04212021 Board of Education Meeting

001yeah okay and we are live all right good all right good evening everybody we are gonna go ahead and start the meeting for tonight adequate notice has been given and as we always do we are gonna um start by saying the pledge of allegiance to sean's flag and his office 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 all right great it's good to see everybody i hope everyone's having a good week um and i apologize for the dogs barking but i can't mute myself so um sean i think we're going to start with um recognizing our own yes thanks amy so uh just as a reminder we incorporate recognizing our own as

002part of the board meetings as an opportunity to celebrate the great things that are happening within the district celebrate our students celebrate our staff celebrate our community members and tonight we are going to take some time to celebrate the production staff and some student representatives from the wydown theater company and um i just want to say that a few weeks ago i had the opportunity to see our well let me start like this you know in the middle of a pandemic one of the things that people might think is that we're going to have to um maybe cancel our performances or um we won't be able to have anything in terms of the theater and what our staff has done is thought about how can we pivot and be creative about what we can do

003so students have the opportunity to perform to be part of a production crew to be able to be creative we saw that at the high school when our students did some some amazing performance in shaw park and then a couple weeks ago i had the opportunity on a set on a sunday afternoon at my own home i was able to see the white hound theater company put on the performance of moana junior and um it like blew me out of the water and thought it was important for us to bring the um production staff and this few student representatives to recognize them because it was an opportunity to think differently and to reach a different type of different audience and so what i want to do is recognize first the production staff which is basically

004our staff our teachers who collaboratively work across different disciplines to support the the theater program and so we sh we have brian engelmeyer i don't know if he's on there where he is he's waving and then we have um he's the director and then we had uh nick irvin who is the music director we have carla miller who is the costume director and then we have ed kastner who is technical director and so i didn't know if any of you just wanted to have a you know anything you wanted to share with the board in terms of just some things that you had to do in terms of pivoting in this experience uh thank you dr daugherty and the school district of clayton and the community of clayton for having us here this evening and

005uh team if you want to say anything please do as well so this was you know as for everything it was certainly an interesting year and we went through many conversations throughout the fall how are we still gonna make theater happen and how are we gonna have a theatrical opportunity for our students and so um as things change and through many conversations uh the publishers we work with provided us an opportunity of an online streaming service the same one that clayton high school utilized and so uh many of you know we normally do a play in the fall and then we do a musical in the spring and so this year we have are doing everything here currently this semester and we are currently set to film our production of our play next week actually

006so we have our season going so we currently have students rehearsing every day working in the tech crew and the costume crew to make that happen so um i'll let the other team members if they would like to say anything and then also our student representatives here we have a student from each of the three areas for our musical we have uh lucy puerto she worked on the technical crew we have lily schomberg she was an actor and then we have olivia mutis who was with our costume crew for moana i guess i would ask the students like what what is it what did it mean for you to be a part of this theater production uh well for me emmett uh being part of this family and working hard and um combining our skills

007and efforts to create this beautiful thing called theater and be able to share it with others thank you so much i really appreciate that olivia lucy or lily do you have anything to add yeah for me it was a lot of just like having fun and having a new experience with a bunch of new people that i didn't i didn't really know and it was nice to meet so many new people and be able to do all these things yeah for me um it's a really nice way to express yourself and to meet new people so it was just really enjoyable one of the things that i have heard from for other students saying that being part of the theater program is an opportunity to start making connections with other people and and and really

008finding your niche within the school and so i just uh really appreciate that our staff creates that for our students in providing them an experience that they'll remember beyond their years at y down so any other uh any anybody else from the staff want to share anything before we bring this recognition to a close so on behalf of the board of education and the administration we would really like to say thank you to the wyodon theatre company for all that you do to make wonderful experiences for our students opportunities for them to be creative to express themselves to build to learn about technology so much of an integration of skills and in our students who are part of the program we want to say thank you for taking risk and uh thinking about ways that

009you can be expressive and learn and make connections with other uh other other peers so we are glad to have you here tonight and want to say thank you yeah very much thank you guys um to this to the staff and to the kids to lily lucy and olivia thank you for taking time out of your nights to be here with us tonight we really appreciate it and i know we've got a first class extraordinary theater program at clayton so we're we're super proud of it and um again thank you guys for being here tonight thank you so you guys are welcome to stay and hear the rest of the meeting or you are welcome to jump off it's it's i'll leave that decision up to you um and then uh sean i think we'll

010move on to the superintendent communications okay so tonight i want to just talk about a few different things as part of my update uh i want to talk about ways that we've been able to be responsive to the needs of our communities and i want to talk a little bit about our vaccines update give you a follow-up about our pupil expenditure talk to you a little bit about clayton education foundation um some things that we're doing collectively with superintendents across the region in terms of learning uh and then give you a couple updates about strategic plan and then what's happening tonight as part of our uh meeting so i want to start by just looking at the data and i share this data with you each time and i think it's important and we have

011had another transition of having more more students together in our building starting in the fourth quarter and we have continued to implement the right risk mitigation measures and we are seeing that those are working and so we are still seeing a very very very low rate in terms of transmission um little to none within our schools this makes us feel really confident about our plans for having in-person learning for the beginning of next school year and um it also makes us feel more comfortable about having our board meetings in person and so we are going to be starting in may to have in-person board meetings with the board and the administrators not yet with the whole public um but it is a step in the right direction so just wanted to share that data with

012you again when i think about being responsive over the last um couple days um you know many of us have heard around i heard a lot around the the verdict of derek chovin and so it was really important us as a school district that we have a very strong curriculum but we also know sometimes that you know outside uh in current events they influence the conversations that we have but they also um also influence how students are feeling and so we as a district i just feel like it's really important to note that you know knowing that we would have students who um not knowing what the verdict was going to be that we might have some students that might be feeling uneasy it might ignite some pain that many people felt when george floyd

013died and so we needed to be responsive in terms of uh having our administrators putting out resources for our staff making sure we're providing brave safe spaces for students to be and staff to be able to go to if needed and then just making sure we're checking in and so i just i'm really proud of our district you know no matter what we always are trying to be as responsive as possible and making sure that we're being there and continuing to be there for our students i also wanted to provide an update around our vaccines and so today was a very important day for us because uh this was the day that uh we had staff receiving their second dose of the the cobia 19 back the the vaccine for cobin 19. and uh we

014had a clinic that was half that happened at the end of march this is the second clinic and we really were able to capitalize on the second clinic because we are we then started the vaccination of students so we had students that were getting vaccinated today who were who are eligible so those who are 16 and above and they were able to get their uh the pfizer the first dose of the pfizer vaccine we turned stupor um gymnasium into a clinic and so went over there today and seemed like things were just running like clockwork we were also able to reach out and to open the um vaccinations open for universities school district of university city students to be able to come over and get vaccinated as well today so this has felt very great

015about um the the organization and now we're starting to have some initial conversations about if the eligibility became open for uh students who are 12 to 15 what does that look like for us and so i appreciate as a district we're working to be proactive to think about ways that we can um support our students and staff by providing this type of service to them also one just to give you a follow-up is that part of our conversation last week when we were talking about the salary schedule there were some questions that got brought up as part of the per-pupil expenditure and and i think that's a really important question and so in may we're bringing the budget forward for um for an initial review and then we're also going to be bringing it forward

016for um a final approval in june and as part of that we're going to do a little bit more in-depth uh conversation and overview about what that means with the per-pupil expenditure and what that actually looks like and what makes what it what it entails and so i wanted just to do as a follow-up from that conversation last week and let you know that we are going to incorporate that into some of our work in may and end up being part of our uh approval for the june budget of the budget in june i also wanted to share with you that the um we are so fortunate to have the clayton education foundation who supports innovation within our school district and thinking about ways that they can provide funding for our innovative projects that we

017can't build into our budget and so on april 9th we had the opportunity to go around to our school district and give our teachers who wrote who who wrote grants through the education foundation and um who were selected for funding and so i think we gave over forty thousand dollars worth of grants on that day stu and and they were all connected to our strategic plan so we had um students that classrooms are going to be getting some materials that are going to be connected to our work around equity we had so a classroom that's going to start doing podcasting with the students as an opportunity for students to discuss the content that they're learning in their social studies class we're getting a new literacy garden being put in place within our schools this is

018just um it's amazing that we have the support within the district and the foundation is just been a catalyst for us to try new things and and and we really truly appreciate their support i wanted to update the board too is that i have been participating as well as dr nisha patel in a nine week uh study around equity with the superintendents around the region and we've been focusing on the book called belonging through a culture of dignity and uh we have been able to have some really great conversations across the region around what equity means what does dignity mean within the schools and making sure that students have a true sense of belonging and so i i've been very uh it's been very exciting to be part of this work because we believe we

019believe that that collective learning could also result in collective impact and so i think it's really great to say that in st louis county and even beyond st louis county we have superintendents coming together to make sure that they're prioritizing their own learning around equity inclusion within the schools tonight we're going to have an opportunity to start our update around our strategic plan and so our strategic plan has many facets to it and tonight we're going to be focusing on that first goal which is a place for everyone which is really centered around a sense of belonging and making sure students feel like they are part of something bigger than just themselves and the series is going to go for the next three board meetings and we're going to cover one goal at a time

020and i really want to say thank you to our staff who's been putting these comprehensive reports together and tonight is not going to be about every single detail that you you you um saw in that report that we provided you but it is to give you like the broad strokes so that way you have an idea and our public has an idea about what we are doing and how is it having impact and then how is the data that we're collecting informing us how we're moving and moving forward in the future the other presentation that we will have tonight is around our with our special school district staff and so our we have a few representatives from special school district are going to give an overview about some of the work that special is doing

021to change their leadership model but also thinking about some of the initiatives that they're working on that are aligned with what we're doing as a school district so um so we'll hear from them and then finally i'm continuing to meet with dr patel and met with her today got to see her today she was in the district and um this has been such a priority for me in terms of being able to support dr patel's in her transition to being the new superintendent and so we are uh i i will just share that we're going to continue to provide um updates uh to the board but it's i i feel so confident about dr patel and her and her leadership and and feel so excited about what's next for the district and in my interactions

022with her so and i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to caitlyn who is going to provide an update from the student perspective good evening everyone so actually when i was touching base with the district advisory council to see what i should include in this update we realized that there weren't too many school related events that were happening out of the ordinary and we realized that that's probably actually a good thing because that shows that students are having a sense of normalcy and consistency in their schedules so on that note there's been quite a few school events happening now that would happen in a regular school year track meets and spring sports in general are happening and they are allowing for some spectators so i would encourage community members to come out and

