001foreign good evening welcome to the 2023-24 budget presentation budget hearing as we build a budget and as we present the budget we always focus on the district vision mission and goals which is having all of our students um needs in mind as well as having our communities uh needs financially in mind so tonight's agenda is the 2023 budget proposal I'm sorry 2023-24 budget proposal proposition number two Board of educational election Albany Public Library budget proposal additional voting information and our upcoming budget calendar as we developed a budget our goals were to help and keep supporting our students for academic and social emotional needs as what we revealed from the pandemic uh strategically plant in a fiscally responsible manner for continued support for our students and to minimize the tax impact on our residents within the
002budget we still have our full day Pre-K and all 12 of our elementary schools and our 12 Community School locations we have our three Magnet Elementary schools and expanding dual language program we have our band chorus Orchestra starting in the third grade we also have our community schools initiatives in Arbor Hill Clement Giffin Myers North Albany Schuyler Sheridan prep and toast we also have additional social emotional supports as in Behavior Specialists psychologists and social workers instructional intervention positions um to support and accelerate learning for math reading an Ela we have our marching Falcons band and color guard including Winter Guard and indoor percussion ensemble we have our 63 athletic teams as well as our intramural programs for students in grades 7 through 12. also in our high school we have our AP our IV University
003in the high school CTE Pathways our Avid College and Career Readiness programs at High School we have our theater Ensemble and as always we try to be culturally relevant in our teaching and learning practices within a new budget we have 73 positions district-wide that were formerly funded by the American Rescue plan or arp um moving over into the general fund we also have 21.1 new FTE positions which include seven and a half new seventh grade teachers or new teaching positions at the North Albany Middle School to help the theater program uh three teaching positions at the high school for cosmetology Health Sciences social studies help support technology we have three district-wide computer technicians a data engineer and a technical support leader we've also added two assistant directors in pre-kindergarten expectation we've also added one dual
004language second grade teacher to help continue in the commitment to double the program size and this slide here we have our expenditures and some of the categories or some of the main categories of expenditures as you can see from 2021 I'm sorry from 2020 to 21 budget through the proposed 2324 budgets on this slide it's a little bit more of the headers or the groupings of our expenditures so the upcoming proposed budget is 307 million 268 458 dollars uh in this slide here we have our general fund Revenue uh which compromise the property taxes state aid local revenues appropriate fund balances uh use of money from our savings account and additional federal aid we are asking for a zero percent tax levy increase so as you can see in the 2223 school year we collected
005122 million 351 302 that is what we're asking to collect in the upcoming year and also on the slide you see a significant increase in state aid which helps with the offset of asking for a zero percent tax levy increase in this slide here it's a nice chart to show that in 2016-17 we relied on our property taxes within our budget of 49 percent uh in this upcoming proposed budget we are relying overall in a 40 percent this slide here uh just to show you that the expenditures or the expected expenditures and the revenues are equal with a zero difference and a zero percent tax levy increase which means essentially that if unless the homestead non-homestead ratio changes uh or your home has been reassessed your taxes should be relatively the same as it was
006this year this slide here is just a nice comparison to show from 2014-15 through the upcoming proposed budget this would be the third time that we ask for a zero percent tax levy increase and over that time it was an average of 0.9 percent of a tax levy increase uh the slide here is essentially showing that since there's no change in the property tax levy that we're asking for again as long as your house has not been reassessed or any drastic changes in the homestead non-homestead ratio the taxes for you individually should be the same if the budget has well has not approved in the upcoming vote on May 16th we have three different options one is to put up the same proposal for another vote we could present a revised budget for voter consideration
007or we could adopt a contingency budget with a contingency budget we would have to reduce the budget by 1.3 million dollars which would require us as a district to ask our community groups that use the facilities to pay for the school use uh we would probably we would make cuts to specific areas including Personnel or Staffing and it would prohibit us from spending uh on student supplies proposition number two is the capital project we observe or the use of the capital project Reserve uh currently we are asking to utilize nine million dollars of the capital project Reserve that we have to increase the overall costs of the Albany High School renovation project to 188 million nine hundred thousand you'll see in the upcoming slide how escalation costs in the last few years has drove up
008the price of the capital project there's additional 9 million dollars would have no impact on a taxpayer as it is coming from our savings account in this slide here the capital project team utilized a 10 average on the left-hand side prior to the capital project being approved as what the escalating costs would be going forward but as you can see on the right hand side the numbers has have draft drastically increased um to a total of 33 or 38 with a compound so it's a 23 to a 28 difference than what was expected prior to the project for an example a dozen eggs in 2016 you can see that a dozen eggs was 2.92 cents to this year it's 4.21 cents the board of educational election we have two board members that will be on
009the ballot for re-election uh they're running unimposed it's vice president Ann Savage and board member Damaris Mann also on the ballot for proposition number three is the Albany Public Library budget um the budget is seven million seven hundred thousand seven hundred ten thousand five hundred twenty nine dollars and there are no Library board trustee positions up for election this year uh for more information please visit the albanypubliclibrary.org website or call Stephanie assignment at 518-708-3912 there is one change for the upcoming vote in the First Ward the location has changed to the New Hope Church at 334 2nd Ave uh this is a different location than it was traditionally used which would have been the city parks and recreation but as we use the snow days our students are coming in for the student Day on
010May 16th so this location had a change and there's no covid-19 smt option this year for more information or to find your polling place please visit Albany schools.org forward slash vote so upcoming calendar I'll tell you is May the 4th we have our budget hearing uh May 9th we have a upcoming presentation at the normanskill neighborhood association the 10th we have a virtual community budget presentation and of course May 16th is the actual budget vote and the Board of Education Board of educational election for more information on the budget proposal also to see our budget newsletter which should have been delivered to your homes by now if not they should be within a day or two please visit albuseschools.org forward slash budget and that concludes our budget presentation for tonight good evening my name is
011Vicki Smith and I'm the president of the city school district of albany's Board of Education and on behalf of the board I'll welcome you to our meeting I'm joined tonight by member Hassan almanawi member Ellen krachi our board secretary Dr shidara shatur our board vice president Ann Savage member Tabitha Wilson and member Damaris Mann I'm also happy to introduce you to if you haven't met her I guess I'm gonna have to stop saying that right Miss Gail because your old hat now miss Jenner Ray Gale is our board Clerk and we are excited to have her and we have also interim superintendent John yagelski with us of course our assistant superintendent for business and finance Joseph Karis and Mr Honeywell who is our district attorney Council attorney sounds good our district council and also with
012us is Mr Ron lesko our director of communications and operations and I believe Mr Kent Baker is uh doing his work there behind the screens with all the technology and he was is with the oh my goodness assistant superintendent for data assessment accountability accountability Technology Innovation did I get it all okay all righty but we're glad to see him and and Bobby I always have to give a shout out to you too thank you I also believe miss Karen bechdel our assistant director of of curriculum and instruction is also in the house and we also have every other cabinet members who will be on later so thank you all for being here um tonight uh the meeting is being live streamed and the instructions to do view those materials are available at Albany schools.org forward
013slash Boe if you'd like to share those with anyone all the slides will be shown here in this room as well as on the virtual screens and again you can access this material at Albany schools.org forward slash Boe um as usual we'll talk in the superintendent's report about any covid related matters or changes but right now the guidance is still pretty clear that we're just all to exercise um you know space if we're sick stay home if we're sick hand washing is always a good thing whether you're sick or not so we just want to encourage everyone to do all of those things and with that introduction I invite those of you who choose to join us as we stand for the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States
014of America and justice for all thank you in addition to the Pledge of Allegiance we always focus our meeting by restating the mission of the city school district of Albany which is to work in partnership with our diverse Community to engage every Learner in a robust educational program designed to provide the Knowledge and Skills necessary for success and I really want to now I'm very excited I'm going to turn things over to Mr lesko to do an introduction of sorts and go from there thank you sir thank you we are so pleased tonight to have a special guest with with us again for our meeting Albany High School junior Elijah Temple earned the gold level distinction in barbering at last Friday's New York State skills USA Tournament in Syracuse he is the first Falcon in
015recent history to earn a state championship at this annual Career and Technical education competition and he is now looking ahead to Nationals in Atlanta next month I would like to welcome Albany High barbering instructor Jonathan wafer to introduce Elijah and tell us more about this awesome achievement I'm not sure how to work am I on okay thank you good evening everyone uh thank you for allowing me to address the board tonight my name is John wafer I am the Barbie instructor at Albany highs of Brooklyn CTE Center and I am here to announce that the ballroom program is in its fourth year this year of existence and with our very first graduating class that will compete I mean that will complete the uh program this year the program has grown tremendously from a handful of
016kids our first year to nearly over 100 Kids uh this year it's a full blown course load and program from one period the first year till now a full uh time program with plans to build a new space within the Albany High School the potential for more growth is extremely exciting so I thank all of you for your efforts helping out with that um excuse me um and despite all the challenges that we've all faced over the adversity with covid in the last four years of education our students are really uh excelling and some of our students most importantly to the right of me have been working in the industry and getting real world experience through the barbering program and most recently as Ron just explained Elijah has completed the competition of skills USA and
017won first place uh Championship with the opportunity to go to Atlanta so I'd like to thank the board for honoring us tonight with his historic achievement and I believe with your continued support the uh program has the unlimited capacity to grow and be a shining example throughout the state and the program to be emulated uh to follow for others so thank you very much and now I'm going to turn it over for Elijah to say a couple words good evening everyone my name is Elijah Temple I'm in 11th grade and I'm currently a part of the barber program at Olney high school as my teacher Mr John wafer previously said I've made history last week finished their first place for the state competition that skills USA for barbering and I think I thank God for
018us first and foremost for that opportunity not only being able to be here but having such a good teacher like Mr John here to the left of me and it's really been a good experience out of skillsusa it's really taught me a lot about the workplace and how to just wake up in the morning we had to get up at six to go basically to work to go to breakfast start our days off and we had to be to sleep by 11 o'clock so it really teaches you how to be in the workforce and I know I'm pretty sure a lot of you experience that as your high positions as your Workforce places so it's really been good and skills USA has really taught me a lot not only just having to go to work
019but being a man and also doing what you have to do waking up every day in the morning and going to work going to what you have to do in life so that's really been good for me and I think skills USA in the barber program at our school can really help out a lot of young men just like me not only because I've started barbering last year so it's really been a pleasure for me to get where I'm at because just a couple weeks ago I didn't even know what skills USA was so it's really been a pleasure to me to do this and have the opportunity I had to now go to Nationals in Atlanta Georgia next month so I really thank God I thank all you for having us tonight it's really
020been a blessing [Applause] and Mr Temple there we'd love to have a photograph with you and the board and I know your family is here if you'd like to also be in the photo we'll we'll make all that happen Okay thank you and congratulations to you we're very excited you know I just want to say something Elijah is a fantastic athlete as well and I've seen him on the podium when he's doing his track and field and uh you know so when he hurt his leg and was out for the season I was like oh man you know and then I see him on this Podium so it's like amazing I mean this is a great achievement thank you foreign thank you the first week of May brings with it celebratory National recognition activities for
021two groups of Educators who are vital to the success of our students our building administrators and our teachers Monday marked National School principles day and the Tuesday of the first full week of May also includes Teacher Appreciation Day while there is some debate this year about whether that means it was this past Tuesday or this Tuesday coming which is in alignment with national teacher appreciation week there was no question about how important our teachers are for us every single day we are grateful for the tireless commitment that our principles assistant principals and teachers demonstrate year round and honored to have this opportunity to recognize all that they do to support our students and our community [Applause] it seems appropriate at this very beautiful and colorful time of year that we have a number of talented
022artists who have been recognized for their work Albany High School senior lavender Sinai Scott has received a 500 stipend from The Colony Art League recognizing her talent and commitment as she prepares to pursue her goal of becoming an art educator we are very excited to hear of her career plans and congratulate her on this excellent award five Albany High student artists recently had their work recognized at the 2023 Capital Region media arts festival congratulations to senior Emily Farrell Juniors Anaya Irwin Chambers Luke Gibson and Haley Vega and ninth grader Anya Miller William S Hackett Middle School 8th grader Sophia kovachi also recently placed third in a Regional Middle School art show hosted by Flockhart well done Sophia we also are looking forward to celebrating our youngest student artists this weekend at the Ninth Annual City
023School District of Albany Elementary art show at the Albany Institute of history and art the weekend long exhibition kicks off tomorrow evening with a reception at 5 PM that also will feature the Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School jazz band this year's art exhibition consists of more than 250 artworks representing all 12 Elementary art programs it is a special opportunity for our youngest students to Showcase their talents and artistic Inspirations from this school year we would like to recognize Fine Arts instructional supervisor Kate Wright for her leadership in organizing this annual event in partnership with the Art Institute and all of our dedicated Fine Arts teachers for the excellent work they do guiding and supporting our students we also have a save the date reminder in the Performing Arts students in Albany High's blossoming dance
024program will perform in a spring dance concert in the High School auditorium on Thursday May 18th beginning at 6 30 pm students from our just dance classes and the cinema dance musical theater Club will perform works by student and professional choreographers under the direction of teacher amanakay akinyemi Albany High's Advanced Orchestra students will provide live music for this event as well and sticking with tonight's seasonal Arts theme Spring Concert season is in full bloom this month our schools have musical performances scheduled in the coming weeks to allow our talented student musicians to show off all that they've been working on over the past several months you can find the date and time for your school's upcoming spring concert on your school page at Albany schools.org I'll remind you about two great community events next week
025on Tuesday all are invited to attend the vegetable projects evening in the garden at Albany High the evening in the garden is free and will be held from 5 30 to 7 PM Tuesday the garden is located at Albany High's North Main Avenue entrance and on Saturday May 13th our cosmetology and barbering students will host Mother's Day spa day in Albany High's amazing new salon classroom spa day will be from 10 a.m until 1 pm on May 13th spa day is open to the community and will feature a wide range of services for more information you can visit Albany High's webpage at Albany schools.org Albany High we have a couple of calendar reminders for our families this month Tuesday May 16th will be a full regular day of school for all of our students this
026also is the budget vote day and you'll recall that we originally had planned a professional development day for our employees and no school for students we want to remind everyone that we adjusted those plans back in March after using our final snow emergency day so Tuesday May 16th will be a regular day of school for all students and all of our schools and offices will be closed on Monday May 29th in observance of Memorial Day we want to remind our families that Friday May 26th and Tuesday May 30th will be regular days of school for all students since we used all of our snow emergency snow emergency emergency days last winter so just the traditional three-day Memorial Day weekend this year and it is now our pleasure to welcome principals principals of Lake of Sanchez
027scale to highlight the great things happening at Sheridan Preparatory Academy this year you gotta turn it on good evening everyone I am suleika Sanchez Gail I am the very proud principal of Sheridan Preparatory Academy um with me I have my beautiful and intelligent assistant principal Tina Marie cascone and my very hard working interim homeschool coordinator Lloyd Johnson III who I may who are my ad is in Albany High graduate I'm supposed to give a a sign well the district Mission the district vision mission oh oh would you like me to read these oh okay oh no I'm sorry I was talking about the district stuff we're moving on to our vision all right so so our school um vision mission and values are um so our mission is Sheridan Preparatory Academy believes that all teachers
