001good evening we would like to call this meeting to order this meeting is being held in accordance with the schedule of meetings adopted at the organizational meeting held january 6 2029 adequate notice of this regular meeting of the kenworth board of education has been provided to the home news tribune the star ledger the local source on january 8 2021. copy has been filed with the kenworth borough clerk hosted in the board office the kennel north borough hall burley in harding schools as is provo provided by the open public meetings act please join of us and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all zimmerman all present thank you reading and receiving of the minutes can we please have a motion to accept the minutes from
002september 13 2021. second second motion made by mr haberther seconded by mr jankowicz all those in favor of receiving the minutes please say aye all right thank you mr godello do we have any uh monthly correspondence uh we don't have any public correspondence this month okay thank you so much next up mr arlington uh superintendent's report and presentation good evening everybody um as you know i like to to include in all board members at board meetings one piece of information to celebrate and one thing to share with the public about the work we're engaged in as a district and so to help celebrate tonight we have several students to honor as part of our student spotlight but to give a better more comprehensive introduction i'm pleased to introduce principal bobnowski well i am honored to
003be here tonight to spotlight some very special harding students i'm here to spotlight the kenneworth girl scouts are open to girls in grades kindergarten through 12th grade who are interested in friendship adventure and making a difference in their community the girl scout program prepares young females for a lifetime of leadership through engaging in challenging activities today i'm joined by mrs kimberly christensen a local girl scout leader and also a very active harding pto mom and a bunch of harding girl scouts so girls if you can kindly join me up here [Applause] if we can kind of make a circle so you guys can face the camera nobody stand in front of anybody else everyone make it like a a a you and i'm gonna ask mrs christensen and maybe some of the girls to speak
004about all the great things that they learn in girl scouts and all the great things that they do for our community good evening everyone as mr bobnowski said i'm kimberly christensen i'm the current service unit manager for girl scouts as well as the troop leader for the second and third graders you see in front of you so girl scouts is all about new adventures making friendships and having fun and giving back to our community some of the things we've done to give back to our community our local food drive clothing drives excuse me clothing drives as well as girl scouts cleaning up parks and other things now it would be great for me to talk but i believe some of the girls want to tell you a little bit about their experiences who would like
005to let's see okay go ahead say your name my name is hannah and i know we also made like a lemonade stand and donated stuff that's right do you remember where we got it i think we donated donated it to a church to the food pantry yeah [Applause] okay go ahead tell them your name and what you'd like my name is kayla and at girl scouts we learn kindness all right does anyone else have anything to say okay we'll take one or two more okay my name is katarina and in girl scouts we learn how to be friends with other people [Applause] name is ashton and we and we learned how to how to um how to to sell girl scout cookies [Applause] thank you very much as you can see these are the amazing
006young leaders of the future so girl scouts is all about leadership community service and learning new things so we thank you for letting us be here tonight and let's have a round of applause for all the girls now ladies as we pose for a picture i have a challenge for you i stated earlier that girl scouts are girls from kindergarten through 12th grade so i challenge you to stay in the program through your 12th grade year and earn the highest girl scout award does anyone know what that is can you help me out the gold award so the gold award so raise your hand if you think you can stay in girl scouts and earn that gold award oh i think you can so let's let's smile for the camera now they could take their
007mask you can take your masks down for a second and uh for those in the community that are looking to maybe get their girl involved in scouting i will have mrs christensen forward the information on to me and we'll include it in our friday community folder so thank you ladies [Applause] uh thank you girls your reminders about um kindness and friendship are good reminders for us adults too so thank you for your hard work for sure um you're more you're more than welcome to stay girls but you don't have to so looks like you all have good manners foreign [Music] okay now for a presentation far less cute but hopefully equally compelling tonight my leadership team colleagues and i are going to share student achievement information across grades k-12 uh we're geared up to do
008that through an agenda structure that looks to set a context context for the presentation and provide demographic data as ways to better understand our achievement we'll also spotlight the work we're engaged in by looking at our investments or inputs and the work and progress we've delivered on over the last few years i'm calling these our outputs these things together help set our path forward so these goals i'm posting here undergird the big ideas of the presentation tonight tonight you'll learn more about the ways our achievement data is problematized by looking at it in multi-pronged ways you should also be able to see how we've situated our achievement data in the larger context of our district goals and of course we'll reflect on successes and growth areas that will bridge the gap from where we are
009to where we want to be we're centering student achievement tonight but we can't look at it in isolation it's important that we look at the different cross-cutting ways achievement intersects with information including our demographic data special education data and our academic rankings when we puzzle these intersectionalities together we paint a richer picture of our achievement profile this year as part of our district goal work we're continuing to focus on future-ready innovation and increased opportunities for job-embedded professional learning as i mentioned last month in a board presentation devoted solely to unpacking our goals this year we're also folding in new goals including working towards building a richer data culture focusing on diversity equity and inclusion and educating the community about proposed facility and academic program improvements i encourage the public to revisit the presentation from last
010month or the superintendent's update i shared last friday for more information on our district goals as we progress through tonight's presentation you'll be able to see how our achievement work coalesces with and aligns to these goals but we're going to start tonight with a very quick big picture snapshot of our demographic data so this graphic traces our total enrollment over the last few years which has remained relatively steady as of today's date we're educating uh 1441 students we have 164 choice students 21 students are from winfield park this enrollment forecast is from uh right before i got here actually in 2019 the white hill white hall demographic report the demographer forecast particularly steady enrollment for next year and a slight increase in school year 23-24 but looking back at what the demographer projected out in
