001oh president savage if you let me know when you think we're all assembled i will then give you a visual and a virtual thumbs up when we're live that sounds like a good plan helps i was actually a good reminder because i was muted and i would have just likely gone about the meeting kick off with my mute on if i hadn't had to say that so that was helpful are we waiting on anybody else can anybody help me count noses here damaris did damaris make the transition damaris and his son i'm gonna give them another second i'll just start without them i'm here i'm just using a different computer ah okay hello hi sorry about that no no problem hassan how you doing why don't we start and hopefully he'll get whatever his tech
002issue is straightened out while we do the initial part of the meeting so whenever you superintendent you're ready to go mr baker whenever you're ready good evening everyone my name is ann savage and i am the president of the city school district of albany board of a board of education on behalf of the board i welcome you to this our first in some time virtual meeting i'm joined tonight by the entire board as well as the superintendent of schools kawita adams and we appreciate those of you who have taken the time to join us in time or are watching this recording for those of you who need instructions or more information about how to watch our live stream meetings you can find those instructions at albanyschools.org forward slash boe we will include all the relevant
003slides and documents in the virtual meeting screen and you can also access those slides via albanyschools.org forward slash boe if you prefer to be able to control the slides yourselves with that introduction we invite those of you who choose to join us as we stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one name's nations under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all 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 robust educational program designed to provide the knowledge and skills necessary for success superintendent adams do you
004have a report for us superintendent adams you're muted thank you very much and um i think i'm clicking too many buttons here but uh welcome to 2022 and happy new year and as we begin this new year we are absolutely facing some of our ongoing challenges with covid19 we know that attending school in person is what is best for our students it is where it is what we want for all of our students to be in school every day we knew that before the pandemic began almost two years ago and it has been reinforced almost daily since then that the academic and social and emotional challenges that have developed or deepened for young people locally nationally and around the world are extremely significant in school building our caring relationships with our teachers administrators and support
005staff is where the students need to be we also know that this is what is best for our families as we all balance work and our personal lives trying to find the right balance amid the continuing presence of a daily world of a deadly worldwide pandemic is very very difficult and these decisions that we have to make within our school district we don't make them lightly we make them after analyzing the data that we have at hand with schools reopening this week and and omicron becoming more and more prevalent faculty staff and students are more exposed to covet 19 and this exposure heightened the risk as we returned from the holiday break we see the evidence in our daily covid19 reports and the daily reports from albany county this disease is spreading at an unprecedented
006rate coleman 19 related staffing shortages have compromised the delivery of quality instruction and the supervision of our students in all of our schools so we are taking steps to mitigate the spread we remain committed to providing our community with the resources and the support needed to keep our students safe and healthy over the new year's weekend we rallied to develop a process for distributing more than 85 i'm sorry 8 800 covet test kits that the state delivered to us on friday on sunday we distributed more than 1200 of these test kits to our families and our school leaders also developed plans to distribute the remaining test kits to our families this week and so i want to take a moment to acknowledge that in receiving those tests on friday december 31st i want to thank
007uh miss roaring and mr kiefer our new director of facilities for being on hand and available to receive those test kits so that laura mckenna and our pps department could then get those tests organize those tests and have them ready for delivery we also have a whole slew of people that we want to express our gratitude to who came in over the break in order to make that happen we had our pps department we had our administrative secretaries our safety and security team communications and operations and i know that i listed that in a memo to our public beforehand but i think it is worth it to make sure that uh people understand that behind the scenes and over the holiday weekend there were people working on behalf of our students our school nurses we
008had volunteers from faculty student volunteers came in our medical director was there in order to make sure that we were able to have those test kits ready to deliver on sunday these efforts are also continuing through friday so that we can visit our you can visit your school's web page for information about when pickup is available at each school through friday of this week if we find that we need to extend that we will look at that and assess where we are on friday so that we can then set up additional pickup times for our families we know that our families have received the instructions on using the test kits and reporting the positive results to the county health department and our school nurses we also have continued weekly cobit 19 testing for our employees
009who have yet to submit proof of vaccination as well as for those employees who opt in for testing regardless of vaccination status we will offer daily covert 19 testing for students and employees at six buildings beginning friday as well and next week we will be able to offer the pcr test so we are continuing with those efforts as we continue to monitor our data we will continue to follow the the guidance and monitor the covet 19 cases in our district and make our decisions in the best interest of our students families faculty and staff our goal is to return to in-person instruction as soon as possible we want to reiterate that we know that shifting to distance learning is a hardship for many of our families and we also want to reiterate that it is
010not our first choice so when following the guidelines in the meantime we ask that our families continue to follow the covet 19 health and safety protocols at home including wearing masks frequent hand washing and social distancing please avoid large indoor gatherings we also encourage the and urge vaccinations for everyone ages five and older who are eligible and able in addition to the to those families who have yet to pick up a covet 19 test please visit your school's webpage or contact your school's your child's school regarding the distribution and schedule for test kit distribution thank you for all the sacrifices that you have made and that you continue to make throughout these frustrating and difficult times all of your efforts are deeply appreciated it is now my pleasure to introduce principal john powell to share
011information about the great things that are happening this school year at montessori magnet school good evening everyone welcome superintendent adams and thanks so much for that and um good evening to the board and to everybody watching um i'm excited to be here i thought i'd finally get a chance to present in front of you because i think i'm going a couple years in a row now with it being this format um but hopefully for next year we'll do it in person uh got a bit of presentation for you tonight to highlight some of the things that we are focused on this year outside of the obvious focus that um superintendent adams just spoke about but um i begin as you did begin the meeting with the fact that our vision mission and goals for the
012district of course they um are our great umbrella over the work being done daily at montessori and on our next slide i'll take a moment to read what specifically is our vision excuse me our mission for montessori in particular so the mission of monastery magnet school is to create and support the development of a responsible culturally diverse community of individual learners through diligent work in and adherence to the montessori philosophy and method and so i wanted to make sure that i slid in some pictures that i thought were really important to the year that is and so um you see the first there is our amazing maintenance staff who highlighted i think in a recent um district publication or the on the website it was um we did a great parade for the men who
013have kept our building clean kept our buildings safe and really have been a role model for how to um just do great work every day as we look for our students and our staff do just the same so um led by mr prince right in the middle great great man so to look at the demographics of montessori it's held pretty steady since last year we have 332 students actually welcomed eight new students this year in the last running of the lottery um in this week's excuse me new students we are pre-k through five building with 14 gen ed classrooms eight being multi-age and six um in the grades three four five now being departmentalized we have four self-contained classrooms for our students with autism and the breakdown gender-wise is exactly opposite of what it was
014last year this year it's 53 male 47 female students disabilities 10 economically disadvantaged at 33 percent and then you can see a breakdown of our different ethnicities below largely staying static year over year as you know of course each building builds a set plan for the year to come and so there's many more things in the sept than you see right here but wanting to pull out some of the things that have been um i guess most meaningful and have really defined the year tier one planning so the idea of planning for students at the whole classroom level has been a great um effort with them with a focus of trying to make sure that when you're planning for the entire class and you're looking at data and you're really regularly considering the progress that
015students are making our teachers along with our coaches and our reading teachers have been this year on a monthly basis resetting the class resetting the groupings of students in math and reading so that we can make sure that the instruction is targeted directly towards the individual learner to a degree we haven't achieved before and i would tell you that if you were to inquire i think the results and the response of the teachers has been quite positive we've grown in this process it's a new effort for us to do it specifically as we are but when you can go into our system and see exactly where a student is where they were what the data is that supports their move and what the exact instructional practices that we're going to be focusing on and the
016skills that they're working on it lets us confidently say that we're planning and preparing for each student at their specific level in the pre-k through 5 experience the other one i chose to pull from our greater sep is the shift in focus of common planning time it's not that it's absent of data it was more data heavy in years prior but at this point it's grown to be more of a conversation about the units and the instruction that is to come so it's it's a conversation with coaches with the teachers with myself and we're taking a look at what's on the horizon two weeks four weeks out in terms of instruction and really talking it through finding areas that you think would possibly be a concern or a struggle for students and really planning into
017that so that you're not finding yourself standing in front of the class or looking at the results of something that you just did and saying i really wish that i had thought about that differently that i had worded it differently that i had led in with a different approach this is an effort of the common playing time now um and it's really an effort across the district under the guide of dr wilson turner so that we are spending that time up front thinking about what is down the road and so i truly do believe that that has been a meaningful shift the next one i pulled was the increase of classroom visits versus walkthroughs question visits have a little bit more process to them because of the back end writing up and summarizing and the
018walkthrough lets you kind of pop into a classroom in a way you would kind of imagine if you just stopped into a class for five to ten minutes and kind of took stock of things and it led to you know meaningful ongoing conversation between myself and my coaches and my teachers and i i can tell you even at this point of the year um i've done 40 to 50 official in in terms of thinking about walk-throughs visits to classrooms and it leads directly back to my time sitting with coaches their time working with coaching cycles in in in conversation with teachers and moving along the different focuses and um goals for our sep in terms of all the content areas and i would pull the last one being the one-to-one small group or large group
019work being done around instructional practices and math and so our we have at montessori two new coaches which aren't just new to montessori but they're fresh from the classroom which has been wonderful with kim mcdonough and marin person who have i i feel taken and the building is taken quickly to them in a way that although we're only five months into the year i've seen so many instances where teachers are already demonstrating comfort with the one-to-one reach out to say you know i'd like to continue to grow with what you are here to share with me and when you have those new coaches coming in you never know how it's going to go so it's a great credit to them and to the approach that they're taking to establish relationships that quickly and with kim
020mcdonough in terms of math it's great to go into the classroom and see those practices already being put into play um that have been worked at the they say small group one to one large group level so just a few pieces of a greater set that i wanted to highlight for you tonight so there's a lot of different challenges that could have been picked and kind of i didn't want to go with the most obvious i mean the most overriding is the realities of coven when we're you know in this case three days back from the break and we're already making that shift we recognize the impact that that makes and and the work that we have to do in the pivoting that is done and the amazing efforts that our teachers take to continue
021the great monastery experience remotely as much as possible but in terms of things that we actually set a focus on doing well this year and is i wanted to go with departmentalization for grades three through five we haven't done that before we had a good sense of it a good start with it um kind of by really by um it wasn't by design more than last year when we had to move to different spacing our fourth grade classroom was entirely in the gym and so it was an interesting opportunity for miss googans to focus on math instruction miss karis to lead the ela instruction at the fifth grade level they were doing a lot of this sort of thing miss bakes and miss walton over the last few years but not officially and then at
022third grade level we've welcomed in a new teacher miss o'neill and so miss o'neill miswayland have again they've split the um effort of ela and math and so the benefits that that kind of approach definitely gives us is that you can purposefully plan with the coaches so instead of even needing to work with a larger group these every time we have account planning session my two coaches ela math can work specifically with a teacher at a one-to-one level really from where they s where they are but then also build those vertical teaming opportunities so those three teachers who focus on ela and those three teachers who focus on math who are responsible for the growth of our students three through five can get together and talk shop and really rise each other's type and so
023um and then the professional development that we can create geared directly for that group of teachers you know it's nice to be in conversations with individuals who are now into this enough to have been able to kind of contrast it versus anything they've done before and have people give positive feedback and highlight things where it's like you know getting a chance to just dive into truly deeply understand what it is to be a math teacher when prior to that they've been you know having to know all things wonders well all things envision and all things fast it's a different reality but i do think that we're starting to see the benefits of it i believe our assessment data will show us that and i do think that that's what the feedback is um is is
024showing me that people are seeing that the benefits are there not that it's without its challenges and there's definitely points where you can counter and say well but i wish this but it definitely seems to be the right direction i do feel that honestly um so i'll go to the next slide there some successes there's always a lot of successes but these i thought so far in the year i can say i feel confident are the sort that we we set out and we're going to meet our our goals and so we're successful to this point of the year uh using data and using that data to impact coaching and um obviously with performance on the back end of it we've done a lot to take from what we've learned in the early going with
025the early data we're about that point of the year where we're going to get a lot more when we return it's nwa season it's another round of ecbm it's there's wondrous assessments but even starting off the first with the fall sessions and then the smaller incremental assessments with math benchmarks that come you can pull out easy cbm easy cbm is an assessment that helps us focus our on students ability to uh recognize letter sound word reading and passage reading as you progress through the grade levels and with a goal of having 80 of our students be proficient by the year's end i can already tell you that all of our grades are somewhere between 63 and 83 of our students being proficient so we're either there or we're very very confident in the fact that
026we will be there by the end of the year so that's great because clearly as anyone would know you need to be able to read to access everything we are about and so this indicator is one of the most meaningful and um very encouraging the adult and student equity teams i you know we've been working our our our own building at its pace through its own process of just the equity conversation focusing the equity lens letting equity be as we've seen in many presentations the plate that everything else sits on and so it's exciting to watch our teachers growing but it's it's arguably it's more exciting even to watch the students have those moments of clarity and even grow and broaden their sense of what equity is about i'll tell you that my current equity
027group that's fourth and fifth grade student-led is focusing on equity as it relates to our special needs students because we're building with four classrooms of students with autism and a high needs level and they're considering resources in our property including the playground which has nothing for those students and so for them to recognize that and then be taking steps to try to get people on board with how to support changing that reality those kind of pieces it's it's exciting to see them growing in their understanding and um not thinking so of themself and really thinking more about what's not okay in their community and within their their classroom and their school life attendance is another piece it's always a point of conversation we have traditionally wonderful attendance but we do struggle with our 613 classrooms
028uh last year we sat at close to 60 percent of the students that were chronically absent by the end of the year we got that down to into the 40s in the early part of the school year we're sitting in the high 20s so so far there's some positive things happening and so i'm encouraged by that i'm hoping that we can hold that number or close to it for the rest of the year because it doesn't just happen it's really on the backs and with the effort of an entire team of people that make that happen and so um i just i thought that was worthy of bringing to focus and then the last piece this is just a really in a a setting aside of a traditional approach to a faculty meeting we have
029a once a month opportunity with all the staff after hours and we have set that aside and moved instead towards principal pd being really what it sounds like it ought to be a specific focus on professionally developing this the staff of the building and that's really every different position so at this point when you go to our monthly professional development block of an hour there's something for everyone and so it's not just trying to one size fits all we're trying to find things specifically for our teacher assistants to grow them in terms of reading instruction or their special education pieces that they have in our 613s um there's been a lot of it's almost a menu sort of thing but you find something for you specifically that's the goal and so um it allows us
030to really make progress on our sep and as we monitor making sure that you're seeing those sep elements front and center throughout the entire year so that shift i think has been a really successful one the last screen here really is just kids being montessori i think you could say it like that um you know we've got some traditional very familiar things where you've got students harvesting gigantic sweet potatoes um you've got hands-on science happening you've got students showing their own comfort with leading their class and i couldn't i wish i could have shown you a video of that math lesson that you're seeing up towards the top from ms googan's classroom it was one of the best i've ever seen and then you see traditional montessori resources being used on the right and up
031on the left side in the corner you see teachers working at within their grade level and in this case learning about foss instructions so just some great pictures from this year i did create a video and so that's the back end of my presentation i hope you do enjoy that if anyone has any questions or wonderings relative to montessori or the year that is i'd be happy to speak to them the time to be here with us tonight thank you so much even if i can't say you're my principal anymore this year superintendent adam hi good evening i think we'll move on to the district update at this time and starting with our vision mission and goals which you've just heard uh from mr powell but just making sure that we are making our decisions
032in alignment with our vision mission and goals and that we are keeping in the forefront of our minds why we're here every day to make those decisions for our students so that they can have the equitable opportunities so that they can reach their potential tonight's discussion topics we have three topics that i will go through with the help of miss mckenna we will talk about employee absences and the tiered plan for coverage covet 19 updates and middle school enrollment planning from our feeder alignment committee meeting last night um staffing coverage for employ i'm sorry i'll back up staffing coverage for employee absences since the start of the holiday break we've had about 333 new covic cases reported through wednesday with 248 additional unvaccinated contacts which also required us to quarantine and so that brings us
033to a total of 581 total individuals in quarantine as per the albany county department of health in addition we've seen an unprecedented spike with our positive cases we you see the data before you that sunday through monday it was roughly 145 new positive cases and tuesday and wednesday 143 new positive cases 200 additional unvaccinated contacts which require quarantine and on wednesday our employee absence rate was 259 employees were absent and 80 of those absences uh affected our instructional staff which left us with approximately 350 class periods that we had to struggle to cover uh district-wide and there were additional challenges in covering lunch periods and monitoring our hallways over the past few weeks prior to the break i know ms mckenna worked with our appsta leadership teams to develop a tiered staffing plan so that
