001and there are lots of uh staff that have joined us today so we'd like to welcome everybody uh we have a pretty short agenda but a a full one we're going to start off with item b and those are our board requests for information rfis so that we can see where we are and prioritize those and if any board member um [Music] has any other requests now would be a good time for you to add them to the list okay [Music] all right so the first request oh sorry [Music] okay so our first request from member jacobs was can a report be generated which separates ethnic demographic data provided voluntarily by asd applicants for educator positions compared to the same demographic information of individuals hired without providing other identifiers like name address etc and we
002know that that one has not been filled yet dr bishop could you speak to that thank you madam president yes and i believe that uh we had put this on hold because we were uh deep into negotiations and the talent management team is support for that so i'll uh request from matt t ford how long that this uh rfi would take if it's short term or long term basically uh long term being throughout the semester short term is within the couple of weeks or um unfortunately i'm having difficulty reading the it's it looks like a link can you summarize for me what this this project is sure it says can a report be generated which separates ethnic demographic data provided voluntarily by asd applicants for educator positions compared to the same demographic information of individuals
003hired so we have prepared uh and shared with the board the personnel reports which designate um our demographics but this is uh basically a comparison over the last three to five years of people who have applied demographics to people who have been hired demographics right and that will take some time currently we we capture well applicants can volunteer their demographic information and we do maintain that for those individuals who are hired but we don't currently that i'm aware of have that applicant demographic information captured for compares comparison's sake so i would say [Music] we would need um [Music] i mean a month conservatively to particularly if it's uh to go back and i'm not sure frankly how far back we can effectively go it's certainly something we could do prospectively um so for for this
004year's data i would ask for a month to complete that project [Music] okay okay uh member jacobs uh this was your did you want to add anything this was your request uh no i think madam president you and the dr bishop spoke to the intent and the information being requested um i just appreciate the administration working to accomplish it and the month seems fine and appropriate i don't have any objection okay okay so then that would be um short term one month yes um madam president just to clarify uh we do not have prior year data captured so it will be this year and then moving forward we can uh create some [Music] databanks for that i i just have a question of clarification so when applicants apply the system that we use to that
005we use to um the applicants the system that they submit the application in does not capture isolated uh fields or is that just not a field that we that we um [Music] is that is that is not information that we we collect period so it's somewhere we just got to go to get just got to get it right [Music] specific to um demographics regarding ethnicity that would be voluntarily provided or not um right other demographic information would would be we would be able to derive or make assumptions um but again that much of that [Music] either doesn't exist at least in in so far as it's not managed in the current report so we would have to create something related to the the applicants who weren't ultimately hired um so that we could compare to
006to those whom we've hired and and we can we'll candidly we'll have to start gathering the data and seeing what we can gather uh by way of comparison i'm not sure uh it will be complete as to um all the interests um within this request but we'll we'll see what we have once we start to get out of that yes um madam president speak sure also our um senior director of equity compliance has met with talent management senior director peggy rankin and when they did look to answer that um they did find that many uh applicants didn't provide that information um and they went further to say even on the summary to hire many didn't identify so um it is something that they struggled to get prior years especially uh due to the choice of
007um sharing so what we do have we we can go ahead and get that this year and then and move it forward but uh they did um really sonia and peggy did try to investigate into this and didn't have enough information okay uh remember jacobs did you have a follow-up yep thank you madam president just to follow up to dr bishop we're speaking that we don't have prior year information for prior years and separating that fact from what we i think we all agree makes sense is that not every applicant discloses which is perfectly fine um but do did we not collect information in the same way uh on a voluntary basis in past years where something changed within the last year i'll have um mr t ford address that the to member jacobs um
008it would have been provided in the same way it's simply whether or not we maintain that information in the system some some information is provided or had historically been provided honest on a document maintained separately altogether from the application in the formerly known as the eeo office now the oec office so that that's part of the challenge would be to discover those historic data [Music] okay so i think we're good on that item any other questions okay so let's move on to the next one this one is also from member jacobs what would it look like for a 2.5 million or 5 million wedge for mental health in the budget what would the opportunity cost be um this there was information in the february board connect and so on can you yes um madam president
