Board of Education Meeting of October 19, 2021

001good evening i'd like to call the meeting to order this is the meeting of the west hartford public schools board of education for tuesday october 19th uh welcome thanks for joining us and uh could you please call the roll miss aronson present dr chang present miss poland present dr steinberg dr thomas farquharson here ms wilcox here mr sedanowitz here student representative avery woods whit weber present student representative andrew maglio present thank you and andrew could you please lead us in the pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you we do not have any revision to the agenda order so we will move on to public communications i did take the sign

002up sheet from over on the table so i'll call people in the order in which you've signed up as a reminder we do not respond to comments each person will have three minutes and then we take seven comments per topic when you're here we ask you to start with your name and your address and to keep your eye over here where you'll get a yellow card when you have a minute left and a red card when your time has expired first on our list is mark greenstein and i'm sorry and just as a reminder we do still have the mass mandate in place until friday so i just ask everyone to comply and if you don't mind going over to the podium that'll come on for you right away thank you thank you deb um

003board members and parents i i'm a west hartford residence well bugbee grad and king philip before i went to private school but i i've got a lot of um west hartford kids in mind parents in mind and especially the board in mind if things get contentious with one group of parents wanting this for the school for safety sake for quarantine's sake for curriculum's sake other parents wanting something else you're going to have a tough year and i have an organization that could help and i just want to see if there's any interest in board members who'd like to see for the rest of the year the possibility of at home schooling with west hartford's curriculum so that it could be west hartford's own teachers who might feel uncomfortable in the schools for the next few

004months it certainly would be with parents who gather just a few kids in the neighborhood who want hopefully that same teacher but there are substitutes available i happen to have a tutoring company that does put tutors with parents it doesn't have to be my firm there's plenty of out there and i'm just hoping that parents and board members would be receptive to that not so traditional way of choice and that could happen in anything except the science lab pretty much any subject except for maybe conor and hall high science labs it's fair game so um i'm around if you have questions thanks for hearing me out and uh thank you mark before you leave could you state your address for the record oh i'm on to crossfield west hartford thank you next gloria mangual i'm

005i'm gloria francesca mengual and i live at 75 white avenue west hartford i'm here because i i read in our weha news about the last board meeting which caused me to be quite distraught i and reading that i could have sworn i was in mississippi or alabama um and i was really concerned about that um and obviously i'm not the only one concerned because the justice department just put out an address against violent threats against school officials and teachers which are going on across the country and i'm just going to read a piece of this citing an increase in harassment intimidation and threats of violence against school board members teachers and workers in our nation's public schools today attorney general merrick garland directed the fbi and u.s attorney offices to me in the next 30

006days with federal state tribal territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend these sessions will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting assessment and response of law enforcement and attorney general garland goes on to say quote threats against public servants are not only illegal they're on counter to our nation's core values those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety i thank you for your efforts i thank you for volunteering my daughter graduated from the school system six years ago and today she is a teacher in maine i'm proud to say um i have worked in the field of dialogue and deliberation and in

007the area of having a civil discourse around things and i don't know what happened to this country that we can't have a civil discourse i want to hear differing opinions i don't want to just hear my own opinion but i want to share my opinion and hear the other's opinion respectfully that is what i ask happen here and hopefully around the country i am really pleased to read the um social emotional learning through an equity lens section that will be reported on later today our children definitely need to learn how to have a civil discourse better and this will move us closer in that direction so thank you so much for your efforts thank you next alexandra banisik good evening um thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak again um and i would

008like to make again few comments regarding the mask mandates as you know there were few states that were impacted by the most recent variant and florida experienced big increase in cases and deaths starting middle of summer there were schools in that state that had mask mandate and there were schools that did not require students to wear masks it turned out that as the cases were increasing throughout the state they were increasing in schools regard regardless of mass mandate when cases started to plummet similar decreasing rates were observed in schools with and without mass mandate that again shows just like the bank leader study that cloth masks are not an effective mitigation strategy in fact even last year during the holiday season here in connecticut positive cases were rising in schools despite the students being masked

009just like last time i would greatly appreciate it if you could please for forward to ask parents results of a study showing benefits of students wearing masks in classroom setting i am aware that connecticut is still under emergency and mask mandates in schools are required by state till at least february 2022 i would appreciate it if you could please comment on how students in west hartford public schools are instructed to keep their masks clean and change them every three four hours as per department of public health guidelines i've been often seeing like soggy masks on little ones faces i would also appreciate it if you could please comment how the faculty and staff in west hartford public schools have been advised to approach children that have difficulty in keeping their masks on um there's no

010remote learning option this year are there any exemptions for the children with medical problems like asthma how do the schools adjust to these children and lastly uh during one of the previous board of education meetings i learned that over 80 percent of children in west hartford public schools ages 12 plus are fully vaccinated against covet could you please comment why the kids in schools with such high vaccination rates still have to wear masks since it sounds like the hurt immunity has been already reached thank you for your time today thank you oh um could you i'm sorry could you please come back and state your address please name and address please uh it's uh alexandra banacic it's 329 cumberland road with hartford thank you thank you those are the only people i have who have

011signed up to speak are there any other members of the public who would like to come forward you can just come forward thank you and start with your name and address please jean wigan 6 middlebrook road good evening superintendent moore and the members of the board at every meeting parents including myself speak about our concerns regarding the mitigation tactics when we were finished superintendent moore turns to the board as as if he has not heard anything we have said and says the mitigation tactics work lots of things work but that doesn't mean we should do them a few years ago doctors were prescribing opioids for chronic pain they didn't realize that they were highly addictive people became addicted and overdosed opioids worked too but we're not talking about opioids we're talking about mitigation tactics on

012paper they look fair enough kids wear masks to school to keep others safe kids social distance to keep each other safe kids quarantine following exposure if they are not vaccinated well that one really isn't okay in a low risk population minimally where the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are minimally transmitting what do these protocols look like in real life is this that sounds quiet what are these protocols what do these protocols sound like or look like in real life a superintendent telling parents that they better get their children to wear a mask if they want to have a good relationship with their school a superintendent telling parents that they had better get their kids vaccinated if they want their children to have a good year a teacher scolding a child repeatedly to pull up their mask

013a child telling a child that they are going to kill someone if they take their mask off there to breathe a child receiving pressure from peers and from adults to just get the vaccine a child's medical status being exposed to friends and teachers because they have to quarantine a child being forced to wear a mask despite chronic panic and asthma attacks a child failing classes because the child struggles to hear and understand the teacher's instructions could these examples cause a mental health crisis among our children let's look at the october 7th edition of the hartford current it was published the day after the last meeting i forwarded it to all of you children's is facing triple the volume of patients seeking urgent behavioral health care than it did over the summer forcing many families to

014wait for hours for an available bed and often for days after that for an inpatient psychiatric bed to open up at another institution the current reported on wednesday dr james schmearling children's president and chief executive officer described the situation earlier this week as a breaking point according to the article the week before ccmc had as many as 47 children waiting to receive behavioral health care for conditions including suicidal ideation and self-harm interesting there's a school year pandemic mental health crisis taking place in our hospitals while we are prolonging the pandemic with mitigation tactics in our schools could there be a correlation oh that's right we don't know because you haven't done a risk benefit analysis of the covet 19 protocols but you are providing increased mental health resources although if the protocols you are implementing

015in school or causing the pediatric mental health crisis aren't you simply putting out the fire you started can you wrap up please i'm asking you once again please conduct a risk benefit analysis you don't want to be responsible for enacting mitigation protocols that are causing children to self-harm and have suicidal ideations thank you [Applause] any other members of the public anyone else wish to address the board this evening if not we will move on to unfinished business we have no unfinished business next is new business we can skip through that no new business and we'll move on to staff communications and reports and start with the superintendent's report okay very good um some good news to report a uh short report overall but um some very good news that we received um at the end

016of last week our esr application which we reported on before um we received notification um late thursday night that we um uh have been approved for our entire application and with no amendments so no even requests by the state of the federal government to make any shifts so that funding um is being released to us any modifications we make that doesn't mean as you remember since it's for a period of time we still have the option to make modifications if things come up that we feel are a better usage we just have to file those modifications to the assert application but very good news and thanks to all my team for the work they did during the summer especially liz hewitt for her work on that application i also want to thank jared moore in

017the i.t department who applied for a grant that honestly i wasn't sure we'd be prioritized for but we did receive it for eight hundred and ten thousand dollars for mobile devices in our schools as well as mobile hotspots and wi-fi hot spots that um families in need they can come forward and we can provide those for people and and that's what that money's designed to go out to to make sure that the digital divide um is not just lessened but really eliminate i'm comfortable saying that in west hartford now there's no reason for any child not to have a chromebook or access to wi-fi at home so they every child in our schools has the same ability to do work that's assigned and to be able to be connected and this grant certainly helps that

018so eight hundred and ten thousand dollar another sizable grant thanks to jared mourin for his work on that um as you know um last week we began testing of students voluntary at the elementary level uh i think uh it's safe to say we're one of if not the first districts to get this up and running in the state um the state provides the program provides the partnership we have about 600 families that have signed up for this at the k-6 level and you know we described it before but obviously the the fear of doing testing of um asymptomatic these aren't kids that are coming forward that feel anything this is is that this will increase your numbers and could lead to fear and everything else and inevitably it will catch some cases that wouldn't be

019caught otherwise but in our first week we taught we we tested 600 kids and had zero positives so it's a great indicator of safety in our schools right now um as we're moving forward and just a really good piece of news for us um so again zero positives last week and that testing is ongoing weekly that same pool of students we tend to have about 10 to 15 more families sign up every week right now on that topic we have four total positive cases in the district only which is really also another indicator that we're doing really well not just as a community but within our schools of um not seeing school transmission um as has been seen in other places when we see you know those new stories out about the number of people

020going into quarantine and how that's affecting school right within our state we have a total of seven people in quarantine in our high schools and our elementary schools right now across the board a total of seven that's out of 11 000 students and staff overall so it's just we're at a really good place right now and um happy to report that um and lastly i i just we acknowledged this last year but sometimes some things get lost in the in the shuffle especially with all the things that have gone on but this thursday night joy wright will be celebrated and formally recognized as the connecticut association of schools middle school principal of the year and joy's work for her to be recognized and that recognition for king philip and really all of west hartford we're

021lucky to have joy as an educational partner and to have her as leader in this district and i just wanted to formally recognize her and congratulate her at this board meeting so with that any questions tom with that um grant for the technology um is because i know that there was some budget money set aside for that so will that offset most of that for us yeah we'll be able to offset some there's also some additional usages of that that we didn't have necessarily budgeted especially in the area of hot spots and some other things but there'll be a significant offset from budget and as we move forward with that too would you mind giving us a quick update on the status of bus drivers and kind of tas and substitutes sure um you know

022as we've said we've done um very well overall with bus drivers especially vis-a-vis other districts that doesn't mean there hasn't been hiccups in west hartford there has been some um but again the state i do have to say this the state departments are working together very well when we get a name of somebody that needs testing typically there was a delay between department of motor vehicles and when an application went in and then fingerprinting when everything came through they are expediting this testing very much to get drivers on the roads when we call and say we have somebody come in the state's been very responsive responsive in that way so that's very good as far as tas paraprofessionals substitute teachers certainly go on whps.org and apply to work in west hartford public schools because we

023have openings and we'd love to have people as part of our schools any other questions all right thank you so much we'll move on to staff reports and board discussions and our first report is social emotional learning through an equity lens we have a uh a full crew here today uh dr haskins dr rashford ms ambrose ms campbell and some students as well thanks for joining us [Applause] watch your heads this is when it's helpful to be more like ms ambrose's height so good evening everyone happy fall season thank you for this opportunity to share with you in the viewing public some updates on our district-wide social emotional learning and program as one lever for equity and civility while we're waiting for our visuals which we did a test run beforehand uh i'll just say