0112019 for the last few years it's clear the report is pretty accurate this doesn't take into account no any new or potential housing in town which i'm told wouldn't affect the very immediate future but certainly that potential for new construction affects longer range planning particularly as we consider a bond referendum to enhance buildings and grounds that opens up space opportunity new housing may also have potential choice enrollment implications so these are all considerations we may be facing in the foreseeable future and certainly i would recommend as we get firmer details about these plans we have whitehall conduct another study particularly as part of the on-ramp to the referendum this demographic data may also be of interest to some of us as another level of detail we'll post this presentation on our website for anyone who
012may want to take a closer look but for now just by way of a high level overview if you look at the last line we're employing 167 certificated staff members the majority of our students are caucasian the fastest growing subgroup are students who identify as latinx and 14 of our students district wide identify as economically disadvantaged i ask that you keep some of this data in mind as we look at more achievement particulars we're going to look across the grade levels beginning in k all the way up to 12th we're going to start our portrait of achievement by looking at the growth of our youngest learners but i'd like to share a bit about the assessment data in general that we're using particularly in an era of of cobit so tonight's portrait is made up
013of several different types of assessment data most of the data we're sharing is norm referenced which means it compares a student's performance to others who are similar so the object of a norm reference assessment is to compare a person's performance to what is considered on par for other students like him or her also really critical to mention that this report may look different in years past because we haven't had standardized new jersey student learning assessments previously the park since 2019 so the achievement data we're looking at here particularly in grades k-8 are based on our own in-house assessment measures and solutions and of course i often share many of the ways our students are achieving as part of our focus on the whole child tonight is not one of those times though we're really zooming
014in on only academic achievement related to new jersey's student learning standards and our students ability to master those standards we're going to start with a look at the tool we use in grades k2 to measure early literacy called the dibbles and brian's going to walk us through mr luciani is going to walk us through those results thank you mr arlington and this works beautiful all right what is dibbles as you can read above it stands for dynamic indicator of basic early literacy it is our universal screener for the district and it monitors developmental of early reading skills across grades canada two it is standardized and it provides a quick assessment for different literacy areas um it is for our use truly for early literacy and by standardization it means that all assessments are universal throughout
015the country that use the double system it is one test that is taken numerous times during the year a beginning midpoint and end and in essence the devil's test identifies sounds letters words and sentences so from the composite score focusing on spring growth overall we improved by four percent for students well below and below benchmark and improved two percent for students at benchmark and above up until the winter of 2020 not all of our kindergarten teachers were trained in og they now all are and as of spring 2020 everyone has been trained so i think you'll see a nice improvement as we move forward and again with the covered year as it was not too bad on the first grade side focusing again on the spring growth overall we improved by nine percent for students
016well below below benchmark and improved eight percent for students at benchmark and above the data is excellent because of the growth accord during that pandemic setting again different subsets but nice improvement on the above benchmark for second grade we only had 14 of the students tested well below or below in the fall that improved the 86 percent of our students ready to learn on grade level at the end which is one of the highest readiness levels we've had in many years as of spring 2020 all second grade teachers have been receiving and have received og training and at the end of the year less than a quarter of the students showed need for further support so what's remarkable here is the students that are on the screen right now have been in our new ela
017program the longest and as you can see they've shown the most growth so it's very promising the results that we're seeing for the students that have been in the program currently we are about 90 with all of our k-3 teachers trained in our orton gillingham program and the students on the screen have have been in that program the most and obviously they have shown the most growth so it is very promising to see the fruits of our labor are coming into interaction thank you mr robnowski not to interfere but anthony was just asking with the chart when you look at fall 2020 versus spring 2021 it doesn't look like growth in a positive light it looks like a loss the percentage is greater that's well below benchmark and spring of 21. so yes looking at
018reading it wrong no so when you're looking at it more kids coming in with a covered year as it was we went to 68. i'm sorry went to 78 we dropped off a bit but really the above benchmark kids was a noticeable approach in essence we numbered up coming up in a more positive way there's still work to be done but the starting ground work at least is in place i think when we go to next year when we see what this second grade class did in third grade you'll hard to see that build up that way and i would just add to that piece yeah brian's right and that there's a drop-off between fall and spring which we expect as a result of the pandemic but not to be lost on the fact that
019we've never had kids in second grade to mr b's point eighty-six percent of them come in at the second grade at benchmark or both above right so yes there was a so that's the part that we're happy about is not so much the drop-off between fall and spring but that they can't the end result yes having 68 or 70 of our kids at or above is higher than we've been in previous years with the follow-up at the end of the year where maybe we were at a 50 or 60 percent increase that way so we did see a nice increase that way but yes there is work still to be done and the students that came in this fall that took this exam we've also seen them come in at a higher point than they
020have in the past so the program is working and we're continuing to see small strides in that growth and again this is only a small percentage of students who have had this since first grade so as we get more students going through the program getting that consistency year after year we'll hopefully i think i think it was but i guess the explanation makes more sense now that you say so 63 and then 78 and again we'll see how the third graders have just taken no we don't we'll finish up and see where they at when we get the map and things of that nature all right our next one on go mat so this is arcade app a k-8 math program it's one of the five most commonly used math programs in new jersey we
021assess at the beginning and the end of the year it measures the growth obviously over the four of the four months over the 10 months and monitors prior math knowledge and readiness for upcoming standards and there's an example of what a practice lesson and homework will look like from lesson 4.1 it addresses the standards that they will learn throughout the course of the current year so obviously on the pre-test that they take early on they're gonna have some problems because they don't know how to do some of the work some will many won't the end of the year assessment is what comes to fruition so end of year for growth 2021 grade two is coming in higher than in the past a good achievement in the spring as you can see and these scores are
