BOE Work Session June 10, 2021

001um i have a motion to approve the agenda please yep motion and the second time roll call this okay all those in favor please say aye anyone oppose that passes all right so we will open up with our way forward comprehensive school improvement plan update for the afternoon and looks like we are starting with dan steinbergie and chris friend or not sure who's what the order we'll get started good afternoon um thank you for giving us the opportunity to give you an update on the customized support area for the the way forward so we'll spend some time speaking to our facilities planning technology and other financial areas such as our debt service transition plan and transportation so the last uh six seven years we've been working with about 160 million in voter approved uh bond

002funds so we're in the uh kind of closing stages of those funds and we'll have an update on our long-term plan for transitioning our debt service levy to capital funding so we have some some updates for that as well so to kind of get us started chris will kind of provide an update on the facilities planning section good afternoon um as dan mentioned uh we are kind of at the tail end of bond issue 17 in regards to the special projects that we've completed um since summer 17 that included the the construction of an elementary school the addition at eureka high school and as we transition out of those projects we get into what we consider to be cycle maintenance so the replacement of building systems that we know have a heavy lifespan and a

003failure timeline that we need to be aware of so the projects that i'm going to summarize here real quick are all projects that you guys have previously approved to board meetings um the construction on most of these has already begun but i'll run through and give you guys a quick overview on on what's happening this summer paving projects the big one is at babbler elementary school that is basically addressing all the hard surface paving areas excuse me in the rear of the building the big piece of that is we've always had some issues with parent pickup in the afternoons backing up onto shepard road and in some cases depending on the timing it can even be out on highway 109. so we've had residents we've had the city of wildwood we've had some people express

004concerns over the years obviously in the last year with the increased parent pickup this has become an even larger issue so as part of this project we're actually going to make about a quarter mile road around the existing soccer field to absorb some of that traffic bring it on to our campus so it's not spilling out onto the major roadways in the area so that's that's the big piece i know deb's excited about some of these improvements um because her staff is over in that building as well and it can be a pretty pretty nasty situation in the afternoons green pines in the wildwood transportation lot are pretty much just straight replacements those are failing paving systems that are due for replacement and actually the wildwood transportation lot we will begin our first concrete pour

005on that project tomorrow so we're hoping to be done by the middle of middle of the summer hopefully beginning of july that lot will be completed district-wide flooring those are just basic uh flooring replacements babbler elementary is room six it's a multi-purpose room that currently has hard tile on it they had requested carpet ball one is room eight we had previously done a project that we did some waterproofing around that area of the building and room eight had had some water infiltration issues in the past now that we're confident that those have been addressed we're going to go in and replace the carpet in that room uh kellison is we'll just kill us hold on here tell us in his room four that's another uh room that we had some moisture issues in we're gonna

006do some water mitigation on that and replace the carpet in there uh westridge we're gonna address the library wild horse is the office uh complex lasalle is basically all of the corridors and the treads on the stair stairwells leading up to the second floor eureka high is basically the 400s wing we know we've done a ton of renovations in that in that facility and as you do that some of your other spaces tend to look pretty dated and that is the last area in the building that had not been upgraded so we're going to replace carpet and finishes in those rooms we're actually besides the installation of the carpet we're self-performing all the improvements with our maintenance staff to help on costs so and then marquette high school the main gym floor will be refinished

007re-striped and uh good to go for next summer or next school year district-wide hvac upgrades we do intend on making some improvements indoor air quality during this summer so we'll be working on that again we'll be doing that installation with our own staff rsd staff so to him to help with the cost indoor bleacher replacements this is a big one um all of our gyms had had aging wooden bleacher systems from original construction um they had continued to give us issues um so we have allocated some money to to replace seven of the eight gym gym uh bleacher systems in in the high schools uh the only one we won't do is eureka high school's main gym and that's because that's a newer facility and it's already a plastic bleacher system a poly system so

008eureka's b gym summit's main gym marquette's main gym and lafayette's bgm are all going to be done this summer we've talked about the eureka high pool hvac unit that unit was running on fumes and duct tape so we are replacing that unit as we speak i know we'll talk a little more further in the discussion there's obviously discussion about potentially a new facility in that in that area in the future and we have made sure that the pool unit that we are putting in is repurposable so if we do construct another facility in the future it could be repurposed um and then the replacement of the ada left at vandover early childhood center that will actually be completed today so the the first uh as you walk in the main doors in the front there

009there's a lift that connects those two areas the first and second level and that lift will be replaced as of today do you have a constant cost on that on all these uh yeah so i've got a few more that i'll go through but the total at the bottom there this summer we'll be executing just over 16 million dollars worth of projects so um some of the larger projects we're going to be doing this summer uh the eureka high school tennis courts as you know we completed the the replacement of the tennis court system at rockwood summit last year we have gotten really good reviews on that system we kind of talked about this earlier that especially in a k-12 environment your your athletic facilities in particular your tennis courts are usually kind of an

010afterthought when you are doing new construction um they're usually constructed by the paver that's doing the parking lot they put down asphalt they paint it they put nets on it and you move on well we've learned over the years that that's not really how those systems should be installed so we did a lot of homework before we did rockwood summit we've come up with a tennis specific system that we're very happy with and our intent is to do eureka high school and marquette this summer as well uh eureka high school right now is probably about 50 complete and marquette has just started in the past week so um marquette high school stem edition so that's actually a large renovation it's a three-year project that this will be the last phase of renovation inside the curriculum

011wing um same contractor we had last summer so we've got a really good team in place it's a tough project with a lot to do in a short time but we're confident that it'll be done and as i mentioned you total all those up that's about 16 million dollars worth of active construction that will execute this summer potential projects for next summer as i said three of the four high schools are scheduled or done or continuing construction at this time with the tennis courts we're hopeful that we can do lafayette next year obviously when we did the four we prioritized them in the area it needs lafayette was probably the best the best court system we had in place we still would like to replace it it's due to be replaced it just wasn't unsafe

012like some of the other facilities had been have been progressing to the funding for that will be depend dependent on how some of our projects come back this summer so if we stay within budget and we actually pull some money back on allowances we're hopeful that we can get lafayette done next summer so we won't know until the end of the summer and we close out some of these projects whether the funding will be there or not but um it is a usable facility at this point it's not dire that it be replaced we're just wanting to do it while we're doing the others um no not at lafayette high school now rockwood summit in eureka they were getting to where they had to cancel events so we knew they were priority they were a

013priority yep um indoor bleacher replacement so we'll finish off the last two systems that would be the summit b gym and the marquette b gym next summer and then we'll we'll also loop in some more cycle maintenance projects as far as flooring roofing hvac things like that another potential thing that we could do depending on what our plan is moving forward as far as future bond issues we have allocated some some funding to start the design process on some projects if we choose to do so that way we're ready to launch in the event of bond issue is successful in the future do you have any middle school tennis courts that you're going to be looking at in the future we do not we currently don't have any tennis courts at the middle school sites

014questions going yes okay chris under the uh cycle maintenance projects are those set up like on a regular cycle like every five years you look at roofs is there like an overall picture matrix of so it's it's folded into our overall capital plan so we know the timeline that we need to be paying attention to these systems obviously there's some some events whether it's a weather event or or what have you that happens in between those those uh those dates but we review it every year at the building level we have consultants you know is it like an example is roofing so we have roofing consultants that that are constantly looking at our roof systems making sure they're on the radar and we review those needs every year that then moves them into priority if

015you see something that whether it's not on your five-year plan or not is that correct correct and especially if it's a safety issue or something that's going to interrupt the learning environment it's obviously a high priority okay all right i think it's also as we kind of move to the next section but many of those projects that are on the list for the summer were funded through savings that chris and his department have been able to realize on projects that they weren't in an initial scope of the the bond issue so we've been able to take care of that through some of the savings that we've realized on those and also to the community that they approved the 95 million authorization back in 2017 but we only issued uh 93 million in bonds so we've

016been able to take care of all those projects and then also issue 2 million less in bonds which saves interest costs and everything like that so it'll accomplish a lot through these through these funds so so part of the uh the long term plan is the debt service levy transition plan so currently all of our cycle maintenance projects um large scale projects are funded through bond issues that are voter approved so we've set up a plan where we would transition our levy that's authorized by the voters excuse me and move it towards a capital projects a dedicated capital projects fund so i believe uh five years ago the original transition plan set us out for a 20 25 26 school year transition to start that so um everything would have to be voter approved but

017the plan the initial plan would move 27 cents from debt service to capital uh to the capital fund to fund certain projects as part of our long-term capital planning and then we'd complete that in the the following year so the initial plan again as it shows that we'd go to the voters in april 24 for that um for that authorization so it would be one authorization but kind of transition over time so it would just be one um voter item that goes out there so um we've uh we updated it here on the right hand side of the slide to show and this has actually been updated since the last time we talked to you in october of 19 where we were originally looking to move that up to to the 23-24 school year but

018we've actually working with our financial advisors and looking at scenarios we're able to actually possibly move that up one year to the 2020 excuse me the 22-23 school year and this would transition 18 cents from the debt service fund to the capital fund and then we would complete that in the 26 27 school year where our debt service fund would kind of remain at the 14 cents so that initial 18 cents that could possibly go in in the 22-23 school year would provide um approximately 8 million dollars to the capital fund um so we look at every penny is essentially 450 000 that we're able to move over so that would go for possible authorization in april 22 so here we're looking within a year of providing that and then final it would finalize that

019in the 26-27 school year so in total it'd be 44 cents moving from debt service to the capital projects fund when the full plan is is moved out so that would help fund our capital needs items that um chris has mentioned as part of the long-term planning for recycled maintenance as part of that annual review technology related items and other projects that may come up over the course of those years and can you clarify go back a slide on the voter approval of operating levy increase there's no tax increase with that that's just there's no tax increases it's a shift it allows us to shift it correctly we're clear on that that's correct we have to go to the voters to move that move those pennies from the debt service fund over to the operating

020side because the capital funds taxes for our our patrons it would be a no tax increase chris to the tax rate right in this atmosphere how do you convince the public we're not trying to do something shady by just doing this how do you convince them good question there's a lot of advantages to this one is we're saving future costs by not because we know we're going to have facility needs technology needs we're going to have our buildings are um getting older so you know we're going to have to replace roofs we're going to have to replace large ticket items maintain them technology items are continuing to evolve so instead of financing those and paying interest costs which interest costs are really low right now but i don't think we can expect them to stay

021at this level for the future we if we were able to ship that into our capital funds we're able to manage that plan that out and pay less money in our overall interest cost and our debt service fund um and pay it at real-time costs so we'd have the funds to be able to plan it out accordingly you've done this before anything like this before no not to my knowledge no we since i've been here everything's been all of our facility needs to my understanding has been funded through bond issues right so so we did at one time have a capital fund in place we're trying to re-establish that fund uh mid 2000's when the recession hit due to budget restraints you know and constraints we we did eliminate that and became 100 dependent on

022bond issues and in the construction world that is not how you want to do business because as dan mentioned you're not getting dollar for dollar on your projects the other thing and we experience this if you go through a stretch of time where you have unsuccessful bond issues you do nothing there's nothing there's no funding in place there's no backup plan so we are a hundred percent dependent on bond issues right now and again that's that's not the perfect model to be doing construction projects do you move it to the the operating levy you'll have that money you can budget okay part of the language and the uh and what goes to the voters for approval would be restricted to the capital fund do we have an estimate what that will put into our capital

023fund initially the 18 cents would be um eight million dollars and then when it's fully transitioned it'd be almost an annual budget of 27 to 29 million it's one cent is 450 000. is that what you say okay kinder i'll just add that i think a comprehensive communication plan outlining uh all the elements of that plan would be extremely useful as well to fully explain to our public uh what this means for them and all of our taxpayers the simple majority yes majority that's different from bond issues and i think there's a slide here that shows that but um for a tax referendum it's a simple majority on there so so this is kind of what the scenarios look like um if we were to move forward so um again for the 20 for the

02422 to 23 school year for that first year transition we would look at an april election on this because the tax rates are approved by the board in september of each year so we would need the approval prior to going to set the tax rates um and then the there's a bullet point on the second and final phase but it would be it'd be one voter approval with the language in there of how we're going to stair step it so that when we get to the end of the process if it would be approved in september of 26 when the board sets the tax rates for there if that's fully approved that's when the final stage would set for that with the full pennies being transitioned we do have the ability if it's not approved

025in april 22 to put it on subsequent elections and again that's where it kind of notes that it we do just need simple majority for approval um but the june 20 for the full transition the june 23 is the um the last possible election um that we could take for a simple majority approval on there to fit the timeline if that doesn't pass then you have to go to 4-7 i think that's that's in regards to when to fit within our current transition plan okay and has other districts done this um that's a good question um i know other school districts do have dedicated levies as part of their tax rate to fund capital projects um i can't think about stop my head any recent school districts that have gone to the voters for this

026type of transition i know that there have been tax referendums to provide for a tax levy increase but i think those were i believe those were tax rate increases so i can't think of anything outside my head but i can follow up okay and then as we kind of move through the transition there's possible um there's chances where if we have large ticket items until we get the full transition and funding in place there may have to be times uh where we have to would do smaller bond issues um from a timing standpoint and this is one that we've talked about before and i think chris is going to provide a little bit update on that yeah so before the pandemic we'd actually started to discuss the potential of having a small bond issue and

027on on the screen is some of the items that we were discussing at that time uh additions at chesterfield elementary and blevins those were both enrollment driven um you know dan and his team and paul northington have been keeping an eye on enrollment numbers and those are areas that that we saw the need at some point that we would need some more square footage so uh it's an eight room expansion at chesterfield and a four room expansion at blevins another project in the area of need is ada upgrades obviously we have a very large district we have almost four million square feet under roof we have several elevators several lifts ramps restrooms that need some ada upgrades our current list right now is just above a million dollars in improvements that we have waiting on

028funding um talked a little bit earlier about the eureka high school potential natatorium we know that's an aging facility obviously we're making an hvac upgrade to it right now but the facility in general is was constructed in the early 70s and it is in need of improvement so we've looked at some options on where that may be located on campus and what that might look like and then uh a potential district storage facility so when we talk about the storage facility for the district where we are really in need of a centralized storage facility um we've looked and talked about lots of different options we've looked at some vacant grocery store facilities um i know carmen and her group right now are renting cold storage off off uh district sites so it's a need it's

029there's not a building that we visit that does not have storage as one of their priorities and unfortunately when you don't have places to store things they tend to find the dumpster and that's not the greatest you know way to go about things so a centralized storage location is is a very critical need for this district in the future a winner so far on the lottery for tom dunn's new pool may take more than one lottery how are we doing on gagging i mean i know that that's pretty full in the couple visits i've had this year i mean they're kind of bursting at the seams again already are we is that on the radar we got anything going on when we designed and made the decision to expand geige this past time that was

030a bond issue 15 i believe um the decision was made at that time that that would be the last addition that we would put on that building you know we're getting to the point now where you're almost constructing a super elementary where you can just keep sprawling all over that campus but you're eating into your auxiliary facilities your athletic fields your playgrounds and quite honestly you're just making the facility too big so the intent at the time was that that would be the last addition my understanding is our enrollment numbers are still good there with the space that we've created um you know they did they went from being in very tight spaces to expanding out once we put that addition on and i think they have some room they have some flexibility within the

031building still to make sure they meet the enrollment needs and then also are we still looking for a permanent resident for our bus lot in fenton is that still kind of on the radar as well or my knowledge yes i don't have any um full details on that but i know that is something in the back of paul and mike's um kind of on their list of things to look at we're down there because right now that currently is being leased down there right yeah yeah there's a whole lot of buses up at the rockwood valley is that the ones from the wildwood place so they can do their so you have any security on that yes so funny you should mention that so as i mentioned earlier we're getting ready to do our first

032pour over at the wildwood bus lot and there is a lot of buses that we had to vacate off of that site so they chose to put them over at rockwood valley um it's kind of oops sorry it's kind of off the beaten path so that was one of the one of the thought processes with that we've also contacted st louis county police um so they have picked up their patrols and i do believe even in the evenings they have a car staged there at times just to make sure people aren't there you talking about wildwood that's the one right by ponds correct okay that's the big is that the biggest one yes yeah so we talked also about the gutters around the tracks and the fields is there a spot in this so yeah

033so actually i have a 2 30 meeting this afternoon to look at those again i'll be over at lafayette high school talking with one of our consultants that worked with us when we installed those facilities the turf facilities so our biggest goal right now is to put a number what's a good budget number you know i know we talked a few weeks ago on what that looked like we're just making sure that we've exhausted every option before we go to that because i would really consider what we're talking about a nuclear option we'd like to really find a way to modify the system that's in place and not tear it out but again we're continuing those discussions and that'll that'll continue at 2 30 this afternoon so as soon as we know more obviously we'll

