Board of Education Public Meeting | Live Stream | May 20, 2021

001good evening everyone my name is ann savage and i am the president of the city school district of albany board of education on behalf of the board i welcome you to our meeting i am joined tonight by most of the board board member al manawi board member tour board member krejci board member wilson board member smith and i are all here board member man was called away but maybe joining us virtually we'll have to see if she's able to do that we also have in person tonight superintendent adams and deputy superintendent roaring as well as board clerk tanya bowie who we are always grateful to have doing the work that makes this whole thing come together as well as mr baker and bobby whose last name is just jumped on my head who make all

002of the barber i knew that thank you make all of the technology work this meeting is being livestring live streamed and the instructions to view the meeting are available at albanyschools.org forward slash boe if you need to share those with anyone we will show relevant slides and documents in the virtual meeting screen as well as the screens here in the room you can also access the slides via albanyschools.org forward slash boe if you prefer to be able to control the slides yourself for in-person for those of you who are joining us in person tonight you know that we are taking the precautions consistent with those required for schools by both the new york state department of health and the cdc which still require masks and still require six foot separation between adults in a school

003setting we all had our temperatures checked on our way into the building and filled out the standard coveted screener we will continue to wear mask unless people remove it to be heard clearly while speaking as i have just done because of limits imposed by social distancing we don't have unlimited space here but we do have room for you so if you would like to come join us at the albany school of humanities there's plenty of open seats 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 to the republic for which it stands one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all in addition to saying the pledge of allegiance we always

004focus 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 have a report for us yes i do just a moment i think i need to adjust my microphone there we go is that better now um thank you so very much mr baker i would like to begin my report tonight with an enormous thank you to our community for supporting our budget once again this year we know that this has been a very trying year in so many ways because of the pandemic and we are deeply appreciative of the overwhelming support by our voters provided on tuesday in every

005budget season we work hard to balance the investments that we know our students need and deserve to support their growth and success with the financial realities of our community our budget development process was especially complex this year due to the significant challenges the pandemic presented we also had the additional opportunity to invest our one-time federal covet 19 relief funds to help us strategically rebuild and accelerate student learning we believe our budget proposal and our instructional planning for the next school year balance these priorities and we are grateful that our voters agreed many thanks once again to the community and thank you for being all in for albany we truly appreciate you may is asian pacific american heritage month a time to celebrate the many ways that generations of asian americans and pacific islanders have enriched

006our country's history and future i would like to commend president biden for his actions in signing into law federal legislation addressing anti-asian hate crimes which have increased across our nation during the covet 19 crisis the u.s senate and the house of representatives also passed the measure with overwhelming support the legislation that president that president biden signed will expedite reviews of pandemic related hate crimes with an emphasis on the increase in the attacks targeting asian americans and pacific islanders according to an analysis by the center for the study of hate and extremism anti-asian hate crimes increased by nearly 100 percent in 2020 across the major u.s cities i applaud president biden's actions and support of all of our federal leaders who back this legislation including new york senators schumer and gilderbrand and of course congressman paul

007tonko i would like to thank our partners at whitney m young junior health center for working with us once again to offer a covid19 vaccination clinic at albany high schools of brooklyn career and technical center today our second high school student vaccination clinic provided first dosed the first dose of the pfizer immunizations to 60 students i would like to recognize district health services coordinator suzanne mccarthy and a brooklyn school nurse cheryl osborne for delivering those immunizations to our students today the second dose for these 60 students will be on june 10th also at a brooklyn we will be partnering with whitney young on a community-wide vaccination clinic next tuesday at harriet gibbons student student services center at 75 water valley avenue all city residents age 12 and up are eligible for this clinic which will

008administer the first dose of the pfizer vaccine the second dose will be june 15th also at harriet gibbons we strongly encourage pre-registration for this clinic you may visit albanyschools.org for more information or call suzanne mccarthy at 518 475 we also are grateful to our partners at young's pharmacy and general store for their assistance with vaccination clinics next week at our four middle schools students ages 12 and up will be able to receive the first dose of the pfizer vaccine at these schools next wednesday they will receive the second dose on june 16th also at school please call the nurse at yours at your students middle school to schedule an appointment we also have more information available at albanyschools.org i would like to remind everyone that all schools and district offices will be closed next thursday

009and friday may 27th and 28th our final unused snow days of the school year our schools and offices will be closed monday may 31st in observance of memorial day we also have a few calendar updates for albany high seniors i mean i'm sorry for albany high school students and families as we look ahead to the end of the year as you know the state education department has revised the regents testing schedule due to covet 19. the state will offer only four optional region regents exams this year which will also require an update to our instructional schedule the final day of instruction for all albany high school students will now be monday june 21st this applies to all students whether they are intending whether they are attending in person or virtually the one exception in that

010schedule will be thursday june 17th only students taking the english language arts regents exam will report to school that day the final three regents exams will be tuesday june 22nd for students taking the living environment regions wednesday june 23rd for students taking the algebra 1 regions and thursday june 24th for students taking the earth science regions once again only students taking those exams will report to school on those days it is now my pleasure to welcome giffen memorial elementary school principal mrs jasmine brown to tell us about the great things that are happening at her school this year miss brown good evening all um so i guess i will start um just to piggyback off of the district's mission in our school's mission so at given memorial elementary our mission is really to grow empowered

011independent thinkers who become strong responsible leaders in their community anyone who has come to giffen knows our mantra we are giffin and you know what that means we work hard we overcome we are strong and we succeed in spite of um our goal is really to teach the skill teach our students the skills necessary for them to be successful in our building and beyond knowing that we set the foundation for their trajectory we also work really hard for our students to positively impact their community and that does not have to begin after they leave our building so i'll speak a little bit about that in a moment um and that they impact wherever their community is so whether that ends up being the south end of albany or across the world that is what we

012strive for for each of our students um if we could go to the third slide i think the next one um our demographics and where we currently are as a building this has been a very different year for us so up above you'll see where our enrollment numbers stand pretty much this year we've been split down the middle when it comes to our virtual students and our students who are in person what you do not see represented on the chart is that we have approximately 20 pre-k students that are there approximately 20 of our student makeup our students with disabilities and about 12 percent of our students are english language learners um the survey that just got put out for families and i'm looking at what they would like to do for next year we've

013only had about 30 of our families respond but it looks like from those 30 about 67 of our families are looking to come back in person and we are looking forward to having them um back in person as well so the next slide is um briefly what our sep goals have been throughout the year um in spite of what the year has looked like we continue with this work um the goals for our building are really around standards-based instruction uh which is where our equity work starts in in ends data-driven instruction to to help us decide where support needs to be in our building for not only students but for for teachers and staff as well and we've worked really hard around learning additional cognitive engagement strategies to promote critical thinking with our students there

014has been a strong focus on student voice this past year and you'll see that in my success slide before we go to the next one that little graphic just kind of outlines what i just spoke about but we measure our success based on our student outcomes which leads me to the next slide which is around our challenge so i know with covid and everything else there have been a number of different things um we've had to to um overcome this past year but for me and our building the work remains the work so we i've identified our our real challenge this year is just to continue to grow the capacity of staff to accelerate the learning of our students um no matter what the the barrier or the circumstances are so we've really tried to

015continue our work around the professional development of teachers which has been a range of things that we've focused on this year we've had a number of teachers attend um the standards conference even virtually once we weren't able to do that in person we still use our data teaming time to really look at student work and try to modify our instructional strategies for students and again that is both in person with the limitations that we've had throughout the year as well as as virtually and utilizing our coaches in the building that's also looked different this year but they have really worked hard around the professional development with teachers um even going into those virtual spaces to try to model for for teachers so they've also been instrumental to this work i mean those next steps are

016really just all those things that i i've outlined but that continues to be the work that we set forth for us to make sure that that we are able to produce student outcomes um that we can be proud of and our successes so i just wanted to highlight our students so i said a moment ago that we've worked around um building our knowledge of um additional cognitive engagement strategies even in this this virtual space that we've been in for the last year and a year and a half so teachers have worked hard to try to integrate a number of different um strategies and tools into their instruction this year um with the one-on-one chromebooks even for our in-person teachers trying to get accustomed to what that looks like and how we integrate that into our

017day we recently can we recently finished our one school one book project all because you matter by tammy charles and brian collier to really uplift empower our um brown and black students um it's really a story about their history and why they are important um and we have had a number of families reach out to us and thank us for for giving them the opportunity to to explore that book with their children and the last bullet up there is really around our um student-led community advocacy and participation and while my um instructional staff does a lot of that work um i do have to take a moment to to thank my home school coordinators um mr walter huntley our common councilman and homeschool coordinator mr derrick johnson and my community school site coordinator amanda boyd

018um who keep an ear to the ground when it comes to the things that are happening in our community that impact our students and families directly um about a year ago before things got shut down my sixth grade leadership team um worked really hard to identify a problem in the south end which happened to be the the food desert and um spoke to some of our our local officials and um kind of set forth a plan which ended with a video that was produced by youth fx youth fx and the food drop and we've tried to continue some of that work um even during our our shutdown period um the two pictures you'll see of late there they are currently redoing linkin park and um there was some you know the community was not necessarily

019happy because there wasn't a bunch of input so we got our students involved and you'll see they did a couple of focus groups a lot of the teachers were able to present the plans and students were able to discuss their pros and cons and actually provide input on the survey um so that's just one example of that work we've had a couple of community gardens and since their inception with the students help um with we've been able to provide over 130 pounds of food to our families that we grow right at the building i am very proud of that work um and what you'll see today is a very short video that we put together because even though our leadership team consists of our older students in the past it was our sixth graders this

020year we've been working with our fifth grade students we are also trying to make sure our youngest students know that they have a voice and can impact their community so for arbor day with our partners we were able to start our own urban orchard so there were a lot of activities and learning going on around that in the short video is really what that day looked like it was cold outside the wind was blowing um but our kindergarten and first grade students we even had some of our virtual students who were willing to come for the day to help plant those trees to begin our our urban orchard within the long run again is um you know for sustainability to help out the community so with that if we could show the short video we're

021at school right now and at the moment we are going to take some pictures with the cameraman right here [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey [Music] we make apples and we squeeze these apples and we make juice does everyone like juice say yes does everyone want to try some apple juice say yes please would you want it with bubbles or without bubbles [Music] okay all right we'll start we'll start with bubbles you said bubbles [Music] they're very fragile [Music] so [Music] all right guys so we're out here with the kids uh we got kids and the teachers kids all around [Music] it says what is your favorite food or drink made from apples choose just one put a cube in the jug we will make a graph of our choices so which ones do you like best

022what are you going to choose apple snacks apple sauce apple juice or apple for apple pie which one do you like best all right don't take it don't take it we're going to talk all right you're going to take your marble and put it in the one that you look like best which one do you like the best and then we're going to count them with the a grass all right put it inside wherever the jar is right behind that's where you're going to put your marble you get a marble right pick the one thing that you like the best and put it in the jar right behind you do you like apple juice best i like apple juice all right put it right in there go ahead what one do you like the best

023you like apple juice oh my goodness all of you like apple juice today we're going to be learning about all the different things with the apple tree right here this is what we're going to be doing do you see that we're going to be planting trees now we got the kids right now [Music] did everybody have a good time thank you okay there's five more people that need to help [Music] so in addition to all the fruits and vegetables we're growing we now have apple trees down at giffen as well so hopefully in a year or so you guys can come down and i'm not making an apple pie but um you may be able to get some additional fruit so thank you you so very much principal brown it is so exciting to see

024what our kids are able to do and thank you so very much for all of your leadership and everything that you do over at given we just appreciate you thank you thank you guys so at this time we'll move right into the district update and um i like the fact that we are able to keep everyone abreast of what's happening now through our district update as well as how we're moving forward and of course we always start with our vision mission and goals to make sure that it is at the center of our decision making and we don't lose sight of the fact that we're always looking for those equitable opportunities for our students so that they can reach their potential tonight's discussion topics we have quite a few we want to update the board

025with regard to covet 19. we have a situation that we are addressing with regard to athletics with regard to our boys and girls lacrosse that i want to update you on and these are recent happenings and so i want to make sure that you're staying abreast of that covet i'm sorry quarter four and the end of year activities we'll talk a little bit about that most information is going out through the schools but we'll talk a little bit about that our instructional planning where are we now what are we looking at in terms of the 2122 school year we did receive recent guidance from the new york state department of health as well as from the new york state department of education some guidances with regard to social distancing and then the other guidance that

026we're going to talk about is dealing with the american rescue plan information and looking at what some of those buckets are that we would be able to categorize and use the funds and allocate the funds just an update on the beaver creek project which is happening over at toast elementary school and then a little bit more information about our feeder alignment committee so today we have 374 confirmed covet 19 cases 199 of those cases were on site 175 of those cases were off-site and i think it what's really important to note is that number that says as of may 19 new cases per day less than one and so we are definitely moving in the right direction we are watching the guidance carefully we are continuing with following the doh guidance with regard to quarantining

027and contact tracing we're also looking at the cleaning and sanitization of our buildings and i still always want to complement our faculty and staff for the great work that they're doing with abiding by the protocols that have been put in place boys and girls lacrosse we've had some challenges due to covid19 we've had some challenges with regard to fielding our team and i know that mrs bechdel as well as our athletic director miss chapel are available they're going to be online so that they'll be virtual but at the end if you need to ask questions that they are here as well to answer some of those questions and as well as for the safety of our students because with a smaller team we may not be able to compete and we really try to restructure

028as of friday we were noticing some challenges and we were starting to restructure how we could still feel the field the teams this week has posed some challenges with regard to that and so we're not able to feel the team so we're not able to have the teams which means that our students are not going to be able to be competitive and compete in lacrosse with that we do value and know that we still want our students to have that experience we did get feedback from parents today because i know our athletic director did meet with parents today and one of the concerns is that even though the students can't compete what can we do to still have them practice and condition and train so that they don't lose skills that they still can gain

029their skills and so we are looking at continuing some of those opportunities there are some details that have to be worked out that i know miss chapel was working on today and so some of these are looking at our computer our community partners such as citilacs seeing if we can partner with them if it's something that we can do on our own those are the details that we have to work out but i do want you to know that we are absolutely looking at if our current coaches can either partner with citilacs or if we can do these opportunities on our own so that we can work with our students after school we know that sometimes location may be a concern we're looking at using myers as the location there's still some details that we

030have to work out there we know that we want to build that stronger relationship with our community partners because we're looking to facilitate flex six and what that does is it puts us in a position to not only retain the students that we have playing lacrosse but it also helps us build and expand younger grades moving into lacrosse and so these are some things that we're going to be working on and like i said i know that miss chapel was making phone calls today to see what we can do to still keep our students engaged and again she'll be available along with mrs bechtel for questions after this presentation for quarter four just want to make sure that you are reminded that we have elementary school moving up ceremonies fifth and sixth grade and the

031sixth grade students that are still housed at the elementary school even though they're at a middle school now we want to make sure that they have that experience of moving up so some schools will have two moving up ceremonies those schedules will be pushed out via the schools so you can check the school snn check the school website and that information will be coming out locally same thing with our middle schools the moving up ceremonies and the eighth grade celebrations please stay tuned to your school because that's where that information will come from at the high school we're looking at our end of the year recognitions and celebrations and i have a correction with regard to graduation and i'll let miss mckenna share that with you because based on our guidance we're able to consolidate