028students and family members will learn all we can believe that we can do our best and strive to achieve our full potential because that's the Sheridan prep way um our vision is to be the great is to be the gateway to the future of our students greatness and then our actual goal is to provide all of our students with positive and enriching learning experiences where they feel safe respected and seen and that they're um great that they're actually being provided with grade level opportunities so that they can achieve our school state standards and so for the next one I think we go into our demographics our school is about 55 black students we have about 21 almost 22 percent Latinos we you can see almost nine percent are Asian students we are about eight percent
029at multi-racial and we are about six percent white students one of the fascinating things about Sheridan prep is that I think our school has been becoming more and more diverse throughout my tenure at Sheridan prep um it's exciting I think if anyone goes down Central Avenue it is a very Multicultural space and place in the city of Albany and our school certainly reflects the changing cultural influences and folks that are coming to our city and so then I think next we had a couple of other additional demographics that were not racial um we had I'm sorry I I don't have the presentation so I'm going off a memory so we had a demographic for the number of students with disabilities in our building and I want to say we are roughly around 17 I believe
030is what it was um oh it's 19 um our English language Learners are 17 are economically disadvantaged our 76 and one thing that I did want to note about Sheridan Preparatory Academy that might be unique to the entire district is that we have about 10 of our students who have mckinney-vento status and that is a significant I think population considering the size of our school so our highlights in our building number one is we have a weekly common planning time with our instructional coaches which may feel like it's a little bit different but not a little bit it's something that is the same in every building but the way it's different at Sheridan prep is that it is coupled with an enrichment hour and so our teachers and our coaches have an hour a week
031that's protected uh our coaches meet with a grade level every single day they rotate with the grade levels and what has happened during that common planning time which is really a great thing and a source of Pride for all of us is that we have evolved our coaching cycles and so our coaches have gone away from simply just you know being models of good instruction so now we have had an like an I do we do you do and so our coaches have been absolutely doing the coaching piece in terms of modeling but also now doing a co-teach where they teach with the teachers and then also do a feedback loop where they see the teachers taking on the really good practices that our coaches have now been working so hard with with them on
032um and so that practice has now evolved into our teachers really wanting to see each other teach and when you walk into Sheridan prep I think most people will say it feels like a warm and inviting place what is really exciting is that it also has almost like a college feel because we have teachers who are willing to learn from each other and who are absolutely taking those steps to be vulnerable because it's not an easy thing to have a colleague watch you teach um and so I am always so proud of the bravery and the commitment that my teachers have been showing because they want to do what's best for kids and then we have our weekly attendance reviews this is something that we instituted a few years ago because of the simple fact
033that we have so many students who are labeled as chronically absent and so in doing the weekly attendance meeting we actually observe and look at each and every single child in the building not just our chronically absent students so we look at the trajectory or the trends that the students are showing on a week-to-week basis and so maybe we have a student who actually had really good attendance but then all of a sudden a week passes by and they had three absences right and now there there's a cause for concern and our old model used to be like monthly meetings and so that child could have by the month had 10 absences and now they're chronic right so the weekly meetings really help us to have the safety net of catching students before they get
034to that chronic um that chronic label or status and I have to say that the work that has to be done in between those meetings has been done by our interim homeschool coordinator and so we make decisions about whether or not a home visit needs to be made whether or not a phone call needs to be made a letter needs to be sent whether or not we need to find out what the barriers are and so that I can talk a little bit more about in the next section of of the presentation because there is one section specific to attendance and then the last thing I talked a little bit about were the instructional coaching Cycles when I was speaking about common planning time and so in our common planning time because of that targeted
035time we are having I think really um unique and purposeful coaching Cycles where my coaches feel like they are imparting change in the building but that the teachers are also really embracing the the ability to change their practice for the good all right so attendance matters I want to reiterate Mr Johnson is our interim homeschool coordinator and he has been with us for a year and a half and in 2021 2022 our daily attendance rate was at 88 and since the onboarding of Mr Johnson we are now at a 92 percent daily attendance rate [Applause] and so that requires daily phone calls regular home visits um Mr Johnson is good about going to houses as many times as he needs to to find a human being to speak to about certain things he's been excellent
036at finding out what the barriers are one of the things that he's done this year that I really applaud is that he's taken a survey of our students who have shown dramatic improvement from last year to this year to find out what the change is for for them why they're coming to school this year and many of them did say a couple of things that were cute but they also talked about our enrichment hour they talked about uh having a clock now that weight helps to wake them up that they're learning how to go to sleep a little earlier and that they have good friends in the building yeah you could say he's a little shy um yeah so like with that survey a lot of the kids spoke about having friends uh coming to
037the shirt and prep because they felt safe um you know their teachers they love their teachers and for the most part enrichment program was like big um that's a big thing for the kids in our Superstar clubs also you're welcome so you might be asking what is enrichment and as I said before we use our common planning time while our teachers have an hour with the coaches the children then have an hour of enrichment with our Community Partners and some of the things that they have been doing in enrichment is that they learn the mechanics of playing basketball they are learning some of the ins and outs of gardening they're learning coding they are doing artwork financial literacy uh it's a lot of stuff they're doing a lot of things in enrichment but it's happy
038we are happy to see how much they enjoy that hour um and then we can go into our chronic absenteeism rate so our our Statewide MIP is right now currently we're supposed to be at 35 percent having a chronic absenteeism rate however um last year we were at a 49 rate and we're now currently at a 40 rate but the thing that these numbers don't share is that our students while they're yes they are chronic they're absent less days and so my belief is that with our attendance approach if we continue to push and you'll see that I think in the next slide our power of attempt the power of of 10 which is the power of attendance um if we continue with that messaging I do believe that we will very likely start seeing
039very great inroads into our chronic absenteeism rate because you can see how we are getting very close to that myth in that graph and so this is the biggest thing that we did this year and this is called the power of attendance and so we highlighted um the number 10 because 10 days of school well it starts with 10 months of school so we said there are 10 months of school and the kids have to be in school for the 10 minutes in those 10 months they can only miss 10 days to have good attendance and so we tried this year to shift from 18 days absent makes you chronic to just saying 10 days or less makes you have good attendance right and so just the swap in that messaging now our families are
040like oh my God 12 days absent and we're like few not chronic right so you know and we're like we'll take the 12. we'll take the 12. just don't get to 18. right um and so our families are learning a lot about about that and so that's why I think so many of our kids made such a dramatic increase in even with our CR our students who are chronic why the decrease in attendance I think we've gained over 280 days of instruction from last year to this year if you if you count how many days the children are now here versus we're absent last year um so we do the 10 10 and 10 it was 10 months 10 days and 10 years old because we want them to be ready for middle school when
041they leave so that's why that's our power 10. it's cute and then last but not least the kids love our monthly incentives and what we do I what I think might be different from others is that we highlight monthly perfect attendance so let's say you had a bad month of October right you got sick you had a bug okay but then you come to school every day in November at the end of November you get a pencil well we we give them trinkets so we just go month by month and it's always very interesting when children believe they deserve the the bracelet or the dog tag or whatever they'll call they're like I don't think I was absent this month and then you have to come with your dad and say oh maybe on this
042day maybe they do they make us check they make us check so we love that they love it we you know all right so our school highlight I have to say that our community school model has been a Difference Maker for our school our enrichment hour allows for the common planning time to be extended so our teachers have that protected hour and our and our students are getting an opportunity to experience different enrichment activities that they may have not otherwise experienced had they not been at our school um we are doing tremendous things to support our families and address some of the barriers for attendance we have a laundromat a pantry a closet um oh we do the feed and read we do books I think we I think that's most everything the enrichment Club
043yeah and so we had we tried to address any of the barriers that our families have well we have um well we have Northern rivers on site we have Whitney Young on site we have Silas smile also coming to our building so a lot of the needs that our families may have we absolutely try to address those as quickly as we can and then our social emotional space I'm going to allow for Miss cascone to kind of speak a little bit about our social emotional area because she is in our building the head of that and you know she has done such wonderful work around our said Suite so just to speak to a little bit of what we're doing in our said Suite which is social emotional Department it's where the behavior Specialists live
044the psychologist the social worker and myself Whitney Young Parsons is there we also have partnered with building blocks which is an outside Community agency and so I don't know whether this differs from other buildings but you know following our mtss model not just looking at academics and behavior we try to look at the whole child at all times but we also meet on a weekly basis we look at all the students so any students that are in tier one they may be struggling even if it's just due to like a bip in the road of maybe a death in the family and maybe something that doesn't carry on all year our tier two kids that might just need a little tweak a little support in our tier three who may be moving to a different
045setting but you know any way we can we're trying to make sure that we're taking data and that we're usually using all of our data to drive all of our decision making it's really a very comprehensive model we have done a lot to bring sensory into our building we started with a sensory hallway now we have sensory hallways on all of our floors we have a calm down room which is just a big pillow Bean baggy space and we're constantly looking to brainstorm of like what else we can bring to just meet all the needs of the students that we are seeing and so as we hopefully our tailing ends out of covid we also have needs for students who have maybe or maybe not have any social skills coming into school which maybe not
046wasn't a problem before covet and so we're starting to really kind of adjust to just be prepared for every learner that comes through the door so we're meeting their needs and also making sure that they're ready for you know what's ahead and so we're trying very hard to prepare our fifth graders to understand you know the ever-evolving change once they leave us to go to middle school and understand how to ask for help and being able to sell self-regulate and understand how you know emotions conduct you know directly impact choices and so I'm always just feeling very privilege that I get to work with such an amazing team that is constantly thinking about not consequence or punitive but how do we restore how do we repair how do we make our students become Future Leaders
047and so that when they walk across the high school stage you know they not only come back to tell us but we know who in the community is moving as a sherative prep Superstar for the rest of their life so I just hope that you know the board recognizes that where we work does have more barriers or different barriers than other buildings and so I always am very thankful that our students are coming every day because the community that we're you know the neighborhood that they're walking through has a lot of struggles that they have to walk past but they do it every day to come to school so that in itself to me is a big Ovation because those kids come and where even some of the adults feel stressed out because they may
048have to drive into a neighborhood but they're walking every day and they're happy to be in our building and we're just hopeful to continue to grow that she didn't mention something that I'm going to give her kudos to um so one of the things that is lovely to see in the SED Suite is when children so she's talking a lot about self-regulation but what our children are getting really good at is being able to call a time out for themselves and when they come down and they seek their break or they seek the time they decide how much time they need and they'll go into her little credenza and open and they're like okay I'll take the 10 minute timer or I'll take the five minute timer and so I think one of the things
049that folks may have as a misconception about school breaks or students taking breaks is that they take these like enormously long breaks and they never get back to the classroom right but we have created a community and culture in our SED suite and in our school that the children are supposed to go back to the classrooms and so even if they have that momentary lapse in judgment that there is always an adult ready to forgive and to repair and to receive and so I applaud Miss cascone for the hard work she's done to really create that culture in our building um and then with our consultant we have been working with OnPoint leadership for the last few years and one of the things that has been really rewarding about working with the same consultant who
050has been working with our building and goes to see our students and worked with our staff is that she has helped us expand our professional boundaries right and so she's always because she knows where we've come from she knows where we can what our next steps are need to be what our next steps need to be and she um one of the things we she has an alter ego she likes to call Lola and if she has to Lola us she does right because now she has had this history with us and so we're always ready to receive the honest and sometimes ugly truth about some of the things that we may need to change and so uh I just feel like I have to say that because I know we've had her for a
051long time and it may seem like what is she still working on but it taught we we started thinking about our beliefs then from our beliefs we met we moved into our planning practices then from our planning practices she started challenging us about well what are the club rules and what's happening across this whole building what's permissible what's not permissible then it was okay so now what where's the rigor in your instruction are you who and who's getting that instruction and so now she's like and how are you the teaching staff holding each other accountable and so every year has been some growth in our practice on how we become a community that really is um centered and focused on our students needs but not just their social emotional needs but their academic needs because
052for our district to get to a place where Equity is real our school has to be the school that changes we know that our school our kids have to be the ones that achieve so we are committed to that and we own that responsibility and you know so thank you for coming to schools and then our last school highlight I think which is we're very excited about at Sheridan prep right is that our school has improved accountability status from CSI to ATA side [Music] and this was yes through the pandemic thank you very much we still did that okay so those are a little bit blurry but I'm just showing you some um some actual data and what you'll see is that within the last few years so that might be edutalk and so the
053this is from nwea and then the red score is what the students actually get as a score once they take the nwea and the thing about the red scores that are is a writ so if I get a 150 and 150 is kindergarten if I'm in the fifth grade I'm on a kindergarten level that's what that 150 means and what you should note is that there has been constant gains towards the mean Norm writ and we have been making inroads of upwards of up to more than 10 points and if we continue in this trajectory we will soon be at the norm and if we accomplish that that will be a game changer for the city school district of Albany so then our school highlights again our teaching staff is collegial and dedicated to Growing
054their instructional practice and determined to create a safe environment for our students and then miss cascone spoke a little bit about our SED suite and how comprehensive that approach is the other thing I would add is how much you include our families and all of the necessary conversations so that we are better serving and meeting the needs especially the emotional needs of our students so our challenges is funding for our programs most of what I described to you all comes from our grant funded our grants from having been a stu a school in CSI status and in receivership and changing even though it's exciting to change from CSI to atsi does mean a drop in funding for us and so we have been using our community teaming our community engagement team to help us start
055considering ways to do fundraising so that our programs can continue I do want to take an opportunity here to highlight Our Community Partners because they do more than just sit on this CET team and help us try to find fundraising our Our Community Partners much to what Miss cascone was mentioning about some of the difficulties and challenges that face our neighborhood have absolutely stepped up to the plate we have a clinic behind us that technically has an address of Central Avenue and we technically have an address of Sheridan Avenue and because of that it appears that we're not as close as we are but we definitely we both share Sherman Street and folks or people who are seeking treatment at this facility behind us oftentimes we're approaching our children when they were walking to school
056which made it very unsafe and so through our community school model and through our CET we were able to leverage a partnership with one of our community agencies and their employees would stand on the corners throughout the street and create a safe passage for our students so that if anybody approached our kids that there was another grunt that there was a grown-up kind of shoeing them away from our children and so those are the kinds of Partnerships that really truly make our school special because we know that our children are absolutely capable of achieving great things we also know that they also have incredible things to overcome in order to achieve what they need to what they can achieve but having partners that are ready to roll up their sleeves and find funds find people