023support clayton high school and clayton school district athletes mischa speech and debate state starts tomorrow and that's going to go through the weekend band is recording three songs for festival and the student-run musical so on the side of theater we just heard from y down for clayton high school their srm is streaming in the next three weeks and they're going to be performing the musical be more chill and also something pretty cool that's happening is that orchestra is planning to have a concert in the quad as for some core class subjects some teachers are hosting english conferences in person and all of these different events and normal events that would happen in a school year that are happening now have led to students saying that they feel a lot more motivated and excited to go

024to school so specific to my position we also released applications for sophomores to be the student representative next year and those applications are due friday so i'm excited to introduce who's going to be in my place next year and that will be happening pretty soon thank you caitlyn does anybody have any questions for caitlyn or dr dougherty regarding um [Music] the the updates okay great sean how many kids do we know how many kids we got vaccinated today i don't know the total number i know that um there was i thought 170 students that were signed up i thought and then i'm not sure exactly how many on from university city great very good thank you so i think we are then moving on to 5.01 which is policy kk um the first reading so

025for that we have robin and so robin's going to just give a brief overview and then um see if you had any questions good evening everyone tonight is the first reading for policy kkk related to visitors to district property and events and the major changes to this new release of this policy is related to student visitation more specifically um if parents want to access children during the school day related to a custody dispute or some other type of parenting plan resolution that they are working through it also more clearly outlines expectations around classroom observations service providers and then prohibited items on campus to better acknowledge the changes in possession laws related to medical marijuana so the additional changes that msba is recommending related to student visitation the outside service providers and the classroom observations those

026changes are not required by law but are changes that they are recommending based on the support that they provide to school districts the current version that i'm presenting this evening has also been shared with our district council as well as some of our parents in the community for feedback excellent so i am going to just go around and uh by the way that people appear on my screen and see if anybody has any questions on this policy uh david uh no thank you jason you gotta mute yourself yeah yeah i just have a question just um so in the beginning of the in the beginning of reading this policy it just kind of talks about the general purpose of just a parent coming to school am i correct about that robin yes it's about accessing

027their student during the school day so just in general and then so it just kind of starts off with that information then kind of goes into about you know in the um the superintendent having um the autonomy to to to tell the the parent no or whomever no that we don't want you to we will you know we don't it can be disruptive right so so just as it starts off and how it reads it goes into that and starts to talk about it being something being disruptive and then the superintendent having the autonomy to make that decision is there like a standard operating procedure that um that's there to make that decision or is it just based on the gut feeling is it just based on discretion i will say in general terms the

028disruption to the environment would be a violation anything any behaviors that would be a violation or disruption to orderly school operation so perhaps a parent has um on more than one occasion become belligerent on campus and has used profanity towards students or staff that would sometimes be grounds for prohibiting a parent from accessing their student on district property other times if people appear to be under the influence and also acting belligerently and would be in violation or disrupt be disrupted to orderly school operations that might be another scenario where they would be prohibited from campus so we're really looking at how is that behavior impacting or not impacting the school's ability to educate the children in the building gotcha yeah i think i got i think honestly i understood that but i was just trying

029to make sure that it wasn't just like you know if a parent comes and someone just feels like that could be disruptive and then just make a decision not to uh to you know to prevent that parent from seeing their child for whatever reason could be dicey is what i'm trying to say because it's just kind of based on discretion kind of a gut feeling so so minus all the the thing that the kind of extreme things you just kind of mentioned is what i was talking about you know it just started it just kind of starts off and starts reading into all right then the superintendent has the the um the ability to to re to just to tell them the parent knows what i'm trying to say does that make sense what i'm

030saying i feel like i'm talking to yes i guess um as a clarifying question do you have a suggested change to the language in response to that yeah yeah only if someone else sees it the way i'm saying i guess what i'm asking for is am i am i reading it incorrectly does anyone kind of see it that it could go the way i'm reading it and if there is is there a discussion behind it from anyone in the board so are you jason are you saying that you feel like it's not um you you would like to see more specificity or uh around i i i i you may be talking about the first sentence where it says the district understands that parents guardians sometimes need to briefly communicate with a student during the

031school day that sentence yeah it just it just starts it just kind of goes into you know you welcome it you welcome the you know parents and willing to see their kids but then but then it just talks about you know immediately just starts talking about the superintendent or whomever uh principal has a discretion to say we don't you know we think it could be a disrupt eruption i mean this is before it gets to all the things that you explain robin that i like you know someone being belligerent someone being intoxicated those things yeah i'm saying that gut feeling could be dicey i think i understand what you're saying jason that it's so subjective that you don't want parents to be judged before anything happens right right exactly exactly so just so hey does

032anyone see what i'm talking about yes okay i see right now and robin what can we do to make that language much more clear and tight can i can i ask another couple questions that might like feed into that because i'm i'm still trying to get my my head around it too which i'm sorry amy for like jumping out of order but um one thing that i was gonna ask is that the sort of explanation references the fact that um msba revised this policy in response to i think if i'm reading this right our district's concerns about parents or guardians requesting access by service providers to to kids while they're at school which um is a little bit different than the normal i mean i think the normal like circumstance when we see policy revisions

033from msba which provides us this this service that updates makes changes when there's updates to different statutes or or whatever so it sounds like this is more responding to a particular issue that we as a district were having it and i want to make sure that that's that's right um you know before i kind of you know get into some of this uncertainty that i that i do understand i think so here the um the changes in yellow are the ones that msba suggested um the the last sentence of the classroom observations which is the same or very similar to the last sentence in the service provider section was a sentence that i worked with our legal counsel on to add in order to better account for district expectations around outside service providers that made

034me to work with students during the school day but are not employed by the school district and then the rest of the changes the changes in yellow are msba's response to districts statewide not just to the school district of clayton as it relates to visitors okay thank you for for clarifying that so so this is this is not just something that they're recommending as a change for us but they're right exactly statewide um again the parts that are in the beige pink color those last that last sentence of those two sections i referenced that is a piece that we added for clayton okay thank you for for that and and with that um with that context which i'm sorry if that was more obvious than than i was realizing but um i do see some

035of the other um i mean concerns about where there's some potential uh discretionary ambiguity but like i was just trying to get the overall picture so hey great jason so jason and gary i hear what you're saying let me get i'm just gonna keep going around and then we're going to come back to we'll come back to your concerns and figure out what how we're going to address it um kim do you have anything unmute yourself sorry about that um yeah i just wanted to ask about the um kind of the zero tolerance policy with respect to medical marijuana i mean i think that the american academy of pediatrics actually um you know is is pretty clear on where they stand on this and although in general they are against medical marijuana for children they

036do support it for children with life-limiting or severely debilitating conditions including some forms of epilepsy and things like chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and so i don't know if we want to maybe amend that language to account for you know students that could be facing medical challenges with which that is a potential option if their doctors recommend it got it thank you i will um reach back out to our district council about adjusting that language for the medical piece to bring it into alignment the other policies it's naming is escaping me right now but it was one that we talked about just a few months ago okay thank you um back to jason's um feedback about that one paragraph about the superintendent um discretion you know rereading it in its context i think um i'm wondering

037if maybe striking kind of like the first half of that list and just bringing it directly to the um kind of just flip-flopping the sentence a little bit but talking more specifically about you know if there is a custody or visitation issue going on with the family that then we would exercise some discretion around prohibiting the parent or the adult from visiting as opposed to going through that whole list because i feel like maybe that will help it put it in better context because you're right later in the policy we're talking about more disruptive behavior and now that i'm rereading this section it's really speaking more toward families who are going through a very complex time and unfortunately in those times the school setting often can be stuck in the middle of really complex um

038communications with the different caregivers and so maybe if i kind of just reorder some of the parts of that paragraph um it will kind of get to that clarity so it doesn't feel so subjective yeah i think that makes sense i think that yeah because it just kind of completes the the two things and we want to make sure it's separated so yeah that makes sense yeah absolutely great joe i don't have anything else to add i think good points so far caitlin and no other questions for me stacy thanks um yeah robin in the pair that small paragraph that's titled service providers so um it says you know unless they're working with students in conjunction with the district's student health services program um i assume you know special school district staff falls into that

039right well we have an agreement with special school districts so that is where they are or pursuant to an agreement with the district okay so they're included that way yes okay the and um let me see so the reference to the district student health services program at times we work with outside organizations to do vision and hearing screenings and then even today you know like we worked with others around the vaccination clinic where people are accessing their student during the school day but aren't necessarily employees of the district but are associated with health services okay and also as robin mentioned she had reviewed this policy with some other groups prior to this which i was a part of we looked at a couple pieces of this in a package steering committee meeting and so i

040just wanted to pass on in my little robin broke us up into sub you know little subgroups and in my group um there was some discussion about using the word disruptive that is it's so strong instead of maybe just saying like interference or interferes with instruction um i just wanted to share that as feedback from you know prior discussion i'd had about this palette particularly under the classroom observation section because that's you know the only piece you had us look at there robin but but disruptive i don't know if you see a difference but i just wanted to pass that on because that was something we discussed in you know in another group okay thank you stacy and then gary do you are you done or do you have more no i appreciate the clarification

041and um the just the thoughtful input from everyone and yeah this is great i appreciate it a lot and yeah okay great so then just to summarize i think robin we're gonna um try and clarify um the ambiguities in that third paragraph down by swapping the sentences around and trying to make it a little less subjective and then also you're going to um look at look into that medical marijuana section yes and then uh reword uh disruptions for classroom observations and service providers okay great very good okay well if there's nothing else then i think we are going to move on to our first information item which is a presentation from the special school district sean are we going to uh i'm just waiting for them to oh okay all right there it is their

042audio is hooking up all right so as i mentioned earlier we are going to get an update from some uh from some of the members of our special school district staff that are going to provide you an update about what's happening within um our partner district and um and how it aligns with some of the work that we're doing in our district and so we're very fortunate to have melissa logan here who is currently our area coordinator and then we also have d'andrea player who is our current director and so um i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to them and they are going to give us an update so what do you need for the update do you need to have are you able to share your screen or not i do

