001the berger schools board of education workshop number it's 1535 is now called the order is your volume [Music] we'll fix the technological issues here meetings are now fully open in person as well as live streamed on the district's youtube channel in accordance with the most recent health advisory issued by the st louis county department of public health and city of st louis department of health on july 2021 face coverings will be required for all in attendance um even if you were vaccinated board workshops are informative presentations just so you know between the cabinet team and the board of education provide in-depth information facilitate open discussions between us and the district's work and topics of interest during these workshops administrators can share information seek input and answer questions from the board are we figuring it out
002here assistant comments are not included on workshop agendas if you wish to address the board you'll want to do that at the regular meeting which starts at 7 00 p.m this evening uh you can use our electric electronic sign-up form which is in the back of the room and will be available or a code between 6 30 and 7 p.m prior to that meeting so given that dr lake do we have any changes to the agenda for this meeting we do not okay do i have a motion to approve the agenda as presented so moved motion by jen second by mike all in favor say aye aye opposed motion carries thank you now we'll go to our discussion topics we have two discussion topics uh for the workshop virginia this evening we'll begin with 4.01
003which is district equity work and i'll turn it over to dr terra sparks sure so colin let's go ahead and have the presentation up good evening everybody on zoom floyd and john good to see you guys matt alonzo is also joining us via zoom he is working at a camp as a counselor this week and so he is on there as well and kathy was on is not available to be here tonight so thank you all for being here so we're going to start out with three years ago when we came into the district colin you can go ahead and change that next slide so so here's kind of our agenda we're going to talk about core collaborative partnership we're going to talk about lindbergh success skills and then i can't see that last part
004i believe it's the opening task for school opening task force just tara's going to give a quick update on that at the end of the workshop today so next slide colin so when you look at our work when you look at our compass plan and you look at how we organize what it is we the experiences we want to design for students we always start with the why then we talk about the how and then we talk about the what and so i want to take us back to the why three years ago when we came into the district it was very apparent that we needed to engage the community find out what was important to the community we went out i did about 83 listening and learning tours i believe it was and part
005of that was to kind of determine you know what's important to us as we think about student experiences so we asked the community and this is not just parents this is business leaders this is students this is teachers this is like i said 83 of them anybody that would listen to me the first year i would go and present to them and so we had 12 i'm going to take this off my talk since might be a little bit easier so we had 12 success measures and we asked the people at those presentations to rank those 12 success measures and in there there are very traditional types of success measures like attendance and things like that and i'm going to go through those with you and then i'm going to go back to the top
006five success measures that our community said to us back in 2018 that was important to them so this is about 1700 responses not quite that i don't know beth you may remember as 16 high 16s but it was a it wasn't like it was a couple hundred responses that responded to these success measures it was a large number of responses so next slide colin so defining success so we asked the community to rank these 12. so the first one very traditional way hey how are we doing how's our act score what does it look like is that important to us do we need to keep focusing on that student mastery of the four c's so that's collaboration communication critical thinking and creativity when you think about the work world that our students are going to
007go out into information is changing at such a rapid pace so they're going to have multiple jobs they're going to have multiple careers so what are some skills that here's the information we need to be teaching kids from the missouri learning standards but not just focus on the road can you regurgitate information back on a test but how do i build a collaborative skill how do i teach you know how do we help kids think create critically and look at things through different lenses and those kinds of things so our community said um so that was one that we asked them and then we said student attendance rate you know you do you need a good student attendance rate state reading and math scores personalized learning for students and staff next slide student satisfaction do
008we want our kids to be happy do we want to gauge hey do our kids feel like they have value do they are they happy coming to school parent satisfaction do our parents think you know do we are we doing a good job is that important high quality teachers in the classroom graduation rate entrance into post-secondary types of programs employment for students following graduation social emotional well-being of our students and staff so we asked the community to rank those 12. so you had you couldn't pick them you couldn't say whatever you had to put a 12 on this one a one on this one and so it was a very clear break where the top five of those really came into play and um so the top five success measures and this is what's been
009driving our work this is what our community said and this is what drove the development of our five-year strategic plan which we're in year three of that we're gonna get ready to start year three so coming up we're going to go through this exact process again when we develop our next strategic plan coming up so um so go ahead and go the next slide colin so this is what and this is the order in which they came to us it was make sure you got great teachers in the classroom so we've looked at hiring practices we've really created great interview instruments to really get to the heart of do you have a passion for kids you know i i get it you may get physics but do you love kids do you want to help
010kids be successful so we've really been really intentional about our interview instruments to make sure we get the right people working with our kids in this community and then the social emotional well-being that was number two on the list that people said if we don't take care of our kids and they don't feel like they belong then they can't learn at the highest level possible same thing with our teachers you know when i came into the district i mean there was some animosity between teachers administration i think we've done a really good job the last three years of really building that collaborative relationship with our with our teaching staff because if we don't take care of those folks who take care of the most important thing that walks through our doors each and every day
011and that's our students then they'll never reach their potential so making sure that they're taken care of mastery of the 4cs again about these critical skills that kids are going to need to be successful in life not just to do school well not just about a test score but what is it about they need to do to be successful in life personalized learning this idea of a one-size-fits-all education that you and i everybody sitting out here got right it was this way and only this way how do we go about designing an experience where this is what johnny this is what i want you to learn you may show me that in a presentation and mike might show me that in a written paper because that's mike's strength why are we you know going to
012the strength of the student you know you can demonstrate learning in lots of different ways than just sitting there and regurgitating a bunch of information and spitting it back out on a test so that's what that's what's behind the personalized experience for our kids and how what does that look like and then happy kids you know what with student satisfaction do our kids feel like we're meeting their needs do they feel like we're being successful and we're treating them with dignity and respect and that they feel like they have a voice and they feel like they have value every single one of our kids walking through our door each and every day deserves that and that's what this work is about and so when you think about this inclusion diversity and equity work it hits
013at the heart of social emotional learning of our staff and our students as well as that student satisfaction you can even get into the critical thinking about looking at things through different lenses and it's been problem solving and different things like that but really it's at the heart of that and so that's our why that's why we're here okay so this isn't something that we just randomly decided oh my goodness let's just do that okay it has been a process of three years through community engagement again back to 83 of these the second year i cut them down i went ahead and did them again and i'm going to do them again this year as long as kovit allows me to be in person with people i'm going to get back in person in front
014of people again i think we did like 40 some the second year and i probably will do around 30 to 35 again this year if the environment allows me to do that because it is important for me to hear what our patrons have to say but again this wasn't and this is what our community told us this isn't we you know dr lake and the board sitting here or the cabinet making these decisions in a vacuum and that's why we created our board advisory committees when we came in three years ago was to get students and parents and community members involved in our work i vividly remember in my interview i said that more people know what we're doing the better off we all are so we want to we want to be transparent we
015want everybody to know what's going on with our work and that's really the culture we've tried to commit to and these success measures have been driving our work so i really wanted to lay out the why why are we here today having this conversation and it really centers around those two success measures okay so with that i'm going to turn it over to dr sparks because it's not only what our community said it's also what our new school missouri school improvement plan mc6 says that we need to be working on as well absolutely when we look at what's important to the community it really aligns with state priorities national priorities as well we look back to the instrument of no child left behind and the emphasis on equity that has been further supported with every
016student succeeds act at the national level and then at the state level we have a missouri school improvement program which is in its sixth iteration it is over the last couple of years gone through multiple comment cycles etc and it is in um implementation phase as of 2022. so we're in the process right now of aligning our work and making sure that we're meeting state expectations and when you look at this particular slide you see safe orderly and caring climate our environment and a key component of that is respect for individual differences how do we look at our our policies our procedures in order to support diversity needs within our district and i know that we've done a lot of that through our equity committee specifically we've looked over the last couple of years at