057and do the things that we need in order to make our School the best school it can be is really a very very humbling experience because we know like are you you friends there's nobody better than our uu friends um they are they're like the greatest right and we know that um you know if we even the the folks that were helping with picking up the litter and you know making sure the safe passage we have those those are the things that people the kids remember it's all of those things right so you know I love our Community Partners I love our teaching staff you know we're we're a good place to be you've never been you should should be there I think that oh no I think we might be going to student voices
058next right that's the next sign okay so these are our student councilman members they're so cute you have President karmir VP Saleh secretary Jorge a member Anthony a member of Brooklyn and our member Madison at our school um anybody who runs for student council automatically becomes a part of the student council so we have elected officials but then if you were not elected and you ran you're you're part of the Congress so anybody who wants to be a part of the Congress has allowed to be a part of the Congress um and so they've been doing some really nice work there they go or be they're cute and smart and they have a lot of agency I will say they are so they have a lot of agency this you can see either our student
059council has been working on giving back to our community we voted on if we were going to do a fundraiser or do something for our community like picking up later we voted and decided we wanted to do a fundraiser after the vote we had to read the different ways to do a fundraiser we voted and decided that the school would have fun if we did a coin drive after a discussion on the rules we did research on different charities to donate to it was very hard to pick just one so we decided to to pick the three we liked and left the school decide which fairly to storage we picked the Ronald McDonald's house the Double H Ranch and the Mohawk Society our next step is going to go to all of the classes in
060our school and pump them up for the quick ride our student council meets every week we are currently working on tickets we are currently working in Pickens working on picking the next book from one school one book we have been listening to a few books and trying to pick up a favor for our school we are also a part of our Outdoor Learning area committee we will be adding our ideas to how this space can be used for our school as you can see being on student council at share the prep is a lot of good work [Music] [Applause] they they truly believe in democracy because they wanted to do this they wanted to do some community service and they voted on every single part of what they wanted to do do we want to
061do community service or fundraiser let's vote okay so then they voted okay what kind of fundraise do we want to do let's do some research let's vote then it was okay what who are we going to donate to let's do some research oh no we shouldn't vote the school should vote they are so it was just so cute to see how much they want they are advocates for their peers and I just they are a cute little group of kids and they work really hard in our school so this is their launch of the coin Drive hello Mrs Mario's class my name is karmir and we are the student accounts we're the school student council the student council decided to hold a coin drive for those who don't know but a coin Drive is a
062coin Drive is when you bring in pennies nickels dimes and quarters to fit another bar after two weeks we'll count them together all together and go on the chairs the change will go to first let's go we'll need to decide if you're trying to follow three so three for those domination Ronald McDonald House is a place for families to stay for free while their children are in a house in the hospital in our in Albany is very close to two major hospitals in our area the Double H Ranch is a camp for children with serious illness and disability so that was a fund someone from many children and maybe the last opportunity they have for a special time the Mohawk Society is an animal shelter for abandoned animals perspectively each class will have a gun
063to put the coins in no paper money no play money and no type only coins after two weeks the class with the most coins will have a part of the choice anyone caught trying to take the money from the job will have consequences but their costs will be disqualified thank you for the time we can wait to start the conversation for good with crap so um it was cute with you know helping them guide what they wanted to say they all were in agreement that they wanted a speech and that they wanted to do it together um so they're you know they're a nice little group of children who are really doing I think great things and have great potential we have equal parts third fourth and fifth graders that are part of our student
064council um and it's interesting because our fourth grader is the president so normally you would expect the fifth grader to maybe be the president but our the president is a fourth grader so I think that's all this was really fabulous thank you and I see a couple of my friends I was over for a reading hour and I and one one young man of third grade I think he's the tallest there he was telling me about his campaign so I'm glad to see I'm very happy to see him now um but I wanted to just ask you and I'm sorry the the coin Drive is that is that still going on or is there an end date so we're currently in the process because my our student council wanted the school to vote on where
065we're donating the coins to we're still collecting the votes on the donation and then starting on Monday we are going to have the coins now they were very clear they did not want paper money they said no we can't have paper money who's we're going to have too much counting to do no paper money and then they were also and I don't know which one of them was like and no checks just like okay it could have yeah that does sound it might have been but it was just funny I was like okay it'll be interesting if a Pre-K comes with a check but okay so I only want and I know generally we don't ask you questions but I just wanted to know because I do have a jar at home that's like years
066old and it's full and I just kind of leave it there and I said maybe I could spare half of that um we'll take your half we'll take your half okay but I I I'm just I just wanted to know when that starts and when um when that needs to be turned in so they elected that it needs to be two weeks because they think that with just two weeks we will get more coins because then the kids will feel an urgency all right so that was you know I one of one of them suggested the month of March and his suggestion was so thoughtful he was like what about the month of March some kids are absent and they were like no two weeks so they're a lot of fun but we will take
067questions if anybody has any questions well I I think I'm I'm not going to do that and I'm sorry I did break a rule um but I really was curious because you know and my excuses like I want to drop some coins I mean they'll be happy to hear it okay to receive those okay I'll be very happy very good well just want to thank you all so much for for joining us tonight what a pleasure thank you thank you thank you and Mr lesko you you are complete for the evening okay thank you sir so I'm going to turn over to uh interim superintendent John yagelski for his superintendent's report or update current a minute I'm going to cover uh we always start with our vision oops that's okay here's your mission and goals
068and I think that's always appropriate and I'm going to talk about four topics uh rather quickly if I can starting with the reminders around budget really key points budget proposal no tax levy no tax levy no tax living that and that is the third time in eight years full Foundation Aid funding from the state made a lot of that possible this year and and we have benefits from that particular amount of Aid when we're maintaining all of our current staff and programs including those staff members that we're heretofore being funded out of the federal dollars the proposition 2 is a proposal to use nine million dollars from our Capital reserves to offset the inflationary cost of the rebuilding Albany High School project and again no tax impact for that and we have election and I
069think we might even be able to tell you who's going to be elected because we have two candidates running for two opened office and and um I'm thrilled to see that there will be continuity going forward with the board that's that's very important though the the budget presentations we've already done a half a dozen presentations at a variety of places with a variety of people we have uh really three two more sessions to go and then on the 16th is the big day for our budget vote on the board of election in the election the polls as you know are open from 7 A.M to 9 p.m we have 15 voting locations city-wide one of them is new but not very far apart from where it was that's actually the the parking lots are joined
070over in the First Ward by New Hope Church on 334 2nd Avenue no uh covid-19 absentee options as as was in the pay it there in the past and if anybody needs any additional information on our budgets and for that process we can turn to Albany schools.org budget second topic was uh transportation and while it's later in the year it's still important that we we were very pleased to have begun a new Transportation partner to help in some of the persistent challenges we've experienced during this ongoing chronic shortage of bus drivers Tech valley shuttle provides that's the firm provided transportation for all Albany High ROTC field trips in the earlier in this week this afternoon provided athletes some shuttle services for the first time and you recall that was a topic that was bouncing around
071in the early part of the spring season and transportation is continuing to work with multiple vendors including Tech Valley and others you know the old bus providers on an additional Services as we look for next year we're testing it out with this year and focusing to a lot of extent on the athletic and end of the year uh the fascinating thing is we have many end of the year dates depending on where where we're at Friday the June 30th will be the last day for this school year we'd like to say the following information as you can see Albany High the last day of school is Tuesday June 13th and and right thereafter Begins the Regents exams and then graduations on Sunday June the 25th at MVP Arena at noon time in Middle Schools uh
072the last day for those three is on the the June 22nd that's a full day and then moving up ceremonies are on the 23rd Friday the 23rd in elementary school the last days of school or Thursday or 20 June 22nd and Friday 20 23rd is early dismissal on both days the early start and we have an early start and early late starts so that the exact times are different but the it's a uniform kind of closing and moving ceremonies each school will share that information with when their events are laid out so lunch will be served incidentally on those early dismissal days so that's important enough Albany International Center secondary grades the 9 through 12 the last days on June the 13th and the Regents exams and of course the graduation is at the same
073time at the same place whereas the middle school students the last days on the 22nd and they have the moving up ceremony on Friday the 23rd time has been set for that Tony Clements for Education grades 9 through 12 the last school days the 20th June 13th Regents exams through 14th to 22nd and the graduation again but this at the same time the same place whereas the seventh and eighth grade is the last day of schools on June the 22nd and the eighth grade move up will take place at their home soon so homeschool and we close with what we've always reported on and we're getting better at it too we're down to 18 Place classes cases uh in in April our fewest monthly case since we'll be back on August 2021 so and we
074continue as he turned to the last one the same messages we've been passing along for this all and I think that may cover it unless somebody has some questions very good thank you sir colleague's questions for or comments for our interim superintendent I see some nods no no okay okay Mr gelsey thank you very much thank you all right very good next up I wanted to just report out on the superintendent search update we as I believe I communicated in our last meeting we had a really very terrific pool of applicants both in terms of qualifications and also in terms of diversity and we are also began that same weekend of the 22nd screening all of the applications resumes that had come come in and then last weekend we spent both April 29th and April
07530th all weekend thank you colleagues really interviewing our candidates first round and second round We are continuing with that process but we are committed to sticking to our timeline where we expect to have a decision made and announced by June 15th and we'll keep you posted on all of that but just wanted to make sure that the public was updated on what we had been working on so colleagues I there's an item there under there that says discussion but I do not foresee any discussion this has been a confidential search so unfortunately there are things that we cannot say but we are moving ahead and that's really the important thing I wanted you to know so I thank you all and also Mr gelski as well alrighty next up is public comment uh this is
076the time that we set aside to hear from members of our public and we welcome the community's input about the decisions we are making we set aside about 30 minutes at each meeting to hear from our district residents parents students and other members of the community and if we have more comments then can be accommodated we certainly will extend the length of the public session right there or we might even go into a second public comment period later in the meeting um also just to remind folks that we accept comments in writing also through your virtual live participation and by voicemail comments that are not in person must be made at least six hours prior to the meeting to give us time to to collect all the materials um written comments must be limited to
077400 words and voicemail comments to three minutes all comments must include the commenter's name and place of residence we do not accept Anonymous comments and if you would like to submit a voicemail written comment we encourage you to review the section addressing the board information at Albany schools.boe excuse me Albany schools.org forward slash Boe as well as review the instructions there on how to sign up for virtual live participation and keep in mind we all ask that all commenters keep in mind that information about individual students and specific staff cannot be shared not only is that a violation of privacy but every student and every staff member deserves to know that concerns about them will not be aired in public and tonight we have let me just sorry for that reason also members who read
078comments will pass over or substitute alternative words if individual names are mentioned we also eliminate those names and descriptions from recorded voicemails also um and one final thing here is that please keep in mind that public comment is not the best place to First Alert the district to a concern you have we ask that you share concerns first with relevant staff including the teacher or principal if you feel that concern is not addressed adequately you may appeal that appeal to that person's supervisor up the chain of command if necessary to the superintendent decisions made by the superintendent may be appealed to the board and we have had a number of comments and Communications with our community many of those I want to just applaud staff Mr yagelski and cabinet for being very responsive to those
079comments and questions that have come in really appreciate that very much as a board we're not going to always have the exact answers so we do rely upon you and and are grateful for that support and so now we do have I believe uh two uh comments and I want to turn to Dr chatur Who will read those two thank you we have two letters today um the first one is from Jen Romano with bullying related suicides becoming an alarming epidemic mass shootings greatly outnumbing the days of the year and gun violence the leading cause of death in American Youth is there more our schools can do I'm here to share the information about no cost accessible programs designed for grades K-12 that can help the Sandy Hook promise Learning Center is a free online
080learning management system for their award-winning start with hello and say something programs it's an easy to use One-Stop shop for know the science resources the online courses were designed by Educators with Decades of experience in curriculum development leveraging programs informed by research the Learning Center includes full training videos interactive lessons school safety lesson plans and a searchable digital library of resources to use at your own convenience start with hello K-12 teaches youth how to minimize social isolation empathize with others and create a more inclusive and connected School culture to say something grades 4 through 12 program train students on different types of warning signs and threats especially on social media of someone at risk of hurting themselves or others and how to speak up to a trusted adult before tragedy occurs the save students against
081violence everywhere promise Club empowers you to take charge of keeping schools safe by teaching modeling and continually reinforcing kindness inclusiveness and the value of flocking out for one another in four order files five school shootings at least one other person and knowledge of the Deckers plan but failed to report it to say something Anonymous Reporting System grades 6 through 12 provides a mobile app telephone hotline and a website for communities to report someone who's at risk of harming themselves or others the 24 7 365 system is staffed by trained crisis counselors who work with local law enforcement and school administrators to prevent both non-life both non-life-threatening events image I urge all of our schools to kick off the school year this September with a call to action week dedicated to kindness inclusion and making connections
082that will Embrace these terrific programs visit www.sandyhookpromise.org to learn about these life-saving programs contact me as the Capital District Sandy have promised leader Ambassador Jen Romano for Sandy Hook promise gmail.com for assistance General Manos langerlands Sandy Hook promised leader ambassador the second letter comes to us from Leanne iorio teselli good evening members of the board I hope you've had a chance to reflect on your appreciation of your teacher since the last meeting how faring that it be teaches appreciation season we the teachers of the city school district of Albany receive the message from interview this week in his message it states in the schools in the city school district of Albany and every school setting around the world teachers are the livelord of organizations vision and Mission here in Albany our teachers devote themselves to
083helping our students grow and succeed the nurture our students academic development and help support their social emotional needs our teachers Empower students to strive to be their best life best selves every day going above and beyond to help them feel valued and supported in our Collective work to build back from the covid-19 pandemic our teachers continue to meet every challenge yes we do all of those things every day during the design school day and Beyond when we should be spending time developing our own families and personal well-being we give back to our students families and community interim superintendent continues to say we owe teaches the debt of gratitude you do but she owes a lot more you owes a competitive contract that draws teachers talented features to a district but also keeps our current teachers
084here and happy he always a MOA allowing us to raise during a negotiating year something you do for administrators and above you always benefits that won't triple our budgets copays that won't dissipate us from seeking preventative medicine and services you always Health Care contributions that show our value and worth you're always working conditions that are safe and supportive you always respect and professional professionalism not micromanagement you always have workday where we are not paralyzed by initiative overload while we appreciate acknowledgment during Teachers Appreciation week we need more than acknowledgment and gratitude we need action and support of us not action that will hold us down thank you for taking the time to read this message but also for putting its suggestions at the Forefront of a district expression thank you thank you Dr shatura and