043have a powerpoint and i believe i am able to share my screen okay let's see here are you all able to see my screen the plant yes great all right so good evening board president reuben board of education dr daugherty and the school district of communi uh school district of clayton community i'm deandrea player i am the director of special education for clayton and along with me is melissa logan our area coordinator for clayton we thank you for this opportunity to share with you this evening and overview of special education across st louis county how ssd has focused on inequities special education data and trends specific to the school district of clayton partner district initiatives budget goals and how we plan to continue to strengthen our partnership i wanted to share with you our 14

044categories of special education as defined by idea you will see all 14 listed and the young child with the developmental delay number 14 is kind of that umbrella disability area for students at the early childhood age and then once they get to school age and kindergarten we would look for a school age disability under one of the 13 categories listed um through the special education process students go through at the school team level interventions through their school a lot of times that goes through the care teams and through student support groups where they identify interventions for students and they take the data on the interventions that they are working with the student on and then if they need to do a referral because the student is not making progress then they go through the referral

045process and then that could lead to a an identification and eligibility for a school-age disability area where the student could have an iep and then we would implement that iep in every three years and a re-evaluation would occur unless we need to look at it yearly or every two depending on programming purposes we have outlined a few of our service delivery models the first area is kind of our least restrictive one and that's class within a class or also known as a co-taught classroom ct classes that happen at the middle school and the high school level at the elementary we do some push in into the general education setting with the special education teacher and the general education teacher we also have services where students are coming into the resource room for their um goals

046to work on the services through that setting and then some students receive a majority of their education in the self-contained classroom for their core classes we also offer a variety of related services to students such as language therapy music therapy occupational therapy and all those take place at the schools we also have supplementary aids and services for students so that's where we may consult with the gen ed teacher or the special education team on some services and aids to support the student next we're going to go into our focus of equity and special education that special school district has been working on so we start with our equity core value where every student regardless of learning ability our socioeconomic status deserves access to the services they need to succeed ssd conducted an internal study and

047as a result of the study ssd developed a framework to support all districts across the county some of the some of the areas considered in developing the framework were caseloads and service minutes identification least restrictive environments and proficiency rates another result of the study was how we understand inequities in schools for marginalized underserved and underrepresented groups some findings from the study are that there is a large variance in mobility rates across the county from 8.6 percent in rockwood to 43.5 in normandy poverty rates vary greatly across the county from 9 friend reduced lunch to 100 free friend reduced lunch there are less than five percent of families living in poverty in eight of the partner districts clayton being one of those elsewhere in the county eight partner districts have over 25 percent of families living

048in poverty and are one hundred percent free and reduced lunch those districts are listed here and bayless and rittner school districts have the largest proportion of english language learners for a district whereas kirkwood riverview gardens webster groves and jennings all have less than one percent of their population meeting that criteria what you see here is a distressed communities index index map leading national and local news publications rely on the dci to contextualize uneven economic conditions across the county nonprofit organizations and state and local governments utilize the dci to target services and programs supporting those distressed communities the index combines seven distinct and complementary socioeconomic indicators into a single score that depicts how economic well-being in a community compares to its peers and so you'll see here that clayton has a score of 37 which falls

049in the the tier of comfortable as a result of the information obtained in the study the district implemented a zero-based budgeting process to not only look at what everyone needs but also what additional needs are that require a focused uh approach again the district has developed a framework that supports our partner districts to ensure that staffing amongst other resources our supports and supports are adequate to meet the needs of our students some schools and programs will receive additional supports to address social social emotional learning literacy and numeracy and these will be programs or schools that have been identified by desi as disproportionate or targeted and then lastly few schools in addition to tier 1 and tier 2 supports will receive tier 3 supports to address high rates of identification of students with disabilities poor proficiency

050rates high mobility and trauma incidences with specific focus on marginalized groups of students so how will this happen the districts have created a system have put a system in place to ensure support is adequate and appropriate in order to ensure accountability at the building level the roles listed here will ensure access to curriculum and materials this team will also ensure implementation of tiered interventions and supports for everyone the team will also participate in the special education process and iep and evaluation meetings and the team will also ensure implementation of the iep as well as provision of faith and support the collection of data and sharing of data for our students our building leaders the building principal as well as the area coordinator will work together collaboratively will continue to work together collaboratively to evaluate staff

051ensure space allocation for students and families and they'll continue to work together to collaborate on professional development needs in order to ensure accountability um at the district level the uh administrative teams will ensure the same mission supports um however in addition to to those mentioned supports they will also support any technology needs the staff and families may have as well as support any transportation needs for our students uh today the following have been methods used to strengthen and guide our focus in delivering those quality services as well as improving our student achievement so our superintendents as dr daugherty mentioned i have regular ongoing meetings uh again uh miss melissa logan myself and dr wings meet uh weekly to focus on initiatives goals and collaborations strengthening relationships as well as participating on either any leadership team

052meetings our teaching and learning curriculum instruction departments i'll collaboratively work on professional development and instructional resource supports again we support staff and students within any technology needs that are needed and then lastly we have parent resources that are provided by our parent and education diversity awareness department they provide supports through consultation professional development leadership support problem solving etc along with our family and engagement department so next melissa will share data specific to clayton so here are the last four years the demographics of students with ieps in the districts broken down by male female and african-american students over the last four years we also have our enrollment for the last four years clayton's overall enrollment and then students with ieps in the district and incident rate and we're remaining between 10 and 11 of students that

053have ieps in the district we also have shown our transfers in and out of students coming into the district and leaving the district and or no longer needing special education services here is a chart that shows the primary area of special education eligibility for students and our highest area is other health impairment with 81 students currently and then we have also we have students with speech at 43 autism is at 40 learning disabilities at emotional disturbances at 19 and ycdd the young child with the developmental delay is at seven we have our staffing over the last five years and it's remained pretty constant over time a few changes have happened with enrollment but other ways we've remained steady with our um staff we also are showing um in years 2018 and 19 the proficient and

054advanced for all students in the district and then those with ieps um obviously in 2020 we don't have that data since the map was not taken to school closure we also are showing as we have mentioned before in the presentation we have looked at the strategic plan with a place for everyone to grow as learners and head in heart and comparing how we are also working on those goals within the district too within our budget goals we are using collaborative teaching tiered interventions we're also using charting the life course student-led ieps for self-improvement and advocacy and then adopt and implement with fidelity again we're looking at charting the life course that we've been implementing at the middle school and high school level and next year we will be doing it k through 12 with the

055students working on student-led ieps and social worker supports in addition to those mentioned initiatives we will continue to focus on individualized learning experiences and numeracy and literacy which will be supported through the proposed budget for next school year so to conclude we will continue to plan together our programming and key initiatives we will continue to plan and update you all regularly the board on initiatives and key topics and we will continue to collaborate to increase those opportunities for our students to participate in general education core academic courses we thank you for this opportunity to share this information with you all and are there any questions that you may have for us okay thank you uh melissa and d'andrea um are you okay so i guess i'm just gonna go around again by how i see

056you guys on my screen on your screen yeah can you stop sharing your screen thank you thank you excellent okay so joe do you have any questions um no questions just uh appreciate it melissa and d'andra that's i think very helpful for the board to understand better what ssd does so thanks for the presentation gary i don't think i have any specific questions either i'll just add that i appreciate the update to this and i've only been one year as just an alternate representative to the special school district oversight board but i feel like i learned a lot in that time and i just would encourage everyone to dig into more of what the special school district does and how it ties in with all of the services that we are providing here to our

057students and appreciate all of you and the work that you do and all of your colleagues as well excellent okay stacy thanks um yeah thank you for that presentation it was great and i just want you both and all of you to know how much we value our partnership with you and appreciate all you do for our kids so thank you so much and thank you for all the work you put into that presentation um it did occur to me when you were presenting though i did have one i just did have one question we were talking about the staffing um who determines the staffing needs is that the two of you and then um you have to get approval obviously you know through your budget and special school district or do you collaborate with

058clayton school district staff to determine what works best or what the staffing needs are so we absolutely collaborate um with the school district of clayton um again through those collaborative um meetings with the superintendents the superintendents uh with myself uh melissa logan as well as uh dr wings as well as the building leadership so we meet in a variety of ways to ensure that the supports that we provide in terms of staffing is adequate to meet the needs of our students so we do go out and do observations and have those collaborative conversations to ensure that we have the right staffing to support the needs in the districts thank you thank you for that sure okay thanks stacey caitlin no questions thank you so much for all of your work and for the thorough presentation

059kimberly i don't think i'm intelligent enough in this area to ask any meaningful questions so i i just want to thank you guys for the work that you're doing i guess one question i would have is um if i could think of any would be you know how often do we compare these services and the outcomes of the students within our special school district against other um special school districts that you know we um think are doing an outstanding job as i'm sure you guys are i mean what other metrics do we use you know kind of for internal improvement sure so again we do look at our comparative data across st louis county for one because as again again special school district supports the 22 school districts across the county so we look at

060that comparative data ssd also utilizes data from our neighboring school districts that we do not provide those services to as well as other closely similar districts in other states and so collectively we use a wide variety of data sources to ensure that we are providing the best services um that we can to our students to meet those unique needs that's great and when we benchmark ourselves against that especially with some of the out-of-state information i assume we feel pretty good about where we land in that benchmarking process we do and again special school district has a data and assessment department who collects all of that data and provides those findings to our school districts as well as our communities so that information is shared i believe annually to our communities regarding how we compare to

061other districts that's great thank you jason yeah i have a question um so just looking at the numbers clayton so so i noticed that it's uh 271 total students who have ieps correct and of that 271 there's uh 69 of of those folks i guess are black correct right so of the total population of african-american students in clayton um that number is a roughly what is that like 300 students sean it's 25 25 right 95 of the ieps are are african-american exactly and then so then so that's that's that's to me obviously stands out does that stay on to you as well deandrea yeah listen yes which is why we we included that data on that chart in terms of demographics okay so so that is interesting um and that can that can be on

062you know numerous reasons why it's so high because that's kind of high correct for some small amount of people percentage of uh students so um there there are um data sources that the state department desi uh utilizes to determine what we will identify as disproportionate and so this could be um i wouldn't say necessarily high but trending towards a higher percentage of our african-american students in clayton having ieps compared to non-african-american students but if you were to compare to other districts where the population is majority african-american students you may find that their percentages could be comparable in some districts gotcha and so so the flip side of this though is that it's like one percent of the population of total students minus the black students like 0.9 0.09 or something like that so my question