032still have multiple ceremonies but we're able to consolidate and i'll just give you a little sneak preview to one day so that's the little cliffhanger right uh with regard to our instructional planning for the 21-22 school year we know that looking at our budget proposal in combination with federal covet 19 relief aid and also with our guidelines from the new york state departments of health we are looking at a full in-person model we're also looking at maintaining three feet social distance we're also looking at students wearing masks should that guidance change then we will adjust accordingly but as it stands right now schools are not permitted to go without wearing masks to go without social distancing we are not able to do that so we are still planning on you know full person five days

033a week we will do our surveys we will see which families are looking at virtual learning and provided that we are within the 75 capacity we will be able to have full in-person five days a week seventh grade seven through twelve if based on building capacity we are above 75 percent then we will be looking at a hybrid model this is also contingent upon the transmission rates that we may experience if we move to low or moderate or if we are at substantial transmission rates then there are various guidelines that we have to follow i think it is important to note that effective wednesday which was yesterday new york would follow the recent cdc guidance that fully vaccinated individuals can in most cases resume activities without masks or physical distancing exceptions include schools and so

034i can't say that enough despite the fact that there are guidelines that reduce wearing masks or physical distancing schools that serve from pre-k through 12 school districts that are serving from pre-k through 12th grade are not included in that guidance and we must continue to follow all of the covet 19 protocols and then we have the guidance for events that are listed um 250 indoors and 500 outdoors venues may wear masks for all patrons the new york state departments of health strongly recommends masks in indoor settings where vaccination status is unknown and you'll hear a little bit more about that when miss mckenna presents about our graduation and what those criteria will be for being there again looking at the transmission rate this is the chart we've shared this out several times and so we

035just wanted to make sure that people were aware of what those guidelines are we've also shared out our instructional planning metrics if you will so that you can see where we are with regard to full in person based on the three feet and student selections of less than 75 building capacity and then if it's seven through eight i'm sorry seven through twelfth grade and it exceeds the 75 building capacity we will be looking at a hybrid model our self-contained special education students full in-person k-12 and we are continuing to plan for a virtual option and so that will be determined via our surveys and it is also pending the guidance from the state department of education i cannot emphasize enough that we are still going to plan for a virtual learning environment because we don't

036know what's going to happen if we don't have it then we will absorb those positions and we will operate school as pre-covet normal if you will and if we are able to offer and there are still guidelines that require social distancing or guidelines that still allow for virtual learning then we will be in a position to continue to allow for that choice so now the hot topic of the night we have received email after email with regard to guidance with regard to the funding for our american rescue plan and this is a funding overview that i am going to share with you this evening because there are still details the final details we still have to get those and i know that miss leffler is going to be available at the end of this presentation

037if there are some unique questions with regard to the grant funding and how it will be allocated but the first thing to note is that when we are referencing the arp funding there is a statutory requirement that we reserve at least 20 percent of our 90 base funding to measure and address the academic impact of lost instructional time this is important and critical because we are going to have community input based on our plan but what we have to understand is even though we have community input based on our plan there are certain criteria that cannot be changed and so i think it's important to set that stage so that we all understand that we must reserve 20 percent of the funding that 31.4 million dollars that you see there to measure and address the

038academic impact on lost instructional time and it can be used but not limited to interventions for summer summer school summer enrichment extended day comprehensive after school programs or extended year programs what's important to note about after school plans and extended school year programs is that they that may also apply to before school options and before school programming so i i know that many of you may remember we had several comments from parents asking about could we use the funding for before school we did check on that and before school and after school options and programming may be provided and so we are looking at with our community-based organizations first of all would they have the capacity to be able to do it if they have the capacity how would we build that program in and

039then how much of our arp funds would we need to allocate to that so know that behind the scenes we are working on that and so as we come forward with our our plan for input that may be something that you see provided we're able to build that construct it is also important to note that there should be interventions that respond to students academic social and emotional mental health needs you have heard this time and time again that we understand that covet 19 has impacted every one of our lives we are seeing it in our children we are seeing it in our adults but we have this funding to address social and emotional and mental health needs of our students and it is also based on different subgroups of students that may have been disproportionately

040impacted so again these dollars are permitted for us to use but there are buckets where we have to use those funds and so there's very little discretion when it comes to those particular areas that are defined the other piece that i think is extremely important is to note that guidelines have been provided that determine how school districts prioritize the spending of the funds and these are the non-recurring expenses in these following areas that are listed additionally we have to also plan how do and you've heard me say this time and time again planning for sustainability there will be some things that we do put in place as a stop gap but then there's some things that we're putting in place that we know we need to continue beyond the funds that are permitted to be

041used um through 2023 and then 23 24. and so what the plan has to do is outline what does that look like how are we proposing and it may change and that's fine because we will make addendum we will make adjustments along the way and that will be permissible however we need to be very cognizant of what are those things that we are building and rebuilding and putting in place that need to be sustained over time and so when we look at this list there are two areas that i want to make sure that um when you go back to the other slide and i talked about the 20 of the base funding must be allocated in the identified areas the two areas that are in bold are the two areas where 6.2 million dollars

042must be allocated to those two areas and those are the ones that i stated before it is important to note as well that the arp dollars may address facility repairs and improvements to enable school operations to reduce the risk of transmission but also looking at inspection testing maintenance repair replacement all of those things they may be mechanical they may be non-mechanical so that we can perhaps look at enhancing our buildings through these through this category so i think that's really important to know on the next slide this just breaks it down so that you can see what the ninety percent allocation is one percent of the state level reserve must be for summer enrichment one percent of the state level reserve must be for comprehensive after school programs five percent must be for reserve must

043be reserved for learning loss or accelerated learning and then the city school district of albany received additional arp funds for learning loss and it is a learning loss grant of 1.2 million or 1.3 if you want to round up and so the total allocation would be the 32.7 million dollars additional guidelines that there are a lot of guidelines that we have to follow just so you know i just want to keep so when i keep saying guidelines understand that there are a lot of guidelines that we have to follow and we check and check and check to make sure that our procedures are in alignment with the guidelines any programs utilizing the funding that are expected to continue beyond the availability of the federal funds we need to make sure that we include that language

044in our plan we also need to identify local funds that will be used to maintain the programs in order to minimize disruption to core academic and other school programs so that's where i said there are some programs that would be temporary there's some programs that would extend we have to be able to determine which ones are temporary if you will or three to three years and then which ones we need to sustain over time before posting our plan we are seeking public input from parents and guardians teachers and other stakeholders we had two meetings already with the high school and it was basically just looking at the instructional model the charts that we have shown there will be additional meetings where we will have input with regard to here are the things that we are

045looking at addressing with our arp funds the department of education will not be developing a template or collecting the plans referenced in the state budget language but we do have to submit them to the state and it has to be posted on our website by july one so we will make sure that we we adhere to those guidelines as well on the next page you'll see that beginning next week during next week we will have a survey distributed digital digitally which will get some high level input about what are those things that our community would prioritize and what i would like to do is ask you to if you go back if you go all the way back to slide 12 those are the different categories and we will truncate those categories so that it

046would be in a drop down menu so that we can see what the community may be prioritizing those items on slide 12 and then we will also have the community forums and we have slated those for thursday june 10 6 to 7 pm saturday june 19 10 to 11 a.m and monday june 21st from 6 to 7 p.m you will be able to watch the meetings on the district's youtube channel and submit questions in advance or live during the feedback form at albanyschools.org beaver creek i'm sorry beaver creek clean water project that's a good one right so this project has started over at toast and we are working with our entities in order to ensure that it is a smooth transition of dropping off our students picking up our students we've had some bumps in

047the road but today we have that road that we have changed to a one way today everyone followed the one way so we are happy about that we know that we're going to keep moving forward and we are again working on i know the city is working on getting the signs up uh faculty and staff they're parking in the sunshine parking lot but we still have enough space because it's it's not full staff but we do have additional parking over on the delaware side right there by the pavilion so right now we're able to absorb the parking but we're making sure that we're ready for the fall when we have more staff on campus feeder alignment committee we talked about this a little bit last week and this has to do with engaging our community

048members and district personnel in a partnership to develop the criteria and make possible recommendations for an equitable feeder pattern for all students transitioning from elementary pre-k five to middle school grade six eight we are looking for 17 to 20 members on the committee each school will be represented we are going to work really hard we had a question come in today that if a school is not represented what happens does another school get to what we're going to do is go back out to that community and really work to have every school represented and as i responded to to that community member that parent i said unless something out of the ordinary happens we are really going to work very very hard to make sure that all of our schools are represented and so it

049would have to be something out of the ordinary that we would not have every one of our schools represented there is an application process applications are due june 4th we ask for your name address phone number and email the number of students in the district and schools attending statement explaining your interest in participating on the committee expectations of the work and outcomes skills and contributions which will benefit the committee the feeder alignment committee will meet virtually these are the dates june 30th wednesday june 30th then july 7th july 28th august 4th and september 29th all of the meetings are from 6 to 7 p.m additional meetings may be scheduled if needed and so that's just based on the work of the committee at this time i know that i have gone over time but there

050was a lot for our district update tonight and so if there are any questions we are more than happy to answer them thank you very much there was a lot of new information particularly on the esser guidance but also a couple of other new things including lacrosse so i'm just gonna i'm planning to just if we can try and get our heads wrapped around the topics in the order that they were presented which would make the first questions about lacrosse and i'm just gonna ask a basic understanding question is this the whole lacrosse program or just modified or is it some i'm going to ask that miss chapel address that question please and then mrs bechtel if you wanted to add something um good evening evening it would be just the modified girls program um

051the boys are playing right now and the girls are at frankfurt at the high school level okay that's what i thought i just want to make sure i had the right any other questions about lacrosse miss creachy and then dr chatur sure i had i had another basic understanding question which is you were talking about building a stronger relationship to facilitate flex six and i wanted to know what flex 6 was so flex 6 is a new type of game that's that was introduced by new york city citylax so it's primarily down there and it stars aligned and i i met with uh george labelle and randy churchill who's with the albany city lacs program and they were talking to me about it last week um and so basically it's a six on six game

052it's not uh it's more of an introduction to lacrosse and it would allow us to truly build a feeder program this would allow us to and our hope is to have fifth and sixth graders involved in this so that we don't end up in the same predicament we're in this year with um not having kids for modified next year as well as not having them for jv next year as well so the flex six would be an easier type of game to teach our students to get them used to using a lacrosse stick and it's six because it's six on the side or it's sixth graders or both it's six v six so it's six people against another group of six okay that's what i thought i just want to make sure thanks yeah sorry

053doctor tutor i was just going to make a comment to your question and it's the modified team because the varsity team i mean they actually beat cba uh this week that's what i thought i just was wanted to be sure because it didn't stay modified on the slide i wanted to make sure i wasn't missing anything board member elementary hello oh i guess my mic was on the entirety uh thank you miss chapel i'm wondering what the minimum number of athletes needed are for actually having a season so uh ideally we'd want about 18 players on the team you need a definite 10 to play the game but you also would need subs and especially with kovid we need substitutes because kids aren't going to be able to run up and down the field for

054like 40 minutes and then back to this flex six if they're working with citylax does that mean they're learning how to play flex6 and will they be ready to play j i'm talking about this year's modified kids right who would normally be playing modified but they were not playing modified so instead they're going to do what you're describing some sort of partnership with citylax assuming we can work out all these details will they be ready to participate on jv next year from this program or are they going to be a little behind where they should have been because they're playing flex 6 instead of standard lacrosse so potentially it's it's a it's a better way to get kids engaged lacrosse as you guys know we've our lacrosse program is about six years um in the

055making and you know as much as we are trying we are not making the great strides that we hoped and so this is another effort where if you think of like for most of us like phys ed teachers kids don't want to do skills and drills they want to get straight to the game they'll figure out the rest later and so this gives them that opportunity to get straight to the game and that this is our carrot so we get kids playing games running up and down the field other kids see them and it's like oh what are you doing oh we're playing flex six come on no skill needed here's a stick have at it try to get the ball in the goal and then once we have them bought into it then we're

056like all right well what you really want to do is you want to have this hand on top this hand on the bottom and if you're trying to throw to a friend you want to make sure you're stepping in opposition and so we would we would start to teach those skills but this is the carrot kids want to play games they don't want to just do skills and drills and we know this already because city lacks has been a lot been around as long as our lacrosse program has been around so this is another effort to not only get a feeder program but get more students interested in lacrosse and we've we have not taken this step in the past so this is an awesome opportunity for us anybody else have questions on lacrosse about

057which i should know something because my high school was state champion but that was a long time ago and i know nothing about lacrosse i was going to say are you going to be a coach for us oh yeah no i wasn't on the team i'm just in the stands uh okay anyone else with a cross if not we'll say thank you to miss chapel for being here and for all of your hard and enthusiastic work for our students um we'd love to see you working so hard for us and we really appreciate it thank you all all right the second set of slides or slides were um quarter four and end of year activities any questions regarding quarter four i have two quick ones or ellen i see your hand do you want to

058go first i think i may have had uh if it's not too early to ask i think you i think you were going to say that ms mckenna was going to talk a little bit about graduation and moving up ceremonies she's going to do that as part of her report oh okay then i'll save my questions for after that thanks you'll have to wait build the suspense we got to have a good story going here so but i had two questions one it has been unseasonably warm here in albany upstate new york 81 degrees not even june it's a little bit shocking but i know this year unlike other years some of our non-air conditioned gyms which are the few unair conditioned spaces we have i know that we are really blessed with the amount

059of air conditioning we have here because we've invested so heavily in our facilities but we do have some on air-conditioned gyms that we're addressing quickly but right now we've got kids in them for instruction all day um which is not typical right normally you're just in the gym for one short time period but i know that certainly several schools are using them for instructional day have we bought some portable air conditioners or done something to mitigate the oppressive heat in some of those gyms i'm going to ask that deputy superintendent roaring address that question please thank you for that question as you know we just started hitting 80 degree temperatures today and we are continuing to move through the buildings to turn on the ac as the ac is moving through the rest of the

060building that will help to provide some relief in those spaces providing portable air conditioners in there will be a challenge but something we certainly are going to look at and make sure that we can provide the comfort the students need for their instructional day okay i'd appreciate it it feels really to me like a very specific covet expense a very appropriate use for one-time money because normally we do not have a class in those build in those spaces all day every day my other question is also very specifically covid related i'm i'm hearing from time to time about kids ending up mostly at the high school have not heard this at the middle school coming to school on the wrong day and then um what i'm hearing is it's sort of mixed some days they

061come in some days they're being asked to leave and i know that every single person in district leadership as well as on the board really is trying desperately to maximize in-person education and i'm worried about those kids who then go home they clearly miss a period because they're in transport transit and they may not log in ever so they may miss an entire instructional day and i'm i'm hoping that there's some creative solutions to this i mean it seems to me like you could let a kid in the building and they could go to their classroom and if they were the 16th kid in the classroom they could be sent to the library i know you have to therefore plan for staffing in the library but again that seems like a perfect one-time expense to

062have some excess staff hanging around just in case but i'm just wondering what it what are our rules on that if a kid comes on the wrong day and do we have a plan to allow them to enter the building and if not isn't wouldn't it be consistent with our goal to get everybody in the building as much as possible i'm going to ask miss mckenna our assistant superintendent for secondary instruction to respond please absolutely thanks for that question so i do want to confirm that if a student does show up on the wrong day they are not asked to leave but they are sent to their academy principal and at that point the academy principal will look at our dashboard to determine whether or not there is space in based on their schedule in

