001good evening everybody we are very excited to have you guys here with us and apparently i have to mute my s speakers there we go sorry about the feedback there my name is ann savage i'm the president of the board of education and we are so happy and excited to have you all here with us tonight welcome to our meeting i'm joined here tonight by board clerk tanya bowie by members of the board of education board member el mignawi dr chatur who is the secretary to the board board member smith who's vice president of the board board member wilson board member creation board member man could not be with us tonight but i assure you that if she knew you all were going to be here she would have made extra extra effort to be
002here because she loves you guys so much superintendent adams is here with us as is mr lesko who is the director of operations and communications we are live streaming this meeting which is why everything is so loud and on microphone so that everybody who is at home can hear us um and that just went unsp muted again i didn't do anything um in any case you can find these meetings at albanyschools.org forward slash boe if you ever wish to listen to one again we'll show all the documents for the meeting in these slot in these slide screens up here as well as in the virtual meeting screen also at albanyschools.org forward slash boe if you want to get to those slides you will notice that some of us are wearing masks and some of us
003are not in the audience some are wearing masks and some are not as it should be as we are doing in this era when everyone gets to make do make the choice that they feel the most comfortable with regarding masks and cobit i do encourage anyone who wants to speak in public comment to take a moment to walk over and see ms bowie who has a sign up sheet for public comment and with that introduction we invite those of you who choose to join us as we stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance in addition to saying 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
004robust educational program designed to provide the knowledge and skills necessary for success superintendent adams whenever you're ready thank you so very much madam president and members of the board it is a very exciting evening tonight we're so very happy to have our girls basketball team with us and we will get to that in just a moment but today is international transgender day of visibility i would like to take a moment to commend president biden and vice president harris for their support of a series of new measures designed to support transgender and non-binary americans in the face of efforts nationwide to obstruct their rights the measures that biden inhere that the biden harris administration announced earlier today include removing barriers transgender americans face in employment and the student loan process removing the requirement for transgender people
005to show proof of identity or doctor's notes to update their gender information through the social security process 10 million dollars in funding to research best practices to ensure equality and data for the census bureau americans community survey allowing u.s citizens the option of selecting x when identifying gender on passport applications the department of health and the human services and the department of education and the substance abuse and mental health services administration also will release new materials aimed at addressing challenges transgender youth may face in schools and in mental health care the city school district of albany supports transgender students and employees throughout the organization and our community we are proud to celebrate transgender day of visibility today we ask families caregivers and community members to be allies as well and to join the biden harris
006administration and our school district in working to eliminate the prejudice discrimination and violence that affect the transgender community we would like to take this opportunity to once again congratulate our albany high school robotics team for its exceptional performance at the tech valley first regional robotics competition earlier this month at the mvp arena team 1493 led throughout most of the competition and finished as the runner-up at the event it is the second time in four years that our robotics team has been the top capital region team at this event and our students once again have earned the opportunity to move on to the first 2022 championship this international competition will be held in houston next month and we are extremely excited for our students to have this opportunity we would like to thank our community for
007the outpouring of support that team 1493 has received sending a large team of students and coaches and their talented robot to the international competition is a large undertaking in the last two weeks team 1493 has far exceeded its fundraising goal through a combination of support from local organizations our families and our school district i would like to thank our long-time robotics partner national grid for its amazing 35 thousand dollar contribution to support the trip to houston ed and lisa mitsun business for good i'm sorry business for good foundation has generously donated an additional 20 000 we are beyond grateful team team 1493 parent gillian flynn also took the lead on a gofundme effort and collected nearly thirty thousand dollars from more than 350 individual donors in just one week our families and community members are
008outstanding all of the support in addition to the eleven thousand three hundred and sixty dollars that the district and albany high have contributed to send the team off to houston and compete we appreciate every contribution that has come in support of our students and their dreams this is the power that we have collectively when we all work together community families and the district in partnership to support our student success we are looking forward to welcoming the robotics team and some of our supporters at the april 14th board meeting thank you everyone for being all in for albany [Applause] we are pleased to host we were pleased to host an important legislative advocacy event at sheridan preparatory academy last friday representatives from the new york state united teachers the state legislature and other area school districts
009visited sheridan prep to learn more about the school's implementation of the community schools model under the leadership of principal zelika sanchez-gale the community schools site coordinator abigail gomes sheridan prep is an excellent example of the power of the state's community schools funding to support students and families sheridan prep has used its community school funding to provide families with access to a washer and dryer a food pantry a garden and a closed closet there are more than a dozen clubs for students and the dedicated parent group helps many family members advocate for their children's education we have implemented community school models at seven of our schools and we are grateful for the state for this continued support we have seen directly how this funding can benefit our students and families we also are glad to stand
010together with those who are advocating for the state to increase community schools funding so more school districts statewide can benefit from these valuable resources i would like to thank principal sanchez-gayle ms gomes and hope for hosting last week's event and also assistant superintendent for elementary instruction dr cecily wilson turner and the albany public school teachers association president laura franz for representing our district we would conclude we would continue to include our voice in the efforts to increase pre-kindergarten funding in the state's 2223 budget as you know more than half of our pre-kindergarten seats are funded at an outdated half day per pupil rate our district invests nearly 1 million dollars annually to make up for the deficit and we urge the state to close the gap for our district we also encourage the state to
011make universal pre-k funding truly universal for all school districts statewide as we heard from our state representatives at our last board meeting we are encouraged by the possibility that the state will begin phasing in increased pre-k funding for the next school year we will be looking closely at that line when the state completes its budget for next year which we will hope will be in in the next few days so thank you so very much we are looking forward to attending the annual albany fund for education gala on friday night i cannot imagine a more fitting theme for the event back together again for our students this will be afe's 23rd annual gala to raise funds that support a wide range of programming and opportunities for our students it is also the first one in
012person since the start of the pandemic it is always such a fun and important night for our school district i am looking to seeing as many of you possible there so that we can come together once again to support the great work of afe and the great work of our faculty staff and our faculty and staff in educating and supporting our students all of our school district offices will be closed april 15 and may 27 on account for unused snow or emergency days in the district calendar the planned recess days um yeah the planned resource days april 15th and 8th and may 27th are contingent on any of the needs that we may have with regard to the use of another snow slash emergency day between now and then i didn't want to say that
013too loudly because we really hope that we don't have any snow or emergency days between now and then if an emergency closing is necessary before april 15 then that will become a regular day of instruction if another emergency day closing is necessary before may 27 then may 27th would also become a regular day of instruction so the district has only used one snow day this year on february 4th which means that may 31st will be a regular day of school and work so i'm sure that you've noticed once again that we have some very very special guests with us tonight we are so very excited to welcome coach decky lawson and the members of our section two champions albany high schools girls basketball team coach decky would you please come to the front coach lawson
014[Applause] we're going to put you on the spot um and ask that you tell us a little bit more about the fabulous season that our girls have had and um not to put words in your mouth but just what a pleasure it is to coach such phenomenal young women and introduce your assistant coaches and our student athletes um i was hoping i was joined by my assistant coaches mark could you come on up coach twigs could you come on up [Applause] um uh first and foremost i'd like to thank our uh superintendent for having us tonight and uh the board the members of the board for having us tonight uh we're very honored to be here um i i really can't say i have done this alone because i really couldn't have done this without
015my coaches coach mark bob simple and coach morrison the girls have came a long way from from day one um and i'm just so proud of them um to to have come this far because in the beginning um it didn't look like we were gonna be this far um they they dug deep uh in practice um they did what they're supposed to do uh they learned the system and uh great things have come um at the end um yes we would have loved to go a little bit farther which our goals is for next year um they already tried to get in the gym already uh the next day after we lost so i'm just so proud of them that they they have that character um to to come up and and support um their
016school our community um and their families and and you know just to represent us the right way um obviously you saw the other day we have our scholar athlete michelle cancer she's our scholar athlete so those are excuse me miss cancer please stand up [Applause] uh also cassidy foley who uh had a lacrosse game tonight um she couldn't be here um so and then we have our mvp of the section shania edmonds [Applause] all-star azir gates we have so many um girls that was looked past this year um according to the section you know um because we have uh silent leaders uh you know b unique anderson who have led us um silently but she had done all the right thing [Applause] she's one of our captains and uh layla four who also was one
017of our captains [Applause] she had she got hurt the first game of the season laila ford did um and you know she was eager to come back she did all the right trainings to get back to the team um and that showed so much you know that she wanted to be there and you know her her dedication to the program to the school um have shown where we have come as a program and i'm just so proud of them i'm happy to be their coach and i'm just hoping that i'm here for the next 20 years so i mean it's just great so thank you very much [Applause] we'll do a picture right now so board members ladies and we have a little bit of a surprise i think for the team as well so
018yes bye wow you [Music] director of athletics ashley chapel just texted that exact moment awesome thank you thank you dr dobbs dr dobbs um thank you so very much ladies congratulations again and thank you to our coaches and our assistant coaches thank you so very much it is now my pleasure you've met this uh outstanding principal via our virtual format but this is our first debut in person and we're so excited to have dr stacy dobbs the principal at delaware community school to share information about the great things that are happening at dcs so welcome thank you so much thank you superintendent adams i'd like to thank the board of education superintendent adams and the cabinet for the opportunity to highlight all of the great things that are happening at delaware community school our vision
019and mission statement are in line with the school district of albany's our dcs vision statement is delaware community school will be a school of excellence and in caring relationships and engaging learning experiences that provide equitable opportunities for all students to reach their potential our mission statement is that we'll work in partnership with our diverse community to engage every learner in a robust educational system program designed to provide the knowledge and skills for art for success i am the principal dr stacy j de dobbs the proud principal i should say we have students we have 13 classrooms and pre-k through fifth grade so we have one preschool and then we have two rounds of the other grades we have 28 percent black students 39 hispanic latino students white students multi-racial students 11 asian students 2 percent
020students with disabilities 76 economically disadvantaged and 29 enl students our set focus and highlights have been ela teacher professional development through our common planning time which we call cpt and professional development teachers have been planning and implementing ela lessons that include higher ordering text dependent questions that are on grade level and include opportunities for student discourse this is supported by our instructional coach and includes a focus on asking higher level dok questions or depth of knowledge questions on levels three and four our math teacher professional development teachers participate in embedded professional development using the studio model with an emphasis on the launch phase with opportunities for student discourse our next studio professional development will be in collaboration with albany school of humanities our home school connection faculty and staff are reaching out to parents and
021families in order to help support attendance and academic growth improving connections with parents and families by making quarterly phone calls home our challenges and next steps one of the challenges that we're currently focusing on is improving our daily attendance and we're doing that by strengthening our positive behavioral interventions and supports commonly known as pbis monitoring data daily that includes both attendance data and our tardy data bi-weekly attendance meetings led by our home school coordinator to help review the data and inviting parental involvement in our committees to all of our parents and we're also holding and hosting various sports and after school activities at dcs so we have soccer going on right now we have the boys and girls club and huge fan of lacrosse so i'm hoping that comes our way so anything that we
022can do to get our students involved in coming back to the school even after school hours is something that we would like to take advantage of our successes are one of our big successes this year is our reading focus we are creating a culture of readers we want every student to have a book or something to read something that they enjoy we want to instill a love of reading our pta has done a phenomenal job of supporting that for us this year ensuring that in our book fair every student got a book this year also creating connections with our delaware library which is just right around the corner and having them come in a well come in virtually and read to our classes our student advisory team who you will have the pleasure of seeing
023momentarily in our video is led by a committee of students in the fifth grade they have been focusing on utilizing their student voice and having being in that leadership role and position and an additional exciting breaking development today that i get to use this forum to kind of share with everybody is that our fifth grade students are going to have the opportunity to be anchors in our new cheetah channel news our new virtual student news that we are getting off the ground in the next coming weeks so we are growing student leaders that is one of our focuses we also have a faculty and staff equity team we meet twice a month once we one meeting we read the book unconscious bias and we talk about the chapters and the second meeting we are developing
024our equity growth plan as a building on how we can implement um the things that we're learning strengthening our pbis we're creating school-wide expectations that are specific to dcs including cheetah tickets new this year and the brand new just the other day golden cheetah tickets where you can earn that by showing all three bees being safe being respectful and being responsible our garden club started this year in the fall back up again and they have just been you know sprouting everywhere students are being able to be in the garden during the school day they're encouraged to go over there and utilize our community garden as well as participating in the garden club after school super excited that that will be starting again next week currently this year our theme has been reshaping our future and
025with our amazing students our dedicated faculty and staff our supportive families our hard-working pta and an abundance of community support that's exactly what we're doing and now i would like to share with you a little snippet from our student advisory committee and they're going to share why they wanted to be on the committee and some of the things that they're doing this school year i want to be part of the student advisory council because i wanted to show everybody that kind of that i can be a leader i want to be part of the student advisory team because we get to help students be better at school i wanted to be part of the student advisory team so i could help smaller children and younger children to get a better future i want to be
026part of this student invitation to help young kids at ucs what we're doing with student advisory council is we're coming up with ways that in a student perspective on how to make school better and fun we did a spirit week which is dress up in kindness what we did for was for a spare week is we made it fun for everybody we made it fair for everybody to do it for spirit week we chose to make a place for kindness and make sure everyone is included we made it equitable because everybody on the team helped with the ideas and everybody could participate we made it equivalent equitable by making it equal for other people and making it possible for other people by giving people choice we made it equitable by doing stuff that's not so
027hard and that everybody can do [Music] thank you very much thank you so very much dr dobbs and it is a pleasure to have you here with us and thank you so very much we appreciate it and dr wilson turner thank you so very much for your leadership uh with our elementary schools and we certainly appreciate all the time and effort that you have put in with dr dobbs at dcs and i will i would be remiss if i did not acknowledge michelle bridgewater who is our school improvement director but also our apsa union leadership and we just thank you for your support that you provide to our administrators so thank you at this time we'll go ahead and continue with our district update um as always we start with our vision mission and goals
028because the things that we do within our district always align with uh looking to make sure that we are providing those equitable opportunities so that they can reach their potential in a robust educational program when we talk about our discussion topics tonight we're going to talk about our covet update and then we'll talk a little bit about the ela exam update and where we are with regard to that uh confirmed cases 1417 this is in our doh school report card 1028 students have tested positive 257 faculty and 132 staff members our average daily uh cases we are for march we are at 1.5 daily average this is the fewest that we've had experienced in a month this school year so as in our city and in our county we are seeing the numbers go down
029we're actually seeing those numbers go down here in our district which is definitely in the right direction however we know that we are not void of covit and we want to make sure that parents continue to be prepared with backup plans in the event that we have to make a shift to distance learning with regard to testing with our staff proof of vaccination received we're 70.4 percent and we have no proof of vaccination for 29.6 mandatory weekly testing for unvaccinated employees continues here at harriet gibbons and the scheduled times are listed below our current protocols are still in place mass for individuals who test positive and death shields in the classroom have been are some are still being removed but for the most we are getting through that process of removing those dust shields we