085again we appreciate all public comments we do find hearing from you uh so valuable to the decisions that we are responsible for making and again our contact information for both public comment and routine correspondence is at Albany schools.org forward slash Boe we now move to part of the meeting we call routine consent during this portion of the meeting we approve routine matters for the district these include items like contracts field trips Personnel matters and the like each board member reviews each item carefully but we vote on them as a group with no discussion that allows us to use our meeting time more efficiently nonetheless each board member has had the option to has the option to set aside any routine consent item in order to require a separate discussion and vote on that item with
086that introduction I will now entertain a motion to adopt the routine consent agenda motion Miss Wilson second Dr chatur are there any set asides yes Miss krachi hi I'd like to set aside item number seven skillsusa and item number 18 Tech valley shuttle please okay and Miss Wilson I also wanted to set aside item 18 Tech valley shuttle okay and Miss Mann I want to set aside item five and eight eighteen thank you I see no other set-asides um let's see uh foreign just lost my place here all in favor of adopting uh the uh routine consent items minus item five item seven and item 18. um yes is that all in favor yes okay so let's break this down um let's take them one at a time all over all in favor of adopting
087item five and I apologize I lost the name of that I'm sorry what's the name of that item Five Boston Freedom okay I'm sorry yes all in favor of adopting item five may I get a motion to adopt I'm sorry I lose my place there we go may I get a motion to adopt item five the Boston Freedom Trail um miss krachi seconded Mr El mignawi any discussion here so I just wanted to comment that I was very pleased to see this um come come over to us I think that the Boston Freedom Trail is a very Dynamic and empowering uh field trip and so um that's what I had to say about that just very pleased to see it and have our many of our students experience uh the trip it's great any other
088comments on that one okay seeing I'm all in favor of a DOT oh I'm so sorry Mr Aman Yahweh pardon me it went too fast go ahead I also wanted to lend my support to really all of the field trips including this one that our students get to go on that are enriching they're exciting and our students love to go on them so great thank you anyone else okay all in favor of adopting item five the Boston Freedom Trail that is unanimous that carries thank you all right may I have a motion to adopt hold on item seven skillsusa Mr omanyawi seconded Dr chatur and he just any discussion on this uh yes I wanted to say I'm really excited and proud that we were able to meet the young man that's going to be
089going on this trip I'm really proud of the work we're doing in our CTE program and really excited that we are turning out that we're turning out students that can compete at this National level however every time we've had a skills USA contract come up for approval I've been concerned with the unusual method of lodging payment and the rates my understanding is most conferences you pay the conference fee and then they say hey we've set aside a block of rooms give us this code and here's the special rates but skills USA requires that the school districts pay that the organization directly rather than going through the Hotel this is problematic on one on one level because the rates they charge are well in excess of governmental rates that our policies dictate that we try to
090use whenever possible additionally because we are a governmental organization we are tax-exempts so if we were to reserve these rooms ourselves we would not pay tax on them whereas now skillsusa is passing through the tax to us additionally when the Office of the State Controller audits school districts on travel expenses they do point out when travel is being paid for in excess of the governmental suggestions and they suggest that districts adhere to it so what I would suggest is if we are going to pay for these travel rates in excess of the governmental rates we should have a little thing saying hey we look for rates we don't see anything in Georgia at that rate or it's important for us to have our people stay in sight for these reasons I would like to see
091that going along with it because my rough math there's two meals included in the price but even assuming that those are 75 dollars a piece we would be saving at least a thousand dollars by government by going with government standard rates which would enable more students to travel for more competitions the other thing is perhaps if we were to push back at skillsusa and say hey we love your competitions we love your organization but hey the people you know the the people that run your audit committee really don't like your method of hotels um maybe maybe we could affect some change and have a system where we could book directly directly through the hotels and save the district money I still will be voting for this contract because I think it's really important that we
092give the students the chance to compete but the just wearing my audit committee chair just wanted to put that out there I would have put it in an email but this but this contract was posted to the website after the deadline for comments on Monday thank you thank you um Miss crazy if you don't mind I want to separate this out a little bit are you able to move on the on action yes okay I just wanted to make sure I heard that correctly that's all not questioning it um okay so then the second piece is um is there cabinet uh do you have a comment on this uh or can you get back to us uh promptly with uh sort of the process as you handle it now and and kit John yeah I
093believe that's their way of covering their costs okay built in because they're paying for programs they're trying to keep that down and it looks good that I can send somebody but then they find out the travel and the other stuff is more expensive but okay okay but you gotta weigh the value of the programs versus the charge is what I see understood but I think if we if we could uh and Mr Karis are you I'm not sure how this flows but I just want to make sure we're doing things correctly um I'm confident that we are but I just feel like we're not doing anything wrong no but want to make sure that the questions get answered so that this doesn't continue to be a question sorry the portions and I will respond thank
094you very much sir and Miss Wilson and just to interject I can also reach out to skillsusa and get some background information and um the thought process behind the charges that um go into this competition as well very good thank you Miss McKenna we'll leave that to you all um Miss Wilson I don't want to um belaborate then actually superintendent McKenna you interjected at the perfect time because I was going to ask for such a similar like document that kind of assesses that the nature of the program is for the development of our students and that although it's unorthodox in the way that they do it like I think Ellen mentioned most conferences or Awards don't do this maybe we could have some kind of statement on our file if we were to be audited
095that would you know resolve that right and I'm sorry because who's got their hand Dr chatur I just wanted to add that you know there are other school districts that also send their kids to this program including the BOCES so maybe you know we can get a coalition of people approach uh skills USA because as Ellen mentioned um if the costs are made reasonable more kids could go right which only increases the value of the program they all say there's economies of scale so well let's make it bigger but not necessarily more expensive thank you and I think our staff has that info those questions and comments so thank you all very much alrighty anything else on this topic yes Mr El mignon I just wanted to congratulate um Elijah and uh just say that
096he's such a phenomenal young man I was really impressed with what he was saying and how he said it and uh his teacher his instructor Mr wafer also you know phenomenal job so I'm happy to vote for this and I do understand um the implications looking forward to seeing you know results but I am absolutely happy to vote for this thank you yes ma'am yes so there's no question that I'm going to vote on this when I look at this through an equity lens and I I hear the concern and I know that we're going to put something in place and have it on file in the event of an audit but when I look at this through an equity lens I have no problem supporting this now and also into the future so it
097just needs to be very upfront about that [Music] thank you all in favor of adopting item seven skillsusa that is unanimous thank you may I have a motion to adopt number item 18 Tech valley shuttle Dr shatour Wilson seconds is there any discussion Miss I'm sorry this is just a technical issue I'm really excited about this this local about working with this local company to provide transportation for our students but the the cut under the contract amount it's just listed as 140 an hour rather than some estimate over the overall total will pay pay this year which we could of course extend if necessary so I just wondered if we and I will vote for this now because it's really important to get our kids where they need to go but it would be great
098if we could amend amend that to the expected total that we would pay in this thanks Mr cares so um when we're drawing up this contract it was based on trying to determine how many shuttle routes we were trying to accom accommodate and then if we had any additional uh feeders that we might have to try to accommodate to right Ron sorry it was a joint effort for this yes thank you Mr Lesco too so yes is the short answer we we will try and do that the challenge uh in the short term for the school year is identified exactly how we'll be able to deploy Tech valley shuttle runs in athletics exactly which routes they're going to use I think just like as today they did a run that just was inside of our
099district taking students from North Albany Hackett and Myers to a practice so because of the nature of athletic transportation that sometimes games change sometimes sometimes there are rainouts we're working through some of those details with tech Valley about exactly how they're going to support our student athletes in particular this school year but we certainly can't put a rough estimate on there for the course of this school year and I think as we as we develop this relationship with them moving forward we'll have a better sense of more specifically how they're going to be deployed and more specifically what a total dollar figure would be in future years that would be excellent I think the other question I had was is 140 an hour does that include gas and everything and is that for what one
100particular size of vehicle just little questions like that would be helpful but I'm really excited but I'm really excited that we were able to put that you guys were able to put this together sure thank you [Music] very good thank you yes Miss Wilson um again this one as Ellen indicated we are excited about this project and I want to again extend our thanks to Trent Griffin braf who did Outreach to us actually having seen and identified the need and also want to highlight that they were awarded these very recently the small business administration Upstate New York business of the Year very recently so I just sick I just feel like it signifies that you know their large commitment to community service and again wanted to say thank you Trent was recognized in Wednesday's paper
101it's fantastic thank you if there are no other questions or comments on this all in favor of adopting item 18 Tech valley shuttle that is unanimous thank you okay as is our normal practice we have arranged our agenda with all action items at the beginning and tonight we will start with policy please I'm sorry uh I'm sorry let me back up one second there is a recognition perhaps I would like to give Michelle the Mr yugelski would you like to or actually miss McKenna are you uh hearing us I'm hearing you I'm right here okay would you like to do the honors yes I would love to so I am so excited and thrilled to introduce our next Tony Clement Center for Education principal Mr Chris Martell uh he comes to us with a wealth
102of knowledge and the skill set the dedication and the relationships to move Tony Clement to where uh we need it to be um moving forward starting on July 1. so with that said I don't know if Mr Martell would like to say a few words um but we are so thrilled to have him and we absolutely believe that he is the right person to lead Tony Clement so welcome Mr Martell and we're so excited to have you join our team thank you Miss McKenna and thank you to the board I'm excited for the opportunity I really appreciate it and I am thrilled to be back uh in Albany uh in my home so thank you all I'm really looking forward to working with all of you our pleasure to look forward to it thank you
103there we go I've got little head things there thank you Miss McKenna and again welcome Mr Martell our first action item has to do with policy can I call on our policy committee members our chair Dr shatour thank you madam president members of the board we have no items for discussion because the policy hasn't met since the last time but we have five items for Action there are three policies and two Tom sections and um unless there's discussion I can just read all of them and we can vote on them together if this consent is that okay yes please okay so the first uh policy is 105 which is our equity and education policy the second one is three thousand goals and objectives for administration third one is 4010 which is equivalence in instruction and
104the two team operations manual related policies are board self-assessment and board goals and evaluation of the superintendent so may I have a motion okay do it as a group as a group could you you want to speak onto the mic I'm not I mean I apologize I was indicating I wanted to do them one by one because I just had discussion on two okay one by one each policy or switches goals and objectives for administration or three thousand and forty ten okay so uh all in favor for uh policy 105 and the two team operations manual sections for self Assignment Board goals and evaluate the superton that's unanimous unanimous okay uh three thousand goals and objectives for administration Wisconsin foreign I was just curious if this would be because it kind of indicates I think
105the one aspect of the it being a board policy um you know for administration if it was going to be reflexive sort of like um basically indicating that it will be a two-way document like indicating board actions also as far as interaction within with the administration that was just a question that I had I don't think this policy is intended to talk about board actions it's mostly intended to talk about Administration um actions is there something in particular you were thinking about or maybe it could carry over to Something in the team operations management manual I just wasn't reading it it just feels like it it's just us directing towards the administration and I'm wondering if through speed like I do have notes so maybe I'll just give that to the policy committee and just
106um in terms of it being like a two-way participatory process yeah that would be great if you would put your thoughts together a little bit too and that we do have in the team operations manual an entire section about development of board goals and obviously multiple sections about the way that we communicate with between board and administration um so I don't know that it ties directly to this policy but it's definitely in there those kinds of things but it would be things like board members like I'm just thinking Let's Pretend this entire board evaporated like board members would not visit you know without proper protocol or direct staff in a very direct manner so that's what I was more so thinking yeah those things are definitely in the team operations manual very very specific typically
107particularly around visiting campuses there's very specific language around that I think we switched it to schools rather than the campuses but there's very specific language around working through the board clerk to assure that it's done with prior notice and that it's never evaluative it's about educating the board about what's going on in the schools and then what was the other one the other example you had about uh visiting well that was visiting without notice or with that there's always notice unless it's an open Forum right the only time we wouldn't necessarily have to if you're going to a school concert you might not you would as a courtesy try and get noticed but if it's a public event no um so that one is definitely covered yeah this this policy specifically you know the board
108directions to the administration that these are what we would like you to do what the board the the there's a different policy on board goals and board board Behavior so we have a motion to approve 3000 all in favor okay anonymous and the next one was equivalency instruction are we citing um No Child Left Behind are we supposed to say every student succeeds Act it's this one this is an excellent question for Miss Bechtel who's in the room who's in charge of this policy is that do we need to update that she's coming to the mic I do not believe so but I will check okay so we'll table this one for next time thank you includes the policy committee work great thank you and next we have a discussion and I think perhaps action
109Also regarding the internal audit turn that over to Mr Karis [Music] good evening thank you um so this is a quick update on the internal audit that was completed a couple months ago um unfortunately the order committee wasn't unable to meet due to a conflict of a budget presentation the same night that we were supposed to do a roller committee um so we're going to meet again pretty soon about the corrective action plan that will go with us and then we uh you'll see end this presentation there is the targeted uh audit that will be done July 5th 6th and 7th so a different vision mission goals uh the internal audit is uh based on 2005 School Finance oversight and accountability legislation uh we are required to have the annual Financial risk assessment and the
110annual special areas testing the drafts were reviewed with the order committee um the review completed I'm sorry excuse me uh the questionnaire is the interviews and walkthroughs we had sample transactions the report layout which was presented to the board and the committee a few weeks ago um areas of control weakness and potential risks that were identified uh the areas where no control weakness and potential risks were identified the results of the sample of transactions from the prior year to control weaknesses and potential risks were removed out of the 17 recommendations that were identified three are currently being addressed for our special area testing that will be conducted July 5th 6th and 7th it will be the procurement through the grants funding any questions do we have questions colleagues could I just ask one sure um
111and not necessarily it really pertains to the question that was coming up around the contract um and uh exceeding State rates or being taxed is that to what I'm assuming that an auditor would pick up those things and again not that we've done anything wrong but that we're we're losing money we're not yeah um with skilled USA It's actually an extra classroom Club activity so they are actually not they are under the school district but they're not technically under the school district um when and I'm going to get more details so I just want to make sure that I have all the details before I really answer the questions but uh for example when we go to Syracuse or Rochester for these events they do go on the bus so to stay off campus or
112away from where the uh event is going on there's a bus that would have to go back and forth the bus stays with the students transporting their equipment and supplies that would also have to take into consideration as well so the Judgment of staying there where the event is which is a little bit more costly and trying to find places to eat with a bus with it it's trying to juggle and to balance all those costs as well also pretty much every District in New York state tries to go to those local areas and that creates that demand which drives up the cost so even if we try to go to another hotel that's pretty close by the cost will also be up so but again as I say I'm going to get more information
113the biggest part is that it's an extra club or extracurricular Club that we do through the school very helpful thank you and um just because we've been involved in skills USA for a long time and so not that the question shouldn't emerge but I've just wondered why it hadn't been perhaps picked up um you know by Auditors saying hey you know you could do it differently but I appreciate your getting back to us yeah thank you anything else colleagues thank you Mr cares thank you oh I'm sorry but so no action on this no actually you have to um accept this okay so let me go back and well shall we do that right may I get an um entertain a motion to adopt the uh internal audit and I see Miss crazy and seconded