034we would not have to go virtual or shift to distance learning but as you can see with these types of numbers even with our tiered staffing plan we were unable to absorb the absences and class coverages that we needed to and at this time i'll have ms mckenna go through the tiered staffing plan thank you superintendent adams so first i just want to just acknowledge that we do recognize the impact on our families and teaching and learning for our students when we do have to pivot to a distance learning day and because we are we have a belief that students need to be in school we did work with our um teachers association um laura franz and our administrators and a couple of cabinet members to create a rotating schedule for teachers on special assignment
035and also our district level administrators and as a result of that collaboration we were able to develop what we're calling a tiered approach to providing students to access to teaching and learning when we have a high number of absences across non-instructional members and instructional staff so with that in our planning we created a tier one and so when we tier one would mean when we have substitute coverage um we have a number of teachers out and we don't have uh substitute staff to cover um the buildings we are then going to continue to follow our students um period by period schedule we will utilize our school level staff to cover for instructional staff that we can't accommodate through our substitute teaching staff we will also have our student support staff supporting our hallway transitions and
036then also of course our homeschool coordinators and our building level uh leaders with an increased presence in our hallways specifically during transitions in lunch and that's when we see an increase in staff absences with our uh safety and security staff um if we can accommodate um um students um in with our tier one plan we will then shift to our tier tier two plan um and what students will still follow their period by period schedule uh we will have all of our tier one supports that i just mentioned um the difference between tier one and tier two is that we will call um um and activate our district level uh teachers on special assignment to provide classroom coverage and then we will also use our district leaders um if we need to to provide classroom
037coverage um if the number of ptosis that we have in our buildings can't accommodate um and stubborn and cover all of the staff absences in the classroom should tier 1 and tier 2 not be effective then we will then go to a tier three plan when we just don't have the number of staff that we need for students to follow their period by period schedule they will remain in a cohort model all day long they will start in their first period class and they will remain there all day long and then we will back fill with teachers that don't have a period one into those classrooms that have an uncovered period one and they will remain with the um the students um for the remainder of the day teachers will post assignments uh in their
038google classroom and students will complete those assignments um in their instructional cohort um on in their google um classroom uh we will utilize our building level staff to provide student supervision for each um cohort or pod and then we will rotate staff to cover for um teachers 30 minute duty-free lunch and many and any um contractual coverage that we need to provide such as a prep period there should be a tier four um in this plan now because we are actually in a tier four plan uh or tier four because uh even with implementing a tier a tier three we were not able um in our middle schools um and the high school to accommodate even a pod approach to teaching and learning for the day and again i'm just going to say that i
039know superintendent adams has said this time and time again we do recognize the impact on our families and teaching and learning for our students and we felt that uh having this tiered approach to cover classrooms um when we just don't have the staff due to um clovid related um absences um and other illnesses that prevent um teachers and and staff from being in school that this is a really important plan for us to execute with that i will turn it back over to you superintendent adams thank you miss mckenna uh this information has been updated as of yesterday we have a little bit of information from today but as of yesterday our total confirmed cases in the district 737 534 of those uh cases are students 135 are faculty and 68 our staff you can
040see the average daily cases i think what is important to note is that today the albany county reported a record number of new daily cases up to 1010 for today we are still encouraging our families to be prepared with backup plans in the event that we have to transition to distance learning unfortunately this is something that we're going to have to uh be prepared for each and every day as we move forward the testing of our employees we do partner with quadrant biosciences and suny upstate medical university for the saliva swab pool testing we do not do the nasal swab we have our reported status and we did update this today so even in my message that went out this morning these numbers are a little bit off but we will correct it on the
041website we were previously at about 40 percent of our faculty and staff that had not submitted proof of vaccination as of close of business today we are at 30 percent 30.4 so we are seeing that the proof of vaccination received that number is increasing we are very very close to that 70 percent and we are still encouraging our faculty and staff to provide us with that proof of vaccination our human resources staff will continue to follow up individually with our employees so that we can stay on top of how many of our faculty and staff members are vaccinated we do have the mandatory testing for those who are unvaccinated and we have a schedule that they will adhere to but then one of the things that we do as well we have people as you
042know the data shows that there are people who are asymptomatic but they do test positive and so our faculty and staff are able to come in uh during the day they do have to schedule an appointment but they may be vaccinated they may have shown us the proof of vaccination but so that they and they may be asymptomatic but we still offer our faculty and staff the option so that they can come in and test um you know should they just want that level of comfort of knowing that they are negative or even the comfort of knowing that they're positive so that they know what to do even though they are asymptomatic and so our testing for employees through friday january 14th 9 a.m to 3 p.m these are the daily locations uh for next
043week this is also going to be where we offer the pcr test as well so we are very excited about being able to offer that for our employees and for our students we continue to push out our vaccine information because we strongly encourage anyone who is five years or older if you are eligible and able to please get vaccinated and we make sure that that information is provided to our families and to our faculty and staff last night i'll transition to the theater alignment committee meeting that we had last night it was an excellent excellent meeting we had great conversation we are adding on to that next layer as we progress through this process i would like to say welcome to president savage secretary shadarshitur and member al-min yahweh for joining the committee these are
044our board representatives on the ad hoc committee with regard to the feeder alignment so now these two have been joined together we introduced dr kenneth robin to our team and to our committee we were very very excited to hear the information that he prepared for us we did a review of the process and the research to date we looked at um a predictive model that dr robin from university at albany uh provided to us uh one of the most compelling pieces was that in the model uh that he presented we were able to compute academic attendance behavioral and res and risk scores for the grouping of our students and look at how that will be incorporated moving forward from that discussion our committee members identified additional considerations that they wanted with regard to transportation looking
045at the distance from home to the school versus the distance from the school from the elementary school to the middle school also the comparison of future draft scenarios to the current middle school enrollment pattern looking at the number of changes that would be from the existing feeder alignment to what one of the proposed current one of the proposed patterns might be and then of course dual language program is now a separate school and some of the things that we looked at it was still embedded within dcs so the committee has asked that we pull that apart and then the use of the district at risk score and the idea was brought forward that we look at that in terms of a histogram so that we could see how many at-risk uh students might be in
046one particular school so that we can look at how we could echo equitably distribute resources for our various schools the last component is our next steps as we look for next week on the 13th there is a special board meeting with regard to the feeder alignment process and we will continue that discussion and then we will look to schedule our community forums and then we'll have our board of education meeting on january 20th and then the 21st through the second we have our community survey for additional opportunities for community feedback and i do want to emphasize that the information that we have now um is is very small and so we are committed to making sure that some of our communities that we have not heard from that we are engaging our community schools counselors
047and coordinators and working with our principals to ensure that we get representation in that survey process across the district and then february 3rd is another special board meeting for this particular item and then february 10th is a regular board meeting so at this time i will open the floor for questions and as always board colleagues i'd like to start at the beginning of the presentation and try and group our questions about topics so that we can um not bounce around too much and i'm thinking if it's okay with folks that will start first with that um the three the tiers one two and three i'm staffing but not talk about our current situation which is as dr mckenna said or ms mckenna said uh our tier four current situation so i'd like you to hold
048your questions about what's happening right now until that second section which is the coveted 19 updates because i think that would be a good time to talk about that so uh discussing our tier tiered uh response to shortage of staffing i see board member crate you have a hand up i do and i just wanted to i had a question that i forgot to ask last time about this and it was my understanding is that in tier three um because the teachers the students aren't in the classrooms but there's particular teachers during the day the teachers post the google classroom assignments for them to complete independently does that and obviously you could have to shift to this on kind of short notice so this would this mean the teachers always have to have prepared that
049google classroom type asynchronous lesson that a student that students can complete independently would that be like their normal lesson or they just have that extra lesson just in case in the back that's a great that's a great question and so the answer is is that our teachers are using google classroom on a regular basis um to post assignments for students in their classroom and so that's you know we we're a one-to-one district and they're using their chromebooks even in in the classroom certainly there's a balance between the paper pencil hands-on activities and the google classroom and so our kiddos are very familiar and accustomed to working in the google classroom and our teachers regularly post um all of their assignments um into the google classroom regardless of whether we're in a distance learning environment or
050whether we're in person so it's nothing above and beyond what they would already already be doing so i guess i was confused because i i was thinking so teachers never really have days where they plan to lecture or have class discussions they absolutely do there's a balance and so once that happens then they would go in um and you know just like we would say you know we're passing out the hands-on activity um teachers will just say okay i want you to log into our google classroom your assignment has been posted they also post um their powerpoint presentations or short videos to support or other documents that may support the lesson for that day but when we have to go into this cohort model environment teachers would have that lesson posted that they would be
051having students do on that given day okay yeah that was my only question just making sure that this that the teachers were not being double burdened by doing the planning they're doing they're doing the planning and work for the for their actual classes in addition to the supervision of the pod correct dr tutor thank you um most of the this question is more i mean the board sort of knows the answer but i wanted to bring to put this question just so that the parents get to hear why the there's always a question among the community as to why does the school at the last minute pivot to you know any of these remote models right and i think it might be useful for them to know the challenges associated with identifying when those staff
052shortages happen uh i mean we know about it but the public doesn't and so i think if you could just give a brief snippet of the process people will be more understanding of so i'll start and if i miss anything miss mckenna as well as dr wilson turner can chime in as well we have a system by which absences are put in call absence manager and we monitor that however there is a time frame that calls can go into absence manager so that we can monitor when we see an an increased number of absences for a particular school as well as district-wide and so based on that timing of when the phone calls come in we have to respond so i'll put it in perspective this way in the evenings typically principals are watching for
053their schools and miss mckenna and dr wilson turner are watching for the schools that they supervise throughout the evening as to how many absences may be coming in in the morning roughly um i think by 5 a.m we can see what that projected number is completely and then we can make decisions there are times when we see that escalation in the evening so that we can make that call say tonight even after the board meeting we could make that call but sometimes the calls don't come in in a manner that we could notify our families ahead of time we wouldn't be able to make that call until after we see what the absence rate would be at a particular building or throughout the district miss mckenna and dr wilson turner if there are any if
054there's anything that i missed please add to that i think you have covered it superintendent adams i think the only thing i would tag on to what dr touretta said is that it does seem that um uh the teachers know right the day before because they're sending kids home with screen but with chromebooks they're they often know by two o'clock uh it's possible we're gonna go virtual tomorrow so i'm gonna send you guys home with chromebooks but sometimes the notification for families doesn't come out until the night time because you're waiting to be sure right and i think from a parent's perspective uh an early warning system would be helpful so that as soon as those teachers get whatever notice they get that says oh you better make sure your kids have this chromebooks it
055would be helpful to send and notice home to parents to say nothing is definite yet but start you know implementing your own backup plans because you may need them i think would be would be helpful to parents especially parents of elementary kids secondary kids do need some time but it's the elementary kids where the the lack of coverage obviously is really a deep problem so i i think that would be a nice additional step in the process if it could be inserted thank you and then i had a question of my own about um tier three and attendance so um how will attendance be tracked on a tier three day and in particular i'm thinking of students who um you know could just as easily do their virtual school from their own house and maybe
056even do a better job at it if they happen to have a warm safe quiet place to be um will that be considered attempt being in attendance at school if you participated virtually from home on a tier three day um so we haven't had that level of discussion president savage um but we do have the um taking attendance process in place when students are in um a cohort or a pod situation and it would be no different than if a student went period by period um the assignments um that students complete would we would have the expectation that they would go through their periods and complete those assignments and then they would mark be marked present for the entire day if they were in school for that day but we have not discussed as a
057leadership team should we have to go into a cohort or pod model for that given day if a student would be able to work remotely from home and get credit for not being um actually physically in school um if we have to implement the tier three model we will not know till that morning so we would not be able to notify families that today we're shifting to a tier three model where students will be in a cohort period one model for the entire day so really it's an internal mechanism to provide access to our schools and to teaching and learning for that day in that that method and not necessarily an opportunity for kids to work in a virtual environment from home i hear what you're saying i think that's a decision that has to
058be made before we can get to a situation where we actually implement this because albany is a very small city no one has more than a 18 minute drive from albany high and probably most people are a six minute drive from albany high so it's pretty easy for kids to get from school to home and i think that's a question that's going to keep coming up unless you have a very clear and specific answer either you do have to be physically in the building or your attendance counts even if you're doing virtual school from home on a day that you would be potted anyway and i'm not saying to trying to dictate the answer i'm just saying we really do need an answer right so and i would say as a team um we feel
059strongly that students need to be in school and we have not discussed the option of students working remotely if we are in a pod day so in a pod situation or a cohort model so you know my my answer on the board floor is is that we are expecting students um to be in school even when we're in a tier three model because we believe that the social emotional mental health um food services that we provide to our students even in that model is important for kids to um to have uh mr el minawi do you guys hear me we sure do um so regarding each of these tiers do we have um exact uh figures for the number of staff required for each level so i mean do we have it laid out so
060that we know we need x whole x number of hall monitors for a tier two day or x number of instructional staff for a tier two day right so for i'll answer the first part for a halt for the hall monitors we need all of our hall monitors um for tier one and tier two um it's only uh when and if we have to shift to a tier three that we could um have a reduced number of hall monitors um in the hallways because students aren't transitioning from period to period there is a tipping point for each one of our middle schools and the high school and it really depends on the number of staff that they have within the building that will tip them from a tier one to a tier two and then
061a tier two to a tier three so for example at myers middle school um the tipping point is having 11 instructional staff um out of the building on any given day because it's not just 11 staff it's 11 staff times the nine periods in that day that we won't have coverage for so it's um you know it's cumulative over the course of the day that we have to provide coverage um so you know again it you know i can you know give you the examples um for each school if you would like but again for you know it's different for for each building so we do have that one yeah it's just good to know that you guys have that detailed level of info absolutely that decisions are made based on that um that system
062um and you know the community should know that there is you know we're looking at the numbers consistently and that we have certain levels we have to meet or we're unable to provide the service appropriately yeah and we are doing that i and cecily can dr wilson turner can probably um will probably agree with me it's the last thing that we do before we shut our computers down at night and it's the first thing that we're doing at four o'clock in the morning checking that attendance and and making contact with our um teachers on special assignment at the district level to um support our um schools so we don't have to pivot from you know one tier to another we would love to stay in tier one um but we know that we have to
063have you know plan b and plan c which we do have um any other questions on this tiered system before we go on to talk about the covid 19 slides including our current tier 4 situation okay then let's continue who has a question about anything covered 19 related and if uh tiny if you can move the slides forward i'd appreciate it questions i'll ask one while people uh formulate um superintendent adams i think you said this but i just wanted to make sure because it was a question i had when i reviewed the slides immediate initially vaccinated staff can access the testing center and we provide testing at no cost to the vaccinated staff they can be tested as much as as often as they reasonably want to in theory yes but typically it's once
064a week okay but so i do well even though the slide says mandatory weekly testing for vaccinated employees it's optional weekly testing for unvaccinated employees they're welcome to come in and be tested if they if they want to be is that do i understand correctly it's in the reverse so if you recall we have our the those who have not provided proof of vaccination did i say it back we have yes we have a schedule that they come in uh for testing if you are vaccinated um then we have the open time slot you just have to set up an appointment to come in and you can opt into that testing and um you know in theory and i'll say i'll emphasize that in theory yes they could come in like every day or every
065other day but in practice what we are seeing is that there are people who are opting um to come in once a week or once every two weeks just because they want to be sure terrific thank you very much i appreciate that other questions about any of the covid19 slides other questions about our oh i'm sorry did i miss someone this is vicky sorry um and i don't know if this is where uh this fits but it was on the the test kit distribution go for it okay and and superintendent i'm going to apologize up front that i i feel like i should know the answer to this but i don't but in terms of the test kits that are distributed to our families um how many test kits or how many tests can be
066um administered for each kit um is in that does that just take families through say possibly the month of january you know and especially if you have multiple children i'm just trying to understand what that means and what it looks like so there are two tests per kit and what we have done is and and i really give a lot of kudos to miss mckenna uh for really stepping up and putting this process in place over the holiday weekend and i know i keep saying that because i think it's important to note all of the work that has gone behind the scenes to make sure that we can provide this for our families we have labels so that we can make sure that each student not just the family each student so if you have
067multiple children each of your children have a test kit and so those labels go on the test kit so that you at home you have the information for your child that when you log in if the child is positive you can log in to put in the results in the portal for the department of health that information is right there for you you don't have to struggle and find it and look it up so you know the thinking ahead of time was to make sure that we put those labels on the test kit so that parents have that information and also in that distribution we made sure that schools received enough test kits for anyone who did not pick up a kit because here's the other thing we knew that in doing this on sunday
068we knew that everyone might not be able to make it so then we built in monday as an organizational day to get the rest of those tests out to the schools and then so the schools could then complete that distribution beginning tuesday and set up different times based on their community what would be beneficial for their families to come in which is why we emphasize check with your school because every school is going to be different based on the needs of the community when you can come and pick up your test kit i will address one of the things i know that was a concern because it was a concern among superintendents especially those of us who have a significant enl population and you know we have over 50 languages that are spoken in our