022comparable to previous years as the question was asked previously so in previous years non-pandemic kindergarten was about 90 first grade was about 90 and second grade was at 92 percent so with everything going on they maintain a good average and again there is improvement from the fall for the spring which is really what we're looking for on the growth model the nwea or as i like to call it map even though it doesn't match nwea we administer in kennel worth in grades two three three times a year again a beginning midpoint end of year an english language arts and ela math assessment that assesses students readiness points and growth over time it does help us drive instruction and align to support other programs such as study island places indicator for multi-tiered systems of support and
023predict student scores on the new jersey learning assessment the nj sla which our students will continue to take moving forward the biggest add-on has been for helping us drive for the mtss program which is really taking a nice recalibration and really coming into fruition with itself at harding and starting at fairly middle in high school the predicament predicament excuse me regarding the assessment for the state test is helpful to get a guiding start as to where things will be when they take the test in april or may so what is a ritz score it indicates when a student is ready for instruction on that day or today all grade levels are either equal to or above the starting norm in ela and the progression of growth is typical of students in lower grade levels are
024expected to make more progress than students at upper grade level so you see a bigger jump from grades three four and five as compared to when we get to six seven and eight that's the norming practice but you can see the growth from the fall to the spring from three points all the way down to 17th grade with plus one point our students started at or above the norm the ritz score in the fall overall our students ended at or above in math in the spring and the progression of growth is typical once again as i stated previously so again we go from plus nine eleven eight ten plus one in seventh grade zero in eighth grade that is all for me we now go to student personnel services hello okay so these are some
025numbers that we've looked at in the past it lets us know the percentage of special education students in the district as well as the number of students with ieps in each building so right now we are at about 218 students with ieps or about 14.9 of our district's population that has gone up a percentage point since the last time we looked but if we look at the state's uh population percentage of students with special needs it also has gone up about a percentage point so that's an interesting parallel right now we have 97 harding students with ieps 104 burley students and 17 students at a district this is another set of numbers that we've been tracking over time if you look in the left hand column you'll see the number of students referred to the
026child study team for an evaluation to see if they're eligible for an iep the center column has the number of students who are actually tested so between the left column and the middle column some students are found to be well the testing is found to be unwarranted at this time meaning that there might be another reason why the student's experiencing difficulties or a student has a pre-existing 504 plan that can be revised and then some students some parents who make a referral also withdraw the consent for that evaluation so the number of students referred gets dwindled down to the number of students tested and then from the number of students actually tested the right hand column shows you the number of students who are found eligible for special education and related services something you might
027want to pay attention to as well the students referred have hovered around 50 each year if you look at the students actually classified it's significantly less so this can be a symptom and we're looking at it as another piece of evidence that shows that we need to bolster our intervention systems because if the intervention systems are in place and working with fidelity then we should have less students referred for special education and more of the students who are referred should be found eligible that makes sense right because we'll be testing the students that are most likely to need those services any questions about that so mtss irs intervention systems whatever you'd like to call them this is a diagram that just kind of shows how intervention systems are organized in the tier which is commonly
028referred to in the form of a triangle with most of our students receiving the supports that they need at the bottom the tier one less students needing tier two supports which are typically done in smaller groups and the least amount of students needing tier three supports which are usually individualized and intense in both frequency and duration at harding the intervention system is this is what it looks like for this year you will see that you know in years past we've been focusing on the sel side of the triangle and this presentation focuses on academic achievements so we'll look at the left hand side and you'll notice that the tier one interventions or the classroom supports the teachers are going to be supported through their plc's faculty meeting time and grade level time meaning that in
029those discussions with their grade level counterparts we'll talk about trends that are happening in the classroom that should be addressed because more students might need that support now we have an intervention coordinator who's helping our interventionist identify students for specific interventions for tier two which is a smaller group and tier three which is often individual based on the skills that are needed and those interventions are going to take place in cycles eight-week cycles with progress monitoring so that we make sure that the interventions are targeted to meet specific student needs and that they're timely and when the student has made the expected progress they would then come out of that intervention group making room for new students who might have needs any questions about this so our tier three interventions started a little early this
030year they started the second week of school and the tier two interventions will begin now as we move forward because we have our universal assessment information up really again the right hand side of the triangle is something we've been focusing on for sel tier 3 students will now have their needs met through ubhc with our new mental health partnership and we'll continue with tiered groups skill-based groups for our counselors and our members of our child study team will provide for students rather on the left hand side of the triangle we're beginning to explore more academic interventions so again tier one interventions will be supported via the teachers through grade level department and plc meetings where we're going to address trends that we're seeing in that content area tier two students are going to have access
031to a more individualized path in nwea which is the map assessment that mr luciani just spoke about and beginning in november we're going to have middle school enrichment period available during the day for selected students and then a tutoring lab available in the evenings for students who are identified through data as needing extra support in a content area any questions about this slide i think that's it for student personnel services there are no more questions hi everybody good evening um so talking about the middle school in high school i wanted to just first of all say i was really proud of our students and our staff and what we our school accomplished last year in the pandemic environment and this year i'm already in the first month and a half proud of what our school
