001good evening and welcome to the garfield heights city school district special board meeting and work session march 8th 2021 i would like to open the meeting this evening with roll call miss thomas here miss king here mr jubie miss morrison here thank you the first order of business i would like to take a motion to appoint sean patton as treasurer protein so moved second with that being moved by miss king and second by miss thomas i'm gonna take the roll call on that and that will be um miss king yes miss thomas yes miss morrison yes and miss daniels also votes yes and with that voting mister um i turned the meeting over to mr patton okay uh the next item is the adoption of agenda items can we also have um prior to us
002moving forward with the meeting um i would like to um apologize to the public we are actually on zoom this evening um versus being in person and streaming live from the little theater and if miss bailey can share with the public um the reasons for that this evening i'm gonna be greatly appreciated absolutely thank you mrs davis uh daniel sorry um so today unfortunately um there was an internet outage with our itc um our internet provider which uh they are called connect regionally there are many many school districts that use them to provide their internet so this was an outage that was regional it had to do with their firewall they were having a problem with it that was causing sites to some sites to work some sites and not particularly the google sites were
003not working so uh a remind message was sent out to all the families because students of course those that were still at home weren't able to connect to their teachers at school um so it was resolved about a little bit before four um and they're still working to identify exactly what the problem was and what caused it so they can rectify it thank you miss bailey for that update and to move forward with our agenda this evening can i have a motion to adopt the agenda tonight go move second mr patton that was moved by miss king in second by miss thomas roll call please miss king yes miss thomas yes miss morrison yes mrs daniels yes with that being um approved i would like a motion to um enter into executive session please no
004move second mr pat and that was moved by miss thomas in second by ms king can i have roll call please that's thomas yes miss king yes miss morrison yes mrs daniels yes at 5 36 p.m we are going into executive session for the purposes of discussing g h t a negotiations and personnel matters ms bailey if you can move us into executive session thank you okay hi mrs bailey i think i'm on the agenda to present in the executive session i never received a copy of the agenda to know where i should be thank you okay do i need to announce that we adjourned the meeting at 603 publicly you just didn't yeah the next um item on our agenda this evening is a present a presentation by yelen yolanda hamilton mr hankey would
005you like to introduce uh miss hamilton and explain the presentation a lot of good stuff for us certainly ms daniels and i'll make very quick mention um real quick and uh thank you to all the parents and students today was awesome and then we can talk about that a little bit at the other meeting but it was so nice to see all of the faces back at school anyway i'll leave that there we're going to turn into and go to something as positive i think uh ms hamilton has been working with us as our diversity equity and inclusion consultant uh for this is this the second school year right miss hamilton yeah so um we have done um some expansion of programming and also we did a lot of unique programming for um black history
006month uh we have an equity test with a lot of good good good news and good things going on in our district uh with diversity equity inclusion ms hamilton has been integral and a great part of our team um so with that uh we did invite her to give an update in all of our efforts and i i i i i'm happy and uh to turn it over to her thank you miss hamilton okay thank you very much good evening everyone and thank you to the board for having me this evening i would like to ask at this time if miss bailey can prompt um the powerpoint and i can just prompt you to change slides if that's okay um just to alleviate logistics around [Music] so i did give you permission to share it
007did you just email it to me my apologies okay um do you want to let me just i can pull up my email hold on i don't know what i'm doing i think i shared something by accident hold on no problem so pretty much tonight i wanted to be able to share some pertinent updates with everyone in the district around the work that we've been doing on this journey to really advance diversity equity and inclusion within our district to mr hankey's point i've been with the district a little over a year going into two years and it's just really um amazing at the amount of work and momentum that we've been um the pace that we've been moving at even in the midst of covet and so um i know that those updates are not
008always haven't been shared as of yet on the website um but we're doing our best to make sure that families and individuals in the community can stay abreast to those things that we are doing okay no problem thank you okay okay thank you mrs bailey okay and well i have i have the capability to transition between slides um actually i'll do that for you so just let me know when okay thank you so much okay of course this is what i just title as the diversity equity and inclusion report for the 2020-21 school year next slide please and so um so we convened an equity task force um in july of 2020 and that task force was formed per um initiated by our superintendent mr chris hanke and the task force is actually con formed