034update you you missed what which which one are you talking about what are you talking about uh like there's a we know where their turf fields are and then our track and there's like a gutter concrete gutter that goes around them i think all four yeah is that a problem it's an injury potential problem so we've just talked about that before and it's an expensive fix so we've i'm just curious if that's how that's kind of looking in terms of a potential bond issue to fix that or something else but investigating and exploring options because it's right on the edge of the playing surface all four at the same time make sure you get the inside lane i guess well the concern is actually athletes coming off the playing surface towards the track um there's

035it's not to get into an hour-long conversation but uh you know i think a lot of people think that was installed with the turf fields and it was not it was actually in place before the turf fields were installed and there was some pretty serious cost implications in regards to msd when we installed our turf if we were to remove that drain system it was going to increase our cost exponentially at three of the four locations um and it does serve as its own drainage system for the tracks so it does serve a purpose there's just been you know continuing concern about an athlete turning an ankle um as they're coming off the playing surface onto the track so we're trying to find a way to make it safer we're just trying to do it

036in a cost-effective manner it's impossible to do like a i'm thinking like leafguard gutters where you could put a drain over the top of it and just cap it i mean that sounds like an easy i wish it was that easy i really do and quite honestly that's how we started the conversation it was like guys let's figure this thing out you know there's got to be a simple face it's been years in the conversation that's what i do in my house i just put one of those things on it looks like he's tired yeah i have been dreaming of a few different solutions so i'm no engineer but we'll talk later i'll share i'll share those ideas okay i'm i'm welcome i'm sure no one else has thought of that that whole pool noodle

037thing again that's right i asked this question earlier and and um i'm going to ask it now because of this conversation so how do you decide what projects to tackle what's your process for sitting for saying yeah i know this came up when we did our outstanding boards application so can you talk to us a little bit about do you meet with each principal how how do you approach this yeah so we currently have a master list that some projects go back you know five ten years um there's over a thousand projects waiting on this list um and really you kind of work backwards we do meet annually with every building administrator in the fall once they get into school and get the school year rolling we go out and we meet on site review

038their list walk the campus find out if there's any needs that can go away or if there's any needs that need to be added so that's kind of where that that list is generated so then once we know there's going to be a bond issue referendum or we have funding in place to address some of these items we have a matrix that we use that kind of scores out each project you know obviously safety is a huge a huge factor in that process uh the learning environment you know things like that so if a project scores across multiple categories obviously it prioritizes itself pretty high so once we know we have funding in place we start looking to see what we can fit in that funding mechanism so it's a year-long process obviously not all

039requests wait until the fall you know we have things come up throughout the school year that that we have active files on every location so if something comes in that that is an immediate need obviously we address those and they become a higher priority somebody from the county come out and inspect all these different places and say you better get that fixed folks not typically the only the systems that the county is involved in the most are fire alarm systems they'll come out and inspect those on an annual basis if you have an electrical system you know they don't typically like i said we have four million square feet so they don't spend a lot of time in our buildings unless we have an active project now with that said if we have an active

040project and they're in doing inspections on that and they see something else they will bring that to our attention but rarely do we get any direction from the county that's unsolicited um this uh slide here just kind of is a reference for when we kind of get to those points of decisions uh to put items on for uh to vote on so um as you kind of mentioned the tax levy is a simple majority and then when it comes to a bond issue if we would have to issue a a bond issue to funds maybe some major projects um we just kind of keep these timelines in place of uh the two thirds and the four sevenths so well um the that has uh been um a state statute that's been in place for a

041number of years so it's basically it helps the taxpayer with the uh the rise in the um assessed valuation versus the actual inflation rate which is measured by cpi so 93 1990 i believe yeah 90. okay and then to provide a technology update dub's going to come up and join us thanks chris hello um i'm gonna start with a little bit of background in may of we presented a pin form for a data governance and data privacy policy and that was approved thank you but we began working on that with rockwood learning council and then covet hit and we paused we just stopped and focused on what we needed to do now it's time to get back into that and so we are working on that and i have a draft ready for the attorneys

042i have a first read up there for july of 2021 that was an estimate it may be august or even september it just depends on how things flow through the rest of the process in addition m sip six requires that every district have a distinct data privacy and cyber security policy by february of 2022 so this is really timely that we get it done the policy will allow us to determine what is important to the operation of the district and it will allow the technology department to guide its work to protect our data inform our employees inform our families and support that work and make sure most of all that we are protecting our students and employees data and improving our and maintaining that trusted relationship that we are doing what is right for our

043families the rockwood learning council was instrumental in this in 2019 up through the february meeting and as part of that we have developed some processes and procedures one of the things that we will be doing is educating our staff with back-to-school training on best practices for ferpa data privacy and cyber security so that everyone has an understanding of just what it is and what they can do to help support that and make sure that they're following those best practices we'll have a software review team which will not only review new products but will also help us determine what to sunset we have a situation here in the district where a lot of times people they they latch on to a product or a tool because they're comfortable with it but it's really outdated maybe it

044doesn't have the best instructional practices anymore and and we really need a process in place to um eliminate some of those as we add new and then lastly learn platform is a tool that we have in place and beginning in the fall we're going to roll it out to teachers so they will be able to request a product that they've never used before they will be able to look on it and see what types of products are available that have already been approved they'll see what kind of privacy practices the vendor has if we have data privacy agreements with them and they've been approved those will be listed that tool will also be available via our public website for parents to look at that has been a big question it was a question before kovid

045but it became very important as kovid continued parents were seeing all of the tools that their kids were using and they started asking a lot of questions why is my student doing this why are they why do they need my child's birthday why do they need my child's first and last name you know so that kind of information will be provided on there and it will also let parents know what tools the district has purchased and which tools we're using that are no cost then underneath that you see implement additional cyber security measures we utilize as many resources as we can from the federal and state agencies i am a member of the department of homeland security and those other acronyms up there and as such we get free tools that we can use we

046have a free access to their security operations center i have utilized them several times they're always great to work with we also reinforce our existing relationships with law enforcement um unfortunately we've had to you know talk to law enforcement a few times and so it's it's very helpful when we know each other in advance of an emergency situation it was handy to be able to call up and say we have this problem and the fbi agent knew who i was and said you know that's great let's see what we can do to help you out and then on esser funding sr funding for sr2 and 3 allows for the use of cyber security tools purchases and so we are looking at that that is on the list for the district lastly our technology hardware and

047systems information systems um comprise mainly infinite campus and business plus they also support the research evaluation and assessment office with data providing data to glenn and his team to to utilize but we're going to be upgrading to the campus cloud choice in july there are some benefits to that that we will receive at no additional cost one of them is we'll have the ability to do online forms which will streamline a lot of our student form collection that's separate from online census verification but this would be for things like field trip form [Music] an activity registration for an after-school activity possibly for summer school we also have created accounts for all parents to facilitate their access to the system so that they can complete the census verification online that really streamlines things for our schools

048because all of the information goes immediately into infinite campus and the schools don't have to do data entry business plus is in the process of being upgraded that will go live in november and it the main benefit for that aside from getting us to a version that is fully supported is that it will allow us access to chrome edge and firefox and eliminate the need for internet explorer which is no longer supported by microsoft then um we continue with our normal technology services things that i you know you see me or bob here to present things like our e-rate requests for funding our staff computer refresh our student chromebook refresh i've recently brought dell and that's what the last three or four so those are the kinds of things we're doing and then instructional technology

049are our teachers who support our teacher who support classroom teachers with the integration of technology and the utilization of those online resources well i have a question always i got stuff beginning we talked about sun setting software you know you're not talking about a mass district-wide where everybody has been using something else you're going to make you're going to have them use something new are you no that's not the intent the intent is that for example we have a district policy that says we review software every five years i believe right dan so we will go through that and we will look at the software to see for example business plus does business plus still meet our needs is it still current does it have adequate data privacy and cyber security uh components built in

050and then we'll look at that the other thing that we can do is look at learn platform and see data analytics on how many people are actually using a tool and if it's one or two then maybe it's a different conversation about paying for it out of the learning and support services budget maybe it's you know talking to those teachers to see if something else works for them maybe it is paying for that those few people using it as opposed to paying for a district-wide license so if you have a third grade teacher at ells at kellison and they they have something that's due to be sunsetted you have something in place to help train them on whatever they're going to we do that's going to be one of the things that instructional technology specialists

051will be helping with is if we as a district decide through that committee or review process that we're going to eliminate the use of a tool then it's not going to happen overnight right it's going to be a planned obsolescence and will work with those people identified as using it to ensure that they know what other options are available and what other you know and how to use those other tools that'll be done through you it won't be done through renee over there will it um right now it's planned to be through my team okay good great thank you that's a lot of stuff i can't keep up here thank you um transportation uh is a as a area of uh customized support so we are moving forward with our bus refresh so we have

05220 new buses coming on site in july and we're going to continue an eight year schedule so we're going to continue to look at updating our fleet and also uh just kind of have uh from a planning stage as to whether our fleet size needs a change just because of uh less routes or fewer drivers so those are all part of the plan so it's all items taken into consideration as we kind of move forward into uh continuing with our bus refresh so i was at a baseball game the other night with my grandson and the whole the whole conversation of everybody in the audience with the new bus routes that came out and the walking distance and that is is that firm right now it's going to be like that or is it if

053you get more bus drivers you'll modify it or how does that work out yeah i can't um unfortunately i can't speak directly related to to those items but my overall understanding is correct that'll be a fluid um scenario where if we do are able to pick up additional drivers um that will be revisited but i think that's something that we're just gonna have to monitor as we pick up drivers and and review our uh our routes go into next year but as of right now we're planning for less routes to begin the 21-22 school year i think it's a good idea to put it out early because it has parents started to talk about it right and in a subdivision or whatever they'll start trying to find one person drive three or four families that's

054a good idea dana if we have let's just say 20 buses or 30 buses that we're not using like can we just unload those fairly quick but then if we find that we need them back can we require buses is this something that we can just go kind of back and forth really easily or so the initial transition to a district-owned uh transportation is released or we were financing your our initial buses but we've actually the last two refreshes we've been purchasing the purchasing those outright so um we are at a stage where we in in the terms of the lease that we're able to to buy those buses out so if we come to a need that we need 10 20 less buses we can pay those out and then we'll be able to

055resell them and be able to offset the cost of paying those off so we do have some flexibility we have more flexibility now than we did three four years ago good in terms of in terms of the bigger bigger loads on buses that's strictly because we can't find drivers right we have the buses we just can't find drivers the efforts are out there i think to to recruit and hire buses but our drivers i'm sorry but um i can't find the applicants unique just to rockwood correct correct and i think all areas of the district um are going through that as well kitchen staff i know is an area that we were they were under staff this year okay and just to kind of wrap up this piece of it so uh fiscal responsibility part

056of customize supports um as we've meant as we uh presented in may we are anticipating a budget surplus for this fiscal year which is quite the change when we were a year ago it's great news and our our fund balances will be expected to be above the 22 target established by the board um and we're gonna at the next the june 24th meeting we'll have a balanced budget presented for approval and uh we're always obviously looking to maintain our aaa um s p rating um we're one of four districts in missouri and less than 90 across the nation so we want to maintain that and keep our fiscal responsibility for our community i read that the end of the year balance went from 52 to 60 million is that right 560 million crackdown that's good

057per forward policy we have to do something with that it's above 22 or what is what is the deal on that um it's a good question i may have to follow up fall back on you in regards to that but um i know the minimum is the 18 and then the four percent stabilization and then anything above that obviously provides some flexibility for future decision making but the minimum or the 22 percent is kind of what our target has been to maintain the last couple years and we've been fortunate to last two years been able to improve that i feel like that's the highest it's been since i've been on the board anyway it's um back in uh 2012 2013 2013 um when i first got here um we were right at 27 yeah so

058it's been a number of years since we've been at that level the last three to four years we've been maintaining right at the 22 percent not a lot of districts in the state that have come out as well as we have this year is that true a lot of them really lost i would say overall um just comparison of how this year was going i think all school districts were concerned about the the um the covet impact from a finance standpoint and from a state level their numbers are um have far exceeded their expectations um from a sales tax standpoint which is kind of indicator of the economy that's way above spending was still going on i don't i haven't looked at everybody's financial condition but i know the stimulus money that school districts have

059been provided has been able to help offset any kind of losses um i do know like for rockwood our self-supporting funds and operations were impacted our child nutrition community education programs preschool tuition programs were impacted just because those are reliant on charging admissions or fees for those but from an overall operations standpoint we were very fortunate to have the outcome that we are we going to get a report from community ed today they're part of the presentation today oh okay okay so we'll continue so we'll continue uh to continue reviewing each area of the way forward we began with the efficiency and the finance and budget portion to help with scheduling and other appointments that are happening throughout the day we've continued to make the way forward we're called compass now our way forward compass

060to help us evaluate and monitor the progress we're making with our strategic plan the way forward currently in our in our way forward strategic plan we have a list of action steps that are connected to meeting objectives that are tied to our goal areas within the way forward the part that we've been continuing to develop are what are those evidence indicators how do we know we're moving in that right direction so again our way forward compass to help us continue to move forward in today's review format uh we'll have with each objective we'll have two slides uh a slide that shares an indicator review so how how we're doing in each indicator uh related to each objective as well as the action step progress so each uh each of our objectives has a list of

061action steps that we're taking to help improve and meet our objectives we set out in the way forward and within each indicator each indicator is going to be possibly one of four levels a level of intervention that we're needing to provide some supports to be future ready uh an approaching uh level that we're on our way there on track that we're prepared to meet it by 2025 as this is a five-year strategic plan and the future ready uh indicating that we're we have the knowledge and skills to adapt as workplaces and opportunities evolve for our students as they continue to move through our schools and graduate we'll also provide an update on where we're at on each action step related to the way forward again a five-year plan some of our action steps haven't been

062started yet we'll share the anticipated start date as well as those that have been implemented and those that are currently ongoing and in progress at the moment so you'll be able to get a review a status of where we're at on each indicator and where we're also at in regards to each action each action step moving forward again as we continue to monitor there's a lot of a lot of areas within our strategic plan this is a sample reporting timeline to you can use our wayforward compass to look at these more frequently to get monitor these can be changed this is just a sample timeline we might be able to use to get frequent updates from each goal area champion and again working with mrs sadowski and the goal area champions to kind of schedule

063uh good reviews uh time but some of these are noted by when data is available either data from standardized tests data from surveys that we're giving to our community just to get timely reporting back and monitoring of the way forward our first area that we kind of started with is the efficiency and effectiveness area and dan shared some of the information as well in the presentation today each area begins the video highlighting some of the achievements uh celebrations that we've achieved uh in rockwood and our communications department has been kind enough to create and upload these videos and we'll share just a one to three minute video i believe before each section to kind of kick it off here wildcats are you ready to celebrate [Applause] on april 4th 2017 rockwood voters approved a bond

064issue to pay for this new elementary school it's the first elementary school built in rockwood since 2004. thank you for all of your hard work on the new eureka elementary school in addition thank you for your work on the prior eureka elementary school funds from the bond issue all also repurposed our past eureka elementary school to an early childhood center to serve our youngest learners [Applause] and dan chris and deb have shared many things that are included in some of these indicators uh so that we can monitor again the efficiency and effectiveness uh part of our strategic plan they shared information regarding each of these indicators that we can look at and check in on regularly and some of those you ask questions about and moving forward the indicators that we've shared here are around

065this completion of cycle maintenance compliance with ada that we don't have any violations annual on-site review of building administrators to make ensuring that we're annually reviewing the needs of buildings the facility safety measures as they're kind of outlined in our superintendent safety plan and enrollment projections able to meet uh building capacity so again each one of these indicators will evaluate on a scale kind of one to four uh the highest being in in blue uh that were future ready that we're prepared and can accommodate uh any future challenges that might come our way anything to library and again with um our action steps that were related there um most things are in progress we do have a um not started with the storage capacity needs and again you heard chris talk about the the need

066for storage capacity a little more depth there systole i i you do i believe it's in um vision board on board i also shared the slides presentation with you just uh um to have that available to access as well excuse me um the second objective was relating to fiscal responsibility by supporting a balanced budget again he highlighted most of these the one part that i'll elaborate on is just we did do a community survey recently it just closed on tuesday so i only have preliminary results back but one of the questions or several questions were related to our responsibility with fiscal um and facilities and 50 of the responses were favorable um and it doesn't feel like a lot uh however when you look at there were 40 percent indicated they didn't have enough information