030still strongly encourage social distancing and mask are absolutely optional in that those who choose to wear masks are permitted to do so and those who do not do not have to our current protocols are listed there we've gone over these several times with regard to covet exposure the main thing to remember is that quarantine is all no longer required for individuals who have been exposed to those who have tested positive our vaccine information is still listed and we have all the links there so that those who still can get vaccinated who are eligible and able we still encourage that we are being vaccinated and of course if the booster shots are available we encourage that as well our new york state ela exam for grades three through eight this week was the first time since
031covenant since the pandemic began that schools in the new york area returned to the standard in-person administration um for 2019 the district's uh opt-out rate was at 13 for 2022 we are looking at approximately 4 at the elementary level 11 percent at the middle school level and the exam the math exam will be administered april 26-27 just an update that the future district updates we'll start to cover the feeder alignment planning process and provide details with regard to that so that you're kept up to date in that format and then looking forward to the 22-23 school year about the important events and dates that will happen so the district update will take a little shift we'll still include the covet information but we'll start looking forward to the 22-23 school year and those planning activities
032that are happening at this time i'll open it up for questions board colleagues i don't know if there'll be a lot of questions since much of this material has been is reviewed with the exception of the test uh opt out information but if you do have questions as always we will encourage each other to ask their most important question first so that we can get everybody a chance before we go around again miss crichy go ahead yes i have question about how the new relaxed covet protocols like a no longer the requirement for social distancing or the quarantining i know that we took the old stricter protocols in mind when we came up with our pod classroom contingency plan if we had a lot of staff absences and i'm wondering is it possible that the
033new relaxed protocols could call for a change to the pod scheduling so there are situations again directly related to if there are high callouts with staffing where we have to implement the tiered process of you know tier one to two tier three with regard to that uh that we will have to maintain because that helps us with covering classes so that we can keep students in school and so with regard to the relaxed masks we have seen a decrease number one in the number in the positive cases being reported are we seeing a difference in the attendance yes but it also depends on the day of the week because sometimes on fridays or mondays we may have higher absences and versus during the week but we still keep that pod construction in place so that
034we can keep kids in school okay my question was more i thought part of the pod thing was you kept kids from moving from class to class so that they weren't exposed to each other but that's not as much of a thing now or that's we're still doing that for protection it's going to serve a dual purpose because if we don't have the appropriate class coverage and we have to keep them in pods then we will do that in addition to let's say that we see a spike in cases for example we have spring break coming up if we see a spike in cases after that then it would also serve the purpose as well for uh keeping kids together versus having them move throughout the building thank you other questions you brought either on
035the cobot protocols or on the opt out numbers in state testing that's crazy again uh just just one more quick question i guess question slash opinion and that's i really appreciate that we're encouraging vaccination we're not requiring it but we're encouraging it we are encouraging social distance even though we don't require it so could we encourage masks without requiring them rather than being completely agnostic about you know whether whether there are advantages there i know it's a really sticky issue but i'd love to see us encourage wearing masks so the the state we fall under the state decision from the governor and so we cannot mandate wearing masks and and what we do is we encourage people to do what they're comfortable with and we encourage parents to make that decision with their children so
036that if they are comfortable wearing a mask they do if they are not they're not and then what we do at the schools is make sure that there's no um for lack of a better way of saying it mask shaming if someone is choosing to wear a mask so would we strongly encourage that we and we strongly encourage safety and so parents would have to make that decision but according to the state it is optional and that's what we would make sure that we um enforce with the parents and with the students right i understand that but i know that vaccination is also optional and we don't shame people and we don't guilt them into it but we do encourage it because it's the science it's scientific in fact that it makes kids and adults
037safer so i'd you know if it's if it's possible to do anything that's positive and not not encourage shaming or negativity but just encourage it that would be terrific thanks anyone else seeing none we are now going to turn to the time in our meeting we call public comment miss parents you're going to be first so whenever you want you can i know you're familiar with the public comment statement i still will say it but make yourself at home with the microphone meanwhile this is the time we set aside to hear from members of the public the board always welcomes input from the community about the decisions we're making per our long-standing policy the board sets aside up to 30 minutes of each meeting to hear from district residents parents students and other members of
038our community if there are more comments than can be accommodated in 30 minutes which will not be the case tonight we may choose to extend the length of public comment period or alternatively to establish a second public comment period later in the meeting per our new new public comment policy we also accept comments in writing by voicemail and now by virtual live participation from the comfort of your own living room comments that are not in person must be made at least six hours prior to the meeting to give us time to collect and verify them as needed the virtual ones just the registration has to happen in advance written comments must be limited to 400 words and voicemail comments to three minutes all comments must include the commenter's name in place of residence we do
039not accept anonymous comments by any means if you would like to submit a vice mail or a written comment for a future meeting we encourage you to review the addressing the board information at albanyschools.org forward slash boe which is where you will also find instructions on how to sign up for virtual live public comment we also ask commenters to keep in mind that information about individual students and specific district 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 for that reason board members who read written comments will pass over or substitute alternative words if individual names are mentioned and we also eliminate those names and descriptions from recorded voicemails we also ask
040that you 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 the relevant staff such as the teacher or principal if you feel the concern is not addressed adequately you may appeal up to that person's supervisor up the chain of command if necessary to the superintendent and decisions made by the superintendent can be appealed to the board ms paris has signed up for public comment tonight we only have one we do encourage that you start with your state state by stating your name and city of residence you have up to three minutes and as usual dr chatur will give you the one minute and ten second alert um so keep an eye on him every once
041in a while [Music] excellent and as you know we don't respond in public comment but we welcome your emails for further conversation hi i'm freda parris i'm the city of albany resident and i want to comment on the equity plan i'll do that and then i have i need another minute after that the history of black and brown children do not and not having access to quality education is almost as old as this country brown versus board of education was a landmark decision in 1954 in which the court ruled that u.s state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional even if these segregated schools are otherwise equitable equal sorry inequality at least that's what i learned somewhere in the early 60s when i was about 12. however i've never in my lifetime almost
04274 years seen equal or equitable access to educational resources for black and brown children nor would have i thought that we would still be fighting for children children to have equal access to the best education available though i truly congratulate all of you on the hard war one victory i'm sorry the parents educators and most especially children have had to go through this pain over and over again and we should be aware that while some people have been fighting hard to make equity reality in american schools and albany schools others continue to fight just as hard if not harder to make sure that it never happens the difficult work undertaken by the superintendent administrators teachers social workers parents partners and the board of education has resulted in an equity plan that we should all be
043proud of i know i am while everyone worked hard to get this far the challenge will now be for all middle schools to raise up all children of all groups equitably i'm available to help it anyway i can and hope that the city and community will do the same again congratulations to all who participated in this very brave and loving action i can't believe i'm crying see and what i wanted to say i've been doing this i've been coming to most meetings for over five years and most of you had heard my voice before and it was usually yelling screaming occasionally thank you occasionally crying and what i've seen is people coming together everyone supporting everyone else sometimes i believe and i've said this to some sometimes a little too much but i'd rather have
044that than what we have had in the past because there's a lot to be said a lot to be done and i think all together we'll do that i'll be i'll be there whatever you need thank you thank you very much in addition we received two written comments by the 12 30 deadline if we do not pronounce your name properly and you're listening from home we do apologize and would appreciate you're taking a moment to contact us to let us know how we should have pronounced it so we can do better next time mr el mignali will read the two letters we have thank you my first letter comes from judith wines it states dear school board members thank you for your work on the middle school enrollment feeder patterns i'm writing with the hope
045that you will consider creating an open enrollment process that weighs proximity to a middle school in selecting who gets to open enroll this would be similar to the neighborhood preference in the pre-k lottery as president savage mentioned at the march 17 meeting the feeder pattern selected severs the link between toast and hackett and ash and myers for families that live in close proximity to those schools the break is doubly felt in my family's case our ash student would walk the 75 yards from our house to the bus stop in front of myers to catch a bus to north albany academy every morning in addition to the inefficiency for individual students there are structural and efficient inefficiencies for the district kids who live within 0.25 or 0.5 miles of the middle school will be driven across
046town or take cdta this will either increase the already problematic traffic congestion near schools or increase the crowding on tripper buses both of which have further negative externalities some children who live near a middle school may choose to stay with their elementary school cohort the number of students who seek to open enroll and also live within a small radius of a middle school other than the one to which they are assigned is unlikely to noticeably affect the desired composition of the middle schools our family utilized the neighborhood preference in the magnet lottery to choose ash over our higher performing neighborhood elementary school because we valued the walkability we hope that you will consider keeping this feature of urban schools viable for our family and others sincerely judith wines my next letter comes from corey beck
047it states what happens regarding adding the six new tripper busses if the budget does not get passed are you able to still get the additional routes without the budget and that is all thank you very much to our letter writers and to miss parrots for your kind words we appreciate all public comments we find hearing from community members to be incredibly valuable again our contact information for both public comment and for routine correspondence is at albanyschools.org forward slash boe we now move to the part of our meeting we call routine consent during this portion of the meeting we approve routine matters for the district including 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
048us to use our meeting time more efficiently nonetheless each board member has the option to set aside any routine consent item in order to require a separate discussion and a separate vote on that item with that introduction i will now entertain a motion to adopt the routine consent agenda motion by ms smith can i have a second second by mr elmanawi are there any set asides we'll we'll start with miss krejci miss creature you're set aside yes i'd like to set aside the lisa good urban grief contract please okay mr el mignoli can i set aside number nine the field trip ahs robotics are there any other set of signs seeing none all in favor of adopting the routine consent agenda less urban grief and ahs robotics that is unanimous times six and now um
049i'm sorry we'll just do them in the order they were stated can i get a motion to adopt the urban grief contact motion by ms smith second by mr uh by dr chatur um is there any discussion ms creating sure i understand from my earlier question that it's possible to get the measurable the metrics that we had with the last contract with these people would it be possible to take this contract off the agenda until we have those metrics and also would it be possible to rework the contract to more accurately indicate how many hours the person intended to work because i got the response that the higher hourly rate was due to the fact that it's only one person and they're working more hours but it would be better maybe to actually have it
050reflect the uh work you know the intended number of hours rather than just a higher rate because they're going to work more hours i'm going to ask dr wilson turner if you will address that question so i don't i don't know that it's about working more hours but we're going from two facilitators to one facilitator so this person's now taking on the responsibilities of what two people would have done during those sessions and the added um difference for this year's contract is there's also um the offer of one-on-one counseling as a follow-up session for families who participate in the urban grief there are results um measurable results just in terms of the district ptsde service survey that we have internally available that show positive improvement in the areas that given memorial elementary school was focused
051on for the year and we're not saying that the urban grief work was the only thing that attributed to the growth in that survey results but that was one of the metrics that was being used and then we can get you the participation of families in that event as well as the other events that occurred during the school year which was the other measurable result for that outcome [Music] just um as an addendum to that i only have a question about removing it if we would see like a drastic difference but if it's the same measurable results from the previous contract would we still remove it if it's going to carry over and be the same like would you accept that caveat that unless it's different we can keep it or it wasn't it wasn't
052that i was questioning what the measure of measurable results were on this contract in fact this current contract doesn't have any measurable results for the future because it's not an instructional contract it was there was a previous contract with them from two years ago that said here are the expected results so i would have liked to see the expected results actually but this one that said since dr wilson turner says the results are positive then and given that they're saying it's not so much more hours but just more responsibility for the if i understand it correctly the higher rate is due to the increased responsibility of the facili facilitator is that fair yes and i and i appreciate you indicating that the the reason that there weren't measurable results included is because the new contract
053language for those who are preparing it does not require that you provide manageable outcomes for previous contact contracts unless it has an instructional aim and this contract is not it's part of the community schools fund which is a direct support to families based on their needs needs assessment for the second part of your question the explanation i received when i reached out to the person who prepared the contract was that the increase in the cost of the facilitator is for the cost of instead of having two facilitators having one who is providing that service to families so yes i assume that there are more hours in preparation if you're preparing it by yourself versus you preparing it for um two people to be able to present but it's one person who's going to be working
054with them going forward at a rate that is um i think it went from 150 to 200 for the single facilitator whereas two facilitators cost us three hundred dollars board member smith um i i um i think that this initiative is so so important and necessary this service that um i would not like to advocate for us to pull and wait for uh additional information if that's what's desired um i think that we could you know get that information you know really relatively quickly i don't mean to speak for dr wilson turner but um i think that we could do that and not hold up any work that is necessary and essential in the community right i think dr wilson turner and mrs adamson answered my questions adequately it was just the initial response didn't
055quite answer all my questions but the response i just heard does make me feel comfortable in voting on the contract so you're saying we can they can i'm saying i'm happy i just wanted to make sure i just wanted to clarify what was going on but now that i've clarified what's because it's a big jump it's definitely a big jump an hourly rate but now that now that i understand better what's going on i would be happy voting on it tonight okay great all in favor that is unanimous thank you very much uh secondly i need a motion to adopt the number nine the robotics motion by dr chatur second by um board member wilson any discussion mr al-manawi i just wasn't sure if i was going to be able to speak on this again
056in the future so i really wanted to one thank our community partners that helped fund this trip i'm super excited for these very bright students and i'm also very impressed by all their amazing work so good luck in houston and we will be watching thank you very much for those remarks i also want to thank the district for their financial contribution to this effort i really appreciate the shared approach of trying to build success for our students through both community partners and district finances but that it allows us to stretch our financial dollars for the district and ensure that they can be spent on instruction for our students who need the most is really it's a wonderful thing to see our community partners jumping in and making sure that we can do both so i
057really appreciate that um and and i don't mean to put you on the spot mrs adams but while we're talking about this do you know the status of our skillsusa folks and whether they got the funds that they need to get where they want to go yes they're going to receive the funds as well excellent because i love how much for support our robotics team has gotten and i really appreciate the times union but our skills usa folks uh culinary students have also been extraordinarily successful in their work and i am so proud that they are moving on as well um and so it's it's always so many fabulous things happening in the district sorry to jump on your um on your set-aside there but there it is uh all in favor of the robotics
058field trip that is unanimous thank you so much and that brings us now to the policy section of the agenda and i turned the microphone i'm sorry we do have an advancement tonight um i would like to um acknowledge that we have an appointment tonight in mrs bechdel's area we are looking at mr robert l lacasse jr who is now our new instructional supervisor for social studies and world languages he comes to us from hudson new york he has a background in global history geography ap world and economics as well as avid he's done some work in the capital region with youth social justice teams and academic connections with higher ed and boces looking at trauma-informed care and so we're very pleased to welcome him tonight and i don't know if he's on the line