017some of our policies to make sure that they are very inclusive of our special education population we've most recently done some analysis around our attendance policies to ensure that they are not punitive in support of students academic success without students losing opportunities to to continue to learn and grow colin if you'll move to the next slide for me please um so you can see a couple of other bullets that are highlighted here within this slide this idea of collaborative relationships i think tonight the relationship that we are the partnership that we have with core collaborative isn't it is an excellent example of that our our ongoing collaborations with our ptos and our parents um through things as dr lake mentioned like our board advisories and then also continuing to monitor our data what does our
018data say in terms of how we're meeting the various needs of our students we look at our gifted population are our free and reduced lunch students um receiving services and gifted at the same rate that they are as a general population so really being analytical and then starting to dive in and say what do we need to do to make sure that we're meeting the the needs of our students and getting them access to everything that they they need in order to be successful so that we can personalize learning for them next slide please so that gets us into the how of this work so as we continue in our journey of supporting our students and making sure that they are connected not just academically but also they feel like they belong every day that
019they walk into our schools we are partnering with core collaborative and if you go to the next slide it is my introduction or it's my pleasure to introduce our our two guests tonight dr floyd cobb and john crown apple from core collaborative they are partnering with us in this work as we um as we develop what's going to work for lindbergh schools for our community for our students for our families so at this point i'm going to turn it over to them i know they have slides as well that they are going to guide us through dr cobb and mr crown apple thank you for joining us thank you all uh for having us um [Music] thank you to everyone mr president and members of the board uh as was introduced my name is uh
020floyd copp and i am here with my colleague john grenoble greetings everyone from central maryland pleasure to be here with you thank you for having us uh so just to give you this is a super high level overview of uh our the work that we do and you can go on to the next slide john and i have had a significant amount of experience in working in k-12 schools both at the central office level classroom level and leadership levels and have spent a lot of time kind of looking at this idea that is traditionally referred to as educational equity and a few years ago we made the decision to write a book that what we attempted to argue is just kind of spoke to some of our frustrations in terms of some of the challenges
021that we would see in terms of implementation and wanted to work really hard to simplify these ideas um because when they're implemented in in a bad way or a poor way they can lead to frustration and kind of resentment and a lot of anger and we wanted to make sure that we could avoid that as much as possible and so what we realized through our work was that um these ideas really boil down to kind of two things right which is really the things that everyone is seeking which is belonging and dignity and we define belonging as the extent to which people feel personally appreciated accepted treated fairly within an environment and when people feel that they belong they don't feel as if they're being treated or distracted by a stereotype and we borrowed some
022ideas we go to the next slide uh from professor johnny powell who works um out of berkeley from go to the next slide there we go and and he has been sort of like the foremost thinker on this idea um really wanting to say that you know as as human beings we just basically have a a unique desire um to have more than access but to be respected at a basic level um that kind of includes the right to both procreate and make demands upon society and what that means is is that when you know that you belong somewhere um you feel comfortable enough to be able to speak up and you know you certainly feel comfortable enough to be able to identify areas that you like and in some cases areas that may not
023make you feel so well and feel comfortable enough to be able to work with those to be able to make sure that we can find ways to make adjustments and corrections additionally to that in the next slide we talk about kind of our broader idea in terms of this concept of dignity and dignity is a concept that was brought to us by a woman out of harvard university who does an incredible amount of work on um conflict management um particularly in terms of thinking about it as it relates to a conflict between nations in general and one of the things that she's done through decades of research is really find out that one of the things that we all desire as human beings more than anything else aside from the need to belong is is
024certainly to be treated with dignity and she identifies the dignity as being our inherent value and worth as human beings um and um noting that everyone is born with it and we all have this ability to recognize or it comes with this state of peace and the recognition and value and vulnerability rather of all human things and one thing that she notes that i think is really important is the fact that um while we were all born with dignity we're not necessarily all born with the ability uh to treat one another with it and so sometimes we make mistakes and sometimes we err and that happens i think that's part of life but one of the things that she also indicates is that dignity is different than this idea of respect where a lot of
025times in life we will kind of use these terms interchangeably uh dr hicks argues that respect is something that is earned um whereas dignity is something that is inherent um and so what we want to be able to do is to think about the ways in terms of the processes the systems the structures and even our own measurement as it relates to some of those ideas that were shared previously about how we can go about treating one another with dignity and i can go to the next slide she has a quote that i really appreciate which is that you know good people with good intentions can sometimes harm others if not conscious of dignity and you know this is something that um can happen um in people with whom we're in uh committed relationships with
026but for with people with whom um um we may not know or or maybe strangers uh but um why we like i said earlier while we're all born with dignity we're not also always born with the ability to treat one another with it and so that's a constant work that we're trying to engage in and so uh as writers and as thinkers what we're trying to do is say okay how do we make this conversation a little bit less confusing when it comes to you know this thing that is routinely called educational equity that is sometimes um not very well defined and what we tried to do was do our best to try to simplify these ideas and on this next slide what i'm going to ask is john to kind of walk us through
027basically some of the ideas that we talk about within our book so what you see here are basically the two sides of of our framework which we refer to as the dignity framework and drawing from dr hicks in in her really groundbreaking work uh one of the things that made her work so um interesting to us is that she was able to make the concept of dignity operational so dignity as we know it even as it's defined is is a noun uh it's this inherent value and worth and she said recently that she spent her career figuring out how to make that concept operational meaning what does it look like in action what does it look like to honor the dignity of other people what does it look like to honor your own dignity and
028from there she came up with 10 this list of 10 essentials that we all you know want from each other and the flip side of that is we can all give to one another things like benefit of the doubt things like recognition for thoughtfulness and effort um acceptance of who you are there are ten of these things and so that really inspired us to dig into you know basically everything we could find that falls into what's called dignity and humiliation studies and um uh to to figure out what what is at the core of uh being able to honor the inherent value and worth of one another so if you look on the left-hand side the side of the framework that is more circular in nature uh what you see are the components of our
029framework and i'll just walk walk us through it a little bit on the outer most rim of that um of that framework there you see the words listening empathy patience and openness these are what we refer to as the four dispositions there are four qualities that we can nurture within ourselves and within our organization so within our departments within our teams within our offenses uh we can nurture these uh in the presence of these dispositions make it so much easier to honor dignity in fact truly listening to someone is in and of itself a dignifying action um so a lot of the work we do is help people become better listeners help people to you know develop their empathy um and that type of thing uh if you move your attention to the center ring
030where the words you see the words appreciated validated accepted and treated fairly this component of the framework is called the indicators of belonging this gives us four states of being four words to describe the experience people are having at any given time in any given environment so this these uh concepts these words help us better measure and basically gauge the extent to which people are experiencing belonging by looking at the extent to which people feel appreciated the extent to which people feel validated the expense to which people feel accepted and also treated fairly we can do a better job of keeping our finger on the pulse of uh the the state of well-being of staff of students of the folks in our community uh and from there that can lead us to planning for action
031to basically improve you know uh the way we do things and how people are feeling and then if you move your attention to the center most area not where it says dignity honored but the words that are close to that these are our four standards of uh four standards for dignity building partnerships and community uh repairing harm and restoring relationships affirming our differences in our uniqueness and presuming competence and positive intent so these serve as the four standards by which we can look at the healthiness of behaviors and practices by looking at the extent to which anything that we do helps to build partnerships helps to build community how anything we do helps to affirm our differences and our uniqueness which not only applies to to who we are and everything that each one of