069district alone i know syracuse has some 80 to 89 languages that are spoken what we have done is at the school site not just at aic but at the school site there is someone who can help walk you through the process so that you can understand those directions i know over at eagle point there's a qr code that you can go to to see those directions we have a hyperlink so that you can see within our information you can click on that hyperlink to see those instructions for translation we ask that you contact your school because there's someone who is at the school who can assist with that and what i observed at one of our schools was as parents were coming in the process was kind of overarching explained and then they were given
070the information with regard to if you have questions as you were doing a test here's where you can call here's where you can get help so that on the ground service uh the translation any assistance that our families need all they have to do is contact their school and the school can absolutely help them other questions covid19 testing vaccination um i guess i would appreciate an update on albany county department of health um test to stay ten days versus five days i know there's been so much going on in the news about all the changes um and what's at the county level and what's at the state level and i'm really just thinking it would be helpful to get an update on all of that at this time with regard to we are waiting for
071additional guidance we had the superintendents had a meeting this morning with the department uh this with the new york state department of education um we also had a meeting with the governor's office in looking for that consistent information because we know even within the capital region we have different dohs that are supporting different practices within the school districts and so we've reached out for information that could help make things more consistent and so as soon as we receive that information i will absolutely share it out it's anticipated that tomorrow's meeting will elucidate what they want us to change to thank you dr sam thank you okay so one comment kids the access bio company that makes these kits has a nice video on their front page of how that has to be done if you
072can put that link on where our test information is if people have you know language once you see a video sometimes that crosses the language value absolutely we can do that anyone else on covid related topics or um board member i had just been going to ask if because the state is distributing these tests if they maybe maybe were state resources for translations of instructions that we could that we could utilize that was a question that we did ask and um they have to provide some additional information they do have i know that there's one or two languages that they do have it already already translated in but one of the things that we talked about on our call was that in our districts most of us already have those services in our buildings to
073support our families and and so sometimes it's the one to one i agree with dr chatur that once you see the video that you can easily follow that and so we'll do that link but as far as additional resources coming from the state with regard to translation we did ask the question but we're still waiting on that response thank you anyone else before we move on to feeder okay questions or comments about where we are on feeder what we did last night was that really only last night that seems like at least a week ago um and or what's up coming can i i apologize can i jump in quickly i was a little slow and be able to get my camera and my microphone to come on related to the translation question please join
074that's great in addition to everything that was noted uh we we did have the instructions that we've been uh providing to our families translated into 18 languages and we've been distributing uh that by our e l staff as well and all that information is available on our website translatable into nearly uh 100 languages too so those resources from the district are available for our el families as well thank you very much and now onto feeder anyone with questions or comments on feeder [Music] i think the superintendent did a great job of summarizing the conversation last night i think the the questions will continue to become more and more refined as the model becomes more and more refined um one question i had about was about the next steps which we did not discuss last night
075so if somebody could move us forward to the next step slides um based on the conversation last night um i'm not sure how this schedule should should or should not be adjusted we had originally when we set this schedule anticipated that the committee would look at some scenarios as early as the first week in january but instead we were in the defining the model stage last night so um i guess i i hadn't really had a chance to think through like what would we do at the board meeting next thursday would the committee ha are we anticipating that the committee would have had a chance to review some scenarios are we just going to do an update on this process what's the goal of the community forums i would think we would want to hold
076on community forums until such time as we actually had some scenarios and i don't feel like we're going to be ready by a week from today or tomorrow to be to be presenting scenarios so i'm just i'm struggling with this this schedule here i think that uh one of the things that we have to do after giving dr robin an opportunity to kind of review our information my plan is to speak with him tomorrow and to see where we are with what he's able to share out on the 13th and then we would take it from there so do you anticipate midi is going to meet again before the 13th to really i don't think the committee would meet i think we would be able to just kind of share out some information and have
077some discussion and then we would have a committee meeting but again i would like to have an opportunity to follow up with him to see what where he is with regard to the deliverables and the requests and then tomorrow we can work through what that might need to look like why don't you and i stay in touch so that we are making sure that we're making productive use of of the time and thoughtful use of the time all the way through the man that was going to be my question is there a possibility we would not have the board meeting next thursday i think she and i are going to talk tomorrow after she talks to dr robbins and then we'll see where we're at okay that makes sense so for anybody who ever thinks
078that a board meeting is not things happening in real time this is what happens we're happening it's all happening in real time we're just trying to figure stuff out um so yes i would say there's a possibility but no decision will be made until we get a little farther down this process okay anything else on feeder i know many of my board colleagues even if they aren't on the ad hoc committee um we're listening in virtually so we appreciate everybody paying close attention to that since it's such an important factor for the next probably 10 years for our district and hello zariah hi all right anything else if not i think that we will call that that the end of the district update is that okay right end of the district update and now i
079just need to get back to my agenda here so i don't make a mistake that brings us to our public comment period and um we do always accept comment from the public even when there is no uh in-person meeting we always accept community comment we really appreciate community comment it really influences us and we we learn a lot from the questions that people ask for 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 our community we do have one voicemail comment tonight and i don't know mr baker are you prepared to do that voicemail comment first is that okay i am and it's coming up right now all right terrific thank you yes my name is tom anthony i
080live in the city of albany i have two boys that attend new colonial elementary and i want to uh discuss my displeasure of closing the school district of the city of albany which is very mind boggling the science doesn't back anything up like that i think the school district has completely failed our children and continued to do it and uh i really do believe that the school district should pay the residents that want the school district tuition fees to send them to other schools where they're in school all right thank you okay in addition to the one voicemail comment we received nine written comments which we are going to read now we really do our very best to get people's names right so if anyone misspeaks and says a name pronounce his name incorrectly we'd
081appreciate it if you let us know by email we also do note that we do not allow comment on individual staff members or individual students we think it's an important part of their due process and the respect that they're entitled to that people's names not be mentioned on the public record without proper due process so board members are going to substitute alternative words if individual names are mentioned with that i'm going to turn it over to board member krejci if you're ready to read we'd appreciate it yes i am the first the first message is from and i apologize if i pronounce her name her name wrong kishawa armstrong good morning i have three children who attend three different schools and one which is vaccinated the other two aren't one of them i will be
082taking to get vaccinated because she has no choice while the other is a 16 year old male whom i can't force to be vaccinated i would like to know can we can we have an option for virtual learning as the numbers are spiking higher and higher by the days my 16 year old has asthma hasn't been treated for in a couple of years but i as his parents are afraid for him to get sick i have been keeping him home since school has returned but will be penalized i have been encouraging him to stay on top of to stay on top of his work which i haven't had any complaints about his assignments just his attendance i would at least like the option to keep him home also with the numbers rising the teachers and
083other school personnel are going to become sick and unable to do their jobs which leaves everyone unsafe if everyone was virtual at two or three weeks i think the numbers would at least go down the kids will be home and the parents who have to go out and work should be taking precautions on protecting their families something needs to be done and soon thank you for your time the next message is from matthew shupe it is ridiculous for pre-k to have a virtual day on december 22nd the day before a break due to bus stuffing shortages as no pre-k students are eligible for the bus it looks more like the school district is just trying to make any excuse to be virtual and not deal with students in the building even when that makes it
084difficult for students to learn parents to work and teachers to educate the third message is from talisha latimer and it is how come if a parent chooses to homeschool at this time at a pandemic we can't we cannot the next message and i'm going to try my best with this name is from michaela cola giovanni she says hello i would like to address the board regarding the pool at myers middle school my son is a hackett middle school 8th grader and member of the modified swim team there have been consistent issues with the myers pool that seem to not be taken seriously by administrators at the building practices have been continuously cancelled oftentimes at the last minute as kids are arriving to practice this has made it difficult for the kids to practice on a
085regular basis i feel it is important this be addressed the kids have an excellent coach and a lot of potential but due to issues with the pool they are not getting a chance to partake in the sport they love they have 7th and 8th graders practicing from 5 30 to 7 30 at night at albany high school to get any practice in so that they can participate in meets which puts a hardship on families and has caused some kids to leave the program it's not fair to the kids and administrators need to address it if if modified swim is going to be offered the district needs to provide the proper maintenance to the pool that is required for them to practice this issue has been largely ignored and not taken seriously up to this point
086which is why i'm reaching out to the board i know the athletic director and coach have made attempts to address it but they have not been successful i would appreciate if the board could possibly look into this matter sincerely michaela cola giovanni and the next message final my final message is from mark adam dear board of education my name is mark adam and i am the parent of a pre-k student at albany school of humanities i am very disappointed in albany's decision to close schools and switch to virtual learning through martin luther king day while i understand covet cases have been increasing over the holiday break virtual learning is not an adequate replacement for in-person learning especially for a four-year-old child we all know that schools are one of the safest places for children due
087to the strict health and safety procedures such as mandatory face masks social distancing cova testing programs etc i think albany city schools have done a great job in this respect thus i would argue students and others will be less safe now that they are at home and out in the community for the next 12 days where the same rules are not being enforced i am aware of the challenges facing school districts and specifically school leaders i work at a local school district and i am involved in the meetings and discussions on how to navigate this ongoing pandemic i firmly believe that we should be doing everything possible to preserve in-person learning for our children unfortunately our children continue to bear the burden of this pandemic schools should be the last thing that are closed everyone
088in my household had coveted over the holiday break because my wife and i are fully vaccinated and boosted we had mild colds with runny noses my son also tested positive and has thankfully not experienced any symptoms his last day at school was december 21st and he was scheduled to return from isolation tomorrow because of the switch to virtual learning he will go four weeks without being in a classroom this is unacceptable my wife and i have lived in the city of albany for 10 years and we chose to buy our current home because it is in albany we love this city and appreciate what the school district offers our child however i am feeling let down by our school district at this moment i know that the district will not reverse yesterday's decision but i
089am pleading with you to a return all students to in-person learning on tuesday january 18th and b do not switch to virtual learning again our kids need to be in school sincerely mark adam and those are that's the end of my comments thank you very much for remember creating uh board member smith i'm going to turn the microphone over to you now and i am also just going to note that one of the ones that was uh originally provided to you when i said you had four is actually the same person about the voicemail so if you can just pass over that one since we did get a chance to hear from him already thank you madam president and i might have to ask you to remind me of the name of that individual as
090i was pulling up my sister mr anthony is the one that that left the right very good thank you okay my first um comment is from meredith wilson who writes good afternoon my daughter is in the eighth grade at myers middle school and takes french class as you know mrs philippo pony retired and yesterday was her last day today my daughter said that they had a hall monitor in the room and watched a movie this obviously not being uh this obviously not being recited or learning anything i would like to know what the plan is going forward including the timeline that the district will be providing a teacher who is capable of teaching french language if this reaches you in a timely manner please include in public comment tonight's board meeting regards meredith wilson okay
091and my second one is from kimberly and i apologize ruckell i'm not sure that's correct who writes dear superintendent adams and board members i know that it must seem like it i am always writing and complaining while i am still extremely concerned about the status of the feeder alignment patterns i understand that the committee and district is still working on new scenarios and intends to use community engagement so i'll simply say thank you for your continued effort on it and take a break from writing on that topic this month my current concern is the ongoing problems and lack of maintenance with myers poole the modified swim team has continuously had practices cancelled or shifted to alternate times and locations to accommodate the fact that the myers pool has clearly been neglected and not properly maintained
092it's my understanding that the maintenance of the pool would be handled by the head janitor which is a currently vacant position at myers there are regulations regarding certifications for the operator and reporting that is required by the state department of health if the person responsible is not employed at the moment how are parents and students expected to believe the proper chemical levels are being upheld and that the pool is overall safe to use i do not want to swim practice or or have meats to be canceled i appreciate the efforts that the athletics department and coaches have expended to find alternate sites to use however the only other site available is at the high school which means scheduling around the varsity schedule this leaves modified with the option to practice during dinner hours and when
093students would normally be doing homework and trying to get to bed at a decent time our students need and deserve to have a schedule that provides them to find a balance between school work sports and life having to constantly change the practice schedule isn't fair to them or the coaches i'm asking that more attention is given to the pool maintenance so that the next anna flanders who is just starting out in his or her swim career won't be discouraged and choose to quit thank you okay okay mr anthony i'll go over that one okay and my next is from uh laura duran she who writes i'm a parent of two district children during the december 16th board meeting board members and senior administrators on the facilities committee asserted that our district doesn't have enough non-binary
094students to justify a dedicated gender neutral locker room in the redesign of athletic facilities at albany high i was puzzled as to how committee members know we have so few non-very non-binary students when there is no way for students to indicate that on district forms did anyone on the facilities committee reach out to the nurses and teachers who work daily with gender diverse students it doesn't appear so the committee members statements were alarmingly out of touch with our student population the american academy of pediatric study on the prevalence of gender diverse youth in an urban school district surveyed three thousand one hundred sixty eight students from pittsburgh public high schools about their gender identity more than nine percent of students claim gender diversity nearly three hundred students albany demographics are likely not so different however
095even if our district only had a handful of non-binary students they would still have the right to a safe space to change for gym and sports board members and administrators should also be aware that not all our students who have a non-binary identity are comfortable coming out on a school on a school form and those students are still entitled to equal rights at school regarding the current plan to give non-binary students the option to use the referee rooms will those rooms be locked so that students can only access that space by outing themselves as they attempt to access a space designated for others the district should not put students in such a difficult position dedicated gender-neutral locker rooms provide safety from verbal and physical harassment not only to non-biased binary students but any student who
096feels unsafe in a single gender locker room please do the right thing for vulnerable students in your care do not send them the message that they are in an afterthought by making them squeeze into a space designated for others finally i urge the district to reach out to glsen glsen to provide training for senior administrators in the board on how to support gender diverse youth who are are at a higher risk of emotional and physical harms when schools do not create a supportive affirming environment okay and i think that is all for me thank you very much for reading uh both of you and that does bring us to the end of our uh public comment period as i said before we really do appreciate all of the work that members of the community do
097when they put those comments together and we do find them informative and helpful we don't now move to the part of our meeting that we call routine consent during this portion of the meeting we approve routine matters for the district these include items like contracts field trips personnel matters and the like each board member reviews each item carefully but we vote on them as a group with no discussion that allows us to use our meeting time more efficiently nonetheless each board member has 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 may i have a motion to adopt the routine consent agenda motion by board member man second board member wilson are there any set-asides i think board
098member man is has a set aside she just needs to find her mute button i do have a set aside and i'm just looking here it's the um the albany symphony orchestra i'm sorry could you speak more directly to your microphone i'm having a hard time hearing you my set aside is number 20 albany orchestra number 20 albany symphony orchestra any other set-asides all in favor of adopting the routine consent agenda last item number 20 albany symphony orchestra one two three four five seven that is unanimous and now a motion to adopt number 20 albany symphony orchestra can i get a motion board member wilson and a second board member smith is there any discussion board member man it's just a comment i mean we have a gem right here in the city of albany
099[Music] so i just wanted to say is that better a little bit okay so my comment is quick and i just appreciate that district the symphony orchestra are working together for the tremendous opportunity yeah thank you very much has definitely been a wonderful partner to us in various efforts over the years so agree we're very lucky to have such a quality symphony program in our um small city so it's terrific all in favor of a doubt any further discussion all in favor and that is unanimous and that brings us to the end of the routine consent agenda and on to our first discussion item which is the data assessment and technology division update typically we front load our our agenda with all of our action items we would not expect to take another action tonight
100although we sometimes do we're not prevented from but we do not have an intent to take another action tonight at this time with that i'll turn it over to the superintendent thank you so very much president savage members of the board at this time we have our division update from the office of assessment accountability and technology innovation led by assistant superintendent mr kent baker and so i will turn it over to him to share the updates with regard to his division mr baker thank you very much superintendent adams and members of the board for this opportunity to report to you about the activities within my division and i have to apologize up front literally right before i was introduced i experienced a horrible tickle in my throat so my voice is uh weaker than normal
101so bear with me please do you need a minute to get yourself some water there's no no rush i think i will improve okay thank you very much for that as with all of the divisions in the district we align everything we do with the district vision mission and further we feed that mission and vision into our division goals and while primarily statutory as goals there are fluid objectives on a year-to-year basis that fall within um within these goals and they become the focus of the work for our foreseeable future on a year to year basis as far as the division composition and structure is concerned we have a relatively stable group of folks with the welcomed addition i'll note here in that top row of instructional staffing i'm very pleased to announce that we