059or not and if he is we would love for him to share hi i am thank you so much um superintendent adams uh i'm humbled i'm honored to be the next supervisor for secondary social studies and world languages in the city school district of albany i really look forward to getting to work advancing the vision and mission at the albany schools thank you very much and welcome aboard mrs bechdel did you have a comment um i too am excited to have mr lucas uh join us at the city school district of albany um i already have a pile of things that we're going to talk about so um be ready bob and uh and again welcome aboard thank you so much i can't wait thank you very much now dr tour thank you madam president
060members of the board we have four policies from last time that are now a for adoption um i just wanted to point out that 10105 the equity policy that we discussed last time had some administrative differences between what was posted online and what was discussed the one that's online right now is the correct version so the four policies that we have to act on today are o105 which is equity policy 8332 which is use of district cell phones 90 to 40 recruiting and hiring in 97 10 travels and conferences anyone have any questions if not maybe uh someone have a motion to adopt all four of them at once ms wilson board member wilson second board member elementary thank you that is unanimous wonderful and we really appreciate the work of the committee on the
061equity policy we talked about it at length last time so if you out in the world are less interested in our equity policy if you go back to the prior meeting you will hear a much more extensive conversation about the equity policy and as i mentioned then i'm particularly excited to see some very clear language about the fact that we will now whenever there are two candidates with comparable qualifications we will prefer a candidate who was educated in our schools or who lives in our city and that i think will be a good step in the right direction to have our workforce start reflecting our student body and that brings us now to the all-important budget update superintendent adams well good evening and i will be delivering the budget update this evening on behalf of
062the business and finance division and this report is very similar to the last report um as well as the virtual community forum that we had um as a reminder this is a budget this budget presentation is not final it is not expected to be finalized until we receive the approved past budget and state run from the state department and we're anticipating that any day now so we're hoping that we should have that if not tomorrow sometime over the weekend at which time we will look at any adjustments that we need to make in order to prepare the final recommendations to the board our budget is the fiscal representation of our vision mission and goals where we look to ensure that our finances support equitable opportunities for students in order to provide that robust educational program
063so that our students can be successful so our agenda this evening will be the following items we are looking at the budget process update draft budget with cost drivers the staffing rolled into the general fund and looking at what arp will cover for the next for year two staffing ratios uh hvac update review update i'm sorry revenue update tax levy scenarios tax levy history contingent budget which is a new slide for most of you but it does review that particular process the multi-year projections and the budget variables and our next steps so our calendar is as follows i will not read all the dates to you but this calendar is posted but we are hoping that if we receive the final state aid runs either tomorrow or over the weekend that on april 6 we
064would be able to begin with the proposed budget from the superintendent and then the following dates are listed with regard to the budget forums i do encourage at this point if there are any ptas or any other community groups that would like special presentations please contact our communications office so that we can get those scheduled um so that we can have more intimate settings with regard to answering any questions with regard to the budget so we'll start with a few key terms provided for clarity and the meaning of the rollover budget and the modified rollover budget our rollover budget that's all current staffing and programs from the general fund carried forward for the next fiscal year along with our contractual obligations the modified rollover budget are the rollover budget items that will be transferred from
065our one-time federal funds to the general fund for the new fiscal year it is important to note that where we started regarding the rollover budget and what it included it's a continuation of our existing programs and services our contractual obligations operations and then any staffing and benefits under our labor contracts the modified rollover budget includes all of the above plus the absorption of the identified programs and staffing funded with one-time federal funds and then the modified rollover budget does not include any new staffing or funding requests submitted for the 22-23 school year it does not address mandates that require more resources nor does it include other items considering to be essential for programming health and safety the modified rollover budget 22-23 we have made some adjustments to this modified rollover budget as we have been
066examining our funding and the needs of the district these modifications and adjustments include renewing our hvac preventive maintenance contract funding for our pool maintenance contract for the five pools in the district restoring funding to the 1920 level for our extended day night school program additional behavioral specialist and social worker positions that were added during the 21-22 school year and any mandated nursing positions that were also added during the fiscal year for the continued modified rollover budget additional modified rollover budget adjustments in order to maintain our current programs and operations we increased our software licenses allocation to build in those that were previously funded by grants and we have increased the allocation of technology hardware to support the chromebook replacement schedule now that we are a one-to-one district and i think this is critical in that
067understanding of why that needs to happen um because just as though in the days of hard copy textbooks you have to have the replacement cycle built in that is the same thing that we have to do with our chromebooks we have to build that in so that we can ensure that we maintain a one-to-one relationship increased funding for hall monitors and maintenance overtime to support after-school programming and facilities use as we have seen through this year as mask requirements have been lifted different covet protocols have been lifted and we build back in some of our after-school programming we need the supervision and we also need to maintain our facilities so those increases were absolutely necessary when we looked at the when we looked at funding for the identified programming and staff from cyrissa or the
068art funds in 2122 if you recall we we did make that decision that we would roll forward the albany international center our dual language program expansion tony clement center for education and then facility i'm sorry faculty and support and administrative positions that are needed as of march 17th we needed to make some additional adjustments as we are still balancing our expenditures against our current revenue at least our projected revenue and included we it included a reduction in the employee retirement system employer contribution rate reduction in our anticipated health insurance increases for next year adjustments in positions including those absorbed from one-time federal dollars increase in our boces expenses based on the updated cost and additional services uh requested most of the summer school has been moved back to grants for the summer of 2022 and
069we included our charter school tuition rate increase as well as the enrollment of 30 additional students within charter school our draft budget includes additional security personnel and equipment funds for additional maintenance equipment with regard to snow removal and school deliveries we did have a few of our vehicles that we needed to repair and replace and we realized that we needed some additional so we've included that our e l teachers and sp and speech therapists the additional custodial workers to support the additional square footage following our construction in several of our schools square footage work needs to be aligned with our industry standard ratios that we operate um with the additional sixth grade core team and i'll talk a little bit about that additional sixth grade core team i don't want that to be confused that
070it is these this is an additional sixth grade team at north albany that we know we have to have because we are going too deep however all of those positions may not be new positions as we look at attrition with vacancies retirements and we look at our staffing ratios what we may end up doing is moving teachers to fill some of those positions at north albany with the increase of that second team that will need to happen however there is no guarantee that based on the schedule we would be able to shift teachers and there may in fact be a new teacher hired for those positions okay so right now i can't give you a definitive answer but you have to understand the way that we have to plan is that we are adding a
071team to north albany to make it too deep in the sixth grade and then next year we'll have an additional two deep and then the following year an additional two deep so that at the end of the three years we are too deep in sixth grade seventh grade and eighth grade so i hope i explained that in a way that you understand how it and how we have to think about it with relation to the budget even though there may be teachers that are already in the budget transferred into some of those positions but at this juncture we can't say concretely whether it's all new hires or a combination or teachers transferring over can i just make sure that i that i say in the as as concisely as i think i understand it we'll
072see if i've got it right we're gonna hire four new sixth grade teachers we don't know where those teeth those new teachers are going to be they'll be four new teachers some of them may be at meyer some of them maybe a hackett some of them might be at north albany some of them might even be at aic or tcc we don't know where they're going to be because that will depend on how you deal with it but for budget purposes there's four new positions in the budget to ensure that we have additional staff to support that sixth grade team very good okay okay thank you we had the increase in transportation uh to accommodate the six tripper buses that we talked about during the feeder alignment conversation increase in sports supervision as we return
073to regular competition levels and i'll speak a little bit about um athletics we have increased that budget by 50 000 and we are looking at phasing in based on the numbers of students that are participating in sports we are looking at how we strategically build in over the next two to three years the funding to support the program so we know that it took a significant reduction a couple of years ago we have built back in a little bit more each time and so over the next few years we are developing that plan of how do we strategically build in based on the numbers of students that are participating in our athletics programs how are we building in to support the needs of the athletics department so it is growing now and we are very
074very pleased with that we are able to support it with an additional 50 000 and then we will look to see how we can continue to increase that particular line item as we move forward and then the final that you see the increase in our energy expenses with regard to electricity and natural gas it is really raining out there this slide is looking at the 116 positions 116.1 positions that we have identified where that funding for those positions whether it was cyrissa or arp and then looking at rolling those forward into the general fund and i know that that has been covered so we'll go on to the next slide these are 82 positions that are being held in arp for year two and this is where that conversation leads into the next slide because
075all three of these slides are connected i'm sorry i have jumped ahead but total from federal funds 84.8 ftes general funding added for the 2122 and for 223 31.3 which gives it the grand total going into the general fund of 116.1 this is my favorite slide because um i think it helps us see exactly how we are allocating resources our human capital um across the board every year as part of our budget development process we look at our staffing ratios by the budget by the bargaining units against our k-12 enrollment and here we're able to show our actuals for 2021 and are adopted for 2122. what's interesting to note about this slide in particular as it relates to the 116 positions and the 82 that we are holding for year two in arp we have
076to be very very cognizant of our k-12 enrollment and if you look at where we are now we are slightly higher than the 1819 school year however when our our enrollment is slightly lower and so we have to make sure that we are keeping our eye on that bigger picture of what is our total enrollment and how are we looking at adjusting our staffing to align with our enrollment for this current year and the next year we knew that we would be slightly higher or shall i say have a lower ratio because of the academic needs and the social emotional needs of our students so if you look at where we are now with only 7 800 students and you look at the fact of our staffing at 1755.5 which is what we're projecting we
077cannot sustain rolling in every single position that we put in to support the accelerated learning and the social emotional learning as it stands now we cannot however i will put it out there that we are carefully looking at our vacancies and our retirements so that those positions that we may not need to fill moving forward can be absorbed through natural attrition without losing the bodies so that the services for our students can still be provided and so this is why i say this is like one of my favorite screens because it helps us see that we really do maintain a good ratio regardless of how many students we have we are looking at the needs of our students and making sure that we are maintaining that ratio so that we can provide the services for
078our students and so we will be um over the next few weeks really the next week cabinet and i will be looking at our vacancies and at the retirements and just to give you a ballpark figure grant you some of those positions we have to hire but holistically we have about 84 83 84 vacancies and 35 retirements so looking at that just holistically you can see where there's some absorption that can take place but the devil is in the details with what are those specific positions to make sure that we can cover and provide those services for our students okay so that will and i'm happy to answer questions about that but this is part of the work that we're doing um in the next few days so that we can see where we are
079and please be mindful of the fact that especially at the secondary level it may not be a clean fte meaning it might be two sections of one subject area one section of another subject area and something totally different for another section whereas it's not a full position of one content area so that's where you end up with the point six the point two the point force that's where all of that comes in okay so we'll be working through that moving forward the next slide looks at our cost drivers our key cost drivers on the draft budget include benefit increases and um you can go through and see where we are we do have just under 1.9 million dollars associated with the retirement contribution adjustments and health insurance we do have salary expense increases just under
0809.6 million dollars that's associated with the additional uh 116.1 positions as well as contractual obligations as part of our collective bargaining agreements and the restoration of some of the additional funds for overtime in night school uh we've increased our allocations for technology hardware and software and then we have increased the utility showing the increase in utilities that have been identified as of the march 17th just under 875 000 and charter schools just over a million dollars transportation just under 631 thousand dollars and our total of 17.97 million dollars we can go on to the next slide uh when we compare our adopted budget of 2122 um at 270 million dollars to the 2223 draft budget of 288 million dollars it is important to note that the district is continuing to build back um pre-pandemic staffing
081but also keeping our mind on the enrollment and the programming including the funding for our facilities you see the notes down at the bottom uh just as reminders as to what that 17 million dollars includes and that equates to a 6.65 in percent increase state budget from the governor includes the following the 2.1 billion dollar increase in educational funding 1.6 billion to fund uh foundation aid increases and 466 million for other programs year two of a year three plan we know that at the end of the 23-24 school year our additional federal funds will no longer be available we will continue with the community schools set aside at approximately 4.4 million dollars fully funding the expense-based aides with regard to transportation public and private excess cost building aid boces uh to the tune of 464
082million uh continuation of our categorical aid at the same per student allocation that's really important because that's where we do have that software hardware our library materials as well as our textbooks charter school tuition rate increase as you know we have advocated for a cap with regard to our charter schools but we still see an increase in that tuition rate and then new program over 100 million dollars over two years matching fund for our social emotional and academic supports and just as a reminder with that remember that we are implementing the ruler program out of um for emotional intelligence out of new york and we want to make sure that we um we really focus on the social and emotional development of our students because we are seeing a great need for that and one
083of those things just in education we have to be able to address the whole child everything we know that we are an educational institution but everything impacts education and learning and so that focus on social emotional learning is extremely important looking at our revenue sources we put them into the four categories of local state federal and other and again our local revenue is primarily funded by by property tax but we also receive tax on consumer utilities and payments in lieu of taxes and pilots and so the other categories are listed there as well [Music] our state aid adjustment since february 10th i know that this has been reviewed and covered we did see a reduction in the items that are listed in red on the next slide um we did see quite an increase in
084our building aid which ended up being [Music] almost an offset for us however you'll see that that decrease in foundation aid and all of the areas that are in red you can tell that there are some cuts that may need to have happened but we are definitely working within those constraints and so we're seeing what we need to do in those particular areas there's only one green area to show an increase we are hoping that on the next state aid run that we do see more green than we do red and so our revenue estimate by source is listed based on the local state federal and other and so we can see a difference based on what we have budgeted for the previous year and looking at the revenue for the 2223 school year which
085is a difference of 16.3 million dollars the 2223 revenue budget in comparison when you look at where we are just a different way of looking at the same information that i just shared it reflects the adjustments to state aid in february increases increased use of appropriated fund balance of maybe 2.6 million dollars continues the use of restricted reserves and it assumes that the property tax levy is flat next slide please oh i'm sorry go back go back i'm sorry so when we look at the budget comparison at this time based on the revised revenue from the february state aid projections and looking at our draft we have a difference of or a gap of 1.6 million dollars our tax levy scenarios we have provided based on different tax levy increases looking at where we would
086stand should the board decide on a tax levy increase where would be based on the different scenarios provided our allowable limit is 2.4 percent as we look at a budget cap of 1.6 million so the tax levy history as a district uh our annual inc our average annual increase over six years has been 1.4 percent and the district's tax levy increase has been less than 2 percent for each of the last six years we know that the board is inclined to have a minimal tax levy increase and so we will keep that in mind as we are preparing the final budget so if we were to have a contingent budget meaning that if our budget did not pass there would be budget reductions of an additional 1.2 million dollars so if you look at the
0871.6 add those together there would be an additional 1.2 million on top of that which would then constitute the contingent budget including those expenses absolutely necessary to operate and maintain schools that is all that would be included in our budget there would be no equipment purchases except for state aided in instructional hardware any building used by individuals groups or organizations other than the district cannot be at any expense to taxpayers they will be responsible to pay any costs associated with the use in full in advance may not purchase pupil supplies retained by students for example t-shirts etc and then it may result in staff reductions so the multi-year projection with the tax with a zero percent tax levy as you can see that um in 2023 it would be a negative 1.6 million in 2024