009as a subcommittee of the board and what we really do is we bring together individuals across the district to really apply an equity lens through all of the work that we are doing and so we came up with a um consensus around how we define educational equity because that is our primary focus as members of the equity task force and we define educational equity by stating that it means that all students should have access to the right resources that they need at the right moment in their education regardless of their race gender sexual orientation disability ethnicity language religion family or family income and um that is consistent with as educational equity is defined by the aspen institute the members as you see on the slide consists of ms michelle daniels president of the board mr
010chris hanke dr gordon dupree miss gina wilson miss carla saunders and myself next slide please so this is just an outline infographic of the journey for our equity framework so we we mapped this out over the course of phases for this particular academic year so again as i mentioned we could we started by forming the equity task force because we needed to bring together core members of the district to get the ball rolling as we evolved into the second phase it really began growing in the sense of learning how to apply equity lens to address all the gaps that we were discovering particularly those gaps that were exaggerated as a result of the pandemic and so we um everything from the digital divide accessing it to technology access to internet those were all things that
011we really began taking an intricate look at and coming up with solutions as to how as a district we could make sure that our students were being served in the midst of this we're still having an equitable lens at addressing some of the issues due to covet but now we are transitioning to look at the equity gaps as a in a broader scope um but also keeping in mind those things that arose as a result a result excuse me of covet 19. um the next phase that we're transitioning to was to reduce communication barriers and so we came up with some ideas around town halls and just really um conducting surveys with parents without necessarily making assumptions about how um parents receive communication but really getting the understanding of what are those preferred communication channels
012and how can we ensure that we're having multiple communication channels to keep parents abreast of and up to date with the information as it was rapidly changing as we all know during the course of this school year the next phase was consisting of professional development so we wanted to make sure that our educators were supported we understand that the dynamic of being in class versus virtual is very different and being virtual for this school year there were many things that happened um in our society which we knew teachers needed to be equipped with the necessary skills to feel comfortable in initiating those conversations around social justice and things that were happening that um impact our students as well the next phase consisted of coming together to really figure out what was some culturally relevant programming
013that we could implement in the midst of being virtual right because the dynamic of parent night outs and things of that nature we had to be creative and think about how we could shape meaningful programming to keep parents engaged and then our last phase consists of conducting a district-wide effort for um an equity audit which is the first time that we're actually embarking upon doing um an equity audit for the district at large the next slide please so with the equity framework these were some components that were to provide you with additional details the assessment of the equity gaps so we talked about what those needs were for um students and families but also teachers as well in informing that process we created an equity rubric to really help us to guide different components and
014considerations for the process of re the school reopenings and we really focused on the most vulnerable populations and those being individuals with learning differences and disabilities as well as the homeless population and other vulnerable populations as classified in our district we prioritize addressing communication gaps and really other aspects of supporting social emotional learning and mental health really collab um collaborating more with community partners because we needed all hands on deck to make sure that our students and families were being served and then providing again that inclusion training and culturally relevant programming next please the next slide please thank you okay so as it relates to communication some of the strategies that we apply the town halls so we created a forum so that parents could have access to real-time updates consisting from administrators including mr
015hankey and the team of administrators throughout the district as well as having access to engage with agencies that provide direct services for our students in the school buildings and so those include agencies such as applewood beechbrook and a plethora of other agencies and again those were opportunities that weren't necessarily afforded to parents without coming on site to the school building right so it gave us the opportunity to kind of cast a larger net to share that information with students across our district thus we saw an increase in parent and family participation and referrals that were made directly to ms wilson our family engagement coordinator as well as dr dupree our director of student and people services and learning more just about parent needs because we understand that with the impact of the pandemic there were