032is doing in terms of data and data analysis and looking at you know where we're headed is exciting so but first let's talk about where we are a few things um the psat in fact is tomorrow at david brearley so our sophomores and our juniors are taking the um preliminary sat it's also called the national merit scholarship qualifying test and that's specifically for juniors so juniors become eligible in their junior year to take the psat which qualifies them to become national merit finalists commended students semi-finalists so they can achieve those recognitions it also allows them to possibly earn scholarships through the the psat so that is tomorrow at david burley and it's something that our juniors primarily take in our sophomores take that as a practice psat all of that is preliminary to the sat
033so the the psat is more than just a practice it also qualifies you for scholarships and such the scores help us towards becoming national merit scholars it has math evidence-based reading and writing and the max score is 15 20. last year fall of 2020 our school scored at 9.60 so that's in the 51st percentile with the sat the sat is offered several times a year it is not embedded within the school day like it is for the psat it's given on saturdays throughout this course of the year the majority of our 11th graders take the psat in june so we provided you with that june 2021 data at that test we had 62 test takers other juniors took it in the march administration there's on august there's an upcoming one in october so students can
034continually take that that test throughout the course of the year but this was a high participation rate so i want to provide you with this data so june 2021 our mean total score was a 972 that of course is out of a 1600. so you can see our english score is a 511 our math score is a 461. then we also have our ap courses so advanced placement ap these are college level classes that are given during high school taught by our high school teachers they're challenging our students at the college level you take a test in may at the culmination of the exam and you could potentially earn college credits depending on the university or college that you apply to also we have the ap designation on the transcript which gives our students a
035slightly higher gpa boost so there's that incentive and if you do take the ap exam you do not take the final exam for that course in that that school year so that is ap college level courses our data over the last few years is up here from 2018 through 2021. we added an additional ap course last year ap computer science so that was a new course we've had 10 for the last few years and we added the additional ap computer science we offered 145 ap tests our mean score this past year was a 2.02 and our number of students scoring a three or higher was 46. so 3 is considered a passing score so if you achieve a 3 4 or 5 you in the passing zone so that is our ap data so in
036terms of the school rankings when you look at u.s news and world report a number of things go into that ranking specifically number of students who took at least one ap exam is one of the factors also the number of students who passed at least one ap exam so you know adding a new ap course could actually help a school ranking but we have to make sure that the kids can pass so that's key there making sure we're not just having kids take the course but that we're instructing them appropriately and making sure that they're prepared to take and pass that ap exam also going into the rankings uh our math proficiencies and reading proficiency proficiencies from njsla of course we haven't had those exams in the last two years so that's just something that
037mr arlington mentioned earlier and then of course our graduation rate goes into the ranking as well here you see what our u.s news and world report 2020 ranking was um so you can see our scorecard tells you where we achieved and we had a number of students taking at least one ap exam then our passing rate then our math and reading proficiency rates and then our graduation rate some people might ask well why is the graduation rate so high if some of the other proficiencies are not as high we do a lot of work with our students through the alternative program through the ascellas program to make sure that our students can be on a path to graduate so we work hard at that oops that was it oh yes great right 321 etc you
038do how do you evaluate the program like what's being taught the right way or you evaluate the program what's going on or give a barometer of how what's going on with the problem yeah it's one of the things that we're working on so that's one of our inputs that we're talking about we formed an ap plc this year to make sure that all of our teachers are aligned and working towards the same goals there's different resources that our teachers have access to ap central ap classroom we want to make sure our teachers are utilizing those um and what we're doing specifically and we can talk more about this later but um we're we're charging our ap teachers to be teacher leaders within the departments so that all of the teachers within a given department is
039responsible for an ap score not just the ap teacher because it takes years for that ap score to become a reality so it takes more than just you know nine months or ten months of instruction so what we're trying to do is make sure that our ap teachers who are often looked as the culmination of an experience in a department and we're making sure that the skills that are embedded within the ap course are being articulated through the different courses starting even as low as 7th grade so 7th grade teachers 8th grade teachers 9th grade teachers no matter what class it is they're all targeting towards those ap skills so that by the time a student does take an ap class and an ap test in his or her may say junior or senior year
040they've been exposed to those skills from the get-go rather than just kind of being introduced to them in that final final year thank you yeah on s.a.t is giving it to the seniors in school something that we could consider and would it be advantageous to our students i know we give the pfat to the sophomores and juniors but we don't do school day for the seniors where some other districts do is that something that could possibly work for our students i am not familiar with the giving of the s.a.t during the school day i know the psat is done in many schools um we can look into that sure i don't i don't have experience with that but that's something we could certainly look into [Music] of seniors in um room tomorrow taking the s.a.t
041yeah yeah it's just something i've not become familiar with but it's something we can definitely look into um so we're going to end a little bit with um a more kind of robust conversation of our inputs and outputs with particular emphasis um on ela and math so across the content areas not just in ela and math but since that's what we're focusing on today like our strategic efforts to enhance achievement have been tied to these three big ideas right developing teachers professional capital through an increase in professional development i should mention high quality professional development through enhanced resources for students both digital digital and tangible and through increased support mechanisms such as a technology facilitator or as mrs cucalo mentioned before an interventions coordinator which aligns to and really starts in our district a true
042coaching model as the best most efficacious way to provide job embedded pd to teachers we want to drill down a little bit to show you what those look like and sound like at the operational level so here are some of our ela inputs so on the ela inputs you can see across there this will be the second year we're implementing reader's workshop and this is the first year we're implementing writer's workshop as it says it's in-house sustained k-6 professional learning and that's been ongoing and continuing we have new units of study for ancillary resources on the middle school side which is brand new we have book clubs and balanced literacy again providing additional supplemental sources english 4 course design which is brand new this year brought up with the staff incorporated with pd from the