088a negative 2.2 million and in 2025 a negative 8.3 million the next slide multi-year projection of 1 tax levy and if you would like to see other scenarios we're happy to present those but we just thought we'd show you the difference between zero and one percent um in 2023 we would be looking at a negative 443 in 2024 it would be a positive 198 thousand dollars and then in 2025 because of the federal fund impact it would be a negative 4.6 million dollars and again that is what we are trying to avoid as we move forward and we look at the staffing and we look at the programs and we look at those true one-time funds that is what we are trying to avoid and i think that presents a very clear picture of what
089the fiscal cliff that everyone has been talking about means and so when you look at it in dollars and cents it really makes sense to understand why our enrollment is so important how we adjust our staffing in terms of that enrollment and then looking at what adjustments we need to make within supporting our students in the best possible way so our budget variables there are basically two variables that are left state aid which is typically not finalized until the end of march april 1 and then tax levy which is set in early april so those are our two budget variables our next step we are still finalizing district priorities incorporating new information as it becomes available we're responding to the board questions please keep them coming so that we can get them to you some
090of them may take a little bit longer as we're getting into much more detail but know that we will absolutely provide those responses incorporating the feedback from the board community and staff as you know we have our meetings that are scheduled so that we can share with the community and answer those questions in intimate settings as well as make sure that we are answering those questions here in a very formal setting and then continue our our lobbying efforts with our legislators at this time i will open the floor for questions thank you very much you did a fine job of doing your inner deputy superintendent of business affairs as usual board colleagues i ask you to prioritize your questions think about which ones are most important and that we will go through the um and
091we'll do one at a time as we always do and we will go through the slide show again as we always do sort of roughly in order and then we are always of course free to have further conversation afterwards any questions about the budget process um update that's just really at the very very beginning up through slide three seeing none anything on the cost drivers and expense side which would be basically slides four through eleven anything on slides four through eleven okay then the next couple of slides are about staffing and staffing ratios that's slides twelve through fifteen anybody have specific questions on those oh go ahead board member smith um just just a comment superintendent i really appreciate your your discussion around your favorite slide because that one is a really important one in
092addition to being your favorite um but it it uh makes sense to me and so i'm just commenting out loud um uh to to understand the level of both academic and social emotional need is is really really important and that message also hit home for me as i was reading um data slides uh that will be talked about later on tonight um and so it seems to me and i know that it's it's always takes time when we're dealing with human behavior and change but that seems this this next couple of years is really critical in on that service end that support end um so i'm again i'm just talking out loud to myself that i hear you and that makes perfect sense okay um i think there was a one thing and i can't
093remember which slide it's on that i would just like to make sure is reflected the next time we do these slides and particularly when we do it for the community which is the transportation which is still showing the gross cost and not the net cost um which i know is tricky this year because there's that one-year delay but that we had intentionally decided to contribute money from reserves to cover that so the net impact of the transportation on the budget is only about fifty thousand dollars ish i can't remember the exact number i'm sure deputy supreme courting has it not the 275 that's shown and i think that's important for people to understand what the real impact of transportation is on the ongoing budget anything else on the expense side or staffing side then the
094next series of slides okay oh yes you can go ahead and i'm just i'm just talking out loud but i like and it goes the staffing piece goes right back to that fiscal cliff piece yeah so the hope is is that if you if we can really hone in on those services these next couple years then we might go back to i don't want to say a normal but a different level of service still providing some continuity of service that's needed but it won't it should not be all of what we need to address these past two years going forward for another two years right so again i'm sorry i'm just coming no no i think it's a great point making that connection one of the connections i want to make for people as well
095is that the ratio slide is an all sources slide that is not just general fund staffing that's all staffing including the staff that's supported by arp and cyrissa money which was specifically designed for the purpose you're describing which is this elevated need for staffing for um our whole society to re return from the cove disruption right that's what the money was provided for that's why we're spending it that is why we're seeing this um extremely um impressive four and a half to one student to staff ratio right which we would generally not be able to uh to sustain as a community but because we have those additional funds that's that's why that's why it looks like that so that i think that's an important aspect of this slide that i i did verify with the
096deputy superintendent to make sure i understood it this is not a general fund slide this is every person who works for the district whether they're supported by a grant whether they are supported by cyrissa whether they're supported by arp whether they're supported by tax dollars um you know as part of the general fund it's every single person and i think that's that's really important to understand um let's see she's okay so that brings us to revenue the the governor's revenue proposal and also the comparison of the state aid runs i echo the superintendent's comments and hopes that we will soon have a new york state budget so that the next time we are together on april 6 we will actually know what our revenue will be we have been very lucky for the last at
097least six seven years to actually have the state budget adopted before we need to adopt the the school budgets that's not always the way it works so i am always nervous that they are going to do something crazy and not adopt their budget we have to guess what our revenue is going to be which which is never a good place to be um any questions about that uh anything on contingency this is a question that was asked in um the public comment about like what happens about our commitments regarding um the middle schools and the transportation and what's going to happen if we have a contingency budget one of the things people have to understand is that the content the budget vote is only on the portion of the budget that has to do with
098the tax levy right and so the more and more of our budget especially during this period is is dependent on uh arp money and state aid as opposed to tax levy money so even if the budget were to be to go down and it would go down twice the net impact on our spending would be only the difference between whatever we adopt and whatever we're spending this year which is not likely to be a huge amount of money because we are all sensitive to where we are um and so then what would happen if it goes down on may 17th then the board will meet and the board will decide what to do next whether to put up the same budget or reduce budget and if a reduced budget then what would we reduce um
099the specific question that was asked in public comment was about transportation the net impact of transportation is only about fifty thousand dollars on the budget so that's not going to be a huge savings for us we'd have to find that money someplace else so uh contingent budget then multi-year projections yes mr albany so i was actually kind of curious about the uh the one percent slide is that calculating one percent just for this year and then flat for 24 25 or one percent each year one percent each year okay and it it doesn't look like quite one percent because she only did one percent on the tax levy not on other funding sources you see how it says local 0.92 you would expect if that were the tax levy for that to say one but
100it's she did one percent on the tax levy alone there are other sources of funds embedded in that local which have to do with utility taxes and pilots and some other things that she maintained flat um or made some other projection i don't know exactly what she did on those but the one percent was only on the tax levy um got it that makes sense yeah okay um i guess i'll i'm gonna use these multi multi um year projections to um to also thank the superintendent for her comments around reducing staffing by attrition and the need for us to follow through on our plan right our plan for arp was to invest in staff and non-stop expenses and then to as much as possible allow those positions to reduce by attrition over time um because
101we know thank goodness we have the foundation aid increase right so we will be able to sustain a larger percentage of those people than we thought we would when we when we started but it's not going to be every position we're not going to be able to maintain this level of staff because we're not going to see 6 12 foundation rate increases every year indefinitely and so my only ask and you know i i leave the deputy superintendent to do her job the way she wants to do it and the way she thinks it ought to be done but this one percent slide and the zero percent slide they assume that we roll back 100 of the staff that every arp staff member is paid so that four million dollars five million dollars that we're
102seeing in 2025 is only five million dollars if we do can maintain 100 of the staff which was never the plan now i know that the superintendent and her team need to figure out who not just actual human beings but which positions we are going to release and not bring over that's not our job what i can say as a board member is that we're not going to do this this is not a realistic projection of where we're going to be in two years because we never planned to bring every um person over so if we were to say reduce the staff instead of seeing 6.5 this year 6.37 next year and 5.5 what if it were 5.5 5.37 and 4.5 we would still be in the red but it wouldn't look quite as bad
103as this and so i agree with every single thing that the superintendent said the needs are extreme this year extraordinary for the next couple of years we want to do every single thing we can for our students we know our students were underfunded before covet right the need has always outstripped the resources but especially in a year where we got this huge state aid increase i really appreciate your sensitivity to property taxes i mean i really feel it's it's a hard it's a hard thing to ask for any meaningful property tax increase in this environment when we have some give right we don't have to bring the 80 whatever we're doing this year in this year we could leave a couple more out in arp which would mean we'd have to reduce more by attrition
104in order to avoid the fiscal cliff right so i you know i think we have some choices here um that don't necessarily mean reductions thanks i just want to kind of follow with what you're saying so um and i think uh generally missouri has presented these budgets the way that it's traditionally been done is it then fair to say this is the worst case scenario i mean is that how we should approach this or are you actually suggesting that there should be a different way in presenting the budget if i may madam president vice president smith due to the fact that the work that we are engaged in right now is not completed with what that true attrition would be we have to assume that those positions are going to be there because otherwise that
105would be i mean even though that may not be realistic because we know that some positions will go away it would be a more inaccurate representation to give a false sense of what is less so in order to show the worst case what would it look like that at least gives you that view of okay if this were to happen what if something did happen where we had to maintain every single position then this is what we would be looking at that's going to govern your decisions but knowing that we are doing that work to say here's what attrition looks like year one here's what it might look like year two that gives you some solace in knowing okay if we go with a one percent tax levy here's what we could expect to see
106if all the positions are maintained however we know that that is not the case you know that it would end up being less how much less i can't say that right now because that's the work that we're engaging in yeah and again the the this i think this is a very traditional way of doing it and it's a perfectly reasonable way of doing it it's just that we're in a very unreasonable environment right because normally you're not dealing with this oh look here's gajillions of arp dollars now figure out how to manage that over three years it's very very very unusual um but what is also the case here is that we there's assumptions built in about foundation aid right that that foundation aid that third year will be five percent that's a guess right
107it's an educated guess it's an educated guess we we also know that our enrollment as the superintendent talked about has been declining two percent a year every year for five or six years well before covert we were seeing that it may be turning around we don't know but that will start to impact our foundation aid ultimately right as your enrollment declines ultimately your foundation aid declines and that become makes it more and more difficult to do what we've done as a board so effectively i think which is to continue delivering more and more services to our students but relying less and less on our property taxpayers right we know that's something that the sport can take incredible pride in that we are now only supporting the district budget by 40 some odd percent in property
108taxes rather than 50 some odd percent which we were seven or eight years ago so it's it's a really it's a real credit that we're able to provide more and more services without relying on our property taxpayers but as our enrollment declines our state aid is going to decline and that's not reflected here so that's you know all of this is multi-year projections are all you can do is is your best um so um okay thank you guys for um letting me talk that through i do think it's important for us just to understand that that negative 4.6 that is sort of a worst case as smith phrased it so well i think um and not to be you know thinking that that's predicted for sure any other budget comments i remind you that we
109will have a state budget sometime soon so hopefully by the time we come back to see each other again on the sixth which is an unusual date for us right we're gonna meet on wednesday six days from now um not thursday wednesday and not a week off but um a week on um and to have this discussion and hopefully we'll have real slight real revenue projections anything else before we turn on to the district priorities update all right superintendent adams back to you well thank you again so very much this is an exciting time with regard to our presentation tonight and it is a collective presentation our cabinet members and myself we will participate in this moving through our mid-year update we have our district priorities um which really lay the foundation of all the
110work that we do we do this collectively with the board we establish that direction at our summer retreat we look forward to how we are developing the metrics for what we are looking at when we talk about our guiding principles i think this year more than any other year our district priorities align with the equity policy and where we stand in terms of what we want to accomplish as a district in terms of providing our equitable opportunities for our students delivering that robust educational program focusing on student achievement improving and enhancing the delivery of quality instruction building our leadership capacity through our professional development opportunities and then the implementation of that professional development empowering our families so that we can develop more of that two-way communication with our families and then partnering with our diverse
111community because we know that this work cannot be done along alone so i apologize up front for the 60 slides but i think that you will find that this is worthwhile information our district priorities are based on the social emotional mental health supports of our students our educational technology safety and security ventilation and air filtration and the accelerated learning and academic support if you recall at the beginning of the year we shared out what our priorities are and then we looked at different categories that helped us define equity and we have our equitable our equity categories our indicators and our metrics and what we're providing to you tonight is a mid-year update of where we are on particular areas every area i will start by saying every area we do not have data on but
112we are sharing with you the data that we have readily available at this time of the year knowing that at the end of the year there will be a district equity report card that we will be developing so you will not necessarily see 60 slides because the format will change in more of a report card format and what that looks like we have to design that based on all of the comprehensive data that we will be collecting so there is the entire cabinet has participated in developing this while everyone may not be speaking you have to understand that it is a complete total partnership and group effort in putting this information together and so we look at the first category of equitable student academic success and the indicator is that the evidence of racial disparities
113in student success would be narrowing and the data that we talked about using to to show this would be the nwea results which we do not have included in this presentation but it will be included in the final looking at the graduation rates among sub subgroups the enrollment in middle school honors and the enrollment in high school ap ib university of the high school and cte and so i'm just going to go through these slides very quickly at a very high level because miss mckenna will be sharing with you this information about the graduation in detail so that you can actually see how we got to the 82 percent graduation rate that will happen in a separate presentation but if you look at this first slide we're looking at the three year trend by outcome
114for albany high 2017 cohort june and if you look at where we are all graduates you'll see where we stand and looking at where we are with regard to regents with advanced designation you can see the breakdown with regard to the region's diploma the local diploma you can also see the ged information you can see who's still enrolled and you can also see the dropout rate what is interesting to note is that from 2018 to the present that dropout rate is consistently getting smaller and so we're very very proud of that so thank you we are also very proud of the increase in our graduation rate because when you look at that column it is consistently going up and so we're very pleased with that one of the other things i'm going to move on
115to slide seven when we look at the three-year trend accountability by subgroups this is always um one of the the slides that we pay attention to as we look at how we are narrowing that gap which is what equity is about and as you can see um our students of color we are absolutely closing the gap but one of the things that i think is extremely important is to note that all of our subgroups are improving and moving forward so we're not only narrowing the gap we're also increasing that achievement along the way when you look at the next slide this is the august information for the same the same ability accountability by subgroups we're looking at the august information so this is where we show the 82 graduation rate we also show that our
116african-american and black students are at 83 percent our white students are at 87 percent and that is very impressive to see the work that has been going on when we look at our middle school ela honors if you recall a few years ago we did look at how we were placing kids in our honors classes and so you will see that we did have a little bit of a covet dip um but you can still see that with regard to our district percentages where we stand with our subgroups in our honors classes overall and that's in ela and then looking at our math you can see that um especially within our african-american subgroup that that number has increased to 16.8 percent of our african-american students in math honors also looking at our hispanic students who
