001you may 23rd meeting of the Albemarle County school board is called to order we will now stand and have the Pledge of Allegiance our chair jonno al carro is not here tonight because of the death of his brother so during the moment of silence please keep that in mind we will now have our moment of silence all right thank you Mic Check beginning with Ross mr. Ross Holden school board attorney assistant superintendent Schmidt chief operating officer Steve colas our Scottsville district K takeoff jack Jewett district Graham page Samuel Miller district David Ober Whitehall district Katrina Colson Rio district Matt ha superintendent Debby Collins deputy superintendent err Kaiser assistant superintendent I move we approve the agenda it has been moved and second we approved the agenda any discussion not those in favor let it be known
002by the usual sign I opposed the motion is carried rueful of consent agenda moved by mr. comas a second by mr. Burke that we approve the consent agenda discussion those in favor aye opposed the consent agenda is passed we are now ready for announcements I'm going to take the first announcement tonight it is my very distinct pleasure to recognize 56 people some sitting and before us tonight and others who are and we're not able to make it night tonight who are our retirees from this school year the people that that whose names I am going to call have retired somewhere between August of 2019 and now and we just had a little recognition and the reception for them and and on behalf of all of us the work that you all have done no matter
003what the role is and what that what your job has been and how long you've been with us truly from the bottom of our hearts our school division is a much better place because of each one of you and our children are in a much better place because of each of one of you and I and I thank you all I am going to read off the names of everybody on the list what I'd like to do is when your name is called if you could just stand and once we get a good group standing I will pause and we'd like you to come up and be recognized and shake the board members hands and then we'll continue on beyond that and I know that at each of your schools and Department says we wrap
004up the end of the year you'll probably have some additional recognitions there again thank you each and every one of you we really appreciate the work that you have done in Albemarle County Public Schools so as I say your name please stand Kathryn Baylor principal at Jack Jewett Brooke Asher teacher at Kail xx I'm gonna I'm sorry I'm gonna agree the years of service so now I'm gonna round them up from the numbers that are on your nametags so um okay Brooke Asher 20 28 years of service Kathryn was lost for 28 years of service Andy Blanton has been with us three years Robyn bowling principal of Greer was with us for six years rhymer brought Herson from western Albemarle high school nineteen years thomasboulier remember to stand please as I call your name Tom
005Booya from Albemarle high school 27 years Beth terms our licensure specialist and Human Resources 16 years Diane Clark from Monticello high school 33 years thank you kevin dogger all from a lead client Support Specialist 819 years Pamela Dean from Stone Robinson a kindergarten teacher there 40 years Janis I didn't third grade teacher at Baker Butler 30 years Deborah Gibson a custodian at Brownsville 14 years Karen good low media specialist at Grier elementary school 32 years Diane Goodrich library media specialists at Stone Robinson 38 years Albert graves a bus driver out at Brownsville 15 years John Gray our assistant director of Human Resources 17 years he'll Hankins social studies teacher at Albemarle high school 22 years Eleni he ssin physical education teacher at baker Butler 26 years Bobbie Hughes assistant principal at western Albemarle 32 years
006sandy Kaiser classroom teacher at western Albemarle 30 years I'm gonna have that group that I've just called come on up and be recognized and I'll continue the list our list is in quasi alphabetical order so if you thought your name should be called don't worry it's coming up I will read a few more names Jane McMichael CTE teacher at Albemarle high school 31 years ago V Martin fine arts and social studies at western Albemarle 37 years Debbie Maupin transportation service manager 50 15 years kandi Mitchell a teaching assistant and Agner hurt 16 years Judy Milione kindergarten teacher at wood Brook 39 years I'm sorry 29 years sorry about that john Payne lead bus driver at Henley in western seven years Linda piece a math teacher at sutherland 14 years bridgett Pritchett a know a five
007in the bus shop 32 years Jane Pritchett office associate at Sutherland 31 years Donna a horn music teacher at baker butler 27 years best score Bansky lead desk engineer 12 years at Spellman teacher at Baker Butler 13 years when Taylor a math teacher at Sutherland 30 years Greg Thomas music teacher at Albemarle high school 34 years Ruth trice world language teacher at Albemarle high school 35 years Bob and Revere the custodian that brought us would four years I'm gonna keep going Maria Wayne a teaching assistant at Greer 15 years Lori weakling weakly excuse me instructional support at Stone Robinson 19 years Lance wise and classroom teacher at Albemarle high school thirty-six years Jennifer white neck gifted resource teacher at baker butler 27 years Keisha Goodman a pre-k teacher at Stone Robinson 33 years with Cavanaugh
008gifted resource teacher at Greer ten years I'll stop there and we'll let those people come up and then we'll continue [Applause] have a few more peace people to recognize Nancy Melek art teacher at Western 34 years Debbie Kayson office associate and bookkeeper at Red Hill 32 years Sandra Billy's first grade in kindergarten teacher at Scottsville 14 years David crouch school counselor at Brownsville 22 years janet key transportation assistant out at Crozet 8 years Linley rd classroom teacher at Jewett 17 years Lucille liova Sario foodservice associate in with child nutrition at Jewett 13 years Thomas Lewis edep teacher at KL 13 years John Ross custodian with building services at Cal 20 years he roguish Shireman japanese language teacher at Albemarle high school 12 years Thomas Scott lead bus driver and transportation 16 years Deborah Riddick teaching
009assistant at KL 25 years Beth Koon special education teacher at Henley 16 years and Blair Jones clap music teacher out at Brownsville 19 years if that group could come anybody from that group please come on up [Applause] Thank You Thomas I'm missing again I would like to thank each of you who recognized for your retirement we wish you the very best as you heard you're always welcome to come back and substitute with us in any capacity we really appreciate that and you'll be hearing from us would anything from the board members before I okay maybe I do have one other thing to say I'm not too sure about it how do I sort of say this but somebody to my right said that the teachers who've been teaching 33 years or more I mean 33
010years have been teaching as long as our youngest school board member has been alive so that's all I got sorry got to me and I'm not really sure how to sort of say that I'm not saying it in a nasty way but it was not of an interesting fact teachers like you are who guided people like me I mean the impact that you have and I'm sure there are people all throughout the community that have been affected by you and think of you as some someone who has got into so thank you I did think of it now we know youngest school you know it's the epitome of the concept it takes the village right there it's a community that's one of the things that I've most enjoyed about Albemarle County Schools is that we
011really are a community group that works together for the betterment of kids right okay so announcements but they're with our retiree visitors you are welcome to stay and join us for the school board meeting but we also understand if you're going on what you're leaving I do have one more person that I would like to introduce to the board tonight and this is the time of the year where we start doing our principal announcements for next year and I am pleased tonight to had to introduce Ashby Johnson as the next year principal at Jack Jewett middle school I should be come on up [Applause] I did have a couple of announcements so one is that our Monticello high school theater teacher Madeline Michael is just won national recognition from the from the Tony Awards she's
012won that Tony's 2019 excellence in theater education award and that's a national she'd that means in essence she's according to Tony the best high school theater teacher in America so it's quite an accomplishment and she will actually be at the Tony's to receive her award just like all the other Tony Award winners so we're super excited about and on another note Chris Bunin who many of us know is a social studies teacher at Albemarle high school but he's famous for teaching his global information systems class that many students want to get into and learn more about geography but also there's a way of framing historical narratives and and doing a lot of social studies through that work Chris was named today as the for the Charlottesville business innovation Council or seebik announced him as one
013of their Award winners for this year so Chris has been garnering awards for quite some time now and this is another one added to his mantle and both of these educators really represent the best in the work that we do in the county any other announcements in school board sure I'd like to invite each of you to the fourth annual diversity conference including our board members I hope you'll be there it's going to be held June 1st at Jack Jewett middle school we will have an opportunity to celebrate staff members who have experienced our culturally responsive teaching certification process as well those who have experienced our micro credentialing process this year we had 26 candidates to be considered for certification of which 23 met the rigorous criteria so we're up to 40 total over the
014four-year period which is a significant accomplishment those 23 will be the headliners at the conference meaning they will be sharing their journey or transformation into becoming a culturally responsive educator so I hope that board members will use that link that I sent you last week and sign up and those in the audience you have about two more days to get it done thank you thank you dr. Esther any other school board [Music] I met with Pam Riley who's the planning commission member from the Scottsville District and she was concerned that they've been approving so many housing units in the Scottsville Fifth Street area she was concerned about the impact it was gonna have on kale which is already at capacity just wanted to share that I had just wanted to read some things from my
015check-in for tomorrow the quote that I'd put on there for all of our employees tomorrow I think it's appropriate for tonight as well is often when you think you're at the end of something you're at the beginning of something else and that's from Fred Rogers all of us out there in the schools maybe and I see some many school staff here tonight when you get back to the school tomorrow please show your appreciation to your school testing coordinator they are now in the process of administering thousands of standards of learnings tests across the county and if you have a moment to send India Han an email she's our division testing director it's quite a job a lot of responsibility as far as helping our to make sure that our students are treated fairly and that
016they have a testing experience that's positive positive as possible they really do a lot of work around that so please give them your appreciation next Thursday and Friday we we start our school graduations at Murray high school on Thursday evening and then of course Friday evening at western Albemarle high school that one you know is outside so I hope the weather holds up it's really quite an event of course we had the K Tech completer ceremony last night it was quite a quite a nice event to excellent student speakers telling stories that were very inspiring I can't say enough about the quality of the programs and the graduates that we offer for our K Tech students and I'm really proud of these students speaking of completers we just had our a change to the way
017that we celebrate our retirees over the many years past we've we've had a ceremony that was just for retirees and their supervisors at K Tech and the AEA would help us host it and this year we did a shift and moved it here to the central office prior to a school board meeting I like that principals came to it other supervisors attended a lot of colleagues came to it and also that the staff had a chance to have a nice handshake with their all with their ultimate supervisors of the school boards I think that was really special and I really appreciate the remarks from Graham that was quite quite a good job on that one today Debbie and several of us participated with school and Building Services staff as well as designers from new Vista
018design and Quinn Evans architects to begin making plans for the process not the plans but the process to envision and create the instructional program for high school Center number two as you may recall locating and building a 400 student per day capacity Learning Center is part of our solution for overcrowding at Albemarle high school as well as ongoing advancement of an ACPs contemporary high school program one aspect of planning a process was to be sure that we engage staff students and families at the ground full of ideas for the center some plans as you can imagine will need to be made centrally after receiving input so that we can address the capacity concerns at both HHS and W AHS as much as feasible we will seek input on decisions about the center and the perspective
019physical plant developments and improvements at our schools based on the responses of our a CPS educators that we have had thus far to the changes we are considering in the high school program to empower student choice and tackle the stress dilemma I'm encouraged that your progressive or our employees progressive vision for what schools could be as aligning with our boards and mine as well and the last note I have is that back in February I had finished a really great novel written by Tommy orange it's called they're there and I pushed out to all of our employees and I asked for a group to form to do a book study to read that book and to do a study I asked for a teacher school administrator support staff member a parent a high school junior
020senior and an instructional coach to get together to read the book and so I asked them to read the book and spend the early spring having book club meetings about it and they had a few meetings and then we had our final debrief meeting on a Saturday morning at Michael's diner up on route 29 I really enjoyed the discussion about this book it's a powerful narrative about Native Americans who are going to coalesce around the City of Oakland and it kind of tells their talks about their journey on their way there and what the ultimate outcome of that of that meeting is and so it was a great great time to do a book study and I'm hoping that we can do another one next year so that's my business and claire has some as