063the classes that they have been assigned they will then be further directed to as you mentioned president savage to an overflow location in the building where staff would be available for student supervision if parents do have a concern they can certainly reach out to their academy principal and will be addressed immediately okay so if i have a parent who tells me that their child was asked to leave the building they should call the academy principal and find out what happened because that should not be happening that should not be happening okay well that is fantastic news i appreciate you giving us that input we will see or insight we will see if it does amount to a meaningful number of kids coming on the wrong day um i have no idea about that how that

064will happen anyone else with quarter four questions okay the next slide was 20 21 22 instructional planning which is pretty familiar at this point right we know we are still waiting desperately for new guidance we believe and hope that there will be new guidance but right now we are still dealing with the new york state and cdc guidance that does not mention the word vaccine so that's a little bit of an interesting situation that we're in but hopefully new guidance will be coming um then we have the arp esser funding guidance i this was all new and a lot of information anyone have uh general questions or specific questions on this we're going to keep coming back to this multiple times board member wilson oh sorry about that thank you uh first question is are

065ultimately they ask that we allocate one percent and set it aside however and maybe the forums will dictate this we're allowed if necessary to exceed that if possible if we want to invest more in seo or sometimes those are minimums those are and and so you have to also know that they also overlap so it's going to sometimes exceed because they they're going to overlap and when i say overlap i'm talking about the use of the sarissa funds those funds would also overlap with arp funds and so there would be additional funds but these are the minimums that we have to meet great thank you dr tutor more comment this week nisba actually had a nice webinar with a lot of groups talking about uh all these funding mechanisms and some of these numbers are

066what they presented there too and not every district has gotten that one percent from the state so you're fortunate enough to have gotten it but from what i understand it's more like a grant allocation that it's still here to still have to apply and so it's not here's the check go spend it so there are a lot of guidelines as the superintendent mentioned that is correct we were told and deputy superintendent rory you can correct me if i'm wrong but we were told that the distribution of the funds will follow the normal guidelines and so we do have to fulfill the application we have to turn in that application and and then based on the timelines that they would normally follow those funds would be distributed and are they all reimbursable funds where we would

067have to expend and then be reimbursed or will we be able to request the funds prior to spending them because cash flow seems like it could be exceedingly challenging here so as is typical with many of our grants they are on a partial reimbursement basis and the extent of that initially depends on when they are ultimately approved so we are able to obligate those funds we go through the application approval process once the approval comes the um for cerrissa the initia we will receive an initial distribution of 20 percent how they're going to handle arp is still being reviewed and evaluated so we do not necessarily anticipate at this time it will follow that pattern and it may be more like what we experience with smart schools okay this will all be clear eventually when

068we figure it out okay anyone else with questions on this i had one queen of communications question do that are we recording these focus groups and not focus groups forums that we're doing because i did try and attend i tried to get into one in between the two that one day and i couldn't get in but i don't know if i was doing it wrong or just it was because it was in between we are recording them and we will post them oh so they're not posted yet yeah but they're coming mr baker is nodding at me yes coming or yes up i think i can answer for mr baker if if you click on the original link to the forum it will take you to the recording of of the actual forum okay i'll

069try again it did not the day i tried to do it in between the two high school forums and so maybe it just wasn't live yet i'm afraid to try it tonight because i'm afraid it'll boot me out of this meeting and that would be an unfortunate consequence so i'm not going to experiment during the meeting um and anyone else i know a lot more is coming on this and we will have many questions as we refine on this um but i think that's good for now okay any questions on beaver creek i know that's pretty much the same as what we had except for the success of the one-way traffic flow which seems to be improving at the high school too right i think we've resolved some of those high school traffic safety issues

070yeah um doctor i had a question about the uh playground that's in the upper lincoln park site behind toast do our kids use that or [Music] do our kids currently use the current city playground at toast since we don't have our own playground yet do we know it's my understanding that they have made some use of that playground um as the five-year plan includes playgrounds at toast we will have two separate playgrounds a pre-k to grade one and then a grade two through five at either end of the building um we are still on target to do that work over this summer at this time so they will open the new school year with their new playgrounds if we are able to maintain that schedule because i know that playground in the upper lincoln park

071needs some work things are like taped up and stuff so yeah we got a we got a comment it was not a public comment asking us to help advocate with the city because apparently that playground is not in fully usable condition and so i guess if our students are using it um then i would like to know for sure that it's safe and that the kids have the access to the gross motor equipment that they are expecting and if not to find out what what the hold up is there it may be that it's all tied up in this whole beaver creek system and they don't want to put in new stuff but it would be great to know what's going on there okay anything else on beaver creek otherwise feeder alignment i just wanted

072to thank you so much for your stress and focus on getting some representation for every from every single school that is going to be so critical um for us to have a really um thoughtful and um a process that the entire community can feel confident was done uh above board so i really i appreciate how much extra work that is going to be i know it's hard to get people to commit to things um and i i just want to to give you my kudos for that extra effort you're doing anybody else on peter oh board member elinae i also wanted to thank you for that and also appreciate the multiple virtual meetings that we're going to have over the summer um [Music] just trying to draw attention to it there's uh five of them

073between june 30th and september 29th so that's excellent thank you and i think those are committee meetings right which will be observable by the public but they are they'll it's not going to be the same meeting over and over again right it's going to be progress through the effort that is correct okay anybody else on anything that was in the district update if not we'll move on moving on i am going to announce that there is no public comment tonight this is our first meeting with no public comment at all in quite some time i do want to stress to people listening at home that we really appreciate all the comments we get both public comments and then private emails to board members and or direct to board um to the board to the boe

074at email address or to our own personal emails we really always appreciate hearing from you and learning what your experiences is it really informs our understanding our contact information and for both public comment and routine correspondence is at albanyschools.org forward slash boe that now brings us to the part of our meeting we call routine consent during this portion of the meeting we approve routine matters for the district these include items like contracts 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 vote on that item before i ask about set-asides

075i do want to draw your attention to the fact that we did have a late addition to routine consent tonight which is number six land bank properties um this is starting to become a routine in the city school district of albany that we are able to identify land that is for sale by the land bank around our schools some of which have very very little green space and as you all know and recall from the conversation about expanding the aic k5 and moving the dual program to the edmund o'neill building that building in particular has a real shortage of um land around it and there are three small lots none of which are going to be like the the key to all of our problems but there are three small lots that are for sale

076and this resolution will uh allow us to apply to the land bank as a potential uh owner of those um so we will see they if if it goes through this mechanism it would ultimately need to be put before the voters right because it's a capital project uh purchase of acquisition they are 600 each so this is not going to be a significant budget breaker but there would of course be other costs associated with um maintaining them and um securing them so that's a new thing on routine consent that was added just today and i know that was late because we are trying to get in ahead of their tuesday deadline um and that's mostly my fault so i apologize um and so with that introduction do we have any uh may have a motion

077to adopt 13 consent agenda ms smith second of by ms krejci are there any set-asides seeing none all in favor of adopting the routine consent agenda in its entirety and that is unanimous thank you all so much and that brings us to another and very very important and close to my heart action which is the certification of the canvas you will see on your agenda all of the uh information about the canvas where there was only one proposition this year the school budget which was uh past 100 to 544 the highest pass rate ever in the history of the district and the lowest turnout in the history of the district so that's unfortunate we do have two winners among us ms smith with eighteen hundred and seventy votes and dr tour with 1776 votes how

078patriotic of you there were 81 ra write-in candidates albany public library trustees jaray gauss 1816 votes there and the write-in candidates the winner was matthew finn former albany public library president and i also believe an albany high school teacher so that is a very nice you know reason to have get to say his name here tonight so we do need to formally um there's special words i'm supposed to say we're supposed to certify the canvas so i need a motion to certify the canvas ms smith second bye miss krejci all in favor that is unanimous and welcome to another four years of fun ladies and gentlemen [Music] okay that is the end of the action portion of our agenda we do not anticipate taking another action tonight while we could take another action tonight we

079generally do not take an action after the end of the action portion of our agenda and that brings us to the discussion portion the first topic is lottery and magnet school update superintendent adam thank you so very much president savage i know that this is just the highlight of dr wilson turner's evening and so thank you so very much dr wilson turner for all the work that you do with our magnet school process our lottery process thank you so very much and at this time i will turn it over to dr wilson turner good evening um and thank you for having me again this this year to talk about our lottery and magnet process um because i give this presentation every year i did change the presentation up a little bit and didn't rely didn't

080detail as much about the process i really tried to focus on what the changes were and what the data is to help give you a sense of what the work has been this year and how that has been different um and really all of the credit goes to um our administrative assistant our lottery consultant our central registrar um mr baker's office who has been instrumental in moving us into really a virtual and electronic approach to our lottery application and our registration application and so i thank them profusely for the work that they do to make this a smooth process as well as the building principles who help to promote their programs in their information settings and i'm just waiting for the powerpoint to come so our goals have remained consistent we really run a lottery

081at both pre-k and magnet and most recently our dual language program to ensure that we have a way for families to access limited seats um in a way that is um equal and doesn't advantage a particular group and we do this in partnership with joseph white associates who has run our lottery um for instance i believe it's the commencement um to ensure that we have a transparent process um we do invest in supplies and materials typically around our um advertisement and our paper applications um and we do have a staff person who is dedicated to supporting the lottery so our procedures our approach to lottery has remained the same and our our information booklet that we developed a few years ago has remained a critical component that helps parents have make an informed choice about

082which program they want to select um and what the preferences are that assist them in making that selection and so our significant changes this year uh was we moved into the virtual world as we did with many things this year and so our magnet programs our dual language program and our pre-kindergarten program offered information nights for families that were virtual um which allowed for we believe a greater participation for families who may not be able to physically come into the building um and allow for a greater interaction between staff um and families to be able to provide direct information to families about the programs um we had the pleasure of working with mr baker's office to develop an electronic application that we will use going forward but also made available paper applications for families who

083may prefer that we did find that most of our paper applications were just duplicates of our electronic applications parents making sure that we received their application information and then we went through an electronic registration process which we actually began last year as a result of covet and have continued through this year we also do email and postal notification um so families are able to find out sooner um about what seats they were awarded however we were not able this year to do our live in-person lottery we continue to do robocall reminders to help families complete registration within the time frame allotted for their award so the data tonight will focus on our application and assignment data we'll look at the just the um the actual numbers and we'll look at the different demographic um lens

084of that data so this year we had 828 seats um available in the lottery 450 for pre-k and 378 for elementary magnet and we look at the trend data you'll see that's a little higher than typical year um we just got over 50 of um applicants for those seats so at 482 um and we were able to award seats to 414 students um i'll remind you that because they're not awarded a seat um does not mean that there are not seats available just means that we're not seats available at the programs that they selected for their first choice or if they provided second third or fourth choices those slots may not have been available either but those families do remain in the waiting pool um for their first choice program so we do have families

085in the waiting pool for our magnet pre-k and in our um elementary and magnet excuse me elementary magnet um k through uh excuse me first through five sixth grade as you know um is being moved to the middle school so we will no off no longer offer sixth grade at ash and toast but we did accept applications this year because that was prior to that decision being made and did provide appropriate notification to those families letting them know that they would not be moving into one of the magnet programs we still do a waiting list for our non-magnet pre-k programs and for the dual language program and that is because we want to ensure that we can continue to feel fill seats um as quickly as we can for those two programs and that leaves

086us with 414 vacant seats um 185 at pre-k and 229 for our elementary magnet programs so this slide shows you just trend data in terms of how our seats have been awarded and what what variability we're seeing in families applying and accepting seats at our magnet schools um so we typically range in the 700 to 750 to 800 range for available seats um and so that we weren't too far off the mark this year with 828 seats but just slightly higher um and we typically range from and that we usually have in the 500s for applications since we've moved this process to march um and we dipped down a little bit lower this year with just the 482. and then there's a breakdown of the number of seats that were awarded um and then the

087number of seats that still remain vacant uh so that you can see each year how that fluctuates just a little bit um between the 2018-19 school year and this current school year but again not very far off for this year um but just dealing with higher all higher overall number of available seats um and thus higher overall number of vacant seats and this is a slide i do prepare for you each year that shows you um how the application data mirrors the assignment data as it should for a lottery process and so if you see the breakdown by race for each school um to see that the families that apply to um the magnet schools are the families that are awarded seats to the magnet schools um and those demographics match up um almost perfectly

088in most instances or if not very close to um and so we do have uh certain racial demographics that apply to other schools more than others um and so ash as i've said probably every year for the last four years is the the building that most represents the demographic breakdown of the district um montessori has a higher white populate population toast tends to have a higher asian population than all the other buildings and dual language tends to have a higher spanish-speaking population which are trends that have been consistent since i've been doing the presentation so our next steps we always each year work to debrief our lottery process from our application process down to the registration process and how many families actually make it into the lottery and we are actually going to meet shortly

089with communications um around ideas to do a more effective job um from our perspens on communicating with our families about the lottery and making the process streamline the process as much as we can so it's easy for families to access even in this virtual and electronic world um one of those things that we want to look at is to see if the pre-k and magnet dual application can have the same application window and then have a much longer window that stays open for families to apply um now the application is electronic and the things that mr baker's office has built behind the scenes allows for a much easier transfer of data that is less manual and thus requires less work and would allow us to open that window up for a longer period of time

090for families and that concludes my report thank you very much dr wilson turner i appreciate the excellent report i particularly appreciate the multiple years trend data it's always really informative for board members to see things going historically because otherwise we're kind of like ah is that good is it bad is it different we don't know so that was really really helpful any questions board member creature and then dr tour dr wilson turner i just wanted to thank you for the very detailed and involved presentation about how the lottery's working now because obviously it's changed a bit over the past few years as we've attempted to tweak it i just had a few questions about the time frame uh specifically for students who are not who are past pre-k level i understood that after december when

091you know the number of slots that are going to be available you stop enrolling new students between then and then march so that means like let's say if i was on if i'm if i'm in the lottery for let's say i don't know a second grade position at montessori magnet and one becomes available let's say in february and i win the lottery in march right i don't get to and i do i get do i get to go into that seat immediately or do i go into if i win the lottery in march do i go into that seat in september so we don't to your point other than pre-k we do we stop pulling our what we call our monthly lottery um at the end of december um because we don't we can't fill

092seats and lottery them for the next year at the same time um and so we have to have a predetermined amount of seats so we put that application out in january in order for families to make an informed choice about what their what their chances are of getting a seat at that school and so since long before since i was in the position december has been that date because it's lined up with what um when the applications come out when that process has begun we have talked about on the board floor in the past about whether or not we could extend that whether we could push it further out and what that would do is push out the application um window and so when we would start that entire process and thus would bump into

093our registration windows for kindergarten and then for everyone else in the school year so it's kind of a a timeline dependent piece um so we can so we can continue to look at that particularly now that we live in this virtual world and the electronic application moves a little bit faster to see if we can get out you know eek out another month um but i know that that's one of the reasons why so you wouldn't be offered a seat at montessori um for first grade in march because we don't do lotteries from for beyond december for um kindergarten up now pre-k students we are able to the lottery wait but you don't do the la i'm not then i'm confused though but you do the lottery the lottery in march is only for the

