Public Work Session August 30th, 2022

001[Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] good evening everyone uh welcome to this evening's public works session of the school city of hammond can we all please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay uh roll call trustee murphy present trustee blake king we're here trustee candelaria president um trustee uh zollo zellner will be joining us virtually tonight we're having a little bit of trouble with his connection so as soon as we are officially uh connected we'll we'll add him into the minutes for tonight's meeting dr ship is going to be helping us navigate this evening but

002before i turn things over to her i would just like to thank all of you for being with us tonight and helping us get a better understanding of the day-to-day operations and things from your respective departments and divisions i would also like to thank all of those that are joining us online dr shipp good evening board of trustees parents uh teachers and community members tonight we have three presentations our first presentation will be from the director of food and nutrition christine clarahan so can you please step to the podium good evening assistant superintendent dr schiff vice president miller school board trustees thank you for having me here tonight i'm going to give just a real general overview of where we are as a department from last year the impacts of covet on us and what

003to expect in the upcoming school year get ready for some fun puns so one thing i always like to come back to is just remembering that we're over a hundred staff members so there's a lot of the hammond community in our department and one thing we like to do is just to keep everyone's face on the forefront so this is a mosaic i created last school lunch hero day and it's actually made up of all of our staff photos so it has like different staff photos and then in the red is like some of our event photos so we like to make sure that we're always bringing it back to the people and our community this is our administration team for those who don't know left to right rocio alcantar lynn sterl myself thess verda

004and kathy fisher we work it's an amazing group of women in the department who take care of so many different loopholes and regulations and everything and we're very very lucky to have such a dynamic administrative team how we are funded so we for those who don't know we're a federally funded program meaning we don't take anything out of the general fund um or the operational education funds normally we actually contribute back to it through indirect costs so we receive reimbursement for meals served that when we'll show you later on was a big issue for us with kovid because we're considered a federal entitlement program meaning we're only reimbursed based on meals served we don't get like a certain amount of money at the beginning of the year and you budget it that way we are

005reimbursed monthly based on what we did the previous month so when covet hit and we dipped um in our participation due to the schools being closed that was very difficult and scary for us i also do the best i can to get as many grants as possible that helps float along a lot of different initiatives and then there's like a la carte and adult meal sales so again that is how we are funded as a department so i know some people get upset sometimes or write comments online if they see you know why do we feed everyone in the summer or those things it's because we're federally funded we are not funded at the local level so there's a lot of different reporting agencies we report mainly to the usda that's the united states department

006of agriculture so it's a federal program administered at a state level it does get confusing when each state has such different ways of interpreting the rules but that's for i think everything education wise so we just roll with all the punches so the indiana department of education is who administers the child nutrition programs of the usda in indiana we're also overseen by the state board of accounts and then the lake county health department some highlights from last year franklin elementary won for the entire state of indiana the fresh fruit and vegetable program school of the year it's our second time winning that honor open and has won it before so that's really exciting for us and it's a great way to show off what we're doing to the entire state so this is then when

007we had the celebration with on the left is suzanne hartman from the indiana department of education we got aprons certificates and 250 dollars to spend on educational materials for franklin directly relating to fruits and vegetables lynn sterl the assistant director does an incredible job sourcing even during the pandemic different fruits and vegetables we had last year interns from ball state university come and it was very cute to go into even first grade classrooms and they can identify dragon fruit by looking at it and not many people can do that so the program is really doing what it's supposed to do here this was a huge highlight for us we've got our eggs bacon turkey bacon and waffle but on the right is dr vista fletcher she's the usda's midwest regional office chief administrator and she

008visited us last march for national school breakfast week and that was really really exciting for us to have such a top-level person they oversee like seven or eight states um come to see us specifically for breakfast week tomorrow on that same front we have an absolutely incredible honor um cindy long is the top administrator for the usda's food and nutrition service in washington dc and they reached out to us and they're coming to albanian elementary tomorrow to see how we run our program there so i can't emphasize what a big deal that is uh we get to spend you know about 30 minutes discussing different regulation issues that we see you know the good the bad and the ugly so we are very excited that they reached out to us specifically so that was a

009that was a big deal and i think a big kudos to the program another big thing we were able to get all 12 of our elementary school buildings all have the same type of bench seating now that was really important especially during the pandemic so what these tables do they can be pushed together to look like a traditional cafeteria table they can be turned into bench seats so that it has like a back in the front they can have kids all facing the same direction so um that's it was a very exciting thing for us to be able to get those for all 12 of our elementary school buildings scott middle school also has them um from um before i got here so before five and a half years ago and we have a couple

010of circle tables at each school on the right is o'bannon elementary on the left is morton elementary um and there's at least two and one with one of the bench seats missing to allow for any type of wheelchair or other access that's needed to sit there they're very mobile so they're good for any type of assemblies that could be needed so they're very easy to clean that was a big thing for us we have these they're called candy handles but now we can wipe things with microfiber cloths so we know that all of the bench and tops are very clean now much better than when we did it all by hand so we're very excited about that and they bring a bright pop of color too which is um really it's a happy place to

011be and you can also see why with o'bannon on the right it is a show stopper of a cafeteria you can see we tried to sell the usda i'm coming to a different school but they they want o'bannon and and i think it's easy to see why there all right another big victory for us was buttercup so we named our van buttercup after um buttercup on the right that's the american dairy association of indiana's mascot we were the receivers of two years ago i want to say now it just took a while for the money to get here but the fuel up to play 60s hometown grant recipient for the state so we got an extra ten thousand dollars and we were able to get this wrap on buttercup she's so fun when you see

012her out in the community um she has wi-fi we were able to have her out at the back to school celebration parents were able to fill out textbook assistance applications running on her wi-fi she's refrigerated and freezer compatible which is great because our freezers are breaking like crazy right now so she has been in use um and you can see here so we um we're honored so it was fuel up to play 60 is a national football league initiative um with the dairy association so we got to go down to the field i know mrs reese's husband he had to like lead the flag out onto the field like that was very cool and we got honored there we got to bring our staff members and they covered the cost of all of that but

013you can see here so like buttercup is out in the community and getting the food to the people so we're very very proud of that and grateful to the teamsters who are helping us drive and load and unload her and to the staff who worked all summer you know bringing her all over the community with health inspections one thing that any time an auditor comes they always comment on how clean the kitchens are we the only violations we ever get are usually it's like a water temperature issue but there's not much we can do about that if they get there at the beginning of the day and a bathroom sink hasn't been running you know sometimes it takes a minute for the hot water to kick in so we get two per school year for

014every operating kitchen there's an additional health inspection in the summer if it's in operation but again we have an incredible track record of excellence you know i worked in the juvenile justice system adult um justice system i worked with airmark and sodexo our kitchens like nothing compares to how clean the kitchens are here and that's something we are very very very proud of i'm a big believer in training i think it um one i think it's a fun perk especially to train on the road but i think that networking that you get the different ideas that are shared along with the school nutrition landscape is forever changing to keep up with it you you have to be on the forefront of it so we had quite a few members go in june to plainfield indiana

015for the isna school nutrition industry summit so that was really exciting spent the night there it was a two day training we had four people including myself go to orlando florida for the national school nutrition association's annual conference um on the left those are two of our cooks brenda and marty um and in the middle is chef jet tila um so he is for those of you who have ever watched chopped he's been a guest strapped on chopped he's been on iron chef america um so it was really exciting to you know get to meet the different celebrities and see like the asian infusion we bring that to some of our secondary meals especially i had the honor on the picture on the right shannon who's in the black dress right next to me we

016gave a four-hour pre-conference session for new directors that went over very very well i love learning and i love helping other people learn that's the great thing about working in school nutrition is that there's no competition you help each other you are all in it together you're not competing with each other we don't lose you know business to someone if you share an idea so um really love that we did a lot of trainings at home as well so this is from august 8th to the 12th we had the ido sponsored culinary skills for a plus school meals training that was held here um chef kathy powers who is absolutely incredible came for the week she brought in different chefs but um because we host it it's for the entire region all you know the

017public schools in the region and private um but we are able to have a 10 of our staff members attend in the top right that's our new kitchen manager for hammond central high school eric watson we're so excited to have him on board he had big shoes to replace when annie dillon retired so that was you learn knife skills me's in place you learned so many different skills there um and we're really excited to have so many staff go through that week-long training we've had christy white who owns what for lunch coming through all last school year she'll continue this school year teaching us really how to use the equipment it is very technologically advanced equipment with fan speeds the combi oven means it's combining steam and the convection heat it is not simple um

018home ovens that we're using and she teaches us how to optimize um you know even like plating up things pre-prepping she saved us a lot of time and shown us how to do um more with less time so we're we've been incredibly thrilled to have her we actually heard back from a lot of um staff who had started taking um advantage of the school meals because they're very cheap compared to going out especially right now and the meals again they are delicious and that is on the top right that's real cauliflower so it does come in different colors and if you blanch it it really helps bring out the color so she teaches us us those things as well uh the keep kids fedex that is what helped us turn our summer around it was

019a very tough start to us for the summer when we had to do what's called congregate meal service meaning the kids have to eat their meals in front of us they can't take any of it home they have to throw it out it's really tough to follow those regulations especially after two years of grab-and-go meal service and one thing just a huge kudos to all the team who worked and lynn sterl who's pictured on the right here we anticipated kids keeping kids fed which meant we were going to be able to go back to non-congregate meal service and we prepped in advance and we were ready to go the very day it was enacted in indiana not only that but we were able to get a special waiver from the state that allowed us to

020serve three days of food at once because everyone else unless you applied and had like a history of following regulations you could only do two days of meal service at once for the entire summer we served 51 283 breakfast meals 57 812 lunch meals but after the keep kids fed act was passed we went from serving a daily average of 745 breakfast to 1893 breakfast it just kind of goes to show the power of the grab and go that's a 154 percent increase lunch went from 923 to 2016. which is 123 increase and that gave us the funds too that we need to have successful school years moving forward all right child nutrition reauthorization i know this all it's a lot to take in but we are highly regulated by the government very highly regulated

021child nutrition reauthorization is something congress is supposed to do every five years and it hasn't been done since 2010 and that's when the healthy hunger free kids act was passed but on july 27th of this year the house committee on education and labor they passed the healthy meals healthy kids act by 27 to 20 votes so it will go to the house and the senate floors a couple of things that it does we are cep meaning we get to feed all of our students for free at no cost we get reimbursed 96 at the free rate 4 at the paid rate because of how the multiplier works and i'd be happy like to go over any of this in more detail i don't want to get too much in the weeds on it but if

022child if the healthy meals healthy kids act passes it's going to go from a 1.6 multiplier to 2.5 and that means that the communities can become more prosperous without us losing free meals for everybody because it's a double-edged sword you want your community to be um you know have plenty of money in each household and when that happens though you lose your free meal so it is that it's a it's a tough thing that way but if we got to go to the 2.5 multiplier we'd be fine for a very long time it adds 10 cents per lunch reimbursement it adds six cents of commodity funding to breakfast one thing that isn't a big deal for us but it's a big deal for other schools it would prohibit hiring debt collectors for unpaid meal debt

023and that is a terrifying thought um just because i don't know how the schools will handle that kind of a debt but luckily we don't have to worry about that for a while thank goodness we have a lot of community partners that i wanted to highlight we were able to work with the aquatic play center we were able to serve grab-and-go meals out of there this summer and that was awesome for us they let us even put our flyers in that um festival of the lakes kids 5k or 3k or whatever that was and that was really exciting um we partnered with franciscan alliance no kid hungary we have a very strong partnership with them even on the national level i've spoken to a couple um or spoken with like you know their board meetings

024so we have a good relationship with them american dairy association indiana the fuel up to play 60 purdue extension so we have a lot of community partnerships that help us do what we're able to do i wanted to show this off because one i'm very proud of it but two just to show you one of the things that we started and it's a little video if you're watching at home but this is the manager dashboard this is the the screen that comes up anytime our staff go online a lot of our staff they are used to working out in the kitchens and so whenever we drop new technology on them or say hey we need you to check your email hey we have to have all you do these things if the desktop changes like

025that's frustrating or icons change so ours never changes so it has everything they need for like personnel issues if they need to um go through some coaching with people or if our staff are getting at each other a little bit their staff complaint forms and it's all very easy for them to find right it's the first thing that they click on all of our allergy information the different diet menus what it means to have a dairy allergy versus lactose intolerance it's all there i do a weekly newsletter for our staff and all the archives are there because we put i put a lot of effort into that every sunday to make sure that our staff are communicated with and know what's going on um in the district here's an example of an old one and

026this is when dr ship when you first started so i had asked you some questions we let people know about you um this was so we always talk about birthdays we you know highlight staff in it but that's the thing that i'm pretty proud of with our department because again i want to make sure that they feel a valued part of the district and knowing things is part of how i think you feel valued it has all the different online learning resources there um here's our little vortex into uh not so positive stuff so um the supply chain continues to be brutal for us i'm sure um people at home and um you all up there notice sometimes there's empty shelves at the grocery store um the three issues we're running into the top three