043outside again with additional books and supplemental sources resources brought up and then two is to differentiate support learning newsela is new this year for us a lot of the teachers liked it last year so we incorporated it with a licensing purchase for everyone and no no red ink has been a continuation at really for quite a few years now regarding that support side so those are the things that we're doing all teachers in all grade levels are learning the same instructional practices which ensures continuity as stated before by mr davies and we're implementing all the programs listed here and as we move forward we'll be doing some add-ons moving forward did you steal the uh i think i have one more ela oh no that's right thank you i'm not losing my mind um final
044slide these are the things that were said it's great to have a concrete program that will give us consistency across gray levels again the mentor attacks are engaging effective robin who's been doing pediatric for the last few years experiences and ideas are valuable practical interesting and exciting we are having higher double scores than in previous years the college center designed for english 4 was a very nice add-on thanks to mr davies and instructional support for small group learning has really been kind of the nuance that we've been working on and then to move consistent instructional techniques and approaches across all the grade levels to help everyone all of our students be successful and also allow our teachers to be successful also as they continue on this road now i can go hi everyone good evening
045so as you saw from the map data earlier we are seeing some nice growth with our students in math particularly in grades three through eight some of that comes from our full support and investment in the go math program it is now kindergarten through eighth grade it took us a little while to get all the way up to eighth grade but we're there now and obviously the company uh hoot mifflin offers professional learning when we adapt a program and it's the expansion across the grade levels is complete in addition to that we've added some programs to help our students who are struggling with math so one of them is a program called alex which comes from mcgraw-hill our high school math program is now new this year we're unfortunately missed some training with due to
046the flood but we'll be getting to that on a full pd day in november so alex is an adaptive program that the students would log into it will gauge where the students skills are lacking and then give them a series of lessons and exercises and things to do in order to work on that it can also accelerate a student who's doing at or above what's expected of said course like algebra one for example math 180 is new for us this year we were going to start it the year before but because of covid it wasn't feasible math 180 is being used with our seventh and eighth graders who are in a math foundations course where they've been identified as needing support so like dawn said it's a tear intervention a tier two intervention for students
047who need additional support in math it's daily for an hour two of our middle school math teachers are doing the program they're currently engaging in professional learning for it and it's a blended learning model so half of the students would be doing a lesson with the teacher while the other half are on their chromebooks doing an online piece of component and then halfway through the period they switch small group by the way you know we're talking maybe 12 kids in class instead of 24. lastly you've heard about this a lot already but we have study island we've been using that in math as well as language arts to help support our students sign a like it's sort of like an alex but it's geared towards our little guys our third through eighth graders um additionally
048this has been in the works for a few years now but we had to pump the brakes with kovid we the math department and i redesigned the sequence of courses for honors math so that we could condense some of the topics and give our students the opportunity to take ap courses in math by their junior year instead of waiting till their senior so for example geometry used to be a standalone course and now geometry and trigonometry are merged together so that by the time they get to their sophomore year they can do trig and precalculus and prepare them for ap calc a their junior year and then ap calc b their senior year so that's um ongoing we're phasing that in and then lastly we've added as i mentioned the math program in the middle
049school the under the foundation's class sorry course as an intervention um using the math 180 program so those are some things we've put in place for math i'm going to switch the where did that go oh thank you okay so as a result of some of those programs we've seen an increase in map scores which is fantastic we've also implemented in some classrooms a small group blended learning model which i explained before where some of the students are working with the teacher while some of them are doing work on a chromebook we also have increase in availability for students to take more ap math courses and then um in a discussion with some of my math department one of my teachers who knew of the aleks program and another district or maybe it was their
050student or their child at home and use it said that it was awesome and they're really excited that we have that here now in district so we're looking forward to seeing how it helps our students as we move forward through the school year so those are some of the things for our math program that we're hoping to see are any questions for math okay so some of the inputs regarding psat ap i spoke about a few moments ago specifically though we offered an sat boot camp this past spring to our junior class which we had a large percentage of students take advantage of that so we want to continue to offer that but we also want to not have something because that was an after school it's actually held in the evening but we also
051want to embed psat sat like questions throughout the curriculum so that it's not just an after school thing for those who choose but it's embedded into our instruction but that was one of the inputs from last year that we hope to continue also as i mentioned a few moments ago our ap plc where we're looking to implement a two-year ap institute training so every summer the ap the college board offers ap summer institutes for educators to go and immerse themselves in ap instruction much like you were saying about some professional development for teachers so we want our teachers to be on kind of a two year cycle where they're either going to attend one of those or participate in the college board ap reading sessions which is when teachers get invited to grade ap tests
052from across the nation and through that process you can learn a lot about instruction by grading all the assessments from across the country so that's part of our ap plc also utilizing ap classroom and ap central more consistently across all the different ap classes and then our ap teacher leaders focusing on those skills within their departments and having all the teachers within the department contribute towards uh work on those skill areas um finally we want to investigate uh pre-ap courses for earlier years so that it's not just ap rigor when students get to an ap class but in advance of the ap course they're experiencing ap like instruction so that's looking into that for the scholars academy so we wanted to close out here by identifying some additional successes and then also some some work
053we have for us moving forward so the alternate education program is in place and it's growing and it's really a movement towards differentiating programming for kids not just instruction and we're finding a lot of kids needs are being met in these alternate ways as i mentioned before the addition of a technology facilitator and an interventions coach provides like boots on the ground side by side support for teacher and we're receiving lots of positive feedback about those roles and the way they help to inform and drive teacher practice a lot of work going on as i shared with you in the spring in the realm of technology and trying to move towards more consistent technology models across classrooms and lots of lots of home to school efforts through increased communications parent universities and something we'll be