094pre-k seats then lotteries the other lotteries for the magnet program in normal times are monthly is that right for the money the the the march lottery or whatever the spring lottery the big lottery is for the following academic year for the current academic year they run monthly lotteries every like every month from then up until december 30th up through december 30th so if some so let's say if a montessori first grade spot became available in december in january or something then that position would be just vacant until september i know i've gotten some feedback from from some people who are part of the dual language program just expressing concern about not filling since after december just because of the nature so it doesn't apply to dual um depending on so we don't we don't do

095rolling lotteries for the dual language program particularly on the spanish side right so we do that wait list for that very specific reason so that we can continue to fill um those seats for as long as we can because rem and you know this ellen from half or excuse me um i remember crazy from being at the dual language program that we don't add students after that um first grade year who are english language learners so it's mostly our spanish speaking students so we have a little more flexibility with duel um so we were very we try to be very thoughtful when we added them to the lottery process to just use the lottery to really address the inequities that we were seeing with people having to sleep outside for the k1 you know for

096the k1 seats but also turn it over to the building with wait list so that they could manage getting students in more quickly beyond that lottery point in time right i understand that that that's why that we maintain the separate wait list system instead of the weight pool system for dual but i thought that there was still a cutoff beyond which students weren't admitted for the year whether it was december january after that new students aren't being admitted into the classes even if there's vacancies now i may be mistaken and my sources may be mistaken on that no if you would be correct after after only pre-k goes till may do we continue to do rolling lotteries for that but we don't do lotteries for duo so they when they give us their numbers in

097january when we're putting that to families as available seats it really impacts the spanish side because like i said we're not we're not adding the english side so yes you would still end up with vacant seats because we couldn't fill seats that we were offering for the next year's lottery i think i'm still misunder you're i there's just a misconduct of what i'm understanding because you're saying well we don't fill the dual language sheets via the lottery but if a seat became available in december or january you still wouldn't fill it till september that's where i mean we do we lottery the entire dual language program that in march that one time we don't continue to lottery it after that after that we turn it over as a wait list and when they apply we

098just add those families to the wait list if there is a wait list so if they come if there's a wait list so if there's a wait list and a spot becomes available in let's say first grade spent let's say first grade dual language classroom on the spanish side if a spot becomes available in december or january it can be filled immediately with someone from the waitlist not not after december okay because they would have already reported those as vacant seats available for the lottery for next year right and i think that's what the feedback i'm getting is they really want to be able to see the spanish language students who come in at that time especially because the school the school calendars in some of these spanish language countries means they come in at

099that time of year they'd really like to see them being able to get language being able to get that instruction in their native language um you know as soon as possible rather than being put in one program for the last half of the year not being able to transition to the beginning of the next year so what i'm hearing is if there's a way to make that possible and make that work that would be really appreciated especially for spanish language students yes it would just impact what we were telling families um once we do put the application out so if we do begin to fill those seats we'd have to go back and let families know you may have applied for a seat that no longer exists right and so then that family's you know

100lottery application then is a struggle for them because they may have chosen that program and now that seat is no longer available they may have made a different choice what i'm hearing is people are saying that they'd prefer that as the lesser of two evils thank you for answering my question in such great detail i appreciate it if you don't mind doctor sure i'd like to jump in because i wanted to follow up on this very point i wonder now if we're finding that our applicants are almost uniformly coming in by um virtual if instead of printing the numbers uh in the hard copy application we could put a link in the application and say the current information about how many seats available is online and then it could be updated as seats get filled

101because i hear this i hear what ellen is saying and board member creator is saying and i feel in general like our programs um we should maximize the use of these programs we want to have full classes um if they're folks who are want them or kids who want to be in any of the magnet programs who want the spots to be filled as late as possible and it feels like with the ability to post that stuff electronically you could gain a couple of weeks um rather than i mean it's it's the tension is between fully informed families how many seats are available and filling the seats to maximize the number of kids in seats and i guess i'm feeling i'd rather fill the seats and have the information be you know a little a

102little more fluid because it has to be updated but then it does have to be updated dr wilson turner before you say anything you can't see um miss smith has her hand up she wants to say something and then we'll we'll give you a turn again go ahead mr smith thank you dr wilson turner and and i hope i'm not missing something now but there there must be an instructional rationale for get that cut off in december and is that correct it's a logistical rationale the best example i can give you is you go and you apply for a dual language first grade seat there are only three and between january when you run and fill out your application and when i do the lottery three families come and say they want that seat now

103that seat is gone you may have chosen to put your name in and i'm gonna say montessori because dual and montessori are typically our most competitive programs to get into you may have put montessori as a first choice with their two first grade seats had you known that the three dual language seats would no longer be there and so we went we've you know kind of gone through this process of really trying to say to families here's how to help you make your best decision we know it's a lottery your chances are your chances but when you have to rank your choices we try to give them the information that is accurate so they know what the likelihood is of them getting into that program so we could stop doing that and parents just take

104the chance of not getting into the program and we fill as long as we want to fill so that we can keep those seats open but it it would present a challenge so we could stay open until i actually ran the lottery and said guess what there's no seat for your child based on the choices that you made or we could make the cut we could make the date that we stopped filling much closer to the lottery like two weeks before the lottery or however far in advance you absolutely need when i say the lottery i mean the deadline right the application like a week before the application deadline instead of a month or two months before the application deadline and and make that note in the in the application materials that this is fluid

105if you really want to see come in now right because every parent who's putting their name in for that next year seat could also accept a mid-year transfer right they could accept they could join the program in the current year in order to guarantee themselves to see right this is another piece of information for them board member manawi and then we'll go back again so i think i understand what dr wilson turner is saying basically that if we fill the seat that is open the person the family that has waited patiently for that seat for the next year is getting bumped basically right so if somebody comes in and there's an open seat and we just give it to them prior to the family or the student that had reserved the seat in the beginning

106of the year it's a little unfair no i don't think you've got it quite right it's not about somebody being bumped it's about let's suppose that there is right now what month are we in here we're may all right let's just pretend we hadn't pulled the lottery and there was one and it is really dual where we have this happen one uh first grade english speaking seat in duel all right and um let's suppose we run the lottery today we tell parents there's one seat available right they put their application in they ask for that seat meanwhile between the day they put the application in and the day the lottery is pulled a kid appears and says i want to register for that seat right now they've now run that they've taken that seat and

107now this person who submitted their application for dual that application they would never have submitted for dual for first grade english if because there's no seat anymore right the child is there occupying there's a there's a kid in that seat there's no available seat anymore so they've been trying to provide as much information as possible to parents so they can make informed decisions about how to rank the various lottery programs but the net result is we have to have a date at which we stop filling seats otherwise we're telling people things that are inaccurate because we're telling people that their seats available next year that no longer are available does that make sense it makes a little bit more sense i didn't do a great job so that's okay it's okay i'm i'm still kind

108of confused about uh how would somebody fill that seat without putting their name in the lottery to begin well they would put their name in the lottery for this year right for there's a difference between lottery for next year and what's happening this year on the ground right so like if you have a second grader you move into the district you're interested in the dual language program google's not a good first grader this duel is just complicated let's go back to montessori because right so you move into the district you can enter the you you come let's say you enter in november right we already ran the lottery last spring right but you're interested in montessori so you go to central registration you say i'd like a seat in montessori they say well there's a

109waiting pool for montessori but there's nobody in it you're in the waiting pool you're instantly out of the waiting pool at the next pull of the lottery and you get that seat at montessori that's what happens right now in september october november and december but right now on december 31st you come in on january 1st and you say i'd like that seat at montessori even if there is a vacancy that vacancy is left open from january first till the end of the year end of the school year right to guarantee that when they run the lottery in april whenever it is they run the lottery that they haven't promised a seat that's got a kid in it because you can't put two kids in the same seat and so that's that tension between providing accurate

110information to parents who are trying to make decisions about how to prioritize and filling every possible seat um and so it is it is truly a conundrum you can't you can't have both um but i do think we can get closer because we could provide the information digitally and explain that you can wait to hand in your application until a week before the deadline which is when and a week's probably not enough because it'll probably make people crazy but some you know we can shorten that period but then i s then i guess the question is after we run the lottery if the seat is still empty do we then fill it like if somebody came in in may after the lottery has been full run do we fill seats then we start our monthly

111lotteries and we start to fill those seats so we'll like we just we we did our lottery poll in march we're a little bit behind we'll probably do a lottery poll in june right now to fill more seats and we'll do them again in july and those are for next year do we go for next year do we fill empty seats this year if we know that there's that there's not do that no we don't so that's another place where we could fill some more we could get some more bodies and seats by um adding in kids if we know there's nobody in the waiting pool for next year for a third grade seat we could fill a second grade seat this year right i'm just trying to creatively i think the board's philosophical position

112and now we're getting way into the weeds the philosophical position is it's important for parents to have the information they need in order to prioritize that is important we don't want to do away with that completely because it's really not fair for people to submit a lottery saying they want a dual seat when there are no seats right and that happens fairly frequently because it's such a small program it will happen less frequently as it expands but right now it does happen we we think that's important but we think it's also important to fill seats as much as possible and we'd like to try and reduce how many seats are left open because of the lottery logistics is that is that where people are and dr chittori you wanted to say something and i did

113not call on you you're good now no i i still have my question but i can finish this discussion but we're good so are we good on this anybody have anything else on this crazy convoluted logistical issue okay doctor so this is also related to the um lottery results that i see it on slide five in the last two years uh there's been like a decline in the numbers i see that the increase there's an increase in the number of magnets this year and i'm guessing that's because now we are since sixth grade is no longer in those buildings we have more room so we have more space and i'm just guessing hopefully that's that and we didn't do a lot of um movement this year because of cobit we couldn't guarantee that you would

114have a physical space at the at a magnet school um and so there wasn't a lot of movement this year okay what concerns me is that over the last two years we've lost 130 seeds in the pre-k program which i mean albany because the full day pre-k we were the you know everybody wanted that and and now that the state's encouraging that other districts are opening that how did somebody sorry go ahead i mean we didn't necessarily lose those seats so we do a conversion piece with our three-year-old program that allows those students to roll into those seats and thus they don't have to be lotteried so if i'm if i'm a three-year-old in children's place at the plaza i can stay for my four-year-old program at children's places applause without having to go through

115the lottery process and therefore that seat doesn't become available thank you got it while we're on slide five can you do you have any hypothesis for why the number of pre-k applications was so low this year um i do can we put slide five back up um it's one of the reasons we're meeting with um communications about trying to make the process as clear to families as possible because we do think there's some some work that we could do um around that on our end because we have different timelines for different things of when things happen if we can streamline some of that um but i also when i look at these numbers think it's reflective of even the 50 of our virtual and in person divide even this year um and so there may

116still be some hesitancy on the part of our families to um select a program this year having not made a decision about what they want to do for school but we do think there is an opportunity for us to look at how we are communicating with our families around the pre-k lottery how we're getting into um the homes and communities to make sure families are submitting um this process because it's their first some of them their first forward into the city school district of albany um so miss hastie is working on that with our communications department that makes perfect sense it looks like it's covered right because it's very consistent from year to year and then suddenly it's almost half so that that totally makes sense i hadn't thought about that okay anyway if there

117were several um uh communications and marketing uh opportunities that we typically do in a typical year this year that we were not able to do this year because of covet we typically do radio and reaching reaching families out that reach families outside of our school district we typically do radio advertising that we did not do this year we took typically do a city-wide mailing for both magnet and pre-k that we didn't do this year and we typically have an annual uh cdta campaign that we did not have this year that we use for specifically for pre-k to swap out with shelters at uh last year was 21 locations around the city so we did not have those those additional opportunities this year to get in front of more of our not out of district families

118to um to spread the word about those opportunities as well okay anyone else on pre-k otherwise i think we're ready to move on to academic assessments good afternoon again good evening again and thank you so very much and at this time um let's see are we ready with the presentation and we are looking at mrs bechtel and miss mckenna dr wilson turner and dr wilson turner ladies we are ready did we lose specta i am so very sorry i was muted um carrying on you may have seen me speaking my apologies on that one so we're going to begin our mid-year academic report presentation and of course always start with our vision mission and goals which guide all our work especially as academic achievement is grounded in every one of the goals and in the

119mission and vision on this slide i wanted to begin the presentation tonight with a review of some of the important activities we have engaged in despite the pandemic we continue to implement our mtss plan for intervention and monitoring as well as implementation of the wonders and envision programs we've carried on with our play-based kindergarten professional development something we are very proud of is the establishment of the google classroom professional spaces to house academic curriculum maps instructional guidance and other important information at the elementary level at the secondary level we've continued with curriculum implementation and supporting teachers and instructional strategies in the virtual environment in cpt other pd opportunities basically school has persevered um but this is an assessment report and assessments have persevered as well at the elementary level we implemented easy cbm for all

120three of the benchmarks that we normally do plus one uh which dr wilson turner will mention i believe as well as our nwea for k-5 at the secondary level we continued with the implementation of benchmarks in the core areas which has provided us with baseline information this presentation is a snapshot of our formative assessments to inform instructional and planning um and planning for the remainder of this school year as well as for 21 22. it's generally given in march but it's been a busy year um so we're closer to the end of the year than we normally are um but this is our mid-year assessment report and i'd like to turn over the data section to dr wilson turner good evening again so i will be discussing the nwa portion of our presentation this evening

121as you should be aware we administered nwa just at the k5 level this year and only into the winter thus far but we do have intentions of administering it in june of this year for spring results um what's important to note this year about nwea is that it is still about percentile data and conditional growth percentile but there have been changes to the norms and i want to talk a little bit about um those changes to the norms so um in the at the middle of last year um just before we went into the pandemic nwa announced that they would be adjusting to what they were calling their 2020 norms um and they actually don't reflect the impact of the pandemic they actually reflect um 2015 through 2018 um assessment data fall winter and fall

122winter and spring for all the students across the nation who take the nwa exam and they use that data to renorm their um their their assessment as a result they have cautioned us from making comparisons between previous years norm previous year's percentiles and this year's percentiles when it comes to the overall achievement of our students however they've been clear that our conditional growth percentage child data remains something that can be compared over years because the growth is measured in the same way and just a quick summary what it basically has resulted in is actually you can receive a lower score than in years past and remain in a higher percentile range um so for example if i was a kindergartner and i got a 146 that would put me at grade level um in the

1232015 norms but now i could get a 140 and that would put me at a grade level in the 2020 norms so there is some adjustment to those academic achievement norms but we typically in this report really focus on our growth data so this slide shows our growth over time and as you know we've been talking about nwa each year we've been really working towards achieving not just the year for a year worth of growth that comes with being at the 50th conditional growth percentile but really looking to exceed that so that we can close gaps for our students in reading we had been trending in that direction for each and every grade and we're really excited to see that data last winter even as we were entering into the pandemic and so we did

124see a drop off this year in our winter administration for k5 um you saw a closer maintenance of that conditional growth in grades four and five because the growth the growth expected is a little bit um smaller to happen and they're still making those gains and we saw not as much growth as we would typically see for our first and second graders um second and third grade though it's important to note and you'll see it on the next couple of sides that there's a test change that has occurred between those grades in the past and so we used to see this really inflated second grade score and then this trip drop in our third grade scores um but i believe this year we move to um the different assessments so you can either do what's

125called the k2 assessment for the second grade or the two five seconds assessment for the second grade and we finally made the move to the two five assessment and so that has impacted outcomes for grades two and grade three um in both reading and in math in math we um again we're moving towards the direction of achieving that 50th conditional growth percentile over the last few years but had yet to achieve it even pre pandemic and as a result our growth in math did not continue to make that same growth towards that 50th conditional growth percentile and you can see that it has impacted every grade and again that transition year from second to third grade um significant in this particular assessment due to the change of the modalities this data supports um some of