117have increased to 26.8 percent um and then you can see our other subgroups there um where we stand so we are monitoring that very carefully not only having students enrolled in the program but the success of the students in those programs that is that next level of looking at how many students are passing those classes and looking at that particular piece with that information our at our high school looking at our advanced classes you can see our district percentages and then you'll see the the breakout by subgroup a slight decrease in some areas with our hispanic students holding steady with our african-american students and our asian population and so those are things that we will be looking at in terms of that's the overall grouping and then we show the breakdown by particular course for
118example the international baccalaureate you can see that there are some increases with our african-american students and with our white students and then there were slight decreases with our hispanic and asian students and slight increase with our multi-ethnic students when we look at our advanced placement classes across the board we were seeing some slight decreases so we're definitely looking into what those decree what may be the reasons for that and um again understanding that you know we were virtual for part of the time in person for part of the time and then now this year looking at everyone being in person and seeing what those impacts were the dual enrollment university in the high school we're holding steady pretty much across the board there's some slight decreases with our hispanic population asian population and multi-ethnic group
119we want to make sure that we are providing those opportunities one of the things that we've started to look at is exploring the question the possibilities of our students finishing high school with associate degrees or the equivalent and so one of the things that we've done is we've examined from our juniors sophomores and freshmens that are currently enrolled what's the feasibility of getting them close we know that our best opportunity for this is looking back at the middle school and having those informationals and making sure that kids are aware of it and getting them prepared at middle school for the increased rigor of the coursework and even thinking about the dual enrollment because that's going to open the door that most likely with our next cohort just the sheer clock time of being able to
120get the 60 credits in order to earn that associate's degree in high school and when you think about that by opening up that possibility not only do we increase our graduation rate we have to think of the economic component for our students and it is grounded in equity because finishing two years of undergraduate work as a high school student already cuts your expense by 50 in going on to college that has no bearing of ethnicity it has no bearing of social economic status because even if a parent selects and has the opportunity to pay for their child's education for four years if we were able to say two years of that we can cut in half by having your child get an associate degree in high school and graduate not only with a high school
121diploma but with an associate's degree i don't know anyone who wouldn't take us up on that i just don't know that if the child has scholarships it still maximizes their scholarships when they make the decision to go to college if they're economically advantaged or economically disadvantaged it works for all so at the core of thinking this way is equity and whether the child chooses to go on to a four-year degree or not that choice is not made for them by default they can make that choice with a firm foundation of knowing yes it is something that i want to do or i want to take a different path and i'm still prepared for that path and so we are looking very closely at these numbers we are working with um hvcc we're going to start
122that conversation with ualbany saint rose maria all of our neighboring universities to see what the appetite is to assist with that and so we'll be working through that um over the next few months and looking at what that looks like primarily for our incoming ninth graders but still not denying the opportunities for those students who are still in high school so that's something that we will be looking at as we look at that dual enrollment and preparing our students for college and careers and making sure that they're ready for those opportunities we also look at our career in technical education and as you can see we did take a slight dip except in our white students we had a little increase to 56 percent from 53.5 to 56 and um so we are looking at
123the career in technical education and seeing how many of our students are moving in that direction we are eagerly anticipating the career and technical education program coming onto the main campus because we know that by it being housed on the main campus we are looking at some increased enrollment there as well across the board so category 2 looks at equitable student success beyond academics we're looking at the indicators that racial disparities in non-academic measures of student success are narrowing we look at the participation of our students on building committees that is some of the information that we will have toward the next piece toward the end but looking at the percentage of students engaged in our enrichment activities athletics looking at our classroom discipline infractions and discipline referrals and for this section uh karen bechdel
124lori mckenna and dr cecily wilson turner will cover this information and so we'll start with mrs bechtel thank you superintendent we're going to look at some music data from the district this very first chart is all courses in the all music courses in the middle school um and so you can see that there and i want to point out that for 2022 we're actually close to reflecting the district demographics next is the standard level of the vocal orchestra ban the instrumental groups and that too for 2022 is close to our district um demographics um it's when we move to those advanced um instrumental groups that we see the disproportionality um especially in uh 2022 i'm thinking that we were on a good trajectory and i'm i'm wondering if covert has set us back a little
125bit but we are going to take this information and certainly inform our next steps um i think there's another middle school slide so this is the um the combined standard level and advanced level so when we look at that again a little closer i mean um to the district demographics for the 2022. and then this is the high school music composition so all courses uh here and again in 2022 we were a little closer to that um district demographic number our standard level uh as well and then our advanced level we see those uh that disproportionality i do want to point out before we move to the next slide that our standard level does include the drumming and the piano classes which are entry-level classes um they're designed to be entry-level classes one of our
126goals with the music task force was to have an entryway into instrumental music for all students at the high school level so um they've been very popular with us bringing the level twos for both of those and if someone sat at the high school concert um this past winter we had a piano soloist there from from this group so this was a wonderful experience okay next slide here we have the standard and advanced instrumental groups combined and then another very popular uh thing of course that we have adopted really as a result of that music task force work um is the digital audio and um i don't know the reason i for the from 2020 to 2022 i don't know if this is a covid impact but we do know that this too is a
127popular course and then we have the art data all courses again pretty close to our district demographic the foundational studio arts courses which are the entry-level art courses for students usually in ninth grade or tenth grade and then next we have the three pathways the first one is the media arts pathway and that too uh seems more proportionate and if we go to the next slide we have the other two pathways the 2d um fashion drawing and paint and the ib visual again a a more proportionate figure there the 3d i don't know what the story is there that is your crafts and your pottery but that's where we are at this moment and it'll be interesting to see over time where we are because that's kind of a big change from 2020 to 2022.
128then next um this is the athletics participation update um we are the third largest school district in section two out of 94 schools and we offer 63 teams for students from grades 7 through 12 are modified mod 9 freshman jv varsity we have boys teams and 13 sports and girls teams in 12 and a total of 772 individual student athletes have participated in at least one team this school year and that split that 435 males and 337 females and you could see the demographics of our athletes on the chart below and then i think i'm not sure who i think i'm turning this over to lori dr wilson turner dr wilson turner thank you miss bechdel um so i have just a few slides on our enrollment and discipline metrics and so our enrollment percentages
129by ethnicity have remained fairly consistent over the last three years with approximately forty percent um black twenty percent latino twenty percent white 10 asian and nine percent multi-racial flux fluctuates about one to two percentage points um and this is regardless of our fluctuating enrollment as we've noted um in our presentation so as you look at the discipline data i just want to clarify that elementary classrooms sparingly use the classroom referral feature i might have select buildings that use that um because they rely primarily on the point system to track the data around student behavior and response to those three concrete um behavioral expectations to be safe be respectful and be responsible um and that those points the earning of those points is tied to a flow chart system that helps us track students who struggle
130to um earn their points and to begin to dissect when and where throughout the day that they will struggle with those pieces and then what supports we can put in place um to support them as a student or to support a classroom that consistently struggles in that area which results sometimes in us adjusting what the what we call the tier one plan for student discipline is in student classroom management is in that classroom so these members may not completely reflect all the work that is being done with individual students um in tracking their student behavior but the next slide elementary office referrals is probably a clear indication um because on that behavior flow chart um there are certain steps and stages that each incident or each volume falling um not failing to earn points will
131trigger um that may result in a documented office referral and then again that same intervention and support is used is used to support either the individual student or a classroom that may be struggling to address those individual needs the um important thing to note is that these are individual incidents um and so these individual incidents can be generated by a certain number of students you may have students who get one referral the entire year and you may have students who get 40 to 50 um throughout the entire year so just keep that in mind as you're looking at this data and i just did a quick check to make sure but our disproportionality has remained fairly consistent um for the last three years even as we made it through covid um and so we continue
132to progress in the right direction and trying to close that gap between how many students of each ethnic group are referred in relation to what percentage of the population they represent and now i will turn it over to ms mckenna thank you dr wilson turner um so over the next several slides i will provide you with the data for classroom and office referrals at the middle and high school level uh as i i have also included the enrollment demographic similar to dr wilson turner for each of those two levels as it's important to compare the referrals to the overall demographics at each level to make to to show the um proportionality or the disproportionality um but before i get into the data the behavior i just want to kind of explain um dr uh wilson
133turner alluded to this that the behavior referrals are coded into uh classroom managed or office managed referrals the classroom level interac infractions are handled directly by the classroom teacher and recorded in our safe schools new york system and an example of that may include a classroom disruptive disruption or non-compliance resulting in teacher redirection or consequence so on this slide you can see that this is a snapshot of our middle level enrollment and at the moment of the snippet and time we had approximately 1850 students the next slide this graphic illustrates the disproportionality uh present with our black and brown students at the middle level with regard to classroom referrals these students are recorded as having a higher rate of classroom discipline referrals than their peers in other ethnic categories our teachers are encouraged to record
134all classroom based discipline infractions however we do know that there is some inconsistency in how they are reported a variety of factors contribute to the disproportionality including implicit bias which as a district we are addressing um in a variety of ways and additionally um at the middle level specifically um as we we are all aware of that um the alternative program at the middle level is not yet up and running um so that has continued to have an impact within our classrooms and our schools as a whole for our um office referrals by race at the middle level the same pattern of disproportionality is existing in cl exist in classroom incidents is present with the office referral metric again black and brown students are over represent represented there has been an infusion of support at
135the middle level to address the social emotional and behavioral needs of our students during this particularly challenging developmental stage and each building was allotted an additional social worker however we are still continuing to fill those those positions we have created a full-time case manager position for our family and student support team diversion program and additional hall monitor staff were added to each middle school and a northern rivers behavioral health clinic was opened at myers and i'll talk a little bit at the end of these metrics about what we have in place just to highlight the social emotional mental health supports that we have in place for our students k-12 at the high school this is the breakdown of our high school enrollment which again has remained fairly consistent in terms of the ethnic breakdown while
136the numbers may look a little bit different the percentages have remained consistent over time and again the total enrollment at this moment in time at the high school level is approaching 2600 students which also includes our aic and our tony clement center kiddos similar to the middle school this graphic illustrates the disproportionality present with our brown and black students these stored students are recorded as having a higher rate of classroom discipline referrals than their peers in other ethnic categories there is also a significant difference between the number of classroom referrals between middle school approximately 1600 and the high school level at approximately 370. this could be attributed to the lack of middle school level versus high school level alternative educational programming options developmental levels of the students and differing documentation practices at the two levels
137but that's something that we are digging a little bit deeper into the next slide slide is the office um the high school office referrals by race and again as demonstrated previously the same pattern of disproportionality existing in classroom incidents is present within the office referral data again black and brown students are over represented and as you are aware uh we continue to work on issues surrounding the disproportionality of our behavioral referrals the district-wide equity and disproportionality team meets on a monthly basis to set goals and review progress at the building level and then again just a variety of factors contribute to the disproportionality including the bias overall though some gains have been made in the areas of disproportionality across all ethnic groups except for asian and the discipline rate has gone down overall by five
138percent um so that's the data on the uh classroom and office referrals but i do want to just point out um that you know as we take a look at um our classroom and office referrals that there are many social emotional and behavioral supports that were putting in place including as miss mrs adams um referenced earlier we are in a one-year of implementation of a comprehensive k-12 social emotional learning curriculum ruler which is rooted in over 20 years of research from yale's center for emotional intelligence in this one-year implementation of the curriculum the training implementation um the uh the staff are being trained in the five learnable skills of emotional intelligence including recognizing understanding labeling expressing and regulating uh emotion we also have in place at each one of our schools k-12 a student support
139team consisting of a school psychologist social worker school new nurse school counselor at the secondary level and behavior specialist support at the building level or from a district level staff including a behavior specialist or a psychologist also k-12 we have our multi-tiered systems of support called mtss where we uh have a tier one tier two and tier three um all tier one is our universal universal supports for all students and uh many of you uh have heard uh pbis the three b's that's included in our universal support uh for classroom management and school-wide expectations as well as trauma-informed approaches restorative practice and then second step currently is our social emotional curriculum and as i just mentioned we're shifting over to ruler k through 12 um next year at the tier two level we also um
140if they uh the tier one supports are just not enough for some of our um our students we also have our tier two supports which could consist of uh group counseling a check-in check out with the trusted adults and case managers identified and uh attached to each one of our kiddos and again as we go through the syst the tears are tear through again tier three would be interventions for students where the tier one and tier two are just not enough to support their behavioral and social emotional needs and at this level we look at doing a functional behavior analysis on student behaviors and then creating a behavior intervention plan to support the behavioral needs of our students we talked during previous presentations around our trauma-informed schools our district continues to grow as a trauma-informed
141agency in partnership with star commonwealth several years ago we began training faculty and staff in trauma-informed practices and to date we have over 100 student support team members building and district level administrators um who have taken a series of five courses in trauma-informed care and are certified level one trauma-informed practitioners we also have 25 district-trained turnkey trainers who are located throughout the district to provide that trauma-informed care and resilience-focused coaching um so we're super excited about the trauma-informed work that's happening here we also have the continuum of services offered by the city school district of albany for our social emotional supports um including and i mentioned some of these the group and intervals individual school-based counseling our social academic instructional groups our check and checkout supports classroom behavioral supports and then individual behavioral and crisis
142supports support plans so as you can see we have so many things happening in our school district and so many things for us to be so proud of to support the behavioral and social emotional needs of all of our students k through 12. and with that i will turn it over to karen becca i believe hi jump in i will jump in we're going to move on to category 3 which would be looking at our improvements to curriculum and instruction and in professional development and so mrs bechdel and dr wilson turner will address the cre component and equity component with regard to that work mrs bechdel thank you superintendent um in this next slide i am getting the opportunity to talk um off cycle about curriculum i believe um so we engage in a as
143you know a very robust curriculum review process in the district um i chose to show from the lens of equity where our curriculum review process um where that's reflected so there are two essential questions that we are engaging in when we do that curriculum review and that is to what extent does the curriculum map the actual unit map support culturally responsive instruction and that are explicitly anti-racist and promote social justice in a manner that activates promotes and supports effective civic engagement and then the second one to what extent does that unit map include those strategies that engage student voice we see student voice as a real strategy um for equity in the curriculum world um and then next slide this most of this information is from our most recent ela curriculum review uh as you
144might guess the humanities ela and social studies really uh lend themselves so well to integrating these the equity work we seek to include it everywhere but um in ela and social studies there is that natural connection so uh jen houlihan did do a survey with students and uh they we asked about the relevancy of text that's in our rubric which you'll see in a few minutes this is a very normed response um we'd like to see it a little lean a little bit heavier towards uh towards the right but it is a normed response about those texts being relevant next slide this one is how we want it to look um the question here to students was my voice is valued in ela i have a consistent opportunity to share my experiences opinions and or