054sharing in a couple months a greater focus and success on culture and climate as we start to fill out our hiv assessments in school climate teams we are seeing an increase in those scores and that's really a firm metric to say that the culture and climate work we're doing is sticking and it and it matters so these are some of the things we want to focus on moving forward particularly looking around assessments and what makes for a high quality assessment so we have this really vetted map program in grades three through eight there's a drop off at 912 so we're looking at like what that means and what the implications are without the map and if it makes sense to move towards the map in those grade levels something that mr davies and i are
055talking about and i know he's working on is looking at the academy you know how far have we veered from the original intent of the academy and really should that intent look different now many years later after inception also as mr davies said there's a pretty wide delta between our graduation rates and our proficiency rates so so what does that mean why are why are kids accessing all of those alternate pathways to graduation and what does that say about the work we need to do around curriculum instruction and assessment we have a data warehouse we could probably be using it more robustly and so that's something we're working on along with maybe researching some other data warehouses that give teachers more granular level instructional data to help drive teaching and learning and something that's really
056important to me is that we stay the course so i think lots of times this is um not an anomaly to kenilworth educators school systems are always looking for the newest the greatest the greatest the shiniest product to layer on and we certainly have a lot of as you heard tonight curricular and instructional programs and strategies and i think we need to widen and deepen them not necessarily add more to them so i hope come budget season what i present to you is or maybe some new tools we need to fill in gaps but not a host of new things because as you heard tonight we have them in place we just now need to refine them and sort of dig into them slowly over time and continuing to focus on these three things right
057these things are going to matter most in the end professional capital resources and informal leadership support on behalf of my colleagues and i we hope that tonight's presentation really showed you the ways in which our goals align to their to our everyday work um and how we're questing after a notion of being in sync with the community and what the achievement goals we have for our students we're happy to take questions now about anything you you heard or saw tonight or any wondering or lingering kind of thought you may have missed them and i i might have missed it but we didn't address anything i i think tonight about our ell community how are we doing with that yeah i know that it i mean it's been a few years jen is out four years
058now but for example when she was here there was a student who moved into district who had very little english and became somewhat of the job of one of our in-school spanish teachers to kind of play interpreter and help out as best the teacher could and that teacher did a great job but our community has been changing our ell population has grown in the 30 years that i've lived here and i'm just wondering are the students that we have in district being properly served do we have a situation that we handle what do we do yeah we do we do have a situation we can handle um dawn overseas ell we actually had a really great conversation about how to present ell data we're thinking um believe it or not our students are taking the
059strong assessments right now and we will need to report those out within 60 days we'll bundle those ell kind of achievement measures with those start strong assessments but as we prepare for that reporting out of ell data i know dawn and her ell teachers have had some really great conversations and maybe you can just share some high level takeaways from those sure so um in this presentation in years past i believe you've looked at the access wida information and it has almost like a scatter plot of the students across the different areas listening speaking writing etc so in looking at that data in preparation for this evening really it's very difficult to see from 2019 to to the most recent data last spring any movement or growth across those tiers because the students aren't identified
060right it was just the scores across the grade level so in conversations with the esl teachers and with kyle you know i said what should we be looking at instead is there something that we should zero in on and what the teachers were able to tell us is that the students are still moving across the continuum but we have mobility that impacts you know where those numbers actually are so the last time we looked at that number we had a large number of students who were preparing to exit the program now we have a lot of new students who have joined us i think at the secondary level bill hopper's class is now 24 students grades 7 through 12. the trends that they have identified to me is that output continues to be a little
061bit of a struggle for some of our students which is not uncommon for esl most specifically speaking so our students are able to do the speaking in the classroom and they do a lot of practice with that but when they sit for the assessment something's happening and their confidence is dropping so we were talking about perhaps reaching out to other people in the school district to see if we can get a little bit more support in supporting the students in their public speaking the teachers have also reported that since the use of og has begun they've noticed a difference in the students writing so that's been improving so as we get more data this fall i'll work with mr arlington and we will come back together to present that information to you so you can
062kind of see where we are with that i mean ultimately my question is do we have things in place of staff classes whatever the needs are that are providing those students that have the extra need so to speak just as we have things in place for our special education students do we have things in place to help any students who might be in that kind of a vote more and just a little boost so our esl program begins at grade kindergarten and goes through grade 12 and they receive the state required amount of esl programming throughout their day so if a student's identified as having that need they're in that program and they receive support through that program okay okay does that answer your question okay thank you anyone else mark remind us i know
063you mentioned it in the past but maybe this is a good time as well to remind us what what measures are in place to at the harding level to to to bring the the folks uh students to the middle school the high school that the continuity like where's that just so everyone's you know on the same page when you're saying rowing together like how does that yeah so i'll let um mr bobnowski and mr davies answer some of that but you could have all the transition experiences you want which i believe in and orientations but until the curriculum is aligned you're going to continue to see gaps so i think that's what lauren was speaking about a little bit in math right now we have gold math progressing up through k8 we haven't had that