063is you know biases cut both ways that's how i looked at this um it's always been the thought and historically that african-american students have been placed in our ieps and special school district liberal classes it's always been an issue but there's also an issue of economics playing a part where like parents who have who have the discretionary income who don't look the part of someone who would be on this stigma about having an iep or something like that having to fight their way to get one and i'm just noticing that less than one percent of our total population of students who are not of color or or minus the african-american students have ieps so i guess one have we are we having problems um listening to parents who are who know that their kid needs

064additional support and teachers are teachers are educators in this case um use their biases and say well well you know they come from you i i don't think that your child really needs that i know it's happened personally to us um so and so i just want to know is that is that common mine's anecdotal but is that commonplace especially based on these numbers i don't know that i could say that's commonplace i can share with you how we are specifically addressing some of the discrepancies in the numbers in the school district of clayton myself again along with dr poole dr wings and miss logan we meet very regularly to discuss um again this data and some of these trends and those processes that are in the district to continue to support the needs of

065all of our students so we know what our data indicates and so we're ensuring that those processes um not only support our students with disabilities but also support our students who um are african-american because we we recognize that we have more students um um being identified in their particular category as ever african americans correct you also see that there's less way i mean this you know just so many less students that are that are um not not not black that have that have not been identified and again um less than one percent pretty low considering correct but that's so i don't know that i can respond to that particular question because we focus specifically on the entire group the entire population of students who um come through that carotene process the referral process that melissa

066mentioned to ensure that that process is is um is operated with fidelity um and then we go through their process to determine if the student meets the missouri eligibility criteria for one of those identified disabilities so if the question is ensuring that our process is is um conducted with fidelity that's something that we continue to work on to ensure that however when students are referred um i i can't speak to why some families refer and why some families do not i hope i'm answering your question if that's the question um not really about you just saying but but not really melissa what do you think am i being clear what i'm asking so i do have a question on your answer yeah what you want um because i mean all students go can go through

067the process for different reasons um and so like deandrea mentioned they all don't meet you know even if they have an outside eval that says there's some learning disabilities it doesn't mean they automatically meet you know eligibility with the state and or we may not find an educational impact either that the students are making progress in the classroom and they're on grade level for reading and math and so we look at all those areas too when they're going through the referral process all right so so then why is it so high for african americans and why are we so sure about them but less sure about this one percent less than one percent of students who have not been on who have been identified like i'm thinking it should be a little bit more than

068one percent of such a large population of students like we're we're 100 comfortable that we're identifying 69 african americans that of 300 but like way less one percent less than one percent of the entire of the rest of the population minus the african-americans i mean i just see there's something wrong with throne there so jason can i ask let me can i can i make sure i understand what your question is so yeah right what i'm hearing you saying is that you're concerned that there might be non-african-american kids that are falling through the cracks or that might not be getting the services um through ssd that they may need um based on you know based on those numbers that you're seeing that you're those are you you just you're so you're looking to make sure

069that yeah yeah i'm just making sure i mean we're 100 sure that those african-american kids they they need the services but but i mean we got less than one percent of the other students minus them the black students that are in that are getting services but there may be more and i'm saying sometimes there there's these biases because i'm because i live in clayton i have a little bit of money and i and you know my wife's a professor and i'm you know i'm just talking sh but i'm just saying like you know i'm you know i have this pedigree right these pedigrees and you're like well i don't think you really need it your son's fine he's all right and they're just really good at like hiding things i'm just saying like that could

070that be an issue are we letting these kids slide who actually also need it as well who need the support as well maybe it would help i feel like i'm just i'm talking and there's no dialogue and i don't want to always be the person just saying these things but i'm just looking for a dialogue i feel like i'm not making any sense well jason i think you bring up an important point and maybe uh melissa and d'andrea it would be helpful if you back up and clarify you know what is the identification process for ssd and how does um how does a child i mean is it the teacher that that reaches out to ssd is it the parent that reaches out to ssd how um and you know if you can maybe maybe

071talk a little bit about the identification process maybe we would better understand um how you guys are going about and capturing kids that uh would benefit from your services sure melissa you want to go back um to that slide that you reference regarding the referral process yes so yeah so within the referral process for students we look at a variety of areas that students can be referred for special education so they could come through um schools either have care teams or student support teams that they um bring students in to have areas that they have concerns about an area and then they the team will put through strategies as i mentioned and interventions it could be meeting with the reading specialist or with the math specialist and program for the students and if they're not

072seeing um progress within you know six to eight weeks then they will bring that student back to the care team and a lot of times the parents are part of the student support teams too so they're hearing things that are going on and the concerns and then through that process they would reach out either the teacher or the parent to the counselor in the building that would start kind of that referral packet to then go with our school site to see if they have enough information to say that we do have concerns and we suspect a potential disability and through that they would get consent from the family to say um we can move on with the identification of testing in different areas such as the iq could be looked at academic achievement areas we

073may be doing observations we may be doing speech samples just depends on the areas of concerns that the team has brought forth we also may be looking at fine motor or um overall motor abilities for pt too got it okay yeah so jason that makes sense i think it's more a conversation that we probably would need to be having with our internal with internal staff at clayton as it look as based on what melissa is saying it seems like that it's our people that might be doing the bulk of identifying kids that would benefit for the services that ssd provides um so it might be a conversa you know it might be a conversation that uh that you know we would need to understand i think better from from sean yeah i guess but i

074guess what i would add is that when i'm i think the number is more like if i'm thinking of it correctly i think the number is more like 10 of our population versus one percent and so um and i think what i hear jason saying and jason push back with like one there's two things like why is there an over representation of our african-american students and then two who else are we missing like is there students that we're missing due to biases that we might be having place and i think that that is a conversation that we're having not only just within our district but the actual region is doing i just was in a meeting last week with superintendents uh with dr keenan around over representation it's not about um it's about the number

075of students that are being referred but also the process that scope that's going the biases that could be in the process that are leading to students be identified i mean clayton doesn't identify the students special school district does so there's biases that could be in there but there's also biases in terms of us recommending certain students so i think that that's that's so it is more of like i think 10 of our you know who else are we missing the other and and i think that what we need to do is keep examining that and i think that's part of the conversations that you're having with our team and it's not only and it's a systems approach like our um they call it different things that diff care teams or student study teams should be

076monitoring the interventions to see whether or not they're responding to those interventions if they're not responding to the interventions you change it if they don't then you refer so i think that those are those are some things that we have to make sure that we're looking at the data to make these decisions but also being cognizant of um biases that people and explicitly might have about certain students and i think it can go in different ways it could be a biases around race but it could be biases about like well they may they have the resources to get those service you know so support so it's just those are those are things that i think jason's trying to say and i don't i don't know if that articulates jason no no sean i think you're

077spot on i mean you think i think you did a better job than i never particularly uh amy thank you for helping me out i mean you all did an excellent job of making me sound much more clear that's exactly what i'm saying i mean both both demographics are suffering if you think about it you know one is overly diagnosed when it's under diagnosed you know we're missing something in the in the process and and this kind of leads into i don't want to go into our next uh conversation piece or our next thing we'll talk about which is equity but this kind of leads into equity just you know the importance of how we identify children who need support i mean it's also a socio-economic issue here you know um that that goes into

078play as well like i mean you like i said before you have a pedigree of education you come from some middle class upper middle class i don't think you need that i think you'll be fine just you know work with them at home here are they you know so that's all i'm saying jason i think you're good let's just say yeah i mean i think you bring up a great point that the biases they can cut both ways and that we need we need to keep it on our radar and um and and make sure that we're capturing everybody that um could benefit from the ssd services so i i definitely appreciate you bringing that up yep no problem thanks guys appreciate it david you got anything no i don't thank you for your time

079tonight stacy did you have something else nope okay all right then um ladies melissa and deandrea thank you so much um for being here tonight we we appreciate the report we appreciate your collaboration with clayton and especially appreciate that um you guys have an eye on equity too um and that you're uh taking into consideration our strategic plan and and our school district's goals as you create your planks i know every every school district has has different goals and ssd works with all sorts of school districts so we we appreciate that um and look forward to our partnership thank you all um so we are going to move on to uh informational item 6.02 which is the update for our strategic plan tonight we're talking about uh goal one of goal three okay thank you

080whoever's driving awesome so um so tonight we're gonna have given up as as amy said we're gonna be giving an update around our strategic plan and um and we when we thought about this is that we thought it would be best to divide it up for each goal and do this series so that way we can um so we can make sure that we are um having enough time for each of the goals so i'm going to progress through so basically the overview is that we're going to be giving that and i would just want to reiterate and that when we were when we approached the strategic plan we really wanted to think about it differently and and think about how we're looking at what attributes we want our students to possess to be successful

081beyond their years thinking about that we are an excellent district in terms of our performance but thinking about how how can we be transformational in our approach and when i say that i want to make sure people understand that that we're not meaning that because we're focusing on different types of attributes it doesn't mean we're compromising our excellence in an academic achievement and making sure we have the highest quality teachers that is going to be something that's a given in everything that we do that's what we're in the business of doing but we also want to create something that's really learner centered something that's aspirational innovative equity focused that is going to help us think differently about our approaches we can take some risk in terms of ways we want to approach that and we

082have approached it with the the end in mind our profile the graduate meaning that we want to have our students to be able to possess these skills that we know that are critical for them to be successful beyond their years here so um our current goals are around you know we use that catchphrase a place for everyone to grow as learners and head in heart and tonight we're going to be focusing on goal one we will ensure all learners regardless of their identity feel safe and valued and that book that i was talking to you about earlier is really talking about there's research that shows the importance of students feeling like they belong and feeling like they feel like this they are in a safe space where they have the efficacy to succeed and to

083take risk so tonight we're gonna use um some of the data that we collected from panorama talk to you a little bit about um you know where we've been with goal one where we are where we are now with some of the data that we're collecting and then uh what progress we're making or what areas that we need to continue to focus on and then what's next so so um i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to robin thank you dr dougherty good evening everyone it's a pleasure to be with you this evening and to be the teammate who helps kick off our update on goal one for this strategic plan so for my section related to social emotional learning i'm going to be focusing primarily on four objectives that are part of