067so when we pair that with the communication part we talked about um that we just have to could be a communications opportunity to share the great things you know i heard how we're saving money through bond issue projects so we're able to fund other things so a great opportunity we can we see there as evidence through our uh community giving us feedback as well dan any other person here elaborate on no um just kind of just quickly touch base on as we kind of move forward the next couple years um we're still gonna monitor you know we're presenting a balanced budget for 21 22 school year but we're going to continue to monitor any kind of impacts as we kind of come out of the cove environment regarding local economy you know we kind of

068mentioned before the local area is what we're concerned about you know as we kind of catch up to those businesses that may have be impacted from a commercial assessed valuation standpoint so that impacts our local taxes but from a residential standpoint it's very strong that's something that we're just going to have to kind of carry through the next couple years with our goal of still submitting balanced budgets for the next couple years and just keeping our forecasting update based on the information that we have at the time in this area we're kind of moving forward that we kind of talked about this again about our debt service transition plan we'll bring some uh additional information as we kind of move forward as we kind of target that april 2022 and we talked about the buses

069and and looking at other financial data just to prepare so and then the last area uh last objective relating to efficiency and effectiveness is around our technology plan that again deb just shared that again we're looking at some key indicators that we can we can monitor to ensure that we're meeting the comprehensive technology plan that we're reviewing annually some of those key indicators include access to one-to-one devices so we have nearly 100 of our students have access to a device completion of cycle maintenance for eligible technology refreshing nearly 100 of our eligible devices we want to make sure that network uptime continues during school hours and so deb shared that there was a 99 percent uh 99.9 uptime during school hours with our network and the technology helped us help desk resolution timeline network we're

070supporting and helping our staff and students resolve technology issues in a quick and efficient manner the last one there is one that we're looking to in the future is an infrastructure technology security audit rating so to make sure we're able to provide the infrastructure the backbone of everything for our network and security moving forward and we're looking at completing and working through that audit with deb and her department and 2122 moving forward any questions can i answer a lot of those already all right uh then our next area that we'll move into is our is around uh staff teachers and learners and again uh each video or each uh section starts with a little video so as we're transitioning speakers um i'll go ahead and play that video thank you dan chris deb thank you

071hello rockwood school district community this is mark miles out and about in rockwood today in the new stem edition at marquette high school today we're visiting the authentic science research classroom of dr kathy farrar i'd like to ask you about authentic science research what's this class all about this class is probably one of the best classes in high school the students get to spend up to three years learning how to do research on things they're really interested in tell me about your experiences in authentic science research what the joys of the class are with the challenges class because like it's very engaging in everything that you're so genetics is only half the story the other half of the story is the things that go on in your life right so we're going to look at

072just the genetics for this time yeah so what do these devices do so this is this is um a fridge slash incubator and it can go from minus four up to 65 degrees celsius and so what it allows is a student to isolate a small amount of contents at a very specific temperature the reason they have to be very specific is because plasmids have to be at one temperature his bacteria has to be at another temperature and what he is doing is something that has not been done as far as we can tell anywhere in the research your description of these projects reminds me of master's thesis work or a doctoral dissertation these students are really being prepared for that college journey oh i absolutely agree with that i think that if a student is

073really interested in what they're doing they can do so much more than we ever think that they can at the high school level we do something so different every day a lot of it's based on software statistics programs and like using excel um she just comes up with a bunch of different projects like how to use both of those programs and to um how to make a good powerpoint like presentation and we're going to do polymerase chain reaction where we're going to isolate that gene and make copying copy copy we'll really go from if you had only one cell to 68 billion copies of that gene in an hour's time they learn how to conduct research do some statistics on their research the content isn't like learning about mitosis or learning about stoichiometry and chemistry

074or even mechanics and physics it's really learning how to do it and then how to go and get information make sense of that information i mean so it's a skill based course tell me about your favorite part of this class so my favorite part of this class is that the fact that we get to choose what we want to do and how we can like present and like explore certain parts of research and like the biology or medical field and so i think like opportunities we get in this class is like really amazing compared to other classes do you think i would be successful as a student in this class do you have a good attitude absolutely do you find things interesting i love to learn then then we would do great all right sign

075me up all right hello rockwood school district missed those those were good it seems like uh so long ago that uh we had the opportunity i was a lot younger than i think i was just so we're just slapping it are all for the stem labs finished it's not okay how close is the question okay good all right let's just feel like give me a second thank you i was using my mizzou cheerleader voice on that so i didn't turn the microphone on but thank you to whoever decided and was so sweet that uh staff teachers and learners otherwise known as human resources could be pulled off outside of itself so efficiency we already did give me an e took care of that laura lee give me an e we're on give me an s

076uh and then you'll do the rest of success later so uh be prepared for that so thanks for having us i'm katie rebel as you guys know i'm going to have my fabulous team introduce themselves just because i know you probably know their face and you probably know their name but sometimes a face and a name together um it's a nice nice touch so tracy all right hi everyone thanks for having us tracy edwards director of hi i'm brenda tinsley coordinator of benefits hi stacy neely coordinator of support staff so we're here this afternoon just to quickly talk to you guys about the way forward uh s portion which is staff teachers and leaders um i do want to say just from the beginning that um covid of course has created some unique difficulties for

077everybody but the one thing that's remained consistent and has set rockwood above the rest is our staff our staff is amazing they've continued to show up every day for kids whether it's bus drivers child nutrition workers teachers our principals we've been in school in person successfully uh far longer than any of our counterparts so during this global pandemic so our staff teachers learners everyone who has contributed to the success of rockwood and to our students um truly has been amazing this year on behalf of a parent of two children in the rockwood school district which when does school start again because they're home all summer now just kidding um i appreciate everything that our staff has done to support to support our learners i truly do so in the challenges of a pandemic um of

078course this is job embedded in in human resources this is this is um either processes or procedures that we follow on a regular basis it has created some uniqueness in in a pandemic um that we have i feel like responded you know adjusted and responded i like to say that um this year has been a hundred years of change overnight number one and number two we've had to re learn how to do pretty much everything we we know as a human resources department um as simple as how do we interview people uh when we're in a global pandemic to uh how does the hiring process continue so we we've made a lot of you know a chain adjusting to the changes we've made a lot of great changes that hopefully uh the positive will continue

079throughout um continue post pandemic because we are we are emerging so as you guys can see from glenn's awesome powerpoint we really have two goals the first is to develop a system to recruit and retain top talent and of course we're lucky because we're rockwood and so some of it is is that sets us apart we have a wonderful community of students and of parents that people want to come work for us but we do have indicators that we measure um how we can better serve our staff when they do come work for us so just kind of gleaning down our key indicators one thing i want to draw your attention to is what i was talking about in that global pandemic recruitment invention strategies you know that's really changed this last year it's been

080very hard to be in person uh we do everything that we can to support support our local universities and you know partners throughout the um st louis region for all positions i do like to say that people think working in a school district means that it's all teachers in fact we have 1600 teachers and we have just under 4 000 employees so actually there's more employees in the rockwood school district that aren't teachers so we look for ways creative ways to recruit and retain all employees and i know that we've get a lot of press for some reason on our bus drivers which is great if you want to come work for us we'd love to have you be a bus driver but we need custodians we need child nutrition workers we need community ed

081staff we need teachers um certainly it's it's uh it's just changed the environment has changed uh for our hiring processes and tammy to your excellent point uh bus drivers are a night nation right wide issue i i do every time i take a picture of it as i drive down uh different local highways you'll see different school districts with buses out in front saying come work for us yeah parkway has one on 141 right now if you haven't seen it so um so we're certainly not in in a unique situation but i do think it's important that we don't lose sight that it isn't just bus drivers we really need to continue to retain our top talent we need to recruit it but we need to keep who we have and then we need to

082find ways to recruit those individuals because we need all sorts of employees to keep rockwood running as you see we did this last year so one of the ways that we do that is maintaining competitive employee benefits we have a lot of retention information and data of supporting our staff but i think one thing that we do lose sight on is that we have a robust benefit plan in the rockwood school district we are one of two school districts in saint louis county that pay 50 percent of family premiums and in this uh environment that we are in we have eap employee assistant which in rockwood is called pass is the company we work through that i really think is an under recognized resource to help support our staff with their social and emotional needs

083whether it's their personal needs or of their children as we navigate these unprecedented times so i think that you know we measure a recruit and retain through different strategies but one of the things that sets us apart is that we're an awesome community a great place to work but our employee benefits really give us an edge thank you so the action steps just support that goal it's the same goal recruit and retain and you can see that we've either uh we've either not started we're in progress or we've implemented several of our action steps uh one of the things that you see the red the 2223 is provide internships for high school and um college students and create individualized development plans for every employee for pd those have been difficult during this process it isn't

084that we didn't want to start it it's just that in in covid and online learning and back in and concurrent teaching those have been um areas that were that were far more difficult we also i also want to share that we continued to host and will continue to host countless student teachers raise your hand if you're a student teacher in the rockwood school district okay there's two there's two here but we continued we realized that as um a school system that's one of our jobs is to continue to teach and to support learners we're uh we're our rare school district first first of all we're the largest in st louis county so universities love to place students here but uh schools didn't take student teachers last year and we continued to we took 91 student

085teachers or pre-service teachers which is pretty amazing if you do the math on that quickly in your head is not a mathematician that's on average three per school um so that that is a lot and that is that jesus our commitment to working being a good partner with local universities all right well before i move on because our second goal is evaluation which is a little bit of a left turn so i didn't know if we had any questions about recruitment or retention or anything human resources related before we move on to evaluation and kate in recruitment what are we doing to establish equity across our district inequality great question so we have been a leader in this area we uh of course are one school district and other people have followed suit we host

086our own diversity job fair every february now we didn't host it this last february in the global pandemic we couldn't really find a way to make it work but we have for the past um four years we've been hosting that we also um create and make an effort to reach out to our historical black colleges university harristow lincoln university in jeff city um to to really help try to get uh make that connection so we continue to work on those things when we do that are we recruiting student teachers from those universities to sort of build our own um cohort of absolutely any staff but yes and any staff student teachers um help mentor we also have a grow your own program that tracy edwards um started about five years ago at this point so

087that is our own rockwood diverse students who want to become teachers we support them through a scholarship and through mentorship and support and then guarantee them a place to student teacher of course we love to have rockwood graduates come back and student teach in rockwood we support that wholeheartedly and um we want to make sure that we're tapping into the resources that we have here ever do you ever get feedback back from potential candidates on why they might not want to work here um i i don't know that we get it on candidates i mean sometimes people just tell me um when we definitely do in our exit surveys i mean we have exit surveys if we go back to our first slide um we have 84 work that uh rate the environment is working

088favorably as employees who leave and we evaluate all of those we take a look at them we talk with a supervisor if there's any feedback we look at ways how we can improve and get better um but candidates you know we do of course the diversity job fair we do a um an exit slip but um most those people want to come work here that's why they're coming so good question good question 84 out of the 4 000. that's not just teachers no no no that would be no it's it's actually anyone who leaves but it's uh it's it's upon exit so i i do want to draw your attention that we have a 93 retention rate in the rockwood school district i mean that's amazing like if you talk about uh professional organizations to

089be able to to keep and maintain and that's all staff um the exit survey is just when you're leaving either you're retiring or you're resigned you talk about that all of these are are based on the 4000 not just the correct yeah very good all right i'm going to turn it over to tracy edwards about the teacher and principal evaluation system all right so as dr rebela shared we have the two goals so this is our second uh this is a round evaluation i wish i had some green on my screen but i don't but there's a very good reason and that obviously is in that box right there so cobia 19 when you're talking about really important committee work and bringing people together on a topic of evaluation you really want to all be

090in the same room and that was just really tough to do so a few points around you know why that is and where we're at so plus just a little bit of i guess tidbits and information so you understand the work which needs to go into evaluation so i realize it says teacher and principal but we have far more than just one you know two instruments in the district we actually have six certified evaluation instruments that all fall into the umbrella of teacher we have a tei teacher evaluation an lei librarian cei counselor dxei diagnostician icee i instructional coach and c-d-i-e-i content and that's three groups of there she is that's over there see if i got him here constant facilitators is the c the i is instructional tech and the d is data analyst

091so though that team right there uses one instrument so that's six certified instruments right there that we look at that are part of definitely part of this rotation so that's just kind of a little tidbit ti actually came out in 1415 so this was definitely our year we were gonna delve in and really take a look tei came along actually right before kitty and i started in 1415 in this role anyway it had been created that was a it was a unique year to have implemented an instrument that you were no part of writing so it was great though it was fine we did fine so then the cei and the lai came along the next year very much aligned to what our tei was which by the way the rtei rockwoods tei instrument is

09298 aligned to the original deci instrument that came out when in fact we had to change the instrument to align and require a student growth piece so at any rate so those three kind of are in a group if you will the t the c and the l teacher and librarian and then the other three came along the following year so the plan is um we definitely are going to take a look i can't tackle all six we can't tackle all six that's just a bit much because again the committee work is both teachers the those and when i say teachers i'm now as you can see um when i say teachers i'm saying counselors if it's their instrument librarians etc so it's the teachers coming together and the administrators coming together in this committee

093work to look at these instruments so the plan is this this school year 21-22 we're going to tackle the first the big main three if you will the t the c and the l we're going to tackle those the committee's going to come and come together in the fall so that in the spring we then have time obviously bring it to you all for approval but then we also need those months in the spring to do training right for both the folks that are going to be evaluated on that instrument as well as the supervisors and the administrators doing the work so um that's a little bit about the evaluation instrument um i'm sure i just kind of cover everything as far as the um reliability training and so on so each year our new

094administrators come to two in-services one in august where i just basically introduce the instruments and kind of get to the to the foundation of the instrument what it's what it's meant to do what they need to be sure they're doing in that ie the student growth and so on they come in august and they learn about the instruments and then i bring them back together in january and that's when we dig again and we really start talking about this summative it's just too much to do in one session so we do one in august for a day and then we come back again in january also each year the administrators are required to do a refresher with all staff so one of those back to school in august all of our 30 buildings have a

095little back to school refresher um that they do as far as that goes i provide a presentation and then finally i provide a way more in-depth resource and presentation for our building administrators to train their new teachers so that's how the new teachers get trained on these instruments so see just be sure that so that everyone in our district is getting the same presentation when when the principals do these things correct correct because they're they're they're more generic in nature in terms the overall one is right even though the evaluations even though we have six they're all very similar they have standards and indicators right all six groups have to write a growth plan so they're very similar there's just my question more deals across the district every principal in like an elementary school uses

096the same presentation so all the elementary teachers counselors whatever are receiving the same information yes ma'am yes couple quick questions okay when you said on these instrument designs that they're less than sixty percent is it closer to zero or closer to sixty you've done it we're we're closer to zero right now just because we haven't had a chance to get started on the process because we put everything on pause uh as tracy was mentioning until this year this is the design of the instruments it's not the evaluation we're still doing that like we've always done actually with covid no the the first year of the first year coded um no we we paused evaluations literally literally paused evaluations so that would have been the 1920 school year uh in the spring we stopped school on

097march 13th so uh and then this last year working with dave cobb and lisa counts um and tracy and i and the principals we really pared down the evaluation um for the for the principles um and and what was required of them so really it has been two years of uh pared down evaluation tools and we're hoping and confident that august 24th 23rd we're going to go right back to normal glenn this is glenn's uh powerpoint so i'm not even sure what the less than 60 means because we we did enter rate of reliability that should be 100. uh we we did um trading that should be 100. um and uh so i don't really know what that means i think that's that's the basis of the question though it's been a two years of

098less evaluation right the other one when you talked about two sessions for new administrators do you count like emily uh alan ortel i know whatever her name is new principal of baldwin she's coming from westridge is she counted as a new new principal absolutely because she'll have to have the two training correct the only way i probably would not require them when it is a required training is if there it was a complete lateral move so cassandra suggs is a good example right as a assistant principal she was fully responsible from start to finish of an evaluation instrument emily was not as an admin intern so emily will be sitting at the table in august and january with me to be sure that she knows our evaluation instruments good thanks uh-huh just a point of

099clarification you said the design work is going to happen in the 2022 school year no the up 21-22 school year we're going to tackle the three the teacher the counselor and the librarian right so the committee will come together in the fall start the work in the fall in person where we all come together take a look at the existing instruments and i will tell you that there's going to be some some shifts student growth has to stay in it it's required by deci and it's the right thing that's why teachers are teachers to make sure students grow that that's fine but we do need to look at the instrument in terms of the numbers of standards and indicators i will tell you that the the the fourth fifth and sixth instrument that we did