021well I have a few items to share with you um one of the things that I wanted to share is on tonight's consent agenda is is a policy that we'd like you to review its policy GCC the leave program and you may be sitting there thinking wait a minute we just did that so I'd like to just take a few moments and explain why that is back on there and what we're asking from the board so obviously this policy has been recently reviewed and adopted and approved by the school board becoming effective July 1st as you are aware we are moving toward implementation of Cronos time and attendance system that will allow for more accuracy and pay for our non-exempt employees for the work that they are doing and the system will also help us
022better manage time and attendance for all employees the rollout of Cronos is scheduled for mid-july while we know that considerable time effort and thought went into the adopted policy as we have gotten closer to the implementation of the chrono system feedback particularly from our principals has caused us to think about considering leave in a different manner for our teachers as employees exempt from FLSA regulations we are able to look at how we administer leave differently for that group of employees we want to make sure that the policy we adopt recognizes and allows for the individual needs of our teachers creates a culture of leave in attendance that is positive and proactive and sets clear expectations around acceptable use as we know student performance is clearly tied to having a high quality teacher who is present
023in their classroom we also know that teacher attendance is tied to a need for substitutes as we have shared through various school board meetings throughout this year when teachers request substitutes in advance we are better able to fill those positions policy GCC as the adoption the July first adoption is written may actually encourage teachers to request leave at the last minute making it far more difficult to hire a substitute for their absence we would like additional time to explore and research best Lea practices for teachers prior to implementation and as such we respectfully requested the board approval leaf policy that is before you for first three tonight this version of polish'd cGCC allows for the recently adopted policy to be implemented for all employees except for teachers and reverts back to the current practices in
024the language related to teachers through approval of this interim policy we will be able to do the necessary research get feedback and will and present what we intend to be the final version of the policy for board approval in the fall of 2019 so I just wanted to put that out give you some information in case you're wondering why is out there so it really is almost a hybrid policy in the version that you're seeing now and we're looking at that as just for this brief moment in time while that allows us to look at other methods and practices around leave for teachers are there any questions but dr. Keyser thank you the other thing I wanted to do tonight is just give you a brief hiring update for teachers for the upcoming school year
025and the thing that I would caution you with these numbers is this is just today's moment in time I anticipate based on our current trends that we still have about 60 to 70 teachers to hire so I know that the numbers that I share with you tonight and the percentages will change as we get closer to the start of the school year as of about 8 o'clock this morning we've hired 92 teachers 33 at the elementary level 54 at the secondary level and 5 instructional support they include the school psychologists speech language pathologists and a learning technology integrator as you are very well aware we are really focusing on minority recruitment and hiring this year at this point 17.3 9 percent of our hires are identified themselves as minority and we also have 15 novices
026that we are bringing on board with us and about eight of those novices 53% of all novices that's not right yeah that's right numbers-wise 53% of all novices fall into our identified themselves as minority teachers so we're really excited to have these folks joining us at the start of their careers as I said we anticipate hiring about 60 to 70 additional teachers one of the things that we were we also talked about earlier in the year was the number of applicants we have and as I've shared we use our screening interview pool as an indicator of how many individual applicants we have for the school division although they may apply for multiple positions at this point we have 851 teachers who have applied for screening interviews we've completed about 550 screening interviews at this time
027and the thing that is really promising for us in our outlook is last you're our total number of screening interviews from start to end of the hiring season was 745 so we've already far exceeded that and we still have a good couple of months to go in the hiring process at this point the only positions that we've really kind of identify as harder to fill and we're calling them harder to fill because they have smaller applicant pools our functional skills special education and German and I also know that that list will change as we go farther in and hire more candidates in some of the core content areas that are often harder to fill but right now we do have a number of applicants in those positions so we feel good about where we are
028we are continuing our efforts around minority recruitment and hiring and I will say the the folks that I've had the opportunity to talk to you at least through the screening process that we've hired are very very impressive so I'm excited about what lies ahead for our students it's questions just one clear so we're looking at about a total of a hundred 150 160 is what we would our what our trends have shown over the last couple of years we were much higher last year because if you recall we we added the juvenile detention center with us and that increased our number of hires and and and so that I think that bubbled us up a little bit more than average so but right now we're we're anticipating right around what the trends were prior to
029that our teachers receive contracts this week and so that tends to be our next wave of potential postings and so we will we will see where we land after that thank you I think I'm done talking and dr. Haas from Patrick he wants me to pass around this agenda for him thanks Hassan so good evening board members Pat McLaughlin chief of strategic planning and I just wanted to take a minute tonight to give you a quick preview of the draft agenda that we've been putting together for our board our annual retreat will take place two weeks from tomorrow will be at Center one beginning at 12:30 and will start off with lunch available at 12:30 we'll start off at one o'clock with the annual board self evaluation we've booked about half an hour worth of
030time for that and then we'll do a quick connector with John McLaughlin from from human resources and jump right into our work continuing our work that we started in April work session around our strategic priorities and we've got two more strategic priorities to workshop and turn into smart priorities following that we're gonna hear a report on our self-sustaining programs and have some discussion around that those are edep and child nutrition anything else in there Rosalind think just those two followed by an equity report from dr. Hairston and and his team and then we've blocked an hour at the end of the retreat for an open discussion for any items that the board members want to bring so I would encourage you all to be thinking about any topics that you want to have for open
031discussion there and if you've got any feedback on the the agenda in its current state you can either give that to me tonight or pass that along to mr. Page and mr. al carro for when we we find a lot of things in our next pre agenda any questions I just would like to repeat that I feel like our priorities should not be SMART goals our priorities are our vision of where we want to focus to make sure the division is headed in the right direction and under those focus points it's appropriate to have strategies and smart goals to accomplish those priorities that are to advance that vision but I think the priorities themselves need to be more vision than a specific goal if that's something we'll have time to talk about some at the
032retreat the other comments thanks thank you okay moving right along we are now ready for our work session I'm gonna start the work session if that's okay perfect we have three items for the school board work session this evening this is a little different agenda a different way of doing a work session than we have been lately these will be more presentations with opportunities for questions I just want to let you know that right the first two items are updates about the seed initiative and the Freshman Seminar the third item is information regarding School Accreditation procedures to set the stage for our first two updates I'd like to put them in context of ongoing work the updates on the seed initiative and Freshman Seminar are associated with our strategic work regarding the social emotional well-being
033of our students do you mind advancing to the next slide these two areas are among several layers we've added over the past five years since the loss of the Safe Schools healthy students grants we have sought to replace and had services for students you can see at a glance the number of additions we've added these have mainly been the areas of professional development for our staff and increasing direct services to our students you will hear about the seed work a 20-month endeavor first and then Freshman Seminar finishing its first year of implementation after each update we will pause for questions our first group will be said we'll start with dr. Nick Smith thanks Nick thank you good evening thank you so much for the opportunity to share what the seed team and myself have done
034over the last 20 months as you remember the rationale for the starting the equity and access initiative was that we had a large growth in student population over the ten years between 2006 through 2017 over thousand students or 8.2 percent students in that group of students we found that there was quite a difference of the students that we're getting there were a good number of economic economically disadvantaged students sixty-seven percent over 67 percent of the students we had a good number of students who are English language learners that was by 30 set over 37% and in addition to that many of the special education students that we had coming in we had quite a number more coming in but the severity of their needs had increased dramatically so the idea was to figure out how
035to do this differently so in the budget initiative for 2017 and 18 we were looking at how to support school and educators with credentialing and one way was through the c-team the other way is through micro-credentialing so the purpose of the seed team is basically to develop evidence base approaches to address the kids need socially emotionally and academically and to help support the staff this teachers and other staff to understand what those so social and emotional needs are with the intention of improving academic success okay the c-team is being developed as a prototype so that we could go through and do the develop processes and start the PD and then once we have that refined some hopefully be able to expand that out into all the different schools in the county so instead of just
036staying at elementary hopefully eventually getting to middle schools and high schools but I spoke a little bit earlier somebody who we talked about the fact that I think at elementary is a good age to start because we can have more effectiveness at that place at that point in time the seed team is actually placed in four schools within what we called the urban bring Agner herd elementary kale elementary or elementary would Brook elementary the placement there was intentional in that they're a larger proportion of students with needs and so that gave us more concentrated group to be able to start working and developing the procedures process understandings and so on major areas of focus for the C team have been culturally responsive teaching trauma-sensitive practices family support practices as well as behavior supports for the
037students in the school in the first year last year we started off we trying to pull the the project together and so on and to do that we the team embedded themselves within the four schools that we were serving during that time we created and presented many professional development experiences in the four areas that we identified during that time we also assisted in vetting a lot of courses that would be online courses to support the micro-credentialing initiative and we did a tremendous amount of outreach to the target communities as well as we collaborated with both the our community service providers as well as many private service providers and finally we created a rubric to guide our efforts and that rubric we eventually distilled down and made a sheep which administrators can use to go around
038the school and sort of self assess where are we in the grand scheme of things where am I in terms of need for staff development where we in terms of our mindset and so on so now we I'm moving right along as you can tell we're in our second year and I feel like we've got our feet under ourselves a little bit more and during this year the decision was made to increase our focus on building staff capacity so we started last year with lots of large venue training's and this year although we've continued those we've also doing smaller group trainings and working with individuals along the way with the idea that as we are entering this work we're helping to hope people not just gained a knowledge but reflect on their practices what they've
039learned and how that fits into their schools in addition we've assisted schools with writing protocols to address some challenges that we have one of the big ones that I will look at a little bit later in this presentation is attendance so looking at what should we do why are we are doing it that way how we go about doing that we collaborated with service providers and have planned events and have worked on building a network for the children and families so at this point we can reach out and touch base with for example the Department of Social Services region 10 to community groups like seemed out at us and the juntos and the Women's Initiative and so on really trying to find where their resources so that as we see the need we can either
040do referrals or work with them on ways to address some of the issues for example one of the things I did a presentation for seemed about Etta's first Hispanic symposium to area professionals and this coming weekend I'll be doing a similar presentation in Spanish to the Spanish community so trying to outreach to everybody and and really welcome them in and and empower them to do things then finally one of the things that we're looking at is how do we align the efforts of all the different part dr. Hairston's Department and ours I think we are doing some very similar things I've worked with some of his staff they work with me we've worked with a isaw department and we've looked at processes like helping the office assistants learn how to use interpret talk for when