084goal one and the four objectives i'm going to be talking about are school is a safe place for all learners to thrive regardless of their identity or ability the district is a learning community where our learners feel connected to others clayton students have a strong sense of self-efficacy and that every student has someone within the school they consider a trusted adult or who they can go to when needed so the data i'm going to be talking about this evening to support those four objectives is going to focus on supportive relationships school climate sense of belonging and self-efficacy before i really get into the data that we collected this past spring i wanted to quickly give everyone just a little bit of history of the use of the panorama education surveys in the school district of

085clayton so back in spring of 2019 we administered the well-being and school environment surveys to grades three through five as a pilot and at that time we had a 72 response rate moving into that following school year in fall of 2019 we brought the surveys to scale and administered it uh from grades three through 12 and had a 95 response rate across that age group and then in spring 2020 we gave it again for grades three through 12. uh we had a 46 percent response rate and i also wanted to highlight that in spring 2020 we were in the middle of our administration window when we had to close the schools related to the covid 19 closure and then most recently we gave it in uh spring of 2021 again grades three through 12 where

086we had a 69 response rate before i start sharing more specific numbers i wanted to quickly also explain that panorama aggregates the data to generate an overall percentage of students who responded favorably on each topic so with every question that is asked related to a topic students are given between five and seven choices some of which are more positive than some of the other choices and they're constantly calculating what percentage of students gave a favorable response to each question and each topic has anywhere between three to seven questions related to it so we're going to go ahead and jump into the data by starting off talking about supportive relationships and supportive relationships was a topic that we added this school year because of the approval of our district strategic plan so this is the first

087set of data we have related to this topic and the questions really focused on the different types of relationships students have with adults and their friends both in school and out of school so in our initial collection a majority of our students reported very favorable responses at the secondary level more than 84 of students had favorable responses and at the elementary level it was 89 and both of those positive um response rates are excuse me favorable response rates uh put us in the 90th percentile for both sets of age groups um and so i thought uh one piece of data that stood out to me was for the mode of instruction so in this school year we were also able to disaggregate the data based on students mode of learning so basically our learn at

088home students and our responsive learning students as of the end of february and at the elementary school level our learn at home students actually responded very similarly to our responsive learning students as it related to supportive relationships we saw a little bit of a difference in grades 6 through 12 where there was a 4 difference between learn at home students who responded favorable compared to responsive learning students and there was some variance as well at the secondary level when disaggregated by race digging a little bit deeper into the supportive relationships with adults which is also connected to some of our objectives to goal one um more than 75 percent of students in grades three through 12 reported having a teacher or other adult from school they could count on to help them no matter what

089and then 85 of our students reported having a friend at school who they could count on to help them so at the secondary level they ask a very specific question for that age group that the elementary school students do not get asked which is how connected do you feel to the adults at your school in overall 38 of our secondary students who participated in the survey responded favorably to that question and the learn at home students and our responsive learning students had very similar results we did see some differences across special education for example more than 50 of our students who are identified for special ed services responded favorably compared to 36 percent of students who do not receive special ed services and then we also noticed a difference in um the responses at the

090secondary level to that question as it related to gender moving on uh we're going to talk a little bit about school climate school climate questions address perceptions of the overall social and learning climate of the school setting and in spring 2021 73 of elementary school students had favorable responses regarding school climate which put us in about the 70th percentile nationally within panorama's data set this is an increase from 2019 when 64 of our elementary school students shared favorable responses and that was in the 40th percentile um in addition um excuse me uh at the secondary level about 66 of our students had favorable responses related to school climate in 2021 and that fell in the 50th percentile um and that was a slight increase from fall 2019 where only 61 of our secondary students had

091favorable responses which put us in the 40th percentile so at both elementary and secondary level as it relates to school climate our percentages are improving and increasing based on national percentile again we did notice a difference across our mode of instruction at the secondary level we noticed that a lower percentage of our learn at home students responded favorably about school climate company when compared to their responsive learning counterparts um and slightly in contrast at the elementary school level a higher percentage a difference of five percent of learn at home students responded favorably about school climate compared to their responsive learning counterparts we also saw a little bit of a variance when the students were disaggregated by race at the secondary level when compared to all respondents so the next topic that we measured was sense

092of belonging and the sense of belonging questions explore how much students feel they are valued members of the school community which obviously is a huge part of goal one in our strategic plan and at the elementary school level nearly 75 percent of students responded favorably to questions about sense of belonging this past spring and that percentage put us in the 90th percentile nationally and is an increase from the 80th percentile from uh spring 2019 and at the secondary level uh our sense of belonging uh percentages have remained steady um at 50 since spring 2019 and this puts us in the 40th percentile nationally again we did see variance across mode of instruction with sense of belonging a slightly lower percentage of learning at home students responded very favorably compared to their uh responsive learning counterparts

093and also i wanted to highlight that in an earlier report uh related to our panorama data and sense of belonging we had seen in in a previous data set a difference in how our asian elementary school students were experiencing the teaching and learning environment and in this last data collection all the student groups had similar percentages of favorable responses so that difference um that we had observed earlier was not observed in this age group uh when disaggregated by race in this most recent data collection so again to summarize for sense of belonging our percentage favorable of responses excuse me at the elementary level is at 74 which puts us in the 90th percentile nationally and at the secondary level our 50 favorable rate uh put us at the 40th national percentile perhaps one of the

094most volatile um data sets that came out of the spring 2021 set is related to self-efficacy and the self-efficacy questions address how much students believe they can succeed in achieving academic outcomes and i'm not going to go through each one one by one because uh folks who are watching at home plus board members are able to access the details through the report that's posted online but we did see a much wider and distinct variance across the different student subgroups we saw differences in free reduced lunch we saw differences in mode of instruction in special education and gender and race related to self-efficacy and i think the main takeaway is that while um our percent favorable at the elementary level was 65 percent and places us in the 80th percentile and at the secondary level we

095have a 59 favorable um rating and that places us in the 60th national percentile um those results are not even across our student subgroups they vary depend on a student's i they vary excuse me depending on a student's identity and some of the other characteristics about them so i think in terms of next steps one thing we need to think about is taking a closer look at that self-efficacy data and really using that to help us develop our sel k-12 curriculum development which is part of goal three which we'll be talking about in a few weeks i think another easy next step is we really need to adjust and tweak a few of our routines to address the response rates at the secondary level more specifically i'd like to see that response rate at the

096secondary level to increase and be more consistent i also think there's reasons for us to be more intentional about reviewing the data with specialty groups um for some cross-disciplinary learning and uh for team goal setting more some examples would include working with deandrea and melissa and the rest of the ssd team to dig more deeply into the ssd data and using some of the data from our panorama collection to inform their plans um and then also even taking a closer look at our gifted students in our gifted program um some of you may have noticed that they had very high rates of self-efficacy as it related uh to students who are not currently identified as gifted and i have some wonderings about what are some things that all of our teams can learn from some

097of the changes we've made in that program and then lastly i think it's important that we ensure that our social emotional learning data is prominent in our school improvement plans i feel like we have enough data now over time to really start um having it be a fixture an important piece to all of our goal setting and planning at the building level and system level in order to keep moving forward i also think it's important to note that this data is very new we just closed the window a few weeks ago and so there's a lot more analysis that needs to happen and you'll see some of that analysis in future strategic plan updates so on that note i'd like to go ahead and introduce cameron poole our director of equity inclusion to talk a

098little bit more about professional learning as it relates to goal one thank you dr wayne and good evening everyone so um i kind of wanted to give a background kind of uh on the foundations of our professional learning and kind of the common vocabulary that we're developing around the district um as well as referencing our about presuppositions which has kind of guided our work and kind of the foundations of what we want to do in order to build a district equity curriculum so everything that we do from a vocab standpoint hinges on account of the five vocab terms that i have on the screen um you know our goal is to humanize each kid's experience um i think you know a lot of our issues that happen in regard to equity um happens you know

099because we fail to either you know have empathy for certain groups of students fail to acknowledge their perspective empathy and perspective were kind of the number one components needed in order to humanize the kids experience um and once we're able to humanize that experience we're able to expand our moral community in that moral community it's a community of people that we have that we naturally humanize and we see um you know the the perspective and the humanity within those people so within our rural community we're able to naturally do the good work you know that we want to do and then uh you know a reference that we come to use the summer is when a kid realizes that they're they're not being humans and that their perspective um it's not being acknowledged you know

100within our educational community um and they're not a part of our moral community so um kind of a sentence you know or a statement that kind of encompasses everything that we want to do is uh you know stating that it's important to understand and recognize all perspectives uh so that i am able to build empathy for my students this will enable me to avoid the soul murder of my students thus humanizing their experience i mean expanding my moral community so that's kind of the you know kind of the goal you know of what we want to accomplish and then also you know hijin are learning on our avar presuppositions and using our abar presuppositions as a reflective tool for us to use to gauge you know the level of effectiveness that we feel we have

101within the educational environment so some of the professional learning that we've been doing um you know around the goal um and specifically the goal in the strategic plan the district's commitment to becoming an equitable anti-bias anti-racist learning community is reflecting on the actions of our students teachers administrators and the board so uh you know one of the big things that i do that you know that is actually you know in my opinion i feel is very effective with you know working with a lot of our staff and teachers around the district is i have a lot of individual meetings and consultations and i kind of went back and looked at my calendar just to see how many individual meetings and consultations pop up a week and i would say approximately six and some weeks less

102some weeks a lot more it just kind of depends on what exactly is going on and pretty much what those individual meetings and consultations consist of are you know individual faculty member building administrator a parent or even district coordinators and administrators so reach out with uh you know just the different problems issues that they're grappling with um they may need a thinking partner on you know on some of those things or they may need someone to intervene up and help them kind of work step by step through different issues of equity that pop up um i think the good strength of our district that'll notice it is that a lot of our teachers and a lot of our sales staff are very self-reflective on their practices but i'm glad i've been able to insert myself

103as a staple of helping them do that so those individual meetings and consultations happen fairly often and i think you know they're getting to the point to where they're very effective um you know when we're really building a great you know cohesive working relationship and working toward equity for each student um going on that coming from a more abroad standpoint with our professional development and learning um by the end of the semester there will be at least 10 plus learning opportunities that have been offered whether it be from a building level a small group or a poc level as well as district-wide professional development as well so we've you know being been able to offer a plethora of events and opportunities in order to you know uh engage our faculty and staff and professional learning