032us brings to the table but also what we do within that standard falls needs such as recognition for hard work recognition for thoughtfulness that type of thing so all of these elements of that framework help us get better at honoring dignity as a practice with the goal of getting more of this right shaping a culture of dignity means that people would be feeling appreciated validated accepted and treated fairly more often than not and if you look at the right hand side what we're trying to help um organizations get less of uh is what you see in that kind of sharp angular diagram that has dignity violated at this at the center and what you see there is basically the opposite of what you see on the left so the presence of judgment denial apathy and
033intolerance uh make it routinely um easy to violate dignity we have some indicators uh that uh would be the opposite of belonging what we might refer to as othering the extent to which people feel dismissed marginalized mistreated uh and otherized or degraded and then we have the opposite of the standards for dignity um dominance blame and shame presuming incompetence degrading differences and what we've realized by working with teams over the past couple of years is that dignity violated side of the diagram has helped especially leadership teams identify some of the unhealthy practices and have really good conversations about how we can do better what we can do better we were just in a conversation earlier today where uh they were talking about a very specific practice for managing behavior that this particular school thought okay
034we can do a lot better of that because by looking at that right hand side of the diagram they realized what we're doing by using these behavior charts is actually probably making students feel mistreated and marginalized so what can we do that's better than that so in general just to simplify it the goal of all of this is to get more of what's on the left and less of what's on the right we can go ahead and advance the slide so we have these belonging structures and uh floyd's going to go ahead and yeah so when we think about kind of trying to put these ideas together in action in terms of how it works in schools really try to think about this a little bit more broadly obviously when think about belonging immediately people
035will probably think about interpersonal relationships which are really important um but there's a recent study that kind of put these ideas together in kind of three parts which we think are are very helpful in terms of of understanding one there's certainly the interpersonal aspect of it do people make me feel like i belong here uh the institutional element of it which was actually just discussed previously uh in terms of rules and policies um that you know we might need to review um and reconsider to see what uh impact or effect that they might have on folks and then the other is the instructional pieces of it uh as to whether or not uh the materials that are being presented um are reflective of the population with which we teach but more importantly our are are
036delivered and are selected in such a way that they honor the dignity of all of our students uh and so taking all of those ideas together um that they help to kind of create these structures and um really create a clearer way for us to be able to to think about some of the ongoing work that we have to certainly do in public education as we go to the next slide which will be our last part of this conversation i'm actually going to ask john to kind of talk through kind of how this process actually works in terms of some of the support that we provide so what you're seeing here is is our mental model that we use it's a it's a theory of action basically and a process a guide for our process
037and it applies to basically everything we do whether it's you know putting together a keynote speech or strategic planning over the course of five to seven years and it's an iterative process if you start at the very center and look at where it says uh who are we through the lens of you know the three keys it would be how inclusive are we you know how inclusive is our excellence that type of thing just to orient you to this a little bit please draw your attention to the bottom of the image where it says past present and future so you see there's there's a dynamic there of looking toward you know a vision of a better tomorrow looking toward the past to learn and get better and then you see on the left and right
038hand side this balance of awareness and action so what we believe very strongly is that we need a a logic model or a theory here to guide us that combines awareness and action in a way where those two concepts are coupled together a matter of fact we recommend taking action right away in the form of assessing the climate so if you look there at the center where it says who are we uh the movement begins to the left and it follows um through this diagram all the way to the left where it says belonging and what we're doing at that point is assessing our climate you know trying to figure out who among us is feeling something is experiencing something less than belonging less than unconditional belonging and that really uh when it comes to
039things like improvement science uh design thinking basically school improvement um that that's that involves the whole process of problem identification you know what what problems can we identify in our environment that we can define that we can focus on that are narrow where we can build smart goals around them and then if you look at the belonging side of the diagram to the top where it starts to turn blue and if you follow it all the way to the right on the side that says dignity uh what that entails then is addressing whatever problems we define through what we call dignifying action we use the standards for dignity uh the essentials for dignity to address the problems that we're defining and then if you follow the figure eight uh to the far right hand side
040and up toward where it turns black again then it's all about applying our strategy returning to our metrics specifically climate metrics and seeing are we in fact making our schools better and safer uh for for more students you know are we improving our overall culture and climate while you know addressing any belonging gaps that may that may be present go ahead and move the slide so i believe that concludes our portion and i believe we'll hand it back over all right thank you both very much i appreciate you sharing that um what we're going to share now is what we do as we continue to move forward in this journey and working with the core collaborative so it is my pleasure to introduce dr jeremy mapp our director of inclusion equity and diversity to talk
041about that process all right thank you and thank you to the board uh and to this community for welcoming me it's been a few couple weeks into it and it's been it's been a great place to be so i'm glad to be here um we'll go ahead to the next slide and just kind of talk about what core collaborative's partnership with us will look like um this is this is truly a partnership it's work that they've done as far as the research side and now we're going to work to figure out how we implement the action side um and so our work will work with our district our cabinet members and our central office administrators um with the book the belonging through a culture of dignity and establishing what our current who we are is
042as john and floyd talked about in the opening there it's a matter of how do we look at the things that we have in place and make sure that they reflect that culture of belonging and dignity um and so that'll be through looking at our current district goals and our outcomes and making sure that those things really fit and really create a space where we have belonging dignity both of our students and of our staff and then that will work into a couple of series that you'll see there and so there's an awareness series and an action series um which include basically a total of about six days that john employed to be working with um these these members that you see there and so again it's that uh cabinet members and the district central
043office staff and then our we have some building equity reps and so they work in teachers that are in our buildings um and they work with us to make sure that we are meeting the needs and thinking about the needs of both state staff and of our students um and then you'll also see there are administrators including our activity directors um counselors and instructional coaches social workers and our special school district staff to be on this journey with us towards making sure that we are achieving true equity and true support for all of our students and inclusion of all those people in that work and so um you'll see a couple of things i want to point out there belonging beyond access and dignity beyond respect again um you know dignity is as dr cobb
044talked about is that inherent peace and respect is that earned peace and so we have to figure out how do we make sure that we get to a place of treating people with dignity because it's first of all that's just that should just happen it should be a natural thing that we do um and then finally our action piece there gathering evidence of our impact so like i talked about on that figure eight it's going to come back to you know who we are now is who's already there in the center but then the work of the action series and the awareness series will help us get back to that work in the in the middle where we can change who we are and make who we are truly reflective of a culture of belonging
045and a cultural dignity for our students and for our staff we'll go on to the next slide and so our work is is around belonging and belonging is an outcome it's something that is not um something that we naturally do it's something that you have to create it's a culture that you have to build you know you think about climate and culture that's all reflected in the leadership it's all reflected in things that we do and that we say are important um and it takes time to do that it takes time to create a culture of belonging and so through this work in partnership with core collaboratives we're going to work to make sure that we create a place of belonging for all of our students and a place of belonging for all of our
046staff and again that inclusion piece being our focus i i've talked about this a little bit the idea that you know our work uh here in lemberg specifically has been very important i think even as far back as the naming of this position um it this work is generally referred to in this as a dei work it's diversity equity and inclusion um it was titled differently in this district for a very specific reason we're about inclusion first we're about making sure that all of our students and our staff feel like they're a part of this and that happens through a culture of belonging we're about making sure that our practices are equitable and so that's where the equity piece comes in next and we're also about making sure that we have diversity and again that
047diversity may not even if it's not in necessarily in our student population or even in our teaching population the diversity of what it means to be a part of the greater world the diversity of what it means to be a part of who we are in this in this state and this nation and how we really interact with all the different people that we will come across um to make sure that we create again that sense of belonging and dignity in our culture um one of the things that i didn't talk about in the last slide but thinking about our social emotional learning piece um that was one of the things that was highlighted as one of those top five the community is interested in making sure that we have a tool that can assess