027and this is nationwide we don't have enough quantity to order what we need to order the paper goods there's not enough quantities there or the manufacturing lines have been shut down or they're discontinuing items like we've been lucky stans is an incredible partner that's our prime vendor out of south bend indiana we've been luckier than most but it's tough when like we find out our juice fender like they're gone they they don't have the paper to make their cartons this year so then we have to find a whole new juice vendor um right now entrees are the hardest for us to find but lynn and our kitchen manager are doing an awesome job keeping up on that because um with all the allergies we have anytime a substitution comes through you have to make sure

028that you're not um like maybe something didn't have soy before but now it does so keeping up with all that it is it's um an intense day every single day um just some statistical information here from the different school years the last three school years you can see here the vacancies we've had at the start of the year the number of new hires and resignations um so i don't know if this is going to be online if not i can definitely email it to you all for the current school year and i love this these are some of our kids from turner park we had their permission to put that up there but that was one of our summer meal stops we did get we started the year 20 vacancies three start three let us

029know like the week right before school and that is brutal that it just hurts when that happens but so far for this school year since july we've done over 20 interviews three staff waiting on background checks to clear seven waiting on references to come back we've had two new hires actually start so far um so we're getting there and we sometimes take five steps forward and run four steps back but we we we're getting where we need to be and for anyone watching whatever camera it is you can apply online if you want to work for us we're great we'd love to have you substitute kitchen helpers kitchen helpers cooks if you go to our website sdhlunch.com there's links right there it's gonna be the first thing you see takes you right to the application

030portal all right couple other things so just to show you how brutal covid was for us these are the numbers from 1920 um we averaged right around 1.4 million lunches 895 breakfast and you can see the nosedive we took when kovit had it nearly uh broke us we started last school year one uh like i think two weeks before school we had 197 000 in our bank account and we should be well over a million so that was really scary for us um we did bounce back and you notice we have a lot more money with less meals and that is because uh the reimbursement rates have helped us out a lot um you can see here how the covered rates they jumped up and that's what saved us when we were serving so few

031meals compared to what we normally do when the schools were closed but i just want to point out that everyone's aware we're getting reimbursed 15 and a quarter cents less per meal this year compared to last year and that is because of the waivers expiring so that means with all the new inflation that has come the shipping charges we're getting reimbursed less now than we were at this time um last year so it's scary but our numbers are good so as long as we keep our numbers up we should be fine um but it's just something to be aware of um we talked about the summer meals some friendly reminder ears here's a porn um i think that's so peaceful uh is diet modification just reminders diet modification forms need to be turned in annually

032no medical signature is needed just a parent signature if it's just lactose intolerance all other diet modification forms need a licensed medical professional to sign off on them we may need depending on the severity of the diet one to two weeks to get all the items in but we work really closely with the family so you know we had a mom come in today we went through the menu week by week and figured everything out so um we really work to make it the best possible meals for the kids because we want them to feel included when they're in our cafeterias this is what the form looks like for those watching at home what's in red if you're a child you fill out all of part a it's the student information but that's all you

033have to fill out if your kids lactose intolerant no need to go to a doctor for that you would just check that they're lactose intolerant can they have lactose free milk or do they need soy milk and then you let us know can they eat cheese or yogurt so it's really simple to turn in um i feel like i've gone a while so but there's a difference between lactose intolerance and dairy allergies um dairy allergy means you can't have any of it in any form it attacks your immune system lactose intolerance gives you like gi upset more than anything else if you're lactose intolerant you can drink lactate milk which is real cow's milk with the lactose which is the milk sugar removed if you have a milk allergy you cannot have lactate you have

034to have something else a reminder on outside food this is for non-sold food that's brought into the building for multiple students so this does not impact what kids bring in for their breakfast or their lunch um this is if it's brought in for multiple students whether it's a classroom party or whatever it is all under board policy 8 500. we do get questions on it so it has to be commercially made nothing homemade it has to have a nutrition facts label and an ingredient list and this is the like the bare minimum but we did this with nursing because of food allergies we need to know what is in that product and for our diabetics we need to know how many carbohydrates are in it you get into some food safety um wild issues when

035you let people bring things in from home if they follow a recipe like you're not usually able to find out exactly how many carbs are in something so it's for the student safety and protection adult and a la carte pricing this is going to come to you all for approval at the next school board meeting and we'll go into the why but you have to serve your food for adults or a la carte it has to cost more than what the reimbursement is um and so that is why we charge what we charge um we don't force people to get a full meal like if you just want a banana or whatever you don't have to pay for the full breakfast or lunch you can just pay um for the individual items and if you

036are wondering at home how do i put money on an account if i don't want to have cash the titan family portal is how you would get to that it's available on the app store and google play at titan family connect and that's how you can set up an account put funds in it that's where you can also apply for textbook assistance um that's all done through that one portal if you want to put if you got five kids and you want to you know switch money from susie to james you can do that in there too if one's using money and one's not so there's a lot of things that you can do if you need help anyone watching from home you can come in and we will help walk you through it in

037person too if you have any issues save the date national school lunch week is coming up october 10th through the 14th breakfast week is march 6th through the 10th school lunch here date is may 5th um we would it's going to be a super fun theme for lunch it's peace love and school lunch we'd love it if you all could come and you know possibly be guest servers for us so we'll send you invitations for when that gets closer but we should have a lot of fun with that theme breakfast is dig into school breakfast super cute for the elementary not sure if secondary wants to talk about construction anymore after we're done with all this stuff but hey we're gonna figure out a way to make it fun for them to in march we

038do have our website you can link to it from the sch main home page the diet modification forms are there all the pricing our menus contact information photos and videos so that's always available online one thing i'm really proud of that i just wanted to highlight all um 16 of our kitchen managers and our two assistant kitchen managers are going through the dare to lead training it's being led by a clarity clinic um staff member who's gone through renee brown training if you don't know brene brown look her up she's absolutely incredible in terms of leadership and vulnerability um integrity so our kitchen managers are meeting for 10 weeks an hour a week in groups of four and five and even after these first two weeks they said it's been really helpful so we're excited

039managing people is the hardest part of any job there there's nothing like it there's no class that could possibly prepare you for what people can throw your way and so i really wanted to make sure that we are giving our leaders the training that they need to be the best that they can be and i think it will trickle down to make the whole kitchen happier so we're really excited about that um wrapping up our goals for 22 23 we um share carts and school pantries getting that program fully functional in all the buildings you all might remember before the pandemic hit you approved to have those share cards and the in-school pantries we worked with purdue extension on it we got the health department approval the lawyer's approval and now we're ready to go

040again so on the next slide i can show you what those carts look like um we want to have the eggers cafeteria seating area completely remodeled we want to have burn takes both the serving line and that seating area redone they need a lot a lot more seating space than what they have it's a real weird shape in there we would like to get our coffee cards out in the high schools and we'd love to be fully staffed being fully staffed kind of goes into all of that this is what the share cards look like and they utilize the pans that we purchase that can keep food cold up to eight hours so if a kid takes like a milk or a juice or a cold item we can still then turn around and give

041that to the families in need so we worked with dr um rushing on that so we'll be working with lydia on taking that out but we're really excited because there are some of our kids who really need food on the weekends or you know weeknights and everything and this is one way we don't have to waste so much food it's hard to see the waste we have a silent auction coming up september 21st at clark middle high school tons of items preview website going up soon um but that's from a lot of the consolidation stuff we weren't able to use so um more coming your way soon on that um not to toot my own horn too much but i just wanted to let you guys know the stuff that i'm involved in because i

042do think it helps our program be a better program i'm the current indiana school nutrition association president-elect i'm in charge of our conference this year so i got to choose the theme which is a seat at the table i'll be installed as the president of the organization november 10th in indianapolis i'm part of the and it was invite only so it's very exciting for me to be included in such an exclusive group of some of the top school nutrition leaders the international food manufacturers association leadership council for elementary and secondary education um the idea sharing and networking that goes on in that group is is unparalleled so it's been very cool too it's extra work but i do think it is worth it because those ideas come back to the program and we're able to

043utilize that stuff here um i'm helping teach some um i as both like the nutrition seminar will be one of the speakers there so it really helps us stay on the front edge when um you know you're the one that's out there um really working and trying to keep up with all the changes that's it that was a lot but that's it so any questions on anything madam president um trustee murphy that was so comprehensive i actually have none thank you and congratulations on being the president-elect thank you thank you it's a it's an awesome organization it does a lot of great stuff mr mr president uh trustee blake i too congratulate you on all of your your achievements and i think you're presentation is incredible as always uh the silent auction you have it

044as clark middle high school yes where so um it'll be like in the gym in the cafeteria area because that's the biggest place we can have it because we have so much stuff going there i do believe that there's going to be like three different types of auctions um i will be with technology stuff and then i know there's going to be two others but it's a good way to sell the stuff that we don't use without like just scrapping it and taking it to which we're gonna let all like the churches we have a lot of church groups reaching out to us like hey you guys have these ovens can we have them um like yeah come to the auction so and uh your newsletter uh the parents that how many parents do you

045know how many parents actually read your newsletter it's just internal it's just for staff okay yes for staff it's not for parents and you uh you share some data with us on different things could you email that to us it's not part of your program yep absolutely and um as far as hot breakfast is are we serving hot breakfasts to everybody we do a hot breakfast about two days a week um the rest is grab and go so it's cold so it's um we would like to go back to having like multiple options sometime in the near future um but right now hot breakfast is two days a week and then it's a cold breakfast three days a week okay thank you and um the buttercup now you said it was it's in our various

046communities so when you uh when it i just like to see it so when is it a different location let the board know because i would they're certainly glad and we're trying to add like a ice cream yeah big thing to it so you could hear it coming too there you go then i know that'll bring people out sounds exciting and and the outside food does that apply to the vendors as well that bring in the vending machines so we have we've keep talking with all the vendors because it has to be smart snack compliant items and when i walk through some of the schools they are not so we keep reaching out and they tell us like oh the kids won't buy the smart snack guy and i was like i get it i

047feel their pain on that um but we're probably gonna have to start taking stricter action on that because if it's under war policy 85 they we have to we have to enforce it we have to enforce that yes keep us surprised at that it is the only place it's okay if it's in like a teacher lounge okay so if it's in a place where no students can get to it it's okay but many of ours are out in the hallways and how about you know when personnel sell stuff to kids so with the fundraisers we have a separate form that comes on every fundraiser and it has three questions um one are the items sold during the school day two do kids get to eat them during the school day um there is a third

048question but as long as they check no on one of those we're okay the usda considers the start of the school day to be midnight that's how they get around with really curving a lot of our stuff but like i know hapa makes a good amount of money on some of their food sales and so they have a big signpost that you just can't eat it can't eat it on school ground rounds that's the other one so as long as you leave the school with it it's okay so every food fundraiser comes through and every school is allowed two exemptions where if they know something's going to be like a big money maker they can apply and say this is one of our two exemptions and then there's no restrictions around it and finally we're

049getting ready to roll out our strategic plan and we have several priorities and priority number three is our commitment to diversity equity and inclusion so regards to your staff based on the pictures you showed i don't know how diverse it is so um if you don't have the information now i can find out yeah but moving forward that's priority number three and we have to make a commitment to diversity equity and inclusion throughout the district absolutely thank you very much all right i just want to say wow and uh thank you so much for all that you do for our community and our students and our staff your your staff is amazing and you guys do so much and we just we just really appreciate you and your excellent presentation and um your pdf is

050on board docs oh great uh so it is there and it is publicly available so i checked on that for you too good so if anybody's watching at home that you want to go back and look at some more uh the slides a little bit more uh that is that is available online all right thank you so much durkin thank you and one other thing i'm sorry the trustee blake i'm sorry president you're hiring correct oh yeah if you're retiring get me a few flyers i would like to put them in the various churches in our community i would certainly can help boost that that would be awesome and one thing to say on that too for people who don't have like the high school diploma or ged we can still hire you you just

051have to work as a substitute employee until you get that but that is something um that we're able to offer and so for like you know moms especially who see like if they've just always worked at home those are great candidates too because they're usually very well versed in cooking and everything so i'll happily get you thank you so much yes all right thank you thank you so much dr ship next we have a k-12 academic plan this is a team effort so you will have you will see and hear several presenters talk about a section even myself will have to go down to the mic and talk tonight but this is a collaborative effort of working together to address where our students were performing during covet and after covet and our plan to help

052close that academic gap with our students k through 12. so mr adam white will start us off with a presentation good evening board of trustees and dr ship i look forward to speaking with you for the next few minutes my purpose here is to lay the foundation to give some context for dr rauch and mr salinas as they talk about some academic plans moving forward for this school year to help you better understand their plans i'm going to be covering the data for two of our assessments from last year one is the final report for i ready which is our district diagnostic assessment and then presenting the district um ilearn um data as well um mr white i'm sorry to interrupt you i just were we able to get trustees only connected he's good do