016so many needs that we just weren't considering and so conducting parent surveys we saw significant increase in real-time responses and it allowed us to be able to address those parent concerns and to provide support we also figured hey we need to really cast our nets wider in how we communicate with parents and so we really did our best to try to ensure that the district was using multiple channels of communication from doing the district-wide callbacks to text messaging social media updates emails and even phone calls and also engaging more with our community partners which was really helpful in helping us to be able to have a couple of learning pods to support virtual learners and those that were um not virtual but remote learners that still require that extra support next slide please thank you
017professional development we had all of our educators and staff that work with children directly go through some equity training particularly around navigating creating brave space for difficult workplace conversations and we really touched on helping educators to understand what are microaggressions what are implicit biases how does that impact the way that educators or direct staff engages with our students and why some of those behaviors are harmful and strategies to apply to help overcome personal bias in the way that it shows up in the classroom we will continue in that vein with providing more trainings of that nature for our educators to ensure that we are making our best efforts to reduce and eliminate bias in the way of our delivery of instruction in the classroom setting also we are in the process of establishing equity action
018teams in each building and that will consist of individuals from each building who we consider as being our diversity champions they will recommend the type of training and support that's needed on you know since they're doing the work daily and we want to be able to support and engage our educators in this process as well and then again ongoing equity training throughout the course of the year identifying what is going to be prioritized as it relates to enhancing the understanding of equity amongst educators and our staff within the district next slide please so culturally relevant programs as mr hanke mentioned we were able to really do some robust programming during this black history month and again working with collaborative partners around across the community to make sure that we were incorporating you know representation and
019particularly working with the cleveland association of black storytelling and really really going above and beyond to ensure that this was a rich programming to engage students and families we also had the opportunity to connect with an out-of-state partner for some virtual field trips because we know that that's another area that our students were missing out on is the opportunity to take field trips outside of the district in the midst of covet so they were able to participate in rhythm and revolution and then we are planning for our di week programs which we hope to even take it up a notch from last year which we saw um a lot of success this also um involved us creating media messages via video right and so some of you may have seen on the website how we
020were able to engage members in our district with messaging around black history month and in addition it's just important um you know for our students and families to see that representation next slide please so that leads us to the last phase of the equity framework for this academic year and that consists of our equity audit and so i just wanted to share you know what is an equity audit when we say that when we use the terms we really want to start having a consistent and common language throughout the school district so that everyone understands what we mean when we say equity or refer to the equity audit and i really like this language um this definition that's in plain language which simply states that goal of the equity audit is to identify institutional practices
021that produce discriminatory trends and data and how that affects students and so in essence um that is exactly what we're doing that is exactly what we use the data to identify and even before going through with the audit we know and are aware that there are gaps right achievement gaps and things of that nature it's not to preach to us what we already know as a district but to help us to look more intricately at those gaps and just really figure out some solutions and opportunities to help reduce that gap next slide please okay so part of the equity audit will help us tie in again our equity our inclusion training in those aspects on an organizational level so from the assessment pl piece we'll be able to have an assessment and analyzation of the
022data to really be able to identify what are the systemic practices that have had an impact on these data outcomes so that will be divided into two categories into how does that manifest in in our organization and in the the service of delivery and the impact and then leading down to having an awareness and better understanding of that it should help us as a district to better create anti-bias practices bias reducing practices built on transparency standards and accountability also referred to as tsa and those are standards across the board for any district um throughout the united states that's looking to develop these standards in their um district-wide practices next slide please so the equity audit phases reviewing equity assets and challenges so that's pretty much compiling all of the comprehensive data and the the board
023members who are on um the meeting tonight you have copies that were sent over to you particularly of the equity rubric for the reopening process as well as the equity audit phases so if i can just draw your attention briefly just to reference and i know the general public can't see these documents but i will describe them the best way that i can the equity rubric um we were able to identify specific categories as related to the most vulnerable populations individuals across departments whether it was intervention um teachers etc were able to take a look at the equity rubric and rate where we fought in that category so i believe out of a score of 32 we rated ourselves out of 26 which is pretty good um and it allowed us to see what areas