048not only social emotional well-being of our students but also is that is there a sense of equity and inclusion in that as well and so we'll be reviewing uh this year you know trying to figure out how do we create or find the right tool to truly assess our students um and make sure that they have a sense of well-being and a sense of again belonging um within our within our community here in lindbergh so so dr mapp uh gave a great transition to the work that we've been doing over the past few years with regard to lindbergh life success skills um so we talk all the time about the fact that we are sending our students out into a world and we need to make sure that they are college and career ready that
049they are ready to apply the skills that they've learned with us in their um pre-k through 12th grade experience in a world beyond us um so over the past three years if you can go to the next slide i'm going to go into more depth in just a minute on this on one more back perfect thank you we're going to go into each of the different um big ideas and outcomes in just a moment but i wanted to kind of talk through how we got here in terms of developing these success skills we've been having a lot of conversations within the district about really being purposeful and what are our priorities for students both in terms of academics and social emotional learning and when you think about social emotional learning you're looking at things like
050are students aware of themselves are they socially aware do they have strong relationship skills can they manage themselves can they be responsible decision makers so we started that process back in 2018-19 in our student life board advisory we really looked at the self sorry the social emotional learning strands the competencies that are out there and we said what does this mean for our students how do we develop something that really prioritizes what what lindbergh graduates will need so that was our first iteration of lindbergh life and we created it with with three strands that were very specific to social emotional learning and then we we kind of paused for a while and didn't really roll it out because we were in the process at the same time about learning about this this idea of portrait
051of a graduate it's a kind of a nationwide conversation about how do schools really get purposeful and intentional about the students they are graduating and the skills that they need to move on and so we started to say should social emotional learning really be something that exists outside of that and our answer was really no we needed to really encapsulate it with those other skills that we knew that our students would need as they progressed beyond us so we started that work in covid hit so we we transitioned our plan a little bit and moved away from doing a separate task force so that our teaching and learning board advisory over primarily the fall of this school year really delved into creating this document analyzing what's there so again as a reminder teaching and learning
052board advisory had students parents teachers um to give a representative view and and provide input on what what do our families you know need to to have their children learn as they're exiting lindbergh schools so that in conjunction with our lindbergh learning team which is a group of teachers who have been guiding us on our standards-based practices over the last few years we pulled this together our lindbergh learning team started to use the document on a trial basis in the spring give us some additional feedback if there was anything that wasn't really translating into the classroom and so at that point we've ended up with what we are now branding is lindbergh life success skills these will officially be rolled out to our staff in august but over the last couple of weeks we've done
053some great work with some of our teacher leaders to build documents that will help teachers understand what does this look like at various age levels so for instance when we start to look at these documents we're looking at them from the perspective of a graduating senior but what does it look like for an early childhood student the language that we would use would be very different and we would need to adjust age-appropriateness obviously so when we go to the next slide i'm going to start taking you through the five big ideas so critical thinking and creativity two of our um our four c's within the district is highlighted here and you can see the outcomes exploring new ideas i've just highlighted and underlined some keywords looking at for solutions for personal local and global challenges
054and considering mindset now when you think about what does this look like for an early childhood student our early childhood educators put together some language that would be appropriate for how this applies there so students can invent activities in play schemes by using materials in new ways so that would be explore new ideas to stimulate curiosity and innovation or another one students can accept changes in different environments and understand and adapt to transitions and routines that third one about how do you how are you open and have a flexible mindset so we did that with each grade span what's appropriate for what we would want to see students achieve when they leave our preschools and get ready to enter our elementary schools as as kindergartners if you go to the next slide column you can
055see integrity and inclusiveness so this is where we start to see the integration with some of the conversations we've had tonight with core collaborative so looking at human dignity integrity empathy respect building and maintaining positive relationships our kindergarten through second grade grade span came up with students understand how these how they are individuals with unique qualities that are a piece of a larger community so again how do you transfer these to age appropriate grade appropriate and build these skills for students so that by the time they leave us as high school students they have these skills well in hand to be successful beyond lindbergh next slide communication and collaboration so how we listen to understand how we work together as as team team members how we communicate clearly in our intermediate grades which would be
056our third through fifth grade students an example of that would be students can give and receive feedback when completing a project in order to enhance it so again applying these tools not just to their social emotional learning but also to their academic and communication and collaboration again two of our two of our four c's the next slide focuses on identity and agency and i want to pause here for a second because we had a lot of conversations about this word agency and it's a we really question should we even use the word because it's not something that people are really familiar with but it's something that's a very powerful word that really focuses on this idea of student empowerment student ownership and to pair it with identity is is was a very purposeful choice for
057us because our students need to understand who they are what are their strengths how do we focus on strengths-based learning for our students and then how do they use those strengths and then conversely their weaknesses to be able to advocate for themselves and for their needs how do they set goals and objectives for themselves to be able to be successful so middle school um that's as simple as saying students can use their strengths and remain positive to improve their community and then moving on to our final one work ethic and effort um using feedback to improve and accomplish tasks we talked about feedback a little earlier part of the part of using feedback is how do you give feedback so there's that skill in itself but then there's also how do you receive feedback and
058then how do you use that feedback and know when it's appropriate to enhance the work that you're doing um how are you making good decisions you know we talk a lot about in our world about students digital life for example how do we how do we really get purposeful about doing that and that that concept of time management and organization truly essential for our students to be successful and our high school um group worked on came up with a specific example there where students are able to accurately predict the time required to complete tasks and manage their time effectively to balance schoolwork extracurriculars etc so our focus has been these are those big ideas and these outcomes that we want but how do we transfer that work specifically into student-friendly language that's age-appropriate and helps
059them build those skills as they they um matriculate to through our schools so with that our next part of the agenda is school school opening so i think we should take a pause and kind of reflect here yeah so we'll take them in between those two agenda items just open it up to the board why um floyd and john are with us and just our team any questions that you guys might have um you know just to clarify or anything so i think it's that time our doctor's crowning crab apple go with us yeah oh okay okay good good hello dr doctor's crown and crabapple crown apple crown apple i'm sorry i didn't mean that uh this is mike tuschlos uh i'm the treasurer of the uh of the lindbergh school board i want to
060thank you for presenting to us today uh we appreciate you taking the time um actually kind of going over uh you know your model uh for belonging uh through dignity uh each board member received a copy of your book i believe we've all read it i've read it um and uh i just uh i wanted to ask you uh some questions regarding uh regarding your approach and i think uh you're probably very aware as most people are that there have been a lot of conversations going on in school boards around the country dealing with curriculum issues um you know a lot of that conversation uh has been around uh i guess issues of uh you know identity um you know intersectionality i'm sure you're familiar with those terms uh well obviously you are and i
061guess what i wanted to ask was as part of your model and your approach um you know i i understand that you incorporate you know a student's sense of identity uh to bring to discussions i guess you know uh any issues that would you know help further a common sense of belonging um but i wanted to ask uh do you anywhere in your i guess model uh use a sort of contrasting form of intersectionality where you create sort of oppositional categories usually these categories are delineated in different ways um they're you know applied uh sometimes in forms of you know who is an oppressor versus who is an oppressed person or group um and it ends up and i think um as you said in your book uh it ends up oftentimes when you use
062an approach i suppose like that uh it ends up reinforcing stereotypes it doesn't help further belonging as a result of that do you use any of that kind of methodology or pedagogy in your model thank you for the question i'll start and then john feel free to um follow up if there's anything that i've missed uh the short answer to that question is no part of the reason why we wrote the book was because we found so many challenges um in terms of experiences that we've seen with teachers with whom we've worked in in school districts who have walked away from basically what we would typically refer to as diversity training experiences feeling wounded and you know as someone who worked with folks on a daily basis it was this weird dynamic to be in