145perspectives in discussions so this was a very nice slide a very nice result of the in the data from the cert the student survey next um miss houlihan identified strengths in her curriculum review process and then some areas for improvement those strengths did include from the kids uh that diversity and tech selection the class discussions the choice in text doing that argumentation and research strategies for accessing complex text which supports um multiple entries to these uh complex texts and then really opportunities to build character and empathy when they work on looking at the experiences of a wide variety of folks her the improvements that jen and her group identified were um one was around writing and i know when she came to you she talked about how that is now um something that they are
146looking at very closely in the unit maps um as an area that they can improve and make better kids expressed um more choice in text selection and more diversity in tech selection and one of the or two of the areas that they mentioned were um lgbtq and asian asian americans uh text that they would like to see more of in their uh classrooms and then that choice in task selection um so they both they so jen is seeing that it's both a strength and some students uh saw that that it was an area for improvement to have more of that choice in in tasks okay next these i uh pulled out of our extensive rubric when we go through the review uh process our rubric is actually used with every curriculum map and the group
147um the assigned teachers usually it might be a team of two or three work with the rubric and kind of look at the unit map um and determine where the map falls in all of the various indicators that we have in our rubric the print in red is where you might be able to look in the unit map the section in the unit map that you might see evidence you might find evidence for the indicator so the verse one first one is about relevancy is the map attuned to the rich diversity of our student body and is it written with a variety of assessments that are aligned to the learning objectives and value of the diversity of ways in which students learn so that's one area that's tied to our equity work next slide uh
148some other indicators is the curriculum map this is how we do this is this curriculum unit map which is maybe a four to six week unit is it written to facilitate student diversity their interest strengths and styles in order to enhance learning and is it written to facilitate student diversity in subgroups in order to accelerate learning and narrow that achievement gap so we really wrestle with these questions questions as we're going through the curriculum review process and next um our next steps in that curriculum review is expanding the books at elementary level on those topics of equity diversity inclusion you know we've done the one book uh one school initiative which is a great way into this work with our younger students we have professional development opportunities that are connected to these topics we are
149implementing those research-based um equitable instructional strategies we have these last few years done a really nice job with embedding learning activities and projects that support social justice we've used um some of the material in the 1619 project to help with that and both our us maps at eighth grade seventh and eighth grade and then also um at in 11th grade and then 12th grade for our civics class and then really supporting our students and activating their voice and strengthening their skills as advocates and change agents in english and social studies as i said this is a natural um environment to do some of this work but what we want to see is the students engage in this work and have it spill over into into their whole approach to how they're doing school so i
150believe that might there might be one more for me and professional development so um we are continuing to rebuild um we continue to foster that culture of collaboration and restoring teacher agency we've had a couple of pretty successful we've had a pretty successful pd day on this month and then we're having another one in may we're very in the throes of planning for that and then we have other avenues for professional development in our district too so the teachers and leaders engage in uh plc's and in those plcs they're looking at data they're looking um we're doing some embedded pd in those environments collaborative planning what are those best instructional practices for a specific unit or activity and cultural culturally responsive teaching so that pd is ongoing along the lines oh did you want to
151jump in mrs adams no i was just going to introduce you um so along the lines of professional development um the next few slides are summary what was actually presented earlier this year during our cra inequity presentation but tying to the district priorities and equity metrics that we have been working towards and so you know that our four core areas continue to be around culturally responsive education professional development our building equity teams our youth empowerment efforts and our equity policy metrics so we have um 11 incredible uh cre facilitators um who helped to execute our cohort model um and they are hard at work this year they've already completed um two cohorts this fall and are currently working on two cohorts of staff this spring and as you may remember our focus was intentionally on
152uh those people who will influence the systems that we develop around instruction and student support so that they are able to bring that cre lens to their work at the district and building level in addition we are continuing with our administrators to make our way through our unconscious bias in schools book study and to take some of the um actual pieces that can be applied and put them into action um in our buildings and classrooms um starting primarily with looking at our data and observing classroom practices that are um in support of are or are or maybe far from what we seek in culturally responsive classrooms and classrooms that are equitable in classrooms that leverage student voice we shared metrics earlier this year in regards to the outcomes of our cra and equity team training
153for both our administrators and our equity teams at the building level and in both areas you'll remember that we saw an increase in their comfort level with having these difficult conversations about race and bias and that's very a very simple way of saying being able to name it talk about it and lead those conversations in their spaces with both the equity teams and the building and district administrators so as i mentioned um this these next steps are well underway with our focal ports of um tran staff that we're training particularly our instructional coaches our school psychologists our behavioral specialists and our school social workers um have come to the table have been active participants in our cohort trainings and we will have have trained the majority of those staff members by the conclusion of this
154year so they can go out and influence those systems our building equity teams continue their work with their building specific plans to integrate equity a lot of them as you saw this evening with dr dobbs have taken the book that we are doing um at the administrator level and our now turnkey match book with their staff um others have selected other texts that they are working through that are relevant to the work that they're building wanted to do um and our building equity teams and our students have um as you know been supported so generously by the carl e2e foundation um because for the last two years they have provided a hundred thousand dollars each year to tax to support our students but this year he expanded and was able to provide text to our
155equity team so that we're actually putting those resources into the hands of our adults um i also just want to publicly thank mr tui mr charles tui for the time he takes with me to actually curate some of the texts that we look at and to bring forward resources that may be helpful to us in this journey we were able to take a snapshot last year of our appr evaluation tool at a particular metric that measures um how teachers integrate diverse social and cultural perspectives and we're pleased to find that in planning the majority of our teachers attempt to incorporate those either an effective or highly effective level in their planning and we're continuing to working continuing to work on monitoring that um in our informal classroom business and our walkthroughs and as well as
156in our evaluation again this year um and eventually we'll move to how that influences the actual instructional practice or the actual execution of the lesson so i will unexpectedly say that the highlight of our cre work to date has been our youth empowerment efforts and i think that shines through with every um principal presentation that you've seen this year as they put forth their student videos and you hear the voices of the students not just for that video but for the work that they're doing throughout their school throughout the school year i think it's been exciting um and eye-opening for our building leaders to see the voices of our students particularly at the elementary level um they don't have pulled back and they have lots and lots of thoughts and things that they wanted to
157say and problems that they want to solve and they really do want to be a part of the solution um and so that work is continuing at full throttle in all of our buildings and the development of those building level equity teams and i'm excited that we have started our district level equity team student activity team meetings with a representative or two from each of our buildings k to 12 um and they've decided the first thing that they want to tackle is the challenges that social media is creating in our schools so thank you mrs bechtel and dr wilson turner for category three we're going to move on to category 4 which is looking at the equitable resource distribution and i'm going to turn it over to mr petron to talk about our human capital
158thank you superintendent uh just as our colleagues have been looking at the um external metrics and and the great work that we're doing with our students um we take time uh throughout the year to look look internally look at the makeup of our staff make sure we're making progress on those uh indicators that we've agreed are important to us so first is our our race our gender um breakdown over the last few years as you can kind of see we've remained steady um you know with the uh education being predominantly uh staffed by female we anticipate to see the same thing here would say 71 of the staff being female and 29 being male and on the next slide we also break down our diversity um looking at the makeup of our staff and in
159respect to our students so again we see a trend over the years we kind of remain steady we did see a dip the last year in our diverse populations of staff but 69 of the staff are white 26 percent are black 3 are hispanic were latino two percent are asian and under one percent are american indian and pacific islander we took this information and we are keeping it in mind as we are making staffing decisions as we go through this year another component within category four looks at our capital projects and our five-year facilities plan and what we've provided for you since that report was so very recent we've just provided the links uh to the most recent reports which provided the detailed reporting about the manifestation of ensuring that our facilities are equitable in
160terms of design and the delivery of what is in the building itself and so um in terms of providing that those learning environments that are equitable in terms of the types of classrooms that we have available the the different variety that we have available with regard to uh ensuring that we are representing different cultures that we are representing different lifestyles and just making sure that we're very cognizant about that in the design of our buildings looking at different cultures and what things may be required for different cultures and ensuring that we have space safe spaces and spaces in our facilities to address that so because those presentations have been very recent we just provided you with links to those presentations but again as we look toward what that year end report equity report card looks
161like this will all take a different form uh so that you can see it more succinctly but i will say as we are a little bit more than halfway through the presentation there's a lot of work that we have been doing to make sure that we are operationalizing equity in our school district and so moving forward to category five with regard to the success in our equitable hiring and retention i'm going to ask mr petran to go ahead and address again our human capital with regard to what we've been doing for the recruitment and retention initiatives thank you again superintendent um and again uh just talking about our recruitment and retention initiatives um these are some of the items that we worked on over last year um you saw me present on these items in
162the fall um but you know this is kind of our foundation and we tweaked some of these things as we moved into this new new year um but you know in alignment with all of the main priorities that are the main things that happen in hr recruiting uh attracting uh diverse staff engaging people in the work that we do um these are right in alignment with the things that that are our bread and butter every day um so we continued our targeted recruiting and retention efforts um this year we really focused on leveraging the new virtual job fairs opportunities getting out to those whenever we can um and actually again hitting the ground running this spring um getting back into our face-to-face job fairs as we all know we have a job here coming up
163in a couple days from now um but we also are sending out staff to uh local job fairs in the area to recruit and retain uh staff um still keeping an eye on building those partnerships for a student-to-teacher pipeline we're refining our hr metrics and progress monitoring tools we're continuing our professional development opportunities uh partnering with ms bechdel's office we provide additional support for our support staff and our administrators we talked about something that we instituted last year we are repeating and enhancing this year which is our substitute training we did that twice this year making sure that our our substitutes are fully trained um and ready to uh support our buildings um the other big thing is increasing our hr communications um we want to make sure that our staff have real-time access to
164data real-time access to the the people data points that impact them the most we want to make sure they're able to access those review those and get concise information right when they need it um another thing we're continuing to look at is reviewing our employee wellness opportunities partnering with the labor associations to determine what's most important for their groups and you know continuing as always with process improvement practices so thank you mr petron category 6 looks at our equitable student and family engagement and for this area i'm going to turn it over to mr lesko thank you if we can advance the slide thank you i'm just going to provide an update on our communication metrics uh since uh our division presentation in early december um uh beginning with school messenger and the period excuse
165me the period of time is roughly the same uh there's about three 19 additional days in the period of time but because of some of our bigger our bigger breaks uh it's just a few more days in this period of time to give you a frame of a frame of reference on how some of the metrics have changed since uh since we last spoke about this on december 2nd so with school messenger we've we're up to about 3.4 million uh emails that we've sent this school year that's just about double uh where we were through uh through the first few days of december um more than half a million robo text messages uh 339 000 almost 340 000 robo calls we've increased the number of uh unique contacts in school tool by 123 since then
166so that's it's great for us to have more contact information in in four families and also more families who have contact information in school tool and that's something that we that we continue to work on we did see a slight decrease in the number of people who have opted in for sms messages uh and i that's one of the things that we're always both with the robo calls and the and the robo text messages one of the things that we're always aware of is you know using them judiciously to provide information to folks that's important but not annoying them and so we we have seen a little bit of it a decrease there and so obviously some folks are telling us that they don't need that additional that additional communication method uh on january 13th
167we we launched the translation function for school messenger so all of our school messenger emails that we send out now uh go out in 30 30 languages additional to english and it's just it's about nine point six percent of the total contacts it's 857 uh folks who have their contact information in school tool which is again where that draws from what the the primary language is listed at so that's been a great uh that's been a great addition for us as well to try and serve and to try and serve all of our all of our families facebook continues to be a fantastic way for us to tell all of our stories uh and uh and you know people follow us in great numbers we've had we have 108 new followers since december 2nd and
168for the school year we have increased our following on facebook by a little bit over seven percent and you can see some of the growth in the our use of it we've more than doubled the number of times that we've used it and you can see the increase in in some of the other metrics the the reach is up dramatically and there have been some some really really popular uh messages that we sent by by facebook when the superintendent met with the albany police department recruits during during the winter that was that was extremely popular on facebook obviously our girls girls basketball team's success was was terrific as well so uh lots of people uh lots of people really connected with us in this period of time and of course those uh those bottom two
169you can see we are really feeling likes and loves uh from uh from the folks at follow us on facebook uh twitter we've seen we've seen some growth as well 56 new followers since december 2nd about five and a half percent growth for the year and again the the the the increases in our usage of it and the uh the folks that we are reaching with it since uh since we are last year a couple of new things that we are before we before i give up the microphone temporarily it's a couple of new things that we are we are working toward and planning for and i mentioned these when we talked in in december uh we will be adding instagram as an additional communication platform uh if not by the end of this school
170year certainly for next school year and we're also working on we're working on a system for folks to send us photos from district events and and trying to find a way that's manageable for us to receive those that was a good it was a good conversation that we had in december we've been we've been thinking about that and talking about that and planning for that so that will be something that we implement uh moving forward but allow us to show our community even more of the great things that our students and staff are up to our final category category seven looks at success in equitable community engagement and one of the first things that i wanted to highlight was from the american rescue plan we did the rfp process and our partners and we've been
171highlighting that along the way but we look at the awards that were given and that we have been working through that process with the rfp uh process there's still a couple of if you go to the next slide please there's still a couple of um contracts that are out that we're working on and those last two that are pending would take us in the amount of when you look at the wizard wardrobe that amount is approximately twenty one thousand one hundred and twenty dollars and with fourth family looking at what they're going to do over the break periods and summer enrichment um will be approximately two hundred thousand dollars for the rfp process which of those arp funds that we have committed to where we had the community submit contracts we'd be looking at a
172little bit over um 800 000 from our arp dollars supporting our after school programs tutoring programs you can see the garden education program and we're so very pleased with all of our partners the symphony the y radix thimble rise city lacks little scholars paper education the red bookshelf and of course wizards wardrobe and fourth family we know that we cannot do this work alone and i think that this is a testament to how we are actualizing equity with regard to including our community partners and the last portion that we're going to look at will be the community engagement and i'll turn it back over to mr lesko thank you just a quick a quick uh snapshot into kathy edmondson's world here for for a few moments there you can see the parent university schedule that
173we've had this year we've continued to we've continued to and will continue to take advantage of the virtual environment to do that it's just more convenient for for people uh to to access it that way and on average we've had about 15 uh 15 participants on a monthly basis and and you can see some of the topics that kathy has worked with our community partners and our district staff to uh to put together for for our families uh most recently mr baker was our was our guest our guest presenter and uh we've got two more coming up for for this school year uh our community outreach team again kathy leading that has uh knocked on more than 200 doors this school year and that's you know in the evenings and on on weekends uh primarily