024of focus we needed to prioritize as it relates to the reopening process for the equity audit phases the document if you can reference that it simply demonstrates the different categories that we are looking at and conducting this audit it consists of everything from demographics to student performance to socioeconomic status disaggregating data around free reduced lunch and discipline data and i just want to say um it really is taking a team effort to get the audit completed and i wanted to just mention an acknowledgement to ms bailey our director of technology and our emis coordinator who have been very intricate in making sure that all of that data was submitted in a timely fashion it's not an easy feat and we were actually able to um complete this over a four week process process um excuse
025me a four week process so kudos and thank you so much as you're working um as a team it's a team effort to make sure that we were able to meet those um deadlines the second phase will consist of developing a theory of action and what that in essence means is that we want to get to a point where we're building a common language and common understanding sometimes for districts particularly those that are not really um in the vein of always looking at data it can be a little intimidating when you look at data and putting language behind like what does this really mean when we look at these graphs and trends so we really want to create common language and understanding so that anyone in our district who sees this data or is informed
026they're able to articulate what this data actually means in plain language and then we want to use the the data to help us to develop and implement an equity improvement plan so addressing those gaps and issues and using that data to really see the transformational change that we desire within the garfield high school district so in essence that is a highlight of our equity journey that we've been on this year just sharing with you and transparency where we are where we where we started from where we are and where we're headed so at this time if any members of the board or anyone has questions i'd be happy to address those at this time any questions or comments i'm just a comment i think you and the team have done a thorough job and um
027a lot of what i was writing down i think are more next steps um you know as we incorporate the findings from the equity audit um into our strategic plan so i am definitely looking forward to um ramping it up and taking it to the next level so thank you for your your leadership thank you miss king and we will schedule um an opportunity outside of the um equity task force for the board to be updated um i'm working closely with our community partner from esc the educational service center who has really um been so helpful in helping us to drive this process forward so i'm excited by the work we're moving in a good direction and again it's been a a great experience um with the synergy with our equity task force and working
028with other departments across our district so thank you yeah i can definitely second what ms king said um you guys have done an amazing job and it was really nice to hear and see all of the initiatives that you guys have put into place in one place all combined because we see these things you know every week and and so to see all of those things together um really it was really nice to see all of the work that you guys have done with um diversity and equity inclusion in our district so thank you miss hamilton for all of your work we appreciate it thank you miss hamilton i also um would like to hold the same sentiments as miss king and miss thomas um you along with um the leadership of mr hankey um
029you guys are really moving the district forward um in equity and diversity and um i'm really proud of the work that you guys have done so far and i'm also i'm looking for um just as ms king said um district ramping it up um i do i just would like for you to share with um the um because i do know a little bit because i sit on the equity task force um how we got to the point and how we were chosen to actually participate in this equity audit that we're doing now okay so um we are a part of a more collaborative network that is called the equity network which is a part of the educational service center if you all know the educational service center works with different districts across northeast ohio
030and for those that have someone like similar to my role we all sit on that as colleagues when we talk about different challenges that each district is having this looks different in each district right and so from that um under the leadership of michael corey and chris pelfrey we were just have you know one of the districts that are part of the equity network and we were um basically offered the opportunity to participate in this the cool thing about it is that the framework is pretty much consistent across the board even though we know that the challenges that each district faces is different but many of our other um inter-ring suburbs are also participating in this um process so it kind of gives us you know similarities in terms of understanding for example if mr