114by Miss Mann all in favor that is unanimous thank you sir okay and next up uh is the the draft of the 2023-24 board calendar meeting calendar which has been my responsibility and apologies for the significant delay in that um and Ms Jenna thank you for bringing that up uh the calendar and I just put it up for discussion tonight so that you would have time to um make revisions or changes I'm going to ask you right now to not so much get caught up on the side on the right where we list the schools I think our cabinet particularly Dr Wilson Turner has been through that I've made a couple of revision since um and so I really want you to be pay more attention to the dates that would be helpful so any
115comments or questions things right now that you want to point out okay seeing none I would like for you to take a look at it and we'll put it back on the agenda for the 18th for Action okay thank you very much and next up item k for discussion is our grading and attendance task force welcome everyone and we'll let I think Miss Bechtel is going to start good to see you gentlemen all right uh good evening Board of Education we are here to report out on the work of the grading attendance task force I want to start by commending the committee members for their passion and commitment to this work the committee has a deep regard for students teaching and learning they seek a balance between student accountability and student support to help Foster
116motivation and engagement in the educational program tonight we will give you our committee's findings and draft recommendations as the first level of this work there is more work to be done before finalizing the task at this time I would like to introduce our co-facilitators of the task force to my left here is Sean Fitzsimons who is in Albany High social studies teacher and then we have Dr Joe slicko our Albany High School operations principal and then Frank Del Senor our secondary instructional supervisor for Math and business so I will turn it over to these gentlemen thank you Miss Bechtel um so I'm going to take a moment to kind of walk through the system that we used and then we're going to sort of pass it on and share out so I want to start
117by saying if you look at the folks who the superintendent pulled together for this it's a very diverse array of of people in terms of their experiences and their mindset we've got guidance counselors we've got people who have done the apex program we've got PPS in there District administrators School administrators teachers of a variety of subjects and so um you know coming together superintendent gave us a charge and that was to first of all review our current grading and attendance policies and of course you the board understand this but we had a lot of discussions about what that meant policies being those broad sort of categories that sort of set the stage for what the district's going to do and then our procedures that get filled in by the district such as grading you know
118handbooks and then our practices we reviewed our current Credit Recovery procedures looking at Apex and summer school especially we conducted open forums with secondary staff reviewed relevant data including Pass rates connected with credit recovery efforts grade changes and then we really took a long time exploring policy implications of you know the recommendations that we put together this was quite a long process but a great process um you know it started on February 1st and we've met multiple times after school in half day sessions originally we were asked to complete this work by March 30th but the superintendent graciously extended our timeline and we absolutely needed it because this is very difficult and challenging work we started with a review of the policies which we'll talk about in a moment we brought in the legal team
119from the district Honeywell we created a staff survey and we're very thoughtful about that administered it to the staff and had over 200 responses so very robust response that we were able to work with we as I mentioned had a couple of folks on the on the task force that are very intimately familiar with Apex spent a long time looking at how that sort of plays out crafted our recommendations and I have to tell you when we went into this I mentioned we have all kinds of different people with different perspectives and I don't think we ever expected this to be a consensus driven process however with the time that we were given thank you again and the amount of information we had to work with I can say with great assurance that we all
120walked out of there feeling like this was very much a consensus driven process reflecting not only teachers but also administrators at various levels different perspectives so I really want to make that very clear and I believe that all my task force colleagues would agree with that and we finally finalize those recommendations which you received and we'll talk about what comes after this and at the end but I'll start by looking at the you know findings regarding policies and and our practices so first and foremost we looked at the board's policies in relation to nispa the New York State School Board Association guidance they have sort of best practices on model policies and I will note that we found that ours are actually quite quite in alignment with those with some exceptions so for example the
121municipal policy does have a minimum attendance for course credit as a suggestion we looked at our guidance documents like I said such as the grading handbook and looked at them in relation to the policies found that they were actually quite well aligned we brought in that legal team and as you can imagine with so many teachers in the room there were quite a few questions that we peppered them with it was quite fun being able to talk to lawyers like that yeah but uh you know in any event what we did find is that um while it it appears that all of our policies and and the practices that we put forward uh are in alignment with stated you know requirements um legal council did acknowledge that there are a lot of things about the
122way that things are being implemented that have created some challenges and that it is very much within local control to be able to address those through changes in policy and practice so um that gave us a great degree of comfort and knowing that we could move forward and at least put forth recommendations um at this point I'm going to turn it over to Dr shliko and uh thanks good evening everyone um so the first type of data that we collected was qualitative in nature and aimed to really capture the opinions the feelings and those intangibles uh directly from our middle school and high school faculties and with two math brains sitting at this table it was quite the stretch for us um but we fought through it we really wanted to be extremely intentional with
123um how we crafted the survey that we sent out one to elicit authentic responses but also to allow the task force to be able to quantify and utilize the data collected to ensure that everyone had a voice therefore we decided to ask the same three open-ended questions both about grading and attendance and you have those there what opportunities do our current grading or attendance practices provide for our students and teachers what challenges do our current grading or attendance practices pose to our students and for our teachers and then finally what suggestions do you have to improve in strengthen our grading or attendance practices those questions created a meaningful but heavy lift for the task force we then took time to sort all 226 responses we first completed a norming exercise then categorized the responses we
124then discussed those categories further refine them and landed with the following major areas of concern which we believe capture all the concerns reported the first was assigning a minimum grade of 55 even if a student has never attended a class the next centered around expectations accountability and consequences then the minimum attendance threshold for course credit Apex which is our credit recovery program and summer school practices and protocols late work protocols hallway truancy and overall concern about learning and proficiency and these will all be discussed further in our recommendations next we utilize School tool and the amazing work of our Task Force member Trish wolf to collect our quantitative data this is where we got excited we looked at and compared data from 2018 2019 which was the last pre-covered year and the 2021-22 school year
125some of the highlights of that data review are as follows so we looked at approximately 20 000 records for each one of those school years and those records include courses not individual students for example a student can take seven eight nine courses that's what we're talking about when we talk about those records and for each of those school years of those approximate 20 000 records about 17 000 of those were completed records so that is where a student actually finished the coursework doesn't mean they pass doesn't mean they failed they just completed they didn't transfer out they didn't drop a course on and so forth um in looking at those records we then wanted to look at well how many of those records resulted in a student passing the course but having poor attendance and
126then we Quantified poor attendance with more than 15 percent of an absent rate for the course in question so we're looking at individual courses here so for example if I'm in Algebra 1 and I pass that course and I had at least 15 percent attendance or more how did that look in these given years so in the 2018-2019 school year 20 of students with full year in Rome enrollments that earned a credit in a course had 15 or more absences in those courses and we compared that to in 2122 which is postcovid 32 percent of those students fell in that same Arena and then we also have the breakdown for students with less than a full year enrollment maybe they transferred in so on and so forth and that was 37 in 1819 which grew
127to 44 in 2122. additionally we looked at the number of students or the percent of students I should say earning credit while failing three or more quarters and in 1819 that was 0.5 percent and 2122 2.4 percent we were also asked to look at some specific contributing factors um that could explain some of those numbers and the first we looked at was Apex which is our credit recovery system and in 2018 2019 again we're talking about the number of students who received course Credit in a course 2.4 percent of those students who received course credit did so with some sort of Apex involved in there in in 2122 1.6 of those students um did so with some sort of Apex in there the next category we call Regents overrides and to explain this is when
128a final year average was below 65 so not passing but the student passed that requisite Regents exam thus we granted that student a passing grade for the course 2018 2019 that was negligible excuse me um pretty much zero percent right around there and in 2122 0.5 percent and then the last category we looked at was just a final Mark override so for whatever reason at the end of the year um a grade was increased to a 65 or above technically and in 1819 that was not calculated but in 2122 it was about 2.7 percent and the reason it was not calculated was because these were individual text files that Miss wolf had to go through and manually Cipher through one by one um the final thing we looked at with our data was the question
129do students receive the minimum grade of that 55 Justin marking period one and then they have an epiphany and they get back on track or does this continue throughout the year so as you can see in this table both in 2018 2019 and 21 22 school years the number of minimum grade 55s awarded actually increases as the year goes on and of note would be the comparison that although this did exist pre-covered it was certainly exacerbated post-covet and now I turn this over to Mr delsignor good evening this leads us to our recommendations the first group of recommendations would require changes in policy the first concern is in the area of student attendance in the 55. there is currently no minimum attendance requirement for students to attend school and class the task force recommends that
130in order to be eligible for the 55 minimum marking period grade students must meet the minimum attendance threshold in the first year students might may have no more than 20 class absences per marking period in the second year they may have no more than 15 absences per marking period And in the third year they would have no more than 10 absences per marking period the policy recommendation incentivizes attendance in the phased in approach would give students time to acclimate to this change and also allow the district to evaluate the policy change and adjust if needed changes to policy and practice would include a mechanism to address exceptions and extenuating circumstances for students and we see the likely place for this to happen through our multi-tiered system supports with our mtss process the next area of
131concern was for Middle School grades in the fourth quarter the concern is students in the Middle School tend to be in attendance but the fourth quarter marking period grade um 55 that they have currently causes them to disengage from instruction and stop completing their class assignments because they've already earned a passing grade in that class this recommendation would incentivize engagement in the fourth marking period the task force is recommending that at the middle school level students who meet the minimum attendance threshold would be eligible for the 55 in quarters one two and three only and in quarter four they would get the grade that they earn the next area of concern is regarding summer school students who are not attending class during the school year are attending summer school as a less rigorous Pathway to
132course credit the task force believes the district should reinstate the pre-covid policy that policy was that students must have no more than 28 class absences for a full credit course or 14 class absences for a half credit course in order to be eligible for enrollment in a credit bearing course in summer school the next group of recommendations could be addressed with our guidance and practices first is in the area of Apex some students are disincentivized to attend classes during the school day due to the current Apex practice of 310 records that earned a credit by using Apex 251 were chronically absent from said course which is about 81 percent the recommendation aims to have students prioritizing attending class during the school day to eliminate the compounding learning laws and the task force recommends that students
133are eligible to participate in credit recovery in a given course for the previous marking period if they maintain at least an 85 attendance rate in that course during the current marketing period the next concern is also in the area of Apex students participating in Apex for credit recovery are achieving passing grades without demonstrating proficiency for the coursework in which they are enrolled the Apex grade is currently being averaged with the previously assigned 55 minimum uh marking period grade this recommendation ensures the credit recovery grading practices do not incentivize students to pursue a pathway to course credit that denies them the advantage and experience that live instruction provides the task force recommends that students participating in Credit Recovery may earn a maximum marking period grade of a 65 upon successful completion of the required Apex modules
134the next area of concern is tardiness some students are frequently tardy to class missing instruction and contributing to hallway traffic that disrupts the school environment the task force believes the district should reinstate the pre-coveted practice that practice was that students will be marked present for a class if they attend at least 50 percent of the period or have a known absence to be clear a known absence is an internal coding that we use for reasons such as music lessons office appointments so on and so forth the next area of concern is regarding late work some students are currently disincentivized to complete assignments on time because the current practices dictate there is often no penalty for submitting assignments past their due date the task force believes that inconsistent late work protocols contribute to a culture that
135does not incentivize meeting deadlines and do not prepare students to be College and Career ready the task force is recommending that each department collaboratively develop guidance and procedures for submitting assignments past their due date that are consistent those procedures for turning in assignments past their due date would be reviewed annually by each department the next area of concern is regarding roll-ups the practice is currently that we are increasing grades AKA rolling them up at the end of a marking period or the final mark from anything in the range of 62.5 to 64.9 to a 65 which misrepresents students performance the task force recommends that all marking period and final School marks reflect the calculated average determined by The District's grading platform a calculated average could still be increased by the teacher based on established grading
136policies and practices if they see fit the next area of concern is regarding 55s being used within the teacher's gradebook the concern is that in response to the guidance in the secondary grading guidance document some teachers assign a minimum of a 55 to individual assignments and assessments which results in cumulative grade inflation which is again misrepresenting student performance because this past practice uh because of this press practice we are recommending removing this language from our guidance document while teachers may continue to use this practice including it in the guidance document could be perceived as leading the next area of concern is regarding regions some teachers are concerned about the process by which students who achieve a passing grade on a York State Regents exam but do not pass the course receive course credit the task
137force believes that grade changes without a conversation with the teacher of record contribute to a culture of mistrust and misunderstanding between teachers and administrators the task force recommends that the building principle should review all cases and afford the student and teacher of record an opportunity to discuss and contextualize the student's individual performance and circumstances the building principle does still reserve the right to change a final grade finally the last three area of areas of concern relate only to the Middle School in the area of promotion and retention the concerns were that at the middle level students are being promoted to the next grade level without earning a passing grade in any core class and often without attending summer school also some students are just de-incentivized from passing all classes in grade 8 because the requirement
138was removed as a prerequisite for attending the moving up ceremony also middle level summer school accountability does not consistently require student attendance during summer school to successfully complete the program concerns came these concerns came from the staff survey and require further study the task force suggests a more in-depth review of these concerns with all relevant stakeholders represented the task force is recommending that a review of the promotion or retention policy 47.50 in the related practices take place and that all actions are communicated to relevant stakeholders prior to the start of the 2324 school year task force also recommends that a timeline and process be communicated to those stakeholders no later than the end of the 22-23 school year and with that I will turn it over to Sean for our next steps so at this
139point we are continuing to collect stakeholder feedback yesterday we emailed both School administrators and staff a copy of this and the recommendations and we are asking them to respond to a survey in which we are looking for their level of agreement on a scale of one to five with optional comments as well we also are going to be inviting the school community so the broader Community parents family students to provide feedback as well we will be holding a virtual Microsoft teams uh Community Forum from five to six o'clock on Tuesday the 9th we're currently working with Communications to add a link and a video and then we'll be holding in-person sessions on Wednesday the 10th at Albany High School from 4 30 to 5 30 and Thursday the 11th in person at Hackett from six
140to seven and we will be collecting questions and comments using a feedback form that will be posted on the website through Friday May 12th any questions so um thank you all very much this was uh boy yeah a lot of work and a lot of detail even for us to kind of wave through I'm sure there are going to be questions I do have a suggestion folks um would you uh if you have clarifying questions maybe that would be helpful to ask but I'm wondering if we want to absorb this also wait for the community or the various pieces of input from the uh our diverse Community to come in just what your pleasure might be if we could take a minute to to kind of discuss that Miss Savage I'm just going to say