024that i am wearing a big grin under my mask because i am so pleased to have with me tonight at the board table representatives from each of our building levels representing our social emotional learning our sel work and they've been very instrumental in the planning the feedback giving input and sharing their experiences so i have to my right gail campbell grade two teacher duffy scott rashford whom you all know from the office of equity advancement kim ambrose assistant principal at paul high school and two very important young consultants for equity and that's 11th grade students derek and juliana both of hall high school so last year and throughout the summer um we received lots of feedback lots of imp input from multiple stakeholder groups and that helped to shape and inform you know the work

025in sel in pro social justice education and it helped us to restructure our classroom community settings to build community to be more inclusive peaceful and welcoming so tonight each um each person with me tonight will give a brief overview of the sel structure and content at each of the three building levels and each will also share just a brief like short reflection of their experiences but for as just a matter of refresher for you all but probably new for some members of the viewing public we have a set of res we have a set of research-based standards a framework that we use and it's adopted by the collaborative for academic and social emotional learning and this helps us to cultivate knowledge skills and dispositions that are essential for you know to helping us advance students

026development and learning and it's and it's for it's not just for students it's for adults too we also have a set of domains for pro social social justice education that we pair with sel we don't really need research to tell us but research backs the fact that you can't teach social skills in isolation and so when these two frameworks are paired together students can acquire real-world experiences awareness tools and supports and competencies that they need to chart the course for their future but also to influence positive change in their community [Music] and so we see seo as an equity lever because it really does promote conditions that enable all students to really realize their self-worth and to clear paths so that they can reach their full potential and these are not just aspirations that we

027have they align with our vision of the graduate and it is really essential critical skills that all students need and dispositions and skills that our adults who educate them need so i am going to ask gail to unmute actually i have to stop using the virtual terms when we are in person i'm going to turn the mic over to her to give an overview of the elementary tenants all right all yours hi um this summer you're on mute no i'm just kidding i appreciate your humor thank you um this summer and also late spring i had the privilege of joining a team where we really looked at our curriculum for sel and sj that's social emotional learning and social justice including specifically to tonight our gender literacy work um we were revising this curriculum and

028that included a lot of the books and materials and we really wanted to look at and include all the facets of diversity at all levels pre-k through grade five so we did that by reading a lot of books and um and we we tossed around a lot in our little group we were a mighty team and we really wanted to see what what are these books who are the authors we really we dove into authors what were these authors doing who were they what did they look like what did they sound like um and what were we sharing with all of staff and students we deliberated over many titles and we rearranged what was appropriate for children at all of their developmental levels and we wanted to include the all levels of diversity in all

029content we adhered to the social justice standards identity diversity justice and action which you saw before in a previous slide and we wanted to do different kinds of identities and different kinds of family and i say that specifically as second grade because i'm stuck right there in the middle as like a middle child but that's my world right now too um and the first lesson is all about identity which is really important for kids and we delved into every lesson uh for pre-k through grade five they are dealing with their name and that unearths a lot of like their family history and who they are and they're like oh i'm named after my grandma and like all kinds of stuff comes in um which is really important of who they are and and their sense

030of self and that's a really important part we thought for every child to think about so that was really cool um and that came about for everybody and it also important of like who is your family and where do you come from and and what do what do different kinds of families look like because not every family is the same so that is an important format for that that flows nicely into our morning meeting format starting the day most classrooms can do that right at the beginning unless of course you have a special at the beginning every individual teacher's style matches up with the person out of their class of course and so that is going to provide the structure and the space for the young children to feel comfortable and open to share through

031the the model of greetings games activities and how they are going to share about their identity their families what comes from home and how that meshes within to the classroom that flows nicely into your sel lessons i know when i walk by the classrooms of my colleagues today sometimes seo lessons are in the afternoon in my world it happens with my schedule to just flow right in in the morning it's inextricably connected to our second step lessons they have great in second steps family letters that can go home and give you an overview of what's happening in the classroom and that you can reinforce that at home as well which is a beautiful thing we also encourage through our summer work we did encourage in every seo lesson to include an sel journal in some

032way so that you can express your sense of self in that journal so it's not always public in the classroom but sometimes those moments are private and we do encourage that with children that it's between you your parent me so that is a safe space as well as how you would like to share because sometimes about identity it is a private space we're growing the notion of the whole child our concrete example i'm an elementary school teacher so i always bring props is something like the book read this book you might notice the crayon right here children noticed right away right what's wrong with this crayon nothing but they noticed that the wrapper is red and the crayon is blue so throughout the whole story everybody's telling this this um crayon uh you know can

033you draw me some [Music] red raspberries can you draw me this red something red something red and they keep drawing something blue until one crayon it's barry says can you can you draw me something blue like an ocean that was the first person to ask and so the kids right away made some connections hey that's just like the book by katherine otoshi that we read it only takes one so some of the lessons we're learning together as a group is it only takes one to ask certain questions and that's the communication we're having that's the community they're building is it only takes one to ask that important question about your identity and about being different and how that's a good thing and that this is still a crayon right and so the kids actually noticed

034inside there's grandparent crayons in there they're silver and gray so there's family inside the crayon book and so that some kids are like this is just about crayons some kids were like hey that could be about me on that crayon and that's the beautiful thing but we're getting kids at whatever levels that they need to understand about identity so this is our careful purple purposeful work and we're going to segue over to scott thank you all right i got it i'm chewing some gum um so thank you uh our work this summer as well as the elementary work was a continuation of a a very important aspect of what we're offering middle schoolers that we began last year and took lessons back with us feedback you know from the the previous year to be able

035to reflect on what worked what we needed to change but all of it really tied back to some essential aspects of what we want as a part of a guaranteed conversation that adults have with children which is what does it mean to be part of a community and what does it mean to build a community there's an equitable community what is the knowledge that one needs what are the skills that one needs to be able to be a participant in building that community maintaining that community and um as with the elementary work our uh standards are really they reflect a crosswalk between castle which is a national organization which uh informs our work around social and emotional learning and teaching for justice which really informs uh the is the sort of core work that we're

036using to be able to inform the thinking we are providing students around some of the social justice standards and we're trying carefully to build upon what the elementary school students uh have done in in taking a good hard look at those identity questions and and what it means to be part of a community starting off with doing some very careful uh work to build community and by that i mean build a safe space for students to really feel like they can get to know one another who's in the room who are the adults that are with them as human beings as well as educators trying to make sure that all the students in the classroom are really part of a classroom which in which they can have honest conversations and really look at some important

037issues [Music] it's building off of that middle school model the the whole concept of team is really designed to be able to break the school down into smaller spaces we wanted to build off of that and really make it such that the adults that are working with the students are in small groups and in those small groups students can have conversations about the theoretical but also apply that to their lives in in the day-to-day world of what it means to be a middle schooler the structure is that the students are meeting together daily in advisory but it's once a week for 20-minute sessions that they are focused around the social justice and sel concepts like the elementary we start with self middle schoolers are very definitely about who am i and very definitely about trying

038to define the all the aspects of identity and then ultimately leads to a sense of self in community where do i fit against a larger context in a broader more diverse community what's my place here what does it mean to be a member of then taking a next step what does it mean to be a member of a community in which we have responsibilities to one another how is it that we respect each other in in light of those differences i love the crayon analogy we really try to walk that to a next place where we're learning about how it is that it's okay to be different from one another and to respect that in that same space what does it mean to honor that and to i loved our speaker earlier one of our

039people who came in from the community ms mingwell who came to to speak about what it means to have a civil discourse we feel that those are important skills that our young people need to learn we need to model that and so there are some definite lessons that are built around what it means to have discourse and what it means to call each other in and be able to have a conversation in which there are moments where we might not fully agree or where we might may make some sort of a misstep and how do we repair that work and so that's the sort of arc there is a feedback loop that we built in this year because we know this is still work that we're evolving and growing and try to get better at

040and so from our office i am meeting with parents i've been meeting with parents since last year on a weekly basis to hear feedback around these lessons this year we're also continuing to step into the schools and hear from teachers where are they meeting with teams and team leaders on a regular basis and also groups of students to make sure that what we have designed is actually what is landing in a way that is being well received well understood well implemented so we feel like it's really important work it's a really pivotal age in the life of young people as they move toward adulthood and these are really good basics uh skills and basic pieces of information and content that allow them to then move to the next level where they can see themselves as

041taking action in the in the community at large and moving into some deeper content as they move toward high school hi everyone so first i wanted to acknowledge all the hard work and to thank all the district leaders and their vision around equity and scott and rosina and the office of equity and advancement as well for all their hard work and effort um jocelyn timberla noble has been very instrumental as well in aligning conrad and hall high school with the community presentations and lessons and delivery of lessons as well even our principals principals of tune at hall as well as principal duarte at connard in providing us professional learning opportunities for teachers as well as our cultural responsive instruction team at both connor and hall we have amazing teacher leaders have helped with the implementation

042of curriculum lessons by developing them and then providing professional learning opportunities for faculty and staff so i want to honor and thank all of their hard work and when i look at the overview of community and what it is at the high school level we're really looking at meeting the needs of all learners through social and emotional learning some of those tenets the first tenets consist really of looking at community in terms of our social emotional learning and our social justice curriculum and aligning that through culturally responsive pedagogy and having equity at the focus of that lens and all of our work another tenant is around the educational equity policy and the vision of equity and anti-racism which is really the compass that helps plan and guide our community lessons and when we look at

043community overall as a whole just an opportunity for students to discuss local and national civic events and having that discourse in community so providing their perspective and viewpoints and hearing other perspectives as well community block and the structure and what it looks like at the high school that's teachers leading community through 20 minutes once a week on wednesdays and a lot of our teachers have a community buddy that they lead the work with through social emotional learning and social justice curriculum for all students another aspect of community is like the first phase and that's a lot of you know student feedback we've received as well as faculty feedback how do we build community within community at first building cohesion getting to know who's in the room and then jumping into our social standards lessons which

044was really important another part is really celebrating and honoring diversity and looking at heritage month as well and embedding heritages into community has been very essential listening to um lived experiences and narratives and identities and acknowledging and honoring people to really foster positive self-concept for students looking at you know understanding equity helping students understand equity and diversity as well as having empathy and self-awareness for self and others is at the focal point and the structure and the format and the routines really help us in creating more equitable schools having inclusivity and as well as looking at ways to continue to have a socially just learning community and you know justin timberla noble has been instrumental at the high school level for our summer work she led this with district wide educators and administrators and looking

045at you know the feedback from all stakeholders from parents from students caregivers teachers and looking at the feedback looking at our lessons from last year and looking for continuous improvement and some of the focal points that we really focus our energy on is ensuring that you know teachers have professional learning throughout the school year around our community lessons um honoring and celebrating heritage months throughout our community lessons as well as continuing to have feedback loops to support our program and our growing and like i mentioned before building community within community before we started our social justice curriculum and ways that we've been collecting feedback i know that scott and rosina and jocelyn have worked on the the at least 13 focus groups from last year and working with the parent high school partnership groups and

046even this year we've worked with you know our student faculty committee um and other various organizations and clubs and activities to get feedback i know avery you've been a part of some of those as well which has been instrumental so thank you and other parts that we have for community is our community corner that we have for parents and caregivers that really gives us an overview of all of the lessons and what we've done up to date thus far has been around building community the hispanic and latinx heritage month we've celebrated and honored through community we've worked on identity gender identity and also you know indigenous people's day as and veterans day that gets us through thanksgiving so next i'll pass it over to one of our wonderful students derek williams so talk about structures