009thank you uh what we did was uh share some information that had been previously requested and or previously utilized in our district for looking at opportunities to really essentially reprogram or redesign and so whether that was i believe we simply used prior information for that and i was [Music] it's difficult to put it out there in a public document we did share uh for instance with the board that if we didn't use s or three in this budget it would look like ten additional staff members per grade level or 10 additional kids per class that was just to give a mind's eye picture but we really would not go to classrooms first we'd try to cut everywhere else but we were trying to provide a sense of the depth of how much we used and
010frankly um then you know we did get questions from legislators that said what you're going to put 10 more kids in a class so what we thought would happen did you know that they just pick up a sound bite for us to gather people that would need to be in this decision-making process from all divisions to redesign a program to capture money out of it um [Music] would really cause some anxiety at this point in time and we didn't pull them out and it would be those of you that were on the board when they looked at just to give an example um there was a rumor that central middle school was being closed down because it was just came as a topic you know and then it was the news for a month and
011the school came out and so we're trying not to name something because simply put a transition of time would take some so what we provided the board was you know when we did this in the past to take the positions for fte 40 health teachers and put them in the budget this is how much that the cost of that was when we looked at um so that the opportunity would be a separate health teacher the opportunity cost we also looked at middle school model and prior to the latest middle school um problem solving that would have been a quite a bit of funds you know put back in i believe we looked at a redesign of the ignite program to access more but there would be an opportunity cost for a change in programming so
012we just put some items in there in addition to there's always fte um if if the board desires like a more in-depth look we would for sure pull um aea leadership principal leadership district leadership into a meeting to have a discussion about it and again that would spark some angst at a time that we didn't need it so if um this is wanted over a long longer period of time how we would do this we certainly would uh partake in that and invite people in and share ideas and and truly have a plan a longevity plan of change and uh can do that but what we did thus far was put in old requests and or prior budgets when we did propose an uh cost to something that had to change to put more money
013into court classrooms was was the goal at that time so um we can continue or uh just hold off um kind of move through this year and then really have a larger discussion not sure uh the where the board was on this um certainly can be done it just shouldn't happen just from the chiefs because then it will be oh the chiefs want to cut us and this is it would look very differently and and um kind of blaze through the district that's just how things have occurred so i guess uh my question to member jacobs is was the information was the information that the superintendent just shared and the information in board connect what you were looking for or did you want to clarify no thank you madam president i found the information uh
014enlightening and helpful i don't have any other questions and i hope the board found it enlightening as well as we have this conversation as well as next year's thank you all right so uh in terms of uh so then we can mark that one completed uh katie thank you oh and that's it we only had two any other board members remember donnelly you have a request thank you madam president i had several inquiries last couple weeks and i guess the question i would pose is was any of the covet impact funding contingent on mandatory masking per se that's the question i begin for people no okay i didn't think oh oh yeah you can answer that real quick any other did you said you had did you have any other any other board members yes
015remember donnelly i mean i'm sorry sorry i know we're the only two guys but we're we're a little different um this actually kind of goes back to the recruitment issue um [Music] if there's an applicant that meets all the basic criteria he has a teaching certificate has no criminal record as what i'm gonna say just no defect in terms of uh an employee is there any reason that person wouldn't be interviewed and be found to be eligible for the higher west and and what i'm asking kind of indirectly i i think from my years in the district and just observing that anyone that meets the basic qualifications doesn't have some some issue generally goes on the eligible to be hired west and is is out there to be interviewed that's my question may i dr
016bishop yes madam president may i ask um our chief human resource officer matt tifford to respond thank you dr bishop through the chair to remember holland the there is a screening function in the talent management area the generalist and staff do a minimum qualifications review and you're correct that if there's no um flag so to speak through that process either because of a failure to meet minimal qualifications or some other issue either related to prior employment of the school district or could be a criminal background check issue than it is forwarded for uh consideration by the hiring supervisor or principal and i think that's real close to what i'm asking the point that i'm sort of making to the public and to the board is there was a time when you could meet all the