102now have three full-time technology coaches on board under my direct supervision and we have really focused quite heavily in the last 18 months in particular on as you all know more purely integrating technology into all of our instructional components we also have as i continue to point out three distinct departments within this division one of those being the technology support realm that is led by mr john wilde and unfortunately mr wilde is unable to be here this evening however he was very instrumental in creating the presentation and we will carry on in his stead the staffing and his department is predominantly tech support desktop support specialist with some specialized positions who perform a higher level enterprise management and of course miss patricia wolfe who is joining us this evening and will partner with me in
103a few slides miss wolfe leads a very small but mighty team of folks who are really the brains behind all of the uh information systems that we manage and that we use to present data models and other analysis tools across the spectrum and we do still retain ownership of all the mechanics of administration of state local and federal assessments and that work is led by ms shayna barber before i get into the next couple of slides of by the numbers just be aware that i know we've packing off a lot into these slides and in this interest of time we're not going to dive too deeply into these because i'm quite confident that the board membership will ask questions when they have them and certainly if you um would like anything else to be expounded
104upon in a boe update i'm very happy to provide more information through that vehicle as well so this first slide really just sets the stage for what i'll consider are our infrastructure our enterprise backbone in the sense that it's the the technology systems and items that we use on a daily basis and that we manage as a division and just on the left we are up to about 27 000-ish managed assets and i'm very deliberate about that term managed because all of these things require support and configuration they are not dumb devices they all grab ip addresses and they require policies management and so on in the right top right uh the one thing i do want to point out is when we look at how success is measured the gold standard in this domain
105would be 99.99 for the things we can control and that we have complete ownership of we do have a network up time and a district systems up time that exceed 99 percent we're clearly not at 100 percent but i do like to point out when you look at typical sector measurement metrics things are incremental and we we accept successes in the sometimes in the teens and we we like gradual growth and trajectory that shows improvement in my world the expectation is everything works all the time exactly how someone wants it so it's a higher standard and we do our best to reach it and we are as close as i think we can possibly be in the bottom right we just look at those systems that are behind everything we do 42 instructional 18 operational
106and very tightly integrated exchanging information seamlessly on a daily basis then the dashboards you'll hear a little bit more about have really become a part of the fabric of all the work as well really quickly help desk i'll just point out that we have cataloged here about 5700 requests from september through december that comes from 30 000 phone calls here to date so july through december about 30 000 phone calls and this help desk counter here just tracks what we've been able to actually enter in so sometimes things will be dispatched on a phone call and the technician doesn't actually enter this into the ticketing system so what you're seeing here is actually lights if we looked at what we really provide in terms of support on daily basis the other thing i want to
107note quickly is that 40 hour resolution time is probably closer to 30 uh this also this 40 hours also includes some let's call it latent uh record keeping where people do not close tickets out in a timely fashion so they live on an extended open period for longer than they're actually open and miss wolfe will talk about some of these items good evening members of the board this is really a summary of our clever data clever is an intermediary software that links to our various instructional products you can think of it as a landing page there are two things to point out on this page one is that 92 percent of the students are using clever and launching into the various software products despite that we are primarily in person and the second is um
108you see on the graphic there for teachers that's not just teachers that is teachers admin and support staff so if you're just looking at teachers and admin you're around the 93 percent for teachers for all staff as well mr speaker email is the official district communication tool and it's obviously a business platform for us just looking at typical monthly traffic it's in the millions it's almost 3 million male items per month what's really important here is we are getting great efficiency right now from our our new email gateway system which is more than just a mitigation and protection system it's also a training platform and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment too the top left graphic looks at rejections that include user action the bottom left is those rejections from
109a system automated in other words we give users the opportunity to parse out what they think is malicious or spam whereas we also have rules in place that allow the system automatically to mitigate and block male items that potentially would deliver a malicious payload and then the rest of the objects really on the right side just point out average monthly traffic overall and for analysts who look on the left side first and look at the means at the bottom and say well you're showing me a total male volume of about 1.2 million on the right you're showing me 2.7 million what's really interesting is if you carry this chart out over a year so the top right is average based over a year per month we do a lot more volume of mail in the
110the middle to second part of the year i can't explain why that is but we do a lot more volume of trap mail traffic in the last four or five months of school cyber security is um quintessentially important we can have all the greatest tools and processes in the world but if we don't have a safe and secure environment and we're not protecting users and their their data then we're failing so we all understand physical security is a shared responsibility and we have a lot of systems in place of the district that help us to monitor and manage those things when it comes to cyber security we have to rely heavily on on a few tools and so the mail system that we have allows us to really drill down and understand what people are
111doing in terms of interacting with mail mail is the main gateway those numbers on prior slides show you how much mail we receive and how much is potentially malicious we do i think a really good job of securing our perimeter in terms of cyber security so the user risk is really where we're focused now i'm really happy to report that as of today you can see in the top left that was on december 27th as of today we've moved to a b grade overall and the really important part still remains that our human error piece is at an egg so obviously our next steps are to work on those engagement knowledge and sentiment pieces and and they will be integrated into larger strategic campaigns the middle just shows you how we have the ability really
112to track down into into employee groups employee individual employees as needed and align them with training resources that are integrated into the mail delivery that can help them to understand and be more aware of what they're interacting with and the graphic on the right just shows you how over the course of just two campaigns of uh of phishing attempts constructed fishing attempts our click rate has gone down significantly and so that trajectory is really solid we're very pleased with the results so far of of those efforts this next slide is our internet usage and management the first thing i want to call your attention to is the web traffic over the past two weeks and what you'll notice is that we've had 1.3 million websites blocked and i think that speaks to how we're always
113protectoring and protecting and content filtering no matter what the location of the student is additionally i think it's important to note if you look at student activity that students are primarily engaged in educational activities during the week majority of the time and this all just kind of illustrates that we really truly are a 24 7 operation that we support and you can see that no matter day or night no matter what time people are online using our devices so the google environment still plays a prominent role in uh instruction and collaboration uh professionally this um just goes to show that even though we are back in person these tools now are become part of the toolkit for our staff and we couldn't be more pleased with with that and if you look carefully at some
114of these graphs what you'll find is that yes there are correlated spikes when we have shifts to uh virtual or remote learning you would see some of these spikes around that last week before the break for instance where you know the activity in classrooms and posts and file shares all all show that we're slowly building toward a more robust use of office 365 as our business or operational backbone and we don't have quite as many users but a thousand unique office daily active office users represents about half of our staff which is solid clearly though the most heavily used platform within the o365 suite is in fact teams so on the right what you'll see there is of a total of 1400 or so meetings in total we've had 11 000 chat messages exchanged within
115those and 40 000 screen shares and again be aware that that 1400 meetings can also include recurring meetings for instance this boe meeting our admin meeting is a standing meeting so you may have one instance of a meeting with several iterations which is why you can have numbers that are much larger than that 1400 might lead you to believe what you'll also see in that middle section really quickly is that people are starting to use the office 365 space to store documents but the collaboration rate isn't nearly as high as it is in google although it's getting there now i'm going to discuss more in depth the data side of the house you can see represented on the previous slides how our universe of data and technology is ever growing in size and complexity for
116discussion tonight we have divided the areas covered by our department into four large sectors to encapsulate the work that we do throughout the district we do support all facets of planning operation and reporting including state reporting through this discussion i'll demonstrate how they link to our vision and mission as a division as well as how our department goals support district initiatives i'm going to start by mentioning the dashboards in general as they've become the basis of a common language and understanding that aids our inner district communication and collaboration through a set of common business roles the main purpose of these dashboards is to assess where students are in the moment either individually or as a group for targeted interventions as well as where we are in our accountability picture as the year progresses they are
117available essentially all areas of operation and they also give the ability to take deeper dives and enhance filtering you're going to see examples listed for dashboards through the different sectors that i have listed on the screen here they've continued to grow in breadth and depth as our user base expands previously our user base consisted mostly of admin users and has now expanded to include support staff we are in the beginning stages of rolling out to teachers where they can see the similar types of information for just their students this user-based expansion supports our district instructional leadership tenant and can assist in conversations with teachers in analyzing student data to help strengthen their instruction this growth and change is really the result of all the feedback that we receive and we're always asking for it so
118we continuously improve and develop the dashboards for what people need we feel our primary mission as a department is to make the information easily accessible with meaningful views so they can spend their time analyzing and working on actionable items rather than compiling data so as an example looking under the progress monitoring area one dashboard of focus for this school year is to build a more robust multi-tiered support services system to help monitor the measure of impact of interventions and the fidelity of implementation in support of the district early warning intervention and monitoring tenant this is an area where there was a lot of manual data collection and collation leaving less time for impact analysis and so now this development of dashboards is really alleviating most of those manual pieces and allowing more time for staff
119to focus on the intervention effectiveness as i move on to program and initiative support you can see from the items that are listed there that the dashboards cover a vast expanse of important areas and many of these feed the data into our state reporting system for accountability it's through the dashboards that we build awareness of the data for building admin and program owners to review and own their own data sets ensuring correctness and understanding the data to make informed decisions we stress that we do not own the data that we just facilitate accessibility to the data it is only through many sets of eyes looking at the data and programmatic ownership that we can all get better and we feel my role as a department is to really kind of help people become from data
120consumers to develop more into more data analysts the next area is the data in operability and exchange you can kind of think is this is really the foundation of how operational data is collected digested and presented into dashboard views mr baker talked about all the integrations that we've had on the first slide as mentioned um we have uh many operational integrations that the data is constantly being moved back and forth between these different systems and with ever-growing complexity which also you know translates into support one example of this is our custom-built security scanning system that we use at the secondary level this system is crucial in building safety and it is integrated in our student management system to tell us where a student you know do they belong in a building what class should they
121be in are they skipping class it has also become the foundation of cova contact tracing by using the scan status and student schedule and lastly this brings me to the operational planning and support as i said in the beginning that we support every facet of planning operations and reporting and are often behind the scenes i want to emphasize that every tool dashboard view that we create to help keep to keep end users with the data at their fingertips has inadvertently results in additional complexity support and training needs additionally majority of these projects data requests or any analysis that people need requires assistance from us to vary in degrees oftentimes with immediate need thank you so in a technology realm we tend to group these into four domains first of all the the tech infused learning
122spaces this is not just the tangible equipment and environment itself but it's the every component of instructional design and the application of that design in those teaching and learning uh interactions and transactions and so i have to give all the credit uh in in terms of progress here to those coaches that i've mentioned already i cannot speak more highly about a group of individuals at every level and they are really truly moving a needle for us and working with their peers to understand how to purely integrate how to take technology and leverage it towards your true goal as opposed to figure out what to do with the piece of technology but that's a story for another time in terms of infrastructure these are things that no one sees cares about and then that's fine i
123get it but they are critically important so we care very much about them and i'll just say really quickly that we are focused heavily on scalability agility and continuity essentially making sure that we can we can be very responsive very secure um in terms of delivering a user experience to everyone that is stable speedy and secure cyber security moving into that really is um it's so much about the user disposition as i've talked about before so we control everything we possibly can from the physical side and so we're really strong at our edge uh inside our network i think we we have done everything we possibly can to account for all those potential vulnerabilities inside and you know when it comes to understanding what's going on on a daily basis we do rely on a
124lot of sophisticated tools to to help us pull in logs parse out activity and patterns get that network visibility and do some threat hunting and obviously what we at the root of what we do is is customer support that is probably the foundation overall and so i feel truly that the the greatest service and value we can provide for anyone is empowerment and we're really turning toward that as a as a true goal from the help desk perspective we're building out you know self-help library that's full of multi-modal materials we're trying to help people become more confident in taking action on their own trying to understand things there's always that potential for for support requests to bleed into do it for me it's the old teaching man to fish conundrum that we battle and we
125really think we are starting to turn the corner in terms of improving those efficiencies for all of our users so challenges and opportunities we all have them top left for us a big one is adoptions um people program offices buildings take on systems that are very attractive serve a purpose and presented in idyllic scenarios to them and it's typically the the data foundations and the technology pieces that are glossed over and lo and behold it's very challenging to step into a situation where a system or an application requires a great deal of configuration integration after the fact and so what we try to do is like i said there's challenges and opportunities with every challenge we find an opportunity and so what we are working toward right now is a much more codified software request
126system and a modified contracts workflow because that's the gateway nothing can be onboarded in the district without going through a review and approval in terms of this its value to your organization instructionally operationally and then the contract piece so if we get involved at those points then we're able to become partners in that onboarding and it helps us all to be better and to get more use out of the tool growth of burden in the bottom right it's we've taken out a lot a lot of actual devices a lot more systems and a lot more people doing a lot more with those systems and devices and so at that scope and scale we against the opportunity and you're going to start to see a pattern here but that software request and adoption process that development
127of self-help self-help resources library and where we can decentralize management we're starting with devices the chromebooks are a great example it's impossible for a technical staff of nine members to be responsible for the management the day-to-day management of devices on a student basis so buildings have taken on and done a wonderful job of taking on that one-on-one management kind of responsibility along with assistance from us top right the hidden support we could really talk about this forever it's the things that aren't part of those goals i talked about early on our division goals some of our initiatives and the roadmap stuff you'll see on the next slide it's things that other people bring to us often in the 11th hour and so those things often take up a great deal of uh time and thought
128and resources and it's not just about the thing itself that often gets into thinking through the application of that platform or tool and how it can be configured in the ownership part of it and and the potential integrations down the road so again that software request and adoption starting to use the help desk as sole source we're very guilty as individuals in this division of picking up you know phone calls from folks and helping them in the moment not cataloging it ourselves not being able to like to identify trends and patterns that would be very useful for us too when we look at aligning resources down the road so if we all start to use the help desk as a sole source we can i think find efficiency there and of course partnerships it's like
129anything else relationship relationships so partnerships with our program offices will also help us to be part of some of the the projects initiatives that that divisions are even thinking about and lastly the programmatic ownership this has been on i think every every presentation i've brought to the board since i've been here um and it really is truly about organizational health overall when program offices or buildings want to use platforms that have great value they really have to understand them at every level and own them because it's the only way you realize that maximum potential benefit from that system it's also the only way you understand the information that's contained within it and make it actionable and in a lot of ways it requires you know a level of management often that someone in my staff
130is going to be able to provide and off you know it's often the case that we have no idea what the system is i never heard of it and i love that people believe that we are all now all knowing and have a mastery of every single product that's out there but we do not and so we often know a lot less about it than they may and we've never even logged into it so programmatic ownership has the same opportunities as most of those other pain points that we have software requests partnerships and i think data governance in this particular case will also be a great benefit to efficiency so where are we headed uh cyber security we will continue to work um that two-pronged approach of dealing with the things we can control inside
131the the physical hardening of our edge and core but also aligning with the nist framework looking at our incident responses because it's not a if it's when we're going to have to respond to an incident and we really want to get into full cycle schedule tabletop exercises to make sure we are agile as a system and it's not that's not about us that's about the organization which is really important i mentioned teacher dashboards when i was talking about the data side so we are in the process now of you know rolling that out at the secondary level we'd like to expand that throughout all levels and you know develop them to meet the needs of teachers as best we can it gives teachers access to the same types of analysis especially like the at-risk pieces
132that we use um and then there's also the possibility of public facing dashboards at aggregate with aggregate data so there's not any student level data in there but you know just being able to present some statistics in an easy format for people to access and then another thing on our roadmap is the paperless system as we drive to a more paperless environment we push to evolve to a completely digitized student record as part we're looking to expand uh looking at a comprehensive student based data storage system that can be integrated with whatever system we need so there's one single point of access with versioning so there's only one copy of something so that's really what we're looking to do blended learning is a district initiative and again it's it's truly about instructional design and delivery
133as much as technology but this is where i have to extend my absolute gratitude for um those coaches that we have working these these are the folks who are working again before they are actually coaches working with their peers and so the one real uh i guess achievement this past year was us launching this academy approach to pd over the summer and we had tremendous positive uh feedback from that so we're looking at how to integrate that academy approach during the school year maybe on shutdown weeks long weekends you'd be surprised number of people who may be willing to come in for an entire day because of the benefit of that model so blended learning as a system um is a i think a road map item for for all of our divisions and then
134lastly that culture of shared responsibility meaning that we all have a hand because technology is so pervasive and the use of data is so pervasive across this system it's a shared responsibility it's the only way as a as an organization that we can move things truly forward with a sense of culture around it and so we are really trying to shepherd um that work along and i mentioned a data governance committee which will be a real um benefit to us in an advancing network and you'll notice you know some of the uh the quotes and and other research items on the on the slide that's just so people understand that our division is as research based as any other uh in the in the district we don't we aren't just reactive we don't just respond