053you know about what time i'm sorry trustees i know i forgot that you were with us easy okay uh trusty zellner are you there your mind is muted trustees i'll know okay we'll try them again a little bit later then i'm sorry mr white not a problem um i also don't think the clicker is working oh see it was a good place to interrupt that right there you go i was testing it i'm sorry you're okay she came prepared move the slides forward great um if we can go uh to slide number three and while he's trying to get to there that the first question i have is on that slide okay so you have spring 22 and you have district fall so i assume that's district fall 21. yes okay yep so a comparison

054from the beginning of the last year there's no red on district fall um i uh just to further compares there is and i'll explain it in just a moment but um the fall district colors are just lighter than what our final numbers are um i just wanted to show a comparison between the two but if we want to see like where our kids are right now um the end of the school year data is the most important even though we are currently taking the assessment right now correct so if i was looking at this and i see 27 on district fall and then 20 on district spring so that means a seven percent increase we have less than those students yes yes yes now i understand yes the colors were throwing me off that's okay

055i apologize i just want to make one note because we have so many sections um at the end of each section uh we have a powerpoint slide that asked for questions at that time okay so i just want to put that out there thank you if you can actually go one slide prior that would be appreciated there we go i have the scripted so hopefully i don't no problem all right um so the first thing i want to review to you um as we look at the data is how student performance is reported with iready i've previously reviewed this with you but just so we can get our understanding together ireti does not rely on national percentile ranks instead i ready group student performance into five categories ireti's placements are an indication of what students

056are expected to know at each grade level when we take a look at this the dark green indicates students who have placed mid to on grade level or above by meeting the minimum requirements for the expectations of standards and that grade level these standards are considered are these students then are considered proficient for their grade the light green indicates students who have placed early on in the grade level by only partially meeting the grade level expectation the yellow indicates students who've placed one grade level below it's important to note especially as we're in the fall currently and as you compare this to our fault data from last year that many students place below grade level in the fall because they have not yet or are just now being exposed to the standards for that grade

057the light red indicates students who have placed two or more grade levels below and the dark red indicate students who have placed three or more years below grade level the charts presented here on this slide provides the board with the context of comparison when viewing our district data moving from left to right you can see the math placement for national norms during the spring 2022 window the indiana performance for spring 22 and our district spring performance with comparison to our fall data for math 13 percent of our school city of hammond k through 9 students placed on or above grade level by the end of the school year 15 of our students placed early on grade level 39 of our students placed one grade level below and 13 percent of our students placed two grade

058levels below and then 20 percent placed three or more grade levels below by the end of the school year when comparing our data to state and national results there are some key points first of all school city of hammond fell within four to five percentage points of both the national and state for students placing early on grade level one grade level below and two grade levels below the greatest difference in comparison fell in the comparison of our performance with state and national at the mid on grade and then also the three or more grade levels below here school city of hammond placed 14 to 16 percentage points behind in the mid on grade level or above and 10 to 11 percentage or points or more than the national and state performance for three or more

059grade levels below with some while some comparison might be worrisome when looked at in isolation it is imperative that we track the growth of our students over the course of the school year comparing the beginning of the year to the end of the year placement our students went from a fall placement in early to above grade level from six percent to 28 there was a decrease of three percent for one grade below placement and a decrease from 52 percent to 33 percent in placement of two or more grade levels below and that's a difference of 19 percentage points next slide please um as previously stated tracking student growth provides the data we need to evaluate if what we are doing in the classroom and with the associated i-ready resources is working the iready growth model

060offers two growth measures a typical growth and a stretch growth for every student in grades k through 8. these benchmarks show just how much growth is typical and how much growth is recommended to put all students on a path toward proficiency or advanced proficiency levels after students complete their baseline diagnostic which is the first diagnostic they take in the school year each fall i ready generates these two growth measures for each student for the year the typical growth is the average growth of students at each grade and placement level typical growth allows us to see how an individual student is growing compared to the average student growth at the same grade and the same baseline placement level the stretch growth is the growth recommended to put students who are below grade level on a path

061toward proficiency and students who are on grade level on a path to advanced proficiency levels students who are further behind have larger growth benchmarks to help them catch up and it will take them more than a year to achieve proficiency for these students the goal is for them to reach their stretch goals in order to help close the gap students who are already proficient have aspirational stretch growth benchmarks to advance to or maintain above grade level proficiency there is a scenario presented here in this slide and in this scenario to help you better understand alex is a third grade student and he has placed two grade levels below on the fall or that baseline diagnostic he has a typical growth goal of 27 points and a stretch goal of 43 points now again that's for

062the year so not between assessments bianca who is also a third grade student placed early on grade level on her fall or baseline diagnostic but has a typical growth goal of 25 points and a stretch goal of 34 points note here that if alex hits his typical growth he will still be below grade level the following year to close this gap he must hit or come as close as he possibly can to that stretch growth over the course of several years next slide please in looking at the overall growth placement for math 46 of students in grades k through 8 met their typical growth goal because a growth goal is an average grow goal we are within the normal range of students meeting their goal when looking at growth based on initial baseline placement we

063are able to see the academic growth that is taking place sixty percent of students with a baseline placement of three or more grade levels below ended the year with improved placement 67 percent of students with a baseline placement of two grades below had an improved placement 47 percent of students with a baseline placement of one grade below had an improved placement and 60 percent of students with a baseline placement of early on and 28 percent of students with a baseline placement of mid or above experienced and improved placement by the end of the year can i get clarification on that last one so if you're using the number 28 percent does that mean the other 72 percent actually dropped that's why i'm not understanding that number is coming from not dropped they just remained the

064same they could have dropped but it they could have dropped they could have remained the same they did not have an improved placement okay so 28 is not necessarily that good of a number then because we'd want them to be closer to staying on track or being above correct i'm just trying to understand this new way of doing these numbers oh absolutely yes 28 of those students who um who placed mid or above grade level they they had an improved placement so they did increase forward the um like you stated the counter to that is that they either remained by the end of the year the remaining percentage um or they did go down now to note the students who are already mid or above grade level it is harder to grow those students but

065that is still a group of students that we we must address because all growth no matter a student's ability level is incredibly important next slide please math placement by grade can be seen here for grades k through six with a comparison to the fall and winter windows as you can see all elementary grades saw a decrease in the placement of two or more grade levels below and an increase in the placement of on or above grade level both are positive outcomes for this year this is seen most at the kindergarten level with the growth and placement of on grade level a 42 percentage points between fall and spring windows third grade experienced the largest decrease in placement of two to three grade levels below with a difference of 35 percentage points between fall and spring

066windows next slide when looking at the elementary growth by grade fifth and sixth grade had the highest number of students meeting their typical growth goal third fourth and fifth had the highest percentage of students with improved placement it is important to note that each elementary grade saw at least half of their students with improved placement between fall and spring next slide math placement by grade can be seen here for 7th through 9th with the comparison to the fall and the winter windows there are several important points to note the growth at these secondary grades while positive is slower than elementary for example the seventh grade placement of on grade level between fall and spring had a positive increase of eight percentage points as a comparison sixth grade experienced a sixteen percent increase during the same

067time ninth grade is the only assessed secondary grade that experienced a steady decrease in placement at the two or more grade levels below with a difference of four percentage points between fall and spring eighth grade had an increase in placement at this level between fall and winter before ending with a total decrease of one percentage point for the year while seventh grade made terrific progress between between fall and winter with a positive decrease of eight percentage points um from 67 to 59 percent they did end the year stagnant at 59 i know dr ship doesn't want me to do this but what standards are being tested in ninth grade is it algebra because i know we were having the goal to get more students into trustee murphy i am gonna we're just gonna put a

068pin in it just shot a note and when we get to the end otherwise we're it's a really long presentation okay so here we go he may even answer it along the way so you like data don't you i love dating um in looking at uh next slide please uh in looking at growth targets for seventh and eighth grade seventh grade had a slightly higher rate of meeting typical growth at 41 compared to 39 percent of eighth grade as a reminder for growth 50 of students meeting their growth goal is what is expected because it is an average um both grades were under the typical or expected range so there's some issues there uh when looking at academic progress 46 of seventh grade had an improved placement and 39 of 8th grade had improved placement

069by the end of the year next slide the chart presented on this slide provides the board with the context when viewing our reading district data with the comparison of national to state performance during our spring assessment window for reading 16 percent of school city of ham and k9 students placed on or above grade level by the end of the year 16 percent of students placed early on grade level 33 percent of our students placed one grade level below and 14 of students placed two or more grade levels below and 20 percent placed three or more grade levels below by the end of the year when comparing our data to spraying state and national performance some key points are that the school city of hammond students placed significantly lower than both national and state in the

070on or above grade level placement with 16 percent of hammond students compared to 32 percent nationally and 31 at the state level the difference though positively decreases for the other four placement levels ranging from a three percent difference at the early on grade level placement five to seven percent difference in the one grade level below placement four percent difference at the grade the two grades below placement and a seven to eight percent difference for the three or more grade levels below placement when looking at hammond growth from the beginning of the year beginning to the end of the year students placing early to above grade level positively increased by 18 percentage points from 14 in the fall to 32 percent in the spring additionally the percentage of students placing two or more grade levels below

071positively decreased 15 percentage points from 49 uh in the fall to 34 in the spring next slide in looking at the overall growth placement for reading 49 of students k through 8 met their typical growth goal falling within the expected range for average growth when looking at growth based on initial baseline placement 59 of students with the baseline placement of three or more grades below ended the year with improved placement 59 of students with a baseline placement of two grade levels below had an improved placement 47 of students with a baseline placement of one grade level below had improved placement 55 percent of students with the baseline placement or of early on grade level and 45 with a baseline placement of on or above grade level experienced improved placements by the end of the year

072almost half of our students in each baseline placement did experience improved placements by the end of the year next slide reading placement by grade can be seen here for grades k through six with the comparison to the fall and winter as with math all elementary grades with uh all elementary grades with reading so a positive decrease in the placement of two or more grade levels below and a positive increase in on or above grade level placement again this is seen most at the kindergarten level with the growth in the on grade level placement of 46 percentage points between the fall and spring window second and third grade experienced the largest positive decrease in the placement of two to three grade levels below with the difference of 23 percentage points per second and 22 percentage point

073difference for third grade between fall and spring windows next slide when looking at the elementary reading growth by grade 5th and 6th grade had their highest number of students meeting their typical growth goal they also had the highest typical growth attainment for math with 59 percent and 56 percent respectively third grade also had the highest percentage of students with improved placement this is important to note as third grade is of the year that assesses reading proficiency therefore we see we are seeing the greatest gains in addressing reading gaps and growth at this grade level next slide reading placement by grade can be seen here for 7th through 9th with a comparison to fall and winter unlike math there was a positive growth that occurred in all three grades for students placing on or above grade

074level there was an increase of nine percent at seventh grade nine percent at eighth grade and six percent at ninth grade from the beginning to the end of the year for students placing two or more grades below grade level there was a positive decrease of ten percent in seventh grade eleven percent of eighth grade and nine percent at ninth grade from the beginning to the end of the year next slide in looking at reading growth targets for 7th and 8th grade 7th grade again had a slightly higher rate of meeting typical growth at 53 percent compared to 52 percent at 8th grade both grades had 51 percent of their students with improved placement from the beginning to the end of the school year all right next slide all right uh this is a time for

075questions all right trusty murphy if i may i can answer your one question right off the bat in terms of the standards that are addressed for math at the ninth grade level and first of all it is algebra and if it would be helpful i do have a really handy document that shows um the math progression as they go through so ultimately what math is taught or assessed i should say um at each grade to help you understand these see this we need to come off to help you understand the assessment students do not get a grade level assessment so if i am a fifth grade student i'm not going to get a fifth grade i ready assessment that maybe is where i start but the questions that i receive on my assessment are tied

076to a grade level so as a fifth grader in order to determine where exactly i'm at for the various domains for that content i'm going to experience both questions that are considered fifth grade questions sixth grade questions seventh grade questions they might keep stretching me up and then they might stretch me down as well so i will get a whole range of grade level questions to in order to determine exactly a where are my deficiencies and b where exactly am i falling for the various domains but there is a progression in terms of um how they assign like algebra questions are typically considered ninth grade questions and i have a really handy document that outlines that more so i'm happy to share that with you so if students like with the sri scores so if

077a student starts failing on some of the words then do the questions start getting easier and start going backwards um to a certain extent yes because then what the system is picking up on is that there's something that's that's going on there and they and what the system is trying to figure out what the assessment is trying to figure out is what is that skill deficiency right so i always do a comparison especially because my son is in the thick of multiplication right now um if he is struggling with multiplication if i give him a multiplication problem and he gets it wrong now i need to figure out is it his inability to understand multiplication or have his multiplication facts or is it an addition problem is it uh his inability to understand caring and