017basic qualifications it was still rather difficult to get a job with the anchorage school district because there were thousands of applicants and people were screened looking for experience looking for unusual talents looking for something above the minimum that made them fit um and and this is from me looking from the outside so my picture may not be totally accurate it changed around the year 2000 um to where the eligible be hired was evaporated uh to a much shorter list than what had been on it and the applicant backlog evaporated and dissolved i i think of it a lot in terms when we talk about wanting to broaden the diversity of our workforce i i think we should but i think i think we're going to struggle to find people period and it makes me wonder
018what we do to attract [Music] people that fit the way we want them to fit to achieve what we're trying to do a recent article in the anchorage daily news talked about a really high percentage of people coming out of the philippines to fill positions in rural alaska and i'm assuming that the rural districts are doing that because of the lack of u.s citizens that are applying for those jobs and not anything wrong with people from the philippines at all but it just seems like a u.s citizen living in the u.s has a natural advantage in obtaining a job like that over someone from another country that's got immigration issues and certainly raises a flag about how long they might stay if they have family back in another country etc etc i i think it
019just speaks to the challenge we face and the challenge comes from funding and from being able to make the job [Music] match the profession in terms of this desirability so i appreciate it thank you there wasn't a request in that just a comment is that correct what was your request [Music] okay all right thank you [Music] okay see no more questions on our rfi since uh list we are ready to proceed to item c is which is our um equity audit thanks bishop thank you madam president this request has been uh on the work session for quite some time since last fall and we've had other uh issues that were pressing that the board wanted to discuss so i'm happy to say that we have uh the report completed uh shared internally and uh now
020we have uh the team of folks coming up uh led by senior director sonia hunt and sonya if you could introduce folks that will be presenting with you as they come up and i'm going to turn this over to sonia in response as you know the board passed i believe last fall so it was 2021 uh the um anti-racism and equity policies might have been the spring of 2020. so okay so um april just last year of 2022 so 2021 of spring okay boy just covered years fly by so last spring a year ago uh this spring uh anti-racism and equity policies so we have been working uh with uh those new policies in addition to prior to that time the board finalized and re-finalized its goals remember the goals were written in 2019 early
0212020 and the pandemic hit and they were reaffirmed then in the fall of 2020 uh fully adopted then when this board came aboard in the summer of 2021 and so we've had uh these constructs before us and prior to this time we shared work that we did with hanover and creating a dashboard mike fleckenstein and his team provided the data to be able to inform how we wanted the dashboard to look and share so that resides on our departmental website but now there was a second part of that audit and sonya and her team are going to share pieces of it so thank you turn it over to you sonia thank you so much dr bishop to the president to members of the board my name is sonia hunt and i serve as the senior
022director for the office of equity and compliance with me i have my colleague dante powell i'm an equity and compliance specialist i'm for the district and also i have my colleagues dr jennifer knutson um dr kirsten johnson schumpler and dan daniel barker um so i wanted to get us started in grounding us and who what work does the what buckets of work does the office of equity and compliance cover and as it relates to student impact and outcomes we are the convener of equity for the minority leadership program that seeks to attract and retain staff of color particularly for the aea the anchorage education association members to be able to gain leadership soft and hard skills that they need to be able to stay in their current jobs and lead in other ways that program
023is in partnership with uaa and is worth two credits we are also the convener of academic equity initiatives like and you'll hear more about the equal opportunity schools which is our ap equity to increase the number of historically excluded students um that are in ap courses and on that tract also we are the convener of the cultural competency training initiatives um and uh to include for example our equity training professional development worth one credit with the university of alaska at anchorage we also manage our equal employment opportunity work which really seek to protect um and to ensure the rights of our adults that work with us every day uh through things like the american with disabilities act title nine education amendments for children for students as well and our title seven civil rights act just
024to name a few we also manage interpreter services to ensure that community-facing uh uh events um can include uh interpretation services to include our deaf community and foreign language around language we also manage volunteer services that of course ensure the safety and protections of students in our building in terms of screening our volunteers and making sure that they should be around children and so our theory of action around this work really when we talk about the equity audit is if we identify and address issues impacting student experience then the disparity in achievement and experience will close over time and along with that we are certainly grateful for the adoptions of the anti-racism and instructional equity policies that passed on april 20th 2021 [Music] in terms of our audit and alignment the equity audit was based