100i think those those groups probably like their instrument a little bit more because we tweaked it as we went along jesse's was pretty heavy and so there's a lot of indicators and standards in there that we feel like are repetitive and so i'm hopeful and i'm really hopeful that the teachers bring their voice and administrators bring their voice i'm really hoping for a pretty good revision to the t the c and the l because it just it's we can make it better again still student growth but we can make it better you say revision you're talking about moving towards moving a wave i hate to use this terminology but moving away from the deci model more are just a little bit of both so for example right now there are nine standards and 52 indicators

101in the tei that's a lot that is a lot to be evaluated on we need to look at those see which ones really make an impact on teacher teachers teaching and student learning and really maybe kind of take it down so it's not so overwhelming and that the instrument becomes more personal more you know valued i guess is the word not more value work of the committee that's what the committee is going to do so we'll do it in the fall what tracy saying we'll do it in the fall and then we will have time to bring it to the board seek board approval you'll have feedback we'll have that feedback loop and then for implementation next school year 22 23 correct that's the math basically you're setting priority standards that will affect student achievement

102for sure and and teachers but not just student achievement because there's other things in there as well right and and i said and teaching i know it's mostly about student achievement but like when i'm observing my student teachers it's also about interacting with the students and absolutely right right only about teacher capacity only two of the nine are directly student growth you know nine itself is professionalism and working with your team and all that kind of stuff collaboration collaboration and all that so yeah the only thing like i said the the key piece that has to be in there there's seven requirements in an evaluation instrument the key one of those seven is student growth and that's where these growth plans come from which i'll kind of transition to principle if that's okay by all

103means keep asking so prince the pei we call it the pei it's very similar to our other six certified evaluation instruments in that they have standards and they have indicators the same and they also have student growth they actually write growth plans our principals write growth plans and it directly has to be connected to an indicator that says what are what is their work doing that is proving that their students in their building are growing just like this and these plans that we bring that back to just you know as we build these out back to the way forward so as they're building each piece it has to keep coming back to the overall district plan absolutely that is a keep a key piece so lots of summer work to make sure i've got all

104my ducks in a row when that committee comes together the first time this fall so there are seven that you said are required what are the two that aren't right now the nine indicators or is that not it different two different things the tei has nine standards yes set that aside because our cei and our lei don't have nine they have like seven there are seven i'm going to look over it okay then that's fine there are seven things that are required one is like levels you have to have levels in your instrument we have four levels that you're scored on one is student growth one what am i doing i'm doing good so that's what i meant by seven so that's the piece no matter what the committee comes up with being revised we

105have to keep those seven amongst all of our instruments to your great point laura lee we might not have nine standards anymore we might drop the tei down to five standards and maybe 30 indicators to be a little bit more conducive and a little bit more doable because it's just a lot and and i agree because as a person who sits and observes student teachers and works with student teachers i know that there are some of those that uh overlap and some that your you're find yourself repeating this is what you did this is why i have but that's why i have conversations with my student teachers you tell me what you've done because i haven't seen you do some of the right things right correct so i i support that i think that's great

106right it's good gracie i'm still trying to figure this out some of these they were you last time you reviewed him as 2014 or 15. are they on a five-year cycle but we didn't couldn't do that last year correct okay i helped that took care of it that's all i needed that's right night really you you we saved last year but even 1920 yeah you know going into it so in march when we left the probationary teachers those were due march one so we actually did do full evaluations on all of our probationary staff it was the tenured staff that we went uh we're not physically in a building to you know finish those out and then this year for 2021 we started off but then we did revise some things as far as the

107number of observations and so on thank you good permission from desi to do that yes we did as long as we still had to do evaluations that was one thing um for this year last 18 1920 they they give us a pass if you will but absolutely 2021 we had to evaluate it was a probationary you did it for everybody but tenure do you only do every three years right not in this system though ironically but that's a whole other presentation of the really intricacies of of that but yeah summatively it's every three years for a 10-year teacher this new student growth piece requires every teacher every year to complete growth plans though which was on your two-off years you kind of sort of didn't do do those and so we've been doing that since

1081450 every teacher every year regardless of where you are in your past write student growth plans the requirement she's saying new but it's not new i mean it's 2014. we're going on a long time now um so it's it's it's an expectation of desi we're using desi's model i mean that's exactly the model we're using that still is the model we're just gonna look at it and evaluate it the last time the evaluation would change prior to 2014 dr kinder you were probably a principal at eureka high school it was years and years um so we had self-imposed every five years we're going to take a look at it and just like when deb was talking about cycle maintenance of of programs and making sure it still works we're going to bring together a committee

109we're going to do a lot of good work this is all very helpful and we're going to bring it back to you with with those changes the ones that are in 60 that relates to our way forward our plan of revising the principle and teacher evaluations we just haven't begun that katie's absolutely right they do the inner reliability training with our current instrument in that but this is relation to moving forward with our new instrument that we can see these turn to green and blue as we um as we continue to develop the instrument train on the instrument and we can monitor our progress so the idea is that we can again keep monitoring and updating this as we're working through the way forward glenn i'm counting on it when i'm here next year those

110are going to be green and blue i like it okay good 75 i'm sorry 75 so thank you so just a few other notes i think i started hit on it again um the pei is also listed there i guess lastly i would just say that while i said that initially while it says teacher and principal i've already shared with you the certified piece we also have an administrator evaluation that gets looked at regularly a supervisor evaluation and then 10 or more support staff evaluations so even though just like i said just kind of throwing it out even though the committee work is a little bit more obviously with our teacher and principal we do have other evaluation instruments that we make sure we look at regularly and are aligned to the work and the

111the needs of supporting growth for for all of our employees yeah look at my red oh as you if you notice through some i'm sorry go ahead no i was just gonna ask if there's any other questions around evaluations and as we're moving through some of the evidence indicators hopefully you're seeing we're using a variety of data points we're not just using again just academic achievement we're using survey data we're using our hiring data we're using a lot of different points to help evaluate the way forward as we move through here we've also paired this with m-set five and also the upcoming m-step six and some of the indicators that they use that we were in alignment with what the state is looking at in terms of school improvement plans as well i'm glad you

112mentioned that because i was going to bring up m sub six if we're hit it's great to be aligned to m step five that as we're moving to m step six we need to be forward with that also correct and there's a lot of there's a lot of overlap and there's also some revising of some of the there's some new steps in there correct all right no other questions do we need a brief break before we transition to student academic learning that's our next yes all right we'll take a brief thank you five seven minute break thank you all thank you for introducing yourselves because i should have done that with the last group and also introduced dr ricker who's joining us today to listen in so thanks for being here oh i can't do

113that i said you're fussy oh yes i've always wanted to dr willett are you ready to roll i am i bet you are okay why don't we go ahead and get started i know we're a few minutes behind and i just want to say too that we didn't say this earlier but hello to anyone who might be watching from home we are live streaming this today so um for those of you who are interested in these updates we are about to get back from our little short recess so thank you dr melvin i'm shelley willad i'm the assistant superintendent of learning and support services and we're going to start back at the beginning of the word success i have the s section of student academic learning so we'll go ahead and start with our video

114so now we're going to be modeling nuclear fusion with marshmallows so i want you guys to bear with me for a little bit do not eat them please um you guys will each be getting sick so make sure i give you six can we get to eat them later yes as long as you don't eat them now thank you so what i'm doing is i'm trying to bring science to them from a different perspective i'm trying to bring it from the perspective of a high school student and make it as hands-on as interactive as question based as possible okay so i want you guys to get two of your marshmallows and like squish them together they don't need to be flat just stuck together okay so this is what happens in the middle of our

115sun okay so we have two special types of hydrogen one here and one there and they fuse together to form helium and a whole lot of energy so she goes to like market high school but she's like a teacher in training for like a science teacher so she goes around to schools and like teaches them science and new facts they haven't learned and does fun activities with them i do it because i want i think that there's a lot of power that comes with being able to teach students and influence you know the younger generation who are not too much younger than me my favorite thing to learn about is the dark matter so because i get to learn so many new things about it it's actually interesting when you get into the topic just

116to get them maybe asking a question that can spark you know a lifetime interest of something deeper and bigger and um i think that that's really cool that i get to be able to do that i think the the tie-in with this video is that as we go through the goals for the student academic learning you will see a lot of evidence of the things that we're trying to do in that video it really exemplifies some of the things we're wanting for our students in terms of voice choice following passions mentoring others a lot of that is in our goals so it's really neat that john v actually just reached out to us in the curriculum department and said i want to do this and work with students and we love when kids do that

117so we took that opportunity and um got her going into buildings so it was great did you have something you want to share with me well the only thing i was just going to share with our uh our improvement plan and our indicators that we're sharing that you'll see that some of the action steps as we move through our plan was made to be fluid so that way as we look at our indicators you might see the action steps need to modify or change that way we can support the evidence indicators that we're sharing today so just keep that mind as we're working through the the plan we're viewing that our plan is designed to uh our indicators rather we're using those to help inform our decisions moving forward it's a reminder that all the

118curriculum that we are talking about today is of course aligned to the missouri state learning standards and goes through our process these are things that we're adding to it to make sure that our students are more are more prepared for the world around them so our first objective is create relevant thought-provoking authentic learning experiences that engage all students some of this will also come in the community connection part of this by graduation we want each student to have an experiential learning opportunity we're collecting a bank of what those are in 1920 we had approximately 20 of our graduates complete an experiential learning opportunity and we are in the process of that and we kind of had to slow down due to covid but we are going to pick that back up next year and start

119working on getting more of those experiential learning um things in there and our pie department is going to be critical in that point and we'll get to that later on in the presentation grade level and secondary courses include embedded elements of gold standard pbl that kind of ties to the experiential learning opportunity piece i have a link in there if you want to look at what gold standard pbl is there are seven elements among them which you saw in that video was authenticity student voice and choice reflection critique public products so we're looking at having those elements in all of our courses that will take place through the curriculum writing process keep in mind that we have over 300 middle school and high school courses and then our entire elementary catalog so as we go

120through that six year cycle we'll be calling out those elements and working on that you can see a lot of those elements and our new social studies curriculum that came out this year k2 k5 sorry um and then students in each cohort are reading at or above grade level of course we want that to happen and you'll see in our action steps some things we're going to do to improve that right now we're at 79 of our students reading at or above grade level we can always work to improve that and then we want students to maintain a growth percentile and the average growth range for math so we use our star measures for that and we look at what that standard growth percentile is for students and there is a range that indicates average

121growth and so we're looking for that average growth or more anything you need to have so that 73 is of students we do the other 21 that aren't reading at or above grade level prevention you want to talk about that sound instruction and intervention so we're working on our mtss goals which dr harris is going to speak a little bit more to that but on the academic end of that we have a pretty robust reading program we're always looking at adding additional interventions there so our reading teachers are really good at in looking at okay these interventions are working with these students we need to add an intervention in x skill and so they are very good at keeping that up to date and making sure that those interventions are in place and using one

122like lucy calkins or something like that that's our instructional methodology but we use specific research-based interventions for students who are struggling in reading and they meet more frequently with a reading intervention teacher and then we're looking at some specific esol literacy training because our students that speak other languages do have specific literacy needs that need to be met so we're working on that 100 of the students to have a experiential learning opportunity and 1920 was only what are you shooting for this year next year coming up better than 20 it depends on where we get on the curriculum writing process and then how much work pi does too but we're slowly trickling those things in and that there's a big range there it can go anywhere from project interface which was very involved over the

123summer to gic which is a course amped as a course journalism is a course or we could just have specific intervention our specific experiences within coursework too so we're looking at a large range of that and building that catalog over time those project based learning well those count for experiential i mean you know that'll account for that okay in the um mtss model and your time at the intervention do we do benchmarking there to make sure that the infections we're using and strategies are being measured and being successful yes and we're going to have the added benefit of a leadership team on that academically this year we're going to have three new staff members from our special school district and they're going to be working in tandem with the curriculum team and our instructional coaches

124to really get some structure around that and some support for our buildings are we seeing continual growth and reading above at or above grade level yeah we're pretty stagnant we're pretty steady at 79 sometimes we get above that a little bit but we're we're pretty consistent in that area how does it compare with other districts that's considered pretty high yeah congratulations thanks it's because of the great resources we have and the great staff all right glenn with your little with your little percentages i can see i can see where that one it's orange is the sort of yellow orange i can see that one and the rest yeah it's less 73 is less than 75 and so it's 35 and 20. so on those you had percentages so i don't have to ask you to

125guess i ask you if it be 0 or closer to 75 i can see it up there right correct all right thank you okay so our action steps for that particular objective we're looking at creating opportunities and support for teachers to connect um by designing interdisciplinary experiences you're going to see some of that in our enrichment series for summer that's going to come out in july there's a lot of interdisciplinary there we're going to develop and implement a system that supports all students and engaging in a senior capstone experience um that work was started prior to covid uh dr trottier was working with a group on that they got pretty far then we put that on hold and then we're going to pick that back up next year so again that capstone experience will be

126a range of things that students could have so it will look different for each student um projected for 20 21 22. we're gonna keep trying to increase that and see how far we can get part of the the problem with setting a specific number on that is that we're also looking at business partnerships and that that has been a challenge in the covit environment we're hoping that that picks back up you'll see that our pi department has really done an excellent job in keeping what they could going this year but um that takes time and and finesse and so we're we're continually building those experiences why was that put on hold just because of cobin yeah a lot of businesses didn't want students necessarily in their and then you've changed the experience for kids because

127they can't go into the work environment so it just had to look different we're going to foster student curiosity by ensuring that all curricular areas include design thinking critical thinking problem solving and inquiry based experiences i think this is where you really are it doesn't look like you're working on literacy skills but you really are when you get to that critical thinking and those inquiry-based experiences those require a lot of deep reading and deep thinking and that's where we're having kids um practice using those reading muscles so that they're using them outside just the literacy course in the day so that's really where we're going to pick up some leverage on those reading scores too is having kids continually use those scores those skills throughout the day and then we want to maintain that curriculum

128writing revision process process that ensures coursework is updated frequently so we have a six year cycle if something happens in the midst of that six-year cycle significant such as standards change at the state level then we reconvene those teams but on in general it's a six-year cycle that we follow to make sure that those are updated frequently and then we're going to create a personalized competency-based system of learning and assessment for grades 6 through 12 that is a huge task that we're starting to undertake our goal is to have that done by 2425. we are specifically digging into middle school assessment this next year we're doing a book study right now with our middle school principals we're going to start working on the secondary next year too through our rockwood learning council and really start

129talking about assessing standards to get us to that point where we can move to a more competency-based system glenn and his department are very um much a part of that and leading that charge and they are doing a lot of the assessment literacy pieces that we need to put in place clint on that last column that orange is a little bit deeper than the orange and the no it's a copy and paste i'm sure it's not this is all the same yellow it should be the same yellow thought maybe it meant they were a little bit past now sorry and then we want to this is kind of funny i giggle every time i see this because we certainly did this this last year but increase online and blended learning opportunities for students we were

130kind of thrust into the middle of that and we took the big leap and created a lot of content last year for our teachers we're continually revising that it's there for teachers to use if they choose they don't have to but it has been a labor of love for sure our next objective is engage all students to take ownership of their learning again this is going to really be dependent on our assessment practices and having kids understand where they're going with their learning we want each curriculum to have clear learning targets i would say that we're definitely in the range range there were probably a little bit higher i kind of we were kind of conservative on that um our elementary courses all have uh proficiency skills written for them our middle school um in

131preparation of our assessment work next year has i can statements ready for kids to start understanding where they're going in their learning and our high school has that peppered throughout too so we're well on our way to that we want students to complete an interest inventory prior to advancement to the next level that is happening on a pretty consistent basis from eighth to ninth grade we're really going to focus on fifth to sixth grade because we want to hit those students younger so that they can start thinking about what their interests are and what things that they want to do in their future and then we want to create and use a portfolio to document artifacts related to the profile of a learner so we do have a tool within canvas called portfolium it allows

132students to choose which items they would like to put in their portfolio when they graduate from rockwood they will have that portfolio and it carries with them for life even when they're out of the canvas system so they can take that and share it with potential schools trade schools or employers which is really going to be neat once we get that going so we're really excited about that really i'm going back a minute uh-huh i'm surprised that that first one is not each curriculum has clear learning targets yeah they do have clear learning targets in terms of the standards but really making those learning targets clear to students is where we're heading with that so the adults all know what those learning targets are but it's really important for the learner to know that if

133we want them to take ownership of their learning okay i understand okay thanks um and then our action steps for that we want to create systems of student goal setting self-assessment and reflection and all coursework that's why we got those icann statements ready for middle school and we're ready to embark on that work next year of really having students start setting their own goals and thinking about their learning and where they are in their learning rather than just waiting for a grade from a teacher um and then reflecting on their coursework we want to develop and implement a pre-k 12 scope and sequence for community service and service learning that connects to the curriculum that will be down the road we want to develop a plan for every student to create a learner profile and