174in support of parent university but when they're having those conversations they're also able to talk with parents about about whatever they may want to speak about related to their child's or their children's school experience she's also very adept at networking with our community partners to connect our families with services and programs that are that are helpful to them and that and that they need and uh very collaborative with community agencies in terms of securing donations of food clothing etc i think in our last meeting we talked about the donations of the gowns that we've had for uh for upcoming proms for uh for the young ladies in our school district she's also working working hard to do something for the boys in terms of tuxedos for those those opportunities too so that's that's something that
175she has she has in the works as well so again as you can see this is absolutely a combined presentation because none of us as cabinet superintendent do this work alone and so again thank you to deputy superintendent roaring assistant superintendents cecily wilson turner lori mckenna kent baker karen bechtel matt petran over our human resources division and mr lesko over our communications division and eileen lefler with regard to grants and programming so i thank the entire team for all of the work and just so that you know this is only half of the year so hang on to your seats for july when the final report roughly july or august when we present the final report of this year because we're only halfway there and so thank you so very much to our team and
176thank you so very much to the board um we hope that this has given you an insight to our progress with regard to actualizing and operationalizing equity in this school year and beyond thank you very very much for the presentation um which is i have the same feeling that i often have one mr baker presents of like a complete sense of overwhelmingness because there's so much fabulous stuff happening um and i think this really speaks to why we're looking forward to that equity scorecard or whatever we're going to call it to sort of synthesize and consolidate this because it's it's it's hard to um it's hard to wrap your mind around and having a concise sort of message map around like what's really happening and how do we talk about it in a way that
177that's more um bite size you know because this is it's very very hard because so many things are happening so anyway um i know that people have questions i'm thinking that probably the best thing as always we will do one question at a time rather than sort of walking through the presentation um i think there'd be that would take too long i'm suggesting that we let somebody ask the first question then we'll ask all the questions on that topic and then move to another topic and i see miss wilson's hand first so i thought you could kick us off if that's okay to have it back thank you for your presentation i enjoyed the experience of having you as mc and i also really enjoyed your budget presentation also so in the area of academic
178rigor and success i noticed that we identified for the asian subgroup we've seen a transition over the years from 100 to like the 80s percent graduation rate and decreases in that same subgroup for honors etc do we identify that that could be correlated to increases in the population i know that we have more immigrants and refugees and that could just have impacted those that data set i will start and any cabinet member can chime in one of the things that we do see is um how people will classify themselves with regard to the forms um and and sometimes people may or may not find themselves in those forms and that's okay but also we do have to do an analysis of the demographics of our city and comparing that to if there are increases in
179decreasing decreases in particular subgroups within the district that work we've not done yet but that is something that we have to look at in comparison to what we're seeing in our data i also think if i remember correctly and i don't i can't pull it up nice it's not loading that that's a relatively small cohort so the the percentages can go wacky just from a couple of kids so that's always something to be thoughtful of i see miss smith's hand i'm hoping we can stay just briefly on on graduation rate um if that's where people are since we're tabitha started um so are you on graduation rate um let's do graduation and then we'll come to you if that's okay just so we can do all the graduation uh um board member great i also
180had a question about the category about how the graduation rate was broken down because i was i was interested in why the graduation rate was presented for the american indians and alaska natives and the asians and native amer native hawaiians but not for the hispanic category i didn't know if that because my understanding of the of the demographics is that we have a much larger hispanic population and i didn't know what their graduate what the reason was for not presenting it or if it was just an oversight that may be just an oversight so we'll have to look to include that mrs adams in the presentation in a few weeks i will be including um the hispanic subgroup in the presentation yeah thank you i wanted to also comment while we're on graduation rate and
181i know we're going to do this in more detail later so we won't spend a lot of time on graduation rate that i'm pleased to see the increased number of regions with advanced designation um numbers that that's increasing also because while we're we're starting to approximate the state average which is an incredible success for us for graduation i don't mean to suggest that oh well when that you know but that is incredible that we've gotten there but now the next target seems to be that regents with advanced designation um where we're still well under uh what the state is statewide anyone else on graduation rate ms wilson just still the first metric but not graduation the ap um reduction i was curious if you're getting any feedback that i know that some folks don't want
182to take ap or advanced courses because they're concerned about their gpa being adversely affected so did you hear any feedback in that regard well their gpa score not being as high as an unweighted gpa score miss mckenna or mrs bechtel if you have any information on that because i don't have any information with regard to that level of detail i don't either we can certainly um inquire about whether we're seeing a decrease because of that um reason you just brought up but i'm not aware respect all no um uh me neither and i i'm wondering though about the covid impact and kids last year having to register for the ap classes and thinking i'm not i don't know that i'm i feel ready i mean that would be more uh something that i would expect
183um remember this is it's baseline but it's baseline from our covet experience which uh will be interesting to watch as we move forward board member smith yeah um i first i just uh just general comments i loved loved loved this entire section um and just spent the last two nights to sort of up late looking at it and spending time with it and i think for me what i i didn't spend a whole lot of time on the data there's certainly there's some data that um i wanted to see some perhaps more of you know like i was interested in how many youngsters are or is it possible to do you know have ap and ib and you know sort of a mix of things and i don't know if that how to what extent
184there are kids taking multiple kinds of things but then i also felt in the end what i was really more excited about is that these are youngsters who are getting more engaged in academia uh it wasn't so much oh are they doing this and that and all this it was really are they getting more engaged and are they um uh getting support and are they actually meeting the expectations and so also overall what i thought what i liked about all this sort of data and i just want to thank cabinet for this uh and i'm sure mr baker's team probably did a lot on this as well and it is that i finally like i feel like there's a culmination that just happened with this presentation of all the data um the development of the
185data system and the inputs all the data that you all are collecting and at the same time the looking at all of this uh through an equity lens um and then all of these various things that we're uh programming the feeder program i could start to see like how the data how i see the data and then i can start to see how these initiatives everywhere from elementary to high school are should change the trajectory you know even in the disciplinary which is the hardest of data for me and i'm sure all of us to absorb um i'm just you know just not happy with the behavioral things to be honest and i know i understand there's lots of reasons for that but i i'm seeing that i'm trying not to even stay so focused
186on that because i see all the trauma social emotional things that are going on i see all these layers of activities and programs that should change the trajectory over time um and the important thing here is that i do feel like we are all in and all but i feel like there's everyone's on a page together um moving in the long professional development whether it's collective or individual really paying a great deal of attention to student needs um and their development so i know ann used the phrase overwhelmed i was probably a little less overwhelmed i probably should be overwhelmed but i because this is a lot of data that you all put together but i was more excited about having all this data and then being able to look over time um at the
187at the inputs and and the impact that that was going to have on the outcomes right so again i'm not saying anything you all haven't already discussed and know about but it's it's the fact that it comes together uh for me in a in a very meaningful way so i just wanted to say kudos and thank you all for the presentation for the data and and just really for all of the work um that you've been doing uh you know at least since i've been on the board and i'm sure some of this started before i got on the board especially with cre it's all coming together is what i wanted to sort of emphasize here so thank you board member creation yeah i just wanted to say i was overwhelmed and mostly in a
188good way by how thoroughly how thoroughly this presentation uh went through our equity plan and really really did work and put in showed us showed us the data on all those equity into categories and indicators that we've spent so much work as a board um identifying and trying to figure out how to prioritize in which we should choose i really i really loved it and i'm looking forward to seeing more reports like this in the future one thing that made it a little harder for me to understand some of the data and i'm thinking and it was fantastic by the way to get these breakdowns from the music equity force of the music and art representation but it was hard for me because i was trying to have my head okay so they're x percentage
189of white students in advanced music how does that compare to the overall percentage of white students in the school so it would have been helpful maybe in the future if we have for example the raw data and the big report that we get on board docs and then on the graphs in the powerpoint have more uh perhaps the percentage by which a population is over represented or underrepresented maybe we have 50 percent more white white kids in advanced orchestra than we would expect to have where proportional because especially with music i don't know if our demographics have changed over the two years it was hard to kind of compare and for the the same for the discipline although i'd also say for discipline it would have been great as we've done in some other discipline
190uh data to delve down to number of students who has who has any discipline because as as i think it was dr wilson turner said it could be one kid who gets in trouble 40 or 50 times during the year which kind of close it out of proportion so it'd be great i'd love to see it as twenty percent of what kids got a referral last year eight percent of asians kids did that's that would be one really useful way to look at that data and again thank you for providing it is just it's a gold mine of data and a little overwhelming so i'm just suggesting some ways that would be a little a little easier to understand without having to go back and forth to the demographic right now thanks i think one
191of the things to also keep in mind is in combination with this being a very high level mid-year individually we've had the department reports where that level of detail has been provided and so we did make the decision that for this we'd keep it pretty much high level but i appreciate that because that lets me know when we get ready for the final and we look at that scorecard that that will make the data much more meaningful if we bring back some of the elements of those specific department and division reports to help make that more meaningful at the final point um we can absolutely do that so thank you and i love that you have the raw data and i love you know i'd love to see that big formal report where if somebody
192really wants to crunch down and get that they can get it but if they just want to look at the trends and the representation especially when we're trying to show people in the community what we're doing and for example people in the community don't have a rough idea of what the demographics in our district are off the top of their head so they may not know if they're looking at a number whether that is that good or is that bad so yeah that way for example if we were to get down to a rate let's say we get down to a rate where you know but yeah that would be great to see thanks so elena i really appreciate what you just said and i also wanted to compliment um superintendent and cabinet for the
193really uh granular factual data which i think is something that that we have been driving to as a as a leadership team um for several years of like okay how are we going to try and get our heads wrapped around this data how are we going to present the data and this is really the art right of how do you figure out how to present the data in a way that can be interpreted by somebody who is not deep in it how do you do what um in my career i've often called english to english translation right how do you translate your deep knowledge to um to someone who doesn't have that deep background and it's it's it's non it's a non-trivial exercise it's very very very difficult to do because so much of what
194you know is just understood um and you don't even realize that you're build bringing that to the table um so along the lines of what you suggested um one thing i would really like and i'm actually hoping this could be provided um in an sbu is the ends for all of the music and art um uh charts they we had the percentages but not the number of students um and so i'm very interested in seeing like what's going on with our music situation because of kova do we have more kids or less kids we got that report i stumbled onto it recently because i was looking for something else the music task force showed right before kovid we saw incredible increases in the number of students who were participating in orchestra and in participating in
195band it was like the graph was like this um and so i don't know what what that looks like here like how many kids and also for some of those um uh questions that karen that you were raising like well why is 3d art so wacky from one year to the other if that's really only 60 kids well you know two kids changing can really make a real change in the percentage so that would help me see that so if it's easy to get those ends to us that we could understand those graphs i would really love that um the other thought i had about which is not necessarily something i need to know but it really was a wondering is we know right now our middle schools are not comparable in terms of their
196racial breakdown right we know that that's something we're working really hard to address but so is any of the disproportionality that we're seeing at the middle level about climate and culture in each building so really are our students of color and particularly black students that that disproportionality is it partially impacted by our over concentration of students living in poverty who are at one middle school and is that middle school um behaving differently than the other two i don't i can't tell that from what we got and i'm not saying that needs to be in this report because i think this has to be at a really high level but it was something that when i was like huh is that you know we know we had a huge number of suspensions at north albany is
197that part of what what we know most of those kids are black because we know most of the kids at north albany are black um so i'm just curious to know whether that impacted the outcome at the middle level um middle school by middle school those were two thoughts i had about the data as i went through it um dr chitor i'm an impressive report but please have mercy after spending a whole day in airports it's a lot of data right so when the final report comes there's going to be more data right more granular data can we do it in three parts so we actually spent time on each topic one of the things i noticed i think i mentioned about it too is that the percentage of hispanic kids who are enrolling in
198ap courses and ib courses and advanced level courses has gone down now we should take a look at what is it that we are not doing to bring you know is it just just a matter of we have less hispanic kids but that's not true when you look at the total numbers by raise so what is it that we are not doing or what what is it that we should be doing to encourage that sub population into into getting more coursework and maybe it's the middle school or high school those are things to look at and in terms of the breaking down or by when you talk about music i'd like to see that for athletics too we have uh 13 different sports it'd be good to see what the breakdown is so are there
199sports that we are not uh offering a particular subgroup you know if it's are all those teams being equally subscribed or are we just disenfranchising a whole group just because they don't have a sport to play so these might be things for us to look as we get more data down the road so i see um miss smith wants to speak and then mrs wilson i don't really know who was first so it doesn't matter to me yeah i mean dr stewart i absolutely agree i think the again i keep trying to keep this at a high level the other kind of layer here here is they're going to be cert certain things have already begun to take place there are other things coming so i'm also very interested to see like what happens when
200if we if we for instance did more around um like it like about sports is there some reason why like there's certain groups that are attracted to more sports does it have does it have to do with not have being exposed does you know what is that about so if we say okay we're gonna like there's gonna be some initiative to do x you know and obviously sometimes what happens is when you have a sport that really is doing well that's you know people yeah let's do this um but anyway if you lay the timeline down on that so you've got you've got an input and then you you're watching to see what happens over time and i think that's where we are there's just lots of things that yes they've begun but there are
201lots of other things that we're putting to place and lots of nuanced things that we're putting into place um that will get us to seeing how at a certain point what that data really ought to or will look like and we just i think that we're not there yet is all i'm trying to point out isn't we're getting madam president may i i wanted to just address a little bit of that with regard to athletics i'm just going to bring this back to um if you recall part of the arp dollars that we are using is building that comprehensive intramurals program so that ties in the exposure that you were talking about at the elementary level and so we have a new physical education instructional supervisor that is working on how do we build that
202in and what does that look like as we offer and expose our students at younger grades to those intramurals because you're absolutely right sometimes by the time we get to high school if you've not had exposure to a particular sport or let's look at music or even art in any of our other opportunities other than our core instruction by the time you get to high school if you've not had that exposure there's apprehension sometimes with trying something new you know being a you know i i did play cello throughout school but i couldn't imagine with our orchestra at i'm gonna do a shout out for huntington high school in shreveport louisiana um i couldn't imagine being a freshman walking into that orchestra class never having played the cello and so there is and i'm not
203saying that there weren't people who were not first year instrument players i mean that's not the case but i could only imagine how i would have felt at that level being a first-year person knowing that i'm i may be sitting next to someone who's already had five years of orchestra and so that exposure at early ages those kinds of things that we are looking to do we did use arp money to help put that intramurals piece together so i think that we'll see some benefits coming from that and i just want to add how much i appreciate the districts um even before the arp fund the recognition of the need for those on-ramps like the music like the piano and the world drumming um which were very very specifically targeted as a result of the
204excellent work of the music equity task force where we as a team said we really need to try and figure out what's going on here and let's take find some action items and that was you know purely district driven and um done out of the general fund it was before the government money um and it really does speak to that and i love all of the intramural work that's happening on the younger gates and i really would appreciate i will appreciate because i know it's coming even more intramural stuff for our secondary kids because there's something a little different about sports because you're not just trying something new it's a competitive environment where you were trying to win whereas with music and art you are not trying to beat someone else you are trying to