025on several objectives of course at the core of it was asd's mission of educating all students for success in life we also wanted to ensure the equity ensuring equity uh ensuring of equity in student access and opportunities identifying and eliminating barriers that prevent full participation for all student groups and certainly for a comparison of student experience within the anchorage school district [Music] and i can pause at any time okay um in terms of stakeholder engagement we wanted to make sure that we really reached a cross-section of our stakeholders so internal and external stakeholders were engaged in this process and it included the anchorage education association members which again include our teachers counselors nurses to name a few our cabinet our community to include parents and grassroots organizations principals and of course our students student voice
026was key in this process and so the process of identification um really was three i don't want to call them three projects within one initiative if you will and so it's the equity data analysis uh scoreboard scorecard and dashboard which i'll show you how you can visit it um it was presented last year but certainly i can show you how to get to it on our website so that it's accessible to everyone and so uh that was the part a part b was the actual equity audit which was a mixed method approach so we wanted to make sure that a review of quantitative data occurred as well as the stories of our stakeholders to fill in lines basically um or the story behind the numbers that we're seeing um and you'll see later on in
027the presentation how it really looks similar in the third part of it is the district equity planning and communication infographic infographic so if you've seen and this is just a printed copy of the um [Music] i'm sorry i'm a visual learner and i assume other people are at times as well so i got mine bonded and i have a few more copies if anybody would like um on the last page you will see something that is meant to serve as a one-pager really well two page or one pager right um but it kind of like succinctly uh gives an overview of the initiatives that have gone on thus far and provides some more information on the back without which i'll get to later on in the presentation and so um that of course includes our
028equity guiding questions that our schools and programs use to further this work as well as tips for extending conversations about this work uh for communities and families and students older and younger so our equity dashboard if you visit departments on the asd website and you go to the office of equity and compliance and you look at the left hand panel you'll see equity dashboard and then you can click launch the dashboard and this is the page that you will see and the equity and what you'll see is a picture of our outcomes and you can feel free and it's over a process of six years so it's 2014 15 all the way to and you can peruse by school as shared before last year um in school year and grade level and it really covers
029three broad areas academics discipline and school programming and what you see on this slide are something all too familiar right we've been working on goals and guardrails um with fidelity from reading proficiency to math proficiency college career and life ready and many of our guard rails are for guard rails and what our audit showed the quantitative recommendations uh based on the quantitative data done by hanover recommends three things to target new teacher recruitment towards minority teachers to investigate further into the performance gaps that exist between students of different racial and ethnic groups evaluate access to advanced courses and identification process for gifted education and so again we wanted to be able to hear from our stakeholders and so panels were engaged we had focus groups sorry we had um a sort of a survey that
030went out to aea members to be able to get that feedback and what it found was something very similar than what the quantitative review found so the bond groups recommendations were improved access to school choice and programs increase educator diversity and capacity improve parity and education funding and maintain our equity conversations and so the next slide shows what i showed you here it's meant to be kind of like you know you uh sometimes at the end of a workbook you have that perforated page and so it's meant to be a one-pager easily read um by community members by parents a lot of infographics used to be able to tell the story of what we've been doing around equity um and so the first page is what you see and this is the back the following
031page is the back of what you see and what you really see again are the equity goals and guard rails um or our goals and guard rails you see district actions um and you see the policies that have gone forward and um continuing on the back you see the four guiding questions that are used in our schools and our programs and you see um tips for two-way communications with our parents and our families as well as conversation starters for our younger and older students and to just go a little further and give you some examples of our action steps that we've been doing so for example with the ignite program dr knutson and uh doctors knutson and uh johnson schrempfield can share more about that with the ignite program for example um that the utilization