141I really like your idea of doing clarifying questions first now in case we didn't understand the data or didn't understand something but I think it's good for us to allow the community to speak before we start taking positions on things because we will learn more from more information coming in Miss Wilson and then Miss Mann so my thank you and I agree 100 with um vice president Savage and president Smith about absorbing the information and waiting to hear from the community I would like to know how the task force is going to engage our diverse community because this is going to affect our diverse student body right absolutely a little tag on to your question are you okay with that okay go ahead I want to tag on to the question of community engagement and
142in particular I want to note that the first of these meetings is less than a week from now and I don't think it's been advertised yet so I wonder if there is a necessary urgency to those that timeline or if maybe we could create a little more Gap because people do have busy lives and as we all know in the secondary world it is Mayhem as we like to call it it is the land of APS and concerts and sporting events and all that that and the idea that parents are going to be free in less than a week to do this is um aspirational go ahead one more tag on we're just dog filing I apologize but since my statement was going to be very similar to Anne's about the turnaround time and also
143the fact that I think it was stated that we thought the community would be membership of the task force but it's clear that your recommendation obviously have Fidelity to the process they're very transparent so I was going to let you respond to danvers's question before because that was just one of my questions but and I just want to tag on to that is we only have uh like what like evening times available so what if we have parents that work second and third shifts I suspect would very much appreciate more time to uh run those kinds of meetings at different times of the of the day we did want to at the very least have those pieces done before the end of the official school year because we you know the Educators on the task
144force and are here and also prepare for those Next Level steps and I do think that after we come back to the board with some of the information from the survey and that feedback I don't want to project but we would likely probably take a look at the um uh policies again and in doing so we could do we could have you know a wide committee for that work I mean we have done that before uh with different I'm thinking of the uh the the one that Dr Wilson Turner did with yes oh equity and and acceleration those were two very large committees that um took a great deal of time to go through that I do know that the task force would like to see some of these if we are going to move
145forward with some of them um for next year and I do think that there are some practice things that we could certainly do outside of some of the policy work but that is how I'm sort of projecting I don't know if um Mr yagelski wants to add anything to that but that's how I see us moving sorry [Music] we started with the target date and I often learned that if you don't set timelines you don't really get it done but I've not been reluctant to adjust those timelines and wouldn't be opposed to adjusting them now but you're going to get too close to next year you don't want to you want to be careful that we're finished this year so that faculty in particular goes away knowing what the expectations are I have something to
146add on that but Miss Crazy go ahead I just wanted to thank you for your work because what an amount of data to go through and what an amount of research you've done I think it's really fantastic and I liked I like how you organized some of the data to show you know patterns and trends like when you looked at the numbers of failing courses by quarter and so one of the questions I have is since we're talking about failing and struggling students here were you able to parse out the data to get case studies of the failing students students that go to summer school students that do Apex to see if there were any Trends or patterns in individual students you know like what's going on with them what's getting them back on track
147even if it's just grades and then second part of that question is just what kind of work will as we get into the input from the community what kind of work will we be doing specifically to reach out to students who are failing courses students who are taking Apex students who have chronic attended issues who might not probably are those students that are raising their hands responding to the surveys they're not going to do it for extra credit uh to talk to them and find out because there I see some hypotheses in here about which lovers will impact student Behavior but in fact we might not actually know what what is what it what really motive what is incentivizing them so I would like to know if we've looked at case studies first of all
148that's a great question um we did not in terms of this task force dig into individual students because at the high school level specifically and I believe at the middle school level as well the mtss process that we use on a weekly if not daily basis especially within the academies that's the majority of the work that we do so we do that deep dive into our tier two and tier three students so we know everything about them we know what makes them tick what doesn't make them tick where to find them where not to find them things of that nature so that work I think we already had a handle on it was this data collection and taking the anecdotal data which is real the qualitative with the quantitative marrying them together to see what
149the global story is because we are all very good and we sat in a lot of meetings where a lot of Educators talk very passionately about those specific students that they had by name one after another after another um but correct me if I'm wrong we really wanted to focus the task force on the broader picture and how does policy and practice across the board at the secondary level really speak to what we're doing and how we are interacting with those individual students thank you that's a really helpful that's a really helpful way to place this project because I think you guys know that that's what you do and so putting that on the broader context is really helpful I have another different question and I'm going to wait to go around and come back
150okay thank you um Mr omanyawi and then Miss Wilson so I'm curious if any thought or analysis was put into uh determining what changes would have happened had these uh in these policies been implemented last year you see what I'm saying so what would the grades or what this you know graduation rate have been had we been doing what you say we should be doing we played that game um we went down that rabbit hole and we went down a couple different paths I'll say and what we found was data that ended up being all over the place because everything was so interconnected so as soon as we changed one variable and said well what if this wasn't the case we would then eventually say well if that wasn't the case then this wouldn't have
151happened and this wouldn't have happened and therefore the water was so muddied that all our heads were spinning after two hours and we felt like we didn't accomplish anything although the conversation was absolutely phenomenal and took us to a different place later on um I guess what I'm saying is we couldn't isolate one variable in a very real way add-on that we are looking we were looking at line items in a table but we're talking about students and students respond to changes so purely looking at the mathematics of changing this policy will have this effect on the graduation rate we'll have this effect on the grading that does not speak to what we're hoping to accomplish with a lot of our recommendations which is by setting high expectations but providing support that we can positively
152impact how our students are ready for college and careers when they leave us privilege here so that my my thinking throughout everything you were saying I kept coming up with that one word expectations how do we balance that and how do you so and also the real question too is how do we roll out these changes so that the message is communicated that I we expect we expect this of you and we're going to help you get there you know so that I think that's the piece that I was kind of focused on around hoping we get some feedback from uh community and a variety of community members on that piece in particular it's a culture mindset kind of shift you know I mean all of us do this if if we think there's an
153easy path it's like water we're gonna take it you know I mean sorry it's just something that we do as human beings um and I so anyway uh back on target here I've got Miss Wilson Miss Savage Dr shatour and miss krachi thank you and this is of course with respect to that the community hasn't had uh opportunity as of yet to react respond or engage I just had like a bifurcated question it seems to be a very um and thank you for your recommendations and still processing of course um it seems to be a very policy driven conversation with respect to as you mentioned how much how well we're aligned to um nispah and things of that nature and our implementation the aspect that we do have local control and the part that comes
154to mind for me uh of course is the level of autonomy everybody involved as whether it be the teachers uh you know I'm everybody involved really and just curious about how's this how do you put this this you know where how do we factor in other aspects such as our Equity policy and our code of conduct because for example you mentioned tardiness so if you were late to class then where were you on the way to class you know like is and how do we allow for success in that for example does that mean there's certain timing issues location issues or people simply someplace else and how do we account for that and you know I'm not trying to solution here right now here but just you know thinking about that and then to the
155point of we of course are data driven so are there certain and this of course there's a question for The Ether and for us to figure out together is there something along the lines of flags for example 65 is passing so thus if you fall into the 64 range what interventions take place at that point and how how do we retrieve people and bring them back on track I talked about this a little bit in recommendation one and it follows through in a number of them the task force felt as though that mtss process that we use would be a really important part of any policy changes and practices that we change so that we are responsive to the individual needs of our students in providing that support that I just talked about a few
156minutes ago we we acknowledge that there are always going to be exceptions and extenuating circumstances that we will need to respond to as we work through this The Savage um so I also want to thank you all for your work um it's obviously it's obvious that a tremendous amount of thought went into these recommendations and particularly the way they were structured and the the qualitative survey the way you broke that down and categorized it to collect the information that had the pro the recommendations aligned to that is very very helpful in understanding the whole process I had one detailed question that I was wondering if you could shed some light on which is that I was a little surprised there's a slide here that compares certain factors including Apex from the 2018 to the 2022
157school year I don't know Miss Regal there we go nope that's the one that one I was very surprised to see the Apex number because I noticed that a lot of your recommendations had to do with Apex and I know there's a lot of feelings about it about Apex and I was just expecting that number to go the other way and to see that the number of Apex credit earns courses was quite a bit lower than prior to the pandemic really surprised me and I'm wondering if you can help me understand both why that happened and why so many recommendations were made around Apex when in fact the numbers suggested it's not as highly utilized as it used to be great question um we went into this thinking Apex was going to be a very
158hot button not topic because it was a hot button topic but driver in some of this data because that's what we felt that's what the building felt um when we got to the numbers we realized that wasn't really the case and to put the numbers in perspective 2018 2019 we're talking about 343 individual courses that were affected out of the 14 298 and 21 22 211 of the individual courses out of the 13 141 that were passed so um it's something that we focused on initially because without the data collection to that point we thought it was going to be something however there are a lot of practices within Apex that we felt uncomfortable with as they exist or don't exist in a very well written manner so it's something that we always fell back
159to as the um kind of a catalyst and Driver to other conversations as this could be the mechanism to get around this other issue we're talking about so Apex in summer school were two things that the task force was fearful that if we tighten certain things up this could be a loophole so let's look at it all together if we're doing this let's do it right let's tighten everything up start to finish and that way we can support support our students the best that we can Dr shatur e comments and questions mixed together so just allow me some time I said I have a few comments and questions all mixed together so allow me more than just one question it's first question is uh you know those numbers increase over the quarters are those unique
160students or or have you haven't gotten to that point where you know because kids could have failed in first and second quarter and could be different set of kids who have failed in fourth quarter so you haven't gotten to that point we had that data by student um I don't think that we felt as a task force it told a specific story okay um some students all four quarters you see that straight through others because it changes I mean if it's 100 students all through the four they're getting passed that's different from there are 50 students who are coming through and it's a different 50 student who happened to past that and these guys had other credit or whatever uh yes and what hit us at the task force level was that the number increased
161both years as the year went on it didn't get better okay going back to the community engagement piece when you do go out I mean if you could dive down and look at the type of students the subcategories and and address the language issue too because you're going to be reaching out to their parents and we have a lot of you know ell student and you know so communicate in multiple ways in in different languages we have the supports in our department in our district so let's use them because we really want them at the table right we want them at the table and engage them now a lot of this comes back to policy and regulations and you want them implemented some way or some something disc is before the end of the school
162year and you want the new things to be in place before the start of the next year right and communicate to the teaching so that next year's grading policy will be following these new guidelines the challenges summer right we're having so even the code of conduct we're having a special policy meeting in in May because May is budget here budget season and all of those things June would be June 7th is the policy meeting after that we don't meet in July so next might be August September right the school starts so what I would recommend being chair I'm going to ask this if you could take those policies that you looked at those guidance documents that you that you you marked it up if you could send us those we could take a look while
163you're doing all this to see okay these are the things that so when we do meet in policy we'll have some discussion and get the ball rolling so it's not like okay we have to wait and now oh summer no one's here right so that would really help us um the the changes so in terms of policy policy changes are brought To Us by the district right unless it's a nesbara sanctioned mandate or this board I mean lately the board has been looking at all policies from an equity lens so we've been mandating changes in policies so this policy was changed because it came from the district the 55 rule was changed at that point in time the justification as we all know was okay if kids are failing first and second quarter let's give
164them chance they can recoup but the way you described it the intent was one thing the actionable items that were happening are not what their policy says right so we need to clarify those things so anything you can do in giving us that information before so next policy meeting is 525 so May 25th and the one after that is six uh June 7th June 5th we moved it yeah June 5th all right we just moved so junful so if you could get us before that time then at least we'll get our part of this stuff done and because it is important that we have those things adopted in place before the next school year starts so everybody's on the same page and we know exactly where we started before you go on with that so
165I mean I I think that's interesting I'm I'm also still concerned that that um so two things my thought were that some of this uh there was a lot of policy alignment so I wasn't quite sure how much policy change would actually be needed so I hear you um but um and that may be fine then if we go if you go ahead and give us what those are and then meet uh however um they're still things that are should emerge from conversations with all of our diverse community members well absolutely so it still means another then we are waiting and losing time if we take what we have and just highlight this hey these are things that we need to look at and we can start looking at it well we get more input
166it's going to take a while before the policy has changed so I won't quibble I I just uh feel like that's okay I just not quite sure I'm on that same page but I hear you okay I mean that's how we function I know but it's really this is really something quite huge so yes absolutely you know and the timing of it is yeah by September yeah this is what I would recommend I understand what you'd recommend I hear you I'm just I'm just saying I have concerns about that which I'm not trying to debate it I'm just saying I have concerns and one last Point okay and then to finish my thoughts yes is you know they said they see this at the University too where students don't attend right and just giving them
167the points doesn't help anybody right I'd never do that in my classes I'll give you a chance to pass but you're going to earn it since you couldn't come to class and earn it you're going to do some extra work so having that incentive incentivization as extra effort another assignment or something and you're willing to do the extra work great give you the restorative process to sign up and do it now that comes at a cost on the other end we have to grade more exams and more things into so there is a balance but rather than I am never I will never support just give them the grid because you're not helping anybody okay thank you Miss Karachi thank you I I wanted to confirm something you kind of touched on before which is
168at the beginning you said that your research and the analysis had shown that our policies are consistent with nisba guidance and aligned with our own District policies I had wanted to confirm that that our practices sorry that our practices now after this deep study are in fact consistent with what stated requires of us and that we're in compliance with data there's no legal requirement to change things we're just talking about improvements my understanding based on Arts that we are not out of compliance with state so so there's not some sort of artificial deadline of oh gosh we're out of compliance we've better get moving because we are not doing what we're supposed to be doing this is more class this is a self that this is uh self what's the word for it self-assigned task
169of improvement to get as good as we can be this is not oops we need to get back in compliance it's really good to hear that because I know at the beginning of this process people thought there was sort of an allegation that the district was not doing what it was supposed to be doing and it sounds like that in fact we were doing what we were supposed to be doing we were doing what we said we could be in fact we were doing what we said we were doing it just wasn't always having the successful results we hoped for so this is just a process part of our process of continual Improvement and to respond to that yes indeed like I said you know we asked a lot of questions of legal and again