063because for some people you know the training worked well right the training people got it and it made sense to them but for a lot of people they just left a way feeling injured and what it how it was received while that may not have been the intent was basically to to try to encourage people to not stereotype by stereotyping people and in doing that um you're just trading you know one frame you know shade of humiliation uh for another um you know the the thing that i've learned is as much as i've studied in this work is the thing that we none of us want to feel in a public space is to feel humiliated like none of us want to feel that and we have different versions of words that we use for
064what that form of humiliation can feel like when it's directed at a specific group but at the end of the day nobody wants that and so when when experiences get set up indicating that that has to be the end result it makes it very difficult to be able to find a pathway in to move forward and so part of what john and i both were seeking was to to to know that you know we can do better in schools right and we can improve and there's lots of students independent of who they are independent of their identities um who can come to school and you know what sometimes for whatever reason may not feel like they belong um and and with that in mind we've got to be able to be clear in terms of
065how we can you know as educators find a way uh to do better and so we have worked really hard um just by you know and we talked about this in the first chapter of our book where this cycle begins to emerge because we're just we're kind of going back and forth at each other and you know we're starting to see some of that in terms of how it can reveal itself um you know across our country and what we're trying to to really focus on more than anything else is to say look um we all have the same fundamental needs um some of us may experience humiliation or indignities at different times or in greater frequencies but we all know what it feels like and and we don't need to to have everybody sit
066in a room and then be made to feel bad i just that's just not something that works and and to be honest with you is is contrary to um just the principles of dignity and belonging and and that's so much of why uh john and i were so much more attracted to thinking about uh moving forward this way as opposed to you know what we see um more often and more commonly uh in terms of engaging in these conversations john if you can add anything i would just add i mean you pretty much said it all there floyd i would just highlight i guess or amplify that the examples that you gave uh mr uh schellis is um i would say a textbook example of uh reducing people to those categories as a textbook example
067of violating dignity and that's not something that we want to be a part of at all uh it's an example of making people to feel something less than appreciated something less than validated something less than treated fairly that's a big one in other words something less feeling less than belonging and and that's something that we feel pretty strongly about because it's antithetical to what we are all about well thank you for that i just have also one follow-up question and and this to me is the question that's uh the most challenging in an educational system where we're looking to encourage uh students who are still forming i mean i would say you know we talk about identity well uh you know they're maturing they're actually forming who they are they're kind of you know in
068an ongoing way changing but in those conversations let's say that are had and we often think of this i mean it could even be at the elementary level more often we think of this as being at middle and certainly high school level uh you know you know where you have conversations that come up whether in a home room whether in a class dealing with let's just say i don't know any you choose a hot button issue of the day or begin you know speaking in terms of who we are and i guess what who we are and and how we represent ourselves to each other uh that when those conversations come up uh one thing you you would want to do i would think because you know to me dignity uh part of actually a
069big part of dignity to me anyway i is is freedom of conscience if we don't have freedom of conscience where we cannot feel free to express ourselves uh you know in terms we want to even if those terms are not well understood by others and might take listening and talking through to understand if those conversations cannot occur or if freedom of conscience is not respected and i know you guys you know pause on the word respect but i would say even acknowledged that you are really violating one's dignity and that and here's the rub when you for instance have um in a classroom setting where conversations come up between students of different backgrounds and i mean you might be familiar to some extent with with blind berg having done some background information or what the
070district might have provided you for instance you know we have you know a substantial number of ell students you know immigrants or children of immigrants who come from all parts of the world from different cultures with you know different expressions of i mean whether it's a faith or cultural expression and when those conversations occur uh in a classroom you may find well i think it's very likely you will that you know there's going to be disagreement and you know we we don't want to violate dignity by violating one's freedom of conscience i would think so how do we go about and i guess this is this is how i would word it uh how would we go about agreeing to disagree in a constructive way if you can answer that you've helped solve many of
071the world's problems right now but it it really is an important issue when there are differences of viewpoints and who values what or what their values are i should say and those values are not always reconcilable uh where do you go in the conversation sure so the first thing that i wanted to to note is that the work that we attempt to do is is more with the adults um than it is with the children and so i don't want to for anyone to have any uh confusion with that in terms of the things that we're trying to do is is provide support uh to the to the educators and leaders in terms of thinking about um climate as a general idea and a general concept to better be able to uh support students and
072actually to get to the very thing that you're talking about in answering your question you know i think that um you've hit something that i've spent a lot of time thinking about um and and i feel like we've as a nation kind of started to get pretty far askew um when it comes to that uh i think that there's an opportunity to you know respectfully disagree you know particularly in terms of matters of policy right like we live in a democracy right the very nature and the very structure of school boards is democratic the purpose right is to be able to bring people together who may have differing views on particular issues to try to come up with uh the best particular solution for the community as a whole representing a component or portion of
073one group's thinking in a component or a potion portion rather of another group's thinking um where i think this conversation at times goes askew is where the disagreement on a particular policy matter kind of moves into this realm as i mentioned before of humiliation and or finger pointing and i think what can happen is is when it gets into that realm we then kind of react uh in a you know protective manner because you know in all of our studies we've learned that humiliation is the most powerful emotion that human beings feel it's it's the thing that we fear the most and so um when we're disagreeing right on a matter of when you name the issue right you name the topic i think that there's whatever we'll just use something that seems benign in
074my mind right of start times or if we can use the you know conversation right now happening uh nationally in schools as it relates to masks right those i think those are really important debates to be able to have um it's i think people get to a point where it's much tougher to listen when they feel like they are being attacked personally or being attacked in such a way that it is attempting um to diminish them all together or to humiliate them in the sort of public square if you would and i think that if we can you know take a deep breath and learn to say you know well maybe we won't agree on all of these pieces but maybe we can agree on this piece i think that that is just a much
075more productive way of thinking about where we can move forward because in truth um even when we think about sort of all the conversations that we're seeing happening in school boards there are pieces where i think that most folks would agree and um and i think that there's an opportunity to be able to start there as opposed to always immediately and reflexively going back into our corners and setting up shop and you know holding camp and and because we we never have a chance to move forward and this is our country this is what we got we got each other and we've got to be able to to find a an opportunity or a way to move forward together okay thank you hi my name is megan vetter on the board here i just wanted
076to kind of ask slash just ask you to speak a little bit more about um going further with that idea um if we're looking at our district and our kind of core with our 4cs and our collaboration like looking through this book and then talking to my colleagues and everyone else we're looking at this idea of the fact that we're all coming to this space and and we can't we can't deny that we all come with differences and you spoke about different types of identities and different types of diversity and so i'm wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the fact or maybe just support the idea if i'm understanding it correctly that we are all coming into this with a lot of curiosity as individuals and that we want to build
077on that curiosity in a respectful way so how can we as a district as adults lean into that curiosity and be respectfully curious in this work and collaborating with each other which will then essentially trickle down to what is the most important part is finding this work within our our students in our community so i was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that sure i can start off with this one and floyd feel free to come in with anything i i've missed i think at the heart of your question is something that is a point that we try to stress when we're working with groups which is this work is relational and what often is is missed when people say that is that relationships are extraordinarily hard relationships you know saying saying
078something like well all we need to do is focus on relationships is like saying all we need to do is send humans to mars it's it's really really hard it's really hard to have and maintain positive relationships with the people we live with you know much less the people we work with or the students we serve etc so you know that point was really reinforced which was part of what um what we loved about the work of donna hicks around dignity is that she discovered through her work with conflict resolution around the world whether it you know was in northern ireland or you know with corporations or individuals that all conflict emerges from violations of dignity you know whether those are violations that everyone can see or whether they're perceived violations of dignity so the