064um i'm not sure um i think eighth grade was implemented last year or two years ago um and as mr b said regarding the balanced literacy program the movement in the middle school towards book clubs the movement towards 12th grade um more like balanced literacy is really a way in which you see scaffolded over time the same high quality instructional literacy principles like carry across the grade levels so i think we're getting there if we're not there already around curriculum and instruction and i know jeremy and ron are also always engaging in a conversation about just like the student experience and how those things could be bridged i don't know if there's thank you okay um a few last things hopefully my review of agenda items and the friday update to the board address any
065questions however additionally and first and foremost i'd like to wish kathy d well on her retirement and congratulate and thank her for her nine plus years of service to our district kathy i wish you all the best in addition to the pro forma enrollment and discipline report in your packet you also have hiv data for september for september there was one reported case at harding and one reported case of hiv at brealey middle school both cases were unfounded and the details of that report are in your folder as a point of order tonight you're voting on the results from the august report you'll be voting on tonight's data that i'm showing you um in the informal reports next month madam president that concludes my report just take a minute to see if anybody anyone have
066questions regarding the hip questions no okay thank you mr ellington thank you everyone um we will now move to report of committees review of resolutions and board discussions first up finance finance facilities and negotiations mr ledotti yeah hi good evening everyone my report's a little lengthy tonight um there's a lot of stuff going on for the facilities and the finance committee most of the summit most of the summer projects are substantially completed and we're in a process of getting through the punch list and closeouts they include the harding masonry project the harding basement ventilation project the harding and burley solar projects the harding energy savings incentive program the lighting process the lighting projects and there are some there are several other projects nearing completion including the new signage in front of both of the schools
067and the harding school gymnasium renovation the administration is finalizing the scope of the work for their referendum projects and the architects are reviewing the scope of the project to try to formulate a cost for the referendum as you know in our everyday life and what we do at home estimating cost of projects has become increasingly difficult due to supply shortages disruptions in the supply chain raising inflation all making it very difficult to sort of plan out projects 24 months in advance the goal of the finance committee facilities finance and facilities committee is to do as many facility projects as possible using grant money reserves and the operating budget okay that should hopefully reduce the overall cost of the potential referendum or the upcoming referendum the modular building project or we like to call them the
068temporary classrooms is progressing despite some setbacks tonight you'll see um in the agenda um change order because if you had needed some piping for a sewer line which was not in the original plans um it should be done expected by january 1st events by the beginning of the year we hope so that's what we're projecting um again we're dealing with materials and labor shortages etc um we're also um in the process of determining um determining how the american recovery plan sr3 funding will be used right now it's previously and as previously discussed we are targeting the bulk of the fund for hvac upgrades we also receive an additional 9 290 000 an allocation that is specifically targeted to accelerated learning and coaching evidence-based summer learning and enrichment and mental health support staffing mr gannell is
069currently and we've discussed this a few times is keeping an eye on the increasing utility cost specifically natural natural gas our buildings are heated with natural gas and they're expecting or estimating a 30 percent increase in this winter due to various economic conditions so that's something we may have to keep an eye on and we are keeping an eye on it for good news for our finance and facilities um or at least the finance committee the budget kickoffs budget has kicked off this week mr ganella is currently reviewing timelines we'll put those together for us and he's also um going over the process with the leadership team okay so the package was all you know three four hundred pages this month for the basically for the finance committee and facilities i reviewed all the financials
070i found them in order there were 12 resolutions but i just want to call to your attention number 10 12 is the others are pretty straightforward 10 is two revolutions it's in educational think tank and design lab they provide leadership team coaching professional learning support around the problems of practice and building stronger data culture to drive achievement 12 is basically an upgrade to our um control system which is our locking system i think right now if a new teacher comes in or a new staff member comes in what's it take you have to change all the locking all the um computer programs for the locking and this will alleviate that um one other thing um i just want to congratulate or welcome justin connelly and um thank drew van der vees for um his future
071endeavors um good luck with everything there could i jump into negotiations um there's um tonight we will go over and i left on the um each of the committee's desks the memory on the agreement to um hopefully finalize the contract with the union and we'll discuss that in closed session and that's all i have anyone have questions for mr alidadi thank you mr no question thank you mr ladati next up personnel and management mr haywater thank you uh quite a few resolutions i'll go through them quickly um resolution 13 is the approval for a part-time occupational therapist resolutions 14 15 and 16 are the acceptance of resignations for various staff resolution 17 recognizes and accepts the retirement of mrs christofaro resolution 18 is the approval to hire mr connolly as a supervisor of buildings resolution
07219 is a lead replacement for relieve replacement for elementary teacher uh resolution 20 is approval for additional teaching steps teaching sections resolution 21 is the approval of before and after care staff resolutions 22 and 23 are the revisions of maternity leave requests resolution 24 is a professional as approval of professional development presenters resolution 25 is the approval of student teachers resolution 26 is the approval of am lunchroom aids and paraprofessional aides resolution 27 is the approval of athletic stipends and 28 is the approval of home instruction 29 is approval and 29 is the approval of substitute staff and that is it for personnel any questions thank you mr hayward next up curriculum instruction mr jenkins sure thank you resolution 30 is the adoption of curriculum approves the service agreement with integrated translation services which provides
073foreign language translation and interpretation services and 32 is the hip report for august 20th the approval of that that is any questions is this something new or is it ongoing and it is somewhat new um i think we did i tried it last year for the first time so communicate the written communication to translate is pretty easy i think i put it in google translate um but for parent meetings or iep meetings where a translator is needed we've been using its to help with that so if a parent comes in and doesn't speak english but is part of the obviously the kids iep team we need to be able to communicate that important information to him or her and so its helps with that and so what kind of a question were we talking about