170it appears that we're in legal compliance however they also emphasize that the way that we're carrying things out has contributed to challenges and I'd like to respectfully say when I hear about Equity I am 100 a hundred percent aligned to that that is important and hearing about the community and getting their feedback is critically important please understand that and I think that everybody in the task force feels that I also will say though as the educator sitting here excuse me this has been at the topic of debate as the teacher the classroom teacher sitting here there is urgency behind this at balancing the different factors making sure that there is real and meaningful Community feedback that is critical I 100 agree with that and I hope that the process can be amended what's laid out
171here is based on what we were given exactly yes but I hope that that happens uh in terms of making sure it's aligned with Equity 100 but I cannot emphasize enough that this is of urgent nature and so I'm asking please that we as a community come together to address these issues and I thank you I definitely thank all of you because I'm hearing thoughtful questions I really do appreciate that a lot thank you thank you let me just first go colleagues to Mr Eagle do you have your mic on did you want to speak on something I was going to let that finish and then oh well before I take any more board questions you are up next if you're ready yeah I I am okay yes I I believe that we have the
172right group of people doing the job and we need to listen to them about what next steps ought to be taken and give them Empower them to do that this Power Group powerful group and it's interesting too that State education department has been watching us carefully along the way not because they don't trust us they're looking for us to help them and we ought to take advantage of that it gives them all the time and resources we need to move it but we do have to move it quickly we do yeah and and I will say I think at the same time it may have felt a bit of a pressure from SCD coming into the mix so you know it's a little balanced but I think we're moving before taking on a couple questions
173I think that here's the question how do you have a recommendation now or are you a revised timeline um if you don't have that sort of mixed in your head if you could come forward with that as soon as possible I think that would be what's needed to make sure that we get to our end goal and that is to have this this uh piece all together okay I'm just so all right and Miss Savage go ahead so that's it that's really the point I was going to go to actually which is twofold one as Miss Bechtel said a lot of what's here is not policy it's practice you don't need to wait for the policy Committee in any way for the board you can do that tomorrow it has nothing to do with us
174that has to do with things that were implemented at the building level and at the district level so that of all of these pages of recommendations I believe two say policy at the top maybe three I've lost count but the the bulk of them too thank you with my my accounting I'll go back to my accounting practice so two pages of policy and then about six or seven changes of practice so those changes of practice are not dependent on the board's policy committee process so that number one those so that sense of urgency is there number two and I I hope you will not take this the wrong way we knew when the end of the school year was a long time ago we knew we wanted to get community feedback a long time ago
175we could have put these dates on the calendar a long time ago and still done them on this time frame but we didn't and it's not fair to parents and community members to say we didn't think ahead so therefore you have to change your schedule and make yourself crazy that is not those two things are not compatible with each other this is our failure to plan that caused this short time frame not the actual deadline right if we had decided at the beginning of this process when we first started talking about it okay here's what we're going to do we're going to do it in this time frame and then we're going to have the parent and Community feedback in May 9th we could have announced that on February 9th we chose not to do
176that well maybe not February yeah I think that's a little over the we gave them targets to begin with and they worked towards those targets it became obvious that we would have to make adjustments to it knowing full well that we were planning on doing something in the community and we didn't want to be in a position where we'd nail a date to do it with the community and then we didn't finish I hear time I hear you but we have to be fair it's more important to get the work done than it is so Mr Aman Yahweh and then I want to finish up go ahead so looking at the school tool data findings school year 2018 19 to 21 uh where lists courses out um so I want to go backwards when this
177was initially brought up I said something and I still stand by it that I would rather have our kids in school than on the street period um and I stand by that so we have to strike a balance but I also agree with the urgency Factor because if you look at the trend the trend is not good it's not good so I would estimate that marking period one for next year we would probably start around thirty two hundred or thirty three hundred and it's going to go up from there until it reaches a Max and it's going to level off because then you're going to have kids that are fine with it and kids are not fine with it so clearly the trend is not good it's as uh vice president Savage said if there
178is a policy aspect to this then it reaches our level if it is an instructional uh you know situation or problem you know let us know what we could do to help but otherwise if it falls into kind of that category we're going to rely on you guys to do what you think is right and if if I'm making myself clear we want that number to go down so that's what I've got to say it is an urgent matter we don't want it to go further up around 30 percent as of last period for who knows what it was like this year so for me too is you know we have a we have as a board as a school Community been concerned about low participation of underrepresented groups in advanced placement in IB and
179other courses so I'm just acknowledging that I agree that you know the trends don't look good but it also impacts everything else that we're attempting to do so so there is urgency in making sure that we um you know get this um information get it right get the right understanding and figure out the pieces so I'm I really do want to suggest if we can can you give us a date by which you could have a revised timeline that rolls us out uh to the finished product including incorporating public comment or comments from our diverse community I think that if I had the opportunity which of course I will to meet with these um co-facilitators and discuss that the board is okay if we just slow things down a little bit in order to get
180that feedback that we need that we can certainly come up with a timeline that takes us through you know June 22nd in terms of that Outreach um in terms of policy we would have to talk through how that might look um and also speak to the superintendent to determine how he would like us to go could I make a suggestion and I'm a little I'm going back to what Miss Savage suggested if it feels like policy is going to get in the way of not or taking away from the time we need to get the act the work finished and the communication out to community and their feedback then I'm sorry I I may be wrong but I would like to say don't worry about that piece at the moment I mean you've got we've
181got bigger things um I think on the table for you to finish up and an input to get back so I I guess uh I think I think maybe as as Karen Works through the the project plan between now and the end of the year that that's a conversation she can have with Dr tatore about rescheduling policy having an extra policy whatever it takes and we this obviously has to be get done and the other piece I wanted to ask about was from the teacher's perspective doesn't this impact the syllabus I know we've gone a long way in making sure um and I appreciate all the work you all have done I know that five years ago I used to hear a lot of complaints from secondary parents about the fact that there were not
182clear syllabuses and now there are right it's a dramatic noticeable difference from a student perspective but that means teachers are going to have to restructure their syllabuses so there has to be time for that too which I imagine you're thinking through how that all flows so great so as soon as you can kind of do that thank you for putting time into that schedule we will take the time to look at the time we have okay and see what it is that we can accomplish in that period um we do want to be smart about what we're doing we want to keep in our mind that we um our goal here is to incentivize kids I'd also like to point out that the 2122 date I appreciate what you were saying but remember that's our
183first year back after the 2021 covid year where so much of the year was not in school so I my hope is is that the data that we collected from that year maybe a bit of a bump and then we'll see more normalcy this year but we will see how that goes um so we can certainly put together something after we convene and discuss and work with the superintendent and relay that plan through the school board update and um and then come back again when we have more information for you okay very good anything else folks one final sir yes Miss uh man and then miss Savage and we'll close out you know at a time when um there's only so many hours in a day I certainly appreciate the work of the task force
184and taking on something that um you know the concern presented itself and all of a sudden you know it hit the news and the newspaper and there's all this negativity so I I want to be clear and I I'm not going to speak on behalf of my colleagues but I am kind of speaking on behalf of my colleagues we want to do everything that we can to raise the Excellence of our student body and their academic experience and um uh and so I I just I would like to say that I sincerely appreciate the time that you've taken to pull together data and to make the recommendations and I also appreciate a revised timeline so thank you thank you Miss Savage that was such a beautiful statement I wish I'd gone first because mine is
185a much more mundane question which is why did why are we only looking at 2122 numbers here why are we not looking at the 2020 23 right that's the Year we're in right 22 23 because it's not complete but first second and third quarter we would know how many right that date is available yes I know that the fourth quarter hasn't happened but the first second and third quarters have happened right but a lot of the data and a lot of the things we looked at are contingent upon end of year grades being changed I was just not talking about the chart that that Mr Ellie minyabi was particularly noticing and because I think all of us noticed that each quarter is up by six or seven percent since the corresponding quarter several years ago
186and Miss Bechtel is saying oh I really hope that we're going to see Improvement now that we're coming back um and I'm there we actually have that data we just don't have it in front of us so that if it's possible to add that and if that's just a love marriage for Patricia wolf to click the button thing like if she can do that because she's already wrote the code to do it for the first maybe maybe that's not a heavy lift to get this year's data for the first three quarters thank you all for taking a look at that um okay so I think that we are once again to thank uh the entire task force and you all in particular for your leadership and work on this uh not easy not fun but
187it's going to help us in the long run and I help our students mainly so um thank you and we look forward to hearing from you yes and they did this while still taking care of all of their primary responsibilities so we also thank you a whole lot Oh thanks thank you thank you again thank you gentlemen I'm staying here because I have a presentation yeah I was Miss Bechtel I was just getting ready to say that you're still on don't go anywhere okay thank you I believe that my colleague Jennifer Justice was joining us online I hope she made it in um Jen are you here yes I am oh awesome welcome thanks okay so we'll change the intensity of the conversation a little bit and um talk about uh my wonderful division um
188where I can speak to so many uh great and positive things that are happening in curriculum instruction and professional development we ground everything in the vision mission and goals our work is connected in that manner and in fact if we go to this next page up the division goals you'll see the threads of this throughout this presentation so my major goals are really around instructional supervision curriculum development and implementation and professional development and then all the sub categories of of that instructional supervision is about the leaders it's also about instructional coaching for my department and really that targeted focus on the professional learning communities that take place in the common planning time and our role in this division on that our curriculum development and implementation as you know we have a plan we have the
189cycle of review that really grounds that entire process and has made it so managed much more manageable and that includes also the implementation of new in our phased in standards and Innovative programming digital tools PD RPD days professional development and I include here the mentor program and student teaching because they too are really they're forms of professional development as well this is my staff I have the four secondary core supervisors in the content areas and every content is represented here um the elementary supervisors they're divided more to stem and humanities we have the K-12 supervisors that includes Kate Wright our fabulous Fine Arts supervisor and John gallarno in charge of PE and health Ashley Chapel is here as well I will make a note um that while I supervise Athletics I don't have a strong
190update about Athletics it's just way too large um and needs its own uh space to to show all of the facets of that so that will not be included in tonight's presentation then mentoring in PD and um my right hand lady here Jen Justice is here to talk us through some of that and Lisa dinardo is my admin assistant and I I just have to tell you I rely on Lisa so much she's such a great asset to our department and provides us with an incredible level of support um so um and much like uh Lori and Cecily we really have worked together over the years to set up uh structures for supervision the same so I too get out there to um in check-in meetings with my supervisors and we have a set agenda
191where we go through uh ml their their own mlpr goals and their their appr caseloads but a lot and then that coaching and Direction and guidance which is so important for our leaders and and we talk about those instructional things uh the walk through CPT status those Trends and then just the day-to-day Logistics of running the Departments my items their items and so um we have those meetings and then we have a secondary core meeting with a little bit of a larger group and the elementary core monthly meeting as well so those are kind of our meeting structures to get the job done and next is okay yes so the supervisors than themselves have um huge responsibility around instruction that's their they are content people they're instructional people they attend um all the the Albany
192High meetings and the elementary and middle school principled meetings they do a ton of walk-throughs classroom visits they pair with the building leaders or they do those individually that is their work getting into the classrooms instructional coaching we have that under our purview in the department as well and our instructional coaches support CPT at all levels and you know around curriculum revision PD data analysis instructional planning um and then we are looking for I've done a little um coach PD myself as we have new folks come on I have a syllabus to go through and I really enjoyed doing that work with um mainly the elementary coaches that's where we had new staff but we are as a result of some of the recovery money going to have our coaches be in a more formal
193conference in the fall with um oh I the man's name escapes me but the guru of instructional coaching so I'm pretty excited about that possibility we have a lot of coaches at the elementary level I have two supervisors but um I don't know the exact number it might be like 18 coaches at the elementary level and so those coaches are our two Elementary administrators they're their tie to the 12 buildings at such a broad spectrum of buildings so that's how that structure works at the secondary level the content supervisors are um there's only three three coaches and they are working plus the data coach and the tech coaches that report to Ken's office so they do their work a little bit differently in their scheduling themselves into common planning time Elementary only has common planning
194time once a week your secondary folks it's four times a week so the structures are a little bit different of how that instructional support goes but it works it works well on on both levels so that's that walkthroughs and classroom visits I know that Miss McKenna and Dr Wilson Turner spoke about this we really had a transformation this year with the classroom visits we the the walkthroughs were bulky they they take they take a lot of time and they um they're a very structured process the classroom visits were really an attempt to just say just go let's get in let's just get in and leave that Post-It note that friendly note and really get to know the trends and I know that Cecily and Lori talked about how that has been such a great process
195for them this year because our all our leaders are in classrooms more and they can pick up those Trends and and see those things more clearly than we that we were always having this uh this long walk through process so we do quite a bit of that um and then uh I think I wanted to let you know on the bottom of this one all of this all of that those Trends inform our professional development planning informs the set process um and my supervisors have conducted 877 classroom formal classroom visits in the system and 165 walk-throughs to date when you know I took this data a few weeks ago so uh they are in those classrooms our curriculum implementation we have the math and World Language we'll be bringing you a presentation in June about
196their work as in their year one of the cycle of review um we also added in the last cycle process the K-12 reading program but the ladies and I have uh that's Elizabeth Murphy at elementary and Jen Houlihan at secondary really talked through that while there's some curriculum it's really more programmed so you're going to see a different structure because you you can't have like a straight curriculum you have to have something that's in response to the children's needs as they are presenting those needs in reading so it's a little bit we're going to do a little bit of a different thing and we don't have a date on the calendar yet but uh I was hoping for an August um meeting and that's for Miss Smith and the superintendent to determine next year physical
197education and health and uh and you know just everybody else is the ongoing revision and curriculum in response to implementation we have the new and phased in standards implementation I I don't think I've given you this information um in the past but I I thought it was interesting because we have computer science which is a little quicker so that's initial implementation for next year and then full uh 24 25 and we're well on our way um to having that ready to go the secondary we have it in place in some cases because they're in in their courses um at the elementary we've done a crosswalk with both the math and Ela standards to see where that natural fit is and we're working with the Librarians to talk about some of the even just that word
198processing piece um science the full information full implementation of the next-gen science standards for grades five and eight is next year full won't be until really June of 26 I think is the last of the new science exams so that's kind of when you're done when all the rollout of the exams are here and then World Language also is just engaging in that raising awareness that phase one stage with the full implementation the test changing for um that June of 2029 so that's a long way out I do appreciate State Ed you know after the the Common Core implementation of 2011 2012 2013 was rough you know and we all learned some lessons um about how this has to be a staged and phased in process and I didn't know um Jenna would you be