205improve and that is a really different i think it's much easier to take introductory piano than to sign up for the baseball team where you know you're going to have to compete baseball intramurals where you could play baseball is different than baseball at a inter-scholastic competitive um i think that those are two things miss bechdel has her hand and then i know ms wilson's been waiting i just wanted to mention that any of the secondary intramural work that's happening all students are invited to attend that that is not for teams it is for any any student to come um ashley has set me straight a couple times on that so i'm very clear on on how that works so um so kids do have an opportunity to play with their peers um and as you
206pointed out a more friendly atmosphere um one brief statement and the category two and then a question so the indicator about student participation on building committees i think that's one that we see play out at every board meeting when we get videos of students um under building leadership teams or in the councils and reflective in that so that's something we see immediately operationalize in the district and it's very reflective um and if parents or um community want to watch the board meeting i encourage them to at least watch that board if they find the rest of it boring and the other area about that also i had questions about disproportionality which the following metric actually did complement and cover a lot of the elements of what we're doing as far as cre and professional development
207so i totally understand how we're getting down to trying to offset that at the administration and staff level but i'm just curious about for example items that can get a student referred are not absent in other racial groups for example of course and are subsets so the concern is whether i have is whether the interpretation of the referral items are being interpreted differently for example just basically like what targeted aspects of the cre training um address the fact that you know there is our inverse relationship between the students who are being impacted in the race and background of the teacher or staff maybe there's a cultural disconnect which i know there's cre training but different things students do depending on which student it is could be interpreted like being very physical or animated or things
208like that are cultural differences or you know things of that nature so i was curious about that and also when students are referred how are we encouraging to them when they return to class to remain in class as a school or with their families or with our staff so i'm going to ask ms mckenna to address that please i'm sorry could you repeat the question sure it was two parts really like uh we talked about cre and that we are of course trying to address biases and the fact that you know people will interpret things differently and try to offset this personality so i was just curious about how that works in the training for them to identify that culturally a student just to see if that's impacting this personality and culturally students have different
209behaviors different ways they emphasize different words and that can be just because all students are basically subject to possibly talking in class if that's something that could get you referred or you know so if it's being interpreted differently based on the race of the student how are we offsetting that in the cre training and then the second question was if a student's like referred out how do we get them back to not having another incident of being referred like how do we keep them in class moving forward so cecily do you want to address the cre training first and then i can jump in on the second part so in the cre training and then subsequently in the equity team trainings and then the building loving trainings that um administrators and those equity teams are
210doing that is one of the things that we are um highlighting for staff and it's probably one of the most uncomfortable parts of the conversation right when we first started our disproportionality work people would say well of course our black students make up the majority of the referrals they make up the majority of our district right and it took us a long time to unpack yes they make up a certain population of our district but they still over represent um in these particular areas and to begin to unpack why is the whole you know i think one of the starting premises of us entering this work and so it continues to be this focus of how we reflect every single individual regardless of our you know race color or creed what our biases are that
211we bring to the table that influence how we interface with our students and how we how we issue consequence how we deliver instruction how we set expectations how all of those things are influenced by the lens that we bring to that work and that's central to the cre cohort training and probably is what makes it one of the most challenging things because that what it starts with is what the team likes to call self work you first have to look inside yourself before you begin to embrace the conversation around race and bias and begin to own how you enter into that conversation so i would say um board member wilson that it is central to the work that is done in that cohort training and then principals have intentionally you know at the secondary level
212by you know moving to the building equity leadership team um and their common planning times really attaching that bias lens to our instructional practices and our discipline practices um to see how those things are playing forward so there's an absolute um direct connection and i'll let laurie answer the second question and i think i would have something to add to the second question as well then just to kind of paraphrase your your second question it was about uh when students are suspended or have an office referral how do we re-engage them into the learning community to prevent the the incident similar to what they were suspended for from happening again um and is that correct that's perfect okay um and so we've done a lot of work um with our instructional staff and our building
213leaders and our homeschool coordinators to approach students and the social emotional needs and any discipline incidents that they have through that trauma-informed lens i talked earlier about that trauma-informed approach to addressing student behaviors and our principals and our home school coordinators assistant principals and our instructional staff and student support staff do approach it through that trauma-informed lens and what i would say is um in in in all of our suspensions when a student re-enters into a school we have a re-entry meeting um with the parent and the student to ensure that um one the student and the parent knows that we are there to support their child in the learning environment and these are the things that we are going to put in place to help their child be successful in school and that may
214be a check-in check out it may be a social academic intervention group um etc so and i talked a little bit about that when i was sharing the data with you but uh we do have those systems in place to support um students when they re-entry to ensure or to support that that incident doesn't happen again or that behavior doesn't manifest and i just wanted to add because you saw mrs adams and i just talked about this a few days ago a young man in the schuyler achievement academy presentation who was one of their student equity team leaders who talked about the refocus room like he explained that refocus room as the highlight of how he's being successful in school that is a key component of that reset that you're talking about board member wilson
215that allows children to step out of the room step out of the situation step out of the space get the reach that miss mckenna speaks about whatever break or supports that they may need for successful re-entry back into school and we've talked a lot you know through the feeder pattern conversation about what how we connect elementary and middle school and then at the elementary level we're really trying to train students it's not about being suspended it's about being reset and going back into your classroom and trying again with new skills that we're trying to teach into to ensure your success board member great um i kind of had a big big picture question slash comment it ties back to something doctor said which is definitely this is a huge broad report enormous scope and it
216seems like it changed its uh it changed its focus as the powerpoint went on because it starts it starts as 2021 district priorities slide three social emotional and mental health supports educational technology safety and security hvac ventilation and accelerated learning and academic supports i was expecting that we discussed those things more but then the presentation becomes more exclusively about equity categories indicators and metrics and the other things only come in sort of peripherally and i just wanted to say i'm glad you didn't put all those things in this presentation because then we'd be here all night and i'm really glad that we tackled this equity piece first because it's so huge and it's so central to what we do but i did wonder if we could put a pin in those other five categories and
217come back to them later because i definitely do want to talk about those things specifically for those individual lenses so at a different time if i may madam president member creation those priorities were the priorities that were established um back when we did the arp dollars and then when we did the community survey to set the stage for what our district priorities would address and so those priorities are there but they are embedded in each of those categories as to how we are addressing them appropriately so you may not see in all seven categories social emotional learning you'll see that where it is applicable within those equity equity um categories that we are using um to measure our success in alignment with those particular um those particular priorities so big picture you're looking at the
218priorities and then underneath those priorities i guess what i could do is share out so for the priority social emotional learning here are the categories that align with that when we talk about hvac you've got it in here with regard to the capital projects and the five-year plan i could put next to that what specific categories align with those overall uh priorities that were established because the goal was not to necessarily address it through the priorities but address it through the equity categories and have the priorities embedded in the categories so if if that's a way that we could identify that to make it a little clearer than we could do that but that would be helpful because for example some things like i would say educational technology while it's important in everything we do
219it would be hard it's pretty deeply embedded in this such that it would be hard to single it out if we wanted to talk about it i definitely i definitely would love to talk about the hvac goal and how we're moving toward that i'd like to talk about that more but i don't want to do it now this is something that's more appropriate to do that and that's where that's where if you recall when i made the statement that we've had that in detail presentation through the capital project report that's why in this report all we did was put the links but i truly understand what you're saying right so that we just want to distinguish categorize that a little bit we did have a big presentation about the new hvac system and the new
220um trying to think of the name of the that was that cost sharing uh presentation see yes for efficiency in the hvac and of course new or more efficient hvacs are likely to have better ventilation but that wasn't specifically about ventilation and air quality so i did want to have that discussion but i don't need to have that discussion tonight i i i think i understand what you're saying but um i am going to say a little bit about when the facilities reports are coming out and we are doing those overall uh presentations we have the work listed not just about epc but the work is listed with regard to the hvac work that has been done and the status of that however i understand what you're saying that we can make that a little
221bit clearer as we move forward um but those pieces are embedded in those different equity categories when we talk about educational technology we're talking about how we're already at a one-to-one um [Music] one-to-one device per student so that particular piece has been addressed but we can definitely absolutely highlight what we are doing in each of those categories or where it is applicable for education for the educational technology because that's more than just one-to-one device that's going to be a part of the accelerated learning the delivery quality instruction building that um leadership uh building our leadership capacity all of those things are going to be wrapped into there and so what you're watching me do right now is process the next report so that we can show that a little bit more clearly and i know
222that our cabinet members are listening intently so that we can remember collectively how to make that a little bit clearer with the priorities and which categories align with those priorities and really specifically i'd like to see i would like to see because so much of this is about measurement and metrics and what we're doing and how not just what we're doing but how we're measuring what's getting done and i'd really like to see uh air quality in classrooms and buildings measured as a metric and presented on so i think i'm going to recommend that you and i have a offline conversation and we can bring that up an agenda setting because that does sound like something quite different than what we're talking about now um not that it's not everything we do is interrelated and
223there's interconnections but why don't um we talk a little bit um you know we that this is the purpose of the agenda setting committee is to talk about um what additional board presentations we'd want and i'm happy to talk about that with you um remember creation we can figure out how to how and when to get it on the agenda with the coordination superintendent that would be absolutely great i just wanted to kind of focus on that it didn't feel i wanted to look at it through a different lens and i just didn't feel we had a chance not that we should because it's a huge presentation just wanted to look at that from a different level understood absolutely and this is you know the part of the job of the board is to identify
224what's important to us and to make sure that if we get it um on the board floor forum we can totally do that the other thing i think we need to think about and i want us all to be thinking about as we think about this report is that there's two there's there's several interrelated things there is this thing we've been calling for better or worse the equity score card which in my mind is modeled on what seattle has been doing for many many years which is very um numerical it's very data-driven it's a trailing indicator it's here's what here's how we've done like here's here's the proof right yes our numbers of uh kids of color who are participating in ap and succeeding in um all uh academic areas is increasing or it's not
225like these are facts that we can address that's one thing then there is the priority activities which is like what do we as a district think we are doing that has the impact on those and how are we doing on those right and this report tonight was kind of both right it was like some of the metrics and some of the um activities and i think it always wants to be both right because you don't want to just look at dry numbers but they're they're they aren't the same thing there's there's two things and figuring out how to um how to present the data and present the reports which are called for and are required by the equity policy that we just um re-adopted again tonight which were calls for some very specific plans there's
226sort of narrative planning and then there's these um this sort of scorecard did is our plan working or not so i think trying to keep those things as as dr said mostly because he was on an airplane most of the day the mercy factor is necessary right there's only so much that any one of us can internalize and i don't mean us seven of us i mean our community the goal of this is to help people understand what we're doing and whether it's working or not and so figuring out how to do it in a way that's that that's broken down in a way that's succinct somehow it's it is no easy task and i do not envy you guys that up because it's it's a major a major task um and so i think
227looking at some of the models out there is helpful miss smith i'm not really arguing with you i i think all of it to me is about equity i think yes you're right i think there are different ways and approaches and also see it's also about how we individually interpret or see things right so that's another factor here um so you know because i'm i might agree with ellen but i might not agree with ellen because like you know what i what i saw here or agree with you or not disagree i saw i read this in my mind as a slice of like uh a sample a snapshot a way of how we might how things are coming together this was a slice of it so for me i didn't get overwhelmed because of
228how i approached it um and but i did say it is overwhelming i i absolutely agree but the from that high level view i was like oh my gosh this is making sense i can i'm fitting all of this together and likewise every all those priorities i could see the equity uh you know the the theme of equity running through all of those priorities i could see those priorities in every one of those uh things as well embedded or you know explicit or not explicit i could kind of see that so that's what i got hyped on so that's why i'm kind of like in a way having a very different conversation in my head than you some of you all are because i don't see it in the same way i didn't approach it
229the same way so i'm just getting that on the table so that's why it's great that there's seven of us yeah that's that's exactly that is exactly the point that's exactly the point and speaking of seven the one has not had a chance to speak and i almost forgot about him board member elemi your chair [Music] thank you i enjoyed listening actually um so i'm going to uh agree with uh vice president smith's comment about this i like this format of showing these indicators i think it works it probably will have some kind of evolution to it but i it's it's readable it's usable and it's good um what i really wanted to actually mention is this this thing that got me really excited about the uh associates degree in the high school and i
230if that can happen that would be wonderful i mean you could potentially save families and students ten to twenty thousand dollars um that is like getting three or four years of tax money back it's literally that's like literally what it is if people look at at it like that so um i'm always impressed by how [Music] i don't know if radical is the right word for it but like how outside of the box we are thinking and how many amenities that we offer our families and we're always shooting for 100 and i think um this might be the tired in me talking okay but i think the the hundred percent sometimes could potentially kind of blind us from certain here and now uh matters and what comes to my mind specifically is just we've got
231to give this feeder alignment so much attention right now um we don't have much time on it and it is going to be like let's like let's prove to our community that we are going to do so phenomenally on that transition that we gain everyone's trust and that's all i've got to say thank you anyone else if not i think we um we are very much looking forward to the evolution of this equity report which weeks we have all talked about for many years that it will become a recurring theme every year looking at it so that we can show and prove and build the trust that the pro that the the steps are having the desired impact and we are seeing it on the big picture of graduation rate and that we'll see it
232on many of these other factors as well so okay uh we are at the end of the discussion agenda and have time for board committee reports if anyone has a report miss smith it is not a report but just a reminder that we have a meeting on april 11th i know we will meet uh you know again at some point before then but i did have a related question i believe that we're still okay if we wanted to as a committee continue the virtual um meeting but i at this point i think there's something about the open meetings law perhaps expiring on april 15th and may be extended yeah i think we're extended right now we are extended right now but there's a i think it's through now this is the second to the fifteenth
233the second extension and so bowie is nodding so okay so i just wanted to make that notation but i'm happy miss uh wilson and mr al-munawi to continue this next meeting virtually uh until that time frame expires it might not it might be nice to go back to academy park and see what's going on over there it might be here but we'll see policy committee also meets next week we flipped the board meeting and policy committee for next week because the superintendent will be at the um symphony event so we will be here on wednesday and policy on thursday for anyone who wants to listen in anything else from committees otherwise um items of other business seeing none motion to adjourn motion by dr chatur he adjourned in pacific time and second by board member
234all in favor that is unanimous we are returned until next wednesday night