078borrowing and all of these other rules that is leading to him not to be able to answer a multiplication problem so it's not just necessarily multiplication that he needs to work on what is that prerequisite deficient skill and so as he would take that assessment if he were to get multiplication problems wrong if you were to experience that it would keep lowering him to see exactly where we need to where do we need to intervene at what level do we need to say he can't get multiplication because he's struggling with this prerequisite skill so that's what the assessment is trying to do which is why at the very end of the assessment they get an automatically generated individualized learning pathway that says listen you have all of this we have all of this data that

079we got from you we tried stretching you as far as we possibly could we went down to see when you're starting to become successful and now we have a really good idea of where your deficiencies lie and so now we're going to create this individualized pathway whose sole purpose is remediation so their individualized pathway is not lessons on grade level well it is if that's where they're performing right but the whole point of the pathway is to get them into grade level and serves as that opportunity to intervene and remediate and that's just one part of the piece of of towards proficiency now are those detailed for parents like they used to be for istep so they can drill down and say okay your child is having trouble with regrouping yep yep so um when

080they get a student score report it breaks it down by domain and we can see in those domains what students what their strengths are and where their weaknesses are so we get um both the parents and the teachers get an idea of well where do i need to enter into instruction for this student so it's not just going to say for reading your child is one grade level below that's that's not what it says it says here are the various domains we assess with reading here's how your child performed in the various domains for each domain this is the strength this is their weaknesses and then this is where we need to begin okay um the first question that i had was in the past they only counted the scores on the students that had

081been with us i forget how many days i think it was like a year and a half is that still true or do we have every student that comes to us count towards these scores are you talking for i learn yes no so no i i can't remember what the do you know the number but if a student comes um towards the end of the school year they have to be enrolled with us for x amount of days so it's not just anybody who tests with us okay so we're getting the data for them but they don't count in these scores because that used to be a huge thing for us so in the past the board would say okay how are the students that have been with us since kindergarten doing versus the kids

082that have only been here like two years and breaking this data down and then you start seeing the trends that the kids that are with us longer do better so yes so mr white when he goes to the next session uh section on ilearn that's some detailed information that he can provide to the board seeing which students will have been with us for that time period to count and students that probably came with us within that testing window but were not a part of us the majority of the school year so you can just provide that information and break down the chart for the board all right so my next one was showing growth so this is on a broad scale a macro scale the numbers that you're giving us so when you start breaking

083it down to like getting individual students to me this is not telling me how many students are making that growth so that was why with that 48 percent 28 bothered me because i was like well wait a minute what happened to the other 72 percent so to me this needs to be broken down even further so you're showing me how what's happening to those kids in that grade and what are we doing differently so obviously you don't have that in here today i don't have it here right but buildings have and we uh yes uh we we have access to that data and into new buildings um and i'm just going to say it again middle school is still a problem in math it's been a prominent math when my kids were there over 15

084years ago i don't know what's going on but we need to figure it out something happens when those kids go from elementary to middle school for these kids to be halfway proficient is just something we just have not been able to crack and hopefully with you deep diving into the data we can do something different this year the other thing i was really surprised about is reading scores not showing as much growth as math because usually it's the flip side to be honest with you when um i was reviewing my report that i put together prior to this i do recall going back and say did i did i mix that up because i absolutely agree with you so even after a double check it is correct and let's see oh and the other thing

085i was saying and i was wondering if that's going and drilling down into further as you watch going from k to sixth grade the kids that are three grade le two grade levels or more behind increases and again that's something that's a trend that's disturbing and i don't know if mr salinas is gonna be tackling that with his but that's another trend we need to be reversing um because i was just like oh this is not a good trend going through with that one and that's it for this part of the section all right are there any other questions for this section madam president trustee blakey thank you overall i'm extremely alarmed over this whole the first portion of this uh presentation again i don't trusty murphy hit on something these percentages represent a number

086of students and i would prefer seeing how it's affecting the number of students as opposed to 42 percent 42 of what of the enrolled total enrollment of the number i don't know that so really these numbers it could be anything i mean when i initially looked at it especially when you when you had the k through 12 in here i'm trying to figure out what was the enrollment for that year i don't know i don't know what you're basing this on so any parent looking or anybody who's trying to help us for 42 of what 40 of 11 000 students so we need to see that data data mr white so that i can clearly understand what's going on and again uh if kids can't read to comprehend of course the math although it looks

087like the math scores went up a little bit but the reading scores again again i am so i'm almost in a panic and having an anxiety attack right now over this because based on what i heard last year when you stood before us they're not getting any better from my vantage point and we need to find whatever plan we're going to come up with this plan going to have to be so solid i noticed towards the back we talked about tutoring how many times have i asked that question where is the tutoring programs where is the mentoring programs outside of a school day teachers can't do this during a working school day when you're telling me right off the bat students place three or more years below that's criminal be low how can we expect

088them to catch up unless we have such an amazing program to do that so again i need to know these numbers the actual numbers they represent i need to know how we're going to address this what creative and uh program we have to fix it because i i am and in reporting we need to see something quarterly i don't want to wait till next year to get this i agree i just i don't wanna i wanna see something quarterly or something how where are we moving what where are we going from semester to semester or whatever don't tell me at the ninth hour that we're still where we were last year trustee king thank you um i just mr white is just he's just reporting the data i understand that but these are conversations that

089we need to have um with superintendent miller and the executive leadership team well i'm sure he's listening somewhere i don't know why he's not here but mr mr white is just reporting this i understand that i am going to i am venting i understand this bothers me but and can anybody regulate how i feel and the questions i ask mr white knows me am i right we've sat down we've talked and and last year i asked that you for the entire board do a narrative for each portion so that we can better understand what where these numbers are because you were sharing some narratives that was not in this report that would help me understand that's all i'm saying thank you to to be fair with this process the team knows that i have expressed

090that we we know this is a surface and we're sharing something that should be shared more often but we also feel like to be fair and break down those numbers sometimes we just need to have meetings with some of the board members and flush that through not as a court all of you together we know we can't do that but some of this information i feel is we know it in and out right but we need to share with you guys what this is what we're sharing with the public is leading to what our plan is so we knew this was going to be kind of tough to hear we should be alarmed the community should be alarmed but we have a plan to address it and we need their support we need the parent

091support so i hope as we move through our presentation and we share this data which is going to the next data is going to be hard to to take in that we get that urgency to say how can we help how can we support our teachers what do we need to do as a community to wrap around them because our teachers cannot do them by them this by themselves sometimes our parents are working two to three jobs so i hope as people hear all the information that we have urgency and we get the support we need to get our students on the right path thank you mr white um actually i think if there are no other questions on this particular section um we'll just take a five minute recess and then we'll we'll continue

092on from there okay [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] all right everyone uh thank you very much uh for allowing us that that quick brain break i i knew we had a title for it i had to ask mr salinas um but thank you very much for that um mr white thank you um we'll go ahead and dive into our ilearn data next slide please um ilearn is a state mandated accountability assessment administered to students in grades three through eight and assessments assesses students proficiency primarily in the state content standards of math and english language arts the slide shows our overall district performance and proficiency levels during the 2022 administration for understanding red indicates below proficiency orange indicates approaching proficiency green indicates at proficiency and blue indicates above proficiency for math seventy

093percent or three thousand five and students placed below proficiency or 922 students placed approaching or 406 students placed at proficiency and three percent or 149 students placed above our three through eight students performed slightly better when assessed on the english language arts standards sixty percent or three thousand twenty one students placed below proficiency twenty three percent or one thousand one hundred 175 students placed approaching proficiency or 691 students placed at proficiency and 4 or 180 students placed above proficiency viewing proficiency by grade for math third grade had the highest number of students placing at the proficient levels at 22 percent or 186 students out of 839 third graders eighth grade had the lowest percentage of students placing proficient at four percent or 31 out of 798 8th grade students for english language arts fifth grade

094had the highest percentage of students placing in the proficient levels at 22 percent or out of 912 fifth graders sixth grade had the lowest percentage of students placing proficient at 14 or 120 students out of 661 students here proficiency by school can be seen for math school proficiency ranged from 8 percent to 25 a 17 percentage point difference between elementary schools for english language arts proficiency ranged from 13 to 23 percent a 10 percentage point difference between elementary schools for middle school math proficiency at edgars was six percent or 55 students out of 865 students and 3 percent or 20 students out of 744 students at scott middle school for english language arts both eggers and scott had a 17 proficiency rate for eggers that was 150 students out of and for scott middle school

095that was 129 students out of 746. this slide presents the proficiency levels by race and ethnicity in the school city of hammond our two largest groups are black or african american and hispanic for math there is a significant discrepancy in the proficiency rate between these groups with our students who are hispanic placing 13 proficient compared to our students who are black or african-american at seven percent that's a difference of six percentage points for our next two largest demographic groups students who are multiracial placed 17 proficient and students who are white placed 21 proficient for english language arts the proficiency gap remains the same with students who are hispanic placing at 18 proficient and students who are black or african-american placing at twelve percent proficient again a six percentage point difference for further comparison students who

096are multi-racial placed at 23 proficient and students who are white placed at 27 percent proficient looking at math proficiency by gender performance in the four reporting categories were similar seventy percent of female students and 69 percent of male students placed below proficiency um just for your understanding there are two charts here one to show the percentage and then the other breaks down so you know exactly that three percent for females uh students above equates to 70 students of female students and 18 percent of male students placed approaching proficiency nine percent of female students and ten percent of male students placed at proficiency and three percent of both female and male students placed above proficiency english language arts proficiency placement by gender however shows a wider gap in academic standard mastery 53 percent of female students

097placed below proficient compared to 66 percent of male students 26 percent of female students placed approaching proficiency compared to 21 percent of male students 16 percent of female students placed at proficiency compared to 11 of male students and 5 of female students placed above proficiency compared to 2 percent of male students math proficiency based on socioeconomic status is presented here like with the breakdown by gender for math there is a similar performance placement here the greatest gap in proficiency performance is at the below and at proficiency levels while small there is a two percent difference at these two levels between students receiving free or reduced lunch and students with a paid lunch it is important to note that the size difference in these two groups there were three thousand nine hundred and sixty testers who

098receive free and reduced lunch compared to one thousand one hundred and ten testers who had a paid lunch performance is also similar for english language arts when viewing placement by socioeconomic status again the greatest gaps exist at the below and the at proficiency levels both with a two percent difference in performance math performance by special education status is here first it's important to note the group size difference with 703 testers classified as special education as compared to 4 367 testers this is a significant there is a significant gap in proficiency between these two groups at each performance level the greatest gaps occur at the levels below proficiency of students who receive special education students placed below or approaching proficiency compared to 87 percent of stu students um 87 percent of students who do not receive

099these services that's a 7 difference six percent of our students who receive special education services placed at or above proficiency compared to thirteen percent of students who do not receive these services again that's a seven percent difference the gaps in performance widen when looking at english language art performance based on special education status 94 of students who receive special education status placed below or approaching proficiency compared to 80 percent of students who do not receive these services that's a 14 difference six percent of students who receive special education services placed at or above proficiency compared to nineteen percent of students who don't a thirteen percent difference it is important to note that the percentage at each performance level for students who receive special education services is the same for both math and english language arts

100for math performance based on english learner status 92 percent of students classified as english learners placed below or approaching proficiency compared to 87 percent who are not that's a five percent difference seven percent of english learners placed at or above proficiency compared to 13 percent who are not a 6 difference as with special education it is important to note the difference in group size with 837 testers classified as english learners compared to four thousand two hundred and thirty-three who are non-english learners the proficiency gaps widen with english language arts when comparing english learners to non-english learners 93 percent of english learners placed below or approaching proficiency compared to 80 percent of non-english learners a 13 percent difference seven percent of english learners placed at or above proficiency compared to nineteen percent of non-english learners a

101twelve percent difference most notably is the difference in student performance at the below proficient level seventy-five percent of english learners placed here compared to 56 percent of non-english learners that is a 19 gap providing us with the data that a large group of our english learners are significantly below proficiency in the standards of english language arts mrs verdusco who's our director of the english development program she's here to further elaborate on english learner performance in the district it's good evening good evening so i'm here to share the data for students identified as english learners and or also known as multilingual learners last school year 1 600 or sorry 1061 students identified as english learners took the ilearn assessment for grades three through eight when looking at the overall combined proficiency percentages in english language arts

102and math the grade level with the greatest proficiency meaning at or above proficiency were our third grade students in addition the grade level with the least proficiency percentages or our struggling grade levels were the seventh and eighth grade students who had the same percentage followed by our sixth graders in the chart above the english language uh for english language arts the grade levels with the greatest proficiency on the ilearn english language arts assessments were third and fourth grade the grade levels with the greatest need of support were seventh and eighth grade and again followed by our sixth graders in math third grade english learners demonstrated more proficiency in comparison to our or unlike our seventh and eighth graders who are demonstrating a great need of support in this chart you will see our 2022 we