199able to click on that nicer link and get back to it I I just thought it'd be interesting for the board I love this page the um stay that has done a nice job with creating um a great page if you just scroll down a little bit see there there's all your content areas and you click in and there's just such an incredible wealth of information I mean I have this pages in my back pocket so thanks Jed I appreciate it um so then back to this um and then of course our we have our stem initiatives the Seal of Civic Readiness the integrated instructional technology those are all a part of my work and then next one I know that the board um wants to know how we are actually embedding the social justice
200themes into our curriculum um and I know I told this story before that in the humanities it's it it's natural and it has been natural for a very long time especially with under the leadership of Jen Houlihan it's passionate about this we have the 1619 project come up and the same kind of passion about that occurred in history where where the struggle was it's like where how else are we promoting social justice and that's that first bullet that amplifying student Voice through the lens of social justice justice um and that's where we get sort of cross-curricular like just allowing our students to talk and even in math we have math talks and uh that kind of learning so um and then we've got the Seal of Civic Readiness projects in grade 12 last year was
201our fledgling year and this year uh it's gone it's stronger it's better so we are working with our community um based organizations on those so next the views um put this up a little bit differently so that we could see but I realized that I have percentages and not numbers um they're very much alike the views I this is really to show that our this is our secondary staff that the Rubicon Atlas is a successful platform for us to hold our curriculum teachers use it they get in there and sometimes you know you might see a little bit of variance um because somebody maybe is doing new standards or whatever but largely those pies kind of look the same so um so we'll move on professional development we have our uh our goals which are
202deeply aligned to the seps the d-sip and our even our district goals um and then the professional development days we did the half days I will say when you look at the survey data on the next page you'll see um they weren't the the half days we did our numbers were a little bit lower especially in that October 20th and I think the teachers struggled a little bit because the other half of the day they were meeting with their parents and um they were focused on their parents and but we know we don't want to send kids home on a half day so this was the the way that we've figured it out and we will do this again next year so we'll take more data and see where it um where it comes and
203on the slide before I actually I'll just tell you Judy you don't have to go back but we had uh We've scheduled 271 conferences uh for in 22-23 and we did with 200 and 21 22 but again we weren't traveling uh and now we're getting back into it and uh Lisa dinardo in my office works with Advantage travel who is the district's uh travel person travel agency that we work with and she really does a fabulous job I mean she could probably go get a job in that but I try not to tell her that because I want to keep her um but she does good work there so and then I think the survey data you could look at your leisure pretty typical and then I we are on the mentor program so I'm
204going to turn it over to Jen to speak for a few minutes on this so as you know the mentor program uh this easy all this transitions new colleagues into the district this includes people that have 12 years of experience or people that are coming in at say 22 that just got out of student teaching and so obviously the level of need is different but we provide that it's something that I'm really proud of a lot of districts don't provide that support and I think it it is something that is really needed in a a community in a district as large as ours this is a professional Community the mentor and the mentee meet an hour a week to have discussions meaningful discussions about curriculum classroom management everything we try to train our mentors although
205we do have some that aren't trained I do um we we're planning on having two trainings over the summer and of course those are voluntary trainings we use um the evaluation system to try to get the teachers prepared for their evaluation talking to them about um what the rubrics are and obviously the whole purpose of the program is to retain highly qualified teachers and the mentors do get a stipend if you look at this graphic I think um thanks judge it's a big jump from 20 to 21 when obviously things were a lot different we were teaching from home and we didn't have a lot of new teachers so you can see the numbers are rising we're adding positions and we do have some turnover and we're trying to Target the reasons why obviously and
206and to get qualified people in and fill the positions as quickly as we can uh Karen do you want me to talk about this one too yes please um so we've been working there a few things that that I think I work pretty closely with HR trying to help people with their certification as you know the state Ed process is really cumbersome and a lot of people don't even know where to begin so they start the process without creating a teach account which is really the Clearinghouse for all the documents and so if you do things backwards I can you know make things more difficult and more time consuming um I work with current teaching assistants and teachers and substitute teachers reaching out to some community members as well that are seeking teacher certification looking
207at Pathways to do that um Karen and Amanda powers and Frank um Delta Gore and I they had a meeting at Albany High to see if there were community members that were interested in maybe becoming CTE certified um because we obviously have some vacancies in in that area and things have changed with the Middle School curriculum and we did have a number of people come to that meeting and you know talk to them about different ways to get certified I talked to a lot of people about this maybe so you own a business and you decide that you'd like to do something different I also manage four apps to the talent Grant which is take a look at teaching and um this it was fostered by um nice it who gave us the money and
208said listen we really need to create a teacher pipeline we need to start with kids so we tried a couple of different um we we wanted to create a middle school pathway and have two middle school or three middle school teams um that sort of disintegrated because of frankly lack of interest it's very difficult to get kids excited about teaching at this time um so we kind of scrapped that and decided what would be a better way to do this and um we decided to focus on high school so we ran three field trips we went to SUNY Oneonta we went to Saint Rose on a walking field trip and we also went out to Suny Albany and um we were lucky enough to have Community Partners so we had um Elevate 518 that paid
209for the lunches for us to go to Oneonta but the apps to Grant paid for the bus so we worked together we've we also um I'd like to give a shout out to Leroy Johnson who is a first grade teacher at Giffin uh he went to Oneonta with me and also out to Suny Albany on a Friday night to meet with some of the school the kids in grad school out there see if they want to sub you know they finished school in May they can come work for us and get us jump on teaching and hopefully work for us so we've been doing lots of um Outreach trying to drum a business if you will people you know are interested in teaching hey we might have a job for you you could start as
210a TA you can have tuition reimbursement um so we're working on all of those things and obviously we're trying to promote teaching as a career and not just teaching too we we when we went to Suny Albany um we spoke with the school of social welfare and um so just talking about social workers and school psychologists because obviously we need staff in schools um and a large focus of the grant is obviously to increase people of color and our teaching staff and so the group that we met with at Suny Albany at night um is a minority group um Dr Tammy Ellis um and I can't even think I don't know what the title of the group is but we've met with all the kids in grad school that she meets with once a month
211and um we're really trying to get teachers of color and so we're working on that this is an area of passion for Jen as you can tell because she she herself came up through an alternative pathway and she's very interested in tapping into the expertise in RTA population and Jen's run some workshops even on PD days and she'll do something it's sort of an open Forum because everybody's situation is so different um but she has connections with Folks at SCD in that office so anytime she gets stuck on a question she she knows who to call so we're very fortunate to have her in our in our district and I'm happy to have her in my office our other responsibilities we've the student teaching program we do that we've only had 65 placements it is
212up from 55 but it's not as as robust as it as it once was I will say it does seem like the colleges are starting to rev up which has been good and we've had some asks from different colleges like for example SUNY Oneonta all of a sudden is looking for placements and I said yes you know let's let's not let's go outside of where we normally go and then some of the online programs which I will work I will work with too um so we we are trying to open those those uh those up and then we I Implement grants so the smart Scholars Grant is is uh still with me and um uh title for the well-rounded education these are the grants that fund the the music and art program in the summer
213and then also the steministas which as a Le you know as you know that Sarah McGraw started that several years ago with the younger girls and now Amanda Powers will be in year two she did it for the first time last year at the high school or at the secondary level and she does that right on the Albany High campus and uh the kids really respond well um the Fine Arts programming can't speak enough about Kay and her ability to put on an event those kind concerts our shows and tomorrow is at the Albany history and art the Museum of History and art which I'll be there and I think the superintendent will be there with me and to showcase our Elementary art program and then we had the whole uh program down at the
214Empire State Plaza so really good work there and we we see the kids that are getting award after Awards so it's wonderful and uh the stem programming oh night here's some nice news about the uh science fair um I know for years we've been trying to get that back up off the ground now covet kind of set us back but Amanda was uh uh Powers was able to is doing that with the grades six and seven every student participated in science fair activity this this year in grades six and seven which was exciting eight I think we had them focus on the ISS which is the International Space Station experiment so that was uh their thing I think that was the thinking and then we have strong partner with Radix uh Sarah they live in
215each other's pocket and have developed a wonderful partnership and then of course you know I do the district calendar such a joy and pleasure and um and I always appreciate this man telling me that she makes it what did you say you want to pull your eye and then Athletics and as I said I I couldn't be fair to Athletics by putting up a little slide so we will have to figure out a way to showcase our Athletics program in a different venue than this and I think that's it for me thank you Miss Bechtel uh questions Mr elmanyali it's actually a comment um thank you and especially for that little bit about the science fair I just wanted to comment that Ash had fourth and fifth grade science fair today um really great projects
216everything from like studying plants and fonts and you know all kinds of awesome stuff but really good job thank you and that's Sarah's been at that work for many years but we had a little Gap in the middle level and so I'm very very pleased that we've pulled that we're pulling that into into that that vertical articulation is really great K-12 yeah anyone else Miss Grace I just had a couple of I just had a really brief question about the pie charts on curriculum implementation and those represent the views from within Albany Albany school's users right uh the seven or six through 12 use Rubicon Atlas and I'm sorry I don't have the numbers if it were interactive you'd be able to press the pie I didn't realize that and the number would show up
217I I forget it's I forget um and I had it in another chart it's thousands of of views um that staff make and it's it stays pretty much the same um but I think it speaks to that everybody is using the tool that's excellent thank you Miss Savage I just wanted to take a moment to talk just a little bit about professional development even though I don't actually have a question it's more of a comment about how critical that is and how much I appreciate the significant effort that goes into that entire project which is just I know you've said this before I don't remember if you said this tonight but you know multiple weddings a year that's right is uh is is not a it's it's an unbelievable amount of work to put those
218things together but really that's what lets us get better right you know that's what allows us to take our teachers who are all fantastic and well-meeting and give them the tools to make more progress with our kids and to help our absu members be more successful in everything they do to make sure that our schools are successful so I just I just really honor the work that's done around professional development because without success for our teachers and our staff we don't have success for our kids so it's more of a comment than anything else thank you and I I do want to give a shout out on to Jen on that too we work as we're strong Partners on that um and she does a ton of leg work with staff and rallying folks the
219diff our different people that come in um so we we definitely work as a team to get that off the ground great thank you Dr chatur just to come and I mean many moons ago I erased the question about why don't we have science fair in middle school so you know I'm so happy here we we're getting back to it yes you know and our kids have gone out the elementary kids and and high school kids have gone out to the Johnson uh Henry Johnson and won awards there so it's like why is this Gap here yes we're back in the game okay colleagues anything else Miss uh bechdel and Miss Justice we thank you so much for joining us tonight and for the presentation thank you thank you pleasure actually up to I'll start
220the facilities committee was scheduled to meet on May 9th we were are going to move that to May 10th so same time same location that's 5 45 here at HG and we do uh also know that the Tuesday there are bids coming in on the face phase four pieces so they don't come in until late that afternoon but we are going to be looking at those on Wednesday um so that also means that we have a virtual budget committee or Community presentation so I am not going to be at that one but Mr Karis can lead off if there is a board colleague who's available on the 10th please let me know but we have not had I'm hoping that there may be a few more people but it's been a low turnout on those
221Although our presentations with specific groups neighborhoods associations and NAACP Etc have been quite quite good good attendance on that and very good questions as well so let me know if anyone has some availability on the top ironically I'm hesitant to commit because it's the Myers science fair so I'm hesitant to commit to that okay that's all right so we'll see what we can do um okay um next committee yes Miss Gracie I might be willing to be helpful but I'm already I actually already have a meeting scheduled to somebody else for 5 PM on Wednesday the 10th no worries thank you I leave tomorrow for a conference and I won't be back in time for the meeting yep and we really don't have to go down the line we'll be okay Mr Karis will be
222okay if not okay but I but let me know you know if that changes for any reason okay um did next committee report I'm just looking uh down at can I just let's see Ellen do you have anything I know you guys have a meeting nope we did have that we did have that report we do have another meeting and I believe that will be the 15th okay yes okay and go ahead doctor's tour so policy typically does not meet in May but because of the time frame and everything uh Court of conduct is being discussed we have a special meeting on the 25th of May and it's a court of conduct and other policies that have to move with the code of conduct are all going to be discus during that so that will
223be coming to the board there will be a public hearing and all that stuff um and then June 5th is our June meeting for the policy okay government relations we have a state budget yay what do you mean we're not getting started on next year's we will be um picking up the ball on child safety zones which we were told were coming soon so I'm hoping soon means you know shortly after the budget passed so I plan to start being um my persistent self on that topic again relatively soon and then we will also be moving forward oh gosh I just realized I meant to send you this quite a while ago for the nisba um how we get our resolutions adopted by nisba so that was I dropped that ball completely but I will
224pick it back up again um sorry Tabitha I know you were interested in that in particular so I will send that so that cycle starts again so that we can meet as a government Relations Committee and review the potential nisbah resolutions and move them forward Mr lesko has something to add hooray thank you Mr lesko I just wanted to note that while all that forward-looking all those forward-looking things are true we also noticed in the budget that that million dollars in our ish in our chart our school transition Aid is still not there so we're going to keep we'll keep on top of that as yeah I think it's not until the May numbers is that right so they're waiting to finalize the uh the enrollment to update that list yeah I think I think
225what what Jennifer Pyle found out when she dug into this was that and death Jennifer Pyle from the conference of big five schools is that the next time they update that is based on the May beds um thing beds numbers and so that would be the next time we would know but it should still give us so it that we are still likely Under reporting our state aid on the state aid runs by in the vein of a million dollars or more I don't want to say how much more because it really depends on how many students there are this year in charter schools what one additional comment on this the final state aid they took out that set aside large set-aside that was there so it's free to do as we want yeah no
226no carve out for high stakes tutoring um even though or high impact tutoring even though of course we offer tutoring in most of our schools or most of the time in all of our schools so it's not like we're not doing tutoring we're just free to spend the money as we see is appropriate I'm not going to do Roz from Monsters Inc but we'll be watching that Charter thing as it goes forward okay I think did I get all the reports I think so who'd I miss no I think we did okay very good the um oh I did facilities yeah okay so we let's move on to other business then and Miss uh Savage I just wanted to report that I went to the nisba policy workshop on the new uh what I think
227of as the 50-yard line prayer case so that was a very interesting workshop and how it's going to implement what kinds of policies we're going to have to change in order to handle that Supreme Court decision and one of the things it turned on was whether if if if the person was praying during a private moment um is that different than his colleague being allowed to make a personal phone call so that was an interesting way that they the Supreme Court interpreted what was going on that you know are you on duty if you're on duty you should not be doing anything personal and if you're free to make a personal phone call you're also free to make a personal prayer I am not the Supreme Court this would not have been my ruling I
228see people looking quizzical over there anybody who knows me knows where my politics are on this but that I don't get to make these rule rules but sadly the Supreme Court is in charge of this so we will there will be some policy changes coming down the pike as a result of that Supreme Court change any other business okay if not I would oh I'm sorry I just want to add something that I should have added earlier this Saturday we're having a big job fair at the high school and the ads are out for that and we're all geared up for that and we certainly got a lot of positions looking for okay that's right that's that's an important one and I think we I know we've mentioned it that some of those budget at
229least one of those budget meetings but yes so thank you for that reminder job fair okay anything else colleagues if not I would like to entertain a motion to return back to exact