135to things and decide let's hey let's do this for fun we pay close attention to industry standards uh best practices we're part of professional groups organizations and we we read a lot of stuff to try to stay current well thank you very much for as always an exceptional presentation within a tremendous amount of detail we really always value the presentation that you bring although i think we always feel a little bit overwhelmed when we are processing it i particularly wanted to just note the level of professionalism that i have seen grow in this department during my um you know almost seven years on the board now it's clear that the proactive nature of what you've been doing your deep thought about the way you interact with the business case for the district it really shows
136um and i think the the fact that we were able to um deal with the extendencies brought about by covid and go virtual for such a long period of time um in the prior school year almost smoothly right there were a few bumps in the road of course because it was something we had never done before but the fact that we were able to do it without a complete train wreck is really a credit to the professionalism of your department and we really we we thank you every day and we recognize what the work that you've been doing every single day so with that i will turn it over to ms smith who is the first one with her hand up you are muted my dear my apologies i i couldn't agree more with miss
137savage um i don't know what it is but i only know about half of like all that you all do i understand probably maybe half of that of the whole thing but when i'm listening to you and going through this i am most excited about this presentation i mean i am tickled pink and and why because um i do see the system that has taken place um you know upon your rival mr baker to the district um and the building of your team with miss wolf and mr wilde and everyone else whose names i'm going to uh not mention uh just because there's so many or not so many but many that i can't remember uh right off the bat but i i really have seen how this has grown over the course now of
138years and i just think it's just tremendous and uh you know when i first looked at the presentation i actually was like kind of a deer in headlights for like this first half because i was like okay what is it he wants me to understand about this but as you spoke i like yeah i got that i got that and then i really could turn my attention though to that user side that ms wolf talked a lot about in terms of the the teacher data and the dashboards and and all of that you know sort of becoming more of an analyst using that data to understand what's happening and to you know and form the decisions that we need to make so i'm i'm really saying uh hopefully not as eloquently but the same as
139madame savage but um i just want to thank all of you in this entire team because this is such an important uh component of all of our work um and for everyone to have that comfortability and access uh to the system a good system and the supports is just fabulous so thank you thank you all of you thank you board member wilson thank you and good out to what all my colleagues stated also i wanted to say when i was reviewing this in advance that these were beautiful um [Music] evaluation i'm sorry visualizations and also just a question about more globally i know that america's competitiveness is going to be based off of our embrace and to what extent we embrace technology naturally we were forced to um shift to a more digital and technology-based
140mode of learning and while i know that there is concerns about screen time i do i'm curious about your thoughts about how to expose students to those future careers like data analytics data analysis and things of that nature are just computer programming and things of that nature just curious about that yep and i will welcome ms bechdel into this conversation as well but i'll tee it up to start historically we've taken a a top-down approach to i think exposing students to specified uh what's called computer science opportunities and so it started at the high school and we we bought into the pretty standard and widely adopted um project lead way for instance and the cisco programming from years ago and and then we we had a plan and kind of brought that down reverse articulation
141to the middle school realm and we focus there on digital citizenship um kind of the culmination of that of basic skills and application and the vision had always been also to continue to feather that down into the elementary environment where you truly expose them to concepts and it doesn't even have to be about a computer it's the the type of thinking um it's the linear logical kind of approach to things and also of course basic skill building now we were doing off that work for a couple of years and i think we've gotten a bone thrown to us recently through the um the release of the digital fluency and computer science standards that the state now has for us and so we do have to in fact we're already in the process of implementing them
142this year is about awareness but we are really going to unpack those and look at opportunities to integrate those into what we already have in terms of curriculum so that much like applying the tangible technology into teaching and learning when it's ubiquitous and seamless and pure it's not the thing it just supports and enhances the actual objective the same holds true i i believe when we're talking about those standards that they can be come part of it used to be the four c's now these digital fluency and computer science standards can become part of what teachers are already doing because we don't want to get into the another thing on the plate um for for every teacher either we don't want to make them their own standalone because i think that also takes them out
143of context a lot of cases so i think to to try to answer simply miss wilson it's it's two phases or stages and it's ramping up foundational skills applying them in the middle and giving them more opportunities through through uh coursework and then in the high school truly giving them the opportunity to dive into fully aligned um computer science topics i think that's probably the best approach for a k-12 spectrum thank you dr once again in a great presentation i i agree with everything that's been said so far and i want to tag on to what tabitha was talking about i mean data is here to say whether you like it or not that's the way of the future everything we do is being tracked everything is data and if you can analyze data you're
144going to get a job whatever sector that it might be in um you know so this is all great that you're putting this stuff together in my dream is you know you you had all this data on phone calls let's say you had you know 30 000 phone calls a month by week and then non confidential data or you know but it's data right that that is sent to like a math class in the middle school or the high school everybody is on office 65 so they have it on their chromebook take that data and do histograms pie chart different things you know so you're look working with real data and that might give kids more of a feel for what they will be doing later on in life also uh on a separate dream
145i would like to say like an after school club where we our old technology is broken apart and they see what instead of a computer looks like what's the mainframe where is the motherboard because they need to learn these things and these are all job skills that uh you know back in the day i mean we'll date ourselves where you know the y2k was going to happen that everybody went on to learn but it created job opportunities and so this is the way of the future so we need if we can expose our young kids to new technology new add new facets of data and technology analysis i think you know it'll be awesome so i mean i would love to see more of integration within you know what you do as well as what
146uh mrs bechtel's department does and incorporate more of that into the curriculum just as a quick response to that we are uh miss bechdel and i are partnered more closely than we have ever been over the past six months in particular and we are both learning a lot about yeah you know i guess how we can maximize this partnership and we're both understanding a great deal more about the details of of the respective work that we've done in silos prior and now we see the opportunities for the interface so we agree and i thank you member manali thank you mr baker um couple comments uh obviously this excellent presentation i loved the infographics i don't know how you did it but i'm going to copy you somehow my in my daily work but um regarding
147the email spike towards the middle of the year i think email is kind of like a snowball you throw it down the hill in the beginning of the year and it just you start picking up more as you go and you go back and you start emailing you know previous emails and either way that makes sense either way i just had a question regarding um uh the benefit of using uh the office 365 to hold the documents over the google drive is there is there like a strategic benefit to just sticking with 365 i i i promise i'm going to try this as quickly as possible because i know we are way over there there is a business benefit this is a case where google truly is it's better for instruction and and routine teacher
148and academic collaboration the business case is there for o365 and yes there are many benefits including if we if we use teams more truly then as you are creating and sharing documents in that space it's that subversion like the one version of the singular document of record um there are opportunities to embed that in different locations there's more of an ecosystem across platforms inside of o365 than in google and the organization the granular organization within o365 is much greater for for again for business operations not so much for the classroom space so i i think we're at a point where we've decided as a district that google is absolutely for us instructionally and we i think we believe that the o365 space is in fact going to be our best option for for business and
149productivity and it doesn't mean that you can't use both and many people do we still work with o365 with a lot of students in secondary level in particular so there's benefit yes but i these we're never going to standardize on one i think we're going to be living in in both worlds i think i think i understand where you're coming from on that um just uh in the light of time i'm not going to keep asking about it but it's it is something that i'm kind of curious about this um a singular file shared over multiple groups but you know how that would change or how different groups edited and keep their own versions of it is kind of interesting to me but thank you i appreciate you i don't see any other hands but
150i did just want to make one more comment myself about the um the way your action items that came out of your four-part slide with this the bump up to the thing oh i'm sorry miss wilson i see your hand now did you have something i didn't want to no yes only on behalf of board member man she's having audio issues but she said this was an awesome presentation so what i was gonna just comment on is is the um the systematic thinking about trying to insert the checkpoints for example at the contract point um that's really i think very helpful and i think integrates so well with the intentions around getting paper free and some sort of a workflow process and i know that we on the board would look forward to seeing that
151for our own workflow you know the the need for contracts to get approved and policies to get approved through a variety of um folks before they can come to the board floor is a constant just sort of niggling worry about like is this happening in the right way and is there a people approving it before it gets done and what's going to happen if it doesn't so we look forward to that and we know you've made tremendous progress on that already with online registration and with the work that the athletics department has done i hope in close coordination with you with final forms um where neither of those things existed just two or three years ago and now we're practically paper free on those two fronts and i'm looking forward to seeing more and more
152of our business processes go in that direction so you're free to comment if you like but i just wanted to to make that note that we look forward to seeing that in our in our day-to-day lives as well i think your comment was spot on and i thank you for recognizing that thank you all right everyone good if so we will let these good folks go on to their next thing and we will turn our attention to this cre and equity update good evening good evening again and oh there she is um my name is not necessarily on this particular presentation but i will definitely turn it over to dr wilson turner your name is on it because we are partners in this equity work and i i appreciate that um and i will also
153say if there are questions about specific assets i'll probably be targeting some of those towards you um so thank you for allowing me to present this evening on our work over the past year really on cultural responsive education and equity um what i like to highlight in in terms of our vision vision mission and goals is that the equity work that we do of course aligns with each of those things explicitly in an effort to really increase the experience that our students have and our families have in working with us as well as our community partners as you know over the last few years our culturally responsive education and equity work has really focused in five key areas um one is now completely with the human resources division um and so this night this evening's
154presentation will focus on the four areas that we continue to work very intentionally on in our district the areas of professional development building equity teams youth empowerment and the our equity policy and the newly established metrics so what i plan to do this evening is kind of take you through what we've done last year um and what we're currently working on um so last year we really took the opportunity um to continue to push ourselves in our cre and equity work even though we were in all stages of virtual remote and person whatever it may be models and i really want to applaud the efforts of our participants in our professional development because they really embraced it despite everything else that was going on but i also want to applaud and i'm going to name
155them very specifically are our cre facilitators amanda boyd who is the community school site coordinator at giffin amanda powers our instructional supervisor for um stem or excuse me just science elementary stem um amelia gallagher who's now the assistant principal over at myers andrea marquez clark um at the high school joy howard who's at hackett a ta leroy johnson who's one of our brand new teachers but he was a ta last year um lionel harris who is a homeschool coordinator mike elliott our social studies supervisor nancy kessel special education teacher at the middle level tina cascone assistant principal tom julio who is our lifer in this work um and walter huntley who's also one of our homeschool coordinators this professional development work does not move forward without them i am literally their cheerleader what do you
156need what resources do you need how can i support you um they are leading this this charge and are very thoughtful um and intentional about how this work goes forward and know how essential it is that this work is done correctly and so we lean on them very heavily so as we looked at our professional development work last year we wanted to really focus on who is leading the effort at the building level right so people come to cre cohort training they get what they need as an individual they go back into their classroom and do that work we felt like that didn't change systems um and so we start to try to look at how we begin to have a larger impact on the work in the system and so as a result we
157took our time last year to focus on developing building equity teams and providing them the appropriate professional development to lead that work so that they became the boots on the ground to provide that support in each building um so each building equity team which i'll talk a little bit about in a second um participated in four two-hour virtual sessions as a team um really focusing on the three core tensions which are you know how you interact with this topic for yourself how you put this into practice and then how you begin to impact systems um and try to grow in their practices as a team to be able to do that work okay honey thank you um and it was a very powerful session because i think teams felt that they were in different places
158than they actually were after they went through and went through training but they also got to grow and learn from one another um because we did partner teams from all different schools across the district in these sessions and the next slide you'll see what the survey results were for how they grew in the practices that we focused on in that in those areas the second part of our professional development focus in terms of growing the leaders of the work was the work um that i applaud apsa for reaching out to lori and myself to partner with to provide professional development through a book study called unconscious bias with all of our administrators in the apsa unit and we met we tried to meet twice a month um but we always got once a month in
159last year to really unpack what we were learning through this text and it really is a developmental approach to how you have conversations about race and address bias um and so it really allowed our leaders to dig deeply into their own um knowledge about race and bias reflect on situations that they've been in and how they've handled them and to begin to think through and practice how they begin to address these things in real time and really build up their competency in the work a huge piece of what came out of that work was really um making our walk match our talk so to speak and what we developed as the equity stance um and really saying if this is what we are about what is the work that we're actually doing that contributes to
160what we're about as leaders in this system that we've continued to refine and revisit throughout this work and so again um there's some survey results in the next slide that i'll share but really what they emphasize was we need to stop talking about the work and start doing the work and they felt like this this session these sessions really helped them to not just think and talk but to really talk about the actions that they want to take and then have kind of accountability accountability partners in the work when they came back to each session um it's probably one of the most powerful things that laurie and i did last year with our teams um and the conversations that we had outside of those sessions i thought were the the biggest indicator of how leaders
161grew in that work um some of the reflections that they brought forward and you know lori and i have our standing agenda items on equity but before we could even get to some of those topics they were bringing those things forward um and so that work was incredibly um important so the survey results are brief it really was just a reflection of where they started and where they ended for the administrators which i'll jump down to which was really developing their comfort level to lead this work and have these conversations at the building level and we saw about a 14 jump there for our equity teams we really focused on the knowledge that we were trying to develop with them to ensure that they were growing in those areas and in every area um except
162for the three core tensions they grew 20 to 30 percent um in terms of their their knowledge in that area and core tensions again is the framework that we use um to really help them understand you you kind of sit in these buckets as you go through this work you start with yourself you start with your then you move to your practices and then you begin to look at systems so this year we um returned to our full cohort model and again tried to be really intentional and so this fall we started out by training 50 um people um actually it's going to be 100 for fall and spring but total but 50 people in two different cohorts um in the traditional cohort model but we took a targeted group of people so again looking
163at that leadership we took our instructional coaches right these are the people who are influencing our teacher practices every single day who are influencing how our curriculum is revised and to put in place um and we looked at our student support team these are the people who are leading our discipline and behavior initiatives in our building and are setting the tone for how we approach these actions in our system and so we're really trying to influence where um key people are who have this knowledge so that begins to shape what happens in our buildings um and again we we didn't finish our book study um we've got halfway through our book because we stopped and did some really key work and so we continue that this year despite fits in starts with everything going on
164with our administrators and they still remain extremely committed to the work and i think as you hear their um their building level presentations that they're doing at the board meeting you're hearing the ownership that they're taking around the equity or work occurring in their buildings which is really powerful so building equity teams is the next um area and uh ms mckenna and i made it very clear um in our way to our administrators that it was our expectation that every building would have an established equity team with established members a regular meeting schedule and a plan of action that they were attempting to accomplish this year and as a result that was accomplished each building has an equity team secondary got fancy and began to merge their building leadership team with their equity team because
165the if the equity work is the work it should be infused in everything that we do and the leadership team is the ones doing that work um and so as mentioned before these teams receive specific training um and teams are at various stages so some teams have been established for you know two three years and they were already gung-ho in this work other teams were brand new they hadn't really established themselves and other teams were rebuilding themselves because they had completely new staff members who were part of their team but each team took on the the point in the work where they needed to start to begin to grow the work that needs to occur in their buildings and one of the main assignments for the equity teams at the elementary level were for them
166to select us one school one book project so they picked the text and a project that they would do to help younger children begin to engage in this work to address the social justice learning standards that are appropriate for their level in order to measure some of the efforts of the building equity team we also added the appr indicator um and i want to thank um appsta for their partnership and as we sit at the table and figure out what indicators sit in our evaluation tool for our teachers to really support the work of what we say we do as a district around equity and so we were able to bring in the indicator 2.2 a incorporates diverse social and cultural perspectives for teachers to plan how they bring these these concepts into their instruction
167um and last year being the first time we did this we had 97 98.6 of teachers do that at an effective or highly effective level to plan for incorporating those components into their um instruction and so we continue to build the capacity of our teams and our teachers to be able to have this lens in the work and bring it front and center to the instructional work that we're doing with our students so for this year we continue to have our equity teams meet they are focused this year on building their plans around those three core tensions depending on where they are as a team and where their building is um to build up their their self-knowledge as a team to incorporate instructional practices for their building and to start to look at for those
168teams that are ready what systemic changes are are you trying to address with your equity team and as i mentioned secondary teams have moved into building equity leadership teams so that work is merged and we are again working with our the charles carl e tui foundation to support our one school one book effort he gave us a tremendous amount of money last year to support these efforts um and have met with him several times this year so that we could do so again and middle school and secondary have looked to also join that initiative so that their students have access to something similar our next bucket is youth empowerment and we were really overzealous um last year we thought we would do building equity teams we thought we would do youth empowerment like we were