032of assessment scores are are are placed in uh some sort of a priority um before even teacher recommendation to be able to kind of mix the bag on how we receive um referrals for our students to be able to increase their opportunity and access i can actually share that one sure with the universal use of math um in 2016 we had very few classrooms um and programs using it and now we have the map growth assessment three through nine and uh prior to really having a district-wide assessment the students who were assessed for gifted were a teacher recommendation and um it might occur to you that there's sometimes students behaviors um primarily our little boys weren't getting as many recommendations because sometimes the behavior affected whether and there were literally um things written about whether
033they deserve it or not and so we flipped that instead of getting a recommendation and then testing we now have a very fair way that all kids are given an assessment and we're looking at it going and scanning oh these are the top students now let's follow through with the recommendation procedure to continue and so uh that was just one example that was pretty significant in our district that kind of changed and flipped the um the services in the manner in which we look for gifted and talented before recommendation it's actually their ability which is um by our universal screener and universal assessment uh has worked and uh students who have had poor behavior you know sometimes you can ask is that the chicken or the egg are they having a poor behavior because their
034needs aren't met academically and so now we're capturing these especially young little boys into the program i had a quick follow-up question on that process um how does that work for english language learners who may not score very highly because of a language barrier but maybe ready to engage more deeply in the way that ignite is designed to do we can ask dr knutson to come forward we do take that into consideration and actually um dante if you just want to pull up an extra chair that's fine um so we are looking at different groups of students and making sure we have equitable access to the program so one of the things that we do is we look at local norms at some of our schools we're comparing kids performance compared to other kids performance
035that might be have similar language proficiency and that type of thing the other thing that we're doing is when we do the um screen are now at second grade so we have the map screener for achievement but we're also this year screening kids with ability at second grade level and what that does is it's shifting the model like dr bishop said for them to find us for us to find them and so by doing that it's a non-verbal piece so that we can capture a lot of our kids that might have english as a second language that might help with that so those are a couple of the things that we're doing to address different needs of kids [Music] yeah and um [Music] you know a lot of the research is about do we own
036equity work are we lowering our standards to get more kids involved and the answer is no what we're doing is finding different ways to find the genius in kids to make sure that we're not missing anyone and doing the assessment first uh was as was a very critical piece um because it was value neutral it's like what do the kids have and what do they own and uh we're finding that then following through with those recommendations because we've all been teachers where um someone maybe by behavior never demonstrated the smarts and you never really as a teacher got to see it because of the behavior so then you wouldn't recommend um so but now we we can uh are testing for the genius um in all our kids great [Music] any other questions yes though
037no i remember well mostly a comment i i had the privilege of touring our gifted and learning um this this year and got to learn about how they're identifying students and the work being done and how it's changed and i really appreciate the work that they're doing and how it has changed and we're working to identify those students um rather than been waiting for teachers to recommend them for for so many reasons um i i do believe that this is helping with identifying students across the district um there is one other comment i did receive a comment from a parent um who's very involved in the community and her daughter was identified as a gifted learning student and her daughter actually came home crying and said i can't believe they think i'm smart because she
038also has an iep so i just wanted to provide that feedback that that was i mean that was a tear-jerker for me but if you could also comment about um how students are identified across the district including title one schools yeah well and if i can also address that um addressing the under representation in our gifted program was really the result of this our barbara guardrails and it really shifted the conversation for how do we provide ignite services or how do we change them to how do we address it the under representation and how do our services align to that how does our identification align to that as well so what happens is students we look at map data so we have an assessment team that reviews all of our map data and we look
039at students who who fall within a certain range and i don't have the exact cut scores with me you know we could always provide that for you as a follow-up and board connect but we look for kids to meet those criteria by adding on the screener this year at second grade we're also looking at are there kids that we are missing that might be underachievers but have high ability scores so by looking at these two things it's helping us make sure we're catching all kids and we're actually working with a researcher from wisconsin who looks at giftedness across the country in equity within giftedness and one of the things they're evaluating to what dr bishop said is does that provide us any more information that we don't already get from map so we're really looking