041folks come in who don't wear English isn't their primary language they developed these cards that say I speak Swahili for example and they know how to use that so we're trying to build in processes for all the staff in the school to meet their needs and one way we're doing it is through the feed team the feed team is family engagement and encouragement and I forget what D is to be honest with you but they were obviously playing off of what what our name was and so we are looking at how we're doing all family engagement and trying to very much align our our efforts so spending our time this year areas where we focused building staff capacity is a mentioned attendance family engagement community partnerships and behavior looking at behavior so this whole process
042is very much plan do study act so we're constantly looking at what we're doing trying to improve it and and trying it again keep going to trying to refine what we're doing so building staff capacity we spent about 46 percent of our time doing that because we spent a lot of time in the schools talking with teachers working on teams trying to build plans just helping people look at their practices and think about how they might do it differently what is their thought process and so on and we like I said previously we've done at large group small groups and individuals we've collaborated as I said we've worked with school teams we've worked with the principals and assistant principals that you're here we've also done a lot of modeling within the school where we've intervened
043with kids and demonstrated how we talk to them and afterwards talked about why did I go about it this way what was it I said and and what was the purpose of that and then we've gathered information with all our partnerships with community agencies and trying to pull all those resources so that we can meet people's needs this is an example of one of the things that we've done well I spoke about the attendance of protocol and this is a flowchart I know that it's I shouldn't say this but I I have challenges with seeing and some of this stuff's pretty small but it speaks to starting off by building a relationship making regular contact with the parents and going through calling parents after a certain amount of time and trying to figure out what
044what are the issues that are getting in the way of regular attendance and the idea is that we're trying to connect with the parents collaborate with not say you are doing it wrong the we understand that many people have a lot of challenges and so we want to figure out how we work together how we partner to help their kids if we have difficulty with that then we'll set up a meeting and pull people in and and make a plan and if that plan doesn't work we'll make another plan and if that doesn't work we'll make another plan but if eventually we get to where we feel like we need to move on see we'll go and get court involvement and part of that is not is not to be punitive but rather to look
045at how we can get services so with attendance we spent 26 percent of our time we were working actually implementing a lot of the attendance things we go into meetings calling parents hoping staff called and make those connections and so on again we worked on making collaborative relationships we worked on individualizing where the person's needs were as I said we involve the court system only if we were unable to resolve the chronic absenteeism family engagement we spent about 11% of our time again the idea we've moved from the word involvement we don't just want parents to come in and say hey I came in for pizza but rather that they come in and and feel like they are part of the school that they're integral to their kid their child's education and so on we've
046focused on helping staff look at effective regular communication part of that as we've used ease the isaw area and that they have a protocol on how to write things in plain English so plain English means very simple wording and that allows if a parent does not know how to speak English to use a translation app on their phone to get much more effective translation trying to get out things in in the native language and so on we've collaborated with staff and parents to plan and care events we've as I said before we worked with the feed team trying to line efforts we have done a lot of linking families to services I personally probably have people call me at least eight times a week saying I don't know how to do this and I I
047don't hand carry them but I help them connect with people who can help them get things done or I help them resolve things you know think through how they may go about stuff the final thing on this page was creating a welcoming milieu I worked with Ashby Kindler and we went and looked at all the schools what does it look like outside how welcome and does it appear how does staff welcome them how do what are as I refer to earlier what are the ways response to people who aren't exactly like them how do they respond to that and and get translation or whatever it might be community partnerships who did about 8% of the time again we were looking at mutual challenges we all know that there's plenty to go around but that sometimes
048we can help each other we can support each other along the way we've been networking with the private resources have been able to get parents up with folks who can provide them with things and we one thing that I've been doing lately is trying to partner with leaders within neighborhoods and with managers of housing developments I found it effective to talk to them and they have relationships with their rental patrons and they talk up events that are going on or services that are round so trying to get them where they're at this next slide is an example of what we're starting right now which is a behavior management protocol it's looking at how behaviors are dealt with we divided amongst minor major behaviors within each area we've given resources for whoever's using it obviously if
049they're online they can click on hyperlinks and find things one example is under the minor behaviors we have scripts one of the things is that oftentimes people react automatically to behaviors and we're trying to help teachers and staff respond in ways are helpful so one of the things is we have scripts when a child is refusing to do something or being defiant what do you say how do you say it and how do you do that and I've actually made little cards that are laminated that a couple of teachers are wearing on chains around their necks so that when they know they're getting into that situation they sort of flip through them and look at them and then try to respond differently so we're trying to provide resources and ways for staff to be able
050to respond consistently to things and and I feel like that speaks to the equity that we're dealing with things so we're respected from the schools thanks Nick my name's Doug Granger I'm the principal at Agner hurt and when I think of C of the C team I think about two kids once a kindergartner he bought him a month of for school started he lost his little sister and went into foster care another one is a second grade boy who spent the last two years homeless most of the time living in a hotel with his three siblings and his mom because of their background they had an exceptionally difficult time trusting anybody let alone strangers in his big school that they didn't have any context for in the past well we have done is we would
051have looked at our teachers and looked at our class lists and found a teacher who has a knack for kids in crisis and honestly a class list with a lot of easygoing kids we just play Sudoku and try to move them around so they could be in the best possible spot and we've done that but the other thing we would do is I'd walk around with the walkie-talkie and so did my assistant principal because we need to be on-call for when there was what the seed teams taught us is an amygdala hijack so they'll me do this little symbol with our hands and we know the kids having about to have a temper tantrum or run away so when we've always had at Agner hurt and I know a lot of schools two or three
052kids like this and we manage it we have six children like this in our kindergarten class this year alone so our old way of doing it just doesn't work it just doesn't isn't manageable so every staff member in our school through the seed team learned how to respond to an amygdala hijack when it kids that stressed every class has a break box every class has a safe quiet spot in the room for when kids feel like they're getting ramped up they can go take the break and they have some activities they're trained in how to use to help them calm down and move on with their day we've also gotten crisis prevention training so everybody knows what to do when there's a crisis like this and they also know what not to do when a
053kids behavior is explosive or unsafe there's great things to do and there's some things to avoid I guess what I'm saying is we don't have to play Sudoku with our class list because every teacher in our school is trained on how to work with kids who are in crisis this year and it's not just about amygdala hijacks or break boxes as a school we've gotten better at engaging our all of our kids all of our families we're not a poor school half of our kids live in poverty but the other half lives in middle upper middle-class neighborhoods we have kids who were born halfway around the world but we have a lot of kids who were born right here in Charlottesville and what that causes sometimes is a feeling of or I can meet this
054child's need who is impoverished in poverty or I can engage this child I can work with this child from Africa who doesn't speak English or I can work with this child who works who speaks perfect English maybe better than I do and you know that goes on and on what seeds helped us do is find more ants more ants in every classroom not just for teachers who have a knack for working with it diversity not just for teachers who have a knack for working with kids in crisis but the tyranny of the or we've moved into more hands every teacher in our school has had culturally responsive teaching modules one two and three every single teacher every single teacher in our school has had training on how to engage families one on one and as
055a class and as a school we've all we're fortunate we have a lot of trust in our community but what we've been learning is how to turn that trust it's okay how to turn that trust into academic performance for where kids are learning at higher levels and that we're not there we're still learning seeds only in its second year and but what I like is that we're not leaving it up to chance or good intentions that the seed team being embedded with us one on one modeling with us and for teachers and for me and for my assistant principal day-in day-out this work whether it's with attendance or an amygdala hijack in this research base it's great training and I'm glad we get to do it as a principal who works in a school every
056day it's nice to be in a school where we're all speaking the same language when it comes to family engagement when it comes to kids in crisis and when it comes to culturally responsive teaching we all are on the same page and that page is filled with really good evidence-based strategies and structures that we're trying to do I appreciate knowing it's not just up to the knack a person has but that it really has to do with training and teaching and professional learning and we're getting better mostly I'm thankful for the skillful expertise of the seed team and how they're right there at our kind of a phone call away sometimes it's just down the hall so just end with a little story one of the little boys the kindergartner I mentioned he had one
057of his caregivers coming to visit and it was in the middle of a middle highjack he was throwing a temper tantrum and it was pretty loud and it was pretty disturbing if you're not used to that and as we're walking down the hallway and this gentleman is walking next to me and I can kind of feel him like what am i walking into I was able to say to him with a totally clear conscience don't worry we're not making this up as we go along and I could feel him kind of exhale we walked in and we solved that problem I think we've always had great teachers we always have great intentions matching the great teachers the great intentions in the professional learning that's happened has been the magic for agna heard it so thanks
058for providing that opportunity and thank you Nick for your team I think we're gonna take questions now one more site okay okay so now it's what do we do from here our goal in the coming years to continue with the professional development activities we want to refine what we're doing the protocols our way of engaging staff and Families we want to work on fidelity of everything we do we've always taught people a lot of information and when they go home so to speak they it's it's hard to stick with that because they're your function on your own so I think a big part is how do we help people implement the protocols the knowledge that they know with fidelity so that everybody's doing the same thing that provides a lot of reassurance for kids and
059their parents when they see everybody on the same page pulling in the same direction and having a clear vision of where they want to go again we're trying to create the structures we want to build who you with in the school so that it feels like it's my school to which every parent shows up whether they're from Uganda from Scottsville or from Argentina you know we we want that to be the place so and we want to continue to collaborate with community resources and build a seamless net where we can really help each other and really support the families as best we can so that's it for me it's set for any questions that you all might have remind me how many seed team members are there we started off with six tonight we're now
060down to four so we have one person in each one of the schools we use the technology person for a year and a half and found that we got into a place where we felt comfortable with what we had and we have that support from the technology team the other person we just felt like it was we could do with the four of us at the moment I mean it also sounds like well since the first introduction of this pilot where my impression was going to was that it was more you going in in problem-solving you have a large percentage of your tongue which may still happen but a lot a large percentage of your time is scaling it so the whole school is on the same page a lot of professional development challenge but
061we're I think we're within the schools we meet as a team once a week and discuss what's going on what were the challenges we're facing and the things that we're doing and we're slowly working on developing that bigger vision the bigger plan to be able to roll it out into different places okay well you're comfortable with the staffing van I mean I I don't have the four School census memorized but it's about 2000 elementary school kids basically the four elementary school so you know everybody always asks for staffing well right right I don't I'm not giving it away but I'm just I just want you to be able to do the job because I think there's a lot of promising element think if we get to a place where we feel like we need more