079hard work is learning well i i believe part of the hard work in learning how to honor dignity more and violated less is acknowledging that each of us has the capacity to harm one another um and it's really easy to do you know my my wife right now is taking care of the kids they're they're setting up dinner outside and everything and i know it's been a long day i know once these kids get to bed uh you know we're gonna she's gonna want to talk about the day i i can harm her really easily by not paying attention to her when she needs me to pay attention it's like super easy to do so acknowledging that each of us has within us like floyd said earlier the capacity to harm one another uh and
080also uh we are easily harmed um you know there's there's this healing component when we mess up right when we uh when we harm one another that seems extraordinarily hard hard to do it's hard for people to admit that they messed up because it shows weakness right so here we are 2021 and it's hard for people to apologize um so you know this type of work being relational at its core when it comes to healing and moving on and finding a way forward involves two essentials of dignity which is acknowledgement which was said earlier and accountability acknowledging the harm that was done acknowledging people being made to feel like they don't matter uh acknowledging um you know concerns that the public might have uh and then accountability right that that we are holding ourselves accountable
081to what we say we are all about and so for instance when it comes to this work when we're talking about belonging we're talking about everybody someone no matter who they are who's a part of our community is feeling like they don't belong then that's a problem if someone is feeling humiliated that's a problem you know we're we're going to do everything with our power within our nature that doesn't happen so so just all in all you know it's it's it's it seems so simple right it seems so simple to say things like what we're trying to do is honor dignity and what we've discovered that you know it's really hard work for instance it's really hard for people to learn to validate one another so what we help this is a really specific example
082because in one of our workshops we do very specific work with helping people understand and actually practice validating one another and one of the points that we make is you don't need to agree with someone to validate them you don't need to and it becomes actually that much more important when you don't but it's extraordinarily hard and so that really captures the essence of our work floyd did i uh neglect anything important there well i don't think i have anything to add to that thank you both so much appreciate you being here so we did have a one of our board members christy watts couldn't be here for the part of the workshop but she's on the zoom she had put a question in the chat about just some of the other school districts that
083you have worked with i know you've worked with i believe it's francis howell some work there and so if you wouldn't mind sharing that that'd be great sure i can start off with this one too we've been uh working with ha francal for for a couple of years now uh i think pre-pandemic we would have been going into year three of implementation and particularly two of two of the high schools we actually um highlight um with groups that we're talking with across the nation and um they are doing some extraordinary work around culture and climate matter of fact if you walk into francis howell north right now you'll see the first thing you'll see is this big sign that says you belong here everywhere throughout the school you'll see basically what what i would think
084of as cultural artifacts of them defining what it means to be a viking what it what it means to be a part of that community uh it means uh let's see the sign that's in every room is francis owl north where the roots of dignity grow the fruits of belonging and they're very clear with defining that and the students you know the students have been involved they speak the language uh all of that one of uh i think the most impressive stories coming out of that school is how they've engaged in the continuous improvement process by i think it would be two years ago now that they administered their first campus-wide belonging inventory and it's this scale it's not our scale it's been around for a couple of decades it's called the psychological sense of
085school membership scale they administered it to everyone you know everyone in the community they disaggregated their data they identified groups that were expressing that they were feeling something less than belonging and they narrowed it down to a very specific problem they conducted empathy interviews and they realized the unmet need that they were going to address was had to do with acceptance and so then their strategy became issuing invitations which is one of donna hicks's ten essentials of dignity and it wasn't issuing invitations to a specific group it wasn't just issuing invitations into extracurricular exercises it was issuing invitations all around inviting people in to your lunch table right and uh breaking uh breaking down clicks in the staff room um uh you know inviting new members into your group when you're in the classroom you
086know into your group work and it became the motto in the theme uh and then right around the time uh the pandemic hit they were going into their second iteration there of measuring but that's that's basically how it works is you know you take a pulse on the on the climate you identify a very specific problem that's related to a lack of belonging and you use that unmet need to focus in on your improvement so you're improving the culture climate for everyone that's one of the success stories we like to highlight there it really illustrates a lot of the principles that we're trying to help people understand [Music] thanks john any other questions from the board or cabinet or anyone i did just briefly uh mike shammy here another member of the board uh i
087want to thank you for the work that you've done with the cabinet administration sort of getting us to the point where you know we see where this adds value and is constructive when it becomes to belonging and inclusion and uh my question was just at a high level uh how does this work here intersect with a student's opportunity to receive that quality education and sort of allow for future success if you could just briefly address that all right yeah so if i understand the question correctly let me just make sure that how does how does our work intersect with setting students up for success in um in life outside of school absolutely correct yes oh sure yeah you know it's really interesting when you dig into the research on belonging you know it's an expansive
088body of work that transcends schools um you know in in the corporate world and gallup actually does a lot of it related to workplace and uh what you'll see are the common threads that when when belonging is high when people feel like they belong they're more engaged and when they're more engaged they perform better whether it's at their job or whether it's in the classroom and the opposite is true and there's so much research on this over the past 30 years that when people are receiving messages that they they they might not belong there that they're more of a guest than at home there's a significant negative impact significant underperformance in the classroom but there's also a slew of just negative health outcomes a matter of fact there's this meta-analysis that we cited in the
089book that shows that uh a lack of belonging social exclusion and loneliness are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of the negative health impact you know over time so what we're talking about in terms of ensuring belonging is very much a health and well-being issue as much as it is anything else so you know that's one piece is we're talking about real life health here uh not just you know preparing for the future um we're talking about actually extending people's lives uh the other part is that uh the work ends up having what is called in the research democratic outcomes it actually ends up supporting the type of community that that we all say we want like floyd said this is what we got here and the work around belonging and inclusion
090ends up uh building um the the the outcomes and the skills that the experts say are absolutely foundational to a functioning democracy floyd and what i would say is you know we talk about this in the book that so many of the challenges uh that we look at in uh education uh really are the effects of a lack of belonging um we have a graphic an entire chapter that talks about this this distinction we spent a lot of time in public education talking about achievement gaps and what we continue to find over and over again is that there are so many reasons why belonging can a lack rather of a lack of volume can can lead to negative performance of students in general and so again thinking about something more on the the front end
091to be able to to make sure that um that we're really kind of working on the the leading indicator as opposed to the lagging indicator uh in this conversation and uh the leading indicator that uh continues to be this and this general idea belonging is trying to say hi this is jennifer miller i have a question as well um at the beginning of most of the chapters in the book and even within some of the chapters you have some exercises and activities for the reader to complete are these types are these examples of things that would take place in like the trainings or the workshops some of them may actually have the book right here i'm just flipping flipping through when we put those in the book it was more of a you know for
092design for people who are backpacking on their own so to say you know taking the book and learning on their own just to provide some opportunity uh for people for people to reflect um were there questions in particular that you had in mind no no there weren't i was just trying to see some examples of what activities would be taking place in some of our workshops well i'll tell you this there's uh an exercise in chapter six uh that has well chapter five two where we have people reflect on times when they've experienced something left you know something less than validation something less than acceptance etc and that's a really important part of our our process and actually that's probably the thing i would highlight above everything else is that we want everyone to recognize
093that this is a very human issue that that we're dealing with this is not you know specific to one group and it certainly doesn't pit one any one group against another group as was uh asked earlier today um so we have people reflect and then we have them share stories about when they've experienced um you know acceptance versus uh a marginalization or rejection when they felt validated versus dismissed and what the reason why we do that is because everyone knows what it feels like to have their dignity violated everyone knows what it feels like to experience something less than belonging everyone knows what it feels like to to belong and so we want everyone to coalesce around those terms and to see what we're dealing with here actually applies to all of us that's very