047within community okay here's the unmute button um hi my name is derek williams i'm an 11th grader at hall high school and i'm here to speak on and piggyback off of the sel instruction um so first we start off with community at hall or in the high school's perspective with welcoming inclusion um the teachers and staff do a really good job of creating a presentation that helps us to not only talk about the matters of what's going on in society but how to help us to start our conversation um so certain things like icebreakers we start off with the um presentation um and just being able to ask us you know just simple questions that are kind of like you know silly and just help us to ease in rather than to just go straight

048into a topic that could be serious and some people may feel a little bit uncomfortable um so it's a very good way of creating the scene in the mood for the classroom um then next on the agenda is the check-in routine um this lovely colorful graph up here is what we call a mood meter um our teachers present that to us and it's very helpful not even just for the students but i think it's helpful for the staff and teachers as well because sometimes you may be walking into the school um 7 30 in the morning you probably have not had your coffee um and you could be tired and a little bit unenergized so sometimes with that we don't know what our mood is and in a negative way um we could be feeling

049negative or we could be feeling down or um for example one emotion on here is furious um and maybe we might not have any time of the day and we might be so very caught up and busy in our school working and um for the teacher's perspective um grading assignments um that we have not took time to sit back and say hey like what am i feeling right now so the mood meter does a really good job of giving us that opportunity at least once a week to say um you know how are you feeling have you done this have you done that have you meditated have you just taken a minute to breathe and i really feel like that's helpful not even just for community but for anybody um and then next is content

050engagement so we are given um nice slideshows um as an example um the latinx and hispanic um heritage month we learned about that um a great example is this venn diagram up here giving us formative information about the differences between latin x hispanic and the similarities and first of all as an african american i did not know that there was much differences between the two and to find that factual as a teenager growing up um it's helpful so that we don't make negative assumptions purposely or by mistake when we're talking with someone about these matters and i feel like that was very useful and factual to present to us um and then another example is also going back to latinx and hispanic heritage month we are also provided with videos from websites like youtube that

051are of course informative um one was a cool coca-cola advertisement and it was this coca-cola truck driving around neighborhoods asking um hispanic and latinx communities or individuals in the communities um what it means to be latinx and what it means to be hispanic and it was really cool um the coke bottles had nice like tattoos on them and you know you just put it anywhere on your skin um and the tattoos were um famous hispanic last names like sanchez and rodriguez just to name a few but it was really good and just to see that um in the overall concept of community to learn more about us and our differences as students and as teenagers and as people high schoolers getting ready to enter the real world as adults it's very helpful for us to

052learn more about ourselves the community and the people that are different from us that are that have the same goals as we do and are close or have already achieved it for me to see that see that for me to see that as a african-american teenager that is it makes me do black flips and cartwheels and whatever else i can do because i mean it's like i mean you would too because this is very this just shows us that we matter and and i kind of get a little emotional talking about it because i mean we need to see that in this world in these days um and just what we're learning i mean veteran's day um indigenous people's day um black history month coming up um hispanic latinx also lgbtq plus this is very

053factual and not only is middle schoolers and middle high schoolers are doing this but middle schoolers and elementary schoolers are learning this stuff and for them to learn at a very early age that they matter and that you shouldn't be scared to be who you are i mean that's big um and that i really feel thankful that we have because not everybody can say that you feel comfortable you know with being who you are and for us to learn this in school outside of our house that's another thing on top of that but i'm very thankful that we have this implicated in our school and now i'd like to pass it on now to juliana to talk more about this all right so in community we really like to focus on having productive conversations and

054respectful reactions interactions rather um as an individual i'm very for being able to advocate for yourself um being able to have assertive and respectful conversations and i think sometimes we get so up and caught up in our own opinion and our own perspective that we don't listen to other people and i started using this babysitting like they're five and seven and i say stop and listen to your sister she's telling you to stop licking her stop and like i use it in community sometimes like people are yelling at each other i'm like stop and listen i use it on a five-year-old it works on high schoolers it works on adults and it just it ties back to the respect part you have to respect people you need to listen to them and especially when we're

055talking about sensitive topics or topics that people aren't necessarily comfortable with it's really important to stop and listen you don't have to agree we don't have to agree on everything it's never going to happen it's just how the world works but what we do need to do is listen to others perspectives and be okay with disagreement and in community we really like to stay engaged be okay with discomfort respect others learning journey and accept non-closure that non-closure part is very important we're not going to solve every problem in the world in a classroom with 20 people it's not going to happen but what we are going to do is discuss them recognize others opinions be okay with that and respect others regardless of their opinion whether it be the exact same as yours or the

056total opposite it doesn't matter if you disagree you just have to respect one another and in community that's just it's something we emphasize and i think it's very important and even going back to like the mood meter we've been using it since sixth grade and it works it's a great resource it also breaks the ice which leads to having more meaningful conversations because we're more comfortable you'll come in at 7 30 and someone's like oh i'm exhausted because i had so much homework well how does that tie into social justice and all these things it makes you more comfortable it makes you feel comfortable in the environment that you're in and speak eloquently and respectfully and just think about it because you're more comfortable and that allows for acknowledging different cultures and backgrounds because we

057come into these lessons with amazing presentations and videos and people are like oh it's just a video of a coca-cola truck going around like what does that mean when you sit and you think about it you discuss it you realize that it's not just a coca-cola bottle it's talking about differences of where we come from what our names mean to us because oh it's just a name it's not just a name it comes from deeper inside and when we talk about social justice i like to come back to we have to know what we're talking about so even on our slides we give definitions so social justice justice regarding distribution of wealth opportunities and privileges within a society and i think hall in west hartford in general does a really good job um just incorporating

058that into curriculum just because west hartford is such a diverse place and it's crazy because you have polar opposite communities that can come together and have such great conversations and be best friends whether you're exactly the same or polar opposites and it's just it's an amazing melting pot it's not just a good representation of west hartford it's really a representation of the united states we're a big melting pot and we're going to disagree it's just what's going to happen but within those disagreements you have to have conversations and not just debate you have to have conversations which is what community is all about it's bringing a community together to have conversations to be a welcoming inclusive and just a socially peaceful and respectful place so yeah i am in a world that you can be

059anyone i think it's just important to be yourself to be able to just be yourself and i appreciate your perspectives um the perspectives of derek and giuliana are just a few of a multitude of student voices that we have invited to share their feedback their experiences their input through surveys and focus groups in meetings like one that we attended last evening a virtual meeting with hall high school student equity and diversity council avery was among many of the voices in that virtual space and it was so expertly facilitated and i won't speak for availability for herself if she wants to but i was very proud of how insightful the students were and providing insight and feedback into the lessons and about what's working and what's not this is for them and so we need to

060hear their experiences here just a few other quotes um from students just feeling like they can be themselves feeling like their identity is is respected here a student really enjoys the flexibility in the discussion where it's set up where teachers can go into more depth in each segment so we made some revisions there too and then one quote one of my favorites is being comfortable with discomfort and we realize we have work to do and we appreciate the constructive feedback the need for more turn and talk came up last night in the conversation before asking to share on sensitive topics and so these are just a few of examples that inform our continuous improvement the one thing that resonated with me from last night's meeting with students was their appetite to better understand why we

061are doing this and how more explicitly how it relates to the vision of our graduates and so we continue to elevate their voices and just to build more inclusive environments and so i just wanted to wrap up with this one minute video one and a half minute video of our students this is every student in the west hartford public schools has the right to access opportunities and educational programs or activities that cultivate their unique gifts talents and interests regardless of race color religion age sex sexual orientation national origin alienage ancestry disability gender identity or expression or any other basis protected by state or federal law every student has the right to an authentic feeling of belonging and safety we acknowledge that current and historical systems of racism privilege and oppression [Music] therefore it is our

062moral imperative and statutory charge to identify and eliminate barriers and in equitable practices that perpetuate disparities across student groups as an anti-racist organization it is our collective responsibility to ensure full safe and equitable participation for all students in every area of our educational programs as a board of education we have a statutory duty to implement the state's educational interests which includes the duty to reduce racial ethnic and economic isolation of our students [Music] so that is our y [Music] that always happens and so we recognize that we have so much work still to do and um this is to hold ourselves up to this important responsibility and this promise and this commitment and our sel motto isn't one that we could emulate from anyone else we could borrow or we could even buy it is

063tailored based on who we are and who we serve as a district and so it really is our commitment for continuous improvement we would have loved to have been able to wait until we were all trained up and comfortable but we just don't have that privilege nor is it one that we want to enjoy and so i'll leave you with one educator's um voice and this is you know this are the wisdom of many of our educators and you know social emotional learning is not just for our students but it's for our community it's for our adults and so we want to thank you for all of your dedicated support uh building our vision helping to build a board equity policy and just stay in the course with us and we'll open the floor for

064your questions and discussion thank you so much i know many of us will have questions and so i'll start with liz well first thank you so much for that presentation especially that last video was really powerful and appreciate all the effort that went into the presentation also thank you to the students for coming tonight and sharing your perspective and and just letting us know what's happening in the high school that's really helpful and um good to see so my question relates to our new initiative the gender literacy program and i'm i want to ask a question specifically to the elementary you mentioned the book uh read and i'm assuming that that is being taught at the lower elementary so i'm wondering what it looks like what what is being taught at upper elementary what that

065looks like well there's a gender literacy progression document that we created in late spring early summer and each grade level has two books that teachers will be sharing with students so the actual lesson plan looks like we share a book like this and we have learning targets that are k through two and the learning targets say something like um i know my own identity i can share my own identity kind of things like that in the grade levels four and five that's when they can share um more ideas about what their pronouns are pronouns can be shared within their own journals as a public or private space that's what i was referring to earlier that is something that you could be careful to put in in a private journal because sometimes that could be a

066private thing for a child to just come to the realization of if they have a different sense of who who their self is as they're evolving with their identity um basically every and then a lesson has an activity um this lesson in particular i had um in like real time i have their seo journals were open and as i was reading the story they were writing things that came to their mind um i did take a couple pictures of their journal i could actually pull it up but if you wanted to but it said things like they were like at the by the end of the book they're like is he red is he blue so they're talking about the actual um and in the book it says that the crayon is he um in

067case you were wondering and they're like he needed to find his real path so it i mean there are concrete children at this developmental age level so that's what they're they're dealing with a concrete part of that and they ask the um they they make mention they're in the story so everything's couched in this in each story and we chose the stories specifically about what is happening in the story thank you sure avery i'd like to ask a follow-up question about the gender literacy program and first off i just wanted to say speaking as a member of the lgbtq plus community at hall in the greater west hartford school district at large i think that my community would agree with me to say that we're very glad that this is being taught the elementary level

068especially since for a lot of our students that this sort of teaching wasn't there when they were younger and from my discussions with my classmates it seems like gender dysphoria and i can say personally homophobia and lesbiphobia starts at a really young age and i was wondering um i see that we have the identity and lgbtq plus a history month lesson coming up for high schoolers and i was wondering how we're going how we're addressing um those more i don't want to say like acute but those needs that high schoolers might have or even the students at the middle school level might have from not having been taught that beforehand um and if within these lessons there's any way that we can bridge those students to resources that we do in the community like gsa

069which has some lessons like today they were supplementing sex ed um for queer students um are what are we going to be doing for that if that makes sense avery great questions and i can speak to the high school level um you mentioned a lot of you know organizations like gsa for example melis dunphy hendricks has been helping us with the development of the lessons and the resources and she also presented the professional learning to staff and faculty just a few weeks ago along with our culturally responsive instruction team and that's something that you know through the student equity diversity council student faculty committee and other various organizations will continue to get input from students before the lessons come so then you know resources and all the other important pieces that you mentioned today will

070be you know at the forefront with those lessons so it's extremely helpful thank you questions or comments jason all right thank you guys um that was incredible uh derek juliana thank you so much for sharing your experience um i was just reflecting on when you were saying derek when you were saying um that you get excited and your voice changed and um and i just recognized that in my own children when when they feel seen their their reading voice changes you know and when they're reading a story where they see themselves in that story their voice changes they are enunciating strong more more strongly they um they take away the information the knowledge from that story um so much more than um then if that weren't the case and i think that's speaks to the