126the recommendations that are listed in the report that we'll talk about at the end of the report in terms of how we need to continue to intervene and support for our students at the younger grades as well as in intermediate grades [Music] each year we try to show you um the impact of our k2 instructional model and what we focused on since our very first academic plan in the budget was this model that would really intensify supports for our k2 students and over the years of that being implemented with additional reading support provided to k12 in particular we saw consistent gains in growth in almost every building at grades one and two up until last year basically supporting that our model was working this year you'll see that we did not quite hit the mark

127in first and second grade and i just want to note that you know the in addition to what people will attempt to say covet side etc we also adjusted resources significantly this year um in light of our budget cuts in light of our instructional models that we had to put in place to allow for six speed social distancing and so instead of our reading teachers providing that double dose instruction model they became a supervisory adult for half of the day um while still trying to maintain their pull-out case loads for tier two and tier three students um so we did have two buildings at first grade who were still able to get to that fifty over 50 conditional growth percentile but for the most part you can see what the impact was of all of

128those factors in grades one and two um with the absence of that model and we look forward to returning to our double dose model um in the coming year and i'll turn it back over to you ms bechtel okay this is the easy cbm data we replaced aims web in 2019 2020 with easy cbm uh this is our universal screener that we're required to have for our mtss program we give this a screener three times a year it is a little five minute assessment it's a sort of a red flag assessment uh it does also the system also has though a progress monitoring tool so for identified students um we provide the intervention and can keep those results uh in alignment with the mtss plan so the easy cbm uh data the easy cbm program

129was um or the i'm sorry the easy easy cbm assessment uh was given in the fall and winter of this year the um we only missed last spring we did not miss a step other than that so i think that that's good news so we did get a sense of our proficiency levels we have the k2 data because this is really about the literacy initiative and you can see that the um you know the percent change the total is that negative eight percent for fall to winter of this year then the next slide has the overall data for grades k through five um and again while it's not as stark as a decline uh we still have this negative six percent percent change from fall to winter 2021 i will mention that uh subsequent to

130submitting the report we did run another sort of interim assessment in um easy cbm a benchmark of sort of sorts an additional benchmark of sorts and we did see our numbers come back up um and so that is is interesting to note that um we did begin to trend upwards again so our next steps for elementary are to return to the three times a year nwa map testing window which means the return of fall testing in our next school year we really are going to have a focus on fully implementing what we call our tier one instructional plans and the active monitoring of those plans those are plans that basically take the data on our students and use teachers and reading teachers and coaches use that to build out the instructional strategies that are going

131to best support um where students are in the instructional model not just taking the curriculum from where it is as i mentioned before we are very much looking forward to returning to our double dose instruction and really pushing double dose instruction beyond grades k-2 um with the additional resources that we have um that are we are requesting through the the arp and cyrissa funds um also through those funds we've talked about multiple times the the hiring of teaching assistants for k2 to again continue to bolster that early intervention support and as indicated by data math has been a need for us um over the past last few years we want to really be able to move that meter needle more efficiently with some math interventionists who have some expertise for response intervention and math and

132uh we are also looking to streamline our assessments and move them into the doctrina platform which allows for easy administration of the assessment and easy scoring and immediate use of that data for our teachers to begin to continue to inform their instruction and i think we are moving on to the middle level as miss bechdel mentioned at the beginning of the presentation the district did not administer nwea reading and math testing at the middle level this year given the obstacle to an all virtual test administration digital fatigue and the confidence in the benchmark system which is closely aligned to the new york state standards we made this decision to forego nwea testing at the mid winter point however nwea will be reinstated in the fall of 2021 so instead at the middle level we have

133focused on benchmark assessments in all core areas as well as pass rates which represents a cumulative calculation through quarter three interim period which i will discuss in a few slides our benchmark system began with ela and math during the 2018-19 school year first as a paper pencil assessment we progressed to the google forms and now finally to e-doctrina which all core areas are using which is a powerful platform system for assessments which allows us to create assessments import assessments connect the questions um multiple choice and short or extended responses to the new york state standards and most importantly the built-in dashboard allows building and district leaders as well as teachers to look at the data from a variety of levels including individual students class grade level course the school and the district it also provides

134us with the capability of creating custom reports so if the can reports don't provide us what we need we create our own and by doing so it allows us for differentiation at the student and at the classroom level as well as data points to determine where there might be curriculum or instructional gaps the course content supervisors at the secondary level began interactive began active implementation of the system with the mid-year benchmark given between december and february of this school year this was a transition period and you'll see this in in the data in just a moment so some assessments scheduled early in the rollout were not captured any doctrina um and like i said in the next several several slides i will share the proficiency data by content and grade level which is aligned to

135the new york state test levels uh uh performance levels of two three two through four i do want to note that these assessments were designed to be administered to all students um however the actual participation rate which in some cases was lower than anticipated and likely a result of the covert 19 learning environment it is important to know that the participation rate on the next several slides represents all students um in in the total even those who did not take the test thus reducing the proficiency rates for students who were below proficiency but not represented on these slides so this next slide is at the middle level grades six through eight for english language arts this data shows us the benchmark results by district school and grade level the data indicates that as a district

13638 percent at grade 6 30 percent at grade 7 and 45 at grade 8 grade 8 are approaching proficiency proficiency or mastery as aligned to the new york state levels of two through four it's also important as you look to our school level data that the pandemic has disproportionately impacted students in poverty and students of color in a variety of ways of which there is a greatest percentage at both o'neill and north albany so for example access to technology where benchmarks were administered almost simultaneously with our shift to one-to-one devices impacted students more profoundly in these buildings thus impacting um results that said the disparity in these results is consistent with the other assessments administered over time such as the state assessments in nwea and as and we continue to work toward eradicating disproportionality in

137the ela achievement data as far as next steps for ela in grades six through eight we will continue to focus on course pass rates in student engagement and results correlate loosely with our attendance and engagement data that we have been uh carefully monitoring we'll continue to grow technical capacity to utilize the doctrina grow adaptive expertise to utilize data to inform instruction and then finally continue pd opportunities in an educational equity and culturally responsive practice focused on standards driven practice disrupting text and student voice moving on to math similar to the ela benchmarks this data shows the math benchmark results by district school and grade level the district data indicates that uh 33 at grade 6 29 at grade 7 and 7 at grade 8 are approaching proficiency proficiency or mastery again as aligned to the

138new york state test levels of two through four the eighth grade data um just to know does include algebra however algebra was unscaled resulting in a lower than expected proficiency rate as represented in this data and i also want to point out that our new york state math assessment proficiency rate historically over the last um several years has been near zero percent um so the seven percent um proficiency rate did not come as a surprise and we know that we have work to do as we move forward next steps in for math in grades six through eight is really boosting that participation rate we want to increase participation rates at all levels especially grades seven and eight we want to grow teacher capacity for data analysis teachers were provided professional development during the common planning

139team time unavailable on the available reports to them in inductrina and how to use that information to identify gaps in student learning and inform their instruction and the use of these reports will continue on future benchmark administrations we also want to target standards for remediation based on this data the standard proficiency rates on the benchmarks were compared to performance on uh recent state assessments to identify the needs for remediation of particular standards at the district building and or the teacher level and this practice will continue on future benchmark administrations moving on to social studies again similar format to ela and math the data shows the results for social studies by district school and grade level for grades seven and eight um this data indicates that as a district 21 at grade seven and sixteen percent

140at grade eight are approaching proficiency proficient or have demonstrated mastery as aligned with our standards um this data again for grade seven and eight only captures some students results as teachers were given the option of using e-doctrina or google-based assessments um based on their comfort level you you can see that grade six only administered in in google in the google platform so the data is not um available um and for social studies as well as we move forward with benchmark assessments we will be looking to increase and accepting an increase in participation rate as students become more familiar with the assessment platform and last but not least again same format as previous slides for science um the data shows the science benchmark results by district school and grade level the data indicates that as a

141district 45 at grade 6 42 percent of grade 7 and 23 at grade 8 are approaching proficiency have demonstrated proficiency or mastery as aligned with our state performance levels similar to our other content areas participation rate was low in some areas due to remote and virtual administration plus balancing time for the benchmark exam completion and makeups with moving instruction forward the proficiency rate was heavily impacted again by the poor test completion among students who participated in the science benchmark um and um next steps for science will continue to increase teacher and student proficiency with the doctrina improve smoother administration scoring of our benchmark exams teachers will continue to review student data from current and past benchmarks in us during cpts and during those cpts they'll create a plan for reteaching content in which students were

142unsuccessful and then again under amanda's leadership she will work with middle school teachers uh and the benchmark exams to reflect new middle school science curriculum maps for the 21-22 school year and i would now like to turn it over to uh ms stephtop thank you this is actually a replicative um slide so we can advance to the next slide we already saw this english language arts i'm really very pleased to report out on the power and the possibility of the doctrina that the assessment platform we thought we'd take a quick um opportunity to do that tonight we began implementation last year at the high school and then um did quite a bit of training this uh late fall winter at the middle level which explained some of the gaps because we were in the process

143of training i wanted to sort of illustrate um the reports so as ms mckenna said there are multiple reports that can be accessed on individual students a class a grade level but not just for overall information but information about student mastery on a very specific standard and the point system we used is a line to the new york state education department so on this next slide what you'll see is a chart and this is representative of the new york state standard for seventh grade around determining um a theme and this is a priority standard that goes from k to grade 12 with increasing complexity as students go through the k-12 spectrum it's about the ability to determine the theme or central idea of a text and this particular standard is for grade seven as i

144said and has the appropriate uh complexity for that grade level two out of 14 of the multiple choice questions on the assessment were connected to this standard and two out of five of the writing points were as well and so forth this particular standard we have about 48 of students um achieving proficiency so now it's time to dig deeper at those school at the school level the classes and student level to determine where we fell down and why and then provide provide scaffolds to ensure that students have other opportunities um to demonstrate proficiency for this uh for this standard so likewise on the next slide which illustrates um math and a sixth grade standard for math and um it's really just the same idea with that grade six standard and 52 percent of points awarded

145and that is just a little insight into the depth and power of edoctrina which we believe we are really going to be able to make a a a great k-12 tool for us as we look at our data and now we'll turn it back over to ms mckenna thanks mr stickel um so these next couple of slides will demons will indicate the middle school pass rate and the middle school pass rates that are reflective on these next couple of slides are cumulative from the beginning of the year through quarter three interim period at the end of march and each table uh represents each middle school on the slide and this slide specifically it's edmond j o'neal and hackett and the next slide we will look at the data for north albany and myers it's important

146to note that students are being afforded flexibility in making up work in the cod19 environment and that efforts to support students are underway in every building and so at the interim point and at the end of each quarter our district leaders and our building leaders are looking at this data through the dashboard that mr baker's department has developed and using that with teachers during cpt time and creating individual plans to address students who are not performing or passing the class that they are in our goal here is to ensure student proficiency and mastery of the standards and the curriculum and we seek to do that using every intervention at hand teacher intervention at the classroom level parent contact the mtss data team meetings attendance meetings and at-risk students and at-risk students return to school in

147the learning labs as well we anticipate an increase in these pass rates by year end as we do see students quickly figure out in quarter four that if they don't pass their classes that they will need to attend summer school and that work is happening now and will continue to occur through the end of the school year i do want to note that it was not possible to pull the data from the same period in the 2019-20 school year for comparison but we can only surmise that these rates are lower than um what they have been in the past and then a special note here uh looking um at these two schools hackett's data um with all content areas reflecting pass rates of 65 um and above next slide please again similar to the last

148slide for o'neill and hackett the pass rates are cumulative from the beginning of the year through quarter three interim um at the end of the end of march and again we do anticipate an increase in pass rates um by year end actually tanya can you go back two slides please thank you we're um are we are still in the data slides uh lori for um yeah we're going to slide number um it's middle school next steps there we go we are there okay all right so here are some of our next steps and i talked about um some of these next steps already and some previous slides but we will return to nwea testing three times per year in grades six through eight for the 21-22 school year we will continue taking advantage of the

149comprehensive e-doctrina reports that will help us inform instruction at a student and class level as well as provide us with trends from year to year on a more global level to inform curricular revisions and instructional decision making teachers and administrators alike will be working through the end of this year again to ameliorate learning loss and implement intervention strategies to support students in achieving success through our mtss process in common planning time as miss bechdel and her supervisors engage in planning for the 21 22 school year they will prepare to address unfinished learning in our curriculum and in our instruction as well as accelerating learning for all of our students moving on to albany high school again similar format to our middle school as you are aware the district has not administered regents exams in the

150last three administrations june of 2020 august of 2020 and january of 2021 the state education department determined that new york state will only administer four regents exams this june including earth science living environment algebra and english in order to comply with the ss requirements students are encouraged to participate but it's not required and as a result no data will be tied to the accountability system or graduation for this year so similar to the middle schools the powerful benchmark system e doctrina is being used at the high school level and allows teachers and instructional supervisors to build their own assessments fully aligned to the new york state standards and regents exams as well as import assessments once the assessment period is over similar to middle school teachers and administrators can generate those reports that ms bechdel

151mentioned and i mentioned a little bit earlier by school grade subject course class and or student level again the core content supervisors at the secondary level began active implementation of e-doctrina at the high school level in with the mid-year benchmark given between december and february and that's what this data represents so you can see that uh the approach and proficiency proficiency and mastery levels two through four for grade nine is pretty consistent across um um the three grade levels and is between 33 and 39 percent for algebra you can see that 24 percent of our students who are enrolled in algebra fall into levels two to four while nearly 48 of our students in geometry were at those same levels um again similar to the middle level the assessments have been designed to be administered

152to all students um the actual participation rate which in some cases was much lower than anticipated and likely again the result of the code 19 learning environment represents all students in that course but it is again important to note that the participation rate includes all students regardless of whether they took the assessment or not um and those students that did not participate would be reflected could you just explain that again because you said it twice and i didn't get it either time you said participation rate includes all students whether they took the test or not and i don't know what that means correct so um and i'll use the ninth grade english exam so in this slide you can see the participation rate for grade nine english benchmark was six to sixty six point four

153percent sixty seven percent um that number represents students that did not take the test and when you look at which is not reflected in this slide for non-proficient students whether they they took the test and they received a level one or they didn't take the test they would still be incorporated into that level one or non-proficient bucket i think i got it so these the first two numbers are they cumulative so the 32.93 incorporates the 21.95 that is correct so proficiency and mastery would be the equivalent of a level three or four on the state assessment this is so the the first one the 21.95 is like a four 32.9 three and four and four the first one is the four and the second one is like a three and four no the first proficiency

154in mastery is level three and four and the other one thirty is it two three or four two three four got it approaching proficiency is a level two proficiency is a level three and mastery is a level four and so if i took and so the 66 just tells me what percentage of our students actually took the exam that took the exam that's correct so 34 of the students did not take the exam at all so we don't know what they rated or they scored a level one or non-proficient so participation rate includes the level ones okay that's very confusing but i do understand thank you sorry to interrupt your flow i was just having a hard time understanding the data i couldn't understand that okay on the next slide this this slide represents social