104some of the highlighted opportunities that we've done you know that we've mentioned and all taken part of our our 14-day racial equity challenge was which was very successful i've been helping push the thinking and the thought process you know with our faculty and staff and doing that as a team from an accountability standpoint from our kick-up survey ratings in terms of you know our staff being able to take learning away from the professional opportunity and grow as a result of the professional opportunity um our 14 day racial equity challenge was at 99 approval rating you know for those who participated in the survey um i know for a fact that there's still cohorts and groups that are still engaging in learning to this day um you know even though the challenge ended a couple of

105months ago also um another uh professional development opportunity that we had that came up in march was uh taking ownership of equity which was part two um there's been a large cohort of teachers that have been working um you know through the taking ownership of equity series um our year three teachers um a group of our career implementation teachers um and our career review teachers as well our next professional learning opportunity um within that round takes place actually next week um and for part two we had a 94 approval rating from that as well and then those upcoming opportunities um actually uh taking ownership of equity part three which will be the last part of that series as i just mentioned um and then our a big a full district uh learning opportunity that we

106have or humanizing the profiles of our of our clinton community and this is a series that we want to continue each semester at some point so we have the opportunity to um interview and have conversations with multiple different stakeholders and groups within the district uh part of the goal of this opportunity is for us to humanize the experience of individuals within our clinton community i was able to sit down and have a conversation you know with a group of black parents to talk about their experiences within the district um we were actually also able to have a panel with you know parents of students with ieps and disabilities um a coalition and uh conglomerate of our asian students within the uh within the school district as well as our lgbtq plus students um having a

107panel as well as well as looking at our latino uh teacher population which we have uh you know fairly decent sized minority of latino teachers in the district as well so the big thing with that is to have those conversations and you know with the help of our production crew we were able to videotape those and chop them up to be used for professional development so each uh each staff member will have an opportunity to kind of choose three out of those five categories to kind of attend those uh and listen and watch those uh those conversations that were recorded and there's uh an engagement opportunity with different staff and faculty around the district uh for them to take part to kind of discuss what they've learned and how they were able to humanize a

108certain identity for the first time and how that's going to push and influence their practices um and then last but not least we've had an uh expansion of our affinity groups um dr weeds has done an awesome job of you know creating an affinity group with our uh with our asian students you know one thing that we took note of you know from our last batch of panorama data um is really trying to create that sense of belonging you know an increase in those numbers with our asian students and she's been able to do a good job um in terms of you know creating an affinity space for them to share their experiences and letting that build a sense of community uh within the population of the high school uh in the middle school um

109at the high school middle school levels our teachers do a good job with the you know with our bsu or black student union uh mr sankey and mrs amigo do a great job of that at the high school i've had the liberty to attend most of those meetings as well so that's kind of where we're at creating so many opportunities using myself as a resource for individual meetings and consultations and we want to continue to expand our affinity groups in order to create a safe space for different identities to be themselves great thank cameron thank you aunt cameron and robin thank you both for uh sorry are we and we have just tony who's has his update really quick as part of our um staff got it i'm sorry that's okay so in our strategic

110plan one of the objectives of goal one is to ensure that the diversity of clayton's teaching staff reflects the racial diversity of our students so in the pictograph um on this slide you'll see a representation of teachers and administrators at the start of 20 21 school year as well as our student population and that's broken down by race this information can be found on the data dashboard that's connected to the strategic plan and then on the next slide um the district's commitment to this really is the single most important factor in being successful in hiring teachers and administrators of color however to be successful with that initiative it's essential that we're really focused and being intentional with our efforts so some of the specific strategies that we have implemented throughout the year to address this

111objective are anti-bias training for interviewing and hiring practices so an earlier update i shared that this back end i think it was january february administrators participate in the training around anti-bias and how that impacts our interviewing and hiring process and our administrators were really thoughtful developed new interview questions that align to our our abarth presump positions and the questions are now used district-wide in the interviewing process and that started immediately after that training additionally principles review will now review the implicit bias reference sheet that we have with all of their staff members that will be participating at each of the panel interviews um another strategy is the analysis of our current interviewing and hiring model so kind of connected to the anti-bias training sort of naturally led to to this step so what we wanted

112to do is really be purposeful and have a deep analysis of our current interviewing and hiring practices so we could determine what might be some of some of the potential modifications that could help us move forward and then from that we created a resource folder for all of our administrators to assist them with uh streamlining the interview process so we were consistent district-wide with some of this work some of the new resources include the interview protocols that we have for each of the interviews implicit bias review that i just discussed with all the participants prior to the interview session and then the a bar interview question banks that the principals helped develop another one is our development and implementation of the state interview process retention is another area that we are working on to improve

113with our staff and administrators of color this year we developed and implemented the stay interviews and they're really helpful because what they do is they provide us with qualitative data and opportunities for us to engage in with our employees in a different way that we really haven't done before that can help us meet retention goals so it really is a focused one-on-one session where we can get feedback and provide that can provide us with different ways to better understand why some employees stay what they enjoy about working in the school district of clinton and then also on the flip side what might cause them to leave so that allows us to be responsive with that information and to you know take a deeper look at our systems and design individual plans that might be able

114to help us with that teacher retention and then finally uh we also created a diversity hiring statement and the develo the diversity hiring statement was really to show the district's commitment to attracting a diverse teaching force and finding the best candidates for our positions in service of our students so earlier i mentioned with our stay interviews that was a strategy to help improve our retention so since 2018-19 school year we've seen a steady increase in our retention rate for our teachers and administrators of color so we've moved from 88 retention to 100 retention as of right now with our diverse faculty we're also monitoring our hiring data and then we're sharing out the percentage of our diverse hires of faculty over the past four years so when you look back at the graph here in

1152018 our diverse hires made up about 13 of our hires for that school year and then uh for 2021 22 our percentage of diverse hires as of right now is 53 percent so our hiring process for next year is still happening and what we'll do is we'll continue to update that data so we can accurately report out the final uh percentage and uh equity or strategic plan update in the fall and then for our next steps what we're going to do is we'll conduct another interview and hiring process audit to determine how the adjustments that we made this year are working for us additionally the themes that we uncover with the state interviews will be deeply analyzed and then what we'll do is we'll determine if there are some systemic changes that we could do

116as a district that would help us better retain faculty and then also as i mentioned on a previous slide we'll continue to closely monitor our hiring data to ensure that we are continuing to increase the diversity of clayton's teaching staff so it better reflects the racial diversity of our students so that brings closure to our presentation i know we just threw a lot of information at you i know we threw a big report at you too and then with lots of information you know it's hard not to give some of these details but we wanted to make sure we gave you you and the public an overview i wanted to see if you had any questions related to some of the information that we presented i also think it's important to show that part of

117the objectives that we've been looking at is disparity data since disparity um data in our discipline and i think that um right now it's been difficult for us to do that because it's not been a typical type of year and so we can look at historical trends but we haven't been able to collect information that for the last two years that would be accurate so i just wanted to mention that as well so amy i'll turn it back over to you thank you and thank you robin tony and cameron for the report uh gary do you have anything so yeah thank you all for the great report i have a couple of a couple comments and then um one question first of all i really really appreciate two things in this report one the the

118pictogram depicting the the staff versus the student demographics i think that's a really clear and transparent way to illustrate some of the things that we've been talking about for a long time and i love that that use of information and that way of displaying it and the same with the chart that shows the percentage of our new hires i think that's a a very an easy way to focus on something that like what we're doing now currently and how it compares to what we've done before so thank you for that um the question that i have relates to the the panorama data and robin i would love if you could explain just sort of the mechanics of the the process of how students do or don't take that participate in that and we have different

119percentages at different times like i i should probably know this but i i literally like i don't know how our kids do or don't um get prompted to to do it so i'd love to just have a little bit you know that's a question gary i have much appreciation for that question because in the short time i've been here in the district i think i've only had one normal test administration of the panorama survey it's been under very complicated circumstances all the other times so um but i yeah so i appreciate that question so at the elementary school level um the entire class basically takes it at the same time as if we were administering a short building-wide test on a schedule and the classroom teacher will often give it with assistance from either the

120school counselor or the ic and then sometimes um you know students in small group settings and for whatever reason they miss it when the rest of the class takes it they'll do it um and our learn at home students also had scheduled time slots to take it um at the secondary level it has varied depending on which part of the pandemic uh we were we were giving it in um at times we have been able to give it through pack time other times we've had to maybe start it at the beginning of class and then have students um you know work through it in the last few minutes of a class at the high school at times we have run it through classes and other times we've been able to run it through the study

121hall hours um the scheduling at the secondary level particularly the high school um was was pretty tricky um in terms of trying to find the the time to administer it um which i think may have been a contributing factor to kind of our uneven response rates however um you know that certainly was not uh due to lack of communication as i have the ability to um send email reminders out to our secondary students um through the portal um in order to take it so um again that's this is an area of improvement for us for sure especially at the secondary level and something that i can work on with the building principles um to have a more strategic approach to make sure that our response rate reaches a level of consistency great um thanks gary

122for the question and thanks robin for the answer joe um so yeah i have a couple of just comments and a question um so first of all thank you robin thank you cameron thank you tony i think it was um i mean really a great presentation um i guess the first thing i'd say is i think the staff data in terms of hiring and retention is fantastic so i mean there that's just there's nothing to say but that's it's great improvement so well done that's the first thing i'd say the second thing i would say is i think the professional learning is really good and a great foundation i hope that we continue to measuring behavior it feels like we're measuring skills and attitude but not quite yet the change in behavior as a result

123of it so i hope that's the next step um and then i would get to the panorama data and i love panorama of course um and i guess what i would say about panorama is i you know i think there's some bright spots but certainly some concerns um you know i think at the secondary level when i think about supportive relationships um i think it's a concern that when we say how connected do you feel to the adults at your school and we get 38 percent of students saying they feel connected and that's 43 male and 34 female i understand that overall um you know we did pretty well but i wonder if there's not some more uh more opportunity to think about kind of teacher-student relationships and some other things because that you know

124one-third is or roughly one-third that's not i don't actually i don't think that's good um i think also with panorama and again lots of good stuff with panorama but if you look at supportive relationships you know the black students down five percent the asian students down three percent school climate black students down five percent self-efficacy the black students down 15 and then on school climate multi-racial students down 10 percent obviously and i understand we need to um process and understand that more but i think it speaks to some things that um we really need to um consider and think about so so i guess maybe no questions just all comments that's it thank you joe i have a question or joe joe when you said behavior was that behavior for you you said you want