040at it scientifically as well as qualitatively in kids experiences then what we have is it's kind of it's called a multiple pathways approach to qualification for ignite specifically so where kids get points for different aspects so for the ability test for the map testing teacher recommendation is last on the list but you get points for that so a student can um qualify in any combination of those points and what that does is it allows our students strengths to get points as instead of ruling them out with one cut score and you're you're out of the competition for getting into ignite for example so we're looking at multiple aspects of that starting with our data and student performance and then for our title one schools it's looking at those normative data for those schools and comparing
041kids to that instead of a national norm remember lessons thank you um could you i feel like i should know the answer to this does ignite exist at all of our schools yes all at every single school kids have access to ignite there are a few schools where we bus kids to a different location just because of size and stuff like that of the program but every every school has access to ignite program okay let's continue with your report and then we'll come back to more questions thank you to the president to members of the board dr bishop and so um our um next item i invite dr johnson schumfler up to talk a little bit about our equal opportunity schools program which is again a cross-collaboration between departments and excellent work is happening um
042just kind of mention some stuff with our eos sure all eight of our large high schools our comprehensive high schools are participating now in equal opportunity schools and as you've heard previously equal opportunity schools is a partner of ours and it targets inviting many of our underrepresented populations to our advanced placement and ib coursework so what we do is uh work with our schools to get more of our our underrepresented students into advanced placement and ivs courses um so four of our schools started last year um and then four the other four uh high schools that did not participate last year now participating this year um so the first year um schools go through a process of surveying students and faculty and parents um and doing a bunch of outreach work and then the second
043year they work with students to actually enroll them in those courses and support them in their coursework um and continue their mission so um we're seeing a lot of good results out of that work and and i'm just really excited about what we're seeing there yeah and um some of that we saw some presentations and again a lot of this is um they scan gpas of students they scan test scores of students in the high schools then and say okay these that are all scanned they're in the top uh you know achievement levels why are some kids choosing ap and why not and so then that's when they dig down into those pieces and as you know um one of the things we're finding is that cultural capital if you had a parent that was
044most likely an ap they had a mind's eye to ask for it when we have kids who are absolutely their achievement their ability their making a's you know have the competency to enter ap but are not those are this equal opportunity schools basically gives you these are the students that are not represented and um they are from all different boys girls all different ethnicities and races it's just it's identifying the undertapped students in schools that have the competency but are not enrolled and so then we dig deep and find out their stories then we uh share that information and then we move it down to middle school and now middle school's saying wait a minute we need to move it down to elementary school to ensure that um these kids all kids have again that
045third grade proficiency and math and reading to have these choices but it's again using data to find information that we're we didn't know because no one asked no one sat with a counselor and knew that my child should be an ap yeah it's creating great conversations at our high schools on the right conversations in my opinion of how we approach kids and invite them to the table and challenge them and create opportunities for them so i'm really excited about just some of the um conversations that are happening that are in our counseling offices with families and kids and and getting them um to challenge themselves and make them more self-confident so um next up is our professional development that continues that's across departments um and while the office of equity inc in in compliance is
046a convener certainly it's happening it's baked into all the work across the district in terms of our next steps we'll continue to engage our stakeholder groups continuing strategic planning and building partnerships and collaborations and as a reminder this work is all driven by educating all students for success in life thank you so much for your time thank you very much so now we can um we will open up for questions from the board remember donnelly thank you my president um director back in fall of 2020 uh when you reported to the board uh you mentioned that your your plan was to utilize authors such as imprint candy in developing these policies i was wondering which of these policies or if any of them were influenced by mr kennedy's works to the president to members of
047the board the policies were adopted by the board uh as i uh it's the anti-racism uh the equity policy there were policies that were managed by the board that's technically accurate i guess what i'm looking at is this this development from your office this it's i guess based on something from hanover but um in particular i'm cons i'm interested in the development of the equity conversations for parents and families and the equity conversations for students were those influenced at all by the works of uh mr kennedy not no it they weren't to the president members of the board they were not this was in collaboration with um hanover who works with districts across the country um in ensuring that all children students experience look similarly and this is just a way of extending the conversation