062I I'm sure I can ask dr. Collins and we'll any other questions one of the things I would add that I've noticed over time is that the the functionality of the group has evolved and when they first began and the principles in the group said in the in the room together there was a lot of sharing in a way of here's what I do and now the last meeting they they put on the table a problem of practice that they were experiencing and they were brainstorming together and they came up with the solution that none of them had thought about before and so I think that's the magic and the beauty of this team is it is it started to have their professionals that live in the building every day think together and not separately
063and that I think the protocols and the processes they that they've evolved are better than they were before as individual schools thank you for your presentation thank you for the work you're doing I'm just I I'm troubled with the equivocation of an amid guerrilla hijacking and a temper tantrum because my understanding was original hijackings can be positive they can be people like me who laugh uncontrollably they can be moments where you have a moment of clarity that you don't logically get there but you think it's an important spot so we just it just I don't I don't wanna get fixated on that it just it just I think when we do a hijacking when a student is overwhelmed right moment and they aren't able to you to think process they are negative process and so
064part of it is by doing things it enables the kids to settle down more so that they can actually use all their capacity and learn the using those really achieves the goal for them of feeling more in control independent and capable so I again in terms of looking at making the hijacking we're looking at piece of that okay okay at what point do you think you might have some programs that's been developed by C to be moved out to the other schools I think at this point we are close to the place where I think I believe that it'll probably take another year or so well I thought I thought you also talked about doing some professional development that would be open to anybody in the in the division is that right I think everybody
065within the system started the year many of things are also available and then we focus in for the schools for the school-based sort of PD um as you're working on this on your protocols are you developing a measurement scale or some concept of how you're gonna measure student progress and maybe not you know one of the dangers of using school-wide averages you know if your cuts if you're concerned about 30% of the students say a school like a ganar say you got 200 kids that you're concerned about and the C team is really working with those 200 have you developed a way that you're gonna measure their progress both on emotional social-emotional learning as well as academics that's a hard question for me as you know I tend to be a global sort of person
066but we are working on trying to get measures it's more sort of qualitative thing more engagement of parents more engagement in terms of really being involved as opposed to just showing up for the pizza party our hope is to work with the group within a CPS that can help us to define figure out how to measure those those things those kids who are identified by the demographics is historically not doing as well as others and see if there is movement amongst that group that was adequate answer but I just I just think it's always important to to measure you know in you know and your look you're working with a specific group or subgroup of students and you know is what we're doing having an impact on their behavior their social emotional learning their academic
067learning or is it not having an impact and if it's not having an impact what do we need to do differently to have the impact that we want okay thank you thank you Thank You Jenny Thank You Nick and Doug appreciate it good evening Jen sublet the opportunity to hear about the C program and the progress that it has made forever is a natural time to also spotlight some of the professional development strategies that we're trying in supporting the city team so as you know we are working to develop a robust professional learning program with lots of different avenues and vehicles for teachers to deepen their learning and to better their practice micro-credentialing is actually a national trend right now as a new vehicle for professional learning it has some significant differences with some of
068our traditional offerings or ways in which we offer professional learning and as you know we have a micro credentialing program with dr. Hairston stop in culturally responsive teaching and the seed program has also allowed for another opportunity of creating a micro credentialing program as well so it's allowing us to pilot a new approach and as mr. Cole as I was saying then study its impact what we like about micro-credentialing is the fact that it is personalized based on skill competency demonstrated changes in practice and the impact that that change in practice has on students so rather than a traditional how long has a teacher been in a session literally recertification points are sometimes tie to hours of listening to a presentation we now are looking at what is a problem at practice what is the
069professional learning how will the teacher then design a way in which to change their practice and how does that change impact their classroom and their students within it so it's much more reflective much more personalized ongoing and job-embedded professional learning has always been challenging and that we want to know how the learning of our teachers impacts the learning and the experience of our students and we're hopeful that the approach of my potentially allows us to have a more clear line of sight between teacher learning and student performance these are some of the characteristics that nationally we find micro-credentialing programs offer and we'll be looking for different ways in which we're able to expand our own offerings here's an admiral County so the seed micro kitchen Geling program that is really hard to say fast when
070you're standing in front of people the seed micro-credentialing program is a pilot partnership within our for urban ring schools we have four strengths I know right we have four strands professional learning that mirror the areas of emphasis that the SI team also supports within these schools what this is allowed us to do is also create a strategic plan for these four schools and I think you heard evidence of that not only from Nick but also from Doug about the importance of a common language within a building so tier 1 seed professional development these are foundational sessions it's that guarantee curriculum for teachers within this building these buildings designed to help support them given the context within they worked with in which they work each day these are face to face sessions and there are guarantee
071curriculum for teachers just as we have a guarantee curriculum for students within the seed schools we also have the tier 2 opportunity where teachers may choose become ce credentialed educators here we're moving into a hybrid environment which for me is very exciting because there's just one of me Oh it is a micro credential in each strand plus a strand of their choice so they have a scope across the themes and they can delve in and it's a combination of a partnership with bloom board which is a digital platform and face to face so again trying to be resourceful and trying to be able to scale up our offerings that both match teachers ability to work asynchronously but also our ability to provide more resources and opportunities for professional learning so an example within one of
072these strands this one is safe brain and trauma sensitive education so it's a theme within seed not only can a teacher choose to delve into trauma safe education they can then pick from one of these five micro-credentials so each of these is an option for learning our teachers have given us feedback about what they like about that is that within the context of a given year or within their context of where they are in their career they can really hone in on what their interest is so our first cohort of teachers from Wagner hurt who have completed a seed micro cadential focus first on instituting a trauma sensitive classroom they work in the multi age classrooms environment there are PLC and they really need in the beginning of in the middle of the year a
073reset and a refocus on making sure their space was trauma sensitive this is just an overview of all the different micro credentials within each of the strands offered by Blum board so again we have face to face options this summer for example I'll run responsive classroom the Advanced Course which teachers can take for four days over the course of the summer infuse a traditional face to face format for they can be working within the Blum board digital format and be working in a different learning environment one of the elements we like about Blum board is that it models and mirrors our own PDS a format of reflection where a problem of practice is analyzed a teacher engages in research and learning and then they develop a plan based on their professional context implement that plan
074and then evaluate it they are developing a portfolio that showcases their work and the impact of what they do with students very similar again to how we would want students to demonstrate their own mastery in work Blum board as a partner allows us to not only structure this type of reflective practice they also provide the learning resources and feedback for our teachers because this is a pilot I'm spending time interviewing and working with the teachers to find out what that first experience was like our feedback has been really interesting they find it's very rigorous the running joke from the Agner hurt teachers was they called the macro contention credentials because there's nothing micro about them but they did appreciate that they were highly relevant they chose to work with peers within their building they could
075have done it individually so I'll be looking for ways to formally and informally make sure that those collaborative environments are are possible we do find that we might need to norm what demonstration of mastery looks like our teachers are tend to be go-getters especially those who take advantage of pilots and so they put a lot of work into completing the micro credential which is great but it also meant it was a really time-consuming process for them so I'll be working with blue board to get a sense of the evidence that they're looking for and how our teachers sort of look in terms of what they've demonstrated now against teachers in other areas they also an ongoing feedback currently Bloomberg gives them feedback on their submission I'll be working with our partner to make sure that
076we actually build an ongoing feedback so they can get a quick check as they're moving through the process rather than just at the end and they also found that we're a pretty resource rich division and so while Bloomberg provided resources for them they also called me and made sure I gave them some resources and we want to make sure that our digital partner is one that's providing about you at it so I'll be working with that partner to make sure we really feel like they are providing the rich resources we expect so just wanted to take a moment to showcase this it is a new element for the professional development programming it ties in nicely with seed we're partnering constantly to balance the micro credentialing program that we have also and our Office of Community
077Engagement and just trying to paint that whole picture for you all of how we're beginning to expand PD questions Jen I thought we might mention that in tier 2 there is a stipend associated with that yes the terminology that we're using is that if a teacher completes a micro credential in each of the four areas plus one of their choice they are credentialed as a seed educator and there's a $500 stipend for three years for completing that so we heard about Agner hurt how are the other urban ring schools doing in getting engagement of the teaching staff one of the parts of building out the program is the tier 1 to tier 2 Holloman of it and so by the end of this year we'll have a three of the four should be what we
078would consider done with tier 1 and that then creates the foundation for tier 2 micro-credentialing so the launch will really be in the beginning of next year adding on more seats I think one of the interesting elements of creating a clear structure is the knowing sort of wind to jump in and I've had some teachers ask well what about could we get started this summer and while they can get started on the research portion of it it really is job embedded in context Ridge and so they need to have their kids because it's designing a problem of practice with the current group that you're working with so we again working on how to time that and match the timing about micro credential with the nature the academic year and I asked Nick out when we
079were in the retirement party I cornered him and asked him some questions about this but I'm totally forgetting what I was going to say good heavens I really did just lose it I'm sorry I do it all the time but I will doesn't have me very Segway so I can help what Nick's team was really helpful for doing even before I came on board so they were working on this before we began our partnership is vetting the digital partner and looking at the resources and looking to make sure they are quality and that this was something that matched we don't want to create an asynchronous digital platform for teachers that is not as strong a quality as our own we want to offer an offering that says the same level of rigor and research-based practices
080oh I know what my question was it was it related to the instructional coaches or equity educators and how do they or should they can they fit into the mix or the see my credential and it's a wonderful partnership where an instructional coach is a great reflective partner so as a teacher is looking at the research they've just done and internalizing that and then thinking about their current class and what they want to try as an action research that instructional coach provides feedback ideas brainstorming support in that way the equity specialist as well our wonderful resource for our teachers for resources instructional ideas the planning I think one of the things that we want to make sure is that teachers understand they have a lot of options delving deep into CRT work working through seed
081micro-credentialing very briefly I had a background in marketing I want that clear message of what our different offerings are I don't want to confuse the energy user which for me is that teacher so making sure that they know they've got equity specialists to support them instructional coaches to support them even the LTI is because in developing a digital portfolio having that learning tech integration what does it mean for technology and integration with our early learners or all important elements so these partnerships are key well I guess my question was also in terms of the education of those those resources about trauma and and all the things that the seed team is doing and that it goes both ways it does go both ways in other words building a capacity of the people who are resources