125to see the change in behavior was that for the teachers right yeah for the staff because i mean you can have the greatest professional development in the world and they can say they like it they can say they're gonna use it but did they really use it does it show up you know if you think about professional development the lowest level is knowledge then the next level is attitude and then the highest level is did the behavior change as a result of it and so i and i understand where you know a lot of this we're starting so i'm not trying to throw shade i just hope the next level is how do we measure a change in behavior as a result of what seems like some awesome professional learning and development appreciate that man

126stacy thank you um thanks all of you that was very thorough um and a great report and i actually i had a similar question that i won't ask because it was about the response rate that gary already asked um robin i appreciate you including as a subgroup the mode of instruction because i think during this pandemic that is really telling and you know some good and some bad um results from that but i think that actually was really helpful to me to see how our learn at home kids are doing as opposed to the kids in person so thank you for including that um i also agree with joe i was going to make a comment about the hiring tony great job on that i think just in the last few years how much we've

127increased our diverse hires is amazing so i was really impressed with that um and i was happy to hear and cameron's report happy to hear about um some of the new affinity groups like that robin you're leading um with asian students and latin students and i was happy in particular about the asian students just because of the rise in anti-asian hate crimes and it got me thinking um are we doing anything um are we doing anything to also though educate our non-asian students about that you know i mean that might be more of a i don't know if that's a curriculum question but it because it's it's not it's something that's timely right now so i don't know if we've thought about ways to address that with our whole student population and i and i

128do and i do agree that we need affinity groups for those kids to feel that sense of belonging but i just got me thinking um you know i know in the past we've brought in out like the adl and outside sources but i didn't know if we were thinking about doing anything inside because i think the non-asian students also need to be you know educated about the tolerance um especially when there's something happening you know currently so but thank you all of you for for all your work on this report i appreciate it thank you stacy caitlin yeah thank you everyone for your work on this report i do have a couple of questions um so i recently talked to the district advisory council about like panorama data and such so this is kind of

129relevant to what we've uh most recently been talking about uh one of the questions that came up is how often are we evaluating the language of the questions is that something that panorama provides um is that something that our own staff is taking a look over and checking to make sure that they agree with like the way that the questions and the language is being used so the questions we've been using caitlyn are pre-created through panorama and depending on um on some of the questions we are able to tweak some of the language um so yes some of them are editable okay um and if i'm correct is this anonymous or not anonymous the general responses are anonymous there are certain topics where we can see an individual student's overall rating but we do not

130we're not able to see their actual individual responses like i would not be able to see exactly how you answered every single question but i could see your overall rating oh yeah and kind of on that note something that we were talking about is like wondering if there's i guess greater awareness for the student population about like what exactly they're filling this out for and like how important it is i know like prior to my time on the board i kind of knew that the panorama data was used for something but i didn't know like how deeply that the board dived into it and how deeply that they used it for all of the decisions that they're making in the future um so i was one like kind of just a comment like maybe in

131the future we could look into having teachers like preface students taking the survey and explaining what it is what it's about what its importance is um and like having students really take the time and make sure that they're accurately filling out the form so that we can actually have accurate data and not like have students like haphazardly doing it um and another question that i had was have we thought about doing or do we already do some kind of disaggregated data uh between like intersectional groups for example like can we look at the data um and publish the data for like asian women or like black transgender students so some of the demographics you stated yes we can disaggregate it it would be by building i can't do all that exactly by that i can't

132exactly get to the intersectionality kind of in the broader sense i wouldn't be able to look at asian women three grades three through twelve i'd have to look at each building individually to get down to to that piece um the feedback around the gender identity has come up and is something that i would like to talk a little bit more about with the vendor um you know it's a little bit um in some ways it is hard for us to currently capture um a non-binary gender identity status right now um with the limitations in the current student information system and then therefore also within panorama um and i think this is an ongoing conversation um about just like all the different platforms we use that um that have space or not space um for that

133particular identifier uh but that is absolutely um a piece that has come up in all the preliminary conversations um i've had with different groups about the data when they've noticed some of the things related to gender so right now is it just like male or female when you click to okay okay yeah um like in the future i would be interested in looking at like the subsections of like for example like if asian women have like uh less sense of belonging than asian men for example um and then is there like a place where qualitative data can be taken in the survey like are there is there like a comment section or like additional comments um or any like questions that students answer with text boxes yes um for some of the topics that are

134covered such as positive and challenging feelings which will be covered in part three of the strategic plan update there were opportunities for students to provide open response okay that's all i have all right great okay um thank you great questions kim so thank you for the presentation there's a lot of information in there um you know um i guess i want to emphasize some things that we've already heard um you know we often talk about um our i think we're proud of the fact that we have a very um good student-to-teacher ratio um and the fact that we do have such an impressive student-to-teacher ratio makes that secondary statistic that i think joe emphasized of only 38 of secondary students feeling a positive connection to an adult in the school that much more concerning from

135my perspective so i think that there's a lot of opportunity there as far as student teacher relationship building and some work to be done um so we should maybe unpack that a little bit more um you know in terms of how the panoramic data is presented to us in this matter there's a lot of text it might be easier i don't know if these reports are something that panorama kind of puts out or that that you guys take the time to put together but seeing something in a graphical representation or form might be helpful just kind of the next time that we see this type of data for digestibility um and then again i want to emphasize i think it's a great job in terms of retention of diversity staff and hiring and some of

136the onboarding that's been done with the um you know the the early not early for our district but um the equity work that uh has been equity and equity education work i think i expressed my personal um discomfort with the word soul murder when the board went through its equity training and i guess i just want to emphasize that again that i'm not sure that that's an appropriate term to use especially as we're um i don't know just especially as we're putting more and more focus in this area so that term actually comes from if you research it interestingly enough from the 1800s from the 1830s and it goes back to um to a german boy who was kept in an underground um like dungeon with no language of human contact for 15 years so

137then it was you know termed as a psychological term and really related to like child abuse and deprivation and i know that it's evolved since then but i think you know as we're all considering where language comes from in the history of language we should be thoughtful about how we use it in our approach in the school district so thank you thank you kim jason yeah um yes i have lots of questions no i'm joking i have lots of questions um so my first question is going back to the ratio of teachers tony to uh students if we were we're declining in african-american students am i correct um sean are we are we having a reduction in african-american students yes we've seen a pattern in that yeah so do we then stop hiring teachers of

138color if we start to reduce the amount of african-american students no jason that would not be our intention at all right now we're sort of using that as a marker for us to have that as a goal to get to but certainly that would not be something we would do yeah i didn't think so i want to make sure that was clear to the public so anyone else knew that that was yeah we're sort of looking at that as a as a minimum as a threshold for us to try to work toward gotcha i appreciate that um also let's see um by the way you all did an excellent job putting this together by the way i know i know this is hard i know it's like really the first go around first year we

139put you know to put this kind of data and work together so i really do appreciate what you all have done um now i'm taking that into consideration with my questions too um so i guess my question though is is all this sounds great but how if you know so i mean the training from the teachers um equity training like is this mandatory for every teacher to go through this um let's say cameron yeah so it it varies based off of years in the district right now um so there's different groups of teachers you know based off of their years in the district in terms of what the professional development looks like um so there's certain cohorts of teachers that are going through certain training this year that next year it'll be a different group

140um one thing that we're pushing for next year as well is also including um you know what our curriculum looks like for your one teachers your two teachers your three teachers as well um on top of what that looks like from a district standpoint each building you know is uh undergoing their own professional development schedule and what they're doing as well and what they deem important within their building so there's individual building development going on as well as district wide development going on based off of the years so so so it's kind of a tiered system then right like you're we're doing in a stage gate process i guess my question then is if there's a year where we're doing x group right now because then x group next year when we're doing y group

141because is x group still doing some kind of training at all in any way yeah so in terms of building that and that's something that we're setting up for next year so kind of what a i'll give you kind of what a rough sketch will look like uh if you're a new teacher within the district so if your year one your year one and your year two teachers will have professional development based off of just you know what our language is with the district familiarizing themselves with our a bar presuppositions um and really understanding you know what we want to do from uh you know from a strategy standpoint in terms of equity the year three will go into more of the case study approach to where they're looking at actual case studies which are

142drafted within in-district experiences and kind of working the problems off through those issues as they arise and comparing those to their own uh professional practice within their classrooms as they get into year four and year five uh that'll be those goal implementation years to where they will have an equity goal that they start to develop in year one and use that as an action item in terms of improving student performance and experience so choosing an identity that revolves around that goal so um if i choose perhaps maybe be you know black boys in my class born as engaged and i'm going to use that as a goal and kind of create you know different methods of professional learning that revolve around that so that might include you know coming up with a communication strategy you

143know that engages the parents and the family you know along with the suit a lot more and kind of tracking the success of that and how that looks at that student's performance within the classroom so you know the bit like the big thing that we that we really want to touch on especially in those foundational years are you know like i said humanizing each perspective for example you know if we have a teacher who you know grew up in a very homogeneous you know environment where they didn't have a lot of experiences with kids of another race how do they know how people think and how they tick who's in that other race so we want to create learning opportunities to where they understand who's coming into their classroom and they have the tools in

144order to you know engage students to understand who they are in a more personal level um and i think that matches well with what we see within our panorama data as well in terms of kind of a disconnect there and we have you know a lot of teachers as we expand our pool and become more um diverse you know we're all taught more so in a homogeneous way to teach to a middle-class white kid so how can we expand that to where teachers have experiences where they can take the knowledge that they gain from all of the students within the within the classroom and be able to teach that individual student so that's why we want to build kind of that verbiage and that strategy in order to engage students you know in a way

145that might be uncomfortable from what we're used to take that to a case study stage and then once we get past the case study stage we now can create an action research goal to really engage and promote our practices and put them in the plain sight so a teacher who starts in the district next year by the time they're at year five their knee deeper to that goal and they're constantly tweaking that and using that to apply that to different students and identities within their classroom um so and one thing you know that i want to throw in there as well like it's uh you know we're trying to accomplish something that probably literally no district in the country has done and and we're building that foundation to be able to do that and i

146think that's something that we can do um and it takes building that foundation you know that teachers just aren't trained to do you know you know my my education as a teacher wasn't rooted on being able to teach kids that look like so how can we get out of that mode and we have to un do some unwiring to rewire you know the way we think of we approach our pedagogy in order to reach each kid so i think we're building some some awesome things with our teachers individually and i think as time progresses and we're able to get our system in place um and really implement this system's change which we can do some big growth down the road so i think i think that that uh that that plan is a great plan