134we believe we can use canvas as part of that as well and then we want to support those pedagogical shifts and instruction that promotes student voice choice and collaboration so getting kids into those situations like john v did in that video where they're really telling us what they think and having choice in the things that they're learning and the direction of their learning so you'll see a lot of that in the inquiry-based learning and social studies a lot of our language arts curriculum has that in it even a lot of our electives have that in there where students get some choice and then our third objective is to equip all students with the flexibility and adaptability needed to suc to be successful in an ever-changing world it seems like an understatement after the last year

135that we've had flexibility and adaptability has been key we want our kids to graduate with post-secondary experience currently with some kind of post-secondary experience that they have in high school currently 71 percent of our graduates successfully completed ap dual credit early college program or project lead the way and we want to just keep increasing those opportunities we also want a percent of our students graduating with post-secondary readiness so right now 66 percent of our students meet the desi approved measures for college and career readiness there's room for improvement there and we want to continue to do that with the offerings that we're having and then of course that post-secondary placement at this point 94 of our graduates attend post-secondary education training military or are employed um those three measures in particular are part of m6

136so we wanted to make sure that those were in there that were continually tracking that to meet that objective and then the last one is non-academic indicators we started that work last year as a subcommittee and rockwood learning council and that group started coming up with what those non-academic indicators would be that align to our profile of a learner and all those things we want our kids to graduate with and so we will continue that work when we're able to continue rockwood learning council next question sure oh sorry um so if you go back up into the percent of students graduating post-secondary readiness have we always been around that percentage or that's roughly right around that percentage and so we're looking at um assessments such as act sat asvab that desi has a threshold for

137lack of better words that count for a particular score so for act that scores 22 to account for a college readiness composite score so we use s-a-t-a-c-t as vam as part of that measure now we have nearly 100 of our students take the a-c-t but again this is percent of students that score like 22 or above at 66 percent it has to be in all is it five categories or whatever or it's just that composite score so no i'm not talking about the act but it's not just looking at the act it's other things right correct any benchmarks correct act the asvab which is a military readiness assessment sat so any type of college readiness assessment that students might take in preparation even uh act as a the workforce um workkeys i'm sorry assessment so

138any one of those post-secondary assessments would count in there and again we use desi's kind of thresholds as the matrix to see if it counts towards meeting college readiness the post-secondary placement that six percent i get it's just the non we just don't get responses back yeah we we're pretty close we generally get about 97 percent we call we send we make multiple calls about three emails um we call every home number we have uh from infinite campus we generally don't get three to four percent um and then we do have students that have out there that say something that's other than education training or military or employed secretarial staff at the annexes all in on giving those phone calls made they take a part in that so you try real hard yeah and it's

139great and honestly we we want to do more we want to do a five year one following up as well um i think that'll be a great part we can add as a future indicator here because some of the conversations and stories we hear from students and families are great we also hear things we can do to continue to improve because we also contact those that would have graduated may have dropped out so we can learn some of the things we can improve on and again going back to the mtss and things we can do to make sure to ensure students don't drop out we're meeting all their needs we'd think with uh the first and the third you know seventy one percent then i knew four percent that we would be much higher than

14066 percent just because they're all related and it's saying that hey look they're ready for post-secondary post-secondary placement but yet only 66 percent are only what we deem ready for it you would one would think with the other two being higher that that number would be higher and the just speaking to the the first ones around the experience that students did participate right participation and a dual credit dual moment so some type of post-secondary experience that they participated in um and then we're again just to align with desi's ms at five we're using their cutoff but you know we have a number of students that have a 21 that does qualify them for a mini you know state universities and different universities so their scores are applicable whether it's the act or sat um it's

141just getting alignment to that cut off we want to give us a threshold that we can continue to work to improve then our action steps for that we want to identify specific life skills to be explicitly taught and embed them in the curriculum we're going to be working on that in 22-23 identifying what those skills are we'll look at industry standards um and we're very fortunate emanuel really looks a lot emanuel young and our pi department keeps track of those job trends and what current employers are looking at so he'll be a critical part of that discussion we want to identify those key communication skills that rockwood graduates will possess and develop proficiency scales for each so that we're looking at targeted learning in those areas we want to ensure that students possess the digital

142communication digital literacy and digital citizenship skills to engage effectively with others we started that work we have some digital citizenship curriculum written we did that about a year ago now we're going to need to go back and revisit that and update it but we are ready to roll that out and we're also talking about media literacy as well so we've been doing some pd and that for teachers who sign up but we want to make that more large scale and then we want to create opportunities for kids to explore personal interests within the existing curriculum and create courses and learning opportunities within existing curriculum that reflect a global perspective so that could be adding coursework like our black literature class our multicultural literature class but it could also involve taking existing curricula with existing standards

143and beefing up some of the resources in those areas and the direction of the instruction in those areas about that global perspective so lots of work that is going on there those started those were just pushed down the road that we had other things that were already in the works and we just trying to make a steady pace in those five years of all these goals just takes time and so that's where we prioritize those and then our community networks part is also tied to this there is a lot of community networking that goes on especially in our cte area but the pi department also plays a large part in this so we're going to show you a video about our fabulous project interface program so today this is like the orientation meeting for project

144interface and for me it's it's kind of a lot because i didn't expect there was gonna be so many kids like like so many just kids here i didn't know that many people signed up but honestly i think it's just a great experience like i'm making new friends at my table that i'm sitting at good morning good morning do it again good morning good morning experiential learning is really something that students may or may not have learned in the classroom so this is their first glimpse of what truly self-directed learning is they're really going to be given the opportunity to um set their own pace and um challenge themselves with the amount of tasks and uh required elements in this program and to really reflect on how they're doing as an individual as they head

145on into college and beyond and guess what you all are in this room today your talent and you're the talent that employers like mrs valentine will be seeking in the not service street future isn't that awesome i think it's important to have this stuff in high school just because it gives the kids a leg up in a professional world where we're competing we're competing with adults who have had like years and decades of experience compared to us where we're like right out the gate for my internship i'm really hoping to go into marine biology so i'm hoping i can work with the st louis aquarium that just opened but if not i am open to any like field biology anything where i can get more experience with the field figuring out like the nuances what

146all i can do with that how people got to their careers and all that kind of good stuff you're an a100 they have a luncheon to kick it off with and they bring the students in we actually um eat lunch with the students and have them get a professional experience of talking with a professional which is always great that's where we get a lot of our curriculum discussion with kids and then they introduce them to the program so you can see that's a fabulous experience we've got 120-130 kids that they built that up to but in a district this size we wanted to give more kids opportunities to do experiential learning so that really was the impetus of starting to think about what other ways could we get kids involved experientially because we can't give

147every kid that experience necessarily and that's everything so today this is like sorry not every student wants that experience they want different things too interesting about that program that a few years ago it was very stem-based um was what the students were requesting a lot of medical and we're seeing them branch out further and further into other areas we're seeing more kids request fine arts those kinds of type those types of experiences so that's been really great and pai has really taken an effort to grow the program into those areas um so our first goal there is to create and develop a shared vision and systematic approach for increase increasing our community partnerships we're at a level one on that first one we did begin on our cte and fax rewrite several years ago with

148an advisory panel for that and we are regularly bringing in that advisory panel to give us industry information about our industrial technology classes our food science class our facts classes and our computer science classes so that's that's a good start but we definitely want to expand that to other areas as well our pie coordinator is integrating meetings and he is going to do that starting next school year when our regular meetings could start back up and then annual community engagement opportunities we've had multiple meetings via zoom to discuss rockwood's needs so i will say this that there was a lot of concern when the pandemic started about what how was pie going to adapt to all of us and they've done a fabulous job they still did the career fair with our kids they were

149still able to give them those experiences and they were rich experiences by adjusting their practices and that team was all in and doing that to make sure that our kids didn't miss those experiences so that was great so our action steps there are to establish a process to engage businesses and universities and preparing students for life after high school once we get some of our other things in place regarding capstones and those kinds of things we'll be working toward that goal we want to form an advisory council that includes stakeholders who meet regularly to review and evaluate needs discuss trends and make adjustments accordingly the other thing that i think is interesting that emanuel young and our pi department has really been focusing on is the saint louis job situation the how the employment situation

150in st louis and he's really trying to help kids understand you don't have to leave home to get some of the jobs that you want and so he's really trying to make a connection there to show kids the career opportunities that are in st louis before they graduate and then our next goal is to sustain and expand partnerships that meet the needs of students staff and families we want to increase our newly created community partnerships when you look at that eight to nine percent may not seem like a huge number but that's pretty impressive given what's been going on lately with the partnerships and how challenging it has been to form those so we've increased those by about 8.5 percent and that will continue to grow over time pre-k learning opportunities integrated into the classroom

151of course we're doing that and right now there are 8 500 classroom programs that pi supports while that and surprisingly that is lower than the average number due to pandemic but that's still a lot of community connection that they're giving our kids in their classrooms we want students participating with an early learning experience prior to kindergarten and we're going to start collecting data on that to see how many of our students do that one of the things that we're doing this year to increase that number is in our enrichment courses in july we have a kindergarten enrichment class and it actually is all about how to do kindergarten and they actually videotaped what the cafeteria looks like and they're going to walk kids through that and what does it look like to ride the bus

152and it's all online learning but the kids will get to see those things and maybe calm some fears before they start kindergarten so we're really excited about that and then our summer enrichment opportunities which i just talked about so once we get those rolling we'll give you a glimpse into that we have a really fun food truck unit at third grade that kids are going to be integrating lots of standards to learn about food trucks in st louis and then we're going to sustain and expand our partnerships so our actions and steps there our develop community and business partnerships that support our learning opportunities which of course is in the works we want to foster development of leadership through community service again we're gonna really work on that in a year or so and then

153collaborate with local agencies and external partnerships to provide social and immersion emotional learning support to our school community so that's in the works as well dr harris is part of that any questions about um any of the academic parts students that don't live in the district you get these experiences difficult about the same um there are additional challenges but we work through those so if transportation is an issue we've been working through that with a few students um if um you know getting to a spot or having a spot local to them is a problem pai has been reaching out to find closer opportunities for them so we are absolutely addressing those challenges as the needs come up all right dr harris you're up next right i'll go ahead and kick off the video as

154you're transitioning up here to universal equity opportunity and access um so i'm a junior here at summit my mom is thai and my dad is bengali but i was born in the u.s i've been over to thailand and bangladesh and many other countries multiple times so i love traveling the world um i also play tennis here at summit i made varsity last year i am in theater tech i'm in charge of costumes and publicity i love to read hang out with friends and then most of the other normal teenagers stuff so the author visit that i zoomed into was natalie perkins she is also the only bengali author that i have encountered and so her books are the only books that i've ever related so closely to um it was really cool like i first

155read her book as als another book offered to me by ms sullivan in book club um and as soon as i read bengali i was like whoa because everybody knows about india but a lot of people don't know about bangladesh a little country on the side of it outside of india and so the way that she talked about the girls in her book coming to the u.s and integrating into u.s culture while also having to deal with indian culture at home that really hit us like a sweet spot because my grandparents on my dad's side lived with me and so they constantly speak bengali and they do bengali things and even though i'm like in mainstream us i come home to that and it's cool to like read about that happening for fictional characters in

156literature everybody should be able to find themselves in literature and in movies and other spaces beside themselves i feel free that i can go out and just in any public library setting or any library setting anywhere i can go and i will find a book written about a culture from a person of that culture and no i'm gonna know that that book is well written because that person that author who's writing it is going to have experience with that culture um so i'm simon um simon i'm sorry oh you did that on purpose glenn i would like to uh i'm terry harris the executive director of student services um so dave and renee if you guys can come close to the table because a lot of my work in you know lisa can jump in

157as well but a lot of my work that we do is crossing over with with these guys and i just also want to highlight the fact that you know that we're not doing this alone this is a group so dave you can introduce yourself for the record executive director of elementary schools partnering with terry harris hey there renee so university equity opportunity and access uh you know this is this is the area right now that is uh somewhat um you know all over the place and i just want to say that when we think about university equity opportunity and access what we're thinking about is the beloved community that we talked about before and so the goal is to ensure that all students get the opportunity to have the opportunity to see themselves as the

158student shared in her video and so i'm proud to know that we are doing some really cool and amazing things i can remember when i was in graduate school thinking about my topic i remember dr kendrick said whatever you do you have to make sure that it relates back to students growth and so glenn has done a wonderful job in terms of pushing me on some of these topics so today what you see as key indicators the stem is the same but basically we're looking at four year graduation rate academic assessments and students taking challenges challenge coursework so the gap between students and sub group and not subgroup is less than 15 percent so if you take a look at that for graduation we're doing a pretty decent job glenn gave a presentation to the

159alternative education committee last night and our graduation rate is pretty pretty low that's that's a wonderful job to the teachers as well as the administrators in our schools as well as curriculum folks so we're doing a pretty decent job there you take a look at the academic assessments that we're taking a look at star act and map we're definitely um heading in the right direction um and then if we take a look at the coursework we're heading in the right direction as well i will also say that many of these topics that we have here are things that we were doing prior to so we were already thinking about this work um specifically to highlight eureka eureka was doing the uh trying to enroll students from different subgroup and challenge classes as early as 2017

160maybe 16. what their summer camp is called eureka wildcat camp so it helps students to um get a preview of the coursework uh implementation of school improvement plans dave i let you talk about that and uh rene renee worked with dave lisa myself maybe two years ago prior to covet created a plan definitely we'll share it with you if you'd like to see it where all of our schools were looking at um university equity and opportunity as well as student growth so dave would you like to share for yeah i will say that um one of the biggest disappointments in covid certainly was before we left in march our schools were making tremendous progress in their school improvement plans they had three goals and uh it was the first time in my role i saw

161actually tremendous excitement about the school improvement plans it was directly related to the way forward we spent a lot of time with renee's help looking at our specific goals at our schools and then and then tying those goals with how can we then support our buildings and with this with this goal university equity and access we we had some really awesome goals um and then you know we left in march and not that the goals went away at all but our ability to continue to implement you know with an in-person system just wasn't there um i've met with our as many of you know we've got five new principals at the elementary level we've got a lot of new administrators i've already started meeting with them one of the first things on our agenda is

162the school improvement plan because it truly is um the framework of what we do and we just we don't want to get outside that framework and so to terry's point um i'm really happy about the progress that we're making on our school improvement plans specifically in this area uh our principals are really rallying around this and they're excited about it you want to add anything you're good all right so before we move to the next slide and before dr kender asked the question around the 15 percentage points glenn how did we get that number 15 percentage points uh so right now if you look at some of the academic measures and the difference between for example friday's lunch and non-produced lunch if we looked at those uh two student groups uh the lowest gap we

163have is about thirty uh thirty percentage points between uh for example non-produced lunch and fridges lunch and so half of that would be 15. so we can at least begin to by 2025 cut the the gap in half and again that's the smallest we have gaps as great as 50 between different student groups and we're using the student groups as identified by desi students that are in freedom's lunch students that with disabilities students that are black hispanic and english language learners so we're using those student subgroups to continue to measure and monitor progress when you say cut the gap what gap are you cutting is this the learning gap or experience gap or what so in this case if you take a look at the the three boxes is the the graduation gap or the

164academic assessment gap and the the coursework gap so it's looking at three different areas of gaps and some of those areas impact each other the opportunity can impact sometimes the achievement and so we're looking at all those areas uh one of dr miles's uh goals as a superintendent was looking at our enrollment and our coursework of some of those student groups and how do we increase enrollment of challenge and honors coursework for students and we've made gains for our enrollment in 2122 and so we look to continue to again monitor that progress but then also support it with some of the professional learning through an ace department in the great work with our schools and the leadership in our schools and our teachers what's the zero the four plus and the four plus represent glenn

165yep so the zero uh the notes when you look at graduation rate and you look at again look at um for example for reduced lunch and non-produced lunch our students that are non-for reduced lunch their graduation rate is around 97 go on top of my head here about 97 percent the graduation rate of students that participate in freedo's lunch is about 93 so that gap is roughly about four and so if you look at all of our student subgroups we don't have anybody that has a gap larger than 15 with graduation rate however if you look at star results map results act results now map factoring in right now because we don't have results for the past it's really two years we're gonna get results back this september october but looking at star act and

166those uh assessments if you look again at freedom's lunch and non-freeze lunch that gap is about 35 between freeze lunch and non-freeze lunch for achievement in star reading star math and also a ct composite score the implementation of school improvement plan really the box should be blue because we did that a while ago and you know just with covet we put everything on paul's so then we take a look at our action steps uh i'll give you a second to take a look at this and i'm just going to highlight a few because you've seen this before we adopted our educational equity statement at the board last year last summer um so we're definitely there that's something that we probably need to take a look at on an annual basis i think glenn's going to