082within the division so they can help our teachers definitely and that I think is also part of what Nick mentioned and one of the questions earlier about how does some of this PD then get out to the rest of the division a lot of the work that the seed schools have been able to enjoy begins to really inform for example the sessions we're running the summer which are around social emotional learning and CRT and so we'll see a lot of opportunity for the rest of the division to tap into that as well thank you thank you and I would just add as we think about micro-credentialing one of the things that we hoped micro-credentialing could do is help us with our division priorities it's a way to think about putting something in place that you
083haven't had in place before and building these opportunities these buckets if you will for teachers to develop in so your next strategic plan will help us decide on what the next micro-credentialing bucket would be and we're ready to move on to Freshman Seminar if that's pleases you okay Jay good evening board members Jake Thomas director of secondary education thank you for allowing us to come out and talk about the exciting journey of Freshman Seminar you'll also be hearing from a couple people from the central office and more importantly we have five teachers with us who are teaching Freshman Seminar that we'll be sharing with us today as well so being able to reflect on the successes and challenges of Freshman Seminar this year you will hear about three areas this evening survey results curriculum revisions
084and school highlights Freshman Seminar is a cornerstone experience for incoming students to high school the primary goal of Freshman Seminar are to assist and advise students in developing their social and emotional skills as well as setting academic and career goals for the social emotional aspect Freshman Seminar focuses on five key areas self-management self-awareness social awareness responsible decision-making and relationship skills the main goals of Freshman Seminar are to support the transition to high school foster a sense of community feelings show empathy for others help students find voice and agency and their learning develop and maintain positive relationships and promote an understanding of the inner distant interdependent relationship among social emotional and academic learning the mission and goals of Freshman Seminar are worthy ones that need our continued attention and dedication year in and year out working
085with classroom teachers throughout the year we have discussed lessons learned about what worked well in what needs more attention you can see from our journey we have taken the journey we have taken to get to this point beginning in 2018 19 Freshman Seminar became a required course for incoming ninth graders in the first year 51 teachers were freshmen seminar teachers and they will continue to transition through high school with this with their student groups that they had this year based on surveys feedback observations and professional development we have made adaptations and modifications that will be implemented in 2019 to 20 now you will hear from our Freshman Seminar teachers from each of our three comprehensive high schools to share their experiences with you first you'll hear from Megan from Monticello and followed by western Albemarle
086high school then Albemarle high school Thank You Jay my name is Megan stripe and I've been the Freshman Seminar coordinator at Monticello and I am very excited to tell you about our experience in this inaugural year but first I would like for you to hear from our students themselves so if you'll bear with me just a moment [Music] to me Freshman Seminar is a class rate you can learn about important things in life that wouldn't be in a standard curriculum Freshman Seminar is a place to take a breath it gives me time to be myself and learn how to deal with school and life in general Freshman Seminar has also given me friends that I otherwise probably wouldn't have met it provides a safe place to talk about the many struggles of high school with
087people you feel comfortable with then relate to Freshman Seminar helps students both relationships maintain a steady mental health doesn't even advance academically by setting goals and planning ahead Freshman Seminar is an effective way for students to enhance their growth in academic areas as well as areas that academic classes fail to focus on I like coming to Freshman Seminar because classes so based off of that I hope you get just a little bit of a taste that has lifted off at Monticello we're not all the way there yet but I think I think we've got take off I do think that a good bit of our success this year has come from the strength of our start last summer our incoming ninth grade families were greeted at orientation with a chance to meet most of our
088Freshman Seminar teachers and have dinner with them in their cohorts for the students whose teachers couldn't be there because it was in the middle of summer and we did video introductions and so they were able to see their teachers being silly on rollercoaster rides and had that first face to look for on the first day of school we've really gone after building a culture of fun among our Freshman Seminar teachers whether that's just wearing our t-shirts together on Fridays doing the same ridiculous songs out in the hallways during passing periods but just creating for kids and understanding that all right Freshman Seminar is going to be different than my average academic classes I charged our teachers at the beginning of the year when they had experienced so much rich PD and so many resources given
089to them that if they were to do two things well this year I asked them to know their students well and to have fun with them and I think that that has been the undercurrent of what has gotten us to May this far in freshman seminar another big focus and cornerstone of our program has been the service-learning aspect and you will hear more about this especially as we look to revamp for Freshman Seminar 2.0 but within our Freshman Seminar service-learning focus we gave students the opportunity to come up with something that mattered to them a passion project and whether they chose to go after that independently or collaboratively they look to identify and needs that they saw in the world and then do something to come alongside another organization that was meeting those needs or
090look to address it in some other way so throughout that in addition to creating a whole lot of good in the world and many trips to the spca students learned a lot of the soft skills of collaborating in a professional environment of speaking to an adult that's outside of your family or outside of your school and that interdependent relationship that goes from taking something academic but then turning it into an event and how do you make that happen so the Freshman Seminar class really became an incredible place to house all of these skills and because of that we're really excited about the potential that that holds for students going forward as we look to focus more on the service-learning component and freman are and so with that it is my pleasure to introduce my friends
091over at western Albemarle Linda fine and Phil Gary thank you so much and before I tell you about the amazing things that my colleague Phil and I are doing over at western Albemarle I just want to take this opportunity to tell you how grateful I am to have been selected to be a Freshman Seminar coordinator I've worked with Meghan from Monticello and Steve Turner from Albemarle and Jay and we met every other Tuesday for the good part of a year to try and make this the best program that we could for our students and I think at the end of the year despite the ups and downs and the roller coasters of it all it was an amazing program for the teachers and for our students Meghan talked about the community service aspect and I
092think that is one of the things our students so enjoyed about Freshman Seminar we had students working at the SPCA at the Nelson County Animal Rescue but they also worked at the Senior Center and the Ronald McDonald House we had students work on particular passion projects whether it be with mental health or environmental issues or cultural issues we had one student who got so into what he was doing with computers that he was asked to present at the tomtom festival and this is the kind of opportunities that Freshman Seminar gave at Western we also did a lot of field trips being out in Crozet we were able to take our students to perón robotics and clean a Plex clean energy to see what kind of job opportunities they have to college during finals exam week
093we took them to Kay Kay Tech and Center one to see what their high school experience could be and how it could be different from the traditional one so we also had internal field trips where we invited them to look at all the different electives that Western offers and so that's just one of the ways that we gave voice and agencies to our students learning that was different from the traditional experience Phil Goering western albemarle oh so one of the things I was able to do with my students this year is project-based learning I was able to bring in UVA students and mentor program rise for real change they were able to work with students from UVA in order to complete three separate projects the projects that we completed were new turf fields it was
094is one of the project that would be our sports students another one was stress and anxiety with eighth grader student eighth grade students coming to we think about the stress of 9 10 11 12 but then the stress of coming to a high school that is so large and having a lot more freedom and then the third thing that we worked on was students helping homeless which actually won a scholarship from the baton school of leadership and public policy and it was amazing to watch these students grow throughout the year this was a year-long process and to take ownership of something that they were able to create and it just as a teacher it's it's amazing to watch the growth from an eighth grade student coming into high school to actually being a 9th grade
095student moving into 10th grade and having skills to move on to the core classes in order to participate thank you now from Monticello or I'm sorry from Albemarle is Katie and hi I'm Katy Christy from Albemarle so in the same vein of the other high schools alum orals had a lot of opportunities for community engagement so we have had impactful guest speakers and opportunities for community building in our classes as recently as this week we had a group of freshmen some of our students working to put some positive quotes in our bathrooms painting some positive quotes our bathrooms for just to improve the restrooms but also to put positive body positive quotes in those places but at AHS what we found most powerful was academic advisor and mentorship so in that time we would do
096academic progress monitoring so that's looking at students grades helping them work through their grades have been helping them keep track of their grades working on those skills but we also help students create a sense of advocacy so when they are struggling in classes how to reach out how to get help how to set up their patriot period how to get the things they need to be successful at school but I feel like one of the big pieces of that was the social-emotional check-ins where we were asking kids how are you do you have anything you need to share with us and the things that we were able to get from students that way and how we were able to meet students needs those activities lead to strong classroom community and strong bonds between our students
097and students in the class but also students to their teacher the that community those strong relationships are one of the most powerful things we saw from Freshman Seminar hi I'm Michele Benedict high school and Katie and I have we felt like we wanted to share a little bit about not only what Katie was talking about but I thought I'd illustrate a few stories about in the classroom so one of our students in our advisory was falling behind she didn't know how to access power school which is how you look at your grades and you find out what you're missing and for her she's a marginalized student and for her this was an aha moment where she finally understood oh this is where I can find information for the things that I'm missing this is the
098place where I can find out what my grades are right now and what I need to hand in so I can stay on top of things I spent a long time with her and one of the things that was really interesting was that she felt empowered to reach out to her teachers she was missing and I gave her the option I said do you feel like this is something you can do or do you need me to write the email and she said no it's something I want to do and I feel like she just needed a little support in which learning and I think that's one of the things that Freshman Seminar um there's a couple of things I'd like to share after winter break Katie and I thought it was important for us
099to check in with our kids and see how do you think how do you guys think this is going some feedback and we did a Google Form because we wanted them to share and not feel like I think they shared openly and they said they needed more time they needed more time in advisory and so we adjusted our schedule to accommodate that and likewise when we talked to the other high schools we shared this information and one of the great things about share what was working and what wasn't working and then come up with common solutions and within our high schools make things work better so I think that was everything Thanks so you already heard from Nick and Jen about plan do study act we just shared with you the planning and doing and
100we like to talk about the studying and acting so the Freshman Seminar two months into the initiative the division we surveyed freshman seminar teachers to collect feedback on implementation and identify areas for improvement then in the final quarter of the school year we surveyed freshman seminar students to evaluate the opportunities provided by the courses to develop students academic interpersonal and emotional skills and you have full access to the results of those surveys just wanted to highlight some of those results for you so in the staff survey that we conducted again those they focused on the six goal areas that we spoke about earlier of Freshman Seminar and just to highlight a few of the areas and you heard it very clearly from our teachers that are teaching Freshman Seminar this year that 75% of our
101students felt like it was either really well-received or mostly well-received as far as fostering a sense of community that survey for those questions was based off of four areas not at all somewhat mostly or very well so those were the highest to mark areas and that was seventy-five percent in the same note you see just over 55 percent felt the same way that very well or mostly the promoting and understanding for the interdependent relationship among social-emotional learning that we were meeting those goals of Freshman Seminar this was the teachers so what we did is we took the results from the teachers from from a couple months into the school year and their comments and thoughts of where they are and we actually developed a professional development professional learning opportunity for those teachers at the right