074like last year uh just to guess in total a couple thousand because that the interpreting thing with the cell phones is pretty good so what the iep would need yeah it's it's uh a nuanced conversation as part of an iep meeting right any other questions okay next up policy review mrs brock all right we have a few resolutions resolution 33 is first reading to adopt policy 2425 emergency virtual remote instruction program it's mandatory and basically it states that the district must have a commission approved program of virtual remote instruction that would be implemented in the event of a declared state of emergency declared public health emergency or directive by a health agency policies 1 615512 and 3 all require the districts to develop and adopt policies in response to the office of fiscal accountability and
075compliance audits in the areas of allowability of costs mandatory disclosures and conflicts of interest um there are some revisions to adopt under resolution 34. policy 2467 surrogate parents and resource family parents it's mandatory it it basically adopts um sorry basically revises um some terminology and minor language policy 51 16 education of homeless children there was a code that was recently revised and now requires districts to annually report to the office of homelessness prevention in the department of community affairs and accounting of each instance in which the district is made aware that a student enrolled in the district because of the student's parents because the student's parent moved from one district to another as a result of being homeless policy and regulations 7432 eye protection it's mandatory and it aligns with several changes made in the
076code and now provides more detail as to a district's requirements to provide appropriate eye protective devices and then [Music] resolution 35 is to abolish abolish several policies um 1648 the restart recovery plan it's no longer needed policy 16 4802 remote learning options for families they no longer have the option to elect to keep their children home so that one is no longer needed policy 1648 restart recovery plan full-time remote instruction it's no longer applicable and policy 51 14 children displaced by domestic violence it's the information that was in that policy guide is now addressed in the policy and regulation guides 511 so that one can be abolished and policy 8810 religious holidays is no longer required as the legal requirements in that guide are addressed in policy guide 2270 religion in schools so that one
077can be abolished as well any questions so when you mention the start the education of homeless children you said you know maybe if parents just move away or something like that and the kids are left with someone else they would be considered homeless and like and we'd have to educate them or like miss no they just hear you all right and i'd also like to know if somebody i'm sorry maybe you could clarify this because in the past it was if the child became homeless in this town and wound up somewhere else place we were required to let them attend school where they became homeless not where their homeless new address is and i believe that hasn't changed okay i just want to make sure it didn't interfere with any of the residents and stuff
078i can't hear you i just wanted to make sure it's really in conflict with any residency checks i don't think so i think this is more of just it's a requirement that those districts have to annually report okay that's fine yeah okay that's what that's everything else is the same yeah okay thank you sure that's okay and the religious holiday one what i don't quite understand what it's covered in another policy yeah religion in schools so we can abolish that one okay clean it up thank you sorry no that's okay anyone else any other questions so quickly i had some questions on anthony um the additional course for the modular it says additional underground uh sewer piping did they not know is that they had to extend it for some reason right why is there
079additional piping like getting better is it going further or something that's what i want that's a lot of money so i just wanted to know if you know and i don't have to have an answer today original site plan that on the original site plan that uh contractors got from the engineers it was located at a certain point on cross street but when they went to do the investigation um to install it it wasn't there and it was about 100 feet down the road okay that's the guy that gave the estimates that error or just you know that's what happens a lot you start with one course and he went out with a lot more of course because of something like that so i don't know who's responsible for that i just wanted to know
080what what that was okay thank you anyone else any questions okay thank you everyone all business for the oath business the tab committee is in the process of scheduling days in the next weeks to meet via zoom we've thrown some dates out there we're just waiting for confirmation anyone have anything under a new business um sorry i wanted to ask that maybe the prince should be building principles um just it's an observation i don't know if i had any data to back it up but didn't um tardiness in the schools i mean sometimes i see so many kids walking into harding or barely kind of after the start times i know there's different times so i don't know if they could maybe prepare something for next meeting to see if that's an issue or a
081concern i know it was a few years ago i think it may have been even when you came here uh when you did a little exam on the school yeah i could ask and maybe report that out on a friday update yeah sure thank you you got it um under new business we wanted to report that the steering committee recently met and connected with the district's communication team laura bishop communications we had the opportunity to vet the firm and hear more about the work they've been successful in in other districts in support of the bomb referendum which will be coming up in the future we discuss their strategies and guiding principles our next step is for the ssp to continue on pricing out projects for board review for the upcoming referendum okay and if uh
082the end of the meeting if the personnel committee can stay behind for a few minutes that would be great okay anyone else anything under new business okay we'd now like to open the meeting to the public is there a motion to open a meeting for the public second okay motion made by mr habither seconded by mrs drogan the meeting is now open to the public for comment okay uh the public uh comment we now accepted the board of education sets a limit uh for the public to speak at the board meeting for five minutes per person unless prior permission is has been granted by the board of education uh to extend time pursuant to board of education by law zero one six seven for the record please indicate your name and address and all public
083comments is anybody who would like to speak at this time second okay motion made by mr ledotti seconded by mr david a motion to close the meeting to the public could everyone please say aye aye thank you okay mr ganella are we prepared to vote on resolutions yes we are we have 35 resolutions on this uh agenda this evening are there any that need to be voted on separately okay hearing none they will be voted on as a package one through thirty five uh byner braun yes david yes drogan yes hebether yes jankowicz yes ledavi zimmerman kenichi yes ocean's carry unanimously okay great thank you mr granella uh do we have a need to go into closed executive sessions uh yes we do okay motion to go into closed session second okay motion made by
084mr david seconded by mrs brown all this in favor please all right mr you know be it resolve the board of education the board of education meet in private session from which the public shall be excluded to discuss the topics of negotiation specifically kea all three units and uh grievance hearings uh uh which private discussion is being held pursuant to section 7b and aid of the open public meanings act the matters on the discussion will be disclosed to the public as soon as final decisions are made and voted upon okay did we vote on that we did we did right it's 847. all right we have a closed session bruno we off okay all right justin thank you you