071the importance of this approach um that you all are are um advocating for and working on um i'm deeply appreciative um i have a question about the differences between um sel at the elementary and middle school levels versus high school and some of the research that i've read on on sel at the high school level is is different than like a focused focused period where there's kind of individual attention to that curriculum whereas if it's kind of integrated within coursework across the curriculum that has opportunities for leadership and these other ways like when you're talking about facilitating the meeting and you all being here such a great demonstration i'm just thinking about you know wanting to know more about your experience with implementing sel in the high school level and what does that look like

072in terms of lessons learned or um how that how that really how maybe does it change from what what happens in middle school and elementary yeah i can just speak to so the competencies they don't change you know developing personal a good positive self-concept at an early age but then we have to keep because when you get to middle school middle school is a time of complex change and sometimes challenge and and so when you get to middle school i think that becomes even more important to just re-emphasize and build personal awareness personal self concept so that it's positive and again we go back to throughout all of the you know developmental years we go back to the windows the mirrors the windows and sliding glass doors the identity piece how you see yourself i

073think that is across all three levels that's where we begin and we keep re-emphasizing that at the i think that at the elementary level we focus it in in civics and so we utilize that our teachers utilize that we also have other programs that anchor it like second step right and so we're able to draw from if a classroom is having maybe if there's something going on at recess in elementary school at the buddy bench and the student's always being left out that might be something that for that classroom that teacher might really focus on you know personal responsibility and a sense of community that seo when we get into middle school i think we start again with reinforcing and affirming positive identity do you want to see more about that yeah i think i

074would say that not only with the identity issues we see that we do our best work when this is integrated into the day-to-day lives of what our students experience and our staff are really we're trying to help them to recognize that if you look at our equity model our equity model builds the equity is at the center which is what is best for all children and what gets to an equitable outcome but around the edges of all of that are all those elements which we know help inform what it means to be ready to learn to be to be seen to be heard to be valued we're trying to infuse that into what our teachers are doing with our students more broadly and and that that is one of the aspirations that we have so

075that students are really feeling like this is my community this is where i belong and the adults in that community develop an awareness and a set of skills to be able to make that something that extends through all day all parts of the day at some of the schools we already have seen some advanced work on that with for example king philip with its work in ruler where they really it's a part of the school culture and i think that would be a good model for what we might ultimately try to aspire to across the rest of the district and in the middle grades there's a great opportunity to really build that in as as part of day to day life looking at where there's cross there's intersections into literature there's intersections into our view

076on history and what does identity look like through each of those lenses but with that overlay of equity and an understanding that this is about helping young people to see themselves in the world and then in all the ways in which they are ready to learn can make themselves um you know their best they can work toward their best selves we really are trying to make it part of the full context that they're in and we had a meeting today with our secondary department supervisors because they're very hungry to really integrate this in all areas of teaching and learning so that it doesn't just live in that block and so we got some feedback from our students at the high school oh i don't know that it's all it always it's always right or always

077feels good to be connected to a science class right but you know we have a cult we have we expect that everybody has an individual responsibility for our collective vision and so it just can't fall on any one department any one teacher one area i would just like to touch on that and i would like to say that for the sel it's not even just a lesson it goes as far as a teacher saying oh how is the class feeling do you want an extension on this homework um i'll give you guys till saturday to do the homework so you guys can go to the football game tonight like it's it's so simple it's just to check in hey how are you guys feeling and since we're at kind of the the point in time

078where we're managing our own schedules we have work we have extracurriculars we have sports clubs etc it's just really nice and comforting to have a teacher just even check in on you send an email hey how are you feeling do you need an extension on this homework even just an email or a post on google classroom saying oh if you guys need anything i'm here and teachers see like what time we're submitting assignments they know we're submitting assignments at 11 59 when it's due at 12. they know what time we're submitting assignments they can see what time we're working at they know we have busy schedules and just a teacher saying if you need anything i'm here if you guys want an extension for the assignment to do to be due monday versus friday just

079being open and saying hey i'm here for you is just really comforting as a student and it just fits into that sel piece and it's not a lesson it's just fit into our day-to-day as a high school student we invite you to come visit our um any one of our building level community morning advisory or morning meetings i think you'll really get to see the experience that students are having in the development um mark so thank you for all the hard work you guys are doing specifically on the elementary piece again the k through two i see that you you've gotten involved with the library media and local communities in the um lbg lgbtq plus alliance were there any indications of the pto parents because we've gotten emails about that um around some of this

080on a k through two piece being a little too early for the children and i'm wondering if you had any parents involved in of of students in those grades for this curriculum that you're introducing yes no thanks for asking so we had um three different parent work groups at each building level yes we had k first second third we had every grade level represented in our work group and we put that out there several times in our newsletters as well inviting more perspectives what also came emerged from that was um the fifth grade we heard you know kind of more curiosity about the fifth grade puberty unit in human growth and development and so there were some links between those two which we brought back into and looked at our lessons around that as well

081and so we did have we did have parent voice we continue to have parent voice on that and you know there were multiple stakeholders not just our community partners not just our teachers but also a lot of parents i'm a member of our school's edi committee so i link within them too so i can hear their voices i'm sorry i didn't hear that i am also a member of my school's edi committee so that i link with them directly to hear their voices too there are multiple channels for that but we always want we don't want to leave anybody behind or anyone you know scratching their heads or curious or worried and so we're trying to do a better job with our outreach and we we see an opportunity for that through our one community

082network so that we can bring it back into the schools where our families are rather than in a large setting or having them to have to watch board meetings to make sense of it so you know we're still exploring all of those channels andrew and then lorna uh like everyone else who spoke and i i really appreciated the presentation and also hearing from fellow high school students because i know my experience in my community block at connor is definitely not representative of what every student is is engaging in because of how fluid the conversations can be um my question is about so i know most of the community block topics focus on ethnic and racial gender diversity and i'm curious if there if there's ever an aim to highlight differences in political ideologies because i

083know especially towards the upper grade levels that's something definitely some students are more comfortable with their uh their political ideology political identity than others um where there may be dis discussion uh less because of differences in and learning progression and more simply just because of differences in opinion that's a great question andrew and so while it's not we don't intend to politicize that environment it doesn't mean that it doesn't come up right because we are talking about real world issues we're talking about you know disparities in like health disparities we're talking about socioeconomic disparities and disproportionality so sometimes those things come up and that's why we subscribe to those norms because we want to be respectful but it is never our intent to politicize the environment or to impose our own adult views on students

084but we provide a way to hear um sometimes some of those political ideologies and to put them in their proper context in in respectful way if i could also andrew just this is one of those when we talk about inculcating into the curriculum as a former history department chair this is one of the things i've always been adamant that american government has to be everybody in the school in the same classes no separation based on anything so that there can be an honest um honest understanding of what you believe why you believe and that's why we go through the bill of rights that's why we go through what are your beliefs and there's so many different elements different teachers will use to look at what are the difference between liberal or conservative or how does

085that come about being and then those discussions so that's something that lends itself to a government class that when done well really really can inculcate this work in a way that you can have exceptional discussions you can't be afraid of it that's one of the things we have to be as teachers we can't be afraid of those discussions we can't be afraid of disagreement because that's how we learn so that's one of the things and we need to make sure we have those norms in place that okay it's okay to have somebody disagree with you that's the thing that we we can't feel personally violate because you don't agree with my beliefs we can try to make each other understand our beliefs and that's what class has to be that's what education has to be

086so i think like that's where we get the american government and then you look at u.s history i mean both required courses but then you look at the literature that we read and what is that all of those things and how that works together in this kind of liberal arts background piece that i hope we're doing well but i know we can get better at lorna thank you so much i have a comment or rather a question and then i'll follow it with a comment my question is from the information presented in the booklet here reference was made to opportunity gap and i know oftentimes you hear of achievement gap may you just share in a in as concrete way as possible what the difference is it's a rhetorical question but but just want it

087to be uh known for clarity for those that may not understand the difference between the two i mean i can cite many of them but opportunity gap look looking at our the complexion of some of our music ensembles or performing arts or who's you know on the athletic field or in the performance stage or who's going on to college what kinds of careers so just opportunities opportunities to really show and um advance toward your potential reach your potential and so it comes back to our motto clear paths bright futures and no limits and so that's a difference between the like making the grade right and really excelling so that you are free you're what recognizing yourself worth your humanity um and really soaring to be whatever it is that you aspire to be or maybe

088not even realizing that you have that potential but accessing your own spark that's that's the difference of opportunity and making sure that we can provide access to that but we've got to really help students to get there and recognize that in themselves wonderful thank you so much and and in the comment the comment is echoing what has already been shared very much appreciate this presentation and the work that's being done and for for you two very very proud of you too i'm proud of you because the things that you are speaking of and the confidence in which you're speaking about it in which there's some adults that are not able to do that and so hearing that you are taking the experiences you're having and sharing it with others that is powerful because as we

089know you're in 11th grade correct 12th grade senior oh hey all right senior all right so soon you will be leaving whps and you'll be in the real world and it's important all the more for you to take these lessons with you out there because in those moments that's where you will truly see the resilience you have within yourself and with that it's so wonderful to see the learning is going all the way down to our elementary school students because by the time they get to where these young people are boy talk about the resilience that we will have in their young people so thank you thank you and please continue to do all that you're doing thank you any other questions um avery i just shortly want to ask um and following up on

090the discussion of students being able to come here and speak what does teaching self-advocacy look like in the middle grade levels and how does that compare to the elementary school advocacy lessons and then connect to high school lessons what does that progression look like that's a fantastic question so um i think to mr morris point a moment ago one of the things that we're trying to do in the middle school advisory currently is trying to offer a skill set but also to talk about what it means to be one's true self to look at through that lens of identity and to think about what one's ideas are sort of maybe thinking through also what andrew's question was about understanding my own thinking first and really really clarifying my own values and then being able to

091go and uh speak about those to others in a way that is honoring their that they may have differences of opinion um we haven't really broached fully yet into where i think we need to go which is to give students more of a lens of what it means to advocate in an adult community we are talking about action what it means to take action and in our version of action at the middle school grades it means that i have really reconciled what my own feelings and thoughts are about some of the larger equity issues and then what is it that i feel compelled to do as a person who then with those ac those um ideals and those values in mind has a responsibility to whatever that may mean to me and then what giving

092options looking at a menu of options in ways that i might speak up i might take action to make this a more equitable community we have done some building around that but i do think there needs to be a little bit more attention given to what it means to be an advocate for myself more broadly so i think there's room for us to go further with that i think with human development too and you're certainly far greater expert with your background than i am the idea of empathy and this is where it's important that we don't just say okay we're doing the same thing here here here empathy is so late to develop and really it can come about at very young for some people and it can come about in their 20s for other

093people and it's not always their fault and that it's part of brain development i don't know if you want to talk about that a little bit too and just the importance of empathy but understanding we have to meet people where they are i mean with in terms of the brain development piece i don't know you know how deep you want me to go mr moore but uh how much time do we have i guess what i would say is you know we try to meet as with the elementary level lessons we try to meet people where we believe most are right and so in terms of the middle grades and as people move into young adulthood you all are are watching your peers you're looking around we're trying to foster and understanding that people move

094through that development in ways that aren't always the same but there is a need to start with looking at who i am and in context because i think that's a hard shift for people and developmentally that does take time and we need to help with that with we feel a responsibility to help with that and to give people opportunities to look outside of themselves because that is a slow process that moves through the middle grades and all the way into young adulthood but the more we offer opportunity to look at different points of view and perspectives the more we help to build people's empathy muscle and ask them to step outside of themselves in a way that is safe so we really try to build space for that thank you so much and if i