102around winter break because right before winter break for them to come and to be able to address some of those questions and we ingest some lessons that we promised we would do on as we went along the staffs staff survey also we there's really there's three structures of Freshman Seminar so we wanted to get feedback and again they had three choices that they could fill out here either it doesn't fit at all it's a weak fit or a strong fit and those three areas are classroom meetings academic advisory and social-emotional lessons and again some of that same feedback that you heard was very strong with the academic advisory piece which you heard from some of our schools the social-emotional learning again a little bit more than half of the staff members felt like that was
103a very strong fit and that's where we again we focused a lot of our professional development the student surveys what we just concluded recently focused on the frequency of opportunities for them to be able look at these different areas do they have the opportunity to do that those survey questions were based off of four different areas never rarely sometimes or regularly so again highlighting two of the areas here and you have a full access to all the results but I'm seventy eight percent of the students felt like regularly or sometimes the two highest marks that we developed a relationship with Freshman Seminar teachers and again I think you heard that as you went through where you see 61% look learning how to balance the academic social and emotional demands is tough and I think that's
104very evident as we talked about students dressed to Lima we presented last week it's a school board about a lot of those challenges to look at as well so it kind of ties hand-in-hand what we're going to finish up with is sharing some of the adjustments we've make and sharing some sample lessons for you some math Maureen and Natalie to come up mean Maureen Jensen one of league coaches what we wanted to show you here was sort of a bird's eye view of the structure of the curriculum for Freshman Seminar we spent a day last month with a group of curriculum revisers to think about freshmen 2.0 and what you see here are what we call five modules for Freshman Seminar module one is discovery and you can see the time frame when the discovery
105module is taught we move on to head activity opportunity and growth and what you see there that contribution model that's the community service that you heard the schools talk about and it sort of runs the course of the year so that Freshman Seminar teachers and students can determine when the contraire contribution would be would best fit their time I know Western likes to do that in the fall and other schools might do it at a different time of year so that's why you see that run along the bottom and the modules there are the four main instructional modules contain about twelve to twenty lessons and I wanted to include sort of a this is the picture of the pacing guide for module three so you can see that it has 15 lessons and it's broken
106down into three sections this is the opportunities module it's broken into sections called growing pains growing gains and growing together and these were written by teachers in our division these lessons also lead coach I'm just gonna walk you through a little bit of the template for the lesson design that our teachers use this template has been modified and refined throughout the year based on feedback so that it can meet the needs of all the teachers across all of the schools in the best way that we can so you'll see at the top every lesson is designed around a big idea and essential questions that guide the the lesson and the content and then there are also structures strategies and routines built into the lessons so that students and teachers both have a sense of what
107they're getting into every day when they come to the class so classes generally start with a bell ringer which is just a warm-up to get kids started and thinking about what they're going to be discussing learning or doing and cost and then we move into a launch which is more of a something that will activate student thinking around the topic and then you'll see in the experiences is really the meat of the lesson and there are things embedded in all these plans like links and videos and choices for teachers so that they can really craft the lesson to meet the needs of their learners and then and then each lesson also comes with a wrap-up or a reflection that helps kids kind of synthesize or pull everything together and make connections so that they can
108transfer really their learning to other parts of their academic and real life so I think questions if we have so freman Allah or freshy sim cuz I gotta tell you I like freshy so I know there was some concern going into this school year from some parents what kind of parent feedback have you gotten about how their children have developed during freshman seminar initially I think parents were curious and they just wanted to know what is it as it got underway at the variety of different personalities at the helm of the classroom really gave each Freshman Seminar section its own flavor and so some students had different experiences than others and that is a point of discussion moving forward how do we make sure that each teacher feels the freedom to personalize their classroom all
109the same time making sure there's continuity but the most encouraging thing that I can share personally is that I have had a number of parents voluntarily come to me and say if you ever need an advocate if you ever need someone to speak to the value of this program please put me on speed dial and so I think that that is really powerful to know that there are folks who are coming to us seeking us out saying hey this has benefited my kid and let me tell you how oh and say from my perspective I actually had the opportunity to substitute from his define back before spring break and well the contrast and personalities leading the group positive contrast so anyway I did what I want to say is that I was really bowled over
110by the student the student run aspect of the program that you've created and I assumed that you know probably the majority of teachers have created in this program that when the class started they they had already because I was kind of running late trying to stay organized they had already started working on the bellringer students helped me get connected and all the things that we needed to do they they were expectant that things were gonna happen in the class they shared things that I couldn't imagine we talked about one of the things we talked about was to tell a story of where we failed at something and then learned something new from it and everything got bet you know things were better than they were before and the stories were really sharing the students were
111sharing stories that I just don't think we would have been hearing you know before this program as freshman in high school because of their concern for not being before being left out of a group or not being accepted it was very clear to me that you over the course of the year had really established a sense of community in in that classroom so I was very impressed and I know it was just one snapshot for me but it was it could have been different right but it was it was great it was really great with Freshman Seminar was that when that when the guidance counselors from the middle schools were telling about what Freshman Seminar was they didn't exactly what it was going to be so no one knew what it was coming in so
112we made a great effort this year to create to get the parents the information to know what freshman seminar was and so hopefully that information and the other thing that's so that's one of the ways the parents they just didn't know what it was and the second thing is students said we want more study time we want more academic advisory and we heard that and we are building in next year the program to make that better so while there aren't no system is perfect we're listening and we're trying to make it better so about what's the average size class for the seminar and how often does it meet freshmen seminar meets is one of the the eight classes of students so just like any of your other classes they take around 90 minutes every other
113day and the ratio is around 1 to 15 is what we wanted to staff that I was looking at the survey data it sounded to me it appeared especially the student survey it seemed okay but not great yeah I mean I would hope you know of course we have nothing to compare it to sir but hopefully as you continue and get that feedback it'll become much more effective program and you talked about parents not knowing what Freshman Seminar was I think looking at the survey data from students I don't think they knew what they were supposed to be learning and so maybe making sure that you upfront say these are the things that we're gonna learn these are the things that you're gonna be able to take away from this seminar might really help also
114as I was looking at the data from the student survey I wondered did you see a variance between high schools did you see a survey we didn't ask for the kids to identify themselves by high school Oh calm and the staff we did but for the students we didn't say okay I think that might be a great feedback tool if you got feedback from not only which school which teacher so you would like flag that some teachers were really successful and some teachers were less successful and what we could do better and staff development or you know maybe this freshman seminars not for every teacher I think you see I just want to thank you guys for for doing this because I think this takes a lot of courage to do something like I mean
115this is brand new this is something that we could it would be very easy for you guys not to do it right it would have been the easy thing and I appreciate everything you've put into it I want to speak from my child's perspective my child griped about Freshman Seminar the whole time and then told me how awesome it was every single day it's right like and I said Kendra is it is it kind of cool to like Freshman Seminar she's like no you're not supposed to like it I said but do you like yeah I mean and so I think they when I look at the student surveys I kind of wonder if there's not something that built into it it's sort of like well you I don't like freshmen from summer are either
116because when I was getting down to the nitty-gritty Kendra told me what we did this and we did this and we did this and I said well those good things oh yeah I'm glad we did that like so maybe it was a good experience so I just want to thank you I think we can always do better but I'm so glad that we did something and I thank you very much I would second the positiveness I think it's really good and and one of the things I think in some ways we won't know the effectiveness of this program until these students are juniors and seniors and it be I think wonderful to survey them then and say what did you think about Freshman Seminar yeah I think the program is good too but how many
117minority teaches do we have seminar teaches are there any out Graham I don't know I can get that for you and break that out with it the its each school the principal's as they build their master schedule decide who's teaching it so what they're doing right now is finalizing who's teaching it next year so the people that are doing Freshman Seminar as they step in and do the sophomore seminar and follow the kids along a new batch of teachers come in so I can get that data for you but I don't think we broke it out like I know we didn't okay we can get that for you if it's something you want it takes yeah you said when they're juniors and seniors I don't know if you realize that the kid the students I
118have now I will still be their teacher when they're seniors so the idea is that I get to stay with them so that's really exciting for me to that I will be able to watch these kids grow and have that relationship with them till they graduate I always thought that that concept of staying with those students for four years was one of the great strengths of this program and so that's one of those reasons why I think it would be good to get feedback as these students maybe start their senior year than they're reflecting back but there's also going to be a lot more crying at graduation all our educators for tonight's presentations thank you so much yep great work guys I think Pat's up dr. mcLaughlin good evening board members I'm Pat McLaughlin chief
119of strategic planning and as dr. Haas alluded to earlier in the evening May is a very busy month for Sol testing our spring non-writing testing began May 6th and with the exception of retakes is due to wrap-up by the end of next week since we began on May 6th students have completed 20 2139 assessments the fact that our assessment process is completed so smoothly is a testament to the team effort put in by India Han our division director of testing Chris Gillman from the office of strategic planning and accountability our school support teams in lead and and particularly our individual school testing coordinators who put in tremendous amounts of time and effort into this work at this time of year as you know Sol tests are a key component in the state accreditation process and
120I'm here tonight to give you a brief update on how schools are assigned accreditation ratings by the state Department of Ed official results from the Department of Education will come to us later in the summer or early fall and we'll update the board on our school specific accreditation status at this time so as you know the Board of Education has implemented a revised accreditation set of accreditation standards this year the new standards are designed to encourage continuous improvement and place increased emphasis on closing achievement gaps prior to this year state accreditation was measured only on overall student achievement on state Sol tests the revised accreditation standards measure performance on multiple school quality indicators and now have provisions to credit schools and students for growth from one year to the next all schools are evaluated on
121the indicators seen here these include overall proficiency in growth in English reading writing overall overall proficiency in growth and math proficiency and growth for achievement gap groups in English and proficiency in growth and achievement gap groups in math overall proficiency in science and chronic absenteeism schools are assigned a performance level for each category with level one indicating performance at or above the standard level two indicating a score that is near the standard in level three indicating below standard you can see for the most part the standards for our academics are 70% or higher with the exception of English which has a threshold of 75% to achieve level one status chronic absenteeism which is defined as missing 10% I'm ten percent or more of the school year sets a threshold of fewer than 15% of the