103to access averages by domains we have our four main domains and then we have three other domains there that are uh combined for example our literacy is a combination of reading and writing our oral proficiency is a combination of speaking and listening and comprehension is a combination of primarily reading and 30 percent listening english learners in this chart uh averaged an overall language proficiency level of 3.2 this is 43 of our english learners so 43 of our english learners are at a 3.2 uh language proficiency level on average the area of focus for us that was identified based on the 2022 we to access data was in the area of speaking in the domain of speaking followed by our writing domain which is our expressive domains in addition the area of strength for english learners

104is listening in this data 55 of our english language uh development our students demonstrated positive growth 38.5 showed negative growth 6.2 percent showed stayed at the same language level and i wanted to add that 22 percent of our english learners uh were new to school city of hammond so this would be our kindergartners or new students coming in we had about a hundred students coming in new from other states districts or countries as well so this means that uh between language levels one to three we have 83 percent of our students that fall in that category and this slide this slide explains a little bit about the proficiency levels after the students are identified and assessed they receive an overall score that can range from 1.0 to 6.0 based on their english language development level

105once a student scores a 5.0 or higher they are considered to be english proficient based on the indiana department of education guidelines again on average our students are 3.2 language proficiency level which means that they are at a developing level students at this language level know how to use or they know and use social english and some specific academic language with visual and they need visual and graphic supports in this slide here you have a two-year proficiency comparison for english language arts as you will notice most of the schools demonstrated growth compared to the previous school year indiana state average was 2.2 percent growth for english learners so in comparison we improved one percent on average and the india indiana state average was 2.2 percent i wanted to point out that nine of our schools

106improved from the previous year one had no change and um four of our schools exceed exceeded the state average when you look at the comparison oops sorry okay here's our i learned two-year math proficiency comparison when comparing the english language arts and math our students actually demonstrated that their strength is in the area of math more than english language arts indiana state average was 2.9 percent growth and we actually averaged 4 percent growth 8 out of 14 of our schools exceeded the state average and 10 of our schools improved from the previous year and two demonstrated no change i think that is oh sorry so that was all our data for our english learners we didn't get that last year yes to the next slide please right um as we continue with our data i

107want to share three terms that you will hear through the state of indiana as we look at how we close the gap with our students and so these three categories is to measure the impact of the pandemic related to the learning disruptions so they are recovering which is defined as the speed of recovery in the strongest outpacing the years worth of growth stabilizing students are rebounding from learning disruption but will need additional support to reach recovery and attain learning declining students learning installed or they're just not continuing to show the growth even though we are providing support so they have a slower progress you will see these term these terms and categories throughout the indiana reports if you go to the idoe website this was a study done between the national center for assessment in

108the state of indiana next slide in summary overall most grade levels and students population had increased of one to four percent in math and ela proficiency rates proficiency in math statewide increased two to four uh percentages across all grade levels proficiency in ela statewide increased one to two in all grade levels except grades six and eight that had a decrease next slide this is a comparison of school city and hammond growth as compared to the state overall if you know we have some positives here with our growth you will see in grades 3 4 five and six uh we have narrowed our growth so is a positive in grades seven and eight when you compare the gap between 2021 and 2022 you see an increase of two percent this is not where we want to

109be but you see that we're moving in the direction that we need to go next slide when you look at the comparison of the growth you can also see that it was narrowed and increased we did not see a decrease in our math cohort groups grades 3 4 5 6 and seven so you have to remember that proficiency in math statewide increased two to four percent across all grade level you see the highest narrow is in grade uh four and five of 12 percent next slide here you are looking at the ela grade level again this is a comparison with the state and school city of hammond 2021 as well as 2022. you continue to see in grades 3 4 5 and that we're narrowing by a certain percentage so we have a positive of

110green in grade 6 it kind of stays equal and grade 8 stayed the same as we move to the next slide if you look at the cohort as the students move from one grade to the next again you see a positive from grades three through six when narrowing the gap and grade seven stayed the same as we move to the next slide remember the terms that i mentioned before and this is statewide data and how the state is uh putting the grade levels in a category in the state grades four math and ela is stabilizing and recovering in grades 5 ela is stabilizing but in math it's stabilizing and recovering in grade 6 statewide we're stabilizing and declining in math we're stabilizing in grades seven and eight for ela is stabilizing and in math four

111seven we're stabilizing and recovering and in eighth grade we're stabilizing next slide any questions on the data before we get to our district plan madam president trustee murphy it's so hard not i want to go back to this other slide um some of the data got broken down further and i want to go i can't remember which page it was i wanted to say thank you but that's what happens you can't say things at the same time all right third grade so they have a test that gauges what they're reading at did we hold any students back because they didn't pass i know we had one student they got 100 on it and we applauded him earlier last year but what happened with the ones that didn't pass um first of all um the state

112does not set any requirement or mandate that a student who does not pass i'm assuming you're referring to iread 3 is is held back that is not a requirement actually they they strongly urge school districts to not do a one-size-fits-all retainment of a third grader who does not pass i read three and that i read three should be one of multiple data points that are part of a larger discussion on retain retention the number of kids i don't i don't know no at this at this time our third graders that did not pass ireed they moved to the fourth grade they are getting receiving a reading intervention as a third grader even though they're in a fourth grader because we expect for them to take the i read again so they're getting that additional support

113and they are to continue to receive third grade reading instruction until they pass the test or qualify for a good cause exemption so it is not the expectation that they're just simply passed along to the next grade level um at all there's still a requirement for remediation at the third grade level no matter if they're in if they're in third grade fourth grade even possibly into fifth grade that's what i wanted to hear all right um page 21. you've got math proficiency rates of edgar's at six percent and scott at three percent and that just killed me um are we having the kids retake the math program i mean when you have so few passing math is linear much more than reading is and to me they had to have missed so much stuff so

114what are we doing at the middle school or do i have to wait for mr salinas or dr roush but about doc okay because that would that was a killer for me um because i love data and i'm like oh these poor kids what are we doing with them uh let's see the next one was on page all right you broke that's what it was you broke it down by gender and you did some other stuff thank you very much for diving down into the data deeper you're welcome um because when i got to that one i was very surprised that our girls were surpassing the boys and it's been an extremely slow trend and so now and everybody knows i've been out there rah-rah girls science math the whole bit and now i have

115to step back and say hey guys what happened to you so this is a disturbing trend that our boys are just falling no matter what racial or ethnicity we have here our boys are falling behind so i don't know if that goes back to dr roush again but that's a disturbing trend we all know it's english has been there forever but for math it's sort of like that's a disturbing trend that the boys are falling so far got behind next thing is page 27 that was on special ed so i know um trusty blake king asked a question about we're doing special ed so that triggered a question for me so our special ed is so broad all right we have kids that are non-verbal all right we have kids that are literally in wheelchairs

116then i'll never hold a pen so who in special ed actually takes these tests and what levels they are and how does that affect our scores yes um uh first of all um ms pryor would be able to provide you with more specific data i know she's actually disaggregating it she's in the process but for your general information all of our students in grades three through eight are required to take ilearn unless they qualify for the i am the indiana alternative measure assessment the state essentially caps us off at one percent of our special ed population participating in that assessment so that is really then those students who have far more severe cognitive disabilities in most cases those students can be non-verbal it is a small population of our students therefore everybody else does take

117ilearn all right so that leads to my next you keep getting me these reports a lot better okay for next time since we're capped at one percent i'm betting that there's students that probably shouldn't be taking this test that probably should be taking the other one because we're cap because school cities had a proud history of mainstreaming our special ed population we take everybody we don't send them out like other districts doing so if we could break down in that so we can say okay this looks really bad but if we break down the special ed children that are taking this and we're probably finding students that probably shouldn't be and that's what's dragging our scores down or i could be totally wrong so i first of all um uh miss pryor is working on

118breaking down that number by exceptionality so we would be able to see would because this those who qualify for special education services range from you know students who have severe cognitive disabilities to those who are receiving speech services and that is that is quite the spectrum and everything that that's in between um so she's working on taking a look at when we take a look at a number of students who have not passed i learn and receive special ed um services where does that fall in terms of the exceptionality that is their primary second of all i do caution against [Music] taking a look at students that class that we would classify that should or should not be taking ilearn the state actually does a very good job at providing us with a very extensive

119list of questions that should be determined that should be considered during case conference meetings in determining whether a child should take i am or ultimately qualifies for i am versus ilearn and so those are conversations in depth conversations and not just something that we're simply taking a look at data or simply a child's ability it is a full picture um in a discussion that determines if a child qualifies for i am or not i'll wait till we get her report thank you all right the next one is for ldp um again breaking down the data further so that's page 35. all right so on the one page you show us with a composite score of 3.2 and on the next slide you tell us okay our learners could be 1.0 to 6.0 then you provide

120us with the data and that's where my frustration comes in so i don't know when i look at the first school the 10 proficient those other 90 percent are they at a one are they at a two are they at a four and so breaking that data down deeper i love them it's going to be a lot more better for me because then i can say okay these kids are only at a developing level right now they are going to struggle with it versus they're at a four or five they probably should be passing and if they're not then i'm going to ask you why aren't they passing so this data is good but it needs to be drilled down further for me the level fours it was uh i believe it was 18 percent

121of our 18 of our population um and those are the students that still struggle with the you know statewide state assessments um but i guess what i was trying to i guess point no i understand i'm just saying for in the future like mr white he knows how i like to drill down and he's added more drilling down so for next time if you could drill that down even further that would be wonderful sure trusty murphy she can make sure you get that soon as data that she has in her fingertips so we will email that to mr miller and he can email that to the board and that's my questions for the last section thank you all right are there any other questions for this section madam president trustee blake king um i don't

122have page numbers the two-year proficiency comparison or i learn english learners i i noticed i think this is from eight percent the other page the one before it i guess this sheet miss uh your report mr russo okay what i really are having a hard time to understand yes uh now urban has the major program there am i correct the dual language yes irving has the language but yet harding you know i have been requesting this to why isn't that program district-wide you know because we have hispanic population throughout the district we have been talking about taking it to another side of town my question is you have the program at irvine but at harding it's the highest um proficiency 21 percent am i reading that right harding right here as opposed to irving six

123percent and we have the program at urban uh that to me and the program also is a great program for our english learners to close that gap it's the fastest way it's a enrichment program for english speakers in a uh english i understand that program but my point is the program is at irving but you're doing you're doing better at harding without the program so trustee blake king what i would say from uh being having in a previous district a program like that sometimes in the elementary grade levels you don't see necessarily the highest performance and then eventually you see as they progress they boom they do better academically so i can have um miss perdusko do a little bit more research on who those kids are what levels they are performing um and she

124is she will be able to provide that for you because that is a a question like that's a major that's something major so miss verdugo if you can make note of that and that's another uh document of data students are by level kind of similar to what um the same thing for the second page but the nine percent again you have harding doing extra much much better as opposed to um let me see yeah it was 21-6 on the other one yeah yeah so i mean that's questionable you know you have the program at one school you would i would think that they would do much better than any other school so it sort of keeps my argument well anyway second question w-i-d-a you know i don't know all these acronyms what does that stand

125for w-i-d-a rita oh the waiter what does it stand for uh world class let me see world class weed i'm so used to the action too world-class instructional design and assessment what do you send that to us yes and actually they're kind of moving away from the long they're just keeping it we to access now as of last year but you know and i noticed when you presented this page obviously you had a narrative to it that could you send us that narrative so i can understand i couldn't follow you but anyway that would certainly help for the language proficiency yes for the week for the chart yeah if you can send that narrative as well with your reports and the same thing for the next page you did a narrative for that as well

126that would help us more understand and then uh my other question regarding gender we did not include the lgbt community will we eventually do that or was it overlooked or how are we going to address that so i i personally um i i do get very hesitant and i think it's becoming outdated for us to be viewing a breakdown of students by gender okay um i don't know what information that necessarily provides to us um so i i foresee the trend being that that would be a demographic group that either expands and so we can really drill down a bit more or that is a demographic group that that maybe is no longer needed for us well again again moving forward with our strategic plan we're addressing dei so we have to be consistent and

127in all that we do okay and i think my final question uh for your point well go ahead on if any other board members have questions all right are there any other questions from the members anyone trust you by king and then uh this partnership indiana national center for assessment what is that where did it come from so i can send you the report from ido it's a presentation they did probably earlier this month so i'll send that out to the board with the recording as well okay thank you very much all right um thank you very much mr white um are we ready yes we are next all right so now we're going to start with the supports and plan for our secondary schools and we will move to our elementary schools as well