155studies and science mid-year benchmarks and again similar to english and math the participation rate represents the total number of students enrolled in the course and the actual participation so 37 percent 41 and 27 percent of our students fell in the approaching proficiency proficiency and mastery for world history 1 world history 2 and u.s history respectively in science 14 percent for a living environment 23 for earth science and 64 um chemistry and 74 uh for physics fell in that um uh range of level two through four and similar challenges um you know for all four benchmarks as we mentioned um earlier for our middle level around participation rate extremely low in some areas due to the remote virtual administration um the proficiency rate was heavily impacted by uh poor test completion among students who participated um

156and then um we also had a noticing that the proficiency rate may be skewed by students who use outside resources to research answers to questions in alignment with the new york state regents exams again we don't know that but um you know there was some conversation around around that as well um some next steps for our benchmarks at the high school level is to increase teacher and student proficiency with doctrina improve smooth administration scoring of the benchmark exams and then continue to have teachers review student benchmark data and use it to inform instruction i believe uh this is the last and final no i have two more slides again similar to middle schools the high school pass rates were cumulative from the beginning of the year through the quarter three interim periods at the end

157of march um here i just want to note that students are afforded more flexibility again like middle and making up work in the covert 19 environment and those efforts are certainly underway through the leadership of miss comerford and her leadership team at the high school through the mtss process at the high school level uh students also have the apex credit recovery system available to them to make up credit credit and our goal is to ensure student proficiency and mastery of the standards and the curriculum and we seek to use that to do that using every intervention at hand including teacher interventions at the classroom level parent contact middle school i'm sorry mtss cpt meetings attendance um at-risk students uh returning to five days per week one per one possible and space allows and then again

158we do anticipate as we always do see an increase in pass rates by year's end and again similar to the middle level it was not possible to do that comparison and i know you'd like to see that um and these pass rates for 1920 we could only look at it holistically as the 2019 um 20 school year um so this concludes our presentation and we will now open it up to questions and comments oh nope i take that back um high school next steps um we will [Music] use baseline benchmark data to measure academic improvements we will selectively use our nwe map tests for our students in need of intervention we will continue with e-doctrina implementation and data analysis and then continue with the implementation of mtss tiers one through three to provide those uh

159research-based intervention strategies modify the curriculum to attend to unfinished learning continue to train to identify and teach unfinished learning um through the data and uh training for our math and ela interventionist um as we did increase the number of math and ela interventionist at the middle and high school level to address the unfinished learning and we will use common planning time to do much of that work now i will open it up for questions and comments thank you very much this report is always a bit overwhelming a lot of information and in particular in the nature of the kovid year it's really very difficult to interpret like you know how alarmed to be about some of these numbers that are alarming because we knew we know that there is going to be a decline and

160we know that we have plans in place to rebuild so um i'm going to turn it over to dr who single signaled he wanted the first question sure wait can i ask if your question's on elementary i so with regards to the you know i know we did the easy cbm and we didn't uh we went away from the aims test and all of that stuff but in elementary we managed to give kids the opportunity to have five days of school if they so chose to do that do we have data from these tests that can that we can look at from virtual fully virtual kids to kids who are in person and see what the difference is we do um and i do believe we had uh dr robin our consultant take a look

161at um controlling for virtual and in person and controlling for um chronic absenteeism and the data still remains fairly consistent so we didn't see when we take it as a total now if we go building by building grade by grade we may see some variations of course but it wasn't statistically significant um and i can just make a note to pull the report out he did one for me early on with ames web or easy cbm because that's the only data point that we had um and i can go back and and see because i do believe we actually do that for nwa as well and put that in sbu so you can see um it wasn't statistically significant child by childhood may have been significant you know building principles began to look at students

162to say so and so has never missed this much school traditionally he would have performed this way and he performed that way but as a whole it wasn't something we could point to and say that's the reason why it looks different i mean i would say we did have a shorter school day and we had a completely different instructional structure and we had children not in front of core teachers all day long um and it taught it speaks the fact that teaching and the resources that we put in place all of these years matter um and trying to grow our students in their performance and having that building by building data would be helpful because i know that some buildings there were more kids in person whereas in others more who chose the virtual option

163so it would be good to have you know anecdotally we say that virtual is not as good as in person right these numbers will actually i'm guessing will prove it but it'd be nice to see those numbers and see does it make sense and how can we apply that if you're to do a virtual academy or something what would we need to think about as we planned that i think another thing to consider also is that the students were virtual took their assessment virtually right and that's a very different experience as a child um whether you're in kindergarten and you have a parent or sister you're in third or fifth grade um so i think there are a lot of factors that that come into play but i strongly believe this the strongest factor is

164a short a shorter school day and you know what we were able to do instructionally was basically physically get kids into elementary school but it wasn't like they were with you know miss bechdel first grade teacher all day long like we had a very different structure for um for that but i will i will pull that data and put in sbu i know we have the easy cbm and i'll go back and look and see if we did the um the nwa in that same way um to control for that and i'm fairly certain we did and it wasn't found to be significant whether it was virtual or in person or whether it was chronic absenteeism or not which i think is the more concerning part that you know you could have been absent and

165still yielded similar results i also thought it was an interesting um just thought experiment about class size because i know people sort of naively think class size is everything right and this if you just have smaller class sizes it resolves things but all of our in-person children were in small classes especially k2 right maybe third fourth and fifth graders were in a large gym or a cafeteria or something but the k2 kids i think most buildings did split classroom for them so they were in class sizes of nine um and so if there wasn't a difference in virtual it really speaks to the value of those interventionists that it's you know you can be in a class size of 20 or and as long as the interventionists are present and able to provide that additional

166support that's more impactful as we think about how should we be using our resources naively i think many people think use your resources to drive down class size but i think this data suggests although obviously there's many compounding factors this year but it does suggest that considering interventionists versus class size it's not an easy it's not easy to make that decision an interventionist may actually went out um other questions about elementary trying to stay on elementary just briefly ms wilson thank you so i was curious how the strategies that promoted the success as noted concerning literary pre-covet are being applied now or recalibrated as we rebuild and accelerate so are you referring to the our k2 literacy initiative yes um so like i like i mentioned um our reading teachers became the other half of

167our supervision model right and so those students did get some extra time with the reading teacher um but not in the model that we've traditionally done and so in our rebuild and accelerate we have restacked our reading teacher levels um so that we can do not only k2 or double dose but really really look at trying to close those gaps in our higher grades and offering a more intensive tier one model um so we really are trying to provide resources for every grade level because our data bears out that intervention and acceleration is going to be needed at each area um similar to middle and high school um our instructional supervisors and instructional coaches are working on our curriculum maps at the um end of the school year to really look at how we are

168going to tackle unfinished learning without taking steps backwards and um you know remediating students but really trying to find those spaces and opportunities where we can pull students up to the grade level expectations and take the time we need to close those gaps anybody else's elementary question i was just going to ask about subgroup data i feel like we often see data these academic data by subgroup um you know by race and by economic disadvantage and we didn't see that in any of the data tonight and i'm just wondering what if if i missed it in the report and i apologize if i did or what were what we're looking at i believe we do that at the year-end report we give you the the full the full monty for the uh the year-end report

169with all that information and all the data tables this we're really just trying to say hey it's the mid-year point here's where we are but i do know you know we're in a very different environment um we should be able to get it if you want to look at it otherwise we're looking forward to really getting that end-of-year benchmark done and seeing that improvement which we'll have um in late june and early july i look forward to your analysis of that data because i do not wish to do the analysis of the data so i know i do not want just the raw the data tables although i'm sure it would be interesting i do think it's going to be compounding the complexity of the data because we know there were racial implications to who

170chose in person and who chose virtual so you know to really look at a unique set of data you'd need to you know split by race by economic dis economic advantages managed and then by whether or not they were 100 virtual student at the elementary level so it's really going to be the crosstabs are going to be to find to find data that's truly comparative is going to be really really difficult if i may um president savage you raise a really good point we also have to account for particular at the elementary level the amount of movement we saw for students from in-person to virtual so trying to keep track of when a student was actually physically present for you know instruction in person versus whether they're in virtual instruction and how many times those

171changes occurred for different students also has impacted our ability to track that data i mean it made me think of it because we do some benchmark data at the math level that is really at the very granular level and they realize how many times they had to adjust the class list um to kind of track data over time for all the movement that occurred with students this year i think if a kid is a virtual kid or an in-person kid but that's not really how it works just like when we look at data over the course of a you know five years for a single elementary school we think of that as kids progressing through the school but in reality that's not what's happening it's just different kids um in many many cases there probably

172also needs to be some sort of a fudge factor for chromebook availability and internet connection and all of those things yeah who who didn't have access to the the technology in that those first couple months so i yeah i mean i think it's just i think we have to trust the the the instincts of the educators because the data is going to be not really that useful because it's so complicated um but one of the things you said about next steps i just wanted to ask a quick question i think this probably pertains to all three but it came up first in elementary about um the replacement of tas hiring tas and interventionists and this is sort of an operational question i'm just wondering we read all the time about how difficult it is to

173hire people are we going to be able to hire the people that we need are we getting applications for these positions or are we expecting to have some vacancies that we would not prefer to have superintendent adams thank you for that question president savage this is where overall when we look at our teacher shortage because you know a few months ago when we were just looking at rehiring and we had a pool of teachers to choose from and they were coming back and accepting positions we're filling those positions but as we move forward we have now you know filled our positions with those who are rehiring and so we get to that point where down the line and even in some of our positions now there's just no one in the pool to hire and

174so those vacancies become important because uh we would be looking at let's say that there's not a certified teacher that picks up that position then we'd have to start the year with the substitute and we would still continue to interview and hire but then you know we have the cutoffs the 40 days 45 days and then you have the 90 days how does that play a part now into the child's learning versus having a certified teacher in front of them it just seemed like the way the federal money is going to impact the entire economic economy of education is going to be really challenging right because there was already it was already difficult to hire for certain things and now we have a whole bunch of money chasing the same number of people right it's

175like it's not like that money came with a whole bunch of teachers um it's just money um so that's going to be a real i think it's going to be very very difficult for everyone um so we'll see thank you mr petrin for all of your work trying to hire people i think also that's where when we look at you know if you go back to that list that we talked about what are those allowable funds and when you talk about extended day programs you're looking at um additional hours the the problem with that though is or the challenge with that is you still only have a finite number of human beings and with the way in which you have to work and and the time on task that our teachers are engaged in it

176it's having an additional support for the teacher in the classroom meaning as another teacher so that we can focus on the needs of our students and then those class sizes don't escalate because we don't have enough teachers in those positions i understand oh miss smith go ahead um thank you i i mean it's a that's really uh this question uh and i understand that we're really hit hard in new york uh there may be uh some a lot of folks are down south and and are finding teaching positions and so forth but we're having greater difficulty here i wonder are there discussions at the state level with the superintendents and the regents or commissioner rosa about strategies i mean is this an area where they might entertain some flexibility around uh certified versus non-certified and

177maybe giving the non-certified teachers some you know in you know they may have experience but you know they would uh you know commit to a period of time in which to get certification but could still manage the teaching i'm sort of just pulling at straws here but this sounds like a a long term kind of problem it is it is this problem right now where we have drilled down to is not just a coveted problem it is one of the challenges that school districts face in a non-covet environment one of the things that with the covet environment that superintendents in the capital region have done is we have been advocating for what are some of those waivers that may be able to take place some of those extensions which allow people you know to sub

178into a classroom provided they have satisfactory or shall i say effective or highly effective performance and also you have to understand there's an even sometimes i won't use superlatives but sometimes there is an additional cost with the substitute being in the classroom they may be very capable of doing the work but they may not have the certification or they don't have the certification so now how do we engage our coaches and our instructional supervisors in working with those individuals so now while that cost is not you don't see that cost directly there are some ancillary costs that impact not having a certified teacher in the classroom and so then that begs the question if these are going if this is going to be permitted and of course we're looking at effective and highly effective evaluations

179and performance then what are the additional costs that may be needed for support it's going to be a very challenging time over the next couple of years for sure anyone else on elementary or are we ready to move on to this middle school i'm sorry oh you do have more elements i'm also just thinking the other and you know where there may be uh you know qual you know college professors and teachers that have you know they have that experience teaching they have that knowledge just like this certification now i know we probably have some of the subs that fit that situation but i mean we might be able to do something i'm going to just jump in and say that i think the superintendent mentioned that she and i are both scheduled to meet

180with the commissioner at some point over the next week and that that very issue the issue of certification flexibility of some kind um is clearly on the list it's on that list um that both the boces superintendents pulled together originally and i will i don't think i've had a chance to send that around the superintendent bless her organizational skills was able to find that and i will send it around um for folks to highlight things that they think will be important but those are the kinds of things that are no i appreciate it i really didn't mean to belabor the point just trying to like really this is a time that calls upon us to think about doing something vastly different and and needing the support at various levels in which to do that absolutely

181um and this you know what we're trying to what we're trying to put together over the next couple days before we meet is what are the things which are in the hands of the new york state regents department uh department of education as opposed to things that are in the state department of health or the cdc um so those are the absolutely on point and i'm going to send around where i'm at and and i invite further feedback from you guys um so that i bring the whole um position of the board when i have that conversation okay middle school who's got anything out of middle school dr chitor it's i just want clarification on slides 15 and 16. 15 where you talk about the math you said something about algebra and not being counted

182i just want to understand what you meant to say for the eighth grade where the numbers drop significantly yeah sure so the algebra um the algebra benchmark assessments are included in those eighth grade scores however the reason why they are so they are low um is because um the typically they um they scale the algebra um results and in this benchmark data the algebra was unscaled resulting in a lower than expected proficiency rate for those for the students who took the algebra exam so it's a combination of grade eight math um benchmarks and the algebra benchmark okay and it's the next slide which when it talks about social studies are we sure that for the hackett and myers are not transposed in one of the columns because i mean you look at the things when

183you look at the participation for social studies it's like the trend seems to be you know buyer seems to have a lower trend in the seventh grade but then in the eighth grade all of a sudden it's much higher than everybody else so unless something's happening in eighth grade social studies it would make sense if those rows were transposed right yeah i'm sorry we can take a look at that i don't have um i'd have to pull look at the actual data set that we use to create um that slide but we can certainly take a look at that and then put something in the sbu because when you look at the trend it just it just jumps over so there's there's a higher participation rate though to that particular um level so we we

184could certainly ask the questions it may it may be something very specific to eighth grade social studies at myers that's what i want to get it like yeah if there is then we should be doing that in the other schools too there you have it anyone else have a comment or a question on the secondary miss crazy you know i just had a quick question actually that was regarding the curriculum because i saw looking at the percentage of students passing each grade that that it looked like uh o'neill and north albany have a course called business but they don't have uh family and career or technology i thought that the i thought that a couple of years ago we had gotten all schools on the same curriculum when we came out with the middle school

185curriculum handbook so i was just curious about that so karen you want me to start and then i can you could add or okay so um so um family and consumer science and technology teachers are very difficult to find and so what we have um started to do was um look at a combining the curriculum for technology and family and consumer science into a business course that meets the requirement for as a unit of study for our middle school students yeah a few years ago sed gave us um permission to use the business course in in lieu of the facts um required credit and we actually um see some opportunity as we uh i'll speak later about the computer science uh standards that have come out we're ready you know we're in the implementation cycle