167talk about that a little bit later but just reviewing that the equity statement the other piece about the equity statement that we want to be very clear about is our equity statement is very inclusive of uh all students and so i think we have to be intentional about language when we're talking about equity and so if we're talking about racial equity we probably should call it racial equity if we're talking about gender equity we can talk about gender equity if we're talking about ability equity we can talk about ability equity so we can be very explicit in in terms of what group we're talking about and who we're trying to support in different categories i was having a side conversation discussing the need and we talk about this in learning and support all the time

168but discussing the need to really um dive deeper into students with disabilities and how to support and help those students as well shelly mentioned the um mtss so we are from an academic standpoint they have already started to put some things together from a social emotional behavior standpoint we have not so the goal next year the number one goal next year is to start to put together our system we have all the things in place we have our behavior analysts we have our therapists we have social workers we have all the elements and what we have to do is organize in a way to create a system that we can implement across the district and so working with todd working with the new director of diversity equity and inclusion or the deed office will pull

169together the team working with ssd and dave and his people we'll pull together a team to try to build that so a year from now hopefully we'll have the structure in place ssd has a pretty thorough system um so this is not something that we have to recreate i mean there are definitely systems out there that are effective and work well so we just need to take a look at those models and pull it together also when we think about this mtss we want to be very clear that we're thinking about mtss in two separate systems so you have the academic piece as well as the social emotional behavior piece right and shelly and i talk about this all the time although there is overlap we want to be clear that there are different interventions

170and supports for our students explore opportunities to create an inclusive school environment for all students that probably could be marked as green most of these on this slide probably could be marked as gl green i was just trying to be somewhat humble but our student our people are doing that you know be it you know the the the video talked about margaret sullivan over at summit and what she's doing i i can you can i can tell you every single one of our schools we're doing something to create an inclusive environment now i think what we also want to make sure that we're doing is being able to uh name the things that we're doing right um so i think that's the piece that we have to work on what systems are we doing how

171how are we monitoring this is it effective is it working uh where's the research is it backed by research those are some of the things that we need to implement and i do i would ask rene if you could just say a few words about this because this is the former subcommittee at learning to support is work that renee and brittany and i think karen hedricks did a couple of years ago so hello a little awkward um basically that work was part of an action group that was part of our secondary rockwood learning council our elementary group um was doing different work at that time and so this goal is really about making that more of a a standing group that's k through 12 instead of 6 through 12 but they really had a lot

172of imp impact on things like our new teacher training and um and made some other recommendations around professional learning and work in the buildings so is that to make people aware much more or to be able to implement these pieces access opportunity and equity that that group we had a series of action committees in the rockwood learning council at secondary which were really tackling unfinished business so the teachers in the committee and the principals in the committee really identified what are those things that we've been working on in rockwood for a while glenn doesn't predate the way forward i think it predated the way forward so it was things like our grading practices um you know and some of those pieces and so to terry's point that he made earlier equity works not new in

173rockwood it's been going on for a long time and so that really predates the way forward and and the way forward really includes that in as a way of making that more inclusive k through 12. thanks and finally the big piece that we're working on uh it's trying to conduct an equity audit partnering with some organization or trying to figure that out on our own i know glenn is advocating to um you know work internally to create our own on audit but really just analyzing every aspect of our our district be it the curriculum hiring practices how are we doing as it relates to creating this beloved community where all students are thriving and doing well um so that's that's another goal that we have any questions before we move forward okay yes in your

174mind what's it gonna take to get all five of those green um i i would say that again honestly minus the equity audit rockwood learning council that should be green um to our the multi-tier system of support we will start that next year that will be great i i it's for me it's not it's not about green we will implement these things i think that this is the goal area that we can say that we have these things in place but this is the goal area where it's really about beliefs it's really about you know making sure that we all understand the philosophy in the rockwood school district around the beloved community asking and how the children right this is one of those things where it's just this is the culture of the district so

175again explore opportunities to support inclusive school environments for all students i guarantee you every single school we have practices in place but how do you how do you make that part of the system the fight the fabric of the school district so we can turn all of these greens but we just want to make sure that it's part of the the fabric of the district in in part of these the action steps by implementing as terry's mentioned implementing these action steps we should see changes with our indicators here aligned with the systematic approach to increase student equity opportunity and access so that's what we're going for is implementing those and then seeing a change through our indicators here i'm glad you mentioned that because the green doesn't necessarily mean success it means you've implemented it

176exactly the real key is be when you go from green to shark proofs or whatever you're going to say yeah it's working yeah it was just like in class when you said if it doesn't relate to student growth then you know what are we doing and so to glenn's point thank you so highlight that we could once we implement these these pieces we should see a change in uh student growth and outcome i would assume the next step is new action steps so once these are green and then you move on to different action steps right because we see that we're not making progress with our indicators then we need to re-look at these action steps and then adjust and either add to these action steps or modify the implementation we also need to be

177able to name what we're doing right so there are some people who are are doing amazing things because they just are amazing person and it works for them but if we cannot name here are the the actions that we're taking in the classroom to then impact student growth um then we have to do better than that because whatever we're doing we want to be able to duplicate that replicate that in other spaces we would recognize that all the action steps were green and we had made significant progress i think one of the signs of a very healthy organization is a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo so the def defining of new action steps to push us even further would would be called for at that point right moving on to provide a culturally responsive

178environment for all students take a second to take a look at that um the first discipline risk ratio is something that we've probably been talking about predates uh the way forward so we've been talking about this for a while in the rockwood school district really working to reduce gaps in discipline for all students for that matter just to highlight certain things we what some of the interventions that we put in place and this is really through lisa's office if a student received a 10-day suspension most of those students are not sitting at home for 10 days like days of old so those students can well it's probably more routine now where at least just offer a student to be able to participate in a student restore program until they have their hearing and once they

179have their hearing whatever happens most and i don't know any kid that's getting 40 days out of school even if they're removed from their school environment they're still in school receiving education and that's that's not really stated here but we have done some tremendous work in terms of moving uh lowering the discipline gap and ratio percent of students responded favorably to questions relating to social support domain on student sel um actually glenn can you just talk about the seo survey that you created for a second so we offer an sel survey um generally we do it twice a year this year we did it once just many students were at home doing virtual learning the first part of the year we offer two times a year and one of the domains is around social support

180and it has questions around i feel like i belong at school i have i have felt supported i have a trusted adult and so we ask that of our of our students and right now this past survey 67 of high school students and 77 percent of middle school students responded favorably um what we did see students that participated learning virtually had a little lower ratings in terms of the social support domain than those students that were in person we've seen that on a couple of other surveys that we've seen that connectedness to school just doesn't seem to be as they're learning virtually as it does when they're in person which a lot of us can probably you know resonate with uh just our own personal experiences in any virtual learning we do i was going

181to say that's an interesting thing to consider too when you're thinking about that middle goal on the last slide because you can have all the things in place that you possibly want and have that be your green light but then your results are you know how do people feel what is their satisfaction so i'm having trouble understanding that first one i think it's a brain freeze i understand what a student subgroup is discipline risk ratio i would understand that what does it mean less than 3.5 for iss and osf so when you're looking at and again we're modeling and utilizing deci's work as well in this area when they do calculations in terms of areas that we're at risk for they utilize this ratio which basically again is your um the ratio of suspensions of

182for example for students on friday's lunch to non-for reduced lunch what is the risk ratio the likelihood that that student group receives a suspension more than the non-subgroup receives it and uh deci's threshold again is 3.5 before so we use 3.5 as our threshold that we want zero subgroups um to have a higher than 3.5 risk ratio for a suspension either in school or out of school a higher percentage 3.5 is that what you a difference of 3.5 or what we don't want um so for example a 3.5 if let's use the example right now that our students on for use lunch had a 3.5 times more likely to receive in school or out of school suspension than those not produced lunch we don't want it to get any higher than a 3.5 a lot

183okay outcome you sorry thank you you look at historical data as he looks at it yes does he look at historical look at current year um and then and again we're utilizing deci's thresholds um as our kind of limit and then that we can monitor and again put different things in place to support this yes that's the number of subgroups we have more than four student subgroups again looking at our different subgroups identified by deci students um with an iep students that participate reduce lunch students uh they're black hispanic and also english language learners correct yep correct and i would say that this is a topic that we probably talk about every other week and learn and support us and we have for a while trying to solve that issue yes okay um sorry so

184that's for both isis and oss correct we look at them individually um deci also looks at them not just um combined os essays but instances that are greater than 10 so we're trying to take into account the different ways that desi looks at this information as well so that way we're consistent between the reporting that we do and then the reporting that we are responsible for dusty say so then the next piece is students cultural heritage is acknowledged within the curriculum shelley and curriculum team um definitely partnered with brittany and uh her team and this is something that is at the forefront in terms of making sure that the curriculum is diverse making sure that students just like the video said so um i i would i suspect that this area will be blue or

185whatever the color is soon because we're definitely focusing on that and making sure that students just have choice within the curriculum but i want to go back to the middle piece to your point jamie i think of all the the things in this this category that second bullet is the most important for me and so this is this is coming directly from students and i think you know we really want to get to 100 of all students feel as though their social emotional needs are taken care of like that is the goal that's that's the goal of student services i mean it's a goal of the district but that's the biggest goal that we're we're focusing on now i think it drives everything students the attendance is going to go up because kids want to

186be at school grades are going to increase because kids are engaged they want to be at school and they feel safe this is the biggest and the most important goal area or action step for us i thought that 67 and 77 was actually pretty low not anywhere closer to what we won in past surveys that has been that has been higher like i said uh when you we break it down and we were able to break it down students learning virtually and in person and there is a difference there some of it may be as a result of covert and not having in okay good when does the next one happen uh well again we do it twice a year so generally uh october and um october and march is when we do those two

187and we do we do work with elementary students as well on surveys so just one i know this is highlighting high school and middle school kids but we do work with elementary kids what so what are the next steps then so you it comes back lower than anticipated and then terry does your department or you work with building principles should put further sub-actions into place to support typically so what happens what has happened is um you know glenn has shared the data and either attend a principal meeting or um just work one-on-one with dave and lisa and then working with those schools to figure out how to uh increase the data to try to dive deeper into what's what's causing that number to be lower than what we expect it's at some point that influences

188the building improvement plans yes that's what i was going to comment on is that we get the data back from glenn's office um we typically tear is exactly right we review that before it goes out we make sure the survey is ready to go and the timeline we get the data back he shares it with us collectively as a group of administrators and then for dave and i individually supervising building principles then we will meet with them individually to talk about areas of growth and highlights and then areas of improvement um and then yes every building um k-12 has this built in their school improvement plan so that's that's something they're measuring and monitoring already and so this is just one data piece that we can use um to turn to determine growth in those

189areas again that goes back to the connectivity of the way forward to the building plan correct and so you know our schools um then beneath that that the action steps may look very different from school to school but getting to terry's point we really see that as one of the most important areas in that we can have all kinds of things and activities and strategies in place but if our students are telling us they're still not feeling that connectivity to our school then we have to adjust and so that's where we'll see the most change from year to year is okay we tried these things we had great success this maybe not so much and so that continues to evolve each year through our school improvement plans do individual teachers write cult improvement plans classroom

190goals i mean well they do through the tei process that's that's that process that tracy and kd were talking about in our sel surveys designed to take a pulse and begin a conversation so it's not a truly diagnostic type tool but it's to begin that conversation and have focus groups of students and we have many buildings that do that they they take the data they look at it they have conversations with classrooms departments um different areas correct one of the the with all schools have the three goals um with the structure that we have in place before covid a lot of i know my buildings under their um their character goal they might have a goal around scl in the survey they're able to look at all of the other schools as well so they

191can collaborate if they all have similar goals so they can start looking at their strategies and how they're how they're implementing so they've been using that system to to create little cohorts um of similar goal areas which has been very helpful and a couple years ago rene worked with myself lisa and dave to create uh for the um the admin conference and one of the things that we asked we talked about the the beloved community we created a spreadsheet with the five c's so what things are you doing as a school leader or as a building in these areas care commitment courage all these things right and so that was shared with the entire districts and we did this on purpose we wanted uh all the principals to be able to see what someone else

192was doing in their building as well as um highlight what what they're doing so they that that we can share and learn so we still have that document um i'm pretty sure people still looking at it so we are doing that the other piece around here is you know i like to think about it in terms of the space in between so the space in between when the surveys are going out like that is the work and so once the the principals are sharing that data with their team then we have the we have work to do with our students so that whenever the survey comes back around it's going to be positive because students know if there's a problem there's an issue this is a safe space to to go to to share that

193information with like that that's that's what this data is really all about right it's about like students knowing that i can go somewhere to to talk about whatever issue or problem i have as a safe space and i think that we're creating that all right action steps again common language develop a framework for common language and support teachers and staff and students i would say we are we've marked this as in progress because if you take a look at to rene's point earlier our equity work that we've been doing has been around for many many many years right we've been doing this for a long time we're at a point in the rockwood school district where we have to think about things from a systemic standpoint so we've tried we brought in glenn singleton we

194brought in um multiple speakers i was trying to think of someone back 15 years ago but we brought in these people we just brought in anthony muhammed right so we're bringing bringing in all these people and so what we have to decide and we can continue to do that and learn but we have to decide what language and method we're going to use as a district and sticking with that that level of research and i think that's where we are so from a curriculum standpoint from a pde standpoint we have some things in place and i can go on and on and on about just the pd and trainings that we've had over the last five six seven years we have some really good stuff that's going on we're pushing um teachers but at the

195same time supporting teachers very yes i feel like we're trying to change a culture in the school that's really not changed in society we're trying to change something that when you get outside the school it's really not evident i think so i i felt like someone was going to ask a question similar to that and when i closed my eyes to someone was keith kinder right so i prepared for this last night i think um in all in all seriousness i think that this is somewhat of an adult issue the kids are they're living in a society that they want and they are creating the structures that they want they're pushing us and so um i want to give get you guys a copy but i worked with a group of students at marquette high

196school and they wrote a book it's called mhs lives and it is a it's like 10 to 15 different stories of of kids and in their experience be it you know i'm a trans student or i'm a the only white player on a basketball team or whatever they tell all these different stories in this book and so they're changing and and that's that's the struggle that's what that's what educators are struggling with right now so we have a community that may enlarge a community not just in rockwood but to your point global larger national community that is probably struggling a little bit and but the kids are not so the kids are coming into the building and are asking they're seeking those the help and the teachers are stuck in this middle to try to

197figure out how do i support this baby that is really in need of support knowing that we may not have that larger support on the outside of the community we have to decide who we are going to be for those students and right now you can go to talk to any principal the students are pushing us um you know you did a good job at thinking that one out i'm glad you did no really you already did a nice job when i really think that's part of our problem it's not what's in the school it's what's outside the school did you talk about common language what do you mean by that i'm a language like ben just very intentional about our language so when we say mtss what do we mean when we say um

198when we say equity what are we talking about okay so i mean if we were if you were to ask any administrator in this room to say the um what's the mission statement of the rockwood school district without a doubt we can do that so we want to be able to do that in certain areas so that we don't find ourselves in this space where individuals are trying to trap us and say that we're teaching something that we're not or you know right we want to be very intentional about what we are doing and to spell that out so when we talk about when we talk about sel at the elementary school most elementary people will probably bring up second step because systemically we've we've pushed that push that through i think yeah about providing

199uh the employee training do we have a percentage of our employees that have been through trainings and um their reactions there because we hopefully we're doing reflective work with them i'm sure renee can get that information for you because every um all of the pds that we have are they are in solution where and so we can pull that number and i want to say that dr miles asked us for this information and us i forgot which areas but there are some courses so i can pull that for you but um we have work to do in this area i think um and i don't want to belabor this because i know lisa's uh is up next and i don't take up too much time but i i i did want to just kind of

200be honest about this piece here because this is this is what we are this is this this the stuff that comes back to you as board members um we have to do a better job in terms of uh when we're talking about culturally competent teaching like what are we talking about so yes it's inclusive of race it is but it's also inclusive of other things and so i think that's the work that we have to do we have to make sure that we are spelling that out expanding on it and using correct language i think some some teachers you know renee can share this as well but two two years ago the the work the the survey that went out the number one pd topic that teachers wanted to learn more about was this area

201and so teachers were highlighting the fact that there was a gap and because obviously you you guys know how our teachers are always constantly wanting to be the best um they understood that there was a gap there and they wanted to learn more and so you know this area is a direct response to teachers requests i think this uh you know language and definition piece is so important because it applies to not just this one area that we're talking about right now but i can remember years ago having a conversation with dr cobb and yourself about character education in rockwood and all the different vernaculars that just you know are all over the place because um in some respect you don't want to just say this is the model we're following everybody do this but