095may i really really appreciate how you mentioned options and i really hope that throughout all these different levels we can have so many different options for students to be able to be self-advocates in whatever capacity is at their level in comfort any other questions jason um so i wanted to um ask about the latinx community in particular here because um i'm i'm thinking about the the different ethnic makeup of west hartford and the latinx community here has roots in the caribbean and has you know uh also not just uh what we might think of as latino identity but also an afro-latino identity um and in in other you know other spaces a strictly speaking african-american curriculum wouldn't necessarily speak to those experiences right um and given the strength of those communities those af caribbean communities

096in um in central connecticut and in west hartford um it's made me curious how that is you know made apparent or how that how that connects um in the curriculum and sort of in relation to that is to think about the gender literacy that happens if if that can also affect language instruction in spanish uh because in spanish there are um gender you know uh conjugations and you know different ways that um that those binary gender constructions feel you know are a part of the language that the lgbtq community in latino communities have addressed in various ways um and you know just to think about those um those communities and to see that that level of awareness across those those different uh dimensions um you know i'm curious if that if if that is something

097that is um you know in the curriculum or what your experience is with that um and i think i think i want to leave it there so yeah thank you is it's not explicitly in the sel sj curriculum but it certainly has been something that has come up when we've talked about gender identity and the latinx community we have heard voices about how that's being reflected and so that's something that we're studying more but when it when you talk about the broader you know social studies curriculum i mean that is something that like you'll hear more from paul about that even in the next week we have a one community presentation on some updates not just legislative but some of some meaningful um revisions that we're making and considering just based on what we're learning

098about again who we are and who we serve and so we're really trying to leave no stones unturned there but it's not perfect but as we learn more and we hear more we try to do better not to not to oversimplify that but it is that is that peace when it comes to the latinx community it's something that just came up in the last week and talking with students and how they want to be reflected even you know the terminology latinx and what that means for different people it's very different and so that's just something we're trying to make sure that we understand so that we can honor it and respect it in its proper way just one other or a couple other points i would i would add we spent quite a bit of

099time talking about intersectionality with our students the last thing we want to do is land on the notion that there are these defined identities that this is the way to understand this identity group i think we've been down that road in education before we want our students to really feel like i get to be myself in all the ways that i embrace the various identities that i am we make sure we leave careful space for that um and that we really explore what that means uh and it is deeply personal and nuanced but also i would say that part of what we we had hoped would happen is beginning to happen rosina talked about meeting with our district our department supervisors we already see where this work is really beginning to stretch outside of community

100and the work that we're doing in this lane our world language world cultures you know program has a definite look at what it means to look at those identity lenses through the lines of cultural cultural aspects of the various languages that are taught and to make sure that it's not taught just as a skill set it's taught in context of identity and culture so i think it there are places where the the that conversation is being had yeah that's that's really helpful um so for my my my pause at the end i couldn't remember what there's one other thing i wanted to ask about sort of related to that and here's a you know kind of come back to the question but i was looking at the asian american pacific islander heritage month which has

101a different a really different kind of you know approach than many of the other ones which is a community panel and i'm i'm wondering a little bit about the history of that or that that choice and if that could even be reflected in some of the other areas um to have community panels because it sounds like there's some some listening going on and other community conversations so we heard from students uh last year during black history month that they really wanted to lead more of the black history month celebration and recognition they wanted to make sure that we were moving away from oppression and more agency and celebration of accomplishment but not lose sight of history a fuller more accurate narrative um and so our students led an amazing um panel discussion last year it

102was really really great at both high schools i think they connected virtually both high schools so it was the first time we were able to bring all of the students together at the high school level for program during advisory time and during community time so students then said we really like that that's a model that we should probably try to keep going um for the other heritage months we're here we want we love being heard and seen and we like to tell our story and share our experiences so that was inspired by that every time we have a model we try to a framework that we develop we try to hear from students about how it's working and ultimately we want to hear from our students i mean we i couldn't wait for us to

103i really value my colleagues but i couldn't wait to get to the finish line and hear from derek and juliana because that's what it's about that's who they are our why juliana i think you had you had something you wanted to add um i just wanted to touch and just say or recognize rather um i know at the high school level we not only have united states history as a graduation requirement that history requirement goes not only just u.s history there's u.s history through the african-american american experience and now i believe they merged african-american and adding on latino american studies and i think that's just a great opportunity in class that no other district really has and i would just like to say ms claremont does a stellar job teaching that class she does amazing

104it's not only engaging and enjoyable it's informative it's um not opinionated it's just straight out facts and it's it's a great class i really i honestly i've never not enjoyed any history class in west hartford ever i couldn't say that for any other subject but my history classes i have always enjoyed them i've always enjoyed my teachers and ms claremont was just like that cherry on top that class was amazing it just provided insight and information that i would not have known or just been introduced to had i not taken that class and i would just like to recognize that and just say that's an amazing program in class that's offered in west hartford and it's a great way to incorporate different ethnic groups and backgrounds into the curriculum in west hartford thank you any

105other questions um before i go back to avery amanda well thank you so much for your presentation it's so nice to hear from you juliana and derek especially and that was very powerful to hear the beginning of our equity policy read by our kids so thank you that was i wasn't expecting that and that was very touching one of the things that a couple of things i've noted throughout our conversation that we've been really following up on some of the conversations we had in the spring about how we wanted to include more student voice and how we wanted to be able to model when we how what it looks like to be a continuous improvement district and i'm hearing a lot of those things in this conversation which i'm really glad about and i wanted

106to tell you i appreciated in looking through the progression of how these pieces unfold at different levels that they're very thoughtful and i appreciated the detail that was included about that but what i just wanted to make one comment and some people have been are aware they've been writing about some issues around recovery in the community lately in an effort to try to support our parents so that hopefully we're also supporting our students and there's a concept in the recovery recovery community called playing the tape through and it's typically applied to substances where it helps people think about if you have one substance how will you feel after that would you be more prone to have another one and then what happens after that and it kind of trains your mind to follow the tape

107through to decide if you want to make that first choice thinking about how that will end and when i think about how that applies to our equity policy and the work that we're doing everything that we're talking about here is supporting children and their development and when we play that tape through what we're talking about is supported people and supported people create supported communities and when it comes particularly to the gender uh literacy program you know there what not not too long ago we had a statistic that wasn't specific to west hartford but in general that 70 percent of all the young people who died by suicide identified as transgender or lgbtq so by omitting that information when they were young and growing they died and so when we think about what we're doing by

108putting the gender literacy program into our young people's lives in a variety of ways not just the schools we're helping them to feel supported and grow so that they live and so the the work that we're talking about tonight is is really work of of life and death in many ways and when we think about it through all of the different elements that we've touched upon tonight that tape continues to play through that all of this work just keeps people feeling more and more supportive finding more and more ways to continue doing that and that's something that continues to me to lead directly to the mission that we aspire to which is why we put it at the top of the equity policy so i i really appreciate the depth of our conversation because it's

109really about our kids and their lives and if we keep thinking about how all of our decisions play through over the life of a student it's very significant and it just me makes this work all the more important when we remember what the stakes are so thank you for your commitment to that and for your student engagement in that and the support our community has given because it's been very significant so thank you and i will take one more question avery all right thank you so much i know i've spoken quite a lot um i actually do kind of want to circle back a bit to um anyways so i wanted to ask what sort of role do teachers um faculty at our schools who have these identities what role do they have in these

110community lessons panels these other programs that are branching out of this initiative and just to give some context i remember you were talking about miss hendrix leading lessons for faculty training leading up to the lgbtqia plus history month meeting but i remember in gsa we had one student teacher who was part of the lgbtq plus community who was at our school for a few months come in and talk to us and how big that impact was and how lucky we were as a group of just 20 students out of the near thousand at whole high school and the thousands in west hartford um and is there any way that the voices if they're comfortable with the voices of our faculty and like elder members of our community whose students can see themselves reflected in in

111real life um and be able to connect to and build those community connections between those specific groups is there any way that their voices are amplified by this program i hear a great suggestion in your question avery and so just to give you a little background some years ago our teachers started the lgbtq staff advisory because they too wanted to feel connected they wanted to feel safe they wanted to feel valued seen and heard and they'd done so much work to establish work conditions and environments for for their identities that um they once the equity and diversity council started they liked that model and wanted to really be a part of that and at that point they shifted from being a staff advisory to what's now called the lgbtq plus alliance because what they have

112done the work that they have done for themselves and each other as adults they wanted to translate that into our schools with our students and with our families too and recognizing you know different family structures diverse families and diverse identities and the intersectionality that dr rashford referenced and so they are very very very vocal and they are very instrumental in all of this work they're referenced in in the report as being consultants for us um so their voices are heard seen in many ways they are very open for those who are open to you know having giving a presentation or sharing their stories and their narratives they know that they have you know an open invitation to do that we don't compel them but i think we could probably be more thoughtful about how we

113welcome them invite them to the forefront because i agree with you students need to be able to see themselves in their educators so i i hear a good suggestion in that and maybe some way that we can communicate with our educators about the importance of their voices and their identities thank you and thank you to all of you for your presentation and particularly um to derek and juliana for being mature enough to come forward and and talk about your experiences and that's been very illuminating for me personally and i can tell for the other members of the board and hopefully for the members of the community who are watching this evening it brings to life all of the work that we've been doing here and that has been going on across the district led by

114dr haskins and it just makes me really proud and optimistic for our future so thank you [Applause] and we will move on to our next presentation state assessment results for literacy mathematics and science and i'll invite forward uh mr vicennes miss jones and ms mckiernan who will also provide us with information that makes us optimistic about our future i hope too good evening and thank you and like to welcome as you said uh kerry jones our director of elementary education and anne mckernan our director of secondary education i'm excited to have them join me at the table this afternoon or this evening excuse me it was afternoon earlier um i'll pay for that later give me a moment here figure out what i'm doing there we go um so i'm going to present on the

1152021 state assessment results and really the purpose of tonight's presentation is to give you information obviously on the outcomes for 2021 but more importantly to really talk about 2021's results as a new benchmark that we have as a district how we compare that benchmark to our previous performance to really understand the impact that the school shutdown had on us two years ago and then the movement into the various forms of instruction that we had across the district these outcomes uh you know the bottom line of it if if we were to aggregate all of the results together and and talk about you know what kind of uh what kind of an impact did it have overall uh just looking at it it would it would come very far from telling the whole story but i'll

116just share that with you kind of as an introduction just to get that out of the way overall it would be between four and five points lowered performance in ela and math if you combine it all together and didn't disaggregate for high needs students versus non-high needs didn't disaggregate for the type of learning model that students were in that that represents kind of the new benchmark um and it's difficult to find that comparative date at the state level because they're not combining it all together they're saying that it's very important to kind of to kind of look at it so we'll talk tonight we'll talk a little bit just to to bring you in because that's new you know normally we've come up here and it's kind of a very similar story uh each year

117we've had incremental gains over the last four or five years and our performance and we talk through what those gains are on a trajectory so we're going to back up a little bit we'll talk about the state context what the state is released for results we'll talk specifically about our results here in west hartford for literacy and math separately we'll talk about science as that's fewer grades and we'll open it up for questions if if i could just add one piece of context paul sorry and this is at the superintendent level in discussions with the state there it was very heated much of last year about whether there should be any assessment or not a lot of people arguing there can't be assessment during this covert year you know you know my take on assessment

118we have to know where people are i was one of the people arguing for that but then the question came about and very heated again this summer and into the early fall about you can't release this these scores because people use them to compare and the fact is this really isn't a time a year to compare districts were wildly different whether they were in or whether they weren't in as paul saying this has to be kind of a new benchmark forgetting and really thinking about this child okay what did this child do and quit this kind of this this this what is it so i mean there's a context for us that's important everybody here if we came forward and we saw a five-point growth five-point drop five-point drop yeah that's something you should be