186although we've been pushed back a year because of this year um that that application and what application that business course model might have at middle level for that uh for the implementation of the computer science standards and and to your point miss uh creatine that what you're saying is there's doing we're doing something different in some schools than others um and so we want to look at that because we have to attend to we like that consistency but we also do have to attend to those computer science standards and so we might be rethinking some things as we move as we move forward did you have a follow-up question or yeah go ahead she has a question i wanted to ask but i also wanted to add the thing about health which is missing in

187um um needle health is only offered at grade six and this year um o'neill does not have grade six i don't think and remember country did you have more more on that topic did you miss something i guess i i understand the difficulty in hiring teachers i just want to make sure that the opportunities we offer at our middle schools are equitable because looking at the numbers for these middle schools looking at the performance numbers it's clear that there are some real issues and i want to make sure that everyone's at least getting equal opportunity and equal access to quality students and equal access to the full broadest curriculum thank you so i i wanted to note um that i i heard you say lord that you could not pull the the comparative data from

188last year or the year before which makes it really hard to interpret this data right i mean this is obviously these numbers are quite alarming um especially when you look at some of the um the lack of passing in north albany for example it's it's really alarming but i don't know at what level my alarm should be is this just the way it is in the middle of the third quarter because that this is that the beginning of the time when people go oh yeah i would really like to go to high school so i maybe i'll turn in all those missing assignments or is this something very specific to the coveteer i really don't i can't really interpret this data without that year by year so i wonder um going forward obviously we can't

189go back and retrieve the data but it's nice to have this snapshot right now that we could use a year from now to to have a comparison and i wondered is there any hope of getting the last year data or it's just something that's not tracked so there's just no way to recover it yeah i did work with um trish wolfe and kent baker's department to see if it was possible and we were not able to get that comparison through the uh interim quarter three from last year but we can certainly moving forward um you know get those snapshots and you know in in time to make that comparison but we can certainly compare um you know the end of the 2019-20 school year to the end of the 2021 school year to show that

190comparison but i think it's a combination of both i think you know kids all of a sudden wake up at the end of quarter three and realize that oh my gosh i better start you know making up my work and and submitting it for a grade so i can pass and not have to go to summer school um but i also do think that it was you know the cover 19 in you know virtual environment has had an impact on our middle school kids and our high school kids so i think i may have asked this question when we got the summer school program do we have enough seats in our middle school summer school like are we ready for if these numbers don't jump up do we do we have the capacity to serve

191the children to get them yeah so right now we're working on working with our middle school principals um and assistant principals school counselors and the mtss teams um we have approximately i um 600 students at the middle level alone identified as at risk of attending middle um middle school summer school um we only have 392 seats and right now the challenge is um getting the staff to teach in summer school there's you know teacher fatigue out there right now and you know we're working diligently with the hr department um and uh instructional supervisors and our our building leaders to tap folks on on the shoulder to apply um but you know i'm hopeful that um we will get those numbers down from the approximately 600 that we had at the end of quarter three um

192to that you know that more manageable number of 392 um so we can fill those seats understand so i guess we'll we'll be hoping for an update on that as we get into deeper into the fourth quarter so that we have a better sense of that um i don't know what our given our union contract what our opportunities are to incentivize people to teach summer school but somehow we need to feel we need to focus if the kids need to go to summer school they need to go to summer school and we need to get that staffed and so if we're not staffing then like we got to figure something out because that's not okay um board member el mignon we had a question and then board remember creator you're next so i'm sorry to

193go backwards but i just want to understand the participation rate a little bit more it is it includes students that didn't take the exams as well that's correct okay i think i may have spoken the participation rate represents the students who took the test and the difference is those that didn't so if it was a 66 participation rate that meant that 37 30 66 participation rate that means that uh 34 i think i did my math right did not take it or participate in the exam for uh sure but uh north albany sixth grade mathematics um six percent mastery or proficiency to mastery uh 12 uh proficiency approaching proficiency so that is 17 18 percent um so 18 of those 64 um of students that took it were approaching proficiency or above yeah so for

194sixth grade it's actually um the 5.93 percent at north albany proficiency to mastery is actually included in the 11 11.86 so 11.86 um were either um approaching proficiency they were proficient or they were they demonstrated mastery um that 64.41 percent at north albany represents the total population of students who actually took the test what you don't see reflected um in this chart are those students who fell below um that were not proficient um which would be like our level one so i was thinking that's what this this chart meant so if you're following the north albany logic if we had all rounded up to 12 percent that means that um 88 um of the students fell at the level one below proficiency i can just one more clarifying question before you go into your other

195question 88 of the students who took the test right so we've got 11 i'm on north albany 6th grade ela right so we had 11. i was on math sorry oh i'm sorry i may have jumped in in the middle of the wrong one i just tried you say 11 so that was the 11 i saw north albany mathematics you're on math okay i'll go i gotta i can find math science social studies so 88 of the 64 they're both at 11 so north albany's basically 12 12 right 11.86 sixth grade um north albany 12 percent were s were a two or above correct of the people who took the test all the people who took the test there's an additional 36 that we know nothing about because they did not take the test that

196is correct okay now i at least and i fully understand the data board memorabilia i appreciate you letting me cut you off there no that's okay i i like um i like this data i don't think um i do think that there should be another column of uh is it number three with that number yeah number one the number one uh proficiency you know this the edoctrina is is a new system to us and um we are learning it um as well but this feedback is really good because as we think in the future about how we could present the data uh better in a more manageable way um the the input that you're giving us is helpful uh but i i think it as i said it's new and we're really trying to make

197sure that we're um uh you know we want to make sure that we whatever baseline that we establish for looking at the secondary benchmarks we can do that again in subsequent years and we're going to have to think about how that's going to be because one of the things that happened from the benchmarks last year is that they they changed and if you have a different test you have to make sure that you're you know which is why this um tracking by the standard might end up being a better way to relay what this data is telling us so we are still feeling our way with this this really powerful assessment system and your feedback tonight is incredibly helpful um but if you'll have some patience with us we're going to get better at it

198absolutely we look forward to future presentations and again like the the year-to-year comparison is so helpful for board members because really we can't we can't remember a year from now what we saw this year so so we will be able to provide you with that year-to-year benchmark data uh moving forward this is baseline year we look forward to it always getting better um okay i know that we are a little bit beyond time anyone have any pressing questions either on middle school or on albany high that they would like to bring to the table i think much of what we said in middle school is similar nobody hey go ahead miss creatine i i just had a question about interventions because it sounds like there are a lot of teaching interventions to teach basically to

199have teachers better trained on using edoctrina and better trained on you know putting across the curriculum but it seems like one of the big glaring things that stood out to me was the participation rates of students and just sitting down to take the test so what are we doing uh what what are we planning for engagement at the middle and high school levels to bring kids actually into coming into the courses and sitting for the uh assessments well certainly moving you know um having kids in person will certainly help to increase that participation rate um as they're more engaged in the learning environment when they're on campus um and as i mentioned you know in the presentation that the covet 19 in virtual environment um was one of the um challenges of getting that participation

200rate up our you know teachers and our student support staff and our homeschool coordinators um continue to um engage our at-risk learners who are not regularly participating um you know in in whether it's a virtual environment or an in-person environment um and so we are on our professional development day on tuesday we had our mtss teams and our h our home school coordinators um saturating the streets and making home visits um to get kids re-engaged in in school that haven't been engaged regularly so we are using every interventionist and every support staff that we can possibly engage in re-engaging our kiddos and that included our school counselors as well on that work thank you anyone else with a question in high school i know that many of the questions on middle school were quite similar

201it'll be a similar kind of question so i don't know that we need to repeat but is there anything specific to high school um do do we have a sense i know we can't quote graduation rate until february of next year but do we have this rough idea of where we're targeting about how many graduates we're planning for for this year do we have are we closing in on that number or not yet did you explain the process we're getting close but i i hesitate and doctor or um dr wilson turner uh mr baker would probably slap my hand if i started talking graduation rate but he and i did look at that data today um and the data's promising okay well we'll see where we're at board member crite gets the last word on

202this and then we will i just had a quick question i guess it's primarily about the middle school because certainly at the high school level i know if you don't pre if you don't pass your key courses you don't go on to the next grade but i wondered what our policy was about retention at the middle school level given given the grades that we see right now i know that i know the policies and retention have changed over the years and we haven't had a lot of need to talk about it but i wondered what we're thinking yeah so the data that we have been tracking all year long through our mtss teams have identified students who are one at risk for summer school and two that are at risk for retention however we know

203that the research says that retention is not an effective intervention strategy um and so we look at a lot of different indicators um when we are considering retention um including you know has the students you know age have they been retained in the past um you know um increment attendance uh social emotional um etc but you know our practice at um the middle level has been um to socially promote our students um and use the summer school as that intervention as well okay thank you adam president if i could add to that we also look at um not just the summer school interventions but what are the wrap around services through our ntss program things like that rti pulling out the supports because as ms mckenna said we know that retention may have more devastating

204effects than promoting a child with the supports that they need in order to be successful i think one of the things that we're going to see come out of covid19 is that the supports that's that's what the funding is about helping close that gap and accelerate that learning through some of the strategies that we're able to put in place to close that gap and then move our students forward [Music] and for for students who can and are committed to it the idea of an extended day um is very appealing as is the extended school year unfortunately you know as you've said staffing for summer school is a challenge so um gotta get the money is the money doesn't teach um so we'll we'll see where we're at on that okay are we ready to move

205on and we will wait for the end of the year look forward to the end of the year report when it comes and that will bring us on to the curriculum and instruction division which is appropriate under the circumstances uh thank you so much i'm actually going to drive because i have a few clickable items tonight so if you'll just give me a moment and if someone could tell me that you can see my screen we can see your screen oh thank you and i'm ready to begin so i'm very happy to be here to talk about the work of curriculum instruction and professional development and really appreciate the opportunity to do that as in all our presentations we definitely start with the vision mission and goals which guide all of the work done i

206just want to make sure you know that we are seeing your whole screen not just the presentation we're also seeing your notes to see it that way we're always happy to read your notes but i wondered if you meant for that to be done differently let me see if i can figure out how to do this i think you're in speaker view and not presentation view right let me try again let me try this so do you are you seeing just the presentation view now oh it's perfect we see just the presentation thank you i figured that out alrighty so um as i started out saying their vision mission and goals which guides all the work in in my division um especially that of increasing student achievement and enhancing uh the delivery of quality instruction

207then this next and i'm sorry for the smallness of this but this is an organizational chart of my division with um basically the eight instructional supervisors uh laid out in that line along as well as the um appropriate instructional coaches that are um your slide hasn't gone to the next one we still see the vision mission goals okay here we go thank you so much for your guidance as i'm learning how to drive here tonight so this is the org chart with the um eight instructional supervisors laid out in this blue line and then the instructional coaches that report to the appropriate supervisors our structures are our um department structures we have uh check-in meetings uh we really work to honor the district goal of building leadership capacity and in order to do this we

208have our check-in meetings which takes place each month or more frequently as needed we have uh core agenda items that are on every agenda and then time to discuss any um issues that the leaders are having or anything that i need to address with my staff we also have a secondary core instructional supervisor meeting which is conducted monthly and lori attends that with me as she can as well as the enl and sped directors as they can just to sort of get that vertical alignment um [Music] so we attend a lot of meetings and um that are listed here uh we have a variety of monthly uh principal meetings and all of these meetings are really designed to support building leadership and implementation of the academic program now let's get to the work of curriculum

209and in dell uh development curriculum development implementation and professional development what we do here is data analysis pd professional development and use common planning time to get that work done my office also directly supervises the mentoring program and works with our partners at the college level for student teacher placement we also engage in walk-throughs to monitor and support instruction and the um i wanted to talk a little bit about the walk through feedback cycle um we are really working to try to build the instructional leadership capacity we work in partnership with our leaders to do this work and then really the core of that is giving feedback to um teachers about what we're seeing and monitor the instructional program so i have some data to show you this is from last year um the 2019-2020

210school year when we had uh over 1400 walkthroughs by all administrators in the district not just the instructional supervisors and this was this data was collected just before the onset of the pandemic and um i wanted to see that and then the next slide over is what we have done this year which um it took us a little bit of time to get into the swing of the walk-throughs um as we were getting the program up and running in the fall but our focus was was on various pertinent areas which i'm going to discuss with my next slide as i said there are 600 there were 616 walkthroughs conducted we do have a focus on student engagement student voice as well as alignment to the learning standards but what was different this year was the

211modality many of the walkthroughs focused on the google classroom and google classroom is a platform to hold materials information to foster communication uh it's where students access all their um content material for the classes and i i want to point out to the board that there was one silver lining in the pandemic there were more than one but this was one too um where we were able to establish consistent protocols for google classroom setup and and the functions and we gathered that information from our experience last spring that really helped us um this year to make it consistent and um kind of doing that google classroom walk through is going to help us leverage using this system in in years going forward because we will continue to use it it's a really wonderful and strong

212tool um so moving on specifically to curriculum each uh each year i do that a curriculum report it's a year end mainly because our cycle of curriculum writing ends at the end of summer and so i like to do that in september uh so that i can wrap up the work that the instructional supervisors and the teachers um accomplished uh the department leads teams of teachers in the curriculum writing and uh the summary of that is in the report that i do um and then i just had a few highlights here uh from the curriculum work that was done last year and they're also in the report but i did also and i've been here before to show you this but wanted to click in and this is this is why i'm hoping this is

213all going to work that way i have to abandon some of my ideas here because is it possible for you to see the um the website we do see it yes wonderful i'm getting better all the time so this is the web page which i did take a little opportunity to show the board at another time but i just wanted to point it out again because it really is a great accomplishment and a great partnership with the communications department as we work to get our curriculum on here's grade seven and if as our families and parents want to know information we're grade seven math here's what here's the the big focus for the year and where we're going and then there's just other information to um access on this website so let me x out

214of this and come back so far so good um in the year-end curriculum report another um item i give is the rubicon atlas looks and um i know that it was very difficult to read this chart i will point out that um the columns do are in alphabetical order as they're listed so it's a little helps a little bit to identify which uh columns are which um but i will say that the four largest ones are the four core areas and then this fifth one um this is arts and music and i believe this uh this last one is uh technology and then this pink one in the middle um i believe is world language so we i i look at that because i want to know how much the rubicon atlas system is being

215used and how often folks are looking it ends up being about 90 views per teacher per year which i i think is an excellent statistic we also have our curriculum dashboard which we started really last year and trish wolfe in mr baker's office was instrumental in helping us build this so we can have a quick look at the status of our curriculum i do like to remind the board that curriculum by its very nature is dynamic and not static um it's so you know so the developing column is acceptable as not only as we work to strengthen our curriculum but to respond to new information to respond to new standards an example of that is uh mr elliott embedding some of the um 1619 project work into both the eighth grade and the high school

216curriculum another responsibility in my office is professional development and we've spent an awful lot of time doing professional development but i thought i would try to show you something fun here today and for the march 15 pd day we really were trying to puzzle the whole thing out to be in the virtual environment as we're all growing our skills and thanks to uh jake in the communications office we've built this lovely schedule which i want to just show you so um here's a chart of the offerings that we provided teachers on march 15th and we color-coded them but the really neat thing is that these are just sort of the titles of what we offered but you can go into each of these to get more information and now i'm in this class kick is

217fantastic i have a little better idea of what it's about and i say oh i really want to go um and register for this event so then i have also a link to the front line professional growth where we sign in teachers only had to sign in once once they were signed in they could they could really shop around and register for those professional development um things so but this was this this was uh really fun to do in in the middle of the pandemic developing this was a it was a challenge and it was a good challenge and i got a lot of very positive feedback from staff um for that day not just the logistics of planning it but but the content people really responded well to in my office we have done