202it's do what works in your building or in your smaller community because we are such a vast large district so you know i'm sure there's pieces of this where where we're thinking that same thing and this is an area where people are craving more and more information but there is also some comfort and some i don't know progress maybe that can be made upon using some more universal type language and platforms to move everybody along so i think we yeah and i think i'm sorry renee i cut in front of you i know you walked up to the microphone i think um over the last couple of years through our conversations with this whole team renee included we we recognized um that this is an area that our employees are asking for and need but

203it's almost that we have to provide that foundation and that um common language to to get them started and so we have found that that has um provided a lot of support i i would say for our principals for sure in in that um collaboration amongst buildings as well that there is a common expectation in common language about what this will look like in our schools again action steps and strategies within individual schools can look very different but when we say equity in the rockwood school district we all know what we're talking about and so we we really had to start at that most basic level to make sure that we were providing what our teachers needed and of course what our students just sorry i would just add just a simple answer to your

204question about where we are with this is equity work there's a lot of different points of entry to equity work which can be highly personal and so you know you're familiar with the um the equity plan that dr miles and brittany work together on and most of that equity work that's listed in there has really been optional for teachers and so teachers have been invited to choose a point of entry so there might be a variety of ways for them to enter into that work and they make that choice you know when and how to do that there's been some work that's been all the counselors have gone to where all the principles have gone to but we haven't done anything that all teachers do with the exception of we use language like culturally competent

205teaching we're really talking about things like um under not getting away from deficit thinking for kids so if you have a student whose primary language is another language other than english you know you wouldn't say well that you know instead of focusing on we gotta fix this child's english we have to fix their deficits instead we want to focus on their funds of knowledge and what do they bring to the table and how do we build on their strengths and so what we have done consistently is our new teacher training is added that piece about deficit thinking and you know in in using that language about being a warm demander you know you can have a teacher who's a lenient or a teacher who's demanding a teacher who's warm or teacher who's distant and you

206know and that sweet spot is really being demanding having high standards but being warm and that way and so that's the kind of language that i would say we've been systematic about um that we've used that with our new teachers systemically for the last several years and that we have um like for example the curriculum writing training when all the the teachers that wrote curriculum for virtual courses last year one of the modules was culturally responsive teaching but that was the lens is more of instructional strategies and and really kind of how that connects with the brain and learning so when they when you were saying that my mind is went to the work we've done with students with disabilities special needs forever i mean that's that's the essence of special education it's just what

207you said you build on the strengths you build you work on the areas of need and respectful you know yeah what's the high expectations it's been the consistent message that we've used in a systemic way but what we haven't done is said all teachers will have x training and so it's difficult to have common language when there's different points of entry into that work and where people are at different places in their in their journey of understanding people who aren't like them you like to sit over here between these two i wasn't planning on speaking we can get you oh my god for your knees all right thanks reena so then we move on to the next area which is empower all students to design personalized pathways for the future for their future i was

208thinking about this i mean there are some so some pieces on here where we still have some work to do um let's start at the bottom icap is individual um individualized career and academic planning so i was talking to todd and the counselors this is an area that um again i think we just have to be a little bit more systemic about we are doing some things um but we just have work to do glenn talked about the dropout rate which we don't really have a dropout rate and i'm not really for sure about the senior exit survey because that doesn't come out my office so um relating to the future planning domain and as you can see 53 of the students respond with a favorable favorable response which obviously means we have some work

209there off the top of your head do you remember just kind of two questions this is a survey we provide as students leave rockwood our seniors graduate we gather information just on their experience and there's a domain specifically related to future planning and uh ask questions about uh their personal plan of study that's also connected to the icap that terry was just talking about the um also asked questions regarding are you aware of the dual credit opportunities the different things that students have different pathways right that they have in school make sure they're aware so 53 of the responses were very favorable and then we had about 30 that marked it as just in a which could mean a couple of different things when we dive in and start talking to them and maybe they

210weren't aware that just when they did the survey they just don't remember those discussions or using those personal plans to study so that's where we can we can dive in a little bit more and learn how we really connect with them to help make sure they're aware of all the different pathways and helping them personalize their pathways as they move forward then here are our action steps develop a comprehensive k-12 college and career readiness plan that for for counselors in the rockwood school district that is their number one um action step for next year to make sure that we we have that ready to go i mean we cannot continue to wait for that increased enrollment of students again we saw this before this is something that dr miles has been um champion as well

211so we're in progress with that and the numbers have increased if you i'm sure he shared that document with you but the numbers have increased and we just have to continue to see that number increase and dr kender to your point earlier about implementation if we want to increase the number of students from underrepresented populations and higher level classes we can do that tomorrow it's easy just enroll the students in the class the success is those students been and those students enrolled in those classes being prepared for the work and then been successful in the classes right so how how are we going to measure success and is it the ap course or what have you but we want kids to be successful in the course create multiple pathways i feel like we're here we're

212doing it one of the pieces that we need to highlight more is just um allowing kids to be aware of the many pathways so right now that's not necessarily the case i mean we have missouri options we have um early college program we have dual enrollment so we have these multiple pathways that we can take a look at and so we just want to make sure that students are aware of those pathways any questions dr rhodes is here and i didn't want him to feel left out i wonder what kind of success he's having at ccl with getting more underrepresented groups into the program it's an invitation to the table denny [Laughter] let's see um so we had uh i presented uh it's been two years ago now it seems like not that long ago

213but um on a new process that we were putting into place um that was supposed to go into place july 1st of 2020 and it was actually put on hold as far as for identification because trying to roll out a new process and trying to get everybody on board as far as there's some education they'll have to go with teachers and everything of that nature so it's put on hold till this this upcoming year the 21 22 year now with that being stated one of the aspects of actually trying to help with this process is i've been working with renee and and actually creating a a course for teachers to be able to go through for pd um to actually learn how we actually do identification and gifted and this is a gen ed teachers

214within the district so not only how we do identification um what we look at how we look at look at it and then i've also been so we have that going into place and then i've also been working with the department of art jesse um just to um look more using what they what the deci refers to as local norms so actually looking at it as um more of a demographic based norm across the district just to see how that breaks down and see if that would actually also help address underrepresented populations within the gifted program to try to close the gaps of underrepresented identification that we currently have and do you have the blessing of jesse to work on this too yes you've been very supportive right yes i um i do a lot

215of work with i'm actually part of the state's gifted advisory council and so i do a lot of work with deci on that and so actually we're working together on a lot of different ways of trying to look at identification and address that across the state not only within rockwood it's just one of many programs that you can do this but we have to take it one at a time don't we you just can't say blanket well i gonna do it all of a sudden it just won't work out that way definitely thank you all right move to our next one character and well-being well we had brought a program in with mindful breathing it's called mindfulness it just helps the kids understand a little bit about themselves how when they approach situations how they

216can start to breathe relax calm their body and react in a better and more appropriate manner it helps you because sometimes you like you're so stressed out that you could like you could just overflow um maybe if you're having trouble doing a test it could help you like um when you're at a really hard question and you don't know what it is you can take a couple deep breaths i feel like you guys have this awesome opportunity to take what you've learned here and share it share with your friends at school share with your family at home it worked i would say that that program is called uh breathe like a tiger over at ellisville and it was it was a before school program and we thought we were going to get like maybe 10

217students and i don't know if the parents were just dropping the kids but that program was very very very popular and we only had a little bit of money to get the program off the ground and i remember allison calling dr lawyer calling me and saying she was going to move some money over to continue the program those students love love love love that program so some of the same information that and we'll these only have a few slots here so we'll quickly go through them but pretty positive ratings here we still have work to do with the sel survey but you know we're heading in the right direction this and just uh the indicator and this one's dealing with a couple of different domains in that survey so we have a survey that has

218several domains and we kind of pull out the domain so they fit and they correspond with sections of our way forward so we're trying to use many different types of data to help support and kind of give us a picture of where we're at to meet these objectives within the way forward and so i don't know if you want to highlight anything specifically from the elementary standpoint dave about sel experiences just because we've been so heavy secondary yeah i would just one comment about the student favorable responses from sel survey we want to we try to get away from finding three or four um survey responses that aren't favorable and then targeting those and then increasing those but then finding the next year two or three more that aren't favorable and then always like trying

219to find the problem so i think we're looking at sel as a global second steps has definitely helped in that area so participation with sel experiences at the elementary level i don't know where we got the 85 percent i'm sure glenn knows but i can tell you that um that directly came from teachers who were kind of creating their own sel experience in the classroom and second steps was when dr harris and i took a look at that um it was one of those things where it wasn't required by all staff we it was a slow implementation i remember it was a little bit criticized for that slow implementation but second steps actually said that rockwood schools did very well because now we have teachers asking for it and now the second steps has an

220adult component that i have principals asking for as well so i'm really excited about the work that's being done in the sel portion of our elementary schools because it's it's really a part of the classroom in the school culture i was going to ask to clarify that participation with sel is that beyond that's beyond just second steps and that's all inclusive of what teachers are doing to build that in the classrooms is that correct which indicates we're building capacity for our teachers in that area do teachers need permission from somebody before they do any sal projects i would say i don't think it's permission i think is more of a collaborative approach so a student may a teacher may be excited about something that they want to try and they're going to talk with the

221assistant principal or principal and say hey i want to try this what do you think uh probably more than anything but what do you think dave yeah exactly we we want to create the autonomy for people to be creative but we also back to i think what jimmy saying we want we don't want for elementary we don't want 19 silos we have to have common language and so we have to stay centered and focus while also offering the autonomy to do be creative so um i think it's a little bit of both but typically the the prince the teachers are going to the administration that the administration questions it they come to myself or lisa and then i typically would talk to terry and we would be on board with it seem like i read

222an article every day about a teacher that has tried something along this line whether it's something involving slavery or whatever and they get themselves in trouble because they don't realize the ramifications of what they're doing on the certain certain uh subgroups i think i mean we may have a situation here and there where that that that may be the case but i think for the most part just the the plcs the team meetings um grade level meetings i think i think teachers know you know how to balance and navigate that path so here you go we talked about professional learning earlier but this is really looking at uh restorative practices uh just for uh your knowledge when we think about restorative practices there's two legs it is building relationships and repairing harm when harm is

223done so many of our schools have already participated in restorative practices again this is really about creating a systemic approach um tammy you're 100 right in terms of building capacity so one of the things that renee and i talked about is how do we build capacity so right now with restorative practices for next year we're going to identify teachers and have those teachers become trainers so the train to train my train the trainer model so we'll have trainers in the rockwood school district and then we'll start building capacity that way we're going to do this for restorative practices but we're also going to do it for trauma and foreign practices so we're at a point in the rockwood school district now where we have to start building capacity and not rely on outside people to

224come in to train our staff so those top two we would definitely we we have a plan to expand our partnership with mental health uh services department is is just wonderful part of that is because of the pie department that we have and the other part of that is because of the counselors and social workers that we have we can always use more resources in this area but i feel like we have a pretty good relationship with the children's service fund and some of those those organizations out there glenn i have been talking about this for probably two or three years now we're trying to develop a student health and wellness survey here's a challenge that we have i can remember having this conversation the challenge that we have with creating a health and wellness

225survey you ask certain questions and it's anonymous and our instinct is when you ask certain questions and someone is saying that they're in need of something we want to be able to identify that student and help that student immediately you don't want to ask a question around you know um have you had suicidal thoughts within the last 24 hours and you have 67 percent of your students who are saying yes and we don't know who those those students are that's not to say that we shouldn't ask we just want to be very intentional and how we're collecting this information so that we can support and help students gary do you see us to you or dr ricker or dr miles or dr protair dr count dr willett or dr cobb do any of you see

226in the next two or three years instead of these things being made available that we can require these some of these things so that that's the uh that's that's what we are i think so we just had this conversation in learning support a couple of days ago and and dave brought up dr cobb brought up the example of second step so as a team like we fight all the time about certain things and so there are some of us who are like let's this should be mandatory there's others or you know let's go slow i would say though if we take a look at as a case study if we take a look at what we did with second step in in the teachers it was probably the most beautiful outcome ever i mean we

227had there are some people who wanted to jump into renee's point there are certain people that can enter a certain certain entry point and there are people who were fighting us i can remember meeting with certain board members talking about second step and is it mandatory and then three years later you have all these people who are jumping on board and they're ready to go what we're trying to do is to use uh you know tammy's word to get words again is build capacity so i think if we build capacity within the school we get those early adopters excited they're going to get their team excited and before you know it you have a whole school that is trained but sometimes you get to the point where the ones who jump in are the ones

228going to do it anyhow but then the ones that yeah i don't want to do it they're the ones that need it the worst there's a there's a three-minute ted talk that um that i i was sent to you guys there's a three-minute set ted talk and it's called how to create a movement and it's probably the i that ted talk is probably how we are going to move forward with restorative practices and all these things it's not to say that we're not going to do it we are doing it but it's just uh allowing people to enter when they need to enter within a certain time period when dave and i did the second step program we gave them we gave the teachers three years and within three before three years you have all

229these people who are all these teachers and all these parents who are wanting this program so very i think apart to join into that though we go back to something we talked about earlier and that's having the common language the common goals uh the common res that we were supporting that resolution for all equity because unless we have that what are they jumping into so i think it's important that we have that that's the goal how we get there with these layered approach like with second steps it won't happen unless we have the commonality to start with and i i so i i just want to come back to that again and in this i'm so happy that you said that just be because when we think about restorative practices people think about whatever they

230think about because what you know that means it's the absence of discipline and no restart of practice is about two things and i think that we can ask all of our teachers this question and i think all the teachers respond in a very favorable way right do you want to build healthy relationships with your students yes they all do if your students are in pain or hurt be it physically social socially or emotionally in your classroom do you want to repair that harm do you want to make sure that they feel every single teacher will say yes that's three sort of practices so then the the actual restorative practices is what does it look like how do we how do we repair that harm every every single teacher wants to build relationships they do and

231when they talk when you talk to them if they're not building relationships that they need to it's because of time but every single teacher want to build relationships and no teacher will want to see a student that's hurt so this also makes me think too but though about i know we're talking about students in this one but you know the teachers that fall into that category and so you know you mentioned capacity and i just think at times you know um you might hear teachers saying different things like you know i just don't have the capacity for that right now because it might be something they're not just their personal life but just they feel like there's been a lot of change at one time and are we looking at the totality of change or

232or new things that they have to learn you know over the course of any given time frame because too much is too much and we all know the environment we're living in right now it doesn't take very much to be too much for all of us because it's been a tough year so absolutely and so it's really about it's about uh meeting teachers where they are and repeating and and and giving the teachers the support that they need right so all teachers want to do restorative practices they just don't know that they don't they don't know that they want to do restorative practices but they do know they want to build relationships with their students and they want to make sure their students are okay all teachers want to be trauma-informed specialists they do they

233just don't want to be trauma-informed specialists the way that how we call it what they want to make sure is that the kid that is experiencing trauma in the classroom how can i help this kid like we get that and so i think what what's happening you know there are so many buzzwords and people are like oh here's this next thing in education and so i think if we can uh remove i mean definitely talk about what what they are but remove the buzzwords and just meet the needs of teachers i think we'll move faster every all teachers want to support support kids before you get back to the common language there are a lot of teachers who say would you like to do restorative practice oh no no i don't want to do it

234yet they're doing it already absolutely yes don't know it there was a there was a kindergarten teacher at one of our schools when we were implementing second step and this person was uh like really like i'm not doing that i'm not doing that and i remember like we were kind of going back and forth and the principal said that's really crazy because like this person has the best classroom culture in a whole school but it's it's you know hearing these programs everything that second step was offering she was already doing 20 years she was i mean she was a veteran teacher she was doing this for 20 years right so i do think sometimes people get caught in in the the buzzword so we just have to be careful with that all right janet just

235giving me that look look so you can take a look at this um again we are moving in the right direction and and and most of these um key indicators number of meetings with local safety team we didn't have too many this year just because of covet but the idea is to have one quarterly meeting and that is tyrone and all the school resource officers as well as with the local police chiefs or whoever they designate as well as the um firefighters as well as a representative from st louis county and that's just really taking a look at our system what's working what's not working how can we collaborate a little bit more talked about surveys we didn't really do this or bullying has been down um over the course of this year obviously i

236think this is my last slide promise janet key are action steps i want to highlight um just the first one provide opportunities for parents and guardians to learn about the intellectual development the needs of their children at ages participate constructively in their children's education uh so this is this is both the social emotional piece as well as an academic piece and so uh this started maybe a year and a half ago kathy and the um the communications team created a page on their site for for parents it was called uh uh parents you parents university right and so we will put information up for for parents to learn and know what's going on in school we also so that was a couple of years ago just this year we created community conversations um and we're