031hanky were to have discussions with superintendents of other districts and they're referencing their equity audits there's a similar framework right so some of those districts who are involved include like bedford heights maple heights brush the cleveland heights university heights school district shaker heights school district and then you also have rocky river and fairview park who are part of this so it's just interesting how a lot of the work that we are doing and putting in action falls right into place of what we talk about in our equity network so that just speaks volumes and really my goal and in my duration with the district i want garfield heights to be a model district for how we advance equity so that is our goal it seems like a very big goal but that is my goal
032um to really help support the work of the leadership in the district to make us a model district of how we apply equity and that is not just something that looks good on paper but it's actually connected to the actions of what we are doing throughout our district so again you know i appreciate the opportunity to be working and serving with the school district under the leadership of the board as well as um miss daniels and mr hankey and pretty much giving me the opportunity to just flow and make recommendations as needed and again um we'll be looking to add to our equity task force starting off we started with a small core group but we will be looking to engage other departments such as intervention because we understand it as we're evolving and growing
033we have to you know start including other departments but because of the nature of the pandemic and needing to just kind of hit the ground running and that's exactly what we did we started off with the core group of people as recommended by mr hanke but i look forward to the expansion i look forward to what we're doing and to see how far we are a year from now and um again thank you for the opportunity i just had um two um quick comments um one thing um well just one comment i would love to see a parent survey based on equity um just to see the changes that we have made i know we talked a lot about um our communication style with our parents um and so i would love to see a
034survey to see and hear how our parents feel about you know the different resources that we've been able to provide for them especially during code i think we would we would see some really good results ms thomas thank you for reminding me because i forgot to mention a parent survey is a part of our equity um audit process and so as of i think it was february maybe 19th when i checked in we had 297 respondents family respondents from our district which um esc was the esc was very impressed by that so that lets me know that we had a good participation and what's interesting is that i i got to take a preview of the data and i don't want to do a spoiler alert but it was very refreshing to see some of
035the data and what parents perceptions were about how we've been communicating them and with them and their perceptions we were able to gather demographic data from them so it was a list of um questions i think the survey probably was five minutes or less but um to have 297 respondents and again it may be more than that i haven't circled back with michael corey but it's a part of that and that will be shared as part of the um the data sharing when work when we wrap it up awesome thank you you're welcome anything else for me okay well thank you again i'll log off now have a good evening thank you miss hamilton thank you i think thank you miss hamilton and mr hankey for the efforts um and establishing that task force for
036the district and um just like the other board members we are in great anticipation to see um the outcomes um based upon the goals that have been set with the equity task force um the next item on our agenda is discussion um relative to the tentative agenda um if all of the board members receive and have an opportunity to review our tentative agenda yes is there any questions um or any discussion relative to the agenda um as submitted um tentatively can i just uh if i may mrs daniels you might if i chime in real quick uh just absolutely you know and every year the calendar right we want to make sure that we we we have we have uh the calendar ready um there was a couple of um uh um minor tweaks uh
037based on feedback and also based on you know making sure we were in line with our contracts and things that are our union or our negotiated agreements and things like that so um but generally you know you start out with some goals and one of them was to move things a little bit later in august which i think we accomplished um we did we did have the discussion you know with the board about late arrival thursdays um uh not happening next year um but um you know it it again is a um pretty standard calendar um i think we were able to accomplish everything we wanted to accomplish in terms of days and you know making sure breaks were as equitable as possible and things of that nature so ms king do you have any
038comments or discussion relative to the tentative agenda no madam president thank you miss thomas do you have any questions or discussion no i don't thank you thank you ms morrison do you have any uh questions or discussion relative to the agenda i do not thank you okay but there being no other questions or discussions relative to the tentative agenda for the march 15th regular board meeting um i will i'm asking for a motion to adjourn tonight's meeting slow move second mr patton that motion was the motion to um adjourn was moved by miss thomas and second by miss king can you take um roll call for me please yes this is thomas yes ms king yes miss morrison yes mrs daniels yes and we just need a time mrs daniels yeah um the meeting is
039adjourned at 6 36 p.m our next board meeting is on march monday march 15th p.m that meeting will be streamed live on our youtube um channel you can find that link on our website um thank you guys for your participation this evening and this meeting is officially adjourned thank you you guys