128so dr roush will start the secondary academic plan thank you dr ship board of trustees moving on now to the secondary plan for school city of hammond i work very closely with dr ship on the secondary plan starting off with the next slide first of all starting off with middle school this this plan is for all students um earlier this summer the indiana department of education they released a standards in essential need of support and so once they release that and and sends are standards that contain content and skills essential to student success at the current grade level and then beyond so basically what they've done is they've taken standards that students do not perform well on ilearn and then also the high priority standards that are on the test blueprint for ilearn and so

129once we saw that those came out the summer school lessons were developed around those because they have really good resources that the idea we had put together and so we started actually this summer making sure that those standards are being met by our students also the as mr white presented the iready assessment we actually moved that earlier to august 22nd so that we can get data in the hands of teachers sooner also at the middle school level the use of standards mastery from iready basically what this is and we started this right before ilearn took place in the spring what they what teachers can do is they can pull current standards and it's a it's a great way to do a quick formative assessment on the standard and then if they need to reteach that

130standard they would reteach it and then they can assess it again and then ireti has another formative assessment with different questions to assess their learning so this is something that we are going to continue to do this year as well next slide continuing with the middle school dr ship created math maps to reteach previous year standards for 20 days and michelle anders created middle school english language arts maps that teachers are using and basically what these maps include are standards that teachers are just going to integrate into their lessons that they are already doing also this year we adopted new textbooks the ready map and this is a great way for the i ready data can now kind of correlate with the ready math and teachers were trained right before school on these new textbooks

131and so there's just going to be a little bit of a learning curve as as everybody knows with with a new textbook the ready map does have this really strong pacing guide and lynn lang inserted into the math map to show previous year standards to be covered using these new textbook resources so that's the nice thing about new textbooks is they just have a lot of a lot of resources that teachers can use and so you know we reach out to the consultant and and worked with um and lynn you know made sure that those were inserted into those maps so that it kind of took a little bit off of the teachers for them to do that next slide please so at the high school level um the instructional coaches uh they worked on

132an sat test prep over the summer um to make sure that a calendar was created for math and english language arts so that we can make sure that students are getting that you know sat prep uh prior to to the sat in the spring we are also so that's going to be in in math and english language arts classes but then also we would also like for the entire school to um also do this so um again they're just getting that that extra just any extra help that they can get with with sat test prep and uh they will be using khan academy because obviously some teachers um you know are not that you know math and english language arts are not their content area and so we're going to utilize khan academy uh dr

133chip also created a calendar for eligible one that reviews content and is mapped for the entire school year uh this is and then the high school instructional coaching team created the english language arts map this is just a great way for teachers to kind of stay on track make sure that assessments are being done and this all will lead into data talks as well that they will be having throughout the year and again at the high school the ireti testing was moved to august 22nd as well to again get that data in the hands of teachers and he talked about those pathways to get those students doing those as well so at both middle school and high school um again data talks after assessments so this should be done really in content but you know

134they have common content uh planning time and so this is where those uh data talks can happen after assessment after assessing students also that what's really important is attendance is being reviewed weekly by administrators uh students can't learn unless they're in school and so we're going to make sure that you know we're staying on top of student attendance a really big push this year are walk throughs these will occur weekly by building administrators and it's really going to focus on academics student engagement and delivery of standards so this is something that is really going to be valuable feedback not only for administrators but then for us here at the district level as well schoology is going to be the new platform that's going to be implemented this school year but it will be in full

135use second semester by all teachers and this is going to just streamline teaching and learning uh teachers are going to be are currently already starting monthly professional development to to learn how to utilize schoology again at both middle school and high school we don't want just the english language arts you know to do all of the writing so we're going to make sure we include um the other disciplines as well uh throughout the year and tutoring again will happen um before and after school as well so stop and think about that so that's going to continue and that's going to hopefully you know help our students um you know kind of get to where they need to to be because again as you said you can't do everything during the school day here's a sample

136of uh the math calendar that dr ship created so you can see those uh standards uh that are implemented um you know throughout those first days of school next change oh excuse no wait wait oh okay i'm sorry that's okay uh next slide and then a sample calendar of the english language arts as well um and as you can see there you know those those are the um standards again that um you know we just want to make sure that any any previous year that we're kind of just kind of touching upon but then and that'll just lead into the current standards as well i just like to add something the the reason for the calendar maps is that in order for us to have data talks um and we assess the students on a

137common assessment we have to make sure our teachers are covering the standards at the same time if we need to bring them to together and say how do students perform dig down deeper with the skill how we're going to remediate how we're going to reteach we need to give that same assessment at the same window of time so no school is above uh or ahead or behind another so it's very strategic this was not done in isolation this was with instructional coaches i i kind of shared my vision of what i wanted i i said i want these i want maps i want to be able to for a teacher especially when you have teachers that are new to education and they're trying to learn their craft of what should be taught and how long

138this is deeper than the curriculum maps they had previous where it just had the dates you have 10 days 14 days visually when i shared this with instructional coaches they said it's good to see monday through friday how that looks what is it bumping against and when we put an assessment in and when we're going to do a data talk as a team to talk about our students and dig deep about if a student is not performing why is it and have those candid conversations so this is a new process we will review it year after year to make sure our students are making the progress they need that also goes in ducktales with the walkthroughs that administrators are doing that is nothing evaluative they're going in to see the engagement how students are learning

139how teachers are delivering the lesson if we are not in there looking and having candid conversations then we can't move and grow our kids and we have to give the support to our staff as well as our our students so that is the reason why we have these calendar maps uh they're different but they're aligned and again this is a what i say a live document so it as we need to tweak it we tweak it for the betterment of our students and our staff to get that growth that we need thank you next slide was mentioned earlier uh parent engagement again uh this is not something that can happen um you know just during those school hours so um some monthly meetings at a court that occur uh that are going to occur as

140well this year is uh with mtss the sel safe this is led by michelle ondis ldp they have monthly meetings um the pta building meetings and we have a new position coming on board that um we'll kind of um you know leave that charge as well uh title one parent liaisons was already in place in each building and then a district parent newsletter will be created this year to just make sure that they're aware of really important dates what's happening in the classroom as well and hopefully coming soon to the board it will be a process that we really work on that parent engagement and really get our parents opinions so hopefully at the next board meeting we will have something to share with you about uh having that outside wrap around support to really

141tackle our working with our parents and helping them to understand what um supports and things we need from them the thing about the district parent newsletter is that uh what i would like to do is to share with parents what we are covering monthly so if they need uh their student to stay after for tutoring or if they don't if they have their own tutor they know what to share with them and say hey my student my child is learning this concept can you help them so i the parent letter is not about just events and activities but it's more academic focus for our parents to have and use as they want please so at the district level this is where dr ship and i will definitely be reviewing all of this data um again

142student staff attendance we need to look at that monthly uh to you know give supports where support is needed at the secondary level grades after each marking period and the semester uh again building assessments uh you know that that does take time and and that's something that we need to make sure we're cognizant of to help the teachers with and again walk throughs um not only you know our building administrators doing that but you know we need to be doing that as well to know what's happening in the classroom and then those building level data talk meetings as well that we need to and that i will be part of of those as well i think oh okay that was it president all right uh trustee blinking thank you um just how structured will your

143tutoring program be you know just how structured i mean who's doing it are we using the universities or is it the high school students you know our you know who's doing it so right now i'm working with catherine danko who's over our tutoring to get those positions uh posted because last year what we did to make sure we had teachers that are tutoring our students in math and ela they would go in and they would say hey i want to tutor in math and english so we can make sure we have those uh teachers that want to stay after and we make sure we start that we're trying to start asap so we have it before and after school ms danko provides the parameters as far as the hours the pay and the support we

144also are going to look at outside agencies as you know the governor has released something with ido about providing financial support to parents so again this has to be a collaborative tutoring effort uh because we also recognize that our teachers are tired too yes and so we have to and i hope community people are listening tonight we need them as well to help with our tutoring programs because we can't put it all on the backs of our educators well in doing that i mean this is the first of course you have to present it to the board first how are you going to present it to the various communities uh that that's the piece we were working on monday so we're flushing it out uh trustee blake clean and we will get uh back to

145the board with that okay uh secondly the summer school what happened over the summer school was there any growth achievement i mean every year i mean we had three weeks of summer school was that effective did we see any growth from that i can say that we had a lot of students participate especially at the secondary level i have that data to share so i can't do everything it's a nice understanding so i would tell you i was very pleased at how many students in indiana online earn credits we have a pre and post test for elementary middle school that i would share at a later date math now we know we're still short math teachers correct so i mean the only way this is going to work we're going to need math teachers or

146some uh the best second to that that we can find and uh and that's that's crucial none of this is going to work if we don't have the teachers in place the english teachers the math teachers the science teachers it's just not going to work it looks good on paper so we need to get very vigorous and finding a way to uh get certified teachers in these buildings and and that's how it's not acceptable at all if we can't and i know it's a national problem but from my perspective well i won't say that but uh a lot of good people have left this district and um that has to stop that bleeding has to stop people running away from us uh second thirdly or fourthly i don't know what it is these walk-throughs are

147they scheduled um some of them will be scheduled at the building level the i i can only speak from the experience of when i was a building principal uh you would pick certain days and you have a focus because you are saying i'm looking at a particular thing when i go into that classroom and administrators would say this is what i'm going into the classroom to observe and even the administrators come back with their data and they talk about what they saw in the classroom uh when we come as district level administrators it would be us saying you know we want to go to scott middle school we want to hit uh say the english and math classes and we want to go in and see if we hear higher level questioning from the teachers

148asking the students how they're responding so we all this has to be intentional everything in this plan is intentional and it cannot be any excuses because we cannot expect things to happen if we all are not in this together so it's not just at the teacher level the building principle but it's also at the district level that we participate in it as well now i understand our scheduling changed students received different schedules monday and uh based on this what you have in this does this reflect that change or or this it does not no so it okay it is what it is that i d printed here okay and then uh it's parent engagement pta we're going to have to work on that because not all schools have pta yeah yes and trustee blake king

149i've been working over the summer working with our president making sure that our ptas all have their email communication and getting them ready they should be at the first home game of every football we have home game for morton high school and hammond central high school to recruit and get our parents involved so everyone can have a a group of people so we're working towards that and working collaboratively [Music] i guess one final question i know we have a hard time you know sometimes we have to do something different every every community in hammond has a community center and if they won't come to the buildings they might come to a community center to get information if nothing else i mean i don't know how many people are actually watching this public works session and

150even if they're watching it watching it to understand parents need to understand this and i don't think that perhaps the average parent does not understand i mean i'm asking questions i don't understand it all you know so at some point we need to might have to get outside these buildings and use the community centers you know every community has a community center and people feel more comfortable perhaps going to a community center as a coming to the building okay thank you so much and again let's utilize churches and organizations to get that and i'm more than glad to walk flyers pass them out when i go wherever i go okay because i realize now that flower you all gave me on the book book rental people are flabbergasted miss king thank you we didn't even

151know that existed you know so everybody's not using power square all these other apparatuses and dividends that we we have for parents to utilize so let's go old school you know thank you very much all right are there other questions from other members madam president trustee murphy all right so you stated that you did the first i ready assessment on august the 22nd and i know you can't answer it tonight but i hope we have a meeting soon to get those results along with what happened over the summer yes that window hasn't closed yet okay trustee king and i would like to go and see that information because the test is three times a year so the best way to do it is schedule three meetings a year so we can watch the growth and

152for anybody out there that might misconstrue my comments our staff did a phenomenal job last year with growth we showed growth everywhere is it where we want it to be dr ship will tell you we're doing all this work to get it where we want to be but i want to say out there with my comments that dig into things it's not because i don't believe you worked hard last year you worked great and you did a phenomenal job getting our district to move forward uh the next question is you talked about the sats what grades are we looking at students to start taking the sats uh they take it in 11th grade just once or twice well the state requires it once so if they take it on their own they can yeah all

153right so they get it once for free correct yeah all right um i know sixth grade isn't quite you um sixth grade we're doing the departmentalization now i know that might be mr salinas so we had the issue with elementary not having social studies and science books but the sixth graders i assume you moved those books from the middle schools down into the elementaries so the sixth grade teachers have all the books they need i am gonna have to ask all right we'll have to look into that all right uh you talked about schoology please describe what that is why ships so schoology is a learning management system so blackboard canvas well it take the place of what we're doing with google classroom that was my question i had written yes so it would take

154the place of google classroom the reason is we're going to learn learning management is because it's putting the students and preparing them for what they would experience in a two-year four-year institution or even if in a workforce they use some type of platform when you have to do training google classroom is that false hood of what you would experience now with google classroom some it can be linked into schoology and right now uh mr switzer who's one of our high school teachers a part of cadre he is working with teachers actually so far i think he's trained like 40 teachers but we have like from now until december professional development for high school middle and elementary separated out but he's working with high school teachers now because some of them eager they can't even wait