169going to do it all and and covet like we're going to do it all um and with teams in various stages of the work and we realized very quickly that those beginning equity teams needed to forgot focus on developing their equity teams um but there were teams that were you know just needed to fine-tune their equity teams were able to start doing some some youth empowerment work um hackett pine hills arbor hill who had already had some established student teams um really began to bring that really powerful work out and really hear student voice in a way that was very different than in the past but despite our attempted launch and not really getting those student leadership teams off the ground buildings were very clear on the importance of student voice particularly during a pandemic
170and so you know some of our social emotional learning work really leverage student voice in different spaces um and leveraging that voice and curriculum and so some of the evidence that we provided to the carl e tui foundation about our the text that they provided to us or to our staff really elevated how we brought student voice forward particularly in issues of equity and social justice and as you have seen multiple times the incredible work that our secondary instructional supervisors have done to do those curriculum modifications so that student voice is present um in the work and i give a lot of credit to them we do not design look for us for our walk throughs to really begin to tease out how we are really engaging student voice in our um everyday instructional work
171so for this year after laurie and i really pushed equity teams last year this year we said to our buildings this year everyone will have a student leadership team that deals with equity issues amongst whatever amongst other things and some are dedicated student equity teams um and so it's been really awesome to talk to principals and assistant principals and homeschool coordinators who have been leading the charge in classroom teachers and you name it of leading the charge of creating these student leadership teams um many held elections many have developed senates many have developed assembly like it is just an incredible thing that elementary age students in particular are getting this experience that their voice matters and that there's a structure for this to happen and we're expanding whose voice is heard at the secondary level
172in terms of developing teams that look this way and so um a couple of our cre facilitators like this is their sweet spot um and so they will be taking on the district student equity leadership team where they'll be taking representatives from each building and beginning to look at what district equity issues we can address and also trying to find a way to get those students to the table in the community where student voices needed around decisions that are being made in our community um so this is probably the again the most exciting work that we're doing this year in this area um and i'm really i really want to applaud our buildings again despite everything that's going on they made a commitment to get student voice and i think it's bringing a different life
173to buildings as a result of that and then last but not least um our last bucket is the equity policy and i'm gonna to quote my superintendent i'm gonna speak about this at a high level and if she would like to add anything she could jump right in but as you all know we worked very hard last year on developing the equity metrics um the superintendent led that charge with our district and building administrators with the board of education with cabinet to come up with these seven categories to really align with what we say we want to have happen in our equity policy um and so quickly the categories are equitable student academic success equitable student success beyond academics equitable improvements to curriculum instruction including professional development equitable resource distribution success and equitable hiring and
174retention success and equitable student and family engagement and success inevitable community engagement and so we've been working since then to begin to figure out what evidence we can collect in each of these areas to show that we are making the progress that we say we want to make in our equity policy and then in addition to that it's uh we have brought together the equity district equity committee to review our equity policy and align it with the new york state um school board association sample policy and to align it with our and to integrate our equity metrics into our policy um and so i know that comes before the policy committee soon um for a review before it goes out for action um and so we'll continue to work this year around how we develop
175those collection procedures for our equity metrics and that concludes my presentation thank you very much presentation i'm getting a little bit of feedback can somebody mute anybody who's not muted mute that sounds better um but i just wanted to particularly recognize the depth of some of the work and yet the practicality of some of the work it's kind of amazing to see you do both deep important foundational work and yet see it implement almost in real time i mean that to me is really the the crux of of what we have to do to move faster move deep but move quickly through this important material so i really i'm very very pleased to see so much was done and particularly in this all the most difficult of all years i think the commitment to keeping
176this front and center while while we were dealing with all that you all managed to do over the last two years really shows how deeply held the value is by the the district that we are going to commit to this no matter what it is the work and so i really appreciate that and miss smith i'll turn it over to you now thank you this is just another area that um well i i'm going to say i'm tickled pink uh as well here um but it also is such it is just very powerful and meaningful and i thank you dr wilson turner and the entire staff for this important work and um and i think i want to just also applaud you all for uh the district as a district having started this work even
177way before some of the incidences you know two years ago you know you know unfortunate deaths of george floyd and you know mr aubry and and you know many many you know other uh black and brown uh men and women and um and then black lives lives etc and so i think you were well positioned we were well positioned as a district to take on this work and i do agree very well hardly with miss savage um and it's interesting because um you are doing this work i think rather uh quickly there's now it seems and it's a very deep commitment but it's also it's moving but it's still at a pace where it feels like you understand the urgency of it but we're not reactive you know what i mean and that and that
178really does make it it's very thoughtful it's very you know deliberate and purposeful and it is the work and it affects everything as you've talked you can see how it's affecting our teaching and learning process you can see how it's in infecting uh and affecting the climate and culture um you know what we do around the making sure our students have access to computer equipment and technology and i mean so it's it is the work that has to occur um if we are to be the people that we say we want to be and i love what you said can't be said enough we can't just simply oh let's talk about it let's just have this you know diversity training and check the box that we did it no no it's it is walking the
179talk and i have to be honest with you and say this is the only place outside of my home where this is happening in my life sad to say um that it is not happening for me anywhere else and i love how this is happening and rolling out um and so i applaud everyone i also just wanted to um say that i'm so pleased that i knew you were going to do this and that is to look at the nisba uh policy uh you know and sort of look to see what we might you know change or not change or confirm or not confirm what's there i i wanted to also point to another document and if you don't have it i believe i know i do have it on my my desk and the
180regents put together this dei diversity equity inclusion work group and they have this document um and you know again uh you know very lovely piece to do um you know to have available but again where's the you know the meat where's you know that we've got to keep moving on this and we're ahead of you know if we look at that document our district is really quite ahead and um and one of the things i'm very thankful for is we don't have to we didn't have to go through being told oh have a policy have this put this in place that's not going to work what we have done as a district it's rolled out rather organically and i'm not saying it hasn't had its tensions and stuff but there is a community that has
181developed here and um of this work and i just love how you've rolled this out and it warms my heart and makes me feel very hopeful about the world in which we live in the short term and in the long term so thank you everyone for what you're doing in this effort in alignment with that document you mentioned um miss smith is the little guys remember back in the spring but we did have all of our buildings complete a survey that comes from there to really get a sense of where we're authentically we are in those practices and we'll look to repeat that again at the end of this year um i didn't include it here because laurie and i presented it back in the spring um but it gives us you know another touch
182point of how we're really doing this work in alignment with with the state initiatives as well i'd like to interject that i think it's important that um as we talk about the different documents that come from our outside entities and agencies because of where we are in our work when we look at those documents we look at number one what are the things that we've done how can we improve on those things that we've already done but then also things that we may need to include we don't look to just force it in right then and there we look strategically at where those things that other entities and all the research that we have where does it fit within what we have already done so that it is not one more thing it's just integrating
183and enhancing the work that we're already doing because one of the things that i know you hear all the time is um the district keeps doing new initiatives we keep adding things on we keep doing this and and we really pull back from that and we we try to examine the research because we are a research-based organization everything we do is grounded in the research and in the data but everything that is out there is not for everything that we do and just because it works in one place doesn't mean that we can pull it off of a shelf and just cookie cutter place it in our district and and so one of the things that we're very careful about is when we see the different ideas and we see the different pieces of research
184we don't necessarily say oh that'll be great for every single school and now schools have to uproot what they're doing and what's working just to do the latest fad that's not what we're going to do we're going to look at that latest fad research based and then see what are the things that we can implement and then it may not look exactly like that so i'll say montessori because mr powell reported today at montessori he may be able to look at those documents and then say hmm based on our model we can take this tweak it this way i'll have my teachers work on it we'll look at it together and then we'll see how we can morph it into something that enhances what we're already doing and so i think that's one of the
185things to understand that foundationally we do as a district we don't just take the latest research off the shelf and plop it in and say no now we're going to do this and every school has to do this if you notice the things that we are talking about that have been required by every school those are systemic pieces but how it is implemented is based on what works best for that particular building so it may look a little differently as you move throughout the district and see what our schools are doing thank you very much we do i know that that's something we really appreciate is the thoughtfulness as ms smith used that word earlier that it's um it's not a matter of try throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks but rather
186to really being strategic um and working to build the foundation um to ensure that the work has longevity right that's really what we're looking for is a long term implementation board member wilson hello and thank you for an excellent presentation as usual much of what everyone stated especially board member smith i concur and in an era of buzzwords and the aforementioned misinformation that comes along with them i feel like we are we are the district you all are um trailblazing a path to operationalize equity this is not um work that's historical or goes back decades it's actually emerging and we're co-creating it together which i appreciate and sometimes i have concerns whether people hear cre and um hear crt for example and i appreciate that we're going deeper than just saying it we're embedding it
187at all levels and appreciate the candor and quite frankly how hard how hard it is to examine what is racism what is anti-racism and of course the natural insecurities that can emerge when people hear change or redistribution and somehow that means i get less or someone is taking away from me what about me how does this affect me and the shift to how does this affect everyone so i appreciate that and as board member smith indicated between the summer uprisings against racial injustice in the context of the pandemic we're doing unprecedented work on top of everything else it's still forging ahead and very happy to hear our students are taking these skills to community taking these skills and we'll be applying them to community issues and my final comment sort of emerged and earlier during
188the district presentation there was a slide about the middle school feeder alignment pattern however i feel that i wanted to more embed this comment here that i know that many many sort of comments and up um input we get are why are you doing all this data why don't you go just based off of the existing locations and i just feel like in this conversation what emerges is that we do have to examine the not so distant history of redlining and other forms of institutional racism that produces inequitable outcomes and make it so difficult to just do what we've been doing and that's why we're going so deep and you know doing all this examination and we're going to do a multi-faceted multi-disciplinary examination of all this and anyone is welcome to join us in
189that effort so thank you seeing no more hands i'm wondering if oh miss smith i was i tried i said i started this down um go ahead no i was waiting to see if anyone else said anything else i i think two things i also again in terms of really the significance of the work um and watching this all kind of uh develop and unfold um i recognize that it's helped me also as a board member kind of try to keep walking and keep moving you got darts and all kinds of things coming at you through many different means but when you i believe when you are working together and you all have uh you know confidence in what we're doing that it's okay like i can deflect that right no superwoman or anything like
190that but but together i feel like we're able to kind of walk together and say you know what our eye is on the prize and so um that's that's what has helped me a lot from from what the district work has been doing i know that um miss savage and the board will talk tonight about our own goals but i wanted to just talk about two elements um and i believe uh that miss savage didn't really um talk as in depth about this over the last year or so and now that i'm about to go through the same experience i'm hoping that we'll talk more in depth about it uh and it's these um our participation in the school boards partners excuse me school board partners um program so uh and again that is where
191largely people of color who sit on school boards district boards charter school boards whatever who are focused on this work uh are doing it together and i think i want to make sure that what we do as a board also gets incorporated into this whole equity cre piece um i don't think we've yet you know caught up to where you all are so we haven't really talked about it in its fullest realm but i think you're going to start to see some of that from the board because we're also partners in this and not just in terms of approving and saying oh yeah go forth do this but we have to also experience this we have to also uh you know um embrace this as part of how we make our decisions as well you
192know and so um i i just want to again thank everyone for all of this work it's definitely shaped my own thinking and i dare say the entire board's thinking and and we have this piece of work that is uh that i think all of us are really focused on on attending to um to the point where i think it's fair to say we've even kind of scaled back our goals a little bit to focus on what's really important for for us to do and manage so again i'm sorry i'll stop talking but just wanted to say thank you again so i'll just pick up and say welcome official welcome for school board partners cohort 4. so those of you who have not googled it school board partners is a very equity driven entity focused
193on providing additional training and support for school board part school board members who are working towards equity and its national organization so that means every member just every school board member who participates comes from a different set of political realities right in terms of what their state's legislation and regulations are and what the school board school structure is right most most states have county-wide structures very different than ours so so so many different things and that makes me reflect on what the superintendent said which is not everything fits everybody but that doesn't mean that we can't learn from looking at what others are doing and school board partners definitely has influenced my approach to things um and um given me food for thought in many in many cases so it's been a good experience and
194i'm so glad that vicki's decided that she wants to do it as well and madame i'm sorry just one more little piece of this so i i also am part of what's now a cohort 2022 uh it's an organization called promise 54. um and they have this program called dei accelerator and it is going to be a year of i have meetings like nearly twice a month and all kinds of things going on and i do want to share that you know out with not just the board but the district staff as well part of what i will be doing is some survey work um which they are encouraging us to expand you know to our other networks and so i want to share some of that survey information and if if there's a way
195to participate in that um i want to see if that's possible you know you would control the own your own data but essentially it is around the same topics and things that we're talking about now um and i won't define that program for you but i will send a link um so that you you all have it so you can see what i'll be doing for the next year or so so it's an another fellows kind of program with um about a 100 other folks across the country um doing this work thank you like magic it's 9 14 and time to move on to the next thing which is scheduled for 9 15 on our calendar but i think we get to keep dr wilson turner because we'll be talking about the elementary acceleration and
196enrichment update yes oh i lost my screen there you go okay so good evening again um and so this this presentation will focus on the elementary efforts of connecting um what we do at the elementary level with the opportunities that are available to our students at the secondary level um and i will begin again with our guiding principles and simply say that this presentation the work that we're doing here aligns most particularly with increasing student achievement enhancing the delivery of quality instruction and partnering with our device communities in terms of our enrichment efforts so to start with an overview um we created our purpose when we originally came together in 2019 to really think about how we create clear pathways for elementary students to access honors and acceleration at the time opportunities at the secondary
197level and really look at what structures need to be created for students to accelerate their learning and i do appreciate the feedback that we are talking about all students when we when we talk about this piece um not just those students who have elite skills but how are we creating this path for all of our students that they have access to multiple opportunities we set our focus at the time to look at three areas um what we call whole school enrichment opportunities targeted enrichment for a smaller subset of students with some skills and acceleration procedures for students who um who are gifted in particular areas and so tonight's presentation will really focus on looking at each of those three areas where we started um how cobit impacted our efforts and where we um what we
198were able to accomplish in spite of that and where we plan to go next and so we'll start with whole school and in enrichment um whole school enrichment is really focused on when we talked about enrichment we've talked about should it be just what happens in the after school program should it be just what happens with you know small subset of students or is there really this space that we want to create where we enrich all of our students in a multitude of ways that helps better prepare them for what is ahead for them um and so we we took some time to look at what we can do around whole school enrichment using our um our encore instruction to really enhance what happens in our core classrooms um and so when we initially came
199together and discussed in um early 2019 2020 we were thinking that we would be poised to roll out whole school enrichment for library um for the 2021 school year um and then look at physical physical education opportunities the next year and then art music the two years after that um and to really scale up a model we had seen work at phillips schuyler achievement academy at the time where they were using community schools funding that they had received to provide enrichment each month for their students either by grade level or by primary by intermediate um and we had started that work really with the librarians because they were in the process of revising their curriculum and had a lot of flexibility to really enhance what was happening with topics in the core classroom area um
200and providing enrichment right embedded in their library time for students um and they began that work really even before the end of the school year and even into covid um really took each librarian took a grade level and began to do some of that enhancement work as even as a part of their asynchronous work um and are trying to bring that to life this year um however as you all know um last year we weren't really able to move forward with this concept of whole school enrichment um at a very detailed level because most of our encore instruction occurred asynchronously so students didn't even have their base level um opportunities in terms of enrichment um and we had reductions in those areas and we also shortened school day to accommodate what need to happen in
201copen however um as mentioned we continue to move forward so this school year we have two schools who are receivership schools who are also community schools aid schools who worked on a model where they could bring enrichment to every classroom once a week using community partners and so each week there's a different module for different grade levels so they may be doing you know gardening with one partnership they may be doing robotics with another partnership where those students have a period of enrichment while their classroom teachers are doing planning instructional planning with the coaches and so students aren't losing instruction they're getting enhanced instruction during that time while teachers are getting enhanced planning opportunities for that time and so those are two examples of whole school enrichment that are occurring right now that we're able
202to do in our current structure um and as i mentioned it's a more intensive model than what occurred at schuyler treatment academy because that was primarily once a month um and allowed for mixed cohorting which we're not allowed to do at this moment in time beyond that um when we built schedules this year and we looked at resources we we were pressed to get our students back of course in person but also to get them back into the encore classes that when they when we talk to them about covet was probably the most impactful thing for them is not being able to engage in in those those live um encore classes and so we do have some opportunities that vary you know from building to building based on schedule where students are are receiving an