119talking to us about we all know what this is with covid and so we really have to focus on what does this mean for our children on an individual level and how are we going to work with them going forward sorry excuse me but i appreciate what you're saying right is but you have the um distinct ability or distinct distinction to sit on the college board as well so does that translate like i understand what you're saying here but when those kids hit and they're applying for college is that understood there at that level too yeah it's absolutely understood and these these scores don't go into that that goes more towards the ap and sat as you know just to contextualize yes what happened nationally there there's different levels state levels we did well vis-a-vis

120the state nationally connecticutly connecticut certainly did exceptionally well vis-a-vis the country and then colleges have to utilize that to look at okay what was school like for this person what kind of benchmarks are there we're moving to it a uh far more of a test optional environment with schools but what are those schools going to look at then what was the coursework what was the potential that had been shown in grades previously because you also had a time where for much of the country for a two year period or a year and a half period you're looking at past failed grades and so what does that mean for admissions officers and that that's something that we're going to bring admissions officers and talk to our school counselors and talk to our kids as they are

121currently at schools to really look at what does that mean contextualized so i appreciate you asking that you know this moves forward too absolutely absolutely yeah and we'll we'll be presenting in a couple of weeks on our sat results and the and the impacts of covet you know the good news story just to give you a little preview is uh the impacts are not as pronounced on our sat so more to follow on that question really in about two weeks time i believe but in general to pick up where tom was talking about with uh you know the requests for waivers um just to give you some context just so to remind you 2018-19 was the last year that we did state assessments in in in the 1920 school year when schools shut down in

122the spring the state did receive a waiver from the feds that said that they could suspend the state testing program and they do need permission so it's not like it's not like we could just call up and ask the governor or ask the state department they had to go through the feds so they had that flexibility to suspend state testing for the uh 1920 school year and they were talking about and i believe they you know there was a lot of question i believe if i if i remember correctly they had petitioned the feds to potentially also get a suspension for last year and did not receive it what they did receive from the department of ed was a waiver from accountability so what they were so what that means is they were told you

123still have to give your state assessments but in terms of all of the rankings that happen across the state you're a turnaround school and you're not and the alliance districts and all those kinds of phraseologies the ratings on schools those things are not in place for last year and so in may typically we do a report called the profile and performance report or ppr it's like the report card for the schools the state assessment results will not be included in that for uh for last year and so that's so that's a report that comes much later in the year in terms of the test itself uh similar to what we said at ap for the for the year the format of the testing was the same so it reverted back to its original format they

124had the one year suspension and then the grade seven test for english language arts was exactly the same format the same scope the same item bank as had the grade 7 test been in previous years still adaptive still delivered on a computer and that's significant because as tom mentioned every school district approached its reopening uh on a completely different timeline completely different models um and and even us we had you know we had an initial model that we started with and then we adapted our model as we learned and grew throughout the year so even in even in a school year districts had different models so the notion that the tests were the same that's going to have a different impact across schools and that's why there's that disclaimer that the state's providing about trying

125to make interpretations and comparisons because the conditions are just so different and that made it difficult for the state to analyze so they have differences in reporting the results based on how they normally do normally the state will just report their overall results they'll break those results down into a high needs category and i'll remind the board and our listening audience at home high needs category are students with disabilities english language learners and students socioeconomically disadvantaged as identified by participation in the free and reduced lunch program that is what the high needs category is called by the state department of ed we also look you know we'll do a look uh because historically that you know we have a very important goal in the district to reduce our achievement gap so we'll look at performance

126across uh race and ethnicity but that's separate from what's called the high needs category so i just want to make sure so the state still looked at high needs but this year what they tried to do was they tried to break uh their analysis down into attendance categories and they're using names that sound familiar to us they're using like fully or mostly in person hybrid and remote but they're not basing that you know just to say that our remote program very very different than a remote program in another district they're basing that on in-person school attendance so if a child attended 75 or more of school in person last year they're calling them fully or mostly in person if a child attended between 25 and 75 percent that's a pretty wide range they're calling that

127child a hybrid learner that that may or may not be true i could have been simply truant from school uh in an in-person model but my score would get counted into a hybrid learner and then finally if us if a child attended school less than 25 in person last year there there is calling that child a remote learner and the state has to do that because while they did collect data from all the districts as to what the different models were and actually approved plans for every district including west hartford uh it's impossible for them you know they just weren't apples and apples so so they said hey we're just going to do this based on that methodology of attendance the the other thing to note before we get into it is that the state

128did provide a remote testing option now it's interesting because the test itself is delivered via computer but what they asked for was they asked all the students to come into school to take the test and that's for any number of reasons test security items you know and and even just to help to make sure you could take the test appropriately that the the technology worked they found that you know they weren't going to get the participation because they had some school districts that were potentially entirely remote or nearly entirely remote so they provided an at home a remote testing option but when they produce their report the one that i researched and referenced some pieces from and linked into to the west hartford report the only data analysis that they're releasing at this point in

129time is data for the students who were in person and a lot of that is you know psychometricians saying we just don't know enough about the conditions if we can if we can have any validity to to the other set of scores although we have reports for those students and we know what the outcomes are they're not doing their deep dive analysis so that's the larger picture of the state context and what i'll do is i'll just share a little bit about the results at the state level so that we can try to use those results to interpret and understand our new baseline and there are a lot of similarities between the trends the trends are fairly similar the numbers will be different our performance our achievement will be higher than the state's achievement levels

130but a lot of the trends that we see are reflected here what differs is really some of the numbers so this is really only got like three slides but there's a lot of information packed on this slide so i want to just take a couple of moments to kind of walk you through what's here you've got the four colors and the four colors as you can see blue is kind of the baseline blue is the 2018 2018-19 results for english language arts on the left math immediately to the right for the two main bodies of students students with high needs who typically had this performance that was lower and and all other students students without high needs students who are not identified with an iep not identified as an english language learner do not participate

131in free and reduced lunch and so these are the state results and you can see kind of the baseline for ela had been about 78 of students at goal the baseline over here had been about 71 percent of students at goal by comparison to about a 40 point or more gap for your high needs population the bars in red represent the performance of students whether they're in the high needs group or not in the high needs group who attended fully or mostly in person and so the first point of comparison as you can see is hey they're fairly close there's a slight gap it's about one or two points between students who are fully mostly in person and then you can see there's a more precipitous gap as you move out to the other colors

132and that really informs our decision this year about the importance of being in school you know this really makes it visual and numerical for you as to why you know we said we don't we you know a remote learning option um for for the the safety that we have provided in the building is going to be far superior and is going to ensure student learning at much higher levels you see that here the green bars are what the what the state is referring to as the hybrid group and you can see about a 10-point drop-off in general 10 or more points it gets more pronounced for your high needs population and then the purple bars represent students that they're classifying as remote learners now when we're doing the the comparisons for west hartford because you

133know uh this is this is all grades lumped together three through eight and because our elementary model probably more closely fit the state's definition of fully or mostly in person in our secondary model more closely fit the definition of hybrid i've when i've done our comparison that's coming up i've put those two groups together and so it's pretty simple if you did put these crew two groups together at the state level and even if you weighted them for the relative number of kids that were in each it's it's about anywhere somewhere in the neighborhood of a five-point drop for ela and about an eight-point drop for mathematics for both the high needs and the non-high needs groups for ela and math and then as you can see it's about 12 to 15 point drop in

134ela for um between remote and the baseline and it's a more significant drop between 16 and all the way up to 25 point gap in mathematics at the state level okay so we're gonna look at that same kind of analysis uh for west hartford um now i do have four bars here i don't know i kind of like the idea that they had four but um as i said i've combined our fully uh and mostly in person and hybrid groups together that are represented by this third bar so let me just tell you what's here uh the first bar that you'll see that's kind of i guess in light blue or aqua this is our 2018 2019 baseline same baseline uh that that the state used what's in gray to the right of it is

135the previous three year average and the reason i wanted to show you the previous three-year average is two-fold number one our 2018-19 scores were the highest scores that we've had we we've had a continued trajectory of improved performance both more so in mathematics than ela our ela had been had been fairly steady but if you lump it all together incrementally ticking up just a little bit and we had seen some marked improvement in mathematics as you can see in both bars so it's there to show that but it's also there to show kind of what an incremental change is so that you can get some sense of the size of the impact of the coveteer okay but really when we make the comparison it's good that this one's in gray because we're really going to

136kind of be comparing these different shades of blue all right so the third bar over in each group the third bar over is that students who attended our schools essentially in person whether they were in that hybrid model at the secondary level for most of the year or whether you know we brought our elementaries back sooner so these are our kids who attended school in person and then uh to the right of that are the kids who attended school remotely and so you can see at least in english language arts for the for the students not in high needs the gaps between our baseline performance are relatively small they're about half the size of the gaps that we see at the state level so our remote model definitely uh the way that we carried it

137out both at the elementary level and in the in the secondary level really and and you can look you can look at that even with the high needs students you see uh you actually see the this the slight over performance here uh among the high needs students but the gaps were more pronounced in math uh but they're about half that of the state level um and i think that's testimony to the to the model that we had into the effort of our teachers the gaps that you see for our in-person model and mind you we're combining these so when we just looked at the state level on the previous slide fully in person there was a one to two point gap hybrid learners a more substantial gap when we combine ours together it's it's pretty

138similar to the fully in person gap at least in ela whoops i'm sorry and maybe about five points here in math in both cases it's about half that of the state so that's telling us that by and large our models last year were relatively successful and that's probably all i want to say about comparisons because as tom said this is not really a report about comparing this is a report about what our new baseline is so with that a couple of other notes we do have the same significant gap uh between our high needs group and our non-height needs group it's about the same value that you see at the state level it's about 40 points sometimes it's a little better sometimes you know a little bit a little bit worse depending on if you're

139looking at ela versus math that gap did not uh did not significantly widen from past years we've we've always had a gap between our high needs learners and our non-high needs learners that we report on each year so the that gap did not get significantly worse students of color i didn't do a separate graph for them students of color did not have um the gaps between our performance for our students of color did not widen last year so uh that we take kind of as a grain of salt as good the average gap for our students of color is written in a report is around 21 points all right so it's about half that of the high needs group but that's a substantial gap and we know that we're continuing to work on that and

140so our baseline is essentially unchanged the good news is that over the course of the last four or five years we had been incrementally narrowing that gap so the fact that it did not widen this positive news story that's the big picture of our language arts and math results so i'll turn quickly to science and and we'll open it up for questions relatively relatively soon science is only the second year that they've been able to administer the science test they had a brand new test based on brand new standards it took them a few years to write the test they were able to give it once in 2018-19 this is the second administration the state results for the science test are not on the screen the state results for your reference were 50 50.3 or

141basically 50 percent of students at goal they were down one point from two years ago so they did not see a big impact in science overall overall if you combined all these together for west hartford we're at 69.3 and we're down almost a point we're down a fraction of a point from previous year we were at 70.1 so we did not have a big impact obviously our science results are higher they're about 20 points higher than the state we saw they saw hardly a a mark we saw hardly a mark we broke it out by grade level it's not surprising that we took a couple of points in grade five because as you know we prioritized math and literacy last year we said math and literacy teachers math and literacy and that's probably part of

142the reason why our gap in math and literacy is only about half of the state we did not see any significant difference between our hybrid versus our remote learners on the science assessment which is kind of interesting uh the state did see a pronounced gap they think i think it was in the neighborhood of 15 points or something like that and what we did see though so what the bad news story was is our high needs group they did that gap did widen for science it widened by about three and a half points uh only 42 percent of our students of our high needs group was at goal um and that that's a that's about that's a 38 point gap from students not in high needs so that gap widens slightly um and that's area