048well i guess i would speak for them probably hundreds and hundreds of parents that have expressed a concern with me regarding what could be included in such equity conversations for students i mean it's quite subjective what fair means and why it's important to be fair and what things you can do to make sure things are fair depends very highly on what is being conveyed as fairness and i think parents out there that have talked to me have legitimate concern that several years ago the district sponsored um basically courses in critical race theory for something like 130 of our employees and you know in the military they have a saying you know you fight the way you train and if we trained people to think that way or you know did that kind of educational for
049them and then now they're going to be charged with asking questions such as what does it mean to be fair i mean i think parents would have a legitimate fear that some of that training might be injected into that process what kind of assurances can you offer to parents that it won't be i see yeah so i would just say that we've demonstrated and we know how you feel about that you've shared it with us and we continue to share back the same thing but i would say what does it mean to be fair the change in how we look at assessment scores before we and this is for white kids every kid this is and primarily the change was in little active boys who sometimes got in trouble in class because they were so
050active but whether they're black or brown or whatever but the fairness issue was that that one change in how we did business was about fairness and so i'm not against fairness quality issue i mean that they were treated equally based on merit and based on the objective standards i i agree with that yeah and so those are the subjective analysis of what is fair well the discussion is all going to be subjective because we're all coming from different places and then we come to an agreement of how do we make our district better and again from day one it has been with the lottery you know just with that it hasn't been to limit the lottery it is like mathematically if you want to get more kids in lottery programs you better darn well have
051more kids in the lottery of color so how do you do that then and what are the barriers not that we're trying to change an outcome but that we're trying to not make the system be the determinant of the outcome that everybody has an equal opportunity that's what we're after because some really don't because of whether it was transportation or i didn't know i didn't have the information because i don't actually as a parent read english so then my kid lost out because i didn't send in a notice right away so we're trying to really think of how do we look at these kids and find who they are and that's what this is about and again i just reiterate that we were presented with an anti-racism and equity policy and and we're trying to
052build capacity in our system for it great thank you dr bishop uh mr jacob fessier mike son yeah thank you madam president just a follow-up i guess to really clarify his words matter um it was just stated that the district basically had trainings i think was the operative word on critical race theory can i confirm that's accurate have we have we required staff to participate in training on critical race theory to the president to members of no the answer to that is no thank you uh madam president can i ask a different question on a different topic sure i never intended to say or said that it was mandatory but it was offered for free to to our instructors or staff that wish to take the course and it was sponsored by our university our
053school district with the unit remember donnelly you are you you are really misrepresenting a whole process because that is not entirely true what happened is that through our normal professional development avenue which is a partnership with uaa staff were given the opportunity if they chose to have to take a certain course or have a book study and professionally i think our sta i would i would i would stand today and forever for staff to be able to have that choice it was not a required it had nothing you have attached the critical race theory to the books that were on the website and to the classes that that staff were taking that is you that it has nothing to do with this board and that misrepresentation really is unfair and madam president if i may
054[Music] i don't think i've misrepresented it at all in fact when i was when i in first investigated this i was told don't blame the university for this those are the exact words that were given to me this was something we did and we asked the university to put on it is still for adults who have a choice we are not in the business of providing of requiring adults to take uh uh to to dictate what they take and what they don't well but you are implying you are implying things that were really not true i didn't imply that at all and i didn't misrepresent it at all i never said this was a mandatory and i was clearly told it didn't come from the university it came from this district okay then we will
055again if you want to have a debate or whether the source materials that were used in those courses or critical race theory or not i'm happy to do that because they clearly are critical race theories theorists that is your application to the book mr candy's not a critical race theorist mr candy is an author he's a critical race there is not a critical race theorist oh no come on let's let's just remember jacob thank you madam president that's a follow-up question regarding the presentation first i want to thank the effort the staff put forth in facilitating the development of the findings and i'm interested in digging in a bit deeper i guess um would it be is the data available that we could request maybe on board connect to see specific breakdowns for how different