203extra um period of an encore class physical education music library or art um what that supports a planning time for teachers i'm going to talk about in a little bit um and so we are trying to get back on track with our encore instructions so to speak and encore exposure for our students um but as mentioned above we're going to need to come back to our conversation about how we begin to expand and enrich um using our encores for our students who are gifted in those areas so our next steps is we have a new pe instructional supervisor who's already hit the ground running and is working to create athletic pathways for our elementary age students um as a source of enrichment and he'll we will be inviting him to join us to look at
204our physical education curriculum um going forward and what our timeline can be for advancing that we are in the process of hiring a new humanities supervisor at the elementary level who works directly with our librarians so that we can revisit that timeline and determine how we want to continue to enhance that work and we are our fine arts supervisor will also be brought back to the table because 22-24 was supposed to be the years that we began that and again we'll look at how realistic a timeline it is and what we can begin to develop around those particular areas we haven't excluded our work with our community partners we just worry that we'll be we'll be limited in being able to replicate something as large as what happens at giffen and sheridan prep at this
205point in time um but we will begin to look at what whole school enrichment options we have available to leverage with our community partners so after whole school enrichment was targeted enrichment which we spent a lot of time trying to think through and we're really excited about the ability of bringing together a group of students across our district at the elementary level the fourth and fifth grade um to to really give them an enhanced experience um to better prepare them for what was to come and also to really provide them an opportunity to begin to integrate socially across different schools before they hit middle schools and see each other in classes um but again with covid we had to shift our thinking because we wouldn't be missing classrooms let alone buildings um but covet provided
206some other opportunities that came towards the end of last year which i'll talk through in this section so um as mentioned we had designed a whole an enrichment program we were going to take children off site we're going to have a dedicated teacher who is going to basically you know once a week provide students with an enriched opportunity they would have to come back to school and kind of make up what work was missed uh but we felt confident with the targeted group of students we would select that they would have the capacity to do that with teacher support and parent support and covet we really just paused our entire conversation around this um but covet also created a gap in the data that we would use to determine our child find process that we
207wanted to kind of execute to make that happen um but we still i feel like um continue to to to do some work last year um really just to meet the basic needs of our students but began to think about um with the opportunity with funding at the end of last year how do we begin to um enhance our children's learning experience right and i know we talked as a as a district about not about remediation but really about accelerating our students learning when they return to us you know in a full school model this year and so we really had the opportunity to leverage some things um and so one of the things you heard mr powell talk about and probably your other pencils talk about is this tier one plan we talk about
208tier the different tiers of instruction that occur in education tier one being the core instruction that happens for students every single day that ensures that they get grade level standards regardless of what their entry point is skill level um but also enhancing our tier one instruction to make sure that we're able to close gaps for students so we've had tier one plans forever they're not new however they were used inconsistently and monitored and consistently and so one of the things that we thought we could do most effectively to begin to meet the individual needs of some of our most talented students was to enhance our tier one plan process and really it's become not just planning but also the monitoring hold on sorry sorry someone's losing a tooth so the tier one plans have allowed
209us to take data on each individual student as mr kyle mentioned and create instruction targeted to for them during our tier one time but also during our response to intervention time so it becomes less about remediation but what does each individual student need to advance to their next level right so we're trying to embed our targeted enrichment or really enhancement for all students in the procedures that we already have um and so what we were able to do with our approved budget last year was add instructional teaching assistance ad math interventionist math interventions for the first time ever which has been a huge huge success um increase our reading teachers and then create our model to support classroom teachers during small group instruction for response to intervention and as a result what we found this
210year is we have this really targeted instruction happening with resources in our ela classrooms that is making a difference for students and is really helping teachers refine how they're teaching to make the most effective use of that time and i think what's really well done or easily more easily done in ela is you can have a group of first graders who are still learning their letters and sounds getting what they need from both the classroom teacher and the reading teacher or the teaching assistant that we've added to k12 or k12 and you can have the precocious you know child who's reading at the second almost third grade level doing their their small group instruction that allows them to do the grade level work but to go well beyond the grade level work with extension activities
211and practices that are necessary for them so i think we cover the gamut in that space in terms of being able to um target enrichment for those students however when we get to some of the challenges that we've faced around this with math that like i said i can't emphasize enough how important the math interventionist ad has been but and i don't often say this like we're stretching that really thin with one math intervention is per building we're not able to get the gamut of skills that may exist in a classroom right but we it's making a difference in the students that they're able to work with and we really concentrated them in three through five um we've also struggled to find instructional tas um because we've had to prioritize of course our special education
212mandated teaching assistant positions before we can fill our instructional the ones we do have as you have seen this year have you know had to be pulled to cover classes and so it hasn't been as consistent as we want but we know when we when it's there it's the right model to use because they can support both ela and math um enhancements for our primary age students and so one of the asks in this presentation that you'll see later is going to be around that math interventionist work so we can continue to expand our efforts to do this work in-house for as long as we need to be able to do that work in-house i want to commend um sarah and frank our ela and um secondary excuse me our elementary and secondary um math
213supervisors for the collaborative work that they've done to really look at the math pathway and begin to streamline their efforts um to make sure our students the elementary level have the skills necessary to access the pathways that are being built at the secondary level um and karen has done a whole sbu on that and i'm really giving a lot of this over to karen in the curriculum wheelhouse piece of it um but really staying in touch with you know what the opportunities are and what we need to do at the elementary level to support students so they're ready for those particular components and so they'll continue continue under karen's leadership very intentionally to align the work at the elementary level with that of the secondary level particularly we talk about those students who are particularly
214obsessional in math and how we make sure that they are challenged and their needs are met in the elementary say so um our next steps um is we will go back to baseline with our winter nwa assessment winters is i think we've talked about before usually our best data point in nwa is where we see children experience the most growth it's where they've hit their rhythm it's not surrounded by a whole other you know sort of testing with new york state testing et cetera and it and it gives us enough lead time to begin to look at who those students are and so we'll begin to recreate our baseline to figure out you know what we would use as a child buying process in addition to all of our other data points um we will
215be requesting as a part of the academic plan to expand our math interventionist model um so that we can reach a wealth of students in that three through five grade band hopefully with coveted restrictions lifting we can begin to look at some cross-classroom groupings um so students are better aligned and we can more effectively utilize that resource and as i mentioned um our stem supervisors will continue to partner together um to look at curriculum and acceleration opportunities to make sure we build the bridge to the middle level so the last portion is around acceleration and so we've separated enrichment and acceleration enrichment going deeper and being more rigorous with acceleration which is really how we address our students who are are really gifted in some ways or just very advanced in some ways um in
216different academic areas and we do really focus primarily on the core content areas during this section so when i presented back in january 2020 we discussed the difference between whole grade acceleration and content acceleration whole grade acceleration is you know most people are familiar with it we're going to skip the student because they're just very exceptional or very high performing in all areas um these students typically sit in the 95th percentile or higher and and multiple measures but we also looked at social emotional assessments to make sure that we'd be developmentally appropriate to advance them um and we always always work with the parent in making this um decision and so we talked about establishing some protocols and procedures for this to happen but that has absolutely evolved as you'll see in the next slide
217content acceleration is something that was done in a very limited way um and that's where you accelerate students for one particular content area and that gets very tricky um in the elementary level even before covet in terms of coordinating schedules etc and so being able to do those enhancements within our classrooms with our interventionists is a more effective model we found for content acceleration we had a long discussion we met back in january 2020 about what we do with our students in math um and i really do think if we can tap our math interventionist we can create something that better supports those students without um having them straddle two buildings um when it comes to being accelerated in math so we're really trying to look how it enhanced that work in in-house after going
218through covet what we've learned is that for most students doing math virtually is not the most effective way to do math instruction um and so the more that we're able to have the hands-on math instruction for our students as a way to accelerate them um the better and i heard that from ms mcgraw multiple times um you know what you know how challenging it is to do the level of teaching you want to do in math um virtually so we really kind of paused um whole grade acceleration um for cobit it was you know for for the most part 1920 wasn't impacted because usually that acceleration happens in the fall so those students have already been accelerated but going into the 2021 school year um we really just got brought children back to school as
219we brought children back to school we didn't have requests and we didn't kind of seek students out to accelerate at that point in time um i probably actually got more questions at that point in time about what happens if i don't have my kid in at this point in time um but what we have found is over the years we it's usually just a handful of children two to three children that we're accelerating um and having them do a con um a whole great acceleration and it's usually students coming out of pre-k who have you know really exceptional um foundational skills um and sometimes children coming out of k who have those really exceptional skills where parents want to advance into the next year frequently it's students who have a late birthday who just missed
220the cut off by a couple of days and so they you know they're not that far from their peers um but we have not in my time seen or selected students to accelerate at second grade or third grade or fourth grade um largely because they've established their peer groups they've you know kind of established where they are that that process in that school um and it doesn't tend to happen there so it does happen in the early years and we are um in the next steps you'll see looking at you know when does iq stabilize for students who were considering are you know truly gifted and truly talented and there's research out there that um our our response intervention coordinator is doing as a part of this committee's work to see when it's best to
221make those decisions should we be making those decisions when they're in kindergarten or should we be making those decisions when they're in third grade or fifth grade based on when those pieces may happen is iq the best measure to look at when trying to make those decisions what other data points do we need to consider so it's given us some time to kind of reflect on um how we're making decisions about when students accelerate what i will say is that we haven't during my tenure had a a an experiment experience where a student accelerated and wasn't successful or shouldn't have um for which i'm very grateful um and i'm really grateful for for parents who when presented with data that says um this is not going to be the right thing for your child or
222socially they're not quite ready for it or they've been responsive to that and really work with us and had conversation and and trusted us in many ways to do some of that acceleration in the classroom for their student um but where it's worked we really had that partnership with them um so i'm actually sorry next slide i'm i'm using my own so i'm not always keeping up with you guys um so again with content acceleration this year we're still really we're not going to put a child another in another classroom for a content area we are really working on using tier 1 effectively and using our inventions effectively to really challenge students in that particular subject area um and we are trying to i shouldn't say trying to we've really refined the response to intervention
223block in the schedule because they're tied to another human coming into your classroom and so that time is really a protected time for math intervention and acceleration it's really protected time for ela acceleration and intervention because there's usually another adult who's pushing into that classroom that allows a teacher to pull a small group while that other adult is pulling a small group but we do believe a math interventionist would be better poised to provide true acceleration beyond what's taught in that particular grade level um to better refine what's happening in our in our math um in our math block during that time we do still use our computer platforms and computers are not the end all be all in the sense of providing that acceleration and instruction but it is a a solid component to
224our program that allows students to continue to work independently at their pace it allows teachers to go in and plan for students on that platform so they're getting the correct level of instruction that continues to support and enrich and enhance them and so we'll continue to use all the resources that we have at our at our disposal particularly this year we're not moving students around to really ensure that children are um our challenge accelerated um and that we're going deep enough for them and not just leaving them at grade level if they're well beyond grade level so as i mentioned our next steps are really to continue to look at the research around you know if we're doing right by our students in terms of full grade acceleration um in which grade levels that's most
225appropriate for that to happen and ensure that it's an unbiased process right that there's a partnership between the school and the parent and the data to really make a determination about students and as far as content acceleration we really do want to try to tackle the needs of our met our high math needs students with additional math interventionists the way we do with ela and as i mentioned before the continued alignment between the k-8 math curriculum to ensure that our students are ready for the different pathways that are being designed at the secondary level and that concludes this presentation but in particular this is very rewarding because the policy that underlies this presentation was adopted relatively recently right just a little while ago so it's really terrific to see the policy infrastructure foundation start generating
226real progress in the district and we know that this is a very tricky area in as i know board member wilson talks very effectively about about the the history of what has brought us to this point in this country by race and class and how that impacts children's outcomes um and where they are coming from and i really respect and appreciate the way you've been so thoughtful about ensuring that all children are have opportunity for enrichment and acceleration and that we're not just continuing to further focus resources where there's already a lot of resources so i really appreciate that the deep thought that went into where this was structured and i now see board member creachy has a uh hand up and we'll start with there sure i just wanted to thank dr wilson turner
227because i'm really i'm really amazed that this has been going on for the past two years that we've been able to continue it um and that we've been able to find the best way to get this kind of enrichment through pushing in to the elementary classrooms or through the all-class type enrichment i'm really thrilled i'm so glad that we're doing this it really makes it i think it's going to really make the difference for a lot of kids giving them something that's really challenging and engages them so and and i really like that we're focusing more on elementary school math to get more kids ready to do math at a really high level so thank you so much uh one other quick point i wanted to ask about or comment on is i know over
228the years we've been very cognizant of the percentage of time our students have substitute teachers because they're being drawn into professional development or some other kind of work and i know that i've been a real voice for trying to do additional training for subs and doing more making our subs more effective but this actually seems like a even better way to provide that coverage when teachers need to be out of the classroom because you've got a sort of a trained person working on a specific set of things and i know it can't necessarily help with a teacher who needs a sub because they're suddenly sick but for professional development types of sub needs where we know a teacher is coming out these enrichment opportunities are a perfect way to sort of mesh in and reduce
229the number of days that our students are in a room with a professional who's not really doing much more than helping maybe move a little bit along so i'm interested if if you've been thinking about it in that way it's exactly what um sheridan prep and um giffen were thinking and it like i said it was like a a two-for-one right they were thinking how are we a community school for only offering enrichment to the 45 kids who stay after school every day with us right and so how do we how do we expand that to reach all of our students because they all need these opportunities in order to enhance their learning and at the same time you know how do we get our teachers um more time right and so it's always about
230time particularly at the elementary level where they're all things to all people um but to give our teachers more time to do the work that they want to do like they want to be you know better what getting what our students need in front of them and so it's been a nice balance and it's it's um you know good practices we take from where we've seen it happen elsewhere and it was we heard the idea first a couple years ago at one of the receivership conferences that the education department put on a school out in syracuse did this model where they actually partnered with syracuse university and syracuse university's staff and students provided an enrichment block for t for students while teachers went and did this planning model and so we've been talking about it
231and we actually pre-covered we talked about it and even mid covet you know mrs gale and mrs brown were like we need to figure out a way to do this because we think it will create you know a two-pronged opportunity for our school so that's exactly it and as i mentioned schuyler achievement that's how they did their embedded professional development is to balance their community schools effort with their professional development needs they need for their teachers and so coming from a couple of different research-based places to do that type of model someday it would be interesting i don't know if we gathered the data in this way to but we we've often looked at like 10 of the 10 of instructional time is actually covered by subs right and so it would be interesting to
232be able to start looking at of that ten percent how much are we covering with enrichment versus how much are we covering with true subs um it just seems like the more enrichment we can do the more effective it is and we know that part of the challenge from for some of our students is the lack of enrichment in their environment right when you're faced with a a story on the new york state assessment about horseback riding that you know privileges a certain set of people who've had some exposure to horseback riding right and so having more exposure whether that's through an actual field trip or through virtual field trip or through hands-on activities really helps our kids in um they need academic work as well but they also need that exterior enrichment so anyone
233else have anything they want to say i know we're a little bit behind schedule but i know we could have an entire meeting just on this so um trying to not uh we're good okay thank you so much dr wilson turner for this and for the prior presentation and for everything that you do we really appreciate it and that brings us now to the school year calendar always the exciting mentally twisting subject of the school year calendar mrs bechtel uh thank you so much it is a hard challenge here after those really content-rich presentations that we had to get into this logistics uh conversation but in any case the committee met this is our committee makeup up here we had our first meeting back in november we were working without a finalized boces calendar or
234regents schedule which we would expect um but after doing this for this many years i'm able to make pretty decent uh projections about how those things will go so this is the draft calendar um on this that i'll be presenting tonight um that we keep going our charge is to provide the board of education with a calendar for the upcoming school year that best meets the needs of students and staff and effectively addresses issues of teaching continuity so i i do like to go through the process for those that might be new to calendar we do schedule 187 days in our calendar which is more than many districts do um and that's a contractual largely a contractual item and to get more days of instruction in but it does cause some complexities uh when we
235go to schedule our calendar um which people are aware of and they don't understand why we aren't like other districts well we do actually schedule more days we schedule two teacher pd days by the apps to contract one is a teacher prep day that has to occur before school uh children begin attending school we are allowed for superintendent conference days that count as student attendance days we schedule 16 days off as per the apsu contract 13 of those days are prescribed and an additional one was added juneteenth june 19 2023 so those are 14 of the 16 days are are prescribed um we have some leeway with the other two we of course must be in session for state testing scoring days and we always consider the boces calendar for days off and we certainly