155for the first training date so he's been working with him now with schoology but it is a good thing for teachers because once you're in it once you set your classes when the next year comes you just roll it over and tweak it however you want to uh it grades assessments for the teachers and highlight within assessments that teachers create how their students are performing so i can go on and on about it but it was it's a very um uh uh i would say it supports education and it supports what this generation is experiencing is not new to me i actually when i was in muncie uh before kovy bef when you had to apply to be able to do this with the state was awarded the grant to do schoology and it is

156a very like i said useful and prepare them for the next step it's realistic to what they will experience in life after high school um trust me i have a couple like can i because i'm not done with schoology go ahead um so what about integration with um like the new textbooks that we purchased like that that's the part of the plan i've worked on that before school even started to make sure everything was syncing so even with that it syncs and links so when a kid goes in they see the books if we have e-texts right so digital books things are there right for that student as well as for that teacher um so it's very i want to get to the point it is a component for parents where they can see and

157look in but i'm not there yet i just want to kind of uh kind of fold it into the district with the teachers and the students being familiar before we bring the parents on board but it has a nice parent component as well where they can check and see us cybus they can see what their kids are doing um so that's like in the next phase and did we look at any other elements uh before i came this is what uh you guys have decided so i'm just making sure it happens okay this one's already agreed upon before i i uh came to the district i don't remember that like so last year i would be interested in yeah i'll follow up with scout on that question but um okay thank you very much okay

158so going still with that one so that the all right so we'll go with seventh grade so i've got my math textbook i go home i've got homework to do i can go into schoology and i can review the day's lesson because i have the online textbook all right so again some of us are really old old school okay and i expected my kid to bring home a whole book bag of books so parents nowadays are not expecting their children because if they bring home their chromebooks all their books should be on the chromebook yes so as a parent that went through that transition of students my child had a book from elementary through i would say middle part of middle school and when that district went to more digital more the chromebook is your

159book then you wonder like as a parent i'm paying x amount of money and this is what you're bringing home well my child everything they needed was in their chromebook so that's what our students will be moving more to in secondary i will say i also have to buy class sets because i cannot forget about the population of special needs students that might need that textbook or a parent might say i want my child to have this book for maybe tutoring or it's easier for them for my child to have the book so when i ordered the math books this year i made sure we had class sets just to make sure if a parent and if it's written in an iep that a student had to actually have a textbook then it will cover

160um but more schools are moving to that more digital curriculum where they access it on the chromebook where students can also access it on their phones i wouldn't use the phone but some of these teenagers use their phones for a lot of things but everything is through their device so as a parent unless my child has an iep which allows them to bring a book home i will not expect them to bring the textbooks home then correct but i would say you don't have to have an iep just to get a book okay but you can talk to the teacher yeah yeah and i and sometimes parents might my ask just for a certain chapter of some certain things being covered can my kid actually have a book just for that you know skill or

161lesson that they're covering and then the student returns the book but that gives the teacher the flexibility even with a class set say if something was to happen internet wise you have a class set so i think i i kind of with the math adoption thought about what situations could happen that would impact learning so that was another reason why i selected to have a class set of math books thank you that was a very good explanation all right so and my last question goes back to your calendar of the standards so where is the re-teaching time so i'm going to start it up i'll pitch it over to dr roush if she wants to talk about it but after you do that assessment that's when you have the data talks and you look at

162the data and you see who mastered who's close and who's far behind and that's when the team of teachers decide how are we going to re-teach it when are we going to re-teach it and so it's you can't cookie cut it because every assessment is different some kids might master standard this time and some may not so we expect that that group of teachers when they're talking about it when do we re-teach do we do it before or after how many kids are we talking about can we have on our coaches or interventionists come in and pull those kids out and do some re-teaching so that's the creativity that you have to have as a team and that's why it's important to have the data talk so you can see what your resources are within

163that building and plan accordingly because guess what you got to come back and talk about okay when did the reteaching happen and how did the student you know do i don't know doctor rashford you want to add it yeah i'm just going to say and that's actually um all these resources can also be used in that tutoring session as well so um with i ready the resources and now with our you know new math textbooks actually all of our textbooks really have some really great resources for teachers to pull from and and give that that re-teaching um to students so going to the tutoring could i also consider that hey my kid needs help with homework it's not necessarily they've got a whole bunch of things but today we get a new concept and they're

164like brought it home and i'm like sorry i don't do calculus anymore you need to go back to school with that so i would say that different than tutoring homework health and tutoring i see a two different things i understand yes i totally agree with you but could those tutoring things also you know i love mrs damiano she used to have at six o'clock in the morning she had homework help my kids used to go to it all the time although she because she did algebra i mean i was about geometry so sometimes the teachers build it in um because they're just the die hards but if you can't do that then sometimes you just need that homework help because us parents don't always remember this stuff right and then ask rose is also another

165great um you know tool for first and it's i know that the schools have posters and stuff like that that they can get out from that's all i have on this section thank you madam president i just like to add one another thing when it comes to the tutoring because to me that's key we probably need to reach out to our community organizations hammond hispanic community committee and the naacp hammond branch and uh the why different groups that are willing to uh i mean since there is funding you know and i'm sure they have impeccable people that could assist us with this tutoring program so we need to reach out to every organization that's in their churches that approach them because this is going to be a big task tutoring that's going to be the

166key that's the key so it's going to be one-on-one in groups of twos and threes you know and we can't fall down on this one if we're finally going to say we're going to do some tutoring i want to see it just and and just innovative some kind of way thank you thank you um i i do have a one more question before we move on actually i guess i have two um we in talking about tutoring and access and everybody has a chromebook and these sorts of things like there's also thing i think i believe the hammond public library actually has it brainwave which is 24 7 online tutoring is that something that we're using here at the school city or in conjunction with the library i think are we promoting that making that

167available to particularly our high school students that's something that has been promoted i know with anna verdusco i actually had them come and speak with the parents and she did a lot of work with them so and they've been in the schools we just have to make sure we keep doing that every year because when you work with your partners you can't do it one time right uh we have to continuously do it every uh start of the school year and and i know online isn't the perfect fit for everybody right some people need nothing but but you know i those sorts of tools are available and wow what a great thing you know um for homework help and yeah those difficult concepts and then uh dr ship i know you also mentioned your summer

168school report um like is that like a really long needs to be in a public works session report or is that something we can slide in one of the next i think board meetings i think i can slide it into a board meeting i mean if we're gonna we're gonna beat the data horsepower the public needs to know know what happened yeah because it'll be like you know how many students we've reached out to which that was the data you kind of had before we started summers right so it's really the continuation of who actually attended the pre and post test um in elementary and middle school how many students signed up for indiana online and actually completed out so um yeah that should be an easy one to just do at a board meeting

169if the superintendent recommends it yeah it um if we could you know put that on the list of things that superintendent miller about um it's already october so i know that we're already starting like we're already planning for summer school and so um i i i too would be curious on and and how successful uh the approach was and you know what else can we do yeah you know so and that boot camp concept we need to explore that because some is verusa she has that it needs to be expanded the boot camp yeah district-wide okay i'm on record you know i want to see some evidence of it you guys are awesome i just want to throw that out there you guys are awesome and i know it's 8 14. okay doctor i'll shut

170up okay last one is it's really just a recap because i just wanted to make sure mr salinas was a part of this i i know he presented earlier but this is a k-12 and we need to make sure that he's always a part of what we do and we probably had some parents that weren't able to listen to his previous um presentation so mr salinas if you could just recap with the board so they can see the connection and how we're aligned good evening everyone doctor ship board members uh see if this oh works all right rich i guess you could man the slides for us or navigate them for us all right so um again good evening everyone and so one of the things that we've heard a lot of uh chatter tonight

171about is again just what's in the best interest of students and one of the things that you're going to see at all the elementary schools and i'm sure this happens at the secondary schools also it's just a a knowledge of what kids need right before they can so before students can can actually self-actualize as students and and gain that self-esteem they need love belongingness safety and physiological needs such as water food and all the things that director clara hand talked about earlier these are all of the things that is a basis for learning in all of the elementary schools whether it's kindergarten third grade or sixth grade so i want to know that one i want to know that that's one of the things that we start with is before we get to the top

172part of any kind of hierarchy it's always important to provide physiological safety and love and belongingness before we get to any part of the the learning process so that's important at all schools this is also very important to understand um we have a diverse population of kids here but just because our kids are brown black english learners special education come from public does not mean that they learn reading any differently what's different is the cultural economic and educational circumstances but their brain works just like any other kid across this world and so we have to understand is the way a kid learns how to read if you understand the way a kid learns how to read then you can reach a kid and teach them how to read not every teacher is a reading teacher

173and that is not a disrespect to anybody it's just that people some people are content teachers some people are language teachers and there is a science to teaching reading okay so that's one thing that's important to understand so we are going to provide teachers with uh an updated professional development session on the science of reading and the science of reading has a lot to do with the way the reading brain works so one of the things that we have to understand is the way the brain works there are parts of the brain that need to be activated for reading phonemic awareness phonological awareness all of those things are things that have to do with the science of reading historically in hammond we've taught literacy through a balanced literacy approach we are moving now to a

174structural literacy approach which again teaches the structure of language through explicit systemic and sequential instruction and so one of the things that we're going to be doing is working with our instructional coaches and also teachers in the elementary schools to shift from balanced literacy to structured literacy i do understand that any change takes years to fully fully uh come to fruition so we are going to be working with teachers for the next several years as we move from our literacy instruction from again balanced literacy to structured literacy dr roush mentioned this earlier the standards in in essential need of support the acronym is sends so as you see the venn diagram you'll see the standards in need of essential support in the middle on one side you'll see the content standards that are essential that

175our students need to know and then you see the standards where our students are performing significantly below expectations so we've seen all the data today that proves exactly what our students need but we also can't ignore the fact that as educators we have to do something again called annual growth and catch-up growth right so we can't just focus on the standards the kids are floundering in but we also can't ignore the standards that that they're expected to learn so those are called standards in need of essential support this is an example of what these standards look like uh ladies and gentlemen so just an example these are sins from the state that they've identified that students all across the state in different grade levels are performing either at above or below and so again to

176a doctor's point dr ship's point of stabilizing or recovering there's data that shows whether we at the district are stabilizing recovering what is good about this is that now you can see where your kids are performing below grade level and then all the resources that come with it one of the things that is uh at the fingertips of educators across the state is literacy frameworks and if you click on the framework it'll give you all of the information you need rich is that something you can click on for us that top link on the right where it says resources that the very top one right there yeah is it able to open up no okay if you click on that framework and i can share this with the links with everyone what comes up is

177a lesson plan for that specific standard the vocabulary for that specific standard mr salinas rich if you hold the control button down and then click the link it should pop up in a new one new window sorry tools for teachers okay but i can pull it up i pulled it up online okay so one of the things that that that's important here is that again it gives the teachers the tools that they need for that specific standard again it gives you the academic vocabulary for it it gives you considerations for special education students considerations for english language learners and it gives you how to address this standard in the areas of reading writing speaking and listening so these are again resources that are specific to these sends which are the standards that are essential need

178of support right now the other thing uh in alignment with secondary we are looking at making sure we understand what standard a student is currently working on and what that standard looks like not only at the grade below but at the grade above so that teachers can vertically align instruction and say hey in order to count to at least 120 by uh ones fives and tens a student should be able to have done this counter at least 100 by ones and tens in kindergarten and then what that looks like in second grade there's power in vertically aligning your instruction to understand what comes before what comes after i think one of the disservices that we've done in the education system is to put kids in grade levels not every kid is a third grader after

179nine months or a fourth grader or even an eighth grader kids learn differently and it's nice to know what kids should be expected to do before and after phonemic awareness again we cannot underscore the importance of this i think there's a perception that only kindergartners first graders and second graders are the ones that are in need of phonemic awareness that is absolutely not true especially in hammond you've got fifth and sixth graders that still need to understand what a phoneme is and that these sounds are related to letters that are related to words that are then related to sentences and paragraphs and so forth what we what structure literacy does is it takes away the assumptions that students know how literacy works structured literacy makes it explicit in terms of instruction so phonemic awareness the

180hegerty program is something that we have in our elementary schools that teachers use on a daily basis with our kids i've done this before and shared it with you so i won't review this but this is the way the elementary school look day school looks like 8 30 to 3 30. we have built in again our structured literacy block our math block fact fluency frequency we have uh data that shows that our students are deficient in fat fluency so that had to be built in whether we're talking about addition subtraction multiplication division or all four of them we have wind time which is uh what i need that acronym uh trustee blake king stands for what i need and so every kid needs something different so again i know that we have tutoring and even

181at the elementary level we do have tutoring as well but we also built in time to give students a little bit of extra teacher time throughout the day and of course we connect everything to our learning objectives and connections to the real world the structured literacy sample schedule what i want to point out is again that the need for phonemic awareness is embedded into the literacy sample i'm sorry sample schedule again the grade level standards that are in need of essential uh support so again as you're looking at the actual grade level standards you're also looking at these standards that are in need of essential support that the idea we have said this is what kids at this grade level are struggling in one of the things that is important to understand in any school