094important to our process because what we believe is if everyone can see themselves as a a part of the the overall problem then everyone can see themselves as a part of the overall solution and that's a very different dynamic than some of the uh ineffective stuff and approaches that we were talking about earlier where people end up walking away from it feeling blamed like they are the problem and that is something that we we try to take head on with helping people uh see how all of this applies to not only the life that they've had but the life that they're experiencing and most of all the life that they want to create thank you okay well john floyd thanks for joining us tonight and we appreciate your partnership to help us you know move
095forward our success measures and especially those social emotional success measure that we have and that student satisfaction success measure that our community had identified you know for us um three years ago so we appreciate you guys being with us tonight and we look forward to to our work over the next year so you guys have a good night and thanks for being here thank you very much have a good evening thank you for having us yes okay i think we're we can get off zoom i think oh no yeah we can get off soon i think yep yes off soon all right um i don't think he can stay for this part he only had 45 minutes so um she's not she's left well i don't know if she's still on there yeah i'm still
096here you can't leave me i'm here okay all right we'll stay on zoom sorry all right all right well thank you and thank you dr sparks for leading that discussion now we'll move to the school opening task force discussion all right well christy we're glad you're still here um colin if you can go to the next slide i wanted to take this time to go through um with you the work that we've done with the i almost said reopening task force we've had to reframe our thinking our opening school task force looking at what the 21 22 school year looks like we had our first meeting on june 23rd and we have another scheduled meeting for next monday what you see here on this agenda is not our agenda for tonight but it was the
097agenda from that meeting on the 23rd so we started with dr charney giving us an update on where we are within the medical community it's great to have her as as a resource as a district parent and an expert in infectious diseases in the work with the st louis um pandemic task force and really she reiterated a lot of what has been an ongoing conversation for us and that we've seen practically implemented within lindbergh that when you have strong mitigating measures in effect the spread of covid19 in schools is really very minimalized that most of the spread is happening outside of the school environment as opposed to in the school environment and since we experienced having students in school from the first day last year we we have that data that we can we can
098share with you tonight so in just a minute dr mckinney is going to share that data and then we'll kind of go through some of the other components of this agenda with you as we talk through where we are right now and what our conversations are as we move towards our next meeting next slide please okay thank you um the first thing i would point out is that when you see data like this through the entirety of school year again we began school at the beginning particularly with our elementary students we started ece on july 1st so very early on um during the covet experience lindbergh was in person in school with students and when you look at these numbers it should be noted that quarantine was an extremely effective mitigation to control the spread
099of of covet 19. in a slide i'll show in just a moment we had simply a handful of cases in which covid19 was transmitted within our schools our schools were in fact one of the safest places looking back we can look back at this as a success the phased-in um opening our schools here at lindbergh were some of the safest places in our community to be because of our mitigation strategies mass social distancing scheduling and use of quarantine so so when you have see cases like on this slide 467 cases of covet 19 among our students out of a population of 7 200 except for as i'll show in just a moment a handful of those those cases occurred and were transmitted outside of the school and then brought into the school and that's why
100you see the large number of quarantines because that was our mitigation to make sure we didn't transmit covet 19 within our schools you could move to the next slide please colin here are the numbers as far as confirmed cases of student student transmission staff to staff transmission and staff to student or student to staff transmission very small numbers single digits these again were based on our contact tracing uh in consultation with the health department yes sir dr tisch all of all grade levels okay through pre-k through 12. these are these are instances that we confirmed when a student transferred it to another student while at school students of student transmission may have happened outside the school matter of fact it did but these were confirmed to happen within the school [Music] yes sir you're welcome
101thank you for the question the next slide uh colin if you could go to the next one these are classroom quarantines um and you can see we've got one time two times three times uh there were times when we we had to quarantine a classroom that means close the entire classroom um more than one time and this did occur at several of our schools however again the quarantine mitigation strategy kept us from ever happening having to close an entire building through the entire school year we did not get to a point where we felt like we needed to close concord elementary or lindbergh high school so again this is a success story and you can see some cumulative numbers there colin if you'll go to the next slide elementary is really more of our focus
102when we look at classrooms that were quarantined entire classrooms middle school and high school you don't necessarily quarantine an entire classroom because students are together for a short time and then they move and they remix elementary classrooms students are together all day in one setting so there were times that we did have to close entire classrooms and you can see the the number of classes in each building that had to be quarantined at least once but again a very effective strategy to make sure that we didn't get spread to the point we had to close an entire building next slide please collin our staff also experienced quarantine again a mitigation strategy and you can see we we had over almost 60 percent of our staff experienced some kind of quarantine certainly doesn't mean this many
103of our staff contracted covid but it does show you the extent that we went to make sure that we put people at home if if there is any exposure next slide please vaccine data right now you can see the percentage of our staff these this is our staff that works directly with um with students and this is a a percentage that i can tell you almost certainly is under reported so this is a low number once we get our staff back here we'll do some surveying and working with staff to understand this number and confirm this but you can see a teacher's a ta staff we're right at the 80 mark and again we feel like that that's a conservative number that's the people that have chosen voluntarily to report to us or they've been
104vac vaccinated here in our own uh clinics so again this is a very great percentage but we feel it's even low compared to the people that are actually vaccinated and we'll be able to continue to update these numbers for the task force next slide please and then finally we have data on the number of students reporting to us that they are vaccinated again eligible students are ages 12 to 18. we have 3 404 12 to 18 year olds in our system currently 1192 as of yesterday have reported the families reported to us that they are in fact vaccinated which is 35 we think this also this number represents a conservative low number we feel like that will we will have more families report into us about their vaccinated status and with this number will continue
105to rise beth johnson's worked with with us to reach out to families and encourage them to let us know if your children have been vaccinated because the more data we have the better decisions we can make regarding the start of our next school year and those are all my slides i'd be happy to answer any questions about the data before i turn it back over to dr sparks if not thank you so another piece of data that we're looking at and keep in mind that all of the decisions that we'll make through the task force are accumulation of multiple data points so we have our quarantine data obviously from last year as well as our vaccination data that we're aware of right now and then in mid-june we sent out a survey to take really
106a pulse from our community in terms of how they felt with regard to masking and quarantining etc so that's another piece of information that the task force will take into consideration is as we're continuing to have conversations so we had almost 1700 parents respond to the survey almost 400 staff and then close to 500 students 500 students were just middle and high school students we did not survey our elementary students if you go on to the next slide you can see that there is in general a preference for masks to be optional that preference increases when you get to the higher age levels where vaccines are already available so this again is just a piece of information i'd be interested to know i know we're continuing to collect feedback from from the community with regard
107to more open-ended responses and we continue to look at that knowing that this survey happened in mid-june and there's been a lot of as we know with covid everything is always at this moment in time here's what we know and here's what the information that we have and since the point of this survey we're hearing significantly more about the delta variant we're hearing much more about hospitalization rates within the state specifically so those are all things that we take into consideration as we as the the work of the task force continues moving on to the next slide you can see and and we've broken this out to look at the data from preschool through sixth grade and then seventh through twelfth grade and that's because that's that point in time where we can break who's
108who is eligible for the vaccine and who is not eligible for the vaccine um so we asked the question about vaccination plans and so what you see here and what we shared with the task force is a summary of the percentage of families who do plan to vaccinate their younger children i put an asterisk next to middle school because middle school will both include students are in 7th and 8th grade and who are 12 years old and currently eligible as well as our sixth graders so that that data may not be as accurate for sixth grade it encapsulates middle school overall and then in the next slide you see the staff feedback with regard to again we see that that slight preference for optional masks that is happening um at each of the various levels