056stakeholder groups what their specific feedback was or is there just these general kind of takeaways that our the board could receive at this point to the presidents and members of the board at this point their general general takeaways um what i can do is uh follow up in board connect with any specific questions and to engage the auditors in the process [Music] so thank you madam president so the intent is really just i'm interested to see if there was different different perspectives from the community versus staff versus students and i think that's data would be especially valuable and so i would appreciate that thank you [Music] member lessons oh before you i need to just uh for the record member higgins has joined us online um thank you for the presentation i've already used the
057dashboard multiple times it assists me in understanding our progress monitoring reports because i can dive more deeply into things i've had some great conversations with community members based on what i found and i appreciate um the sort of the time the boundaries that understanding the data exists over that six year span um a question would be will it be updated as we move forward or is that data set going to be kind of static what what do you envision to the president and members of the board we anticipate moving forward and updating it regularly every year um and that is dependent on funding um to be able to ensure that that happens thank you i had one quick comment um i did want to say that as a parent of young children who are siblings
058children have a very astute sense of fairness and what is and isn't fair if you talk to anybody under the age of 10 they they know when a cookie is cut in half or not so so i do think that these are age appropriate and i support the sun the framing that um this is if you look at the first source how can two-way communication can boost parent engagement and i think that i hope that we all know that parent engagement is um it's a secret sauce to educational success so if we can engage our parents and hook them into supporting their students where they're at um even if it's let's talk about how we divide this cookie guys is it fair if we cut it this way who will be excluded i mean those
059are you can work on fractions too um so anyways i just i see that as a parent of young children thank you so much [Music] so i i just have a a question about the student voice could you explain the process uh how did you connect with students and just give us a little overview of what they had to say sure i think uh to the president remember this award um we were able to engage our um student government government governance uh for um asd in this process so it's the group that regularly meets a few times sab yes yes and so they were engaged in the process so that was the student body okay so in the recommendations from hanover the one that said investigate further into performance gaps do we have a plan
060to do that yet or is that still in the in the for all of the recommendations uh where are we on yes those um i get the target these are all part of our either our goals our guardrails um whether it's proficiency in reading and math or um teaching you know uh getting getting underrepresented groups in our charter schools have we given any any have we done any work on how we're going to get kids uh in into the charter schools that might be for you yeah thank you madam president um really the all of the guard rails are in process now um to present a plan and build capacity and most of them are gathering this year baseline data to move forward um for that particular one whereas we can look and see kind
061of the kids when they are in the school the guardrail is to increase students entering the lottery and so we we don't have information on their demographics so we had to actually rewrite the program and then it has people have to answer that if they want but it is going to be a suspect why would you ask me that because we didn't ask it before so we're trying to really uh share it you know it is for this that there still is you know um the lottery is audited it is not you know by demographic reserve so we're moving into this very cautiously and really thinking about the implications of how we gather data we certainly don't want to keep anyone from entering at the same time we want to kind of rise the tide
062for all ships so uh but each one of these whether it is looking at the gaps i mean really the monitoring is part of that and the data conversations at schools individual schools literally have conversations about who are our kids being successful and who are not and then they engage with the teachers about why like what do you think and where whom are the kids and sometimes it's related back to um you know what they know a course that they took um teachers uh having the basic skills you know different things so it it is um you know the web of the information and what can be done is pretty i mean it's deep so great okay uh any other board member questions or comments [Music] see none i thank you for your report and
063um can i get a copy of the powerpoint yes um we'll make a copy of that and it's posted online for community as well but we'll get you a hard copies okay if it's posted i can get it thank you okay all right great job thank you good work appreciate your time thank you sonya and team so that brings us that we're now at the end of our work session agenda need a motion to adjourn into executive session on president move we adjourn in the special session for the purposes of uncontested student hearings negotiations and contracts executive session yes okay i'm not sure what i said but yes special that is kind of special huh all right wait a second two seconds okay all right we