122students to achieve level one status what's 20 percent or what's 15 percent I'm sorry what would be 20 percent of the number of days it's 10 percent of the number of days right what is that how many team so we have 180 school do think it's a little bit more complicated than that because you are you have to be enrolled more than half of the school year and it's depending on how many days you are enrolled so if I only enrolled 95 days in the school year and I hit 9 absences I would be on the threshold of chronic absenteeism if that makes sense Thanks so in addition to the indicators in the previous slide high schools have three quality indicators on which they're also evaluated the first is called the graduation and completion index
123each school is assigned a score for the index that is calculated using different weights for students who earn diplomas who are in GEDs who get certificates of completion or who are still enrolled in school after their fourth year but have yet to graduate well that's put into a formula to give the graduation and completion index and to get a level one status in there you have to have a score of 88 or higher as you can see there the second indicator is the dropout rate for the cohort meaning they make a very simple calculation what are the number of students who dropped out in comparison to the number who entered as a cohort of ninth graders four years previously they divided those two numbers and that gives you your dropout rate 6% or less is
124a is a level one indicator for us and then the final indicator is another new one and that's called the college and civic readiness index this one actually won't go into effect until the 20 2021 2022 accreditation status but that the state has identified four indicators for college career or civic readiness those are completion of an AP ib or dual enrollment class earning a CTE credential completing a work based learning experience or completing a service learning experience so to calculate this every student who has done at least one of those you don't have to do more at least one of those is counted in the numerator and then it's divided by the total cohort number and again as you can see level one for that is 85% or higher so these indicators are combined to
125determine the school's accreditation status with the State Department of Ed their accreditation ratings that schools can earn the first is accredited which means all of the quality indicators that you just saw are at level 1 or at level 2 you can have as many level ones as many level twos as you want as long as you have everything in the green or the yellow you are an accredited status accredited with conditions meaning school has one or more indicators at a level three schools who are credited with conditions must submit a comprehensive needs assessment and a continuous school improvement to the state Department of Education in the final category for accreditation is accreditation denied schools are rated as accreditation denied if they've been accredited with conditions and they fail to adopt or fully implement the required
126corrective actions to address the level three conditions within their school so it's important to note that for schools that have consistently demonstrated success for state accreditation the Department of vegetate of education grants accreditation waivers these waivers last schools to maintain their designation of accredited during the entire 3-year waiver period even if one of one or more of the indicators falls to a level three to be eligible for a waiver schools must meet full accreditation criteria for the three-year period being used to determine waiver eligibility so that brings us to our current state for accreditation all of our schools are designated as accredited with the exception of Greer elementary this year Greer is accredited with conditions for level three scores in achievement gap for students in English and for students in math Greer successfully completed their
127comprehensive needs assessment and continuous improvement plan and submitted both of those to the state and they were both accepted the majority of our schools have been granted waivers through the 2020 2021 school year but there are eight schools in the division which are not eligible for waivers beginning next year so if any of these schools have an indicator that is at level three they'll be designated accreditation accredited with conditions during the 1920s me during the 2019 2020 school year all other schools are on waivers through 2020 2021 so in essence if any schools are gonna not be accredited fully accredited these are the possibilities there finally there are future waivers that the state is creating there's going to be another waiver period that runs from 2021 through 2024 we're not quite clear on which years
128are gonna be counted for those yet but there's potential any anytime a school even if they are currently under a waiver it gets an area that's in red they can lose their eligibility for the next waiver period which means that they've got to improve into level 1 or level 2 categories before that waiver period commences in order to keep their fall accreditation so as you can see accreditation is getting pretty complicated our goal is always to have 100 percent of our schools fully accredited and we work toward that every day and so that was just a brief overview of kind of our current state of where we are and if you have any questions about any of those I'd be happy to answer them what are the four cat what are the four criteria that
129would make you eligible for the waiver why aren't there schools so so if in any of the this waiver period that we're in right now had looked at three previous years of accreditation data and if schools had any items under the old accreditation standards it's a little bit complicated some of the waivers look at old accreditation standards some of the waivers look at new accreditation standards and if any of those had been at a level three during the past three years they're not eligible for the waiver basically like a warning school if they're that's right yes so if you the waivers are granted so that so that schools who have been consistently high achieving if they have a slip they don't they don't automatically drop out of their accredited status if schools have have had
130some accreditation issues then they're not eligible for that waiver because they should already be focusing on on those areas and trying to pull them up into the yellow or the green if that makes sense but it's the the the waiver process has become much more complex with this new system and and we're hoping the state continues to refine its guidance that it gives to us to make it a little bit easier to understand which schools are accredited in which years are going to count toward those waivers do you like the changes I think the changes have a lot of positives to them because there's there's a lot of student growth factors that come in you know for example when you look at those scores to hit that say that 75% threshold that's not only students
131who hit a 400 and the rest of well test but the states created tiers of growth so if I was a third grader and I did really poorly on my reading Sol as a third grade student it might need a hundred plus points to to get to passing as a fourth grader the state said well you know it's kind of unlikely a student's gonna make that big of a jump but if we get to a tier two on that we're gonna count that as growth the students doesn't pass the SOL it doesn't count as a as it passed Sol for him but for but the state says that's making the progress we want to see that students on track to eventually be passing as Sol and so and so that's I think that's a positive
132that we've asked the state for quite some time to to find a way to incorporate student growth into into Sol scores now I do think it also puts uh puts a clearer focus on our achievement gap groups or you know previous accreditation was only for overall students you looked at how did all of your kids do on their reading test and so sometimes that could mask some issues with with some of our membership groups for achievement gap now if I think there's six or seven different membership groups for the achievement gap and if any two of those fall into level three then the whole category becomes level three and and so it puts a pretty clear focus on that I think that just the difficult part is trying to figure out all the different nuances
133to the rules as they bring it on that's right and you've done an excellent job of interpreting all that Patrick I'm now I'm not surprised but I mean it's it's pretty astounding how quickly you're able to explain all that with the implementation occurring when it did the other thing that dr. McLaughlin is working on in his office is working to align our internal school improvement our school strategic planning process with with the states because the forecast is that at some point the state will have a template that all schools use so we're we're trying to move in that direction and we're trying to strike a balance between making sure that we continue to do the good things you know the concept based learning all the you know project-based learning all the things that students enjoy
134and make sure also that we incorporate competencies to be sure that the teachers are mapping the the engaging work that they do to competencies and also assessing based on those competencies so that we have a better picture of how students are doing along the way I think my read on it for most superintendents is pretty much what I said that they're pleased to see growth accounted for in a logical way at one time the state was getting ready to roll out percentile growth scores that looked like a baby's growth chart and that was just didn't get anywhere this this is much more easy to understand and far more encouraging for teachers because it gives the teachers a feeling that they can make progress with a student and have a sense of progress and accomplishment along
135the way so it's move in the right direction and our goal as Pat said is to have all of our schools accredited and I'd also like to see schools beating those odds and getting more VIP Awards which is the next tier where your school gets recognized for achievement we have a few schools that get those from the state but I'd like to see more of them I can't I guess my question is it's not about the I mean it's about career I mean we're now having a second new principal in two years it is our highest poverty school it's in my district and how are we going to get it there you know I think I think that's a question we're all putting some serious thought into we don't know this year's results yet for
136for Greer so you know those who come to us and in the late summer early fall I know Jill Lee did some you know had that as her as her focus they are I'm confident that Steve Saunders is going to be a great leader in the school too and and that we can put a collective team effort behind behind what we can do how does the state accreditation data deal with the high mobility students on my date as a couple years older I know when last I spoke with Robin so it is a couple years old out of 650 kids she had something like 96 kids come in substantially after the first of the year or leave before the end of the year there are some unions there's some provisions for when a student enters
137your school there's a couple of different threshold one for federal accountability one for state accountability I I don't want to say without mixing them up because I don't have it right in front of me but if a student enters after a after a certain date to your school their score does not count towards your state accountability so there are some provisions for that same thing if if a student leaves you obviously he doesn't he doesn't count for that school anymore and may count for the schools which he or she so what I would say is that in in in response to that question is the way I would answer is you're going to get there through high quality teaching and learning and that sounds trite or very global however I would say that when you
138open up the budget notebook and you look at the 20 proposals that we've made all of those are tied back to metrics that will enhance learning for students the culturally responsive teaching program is an evidence-based practice as teachers are credentialed in that they they will grow greer is a very low is completely out of balance in terms of the diversity of the teachers that work there and the diversity of the students as we make more diversity hires that career that's going to have an impact when we improve the quality of our substitutes because it is a high-stress school then teachers tend to be off a little more because they're getting professional development or they just need a break that's going to have an impact it'll be it's not going to be just one thing that
139gets it done it's a seed team is the C team all of it all the things you're investing is board are going to help play out at that school with focus I think that's the thing we've been missing in a lot of circumstances around the school system is we've said okay we're gonna have great teaching and learning we're gonna have this we're gonna have that but the question is for what and my answer starting as we started the school year is to is to make sure that we have equitable outcomes for students that if these students come to school ready to learn they're they desire learning no student gets them that gets up in the morning and says I refuse to learn today they are they're coming in they're giving us their best we need
140to use evidence-based practices to close those gaps and that's when that's how we're going to make a difference and I know we will the others thank you what I would add is that the fidelity to the professional learning community is really important and when when we see fidelity to that with best practices and lessons study and teachers working together around common assessments we do see increases so the fidelity to the PLC model really makes a difference I didn't mean it as a criticism if you haven't you should ask that question every time we look at this information that's the other part is bringing it to you more often more accurate and being transparent with you as a Ward as to how we're actually doing as a school system on Accreditation this is the first time
141I can recall such a report to the board yeah I gotta tell you dr. oz dr. Magoffin I love that because you told us specifically this school I mean that and that is the first time I've seen very complex things but this was something then I understood and I thought was very helpful yes and and this is this this is gonna be part of what we do it is actually part of our policy that's that needs to be followed and as someone once told me you know that negative news doesn't get better when you don't talk about and don't share it we if this is going to get better because we're talking about it other questions okay thank you I guess I was curious because you know we were mentioning kind of some of these