143for us to focus our efforts for context i apologize the science assessment is only given in these three grade levels 5 8 and 11 whereas the math and literacy are given in all of grades three through eight so just a quick comment um things that i expect you you know about you've heard about you've you've heard these things kind of referenced whether it be in the esser presentation or the opening of school presentation and many of these are things that we in terms of our ongoing efforts that we have board reports scheduled for to talk about our progress so tonight we're here to talk about our benchmark and then throughout the year a little bit later in the year as we get a little bit deeper into these efforts we'll be talking about our progress

144ultimately so that we can have reports at the next year that talk about where have we gone in terms of our acceleration of learning but we're doing a lot of work with our leadership team making sure that they understand the approach that we want them to take we want them to have a strong focus on academic content and grade level learning and we want them to scaffold and differentiate within that that's a very different approach than taking a remediation approach where you say okay well we're gonna start i'm not gonna start you in seventh grade even though you're a seventh grader i'm gonna start you halfway through sixth and just play you know i'm gonna try to i don't know what teach faster and never get there kind of a piece there's a lot to

145be said for how you set the expectation and then how you scaffold and pull kids up as you identify their need you're well aware of our effort and your support for math coaches we have math coaches at all levels in the district uh some being new at the secondary level and we're we're using them to support teaching and learning at all levels uh we've had a lot of training for our reading specialists and a reading team so that they can not just be expert interventionists with small pockets of kids but so that they can do cycles of coaching with teachers in their building so that we can get at tier one supports get at that scaffolding and get at that differentiation right at the classroom level uh we've made it a focus as teachers are

146doing their goals this year they've heard a lot of talk to uh about you need to get back to best instructional practices and you need to be able to balance the the needs of social emotional learning and setting a classroom environment with engaging all learners and establishing goals to focus learning and helping to make students thinking visible in the classroom they need to be able to do it both and that's a tall order and i give our teachers a lot of credit it's going to be a you know a multiple year effort to come out of this you know how we're funding a lot of this through esser funds we've increased our tutoring force significantly through both esser and title as well as other specialists and special educators to support our children and we have

147new resources that were that we're looking at some specific purchases that we made at the elementary level on our new screening tools based on best practices and lesson learned at the secondary level the iready assessment tool and it's not just an assessment it comes with teaching tools aligned to student performance so that you can have the right now kind of interventions we had been using that for a couple of years seen some really good gains within the secondary world so we brought those things into the elementary this year to uh to take advantage of that so those are the that's the short and sweet of it and uh love to entertain any questions or comments the board might have thank you so much uh questions mark yeah maybe i asked my question too early but

148um so you know because i was concerned about carrying the the learning deficit forward and it because you know you think about people that graduated in 2020 they probably got past that curve right you know and they were able to be successful on sats and things like that but now this this uh this graph moves forward right so that's really my concern um how the movement of this graph over the next few years and and i like how you talked about the ongoing efforts i'm curious how far you can get down into the details as far as you know i know when you're studying for sats you can be on the khan academy the cod academy will walk you through why and how potentially you got that wrong and where um your particular deficits are

149as if i understand khan academy correctly does this state assessment do the same so if we're finding a um is it vocabulary is it retention is it uh where are where are those where are the deficits and same in math is it is it in um multiplication is it in long division things like that does the state assessment get into that uh detail and if so can you move these resources and and attack appropriately so that those and by by student too so that those deficits that we do see albeit small but you know you move the graphs around there's still a deficit because you know we're in a continuous improvement environment and we kind of want to see that graph go up up but we also do know that we are in a pandemic

150so you have to understand that because had there not been a pandemic if we saw this i think this would be a different conversation and we'd be very very concerned um so can sure i can start and uh my team can chime in anything so first you're absolutely right that the uh that the s.a.t and the psat and all the suite and we do we do have those assessments uh for our ninth graders tenth graders eleventh graders i'll take the psat culminating and then they take the sat and they do a great job with being able to really break down performance of students to a very discreet level and there's a whole suite of tools and i and i share that just so the public can hear that and know that especially given the fact

151that i know our high schoolers just finished uh taking the psat in ninth grade 10th grade and 11th grade last week and so those results will be coming out directly to them and they'll have resources that they'll be available to them through khan academy free and the college board website uh that they'll be able to to make that very targeted practice our state assessments uh specifically in math and literacy historically have had something called assessment targets and when students get their score reports it breaks down not as finely as the sat does but but we used to get data that we could use instructionally which was the big thing which was the big complaint when the state assessments change over initially how can we as schools use this as a learning tool and there are

152typically in the neighborhood of eight or nine or to 12 learning targets that are that are associated within the four general domains each test is centered around four domains so literacy it's reading writing speaking and listening and research and then in math it's concepts and applications and communicating reasoning and problem solving and data analysis so i have not seen released assessment targets for this year yet but that's something that uh you know as they they've they've only had a limited um a limited release of data very different release of data than in previous years and one of the things that ajit who is the psych lead psychometrician of the state has talked about at a recent uh assessment accountability meeting that i sat in on they talked about the growth model and what the other

153thing they're working on is a two-year growth model typically if we're doing this we'd be talking to all of you about here's the amount of growth that kids made they don't have a two-year growth model currently so they're working on that estate so that they can provide the school districts with more information about what is this the reasonable and specific target both in terms of the measure of that amount of growth the number and then also in terms of what those targets are themselves so i need to be working more on geometry or more on you know operations with decimals as you were saying so historically we we have a foundation that we can build from because we know our past performance we kind of know where some of those hot spots are but we

154don't have the full uh details on that from the state as yet nor does any district what we do have and and can certainly yeah what we do have though uh mark which is great is we have our own district benchmarking assessment so our own diagnostic tools we administer fall winter and spring so at the elementary level we use have a new tool which the middle school has utilized for the past several years called iready it's a diagnostic benchmark it's new to us this year so parents tuning in at the elementary level it's new they've been using it at middle school but it helps us understand those four domains um so if you're even at k one and two where you don't have a state assessment we can know right away and those are the

155grade levels actually elementary we're most looking to see how can we boost our foundational mathematic skills because those are building blocks for those students who are heading down the road we didn't see as much of an impact at least in our own data at 345 in mathematics in our foundational mathematics data so this diagnostic we're currently just collecting the data now through the next few weeks and we're really excited to see how that new assessment is going to help us really uh narrow down and hone in so when we have a student who might have it's very specific so a student might have really strong skills in this one area but really have assets in this other area so we can hone in at the classroom level or with interventionists to say we've we've hired

156250 more hours worth of interventionist weekly through the esser funds those interventions can be targeted toward the very specific skills the students need it's not just a general intervention program it's work on the specific skill we know this group of students targeted has this need they can fly in this other area in the classroom so it's really going to help us be very specific and accelerate and not just keep students behind in the places so they'll catch up in the places they need to and keep moving forward in their classroom so we're really excited to have these great tools and additional staff our math staff is now almost on par with our literacy intervention staff which it's in past been almost half our math intervention staff so really thrilled to have the extra funding and

157tools to help us get there i'll give you one other aspect of the tool that we're talking about in math and and that is a teacher will give an assessment in this tool and it and the assessment will help break the children down into this group is really close or above grade level this one is at grade level this one is struggling a little bit below and here's two other groups and then it will provide direct resources for each group and that's one thing we want to get even better at using so we brought in i ready about three years ago it's helped us because it's very aligned to the state assessment it actually gives us much better information ultimately and more usable information and what we want the math coaches to do is to

158spend time with the teacher saying okay now we we see how the kids are breaking out we see the just in time kind of resources we can say uh you know these children are flying and here's how you can keep them going these children need some more here's but they're close and here's what they need to do and and then these children can do these things but they're well behind so we and immediate resources for them so get having to teach helping the teachers to work with the groups like that instead of maybe as much whole class we want to keep getting better at those and i think the math coaches are a big piece to help the teachers organize like that work through groups so we can get children just in time resources we

159have a similar tool in english language arts as well andrew i don't know how specific the results get as in like whether you know like which students are scoring what but i'd be interested to know um for the for like the um highest scores who have like been in like math quest or like accelerated math in the past whether they were also achieving around the same level or whether like the upper echelons of the range dipped as well yeah by and large we saw um in in that's a very secondary specific question for the audience at home where you've got levels of classes but math quest is one at the elementary level we saw that those students didn't have the same impact and the rationale is kind of simple most of those programs are teaching

160kids at a grade level above so when they're taking the state assessment they're still performing very very well on on the grade level material avery um i only have one question and this may seem a little bit repetitive to the question about the sct and ac and ap exam scores um it says gaps between students of color and the all students group did not widen the gap of approximately 21 points um does the all students group include both students of color with the same um parameters as the last one hispanic boxing's excluding asian students and do we have the data for white students is the gap wider between all students of color and white students than is for all students because that percent point might if so express a different reality sure so we we

161do we do have the ability to tease out the data any way that we'd like we can we can look at white students individually we can look at asian students individually students of color for the benefit of the audience is we've combined black students hispanic students students of two or more races and that general category for good bad or indifferent has been called students of color in the past we've done things where we've listed out separately each individual race categorization to demonstrate the performance of groups um the all students category is just all students so um historically depending on subject area and grade level uh your your white students or your asian students are typically like with ap you saw they were over represented relative to the number of threes they they have a higher

162uh percentage um than students of color in terms of passing so so and and therefore higher than 21 percent i couldn't quote you off top my head exactly what that was for this given year uh but certainly information that we have in that on the on the typically on the public domain where the where they'll have the trend data for uh the state assessments you can break it down and look at it like that what what we've chosen to do is because we don't we don't really want it to look like we're we're trying to compare um we don't think there's anything inherent in a person's race or ethnicity that that is assuming they're going to perform better or worse we want everyone to perform equally so what we've done is we've reported this is

163the gap between a particular group of students that is not performing at the same level as the average for the district and therefore we want that group we want to find the measures by which we can help that group of students perform at that level that's average with the district um you know you know so it's like not the competition between race and ethnicity but the expectation that all students can perform equally if we're able to clear those paths and that's something avery the state moved away from but it's something that's really important for us not just to look at scores but look at grades and i used to break down in history grades by race by teachers you could look at okay what what's at the root of this what's the cause of this

164without trying to problematize race is kind you know what i'm saying in terms of this because what happened i will delve into this because i i brought up during your last question i've i've thought about how to express it quicker so simpson's paradox we used to compare ourselves in like durgby and districts around the state and this is one of the things that people don't understand but i'm gonna say quick like if you take our white students vis-a-vis and other districts white students our students outperform if you take our students on free introduced lunch our students outperform if you take our students of color our students outperform vis-a-vis all these districts and then when you compare the test results their results are higher than ours how can that be if we performed in every subgroup

165it depends on what the percentage of the subgroup is and so that's that's something that it it it's one of those kind of damning things with statistics when you keep breaking them down into smaller and smaller levels so we do break it down we do look at that but how we report it out and how we talk about with staff and how we talk about with kids because the truth is it really comes down to that child now we need to look at it systemically as does the board do we have an issue and and do we have an issue vis-a-vis state and vis-a-vis nation but the score itself the work that we're doing and the reason we're investing is so that that child gets what they need that's kind of the competing interest here

166of testing and that's that's the national story of testing going back to the reagan administration really with um how testing gets weaponized in schools and with communities too so a fascinating question really to look at thank you so much for that clarification lorna thank yes thank you thank you question and as as the information was being shared i'm recalling previous years and in updates and information shared and please correct me if i'm wrong i recall that um one of the years it was shared that when the data was disaggregated in terms of addressing the achievement gap that it was noted it was more so attributed to socioeconomic status as opposed to race is that something that 100 and that's i mean that's really where the state has gone with the high needs group um they