218a whole plethora of surveys more than ever before i think these are listed on this chart but we also did some surveys on the learning about the digital tools so i wanted to highlight some of those for you here and i focused on the google suite so this is about google classroom and um teachers needing support comfortable or an expert now this was the the blue column was taken in may and the orange column comes from october and um i really wish i had done this on march 13th because i actually think that uh the this data would be uh far more dramatic but the good news is is that the needing support uh and you know i have not used it needing support really declined in those um those months from uh beginning to

219end and then this is google me which is similar we can see people becoming more comfortable um with the tool google slides this was an area that took a little longer um but people were getting uh comfort more comfortable as the the months the month went on and then finally i wanted to talk for just a moment about teaching in the digital environment and the tools for that help to increase student engagement and support student voice because that really was our focus those tools are near pod class kick jam board cami padlet and you may have seen um some of these things as you've watched your own kids um in in the in this learning spaces but i thought i would show you an example of an engaging professional development um so this is a

220near pod and let's see if i can if i can do that so um the instructional supervisors did so much work this year around culturally responsive education in the content areas this was this is um amanda powers emoji and this is uh frank delsignore's emoji they uh clearly amanda's science and um frank is mad and so they did this with their teachers but they also did it with the leaders um back in december and so just quickly this is kind of the attractiveness that we um are teaching our teachers to do and actually not teaching our teachers but learning together how to do um in order to make the the classroom more engaging the virtual classroom more engaging for students and i just wanted to show you that here's this a way that teachers might

221use this is that oh dear okay um i don't think i'm going to be able to manage to show that to you i'm sorry it worked earlier today but isn't working now uh but basically what that was going to bring you to was an activity that we did around math um and where people were students and in this case the leaders were the students could go in and they put post-it notes virtual post-it notes on the activity to identify what it is that they learned i would have liked to have shown that to you but it's not cooperating and that i believe is my last slide in the presentation and i would be happy to take any questions thank you very much for the presentation ms bechdel we know that how much of the work

222that you do uh forms the foundation for the instruction and the curriculum for the whole institution it's really at the heart of a lot of what happens around here um board members does anyone have a question or a comment from ms bechdel ms wilson hello thank you i'm noting that history and social science are on year one of their curriculum review cycle which typically takes five years are you incorporating any um being the type of year we had are you incorporating any feedback from community members and students into what the curriculum for history should entail i'm just curious if being a year one so actually the year one the year one group this year is ela and science so next month um in fact the ladies are very busily uh preparing their report and presentation

223for the board which i believe they'll do on june 17th on ela uh science i was asked if we could um just delay until august um it will spend challenging year and she uh amanda just needed a few more weeks to pull that together um so you know we i think that to answer your question about um outside of the um teachers and um we really rely i think on our regular school surveys that we have so we do have the dtsde survey which speaks to curriculum but you're right about not having active voices and that may be a really good next step um about how you know about how families in our community feel about the curriculum i do know that for social studies which is up for review next year that mr elliott

224has been very actively involved with um the naacp and connecting students and mentors connect you know that work of that we did around the 1619 project and then um uh and then actually you know speaking to the naacp about that and then the naacp reaching out to mike to make those connections has been a really important thing especially as we begin implementation of the seal for civic readiness because there are some culminating projects that we've already started as a part of our pig and echo so you're getting me going now and we've already started as a part of our pig and echo um uh curriculum a couple of years a few years ago and now we're just ramping it up even more and and one of those ways is to um have kids do projects

225with uh people in the community oh that sounds great and i apologize mentally i am in 21 22 already it's where we all want to be anyone else with a question for miss bechtel miss smith it really not a question but just a comment i i was so delighted to to read through this piece just uh just sort of um as you referred to silver civil line or linings i just felt excited about in this awful awful year uh to know exactly you know more about what teachers were doing how they were um taking this virtual you know challenge on but also really enhancing what they've been doing and have been doing uh you know and i just really kudos on this piece i was just delighted and uh maybe just one question on this

226schedule of um pd um are those sessions um and i may have missed it are they recorded like so could i go in like go into the schedule and find a recording of the training that was done so that as a teacher i could use that or access that again and again so in some cases we did that um particularly the tech ones uh jeremy dudley who i'm sure you're he's our instructional coach he's excellent um it's another silver lining uh from kovid is jeremy and i have been meeting probably once a week since last march and that connection to kent's office in that way has really been beneficial for uh for both of us and so um jeremy will record sessions and and put them up but then you know the department meetings they

227were very specific to departments so um not so much i gave people flexibility and i gave people flexibility kind of dependent upon what they were doing i mean clearly some of the um wellness pla um seminars we did not record um but some we did yes we are we are starting to develop that library of items that teachers can access particularly around the digital resources and uh i was again i know that this happens probably more than i know but the collaboration between the uh content areas between the disciplines but also to see that uh slide that where it says cre in stem so it's it's more than just connecting these disciplines but it is in the context of who we are who we want to be and so just kudos to to the pd

228folks and to the teachers who are also incorporating all of that work matters a lot thank you the teachers have really worked hard and um and and implement implementation and learning and um i i saw was watching doug fisher yesterday and he um a little webinar and he said something about how tired teachers are and how they feel a sense of loss of agency that they're not having the impact that they've had in the past and that we have to constantly and be positive about our teachers and the work that they're doing in an environment where they don't always feel like they are having that effect so we are definitely sensitive to that so i just want to point out to my colleagues that we are roughly a half an hour behind schedule so i

229want you to think really carefully about whether you have a question you really need to ask i have a question i am not asking even though i'm dying to because i really think it's important for us to get to the end of the meeting and we will see miss bechdel again towards the end of the year on specifically on curriculum development so i just want you to know this is not your last chance to ask her a question but that said i'm not trying to quash discussions so does anybody have a question that they really want to ask on this because i board member albania you're going to hold your question or you want to ask it i just wanted to say i really like the list of surveys on pd and [Music] courses just

230want to keep it at that thank you very much for being succinct i appreciate it uh board member creatine and i similar similarly didn't have as much a question as much as uh i actually looked through the spreadsheet of the pd development and that was really impressive and consistent with you saying it's great to provide that positive feedback i was really impressed with the options you're providing for the teachers uh to to develop them there's professional skills that was really great to see and i'd love to see more of that thank you fantastic we know four weddings a year it's a major challenge it's very impressive okay are we ready can we move on now folks all right thank you very much ms bechdel we always enjoy when you're here with us and that brings

231us to our discussion on the reserve funds so to talk about our reserve funds we're going to hear from our deputy superintendent kimberly roaring thank you superintendent adams i'm excited to to be the end of your meeting this evening as we talk about reserve funds as we come close to the end of our fiscal year so what are some what are reserve funds they provide a legal way for the district to save for future needs and use there are restricted reserves and unrestricted fund balance is two mechanisms for us to do that many of the restricted reserves are simply established by board resolution and they can be funded either during the fiscal year or as part of our year-end close however the capital reserve does require voter authorization of a proposition that stipulates the expressed

232use of those funds the total dollar amount that may be deposited and when that fund will expire unrestricted fund balance is statutorily limited to no more than 4 percent of the next year's total budget why should the district have reserves they provide financial stability they reduce our reliance on debt for future capital projects they also serve as a source of revenue that may avoid cuts in our budget process our unrestricted fund balance provides savings for those unanticipated expenses and also each year we talk about the state comptroller's assessment of our fiscal fitness and these are an essential element of maintaining fiscal fitness in the state comptroller's evaluation this ability to save and plan for the future also helps smooth out any spikes in our property tax levy albany has five restricted reserves they include the

233capital reserve the workers compensation reserve unemployment employee benefits and tax tertiary and we will talk a little bit more detail about each of those starting with the unrestricted fund balance however these are funded by any unused undesignated funds at year-end close it often is a revenue source for the district in fact as part of the 2122 budget we have planned to use 2.58 million of appropriated fund balances or revenue source again it helps provide stability in the tax levy is that revenue offset to a steeper increase in the tax levy and it is again statutorily limited to four percent so for next for the end of june 2021 our maximum amount we could have in that would be 10.8 million at the end of 2020 we had 5.7 capital reserves are used to help finance

234the cost of construction reconstruction or acquisition of property or equipment they are again established by voter approval in a very detailed proposition that includes the specific purpose maximum amount and term of the reserve and can only be expended with voter approval for a purpose that is within those parameters they may be transferred to other funds by voter approval but must first be applied to outstanding bond debt of the district our balance at the end of june 2020 was one million dollars the unemployment reserve is used to reimburse the state unemployment insurance fund for payments made to claimants albany is self-funded so the full cost of unemployment insurance benefits is the district's responsibility we receive quarterly invoices or statements from the fund stipulating how much they have paid out on our behalf and what we must

235repay them this fund may be funded through budgetary appropriations or other reserve funds subject to performance of referendum our balance at the end of june 2020 was 2 million the workers compensation reserve similarly is used to pay for compensation benefits medical hospital or other expenses expressly authorized by article two of the workers compensation law this is also established by board resolution and our balance at the end of june 2020 was three hundred thousand dollars employee benefit accrued liability reserve is used to pay accrued employee benefits at termination of their service so many of our collective bargaining agreements have a provision that at retirement if you have a certain amount of unused sick time there's a value attributable to that and it's paid out at separation it's important to note that this reserve fund is not

236able to be used to support the district's retiree health insurance expense this is established also by board resolution and our balance at the end of june 2020 was 9.84 million you may also recall that as part of our budget development process for 2122 we planned to use 600 000 from this reserve to offset those costs tax tertiary reserve is intended to cover the cost of judgments and claims and tax tertiary proceedings this like a capital reserve is also established by voter authorization which too the proposition includes a purpose maximum amount and probable term the balance at the end of june 2020 was just under 953 000 there are five other legally permissible reserves that the district has not established they include the property loss and liability claims insurance tax reduction repair and retirement contribution the

237retirement contribution reserve is intended to pay the employers portion of contributions to the employee's retirement system the district also has the opportunity to establish a sub fund within that reserve that would allow us to support contributions to the teachers retirement system as well this is created by board resolution expenditures are authorized by the board of education which would typically be done as part of the budget development process and determining that as a source of revenue the city school district again has not established this reserve the state comptoner's office has been very clear in stating that planning for today and saving incrementally helps to mitigate the financial impact of major on non-recurring and unforeseen expenditures establishing and funding allowable reserves is a clear purpose to smooth out spikes in the annual budget and the property tax

238levy so this language clearly supports the establishment and proper funding of reserves and then aligns again with how they attribute our fiscal stress indicators next steps the board of education would consider establishing a retirement contribution reserve and perhaps a sub fund within that reserve for the teachers and system employer contribution that may be taken up at the june 3rd meeting you will also be presented with a recommendation for funding the capital reserve at the june 3rd meeting and then as part of our year-end process we will give you a funding recommendation similarly to what we did last year designating specific restricted reserves and amounts not to exceed at the june 17th meeting i'm happy to take questions board colleagues we also had a couple of memos on these uh in sbu a couple of weeks

239ago so does anybody have any remaining questions on the reserve fund presentation otherwise i would anticipate that most of us are feeling positively about the idea of opening this additional fund which we would do next time if you have any concerns about that i would like to hear them because otherwise i expect it to be a relatively quick and easy action next time okay thank you for the feedback i'm sorry we don't have any questions we can make questions up if you'd like to stay longer though okay on that note do we have any board committee reports ms smith has a committee report i'm sorry i should have let someone go first i'm just getting it all together here um we as the facilities committee met last night as a fact matter of fact and

240a very good meeting let me first say we ended by reviewing uh five nisba policies that you had asked the policy committee had asked that we take a look at and i want to thank miss roaring for sort of taking the lead early on actually during the budget process to give input and then we took a look last night and so we have those policies ready and i will be forwarding them on to the policy committee dr chatur for your team's consideration so thank you and miss wilson mr elmanawi and miss roaring thank you very much last night the committee as i said met and we received updates on the following projects albany high school phase three rubber gym is nearing completion and we're going to jump for joy when that happens the floor pour

241occurs in june and we still plan to have that building available for use this summer work in the loft building is also tracking uh as scheduled and that space as you might recall includes the cte space for health sciences automotive and building trades as well as the media center demolition of the auditorium is complete boy and also the tennis court fencing is being installed and the courts are scheduled to be completed by august 1. okay at north albany construction has started in the former daycare portion of the old ymca and that's going to be ongoing for a little bit but that work is underway additionally uh we have uh spent some time discussing the cap the five-year capital plan and uh bids were received on may 18th and a detailed review of those bids are

242sort of taking place this week i do want to point out that you will see that our the total of those bids is more than we had estimated so we are looking at options for closing the gap there including use of alternate sources of funds i.e one-time ar p funds for like mechanical work the project team is still still recommends bidding the contracts [Music] actually we still look to bid those contracts out and will be submitted for our approval at the june 3rd meeting so in fact what we've done is the facilities committee has moved its meeting up from um june 8th uh to first or second we're going to confirm that and then we will have for your review uh and uh the bids for awarding now i want to point out a couple

243of things uh there have been some challenges um associated with the pandemic and uh change in supply chains like labor markets so some of that we talked about tonight that indus industry is seeing labor shortages uh which is impacting cost and timelines so we're tracking that keeping an eye on that and we'll kind of keep everyone posted we're also seeing significant cost escalations for materials and supplies um one example last night which was i mean again i'm just not even thinking about all of this but they were talking um our uh general contractors were talking about the lighting fixtures that need to go up in the rubber gym and they can't quite put them up there yet because what do they need a little chip that has to go into those lighting fixtures which is

244not going to be available immediately so you know we're we're going to see some certainly some impact here and just what that will actually look like we're just going to have to keep tracking it and and keep keep everyone posted yeah so uh thank you committee for the time last night um and i hope uh board colleagues that this is a helpful report i do want to remind you as i'm probably in the habit of doing more and more now that i am attempting to use two uh teams to post um the policies to post minutes and um agenda items in there for your um access on a regular basis um so thank you miss roaring and thank you team members or board members and that's it thank you very much i am not at

245all surprised to hear any of this given what's in the you know regular news every single day about material cost of materials increasing and just ironically and tonight's marketplace was on the subject of computer chips and how they are you know 17 to 18 weeks delayed over where they ought to be so it's um you know we are living in that same reality as everybody else so it's unfortunate but it is the way it is and i appreciate all the creative energy going into figuring out how we can still deliver the needs deliver for the needs of our students any other committee reports doctor no we don't have a i don't have a report but i had a question for uh mr smith you know would it be possible to get a tour of the

246new albany high phase phases why sure dr chatur and i'm going to just have to pass that question over to miss roaring but we can certainly schedule something i presume [Music] so i will follow up with our construction manager and see when the next best time would be to try and schedule that opportunity for members of the board to take a tour of the progress that's being made on phase three as that is a multi-year phase and certainly incremental progress would be advantageous to see thank you so much any other questions or comments for vicki or committee reports okay any items of other business for the good of the order madam president yes during routine consent i wanted to make sure that we did not forget about miss christina levesque she is the new assistant

247director of special education so we congratulate her and welcome her on board welcome aboard and with that happy news i would entertain a motion to adjourn board member creachee second by board member smith all in favor and that is unanimous and we will see you in two weeks thanks so much