182setting especially in urban setting is the need to be in intentional about general and content specific so i'll give you a quick example if i teach you the words house dog book and cat that's that's general vocabulary when i move to words like emerge frightened or navigate that's level two then when i go to words like photosynthesis or acute or biotic that's content specific level three so think about the kids that we have in our community or in our homes what kind of vocabulary do you think they're exposed to and what kind of vocabulary are they expected to know and use at school so that is why it's important to always embed targeted vocabulary not only in literacy blocks but you'll see also in our math blocks there's math content specific vocabulary that is also

183a reason why some of the kids are failing studies have shown that the kids do not fail exams because they don't know the content they don't know the vocabulary that goes with the content and that is what's happening in many cases okay as my secondary colleagues talked about it's important for us to have critical questions when we have our adult conversations about the data what do we expect students to learn how will we know when students are learning how we respond and adjust when students don't learn so that goes back to the formative assessments that dr rausch talked about and how we respond if students already know it how do we what do we do with kids who already know this stuff and we don't want to bore them so how do we uh accelerate

184learning and um challenge them as well and again along with uh dr ships and dr um roush's um they mentioned tutoring we are also at the elementary level as well going to be offering before and after tutoring for our students all right trustees are there any questions for mr salinas madam president trustee murphy i'm going to go back to the other one i asked about sixth grade department departmentalization science and social study books can i make the assumption you moved them from the middle schools and gave them to them so because i i know i said this before but i'll say it again you have no social studies or science time in there and i'd be really sad if we're not giving social studies and science to at least the sixth graders and getting that

185instruction in with them even though you moved them into the elementaries right so last time i was here you asked about that and those schedules at the sixth grade level have been modified to include science block time and also social studies time because we are departmentalized what i will say is that we are working as a team to make sure that all of the textbooks that are across the district that are getting into the elementary schools right now we only have math and ela as a as textbooks that we actually charge fees for and i believe this is a science year adoption this year so this year is the year where we're going to move forward and then social studies is next all of that is coming but you're right there are materials that we

186need to get into the hands and we're working on a process to get them from buildings that are not being used into the um the elementary schools the other thing is that one of the things that's new and i'm not sure if you're aware it's something called the the learning lab the learning lab is a site that all educators should go to and i personally just learned it through working with dr raj you can go in and click any content question you want and lesson plans will come up um vocabulary lessons will come out formative assessments will come up so that is also another resource that teachers have but we are getting um those textbooks into the hands of those teachers so at the sixth grade level trustee murphy they the blocks are included good

187um again you and i are just going to disagree on this point our teachers should not have to go to an outside source to get less plans on science and social studies we should be providing them with books because those books are supposed to be aligned with the standards so if i go outside and you write there's tons of resources out there but i don't know if that aligns with the standards for my particular grade level i don't but if you give me a book i know within that book and i agree with you on the reading block time you could be putting the science and the social studies into that reading block time but they still need the books i agree um because that brings me back to we're supposed to have an annie

188burns hicks lesson plan this year that's part of social studies and obviously there's no indiana history books yet with her in it but how we're going to get that into the hands of our teachers and what grade levels are we going to teach that and now just the last one's just a comment so we're doing a lot of stuff to reshape elementary and i heard you when you talked about kids at the different levels so i'm hoping this year as you think about more departmentalization you're still looking at looping multi-age and all the rest of that stuff and i'm done for the evening and there's lots of research that looping actually works yep those are great questions thank you madam president trustee blake i just want to have one observation as uh trustee murphy has

189indicated resource is critical then our teachers have a resource available to them within the district and secondly uh i guess the reason i sort of seemed frantic is because it's just been brought to my attention i don't know if you all know that prisons are built on third grade data from school districts and currently we are building a 4200 bed prison in westfield indiana and i know someone that's sitting on that board and she brought it to my attention and her question to them was well how do you know you're going to feel it and the folks guarantee them that that it'll be ready about three years it will be full to capacity so again we got to get busy educating our kids because i'd hate to think that we are preparing these kids for

190one of those 4 200 bed at that prison in westville indiana so we have to get busy and get about the business of educating our kids okay so that's my point agreed i guess that's why i get so crazy i know i understand there's there is data about elementary kids right and prison rape yeah absolutely right about that thank you [Music] all right are there other other questions from the board all right dr ship um if there's no objection if there's anybody in our audience that would like to go ahead and go i know we have one more presentation it's 8 30 and you guys have to be up early um if there's nobody here that objects to that run save yourself dr ship i can't wait to talk about fleet management all right well

191here it comes all right eric kurtz two minutes i gave him five oh you gave him five okay i want i want the nitty-gritty i want the data i want i want spreadsheets the whole nine yards what i wanted to share with you this evening is just some options on fleet management prior to my arrival here i think starting last december there was some evaluation of maybe enterprise entering into a leasing arena eric could you grab the mic just because i'm having trouble so all right thank you yes and uh so i've tried to take a look at some options we are still talking so we are still looking i'm still talking to enterprise but i'm not sure that that's the right way for for us to proceed so when i talk about our fleet

192i'm talking about our maintenance custodial technology vehicle service vans compact cars the things that our technicians use to get around the district i'm also including our school buses special purpose buses and some of the equipment that we use to fix fix our vehicles as we look at our fleet on the maintenance custodial technology side we have 39 vehicles that number really is a little bit inflated because my understanding is like five of those vehicles are out of service and not operational uh the last new vehicle that was purchased for that fleet was in 2019 and there was one new vehicle purchased in 19 1 and 18 1 and 17. 14 of our vehicles in that fleet are over 20 years old of that 25 are actually out of service and beyond economical repair so we

193really need to just dispose of them probably we'll do that in the auction that christine spoke about just so that we can get those off our books in the transportation fleet for moving our students safely to and from school between our buildings into programs we have 47 regular school buses that are 66 to 88 passenger capacity out of those 47 two are actually out of service and then we have 10 activity mini buses as we look at trying to keep up with and keep that fleet safe and operational and reliable i've identified really four options that we have the enterprise fleet management program that was under evaluation is one just buy with cash as we go as another the program that i'm probably going to encourage us to really use is the hoosier equipment lease

194program and then there's some other options of borrowing money and interest rates um you know the enterprise program [Music] they have a pretty in-depth uh presentation it gets us newer vehicles we get the latest safety equipment the latest fuel efficiency although uh enterprise holds the title or ownership of the vehicles we don't they have a pretty good methodology for looking at life cycle management they've got a slide that kind of explains it well the biggest concern i have is we need some vehicles now as we move into the winter and they're telling me that if we order immediately it's probably a one-year wait time [Music] i'd like to be a little bit more in control of our destiny of having vehicles for snow plows and those kind of things um the enterprise pitch really relies

195on taking like the pickup trucks and cycling them out of the system after three or four years of ownership it's ridiculous yeah you know they their their position really is is that they have a lot of value still and that we get the benefit of our government discount selling them and putting that money back towards the fleet i don't know if i buy that but that's their presentation and really what i think is the nexus of of what they've been proposing to the school city of hammond what i buying cash is probably the best approach the problem that i have with that right now is looking at the cash flow impacts so what i've looked at is using the hoosier equipment lease program which is administered by the indiana bond bank we own the vehicles

196we're able to spread some acquisition costs over four or five years probably borrowing one and three quarters to two million dollars towards our vehicles several you know several hundred thousand of that is already committed to be spent looking at an interest rate of probably around three percent maybe three and a half and infuse some newer and reliable vehicles into our fleet what's already on order we have seven seven school buses that are on order uh that are expected for delivery in november a lot of that funding is tied to some rebates with the volkswagen settlement money and some other federal grants to encourage alternative fuel vehicles my concern with that is it takes about four months to get those rebates back from from my experience and working with that program so that's just under a

197million dollars that that we are going to owe very soon in buses then we had we had ordered seven special purpose mini buses but the manufacturer canceled that order on us at the end of july and the price has gone from about eighty two thousand dollars per minibus to a hundred thousand so there's been some significant uh increases in vehicle costs and then the plan is also to buy three of those special purpose activity buses white versions using some of our federal our special ed funding because we need some more resources to move our special education students around as we move into the fleet or the maintenance side of it we've already initiated a refurbishment of one of our lifts and that's about sixty five thousand dollars and then we need a replacement bus lift

198of a hundred and eighty five thousand so those bids have been received and they're starting to move forward and that's just a pretty big financial hit you know this is an investment that that will benefit school city for 10 to 15 years lifts that we're replacing or refurbishing are already like 20 years old so it is a long-term investment and allows our mechanics to repair our vehicles and our buses as we look at the the vehicular fleet that i said is you know getting pre-aged looking at six to eight vehicles over the next 12 months my concern with those is the availability of inventory uh the price escalation that we've seen and we really need to be able to buy on the governmental pricing or qpa's quantity purchase agreements so we don't get taken advantage

199of by the dealership and been able to successfully do that in the district i came from but you know the vehicle marketplace has been rapidly changing next steps you know continue to explore the options my intent is to prepare an application for the hoosier equipment lease program so i can lock in and know what the interest rates are ultimately if that's a program we want to proceed with there's some board action that would need to be taken to approve those leases but the application does not bind us to anything we'd want to do a reimbursement resolution because we'd be spending some sizable money on those lifts and possibly the bus arrival at the end or in november that i'd want to use these funds for so that we don't cause ourselves too much of a

200cash flow problem we do have a planned auction the initial one is primarily around food food service that we're looking at the 21st that'll be on the next board meeting agenda for board action to approve that at that we're going to get rid of obsolete and old assets that aren't used or useful primarily food service but i want to get rid of those inoperable vehicles that we have because there's no reason to have them sitting in our parking lot we have really already stripped off parts that are useful to keeping our other vehicles running so that's that's really where we're at on the hoosier equipment lease program i would be looking at spreading though that amortization over a five-year period and you know hopefully we get an interest rate under three and a half percent

201and my primary reason is so that we aren't having all these cash flow hits at the same time uh typically in the operations fund and while we wait for the reimbursements and then as the reimbursement or rebates come that we're getting then we'd use those to acquire acquire the minibuses that we had previously ordered but the order was cancelled so that's i didn't want this to be the for i didn't want the first time that you hear about this to be at the meeting where i'm asking you to approve uh the engagement of that hoosier equipment lease program madam president trustee murphy i really didn't like enterprises they they talked for a very long time i totally agree with you replacing our vehicles every five years in a blue-collar town that's not gonna go over

202well at all um you inherited this okay so what i'm gonna say next is no reflection on you i'm extremely frustrated to know we haven't bought a vehicle since 19. um we had in the budget money to replace one or two of these every single year and we shouldn't be in this position right now so the fact that we're in i'm really unhappy so that's not about you that's about what's happened in the past i don't have a problem with the help but we still have to pay it back it is it is a loan in loans right and we don't have a lot of room in the budget especially if we don't win a referendum in 2024 we're not going to be able to pay this back so that's my problem with getting a

203whole bunch of vehicles now because we need a lot of things and if we should just i like replacing a couple vehicles as a year as we had in the budget but for some reason that money went to other things so i will go and see your presentation or the contract when it comes and i will send my comments at that time but my worries are being able to repay this loan in the future all right are there other comments or questions just one other comment trustee blake king thank you please i recall us purchasing more than one vehicle since i've been on this board so please um research because i remember we got a ton of brand new ones buses remember man we purchased them so there may have been there's been some buses

204i think that were purchased in i'm talking the maintenance the maintenance staff lead the i.t fleet okay well that's different we'll break it down what you're talking about be more descriptive we do buy usa don't we excuse me we get everything from within the united states we purchase everything within the united states yeah i all the vehicles that i've seen in the fleet are american auto manufacturers however most of them have significant components that are made in mexico or canada okay but yeah please that vehicle purchase i know since i've been on this board i've approved a fleet of buses so please um and one other thing when you say enterprise is that a company or is that just a cause so the enterprise car rental oh right here they have um oh my god

205a leasing program that they do business that's the best governmental entities enterprise have we searched any other other than uh enterprise was already in play when i arrived here okay yeah it was it was um yeah but it was uh something we were exploring not anything that we did it was a fleet management proposal so and to your point that we hadn't purchased any i think the enterprise concept came up in it's kind of been you know continuing to percolate through 21 and 22. i just don't i think we've been in a little bit of paralysis and now we have you know i'm concerned about snow removal and being able to spread abrasives and salt and you know getting our hvac techs to buildings to fix things and it's it may become a problem all

206right are there any other questions or comments from the board on fleet management hearing none thank you so much for hanging with us i know it's been a long meeting uh dr ship that is the end for tonight all right um thank you everyone online that has uh stayed with us and our next board meeting is on tuesday at six o'clock all right thanks very much and have a great night everyone you