167don't report they've they've lumped that because uh participation in free and reduced lunches is protected by privacy so they've lumped together students with disabilities english language learners and socioeconomically disadvantaged into a group and what they found across the state and what we talked about years ago really is that our performance gaps are most significant in our high needs groups if i take students of color as a group or asian students really any group of students and i say all right let me identify those students of color let me identify those students of whatever category that are in the high needs group and not in the high needs group and look at their performance separated on that those that are not in the high needs group perform extremely close to the all students group you know

168generally speaking it doesn't matter what your race ethnicity you know where you buy your sneakers any of that stuff doesn't matter if you're not in that high needs group you you all perform uh relatively close to those um third bar uh on this level over on the right hand side of the screen if you are in that group and and by and large where are our numbers um our most our most significant numbers um within this group when you when you desegregate it out you have a high percentage of students in the free and reduced lunch and then you have a high percentage of students who may be in that free and reduced lunch group who are also students with disabilities or who are also the intersectionality of it english language learners but at least

169there we understand um we understand and we can we can target if i'm an english language learner if i'm new to this country and if i'm learning the language um and i'm only reading you know three four or five grade levels below when i take a a literacy test that's on grade level i can expect there's going to be a gap in my performance and when i'm taking a math assessment that's by and large very language dense and the further along we get in our state assessments for mathematics the more density there is in terms of reading the problems i can expect that english language learners are going to have some struggles with that and then if i'm a student with disabilities you know my my struggle will be very will be very specific to

170whatever that disability categorization is and what my independent needs are but the reason i have an individualized education plan is because there's a known gap so we we expect all of those gaps and and our goal um is to really make sure that we've got the programming and the supports in place to us to be able to support these students over time because language proficiency and overcoming a learning disability they're not one year fixes they're things that are going to take multiple years so the real question is how do we support the students that are socioeconomically disadvantaged how do we provide the programming and the wrap around supports for students so that so that they can be successful in a shorter amount of time but you're absolutely right that are that are that are gaps

171for students of color if they're not in those groups are are very minimal thank you jason all right guys thank you so much for this presentation um i have two questions one is can you break down your understanding of the remote group um and if from if memory serves there were particular dimensions to those self-selected families that that chose remote and if that selection determined some of these some of these outcomes um the the the other question is um is in just to go back to the sel curriculum there's in high school there's financial literacy right um and i'm wondering if there's application for financial literacy in these earlier grades as a way of one addressing the sort of consciousness of of those of the economic disadvantage right but then also developing that kind of

172personal connection to why math matters as a as another way of connecting to the curriculum connecting to to those things if that happens in in those earlier grades already would be nice to know or you know so those those are the two questions thanks sure let me start with remote and i know i so i carry emotionally i know she's got a lot of this data probably still in her head one of the things just in terms of who made up the remote uh population it was uh more heavily populated with english language learners um i don't recall if it had a more significant students with disabilities disabilities and students i mean just off hand our latinx hispanic population was almost double our typical elementary population i know at the elementary level i can speak

173to that we had almost double our numbers of students with disabilities um our numbers of students with 504 plans as well so it definitely from a pre-reduced lunch what didn't impact us students were at home obviously not receiving but we did have many families who were getting free introduced lunch obviously through our pickup sites at the schools but it wasn't a something we collected per se in the remote learning environment uh so that was something we weren't tracking in any sort of way or keeping track of formally but but certainly our our population was a more high needs population as whole on whole it it's a fascinating research study that needs to be done nationwide each town it was different you talked to different towns about who made up their remote from city to suburban

174to rural it is a fascinating look at who made up the students that chose to be remote and so many issues that go into it and roughly about half of our open choice population population um was remote in elementary i'd like to also just add the um the particip there's a big caveat with the results of that particular group too and that is they had the lowest participation rate of all because if a parent kept a child home not to go to school then they parent did not want the child to go in to take the test and then some people did or did not want the child to participate online in the test so um that group had the lowest participation rate in the test so it's a little more skewed than our normal

175hey we have not even even our in-person students were in their 90 95 participation rates so just keep that in mind when you're thinking of this remote group that their participation was much much lower and therefore less reliable and um in terms of your the second half of your question jason um i mean the biggest thing i could i could probably say is you know one of the things when i think about how best supporting our socioeconomically disadvantaged families you know it's some of it's a question of and some of it kind of even spills into the question of uh remote school attendance or not and and the ability for families you know if i've got a we had we had an early release time the beginning of the year and if i so i've

176got a younger child at home i may need uh and they're going to be coming off and i can't get off work i can't adjust my schedule you know if all these kind of real life factors that impact us as human beings and adults children take up a different different role older siblings sometimes take up a different role that can impact how they attend school that can impact their connectedness to the school that can impact um what time looks like outside of the school day in support of academics um you know so schools you know it's a lot of the things that we were trying to do during the remote year last year trying to send home books bags of books we're always attempting to do that so that so that we can foster this

177you know this literacy rich environment in outside the school day but there are there are so many factors that kind of play into that it's a it's a phenomenally complex question that you raise and and something that schools are always on the lookout you know it just speaks to the importance of some of the wraparound supports that we offer you know whether that be the school social worker or our partnerships with community organizations like the bridge and all of these things uh because it's it's it's so much bigger than than just the classroom teacher and the student quick answer jason to your second part on why math matters for elementary children and our first unit in every grade level k5 is a community of mathematics which mary listener town my mathematics coordinator along with our

178math elementary math team have put together and it basically addresses why math matters why we need to become a community of mathematicians as as learners and in each of those units there are mathematicians who are honored celebrated books read in fact women mathematicians stem scientists and mathematicians to celebrate and from you know women men people of all race ethnicities and that's a very important start to both our community of scientists community mathematicians units start every single beginning of the year for every child child in our in our district liz just to piggyback off of jason's question i thought it was interesting that for the remote learning group the english wasn't as impacted as the math and i was wondering if you had any insights into that and then another part of that question is have

179you identified these students i mean i know you've identified them but are you working in school to maybe group some of the remote students especially in the area of math to to sort of supplement their learning this year and fill in those gaps sure so on the first question you know it's both in the west hartford trends and certainly in the state trends math was definitely more impacted than english language arts specifically in remote and i think there's there's two kind of common sense answers for that without getting you know crazy in grade level standards and all the first is that math is a much more sequential curriculum literacy is a much more cyclic curriculum you're circling back the text level is getting more complex but you're you know you're focused on similar themes that

180repeat themselves so so that all by itself is a is a bridge and a support for for learning um even under disrupted environment but the second thing i think that's probably very big is uh in my humble opinion i think i think it's complicated to teach mathematics remotely and i think i think some of that cyclic nature makes it easier you know sometimes in a more thematic approach for literacy instruction and language arts instruction especially at the upper grade levels as as students are third fourth fifth grade and they've got vocabulary you know they have a standing vocabulary it's more about some of the standards and authors craft and things that you can discuss they're able to they're you know doing so in a remote setting is probably a little bit easier than you know

181you think of your traditional math where there is some modeling that's happening and you're trying to get kids to begin to understand some algorithms and be able to follow the algorithm repeat it see the connections sure they're doing it through a video camera but it's it's it's it's a little bit more complex so i think that's going to be a reason why you're going to see a steeper decline in the mathematics for remote learners than you are going to see for for literacy and in terms of how we group them i would simply offer this some of that grouping is going to happen automatically as carrie and ann both aptly described we give a series of benchmark assessments um that are that are assessing where are kids like right in the here and now and

182and that window opens right now in the fall they're in the midst of that testing that's a supplement to the state assessment results they have on each kid they typically try to triangulate data between what am i seeing just in the classroom what did the state assessment tell me if there's state assessment data or spring assessment data on that child and then what is this fall assessment and i'm going to identify groups that i may need to intervene with some students need a tier one the classroom teacher can make some adjustments some students might need additional intervention at a tier two i'm going to plug them in with a tutor or a specialist some of your remote learners are gonna are gonna clump together naturally but we're not you know we're deliberately not trying to

183say anyone you know that's a remote learner you all need to go here for specialized instruction obvious you know for the obvious reasons because we have some students that do very well in the remote setting with some that didn't so we don't want that to be the only uh the only factor and that's really where we triangulate the data and we're using our our fall assessments could i respond quickly you know i i was thinking about the the the difference too in those in in those two um evaluations for the remote group and what kind of clicked for me was and what you were saying about you know that they were inconsistently testing right and so you have different people in that in that group testing and so that number isn't actually representative of of

184the group and is that right yeah yeah so and just that makes sense any other questions okay well thank you very much watch your heads alright we will move on to routine matters and approval of the minutes i am looking for a motion to approve the minutes from the october 5th regular board of education meeting so moved amanda aronson thank you amanda is there a second second uh seconded by mark any uh comments edits revisions to the minutes if not i will try your minds all those in favor of approval of the minutes please signify by saying aye aye any opposed say abstentions the eyes uh information and reports board members communications and reports are there any reports from other boards and organizations are there any other information or discussions okay non-staff communications and reports

185reports from student board representatives we'll start with avery thank you so much so um as per mr sanderowicz request i will be starting off with discussing sports so football is 5-0 having b east hartford simsbury ward southington and most recently platt this friday the team goes up against berlin so good luck warriors next the student spectators are now allowed to attend home volleyball matches which many students are happy about as that's one of our very popular sports to spectate hall's business and finance club deca is hosting a pink out day with boys soccer and football and all proceeds are going to the national breast cancer foundation um hall opens its first musical in decades the 25th annual putnam county spelling bee next week shows on october 28th the 29th and the 30th um and hall

186is offering students to seal it by literacy exam which is an exam awarded by the school that recognizes a student's language proficiency in two or more languages which can be given to employers or admissions offices and finally the senior planning qmas continue tuesday thursdays and fridays through november 23rd for parents to ask guidance counselors questions about post-secondary planning for their students thank you andrew i'll start by just saying uh as this noted earlier at the meeting uh freshman sophomores and juniors took the psat at connor last week on wednesday and um i don't have the specific numbers of participation for freshman and sophomore but i do know over 90 percent of juniors participated and that's obviously the most important year to do so um we also had student council elections last week so we now

187have a new board leadership board in that club and they did not publicize the number of voters but if conversation in classes social media and in-person campaigning with any indication there was definitely considerable interest um among all grade levels in in voting um we we had our first play uh we we do our musicals in the spring but we had our first play uh last week and that was also our new theater teacher's first play here miss hunter um and i heard that was a great success uh there were three shows for that i'll also highlight sports this time uh girls volleyball is doing extremely well at conor they're 13-1 having lost only one game 2-3 two sets to three and although girls field hockey is not nationally ranked they are also doing very well

188with a record of nine two and one and i know one of the losses was very close uh and then boys varsity golf finished sixth sixth place at the ciac d1 state championship and they were the ccc west golf champions so golf is also doing great uh we're having a club fair this week during the lunch waves outside um and so i know that's a great way for underclassmen and and even upperclassmen to get involved with different clubs and the final thing uh i'll highlight is that looking forward to um tomorrow and next week we're having our first indoor musical event since the pandemic started tomorrow for band and choir or abandoned orchestra and then choir will be next week on tuesday super thank you um before i move to future business i just want

189to note for the record that um our colleague dr steinberg is looking forward to rejoining us at the board table at our next meeting uh still a little bit under the weather and um being responsible and keeping her germs to herself at this point um future business announcement of future meeting dates our next meeting is wednesday november 3rd here at town hall and at 7 pm and note that that is a wednesday because the day before is election day so i'll just take the opportunity to remind everybody to go vote um if you um want to have your say in democracy and after that the next meeting is tuesday november 16th and that meeting will be at 6 00 pm which is also a change from our norm are there any requests for future agenda

190items and any comments from visitors left in the room no okay and we do not have an executive session and so i will take a motion to adjourn so uh thank you lorna and seconded by mark uh meeting is adjourned at 9 45. thank you everybody you