out next year you may keep those on you could add an open-ended question if you wanted usually that's not a great way to collect
182information because people vent and anyway and we want to make sure it's confidential i want to reinforce that we don't report any individual level data so people can be open and if they do a custom an open-ended question sometimes you can identify who the person is even if we try and mask it so this is probably the cleanest way to start so i'll just wrap up with a couple of things that we already know about going forward and again this is with it really pretty you know fresh off the press for us right so obviously we are committed to that deeper analysis by principles by directors by us and to really think about areas of focus to develop and implement action plans we really want to make sure that all of the work that we're
183doing is really actionable we also are going to use this for the goal setting and metrics that we use in our school and department improvement plans in fact that's going to be the a a large part of the conversation and the work that we're doing in our end of the year leadership meeting that will then transcend into summer data meetings and then the work that we do going forward into next year when as we really implement those improvement plans for our schools and departments and then then i talked about the using that data as key points for the meet and confer and again you know going back to what i just said you know this is something we are very committed to um obviously we can come back to the board and give some updates
184with where we are and have some schools or departments talk about maybe some of the work that they're doing around it but uh i'm i'm uh you know this has been a really interesting day especially having the opportunity to listen to the conversation three times listen to the questions that were asked by the different groups um very honestly it has i've been engaged all throughout it and it's been actually really interesting for me to to really start putting some of these pieces together and think about the work that we're going to do and um and you know like i said we've got a lot of opportunity ahead and i'm i'm actually really excited to see where we are you know the next year at the time that we get results back from the survey and
185see how we compare to ourselves um and not just the national norm and um you know hopefully we'll see the same similar trends that dr hodges talked about that this is the lowest year and we will just keep moving things forward because every forward step for our employees is a forward step for our kids so thank you i i can't help myself um is it i mean given where we're starting is it realistic to see much improvement in the first year i mean this sounds like it's more than a three-year project yeah i think you probably ought to work on it forever yeah even if you get to where you want it you got to put effort in just like a relationship right right so to answer your question what is meaningful change from year
186to year maybe i'll answer it that way on the scorecards if an item goes up by two tenths of a point or down by two tenths of a point we put an arrow on it on next year's scorecard and we trend the data so that's meaningful change kind of a good rule of thumb you might say is that statistically significant well for a division of 3000 people most things would be statistically significant but for a local school or local team maybe not as much so two tenths of a point is our rule of thumb i think it would be reasonable to get there i think you could get to a 4-0 in a year of hard work and that would put you at or a little above the midpoint of the database and then we'll
187start comparing to the top quartile and maybe it takes a couple years to get there one one school that i worked with it took them five years to get from a little below where you are right now to being recognized as one of our gallup great workplace awards so that was a process of four or five hard years but they're in a lot better place now and and they they did almost all the work we just showed up to offer some input every once in a while but so it's it's not a quick fix nothing is right but um i think the openness to the conversations and the commitment to action today puts me in a good spot so yeah that'd be a if you were to set a goal or kind of pay attention
188to that for next year i think any any i mean a tenth of a point growth would be meaningful change for the whole division but you're going to see some schools that are going to bounce more than that and and you'll probably have some that go down and there's a lot of factors leading into that but we'll be able to make put a better story together for you next year about that thank you any other questions before we wrap up thank you to everyone when you said you've done this three times today thank you thank you um thank you for the presentation thank you for being here and thank you for all the work i appreciate it our pleasure thank you dr kaza and thank you dr haas all right for the um presentation are
189there is there any other business but board members or by the superintendent i actually had one point that i wanted to bring up um in public comment ms kleinman was talking about living wage and um i know you know it was two years ago or some pandemic ago we were talking about getting up to 15 as our bottom and um i think that we sort of fixated on that number uh and maybe at some time that was a living wage but i don't think that is the case now so um and i just pulled up like an mit calculator and the living wage in elemental county is 1859 listed on this one that i just googled and found which is like 24 higher than 15 so and i know that like budget season is sort
190of ongoing and constant but you know i i think it would be a valuable conversation for us to have to set our minimum wage not at a number but at living wage or at least to have that to benchmark against um and so when we're looking at our budget i would be interested in knowing um what that would be how much that would cost for all of our employees i guess following that i don't know what a teacher's aid makes i thought the bottom was 15 for teacher's aide i thought that what was your question kate it was what is that what is the starting salary for teachers assistant or teacher's aide [Music] is i believe it's pay grade 6 which is coming in the first step is around fifteen dollars and ten cents an
191hour um and then it goes up based on experience and qualifications they're placed within that range based on experience uh how they exceed the minimum qualifications of the job well i would agree with miss lee then we may need to look at that i mean i saw at my car wash they were had a sign out front starting at 15. so that i think that's an important conversation to have i would agree with that i feel like our class bag staff is is overlooked often overlooked and often doing jobs they're dealing many times dealing with students um as much as teachers are are providing services that are just as valuable and i feel like they're sometimes neglected in the conversation i found her comments really compelling that's all for me okay no other items hearing
192none meeting is adjourned thank you [Music] you