147in in theory definitely right it sounds like the five three to five year plan essentially when we start seeing what joe talked about which is behavior change would you would you disagree with that because that's that is a question but before you answer that question the other part that is i'm thinking about a holistic approach on how we train um our our educators right you know in one or two years can we just jump down on it so that we don't get too far away from um from the initial the initial um you know teaching that we're that about equity about these things that we're talking about so we don't get too far away from it so that everyone's on the same page because because to me the way i look at equity and what's

148happening in the world the the rsi will happen simultaneously they're having simultaneously right and so what's causing this constant delta this change in how we look at race this change in how we look at equity this change in how we look at gender equality all these things are confluence of things that's happening so fast and my question is how do we how do we would it be more advantageous cameron and tony and robin if we just had a holistic approach and just jump down on it uh versus this kind of stage gate process over a three to five year process um you know that's an awesome question you know and and in jumping in the position um a lot of those approaches have not been effective in terms of long-term change um i think when

149we're talking about behavior again and we're talking about engaging humans and i think one thing that we that we lose is that we're in the business of people and just like from a marketing standpoint if i want to market to a certain demographic and what we're marketing is an educational experience we want to take the opportunity to know who our consumers are and you know we need to you know whether that's through focus groups whether that's through looking at data whether that's through um understanding the environment in which our students come from we have to understand who they are and i think the best way to do that is to engage our students head on you know if if i'm a teacher and there's a disconnect between me and my asian students the best way

150for me to serve them is to engage them and ask them exactly you know what they need from me in order to have you know the best educational experience possible so i think you know our big push is to make sure that our teachers are actively engaging you know our students are one-on-one not concentrating on you know some book that they've read from some author who doesn't know what clay school district is um so i think in terms of that behavior you have to understand what you have to do and by understanding what you have to do you have to be able to engage and build relationships with the students within your classroom so i think before that we get to that behavior change i just want to make sure that our teachers understand what

151our lgbtq plus kids go through on a daily basis what it's like to be an asian kid in the classroom and have certain stereotypes heaped upon you um what it's like to be a black student to be looked at in a certain way you know whether you come from a different neighborhood or whether you live within the district and get away from all of those different stereotypes and be able to engage me as a human being rather than kind of what you think i represent so i think we're diving deep down um uh you know i want to say it was um you know time times magazine did a big article that i read about a year or so ago that kind of a lot of that doubling down way has you know maybe some

152short short-term you know some short-term success in some ways depending on how you look at your stats but uh in terms of kind of really building a foundation you know we want people to understand people and i think the best way to do that is to create opportunities to engage and really humanize different people's experiences and their perspectives well so two things you know i'll i'll stop talking here but one is i was when i say holistic approach we we whatever the core the crux of what you're trying to uh the basis of what you're trying to teach the the teachers right when it comes to equity a bar is commitment to to the process um that's you teach that and then from there you continue to build like you you talked about right this

153this this uh reinforcement uh adding new things different different strategies consistently adding those things throughout the years but just getting the core fundamentals down is what i was talking about my other thing is though um is i know we talked about a bar policy so this is a two-part question how's that going it's going well um we're at the point to where we have you know five policies that we were able to pinpoint from policies around the country that kind of encompass what we want to accomplish um we have notes and details on each of those policies and right now i'm in the process of combining those notes adding our language and verbiage within the district to it um and creating our own um the goal is to have that policy readily uh for you

154all to vote on by the end of the school year okay because i think the the second part of that that question is is i'm thinking that the pot that policy is going to be the um adhesive that allows us to have fidelity to what you're doing because it doesn't really there's no sticking point if there's no repercussions for uh for for a misbehavior right you know and i am just going back to what we talked about in the beginning of this um this uh board meeting which was um uh people who are coming to the school there's policy around that right it's policy around coming to the school and having the autonomy to tell some folks that you can't come anymore because of this kind of behavior there's repercussions and then there are all

155the teachers and staff we know that they're cognizant of the types of behaviors and what it is and because of that everyone kind of responds and operates based on that policy and i'm thinking that we need to have that same type of policy to really support you know um what what we're working on right now uh so that it's such finality to that so awesome man i appreciate it thanks a lot for uh putting this together guys excellent thank you jason david no i don't have any questions thank you guys okay so i just have it uh thank you for the report guys i have two very very quick things um i the first thing is that um there's some really great great strides that we're making and i i that's a lot of really

156good things to celebrate in the report the one thing that concerned me the most or that was concerning to me was the score with respect to black children and the efficacy so i hope that we can um you know it based on that like what i what i take is that um they don't feel good about themselves and they might be lacking some critical self-confidence so i hope we can do a deep dive into that and understand um really understand what's going on and and try and move that needle there and and help those help the kids that are not feeling good um then the second thing is um i want to acknowledge well this doesn't really have anything to do with this report except i would like to acknowledge cameron and he was just

157awarded the educator of the year for 2021 by the st louis association of secondary principles so cameron we are so proud of you we are so grateful that you're with us and leading this work and um we look forward to many more years of success with you thank you thank you i appreciate it you are welcome um and with that we are on to hold on guys i think are we good i lost my screen but are we uh i think we're probably on to the consent no no we're on action item okay i'm sorry actually and i have to recuse myself from this one yeah so i'm leaving just text me when you're done okay okay good so um stacy will you go ahead we're on 7.01 just a motion please for the uh

158part-time temporary employment yes 7.01 part-time temporary employment i recommend that the board of education approve the part-time temporary employment as submitted second okay great so we have a motion and it's been seconded is there any discussion okay okay gary well actually i think we don't need a roll call we don't need a roll call i have for some reason the sheet i got headed as a roll call okay never mind it's okay um is everybody in favor aye yes aye all right all right great any opposed great motion passes unanimously and um can somebody text joe or come back next to joe thank you and then stacy next we're gonna move on to eight which is the consent consent items yeah i'll wait till joe gets back okay okay um 8.01 i move that the

159board of education approved the consent agenda second great we've got a motion it's been seconded any discussion all in favor any opposed motion passes unanimously and we are on to uh not section nine which is public comment chris do we have any any comments tonight um yes we have one comment tonight um from marlene kovach and she writes in regards to district equity and inclusion initiatives i urge the board to consider teaching something other than critical race theory which is currently occurring in literacy classes and elsewhere students are given assignments on the wheel of power privilege and then asked to describe how they are privileged or unprivileged based on immutable demographic characteristics like race gender sexual identity and so on vocabulary definitions like race are taken from critical race theory and they don't resemble any

160dictionary definition source materials almost exclusively feature lead characters who have been opposed to white persons as the theme classroom reading of the book stamped by ibram kendi who presents current and future discrimination to remedy past and present discrimination when asked if there is space for a white student's voice i was told the white perspective comes from the history books as if my own daughter is not entitled to her personal lived experience as a white person or as if all white people are monolithic critical race theory is founded on dividing people into groups based on immutable characteristics then like gender ethnicity and race then labeling those groups as either oppressed or oppressors children at their most impressionable and insecure ages are assured that these characteristics over which they have no control intersect to make up who

161they are differences between individuals and groups are highlighted and exploited blame is a sign regardless of responsibility white children are taught to be ashamed of their skin color and people of color are taught they are powerless and oppressed how can either group feel positive healthy or happy with this messaging this programming is teaching our children to hate each other or at a minimum pit one group against another based on their differences my white child feels unwelcome at best and discriminated against at worst which is what i thought the district was trying to overcome the district is teaching our children to no longer judge others based on the content of their character but instead on the color of their skin and their demographic and other demographic characteristics thereby embracing the exact reverse of the dream dr

162martin luther king jr so ardently desired and fought for as an alternate anti-racist probe a racism program i am recommending the district consider the theory of enchantment by a young african-american entrepreneur whose program focuses on love for self and others and positive relationships among groups my second concern is the district has embraced one-sided and biased progressive ideology in the classroom just as i don't have to identify with a certain religious group to use the public school i shouldn't have to identify with a proscribed political ideology to use my public school i shouldn't have to choose between raising my children with conservative values and using my public school public schools are funded by the whole of the community and the benefit for all not just those adhering to a certain political ideology based on voting patterns

163it is reasonable to expect 20 percent of the clayton community does not vote democrat possibly many more than this figure do not support progressive ideology even if they do identify as democratic the district makes accommodations for groups making up for a far less percentage of the community than this example transgender population is estimated to be less than half a percent my daughters see and know no one in the district with who they identify as being either conservative or republican or simply just people who don't embrace progressive ideology and make no mistake about it teachers are all too willing to display talk about and in fact teach their ideology as fact not just one frame of reference or point of view there is no classroom time devoted to alternative viewpoints the instruction is exclusively framed through

164a progressive ideological viewpoint and presented as fact most notably in literacy classrooms all literacy source materials are from progressive ideological viewpoint not one resource is from a conservative or other author either black or white such as thomas sal walter williams jason reilly ben carson or heather mcdonald this is the definition of indoctrination the lesson plan inoculates a belief system in students minds making them adherence of the belief system thereby crossing the first amendment line of separation of church and state i'm hoping the district can return to teach critical thinking rather than one-sided indoctrination and activism and that's all okay thank you marlene for the comment and just as a reminder we as a board don't discuss public comments uh right now but somebody from the board or from administration will be in touch and with

165that we are on to um well does anybody have any updates or reports from committee meetings that they've been to since our last board meeting i just have a quick one yesterday ames place had its neighborhood meeting and um there was talk from um i believe the city uh doing a study on whether at the cut off to demand from this neighborhood they would put in a u-turn for cars to be able to turn around sean i encouraged the city planners that are contemplating this and doing the study to reach out to us and directly to you because i think that we would have some concern about the need for an additional crossing guard there um you know right now there's a lot of student traffic both two y down and two captain from both

166sides of the demand neighborhoods so it's only in the early study phase but um it did not really receive a lot of support from our neighborhood at least from the attendees for the annual meeting um and i think that it would be something for the school district to keep an eye on as that study kind of develops thank you kim anybody else okay well um thanks everybody for their time tonight and um stacy i think we will take a motion to adjourn i recommend that the board of education adjourn okay all in favor aye aye all right great