237partnering with chad's right now but they are basically going through uh the signs of suicide program that and that's like a four-part piece the next piece is looking at trauma so from a social emotional standpoint we have a zoom link where parents can sign up and then we also have our parent university um review and evaluate the district's comprehensive safety plan you know i would say rockwood has been great at that over the last couple of years this year due to covet we probably didn't do as much as we needed to but that is something that we're gonna tyrone going into a second year having great relationships with individuals in the community i can see our safety plan um coming back and doing our safety walk-throughs and we definitely invite all of you to participate

238if you want anything you would like for me to talk about here all of our staff required to go through certain safety trainings though on an annual basis yeah so we do um yeah you're talking about intruder training so there there's a intruder training that all staff members go through we haven't done the intruder training the uh like the full out intruder training so basically what's happening is what staff members are getting it's just uh um a recap if you will so there's a video and they go through the four e's and talk about those things as well as they they do the tornado drills and others oh yeah they're yeah so there's other safety things fire drills that we have to do per state right yes dave anything you want to add great job

239uh the anti-bullying program i will just say this it's bullying is down um anything over one percent is too much anyway so it's hard to say that bullying doesn't exist in our schools when somebody's been bullied so um we want to be careful about that but you know our students are they treat each other very well at our elementary schools there's no doubt about that i see that and that is a direct result of the anti-bullying program um as well as the seo work that we're doing so if you remember you know three four years ago bullying was a hot topic there's no doubt about it and i know that we all got emails for that um i think that we've done a really good job and our students have done a really good job

240of advocating for one another and so i think that's a direct result of not only the anti-bullying program but the entire sel component of the work that we do anything you want to add cool i would just end by saying echoing what dave say said we have some really amazing students in the rockwood school district every single week i receive a phone call from or an email from students and they're always asking about some program that they want to do this past week i received an email from a student at marquette high school and she wants to create a zoom conversation around eating disorders specifically for athletes and you know we kind of talked about why and she said you know there are many athletes who are who who's struggling with this i said so

241what do you want to do and she's like well i just want to go i want to learn a little bit more about it and i want to have a zoom link conversation and invite students and i just want to create a space where we can talk about it i just think to myself like with all the things that are going on we have some amazing students who are not selfish who are really caring and thinking about other students and that's who we are as the rockwood school district so we have work to do and we've been doing work but when you have highlights like that that's that it's it's a an example of the goodness that we have in our district even when things are tough thank you for allowing me to talk way

242more than the time janet allotted for me but uh i appreciate it thank you all right and we're nearing the finish of the marathon comprehensive review we'll finish with strong leadership and i'll get the video going while lisa makes her way up [Applause] [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] now [Music] it's all about what you all do you make the difference i am just trying to help provide resources you took care of my son like no one else you taught me so many things you made me a better parent and i thank you for that and i know you do such a great job of helping so many other parents and children and i thank you for letting me be a part of it [Music] right here we

243go last um last goal area i got a little nervous when you know a quorum of the board got up and left i was trying not to take it personally but you know i get it it's been a long day so thank you for coming back i appreciate that um so i have easy work i have one little tiny um area here um but i kind of say that facetiously because leadership is is really um the essence of keeping this district going right and i think it's um great that we chose this video to highlight strong leadership um because leaders are not just our principals they're not just our superintendent leaders our our bus drivers um leaders are our teachers um our cafeteria workers our board members you know leadership is is really all the

244the people in this district katie mentioned this earlier um that have just um really shown what the rockwood school district is about in the last 18 months so um obviously these action steps these key indicators were written before covid came around but they still are are very relevant um so the one that i'm going to highlight the most um today and again this my portion will be brief because then i know the next objective falls under the board leadership side of things but i wanted to highlight the work we're doing around profile of a leader and um yes that's only 70 completed and i will use the same rationale that a lot of people have used today and that we started this work two years ago at our admin conference and then we got into

245the school year and the school year ended early so um this is um priority uh work for us at our admin um conference this summer um similar to it's on one here we go um our profile of a learner that we that is part of our um strategic plan we want to do something similar for profile of a leader and we started that work last year where we put together some initial descriptors so we had all of admin council participate in some activities and helping us define what leadership means in the rockwood school district and just like we say this is kind of the road map for our learners when they leave the rockwood school district at any point they should have experienced these things we want to create a visual very similar to that

246around leadership and so we will develop the categories and the descriptors under that um many of the things that our admin counsel when we did those activities of defining those characteristics of leadership care traits we really see things around being a visionary student and community connectiveness and and being connected with your individual school or department um community communication skills interpersonal skills creativity adaptivity um you know there are probably about 80 descriptors or traits on that list and so we're going to take those and categorize those and develop a visual some similar to profile of a learner so then as we work through all of our leadership trainings as we work through professional growth opportunities it will always tie back to that and while i think we all understand the essence of leadership again back to

247that common language that if we really define um that these are are um key indicators around leadership it it helps us as we um of course hire new administrators and leaders as we train folks in our district so uh that will be the work that we will continue this summer when we get our admin council back together for our annual um school year kick the year off retreat time um the next two indicators talk about leadership opportunity leadership development opportunities again this ties directly with renee's work with the opportunity this past school year of having full day professional learning we had a high percentage of teachers and leaders really participating in strands of learning that are tied directly to the way forward renee and her department did an excellent job of creating those strands and

248it ties in exactly with what we talked about that if it is an organic um learning opportunity we we saw folks really engage highly and deeply in those activities and so they were allowed some choice they were allowed to choose things that were relevant to their learning into their school environment but all of those were connected to the way forward so we had a good participation rate there and then you can also see we had a really high rating of favorable responses on the quality and content of the learning that took place so um even in in the middle of a pandemic learning did not stop in the rockwood school district for our adults and again probably increased exponentially just because we were faced with so many um new learning opportunities so those are my

249key indicators i will be happy to answer any questions and then otherwise i think lynn is going to take it away for the next objective awesome thanks guys thanks yeah you are threes you want to go through the other so i i did meet with uh lynn um regarding the the objective about board education governs the rockwood school district an efficient effective and fiscally responsible manner and looking and develop some key indicators to help us know that we're on the right track and making progress with this objective uh some of the indicators we came to discussion with and some of these are also noted in mc6 local board administration conduct business and compliance with the missouri open meetings records act um we're at a 100 percent um there um local board regularly systematically monitors the

250implementation and progress of the csip which is what we're doing here the goal is to try to review five six areas i'm sorry goal is to try and review all seven areas at least twice a year and that's that chart we kind of showed at the beginning that we can start to divide it out in a more systematic process so we're not doing the marathon today we can spread it out and then you know be able to dive in a little bit more in different areas um part of the um action steps is around i believe let me speak a little bit more to this around the superintendent growth plan and we want to connect that to the way forward objectives also that with the superintendent growth plan we're also seeing a change in increase

251with the way forward uh goals as well and with dr mile's goal this year around increasing enrollment with challenge participation for students that don't normally um which students aren't normally participating in challenging hours coursework from fifth and sixth grade we've seen improvement so that's directly related to one of our objectives in the way forward in the universal equity access section on our annual community survey so we just did an annual community survey closed again earlier this week uh just quickly looking at the preliminary uh responses uh from a question that uh asked the about the board of education job performance right now we're at about sixty percent of the resp uh respondents uh rated favorably uh meaning the top two um parts of that survey and that's again something we can continue to review annually

252um as part of our ongoing work also we asked the community about favorability in terms of budget management and again we kind of talked about this in the financial budgetary area of our way forward earlier that's 54 responded favorably we did have about 30 percent that kind of responded that they did they didn't know they weren't sure um again that's an opportunity we have probably for communication and share just the great things that we're doing with the fiscal responsibility and management that we're doing i heard a couple great examples just over today when chris was talking so possible opportunity for additional exposure and then lynn do me pull up your i guess do you want to talk about any of the action steps that all the action steps that we had as a board that

253could be one of my goals personal goals all the action steps that we had listed in the in that way forward you can look at those the first one is green which is a superintendent evaluation process which we're going to go into a little bit more specifically here in just a second and facilitating the implementation of the rockwood strategic plan again in progress this is why we're here and not only are we here today but we've been doing for the past couple of retreats of all related to the way forward uh in our work sessions i develop a visualization uh to monitor the strategic plan again this is in progress we saw today what clint talked about the schedule opportunities and just to just to be able to see visualize it uh in this format

254is very helpful and then we'll talk about some of the other things as far as voice and building trust in our community and uh and how and the communication so if we want to go to the next slide i thought we've already done that we go back a little bit it's the second one we facilitated that that's done i've got a copy of it right here it don't we i would the green would you it should be green shouldn't it the second one go in until until it's completed it's still an implementation no it says facilitate it doesn't say completed i would maybe argue it would be green yeah i'll argue it should be make a motion to move it to green and it is green yellow because it's an ongoing process until they tell

255our they said facility said facilitate the implementation do you make it stripes okay go on so i feel good that the board actions our requirements has led to the implementation of the rockwood strategic plan it is always going to be a work in progress because this is not a one-time year thing it's going to be over and over again so however you want to do that yeah you give it the color you want glenn all right so i'm going to go a little bit more in depth and another powerpoint that we have out of the place i can't follow you where are you there you go okay lynn go ahead all right all right so this is these are our are our objective and then our action steps and i took each one and kind

256of drilled down a little bit so go the next leg and so this was really i think one of our most important work that we've done for the past couple of years is the superintendence or superintendent evaluation process uh we've had a great person to work with and so we had uh at the beginning we had some guiding principles one is that we wanted to ensure the superintendent's success and move rockwood forward we wanted to make sure that the process superintendent evaluation process was connected to the way forward we wanted to make it sustainable throughout no matter who's superintendent um we wanted to have a process engaged all the board of directors and we wanted to make it meaningful and defensible so we got started in 2019 with janet talley which we all remember and

257we looked at the educational leadership standards missouri department of elementary secondary education superintendent evaluation process decis we looked at the rockwood school board policies and regulations and we also looked at rockwood strategic plan we identified priorities for 2019 and 2020 and opportunities for improvement as we go through this process we keep tweaking it depending on again continuous improvement so this is a very uh this is a graph to show this cyclical approach and we've all the board has seen this the board has seen this so i'm kind of wanting some feedback from the others in the room so this is the cyclical process so identify priorities for the growth plan there is an opportunity for update and feedback dr miles has sentences his plan and then he updates it sends it to us we we

258provide feedback we go over that in a closed session there's a mid-year review another update and feedback and then and then the end of the year summative survey the mid-year review actually informs a contract determination the timeline for all this which we have done and completed and we will complete the process actually tonight with the final summer deal with dr miles so those are the dates and then as dr ricker comes on board here you go this will be the dates okay so our next steps is to continue to look at the process and make the needed adjustments to implement it with our new super with an interim superintendent and then implement with the superintendent that is in place far 2223 if we hopefully we'll get there right jamie okay some of the other areas

259is uh is to facilitate the implementation of the rockwood strategic plan we have done that through the work sessions retreats we've scheduled way for it the board presentation scheduled to support the weight force folk way forward focus i will think back to that especially in the area social emotional uh learning terry has come and presented that that was actually a focus of our work for this last school year jamie in the school year as well and that when the way forward was being developed members of the board actually participated in a number of the different committees it's a little more challenging in these next three areas because they they blend together so you can quickly see different activities that have supported the actions that we have in this area we'll just let people read okay

260all right any questions comments back like slides um right there so when you talk about determining scheduled learning opportunities for the board that's going to be something that's going to come out of our work sessions together comes from cope so okay jamie you might want to talk a little bit about that i i personally believe that's an area that we really do need to focus on together in terms of our own equity learning our own common language amongst us as board members so i'm i really think we need to have that come to the forefront that's great because you're on cope so that will be a good discussion point so this year uh jamie has stepped down because of her role as president of the board and it's randy myself and you tammy so we'll

261meet uh the summer sometime and talk about the opportunities we've started the conversation already and i think that you know the opportunities come from all of the board members as to the direction that we take but there are lots of opportunities in our district and lots of things are happening in our district as we heard today with the way forward that we need to be a part of and increase our own growth and learning give some examples well for example like inequity in terms of there's so much going on with with ours with our teachers and our administrators in terms of anti-bias and we haven't really approached that as a whole board in our own level of knowledge and understanding are we all on the same page with what are the term what is the

262terminology what is the language what is the commonality common language that our board is that our district is taking and we need to do that examine that within ourselves as a board if we're going to move the district forward i mean that's just my thought oh i think that's good and i know we did talk about initial topics at the cope meeting i lost track of dates in my head whenever that occurred but um and for next school year and and historically we would just bring those ideas to the board and then get input from the all seven members on if there's things they want to see or not want to see and i think with glenn's idea of you know spreading out the way forward updates like he had on that calendar is going

263to be a great opportunity for some of the things maybe that you're mentioning right now because we can look at that you guys can look at that in connection with cope and the cope topics and see all right well maybe we already had pulled something you know a character update or something as a cop topic i don't really recall our list for this coming year but we see that it's already on here and that's an opportunity for a different cope update uh or learning opportunity at a meeting so i think there's there's lots of things to to kind of pull together between the two first one in september yeah pie is our first one in september and then we haven't decided the other topics yet so we'll decide that uh i believe we already have

264that meeting scheduled in august i think or we plan to meet in august when i was looking at the action steps to put some information together i think it might be a good idea as a board to spend some time talking about our action steps obviously the superintendent evaluation process has gone well and that we need to maintain that and also the implementation of the rockwood up way forward plan but i think that in the other areas we probably might want to come back and revisit those action steps and see if they make the most sense at this point in time um you know work with lisa work with whatever team she would feel appropriate since she's kind of a grand way forward person um and that and we when glenn and i match talk

265about the indicators we talked a little bit about that as well so obviously we to always have a unified voice we want to build trust with the with the district we want to make sure that we're fiscally responsible all those things and so i think there's some opportunity here to make some adjustments to our action steps that can reflect upon some of the things tammy you were talking about i think too for the next work session whenever that may be you know we're not going to be spending you know the time doing this update next time so topics like you're you're thinking of would be fantastic for that kind of an environment where we have more time to be together in a less formal though it's the same setup today but environment to work through

266some of that so when we met with jan chilly in march of this year as march i believe we met with her twice she really helped us with with the community communication piece so so that's the board report right and as you look at whether it's through cope or otherwise you look at dates to review some of these goal areas um the recommendations i put on there are alignment with data that we're getting back whether it's through surveys or again achievement data or um focus groups whatever it might be try to align it so that way it's timely that we're getting the data back you know it's not months between when we get the data back and you hear about it it's you know relatively in a short timeline so you can refer to that

267to kind of give some idea of what my when it might be best and maybe look at it and also have a discussion around hey can we get something sooner or change something like that around but that pretty much uh sums it up for all all seven areas uh i say i'm excited to do this work uh getting a lot of credit for the colors and the presentation here it's been a joy working with each of our gold champions uh to collaborate on our um key indicators going through here so um again thanks thank you thank you five minutes to go do you want to just dig dance or something i can fill 60 seconds of that five minutes just to say thanks to all of the gold champions this is a very comprehensive plan

268that touches all facets of our district you look at the variety of approaches that are deployed throughout the the district and you can just understand from the conversations today there's a lot of learning that's taking place regarding what's going on throughout the district and as these processes become integrated with the daily operations i think you're just going to see a rapid uh impact and positive impact upon the district with the way forward but our gold champions and all the teammates the staff members with whom they work gathering student voices and the voices from throughout the community i think just add value significant value to what we are trying to accomplish within the district and kudos to glenn for your coordination of this work as well and the visualizations that you provided i think provide us

269a quick snapshot a great visual of of how we're doing so thank you my pleasure glad to help you've all been fantastic so thank you i know it's a long day and and it's information you guys know but it's really good for us to sit here and hear it and go through it as well so um this is i think it's also important for our community absolutely hear what we're doing in the work that's being done yeah so thank you for sharing and it's a good time to refocus on it as we uh look ahead to the way forward into the next school year absolutely and you did hear through there a lot of times we put things on hold because this right plan was developed prior to covid um but wasn't everything stopped it's

270just it shifted some priorities uh things that we didn't maybe think to come up we shifted and had to respond and there was a lot of professional learning that our staff did to help support that virtual instruction and a lot of flexibility so a lot of great work has happened in this short amount of time and i'll just make one final announcement to those of you watching from home that this is when the live stream ends for the day until 7 pm when we open back up for open sessions so we are going to do an hour of msba board training that would not be of interest to many of you so we will end it here and pick you all back up at 7. thank you lynn for putting that together for us too

271by the way