236must consider boces calendar for long breaks because we do have out of district placements that we must pay attention to these are our recommended priorities um we have no student attendance on election days for safety and security reasons i will say in 2023 the csda budget vote will impact all district schools we do those votes in our schools um the general election still impacts montessori and a brooklyn we have a call into the board of elections to find out if we are going to be able to move those out of those uh schools particularly the elementary school a brooklyn could probably more easily um manage it but we would like to no longer conduct the election at montessori so we'll see how that goes we have a staff pd day prior to the first day
237of school um in that or we try to anyway in addition to the asta teacher prep day we try to avoid end of year pd days because we don't get um the best bang for the buck uh people are tired and um not as ready to receive professional development um we consider any discretionary days with the these parameters in mind our contracts of course are these priorities the academic needs of students and on the maintaining appropriate levels of staffing a few items for discussion um well that i just wanted to remind the board that the region's testing days and spring break are they are conjecture we're waiting on nicer than boces calendars i did get a peek at a draft boces calendar so um but nothing has been finalized um the last time i checked
238was last week i think um religious holidays um and then the remaining teacher pd day uh which we you'll see in the draft calendar would occur on the school board budget boat day in may and then something that we've um put in place last year is where we have instead of snow days um that we go have gone to virtual days and i know this is a um a subject that some people feel strongly about one way or another it has worked to our advantage because it has given us flexibility we do schedule three days um for snow we deliver emergency i should call them and um if we don't use them then the teachers and staff get them back and we don't have school on those days so if we actually have virtual days
239rather than a snow day if we can pivot to those uh virtual learning on those days then we can maintain some of those flex the flexibility of where we're planting those um snow days or emergency days in our in our calendar and then i think um i'm hoping um we if that everyone has available to them the draft calendar it was in the presentation so what the uh formal recommendation won't be made until we have the other calendars finalized so i will be back in front of the board but um we're tentatively looking at the two additional days off uh to get to the 16 being september 26 and october 5th september 26th is day one of rosh hashanah and october 5th is yom kippur um first days for staff would be tuesday august 30th
240and when wednesday august 31st though they would become convocation and teacher pd day i've already discussed with mr petrin who is my co-chair on this committee um how we would have to accommodate those few employees whose uh work year doesn't begin until september the first but we can generally work around that um the first day for students thursday september 1st and friday september 2nd but these would be orientation days we've really found a great benefit in these last couple of years of covid in beginning the years uh the the year with those formal orientation days to acclimate school uh kids to the new school year it's really worked out it's been very successful and people would like to keep that in place um under discussion is the placement of the the pd days right now
241in the draft calendar we have it on september 27th which is uh day day two of rosh hashanah um and the other one is march 6 there's some some discussion from the committee about where in march we would put that day it might be a friday um it might be a monday we haven't totally firmed that up um but that is a little more arbitrary um the september 27th day becoming a pd day would be good because it would be it in the beginning of the year i mean preferably it would be in that first or second week of september but um we decided that if we were doing the orientations on thursday september 1st and friday september 2nd we didn't want to do a pd day the day after labor day because then there'd
242be so many days between that orientation and when kids actually um came to school for their uh you know to start the uh that we didn't think that that was a good idea so that's really where we are i did want to mention too about um the religious holidays because i know that uh this year we have that eat holiday off eid in the 22 23 calendar year is on a saturday so um we don't need to have it in the the weekday calendar um this year um it's it just doesn't impact us for next the following school year we might have more of an impact because i believe that uh both of the eid holidays fall within the school year but we will deal with that one a year from now um so for
243now i i think that's it i would take any questions if you have any questions on the draft calendar i have it up here on my laptop as well and i know my board colleagues know and hopefully members of the community who are watching this know that you can easily access that draft calendar on the agenda so that you can see it it's it's right there for you um anyone have any questions for ms bechdel or comments on the work of the calendar committee thank you board member creative for your liaison work we appreciate you i appreciate your noting that the eids fall on non-school days this year this school year i wonder if you would consider as you have sometimes in the past placing them in the holiday dates um i know like for
244some some years rosh hashanah will fall on a saturday and it'll appear in our dates list even though it doesn't impact our calendar just so it stays part of our mental consciousness about what's important and what we value as a district so that's that would be one suggestion i have sure yeah we can make that work thank you anyone else have any comments or thoughts and i just wanted to comment that i know this is very difficult work um logistics are always incredibly complex especially when you're dealing with the district our size with uh so many different beliefs and um needs uh for time off so ms bechdel thank you so much thank you for your team and to the calendar committee you guys are always keep staying on top of uh what's important so
245much appreciation to you guys this one didn't cause us too many problems there were there were no real ultimate conflicts i i don't think so um this was a i think an easier year for the calendar can you talk a little bit about that um i know this is something i bring up every year and i and i i always appreciate a reminder about that hanging monday on may 15 and whether you think that there's value in even worrying about that i know we have those two snow days around memorial day so we end up very very frequently between virtual days and climate change we end up very very frequently with a five-day memorial day weekend and i always struggle with why that's better than having a four-day weekend around the budget break followed by
246a four-day weekend around memorial day so that you don't end up with a hanging monday and i'm just curious again what the what the thought is on that on the calendar committee yeah and i i think that's a that is a choice in this calendar um if the board so desired for me to bring that back um to the committee we certainly could discuss it i i think that folks on the committee felt that um attendance wise that you know the tuesday the i think it's the 16th of may um that it hasn't uh you know we haven't looked at the attendance recently i suppose we could go back and look at that data and see um how that has worked out and if there is really any um sort of attendance impact that would
247make us lean one way or the other i can bring that data back to the committee uh but they the committee really liked the idea of having that that longer weekend it was something um attractive to folks yeah i i guess i'm curious not just attendance wise but also just pedagogically i would imagine as a teacher if i'm trying to put together a lesson plan it's a series of lesson plans for a week it's nice to have the days contiguous and not have that that day interrupting in the middle but but i'm not a teacher and i'm you know i just want to know that the reasons that we make these decisions are for the benefit of the students who we're all here to serve that's always my fundamental question right um i do think
248that there's i i do think that this is a literally one of those choice um decisions to make um i don't know that the hanging monday is it is a terrible thing especially at this point in the year um the other thing is is that we are in ap and ib testing at this point and while that's really very heavy for um the first and second week we do uh go into the third week um for either some makeups or or other things so i i i guess um and then people you know it's another reason it can be an ap exam on the 15th right there there could potentially be it's it is as i'd have to go back and check that but the it's the first and second week but the third week
249there's an awful lot going on as well i know that leah evans has uh let me know that while the the hard scheduled dates are week one and two there there is some activity that occurs um in week three as well so uh particularly i think for ib so you know to have that day off i remember the year that we did do that was um a little bit problematic for her we've actually had in the past where we've had a day off in this period of time where we've had ap exams and have brought kids in to take those tests um if they were so scheduled got it my last thought is if in fact we do need to use montessori for education which we mean for voting which i think would therefore mean
250that the students would be virtual right that's what we did this year um i would hope that we could get that on the calendar so that it's on the family-friendly calendar from the beginning of the year so parents could plan for it if if we know in time to do that um i'll i'll add the information that we have met with the board of elections and they do have a goal of transitioning out of our schools and that's why we're down to two if you recall we did have more but we're down to two now and so um they have been very very cooperative they are fully supportive of trying to move out of montessori and we understand that and they understand that uh but i know that that's also looking for a location as
251well and so i just want to make sure that it is on the record that this is not anything that is contentious it is something that um in our meeting with the board of election this was a few years ago they did express that they are trying to move those locations the voting locations out of the schools so we know that that's on their in their plan it's just a matter of when that will happen i understand well thank you so much appreciate it anyone else with questions for the calendar otherwise um i expect the next time we could do this very briefly right because we'll have have everything in front of us and just need to adopt it once once we have the final calendars out of boces and the state department of education
252that is correct all right hey did you have something else i didn't want to cut you off no i i think i was just going to end it if there were any revisions from this for example that march pd date i would just make note of that and um and we could you know just have a very brief couple of minutes uh presentation and then a vote sounds good okay so the last bit of work we have to do tonight is really board business um the we've done this each year over the last several years um just for benefit of anybody listening to meeting from home the board is a very reflective board and each year we do do a board self-evaluation using a series of rubrics provided by the new york state school boards
253association in order to evaluate our own performance and identify areas in which we think that we have room for improvement and we take those in those areas where we would like to improve or work in a different way and we consolidate them into board goals and this year as in prior years we have um increased our comfort level with our own systems we are now a pretty senior board right almost everybody has been on the board for two or more years which makes us a pretty senior board lots of very little turnover in the last few years so everybody kind of knows here's how i ask a question or here's how i get something on the agenda those things are very comfortable for us so that has been reflected in um the outcome of our
254of our evaluation of our board metrics and so this year we decided to really try and focus as ms smith said a little while ago try and focus our efforts on the most critical things because we know especially in the time of covet how difficult it's been for us to do anything and that's why we're always so amazed by dr wilson turner's continuing to make progress on the enrichment work because we're all like wait we had board goals and we had a really hard time delivering on them because of everything that was going on so we're always impressed by the ability of the cabinet level staff and all the people working with them throughout the district to continue to make good progress on these important activities that aren't so urgent as covid but in any
255case for this year we narrowed down to three goals and four activities which are on the screen in front of you we've also um we're also going to try instead of identifying a single person responsible for each one to identify these small committees um these committees um are proposed i'm certainly open to other ways of rearranging people and to make everyone happy and get with the the things that they want to work on the most but the goal is effectively communicating district priorities um and continuing to improve two-way communication and the two activities related to that are a virtual forum regarding our work to dismantle systemic racism within our district so that would be very heavily reliant on the work dr wilson turner talked about tonight um that's one activity the second activity um is
256to more effectively communicate with the community regarding the board role and the opportunity to serve as an elected board member we will have board elections this year every year we have two board seats that are up for election and um depending on people's choices we anticipate this year only one in one incumbent plans to run so we will be looking for candidates to serve in the school district goal two engaging professional meaningful development for the board we have always for many many years relied on the new york state school boards association to provide professional development and as we talked about a little bit ago ms smith and i have been interacting with school board partners which is another way that we access professional development for board members but and the district has been um very
257instrumental in providing culturally responsive education training for the board that has been a very um valuable experience i think for all board members but we are looking to be extremely thoughtful about that and really think hard about what kind of professional development we think board members need and what the budget for that might be and so that's our second goal and third activity and then finally goal three which is been a goal for some time is to finalize the team operations manual we do have an adopted team operations manual but it is fallen woefully out of date and we are attempting to bring it current and not only bring it current but create a system for maintaining its currency over the long term and so miss smith has been heading that project up and will
258um hopefully we anticipate being able to to get that done we hope no later than the end of this school year june of 2022 and so those are our goals and objectives that we designed defined together through our um retreat um just a few weeks ago and so i'm sorry to have talked for so long i'm certainly open to conversation um about any edits you all would like to see in these or changes and who's on what committee or whatnot and we will not act on these tonight as usual we will act on them in two weeks in case we've had further opportunities to reflect anybody have anything they want to add ms smith miss smith you are on mute okay thank you um so uh just real quickly i wanted to just uh express
259uh this thank you madam president for your um time in recent weeks actually on the board operations team manual and i'll be ready shortly to contact miss van and dr chatur about our next you know review of that and then we will have everyone take a look at that also a request that uh superintendent adams and cabinet take a look at that uh for input and some you know clarity if need be so i really hope it's well before we can adopt it in june but i want to kind of keep that moving um since it has taken a bit of time but i think um we'll be really closer to uh like february march when we finish up so thank you anybody else with comments or thoughts on board goals board self-evaluation anything you
260want to say if not then i will return to our regularly scheduled agenda which brings us i think to board committee reports any board committee reports alrighty that's gonna madam president did we want to um do the video from montessori you know i was just gonna say other business and that would be superintendent adams i know you have an item of other business yes this earlier in the evening uh we did not get the video moving and so we we failed to show that and so we do have a video mr baker made me aware that we do have a video for montessori and i appreciate that mr baker because we absolutely want to show our students and highlight montessori this evening and so at this time mr baker will move forward with the video
261from montessori my favorite things about montessori are that we foster independence with our students we make sure that they learn in a warm and loving environment that we provide as many learning opportunities for our students using hands-on activities and the montessori philosophy i think my favorite thing is having the opportunity to be part of the student support team i feel that social emotional needs of the kids come before they're able to learn the classroom i have an awesome partner sarah carradore the school psychologist i worked with and with sarah we're able to look at you know community issues social problems things in the classroom and we have like the leeway and the support of the school to really personalize district initiatives and roll those out in our school my favorite thing about montessori is being
262completely surrounded by adults who are passionate about what they do every colleague of mine lives and breeds montessori and for them that means dedicating their own time and resources to creating materials and experiences that engage our kids in every way possible the flip side of that is we're surrounded by kids who soak up every single bit of energy that we put into making this experience um a really engaging one for them and that energy just fuels this place i love the staff being here there uh they took me in like i was here for years and uh everybody is great here i love the kids i love the building i feel very supported at montessori by the staff the leadership and the parents and mcc as soon as i got hired for the district and
263knew i was coming to montessori the leadership at the time really really thought it was important that i go through montessori training and i was afforded the opportunity and ever since then i felt like we at montessori are a huge family that help one another we share materials and ideas even though i work with the whole school there is a small pot here we have four special ed rooms we have 25 students with severe autism with about 20 staff members and it's a very supportive group i work with in that group um those students 10 years ago wouldn't have been served in district and i'm really proud of the fact that we're a team we work really hard to meet the needs of those students and to work with those families to get the services
264that their children need so i'm really proud of that i think what makes montessori special is the families that surround us and support us no matter what challenges we're facing whether they're global ones or ones within our building our families are there to know that we're providing their children with an experience that is hands-on that meets every child's needs and they're enthusiastic about that that makes going to work every day a really exciting experience yes i do it's uh the teachers is very supportive they help us out with a lot of things knowing that we have extra work since the pandemic began the principal is very very supportive of what we do here and i just love it um it means to like if you see paper on the ground don't pick it up and
265pass it to other people don't just throw it away maybe see who's it is or hint to the person with the name on it um second um working by yourself you want to be independent you don't want to fool around with others you really want to try to get your work done and if you don't and you get a little bit of it done just make sure you're happy with yourself and you actually you tried and the third one is working with others you don't want to take advantage of them you want to only like have them answer the questions you just sit around doing nothing you really want to work as a team ssr safe respectful and responsible active learning we do stuff with our bodies and hands to learn independent learning we get
266to partner learn and kids get to give and take lessons as well does it mean to be montessori at montessori we're all a family it's so nice to see enthusiastic self-motivated learners and it's just a joy to come every day and see our students ready to get to school ready to learn and really ready to guide their own education when i think about being montessori the first thing i think about is looking within myself it's about being self-reflective and self-aware what's the energy that i'm putting out into the world and how am i treating others around me how am i treating my environment and how am i treating myself the second part as an educator about being montessori is being responsive to and observant of my children around me and how i can meet each
267of their specific needs and grow them into independent learners i think me what it means to me to be a montessori is that as a montessori educator we take the district curriculum and we put it through the montessori lens and we create hands-on activities for kids i also think being montessori means that we foster independence we foster ownership whether it's of their work academically or of their behavior we're providing students with an opportunity on how to learn to be a better global citizen and look out for one another especially when going on into the middle school and beyond i get to be with all my friends i get to use colorful materials i really love art and recess mrs colvin and mr powell are really nice so you've been here since pre-k all the way
268through grade five what things are going to miss most as you prepare to leave montessori i'm gonna miss all my teachers that i've had in the past i'm gonna miss all my classmates especially the ones that i was actually close to um i'm gonna miss the school in general i'm gonna miss all the people all everyone really everybody is like so nice at the school thank you very much for allowing us to go back and enjoy this video thank you thank you very much it was a very nice way to end is that there's actually some benefits to ending with uh with the kids as well as having them at the beginning and let's see i know everybody wants to hear the famous words uh let's entertain a motion to adjourn but sadly no that
269is not what we're going to say i am however going to entertain a motion to enter executive section to discuss the employment history of several people and matters leading to their continued employment can i have a motion motion by miss uh wilson second by mr elmanawi all in favor of entering executive session that is unanimous times six i know that dr trattor uh dropped off the call a little bit ago um so i hope he is feeling better i will see you guys all in exec in a moment and thank you everyone else we are not planning to return to public session um except for to formally adjourn the meeting so there's no you can certainly hang around and watch for a blank screen but nothing else is going to happen tonight we will see
270you next week we do tend to deliver have scheduled a meeting special meeting to discuss the feeder pattern but as discussed earlier that's subject to further conversation