109and then you can see district wide as as well and then i also broke out the teacher data i wanted to look specifically at what is the data for our classroom teachers who will be spending that time specifically in the classroom with with our students and there's not there's not a significant variation there from what the the total data shows us moving on to the next slide our student feedback our students definitely have some thoughts about those masks so you can see here we see probably our highest level of preference for optional masks in our student population next slide for me please the reason why this is so important that we have the conversations about masks and it's part of us making decisions about whether um where masks are going to be required or not
110required what will be optional is there is still going to be a significant requirement for us to quarantine students when they are direct contacts and our priority throughout all of this has been how do we have strong learning experiences for students to the best that we can we know last year was was definitely anomaly but as we go into this year we are trying to capture every every high quality learning experience that we can for students and when students are quarantined they are not at school they are not able to learn with their peers they are not able to have that direct contact with hands-on learning with their teachers etc and last year we were able to do what we called concurrent teaching at times where students were able to be live in the classroom
111or to be home and be live interacting with the classroom that really reduces the efficacy of learning for both environments that is not our plan for quarantine instruction this year going into this year students who are quarantined will have asynchronous work so at the elementary level those will be personalized learning menus for students at the secondary level we have canvas which will have the outline of all the work students need so our goal is to keep our kids in school so that they have access to rich learning experiences as opposed to kind of this self-managed process of learning next slide please as i shared with you earlier it's important for us to have the conversations about what does it look like for print preschool through sixth grade and how those decisions may look different for
112our seventh through 12th graders because of access to to vaccine eligibility so in in going through this process and you can go ahead and go to the next slide colin we are we've delved into subcommittees as a part of the task force and the subcommittees have been meeting i know at least one of them met yesterday we've got another one meeting tomorrow to really talk about what does it look like for elementary age plus sixth grade early childhood what does it look like seven through twelfth grade the operations of the district looking at things like food service etc that's another uh subcommittee communications what are our communications with our families and then as i shared we are scheduled to meet um next monday it is possible we may need an additional meeting that's a surprise
113for anybody who's on the task force who is listening to us right now and then we want to you know it's this fine line of being able to communicate with families as soon as we can but also giving giving families as accurate of information about what the school year will really look like so late july early august is when we will communicate with families what those next steps are for what the process for opening school is so that's the trajectory of what happened in our last meeting if we go to the next slide we ended our task force meeting knowing that cdc was going to be updating guidelines um and those have since come out and like us the cdc values in person learning and knows that that needs to be a priority um the
114the priority around around you know having eligible students have access to the vaccine definitely something so that we can again keep kids in school and then the conversations about masks so the updated guidance from cdc is that they are recommending that students children age 2 and above who are and those who are not fully vaccinated remained masked when indoors outdoors is a is a different it is a different expectation students can be masculine so that's extremely different than what we had going into last school year and needs to be a part of the conversation that the task force has not yet had and then on the next slide um one of the i'll talk about distancing and medication first um and then touch base on quarantine which i think again is one of the biggest
115parts of the conversation that we need to have um physical distancing is still encouraged but we are looking at three feet not six feet again that goes back to what the data has been over the course of this last year and looking at transmission in schools mitigation measures still there's a requirement for masks on transportation but food service can can change and adjust and does not have to have single serve etc so there are some changes there that kind of ease some of the procedures that we had in place last school year quarantine once again for those who are not fully vaccinated they will need to quarantine so fully vaccinated students will not be required to quarantine and this next statement is really important students are really people but we're talking about students here when
116not not vaccinated if those in close contact with one another direct contact who would be eligible for or required to quarantine if if they were wearing masks appropriately quarantine is not required so that is very different than last year when we had masks in place and yet still students were needing to quarantine with masks in place quarantine will not be um the outcome for our students so these are this is new information these last two slides that need to be a part of the conversation of our task force but it's definitely again when you look at the totality of information that we have it is a piece of the information in our decision making processes then did you have a question i do have a question about um asynchronous work if a child is quarantined
117how does that work i mean the biggest thing i hear is the reason why you know being at home didn't work for students was because they weren't doing the work they weren't logging in and they weren't completing the work so what is the district's plan for students who are going to be quarantined and may potentially just miss out two weeks of school well and our goal what we hope is that we can avoid quarantine i mean ultimately that is our number one priority is keeping kids in school because it's not a successful option for kids um having said that you know we'll continue to reach out as a teacher i would those kids are my kids like i want them to be successful i'm going to be following up checking in having the opportunity calling
118calling parents the same way you would do if your students were in person and they you were not seeing that level of success you'd want to be in communication to follow up with that and i would just say too it's 10 days not 14 so so if you hit it bad yeah it could be two full weeks of learning but typically it's maybe you know if i you could potentially even have five six days so but that's it you know this idea of the concurrent teaching with with staff um you know it's kind of like when you try to do too many things you're not really good at any one thing so having kids sitting at home and kids sitting in your classroom are secondary teachers now we developed our elementary where that didn't have
119to happen and we've made that option for our elementary families again with our elementary arc and i think we have two two classes i think of elementary arc um so you know we'll we'll do our best and to make i mean just like if a kid was gonna miss you know five days because they were just normally sick we'll continue to do those things the nice thing about canvas is it's secondary level which we didn't used to have when kids would miss school everything is right there videos can be embedded lectures can be embedded so i mean the experience of being away from school now learning regardless is much better than when all of us were going to school and missing school so is that the last slide the last site is all right so
120questions about that so yeah that's all right so question so we are like tara said going to meet again um and we'll continue to gather data i have a meeting with all the area superintendents tomorrow um so we'll get a feel for what's kind of going on around the county and what the thought process is we you know historically our health department has always followed the cdc recommendations which then in turn we have followed so that's kind of you know just some thoughts but we haven't made any decisions yet we're still gathering we i want to hear some conversations with some other people um kind of what they're going to do as far as processes and that's to be honest with you that's what our this group is our superintendents have done through the whole
121pandemic i mean we have been there you know partnering and collaborating with one another and making sure we were making good decisions for the saint louis region together and so we'll we'll continue to to do that so but um like tara said we may need another meeting besides the the 19th meeting and then obviously with the board we'll before anything goes out you guys will have that information and we'll go from there so thanks christy has put a question in the chat she asked if we will still have students in pods um the three feet etc and you know chrissy all of those decisions haven't been finalized yet but we are trying again going that idea of going back to normal as much as we can and having that flexible the flexibility to group our
122students that is something that we are we're prioritizing and as a part of the conversation i think that these new um guidelines give us a lot more flexibility to be able to manage the instruction in a more typical way yeah and tara makes a good point you know as much as i think we all would want to be just back to normal it's not going to happen but we're going to be more normal than we were all of last year so and like letting volunteers you know most likely volunteers are going to be parents are going to be able to be back in buildings with certain you know procedure you know so we're getting that normalcy back i know for some it's not as fast as they would like but um you know we have
123to think of the greater good and the larger picture of every everyone and take those into consideration for safety you know first listening to our medical experts so any other questions okay yeah thank you dr sparks for the presentation and you know obviously the situation is fluid and uh this administration and does a great job of being transparent and trying to get information out there as best as and as quickly as possible so uh stay tuned um and i'd like to also thank everyone for joining us whether here in person or or virtually or live stream or whatever we call it um so thank you all for uh joining us in here and gathering this information we would love to see people come in and get informed and see what's going on and this cabinet
124administration shares any and all information they have as quickly as possible with the community so we appreciate that given that we'll move to 5.0 which is a german to have a motion to adjourn board workshop number 1535. motion by megan second second second by jen all in favor say aye aye aye opposed motion carries so aboard workshop 1535 is adjourned you