142system-wide approaches that were taking like culturally responsive teaching and I sat in on reading yes grading the Martin micro-credentialing final reports and I got to talk to a lot of the teachers in my understand and my understanding was that different schools are utilizing it completely differently like kale is really embracing it and we had you know this big bloom of teachers that took it there whereas Grier grew was specifically mentioned as a school where not a lot of teachers were really participating and I don't know what cause I don't know if it comes down to the admin and whether they're supporting it and I guess what are we doing to make sure well some of that is about the capacity of the the C group to DeeDee and kale was early in yeah and Leilani
143was there at kale embedded there so that started very quick and so this some of it was about the capacity of the the how many people we had which I asked that yeah which I asked them a lot about because you know we want to expand this and they're already kind of at capacity so I guess my question would just be if we have this school that's not that's we're worried that it's not going to be what are we doing could you know you gave this broad answer we're doing CRT what are we doing to make sure that that's happening at that school yeah so one thing for sure this summer based on the anti racism policies we said that all staff in the county we're gonna begin have that baseline CRT training so that's
144a first step that we have that we've never taken so that'll be the first step for Greer the other part is focusing in on their diversity hiring and they've already made two minority hires which is more than than they've made probably in the last five years this year they've done that and our focus should be to look at the administrative team at the school that's good my follow-up because we just switched administrators and I guess I'm just I'm curious like did we ask I mean was that part of the selection process or is there the person Steve Saunders is that who everybody is he bought into CRT is he planning to use that is he how does he feel about this yeah I think it I mean honestly I think it comes in with him
145and the other part is that Steve if you look at big and this isn't my own thought this was like the people involved with CRT telling me that it's basically dependent on the administrators of that school being bought in that's why you know dr. Harrison have had this conversation in the past that has to start at the top it really does because the if and there's a lot of things like that that you know that you're pointing out in schools the principal role is an important role they if there's division there's a division initiative they need to buy into it with us for good reason and one of the things that we've already talked to Steve about is the fact that the CRT programs not strong at Grier and yeah that's just part of him
146coming on board and taking it on so it should start at the top the other part is that if you look at Steve's track record at Baker Butler he's pretty much closed achievement gaps for african-american students at that school that were deep and wide so he knows how to do it he has high fidelity to the professional learning community model but I think that the X Factor and a lot of these pieces is the practice of CRT and it is the diversity of the staff I think those you know people will say well why do you know they'll ask me like why why does it matter if you have diverse teaching diverse teachers and the reality is that it is an evidence based practice that when students of color have teachers of color they perform
147better in class when when white students have teachers of color often they perform better in class by by having a diverse mix of teachers at the table they see all you know people working together collaboratively and they collaborate better so there's a lot of evidence around this it's not just a feel-good thing you know I'm preaching to the choir but there there are there there's evidence and reasons for why we're doing this greer does not have a diverse teaching staff period it's far out of balance i believe that as we increase the diversity of that teaching staff that school is going to perform better i also believe this we can build the capacity of the staff around culturally responsive teaching practices the school will perform better and that does start with the principal yeah i
148guess that's just all i'm saying is that i know that we have these broad things which i agree evidence-based practice i want to make sure that we have a focus that they're actually being implemented in that school because different schools based on the administrators are you know having different results and those are elements that would be in the continuous school improvement plan as well and we used to be pretty wide open on those plans about you know what do you want to do with your school improvement but we're now is it gonna be like targeted for the state process requires that it's like you have two choices that our state choices yeah you lose that autonomy i don't know if that's one of the best things ever but you know i would just like to
149affirm that school based leadership doesn't matter especially from that principalship perspective i'd mention the diversity conference that's upcoming and when i look at those who have registered we don't have the participation from our principals that we should the principals who have registered for the conference are those who are who who are already participating in the program such as Dede Jones from kale Michael Ronnie who will be certified this year as a as a principal Ben Allen from from kale I'm not quite sure why our principals have not engaged and one of the best experiences that they could have relative to being introduced to coach responsive teaching but it hasn't happened maybe and you could call them tomorrow and I was I went through the list and I was thinking about sending something out directly to
150them especially where they have people who have gone through either the micro credentialing process or the certification process but we've pushed it out there you know some of this has got to come from the heart because you know that's what you need to do and when we talk about mandating you know you can't mandate a commitment you had to understand the difference that it can make but I'll follow through with that but it's called with dr. castor Easter called and what I call it is called directive empowerment you know what that is dr. Harrison well mayor of fact will help you you can pick up the phone and the rest of us it's good to know that information I'm glad you're sharing it tonight might have been better to you know clue me in ahead
151of time but we should pick up the phone tomorrow and make those phone calls and have those principles registered yes they're attending a wedding there's a good man dr. house thank you that conference gonna be the same as last year where you get to sit in the different classes we have we have 23 folks have gone through the certification process 21 will be presenting and they will be showing the evidence based that dr. Haas is talked about as to how they have gotten specific results with students based on some intentional acts of teaching also we'll have a gallery walk of the micro-credentialing individuals we have had 27 folks to go through the micro-credentialing this year we're still determining those who have met the criteria okay that's it so it must be the same format that
152you've used in the past right yes sir okay and when the invitation is extended could Greer especially be included in that at list you know the calls that you gonna make it's somebody's gonna make I mean come back and tell us which principals attended yeah I mean I don't know it's they should get guys get recognition for it I mean it's kind of that's my fear with CRTs we're gonna be preaching to the choir eventually and as opposed to bringing in people that need to come in and be listening and that's a great conference I remember last year when I attended I mean you learn just from that one day people should be there on top of everything else it's high-quality professional development and it's fun and it's something that we put money time talk
153effort into I you know I want to make sure people are doing it is there any way that maybe the teachers at Greer could especially be invited to this every educator in my County Public Schools has had the opportunity to be exposed to right but I mean maybe a special invitation especially great in Greek perhaps mr. page you may send special okay I'll expect central office help with that okay thank you I mean jokes I mean it is nice to invite them but administrators I think there should be a more I mean they should be coming mm-hmm right but the administrators being there without the teachers being there okay also we don't have any board members who have signed up that's what I'm wondering about many of the principles as they are I haven't signed
154up yet but I'm gonna be there stuff so sometimes principals don't sign up for things and show up to I'm hoping that's what happened okay all right thank you doctor thank you for thanks we only have two items on the agenda so do we have a consensus to move ahead or if you want to take a break we have one public comic okay which is all right all right so mrs. Carlsen you will take charge of a public comment session I'm happy to Dave did you want it okay got it we invite public comment guidelines we invite and actively seek the public's input in the matters relevant to school board governments and provide for time in our meetings to hear from our residents and community members respectful and on topic comments are expected to Republic
155comment please Wilfred this willful disruption of the meeting may result in being asked to leave by the chair public testimony guidelines are one speakers should have here to the following protocol - at the speaker's podium please state your name and address our voting district or please give any written statements and other supporting materials to the clerk for distribution please note that written statements there's only one person doing this she knows the rules that's one reading so fast dish please note the written statements are made a part of the permanent records of the school board additionally if the speaker is unable to complete the presentation and the time allotted a copy of their supporting materials will be provided to school board members three minutes will be allowed for each presenter to speak a color-coded light system
156will be used to time presentations the yellow lighten the yellow light means that the speaker is two minutes into the presentation the red light means speakers at the three minute limit of the presentation and must wrapped up promptly in order to maintain respect for all points of view the school board requests no clapping Boone or any form of support or non support be used if members of the public wish to show their support for a speaker they may stand to raise their hands debate and dialogue with the school board is not allowed during public comment we have miss Amanda Marisol before me you know they left we have Amanda Moxon hi I'm Amanda boxin I'm in Rio district and actually wasn't gonna make public comment tonight I just came to listen to the reports but
157some things stood out to me that I thought would be important for you to think about particularly with your retreat coming up in a couple of weeks and my hope is that some more actions around dismantling systemic racism in the schools will be discussed so the reason that I'm up here right now is because I spent all afternoon with one of my clients here in town working on diversity and inclusion and I just wanted to share this with you so words really do matter there's some words I've heard tonight get thrown around that I wanted to just share a little bit more around the impact of those words diversity minority micro-credentialing and evidence-based practice so it's often said that diversity inclusion is somehow this bucket that's tied together so people sort of say diversity thinking
158that it includes more than that but it really doesn't diversity is just difference that's all that it means so when we're talking about diversity in organizations what we're talking about is everyone is welcome here right that's what we say we want everyone we want everyone to come doesn't matter who you are what you look like we want you here that's diversity but the problem in organizations is that they don't focus on inclusion inclusion is the difference of saying that all are welcome here to saying this was created with you in mind and I will tell you I was really hopeful listening to some of the presentations tonight around some of the attention that's being put directly towards children I really appreciate that the challenge is that with a lot of those programs you know I
159used to run a 32 million dollar IT operation and one of the things that I learned in doing that process was that when you spend a lot of time in a lot of small areas piloting a lot of different things you end up not being very effective and even if one of those solutions seems like a good hit you can't make it sustainable because you don't have the resources to do so particularly when other people don't want to let go of the other pilot programs that are going on so one of the mantras that our team came up with that proved to be really successful was laser focus not light bulb glow so I wanted to share that with you I think it's an important thing to think about if you were to take all
160of the resources of the seed programs and freshman seminar and all these different things and step back and actually look at the that what we're trying to combat is driven primarily by systemic things system at racism classism ableism right and those are the roots at all of this so when you think about systemic racism that's at the roots institutional racism is the trunk and the branches the processes procedures and organizations that prop up those systems and then you have the leaves and what you all are dealing with right now is really just the leaves on the trees and you're not getting it the root of the problem so I had a lot more to say but I don't want to get arrested good night thank you Thank You Amanda miss Moxon does anyone else want
161to give public comment we're done public comment is closed I will go ahead and recap what Amanda said she wants to give us some things to think about as we head to our retreat to help us as we continue to try to dismantle racism and our schools school system one thing was that words matter word she heard us say diverse person you minorities micro-credentialing she point out the difference between diversity and inclusion you and I feel like no it's good it's good that other people diversity inclusion diversity saying all are welcome inclusion saying we actually have created a space for you here created a space with you in mind and then she pointed out after our presentation that piloting a lot of small things can quickly become unsustainable and I like that she said it's
162important to be laser-focused not just to have a light bulb glow and we are getting at the Leafs of problems without getting to the root of the problem thank you so much that has summary mrs. Carlson do we have other business if a board members or superintendent I just want to tell Joe no cuz I know that he's I know that he's listening to this Jonna we love you we're very sorry and you're in our thoughts know of the business thank you to the board thank you to the public for being with us and now meeting is adjourned