001foreign thank you foreign thank you [Music] foreign [Music] I don't know we can reconvene our meeting to open session the board has been in executive session since six o'clock to discuss Personnel matter and contractual matter if we could stand for the pledge I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States one nation under God indivisible with liberty introductions Dave Hurst Robert John Walston Jody Monroe Holly Dunbar Christine Beck Catherine natto John McPhillips and Willow bear and Meredith Moriarty are not able to be with us tonight um I think we might have some take students with us tonight your obligation is to stay with us until nine o'clock or if the meeting ends before that if we go until nine we'll take a break um at the when before you leave there are sign out
002cheeks that are sort of scattered around up here and you guys just need to sign out on one of them uh first up is our approval of minutes it is recommended by the superintendent at the Board of Education approved the minutes from the January 18 2023 regular board meeting so moved second uh any discussion all in favor all right any opposed any abstentions that passes item three meeting reports first is our superintendent's report thank you uh first I'd like to congratulate uh A.G irons he is our boys basketball coach and I don't know if everyone's aware he surpassed his 200th win for basketball last week so I'd like to congratulate him we have some poetry out loud winter winners with us this evening and so I'm going to ask Mr Rickert to come up and
003just give us a brief overview of what poetry out loud is and then he's going to introduce our two students who will do some poetry recitations for us yes thank you for having us um how tall are you all right I'll leave it right there so for those who don't know me thank you for having us it's uh my name is Andrew Rickert and I've had the great pleasure of serving as our poetry out loud supervisor here for the last six years so this past December we held our sixth annual High School poetry allowed competition and for those who don't know poetry out loud is a national recitation contest that requires students to not only commit a poem to memory but get at the deeper meeting of the poem so they dig for looking at
004the author's intent and um you know some trying to uh communicate that in their recitations so I've brought both our 2000 2023 champion and runner-up so first off we have Laurel Mensch who is our ninth grade representative she is our 2023 runner-up and a first timer in the competition and then we'll have a recitation from Pamela white who is our fourth uh four-time School champion and the reigning state champion of poetry out loud as well as a national finalist last year so she went all the way she was one of the top eight in the country for poetry out loud and represented us very highly so thank you again for having us and we'll start with Laurel just ice Immortal autumn by Archibald mcclash I speak this poem now with grave and level voice In
005Praise of autumn of the far horn winding fall I praise the flower Barren Fields the clouds the tall unanswering branches where the wind makes Sullen noise I praise the fall it is the Human season now no more the foreign sun does meddle at our Earth enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bow but now in Autumn with the black and Outcast crows share we the spacious world the whispering year is gone there is more room to live now the one secret Dawn comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded ghosts between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves and Winters covering of our hearts with his deep snow we are alone there are no evening Birds we know the naked Moon the tame
006Stars Circle at our Eaves it is the Human season on this sterile air do words out carry breath the sound goes on and on I hear a dead man's cry from Autumn long since gone I cry to you beyond upon this spitter air thank you Envy by Mary Lam this rose tree is not made to Bear the violet blue nor Lily Fair nor the sweet minionette and if this tree were discontent or wish to change its natural bent it all in vain would fret and if it fret one would suppose it Nair had seen its own red rose nor after gentle shower had ever smelled its Rose's scent or it could never be discontent with its own pretty flower like such a blind and senseless tree as I've imagined this to be all envious persons
007are with care and culture all may find some pretty flower in their own mind some talent that is rare thank you [Applause] and so they're going to be representing us at the regional Hudson Valley Community College where they'll be up against some of the best talent from our regional area on February the 24th and from there two Representatives will move on to the State final and uh so we wish them the very best and we thank you for recognizing today foreign thanks so much um and uh the last part of the superintendence report we had a presentation on reading back in the fall and the board had some follow-up questions so um Dave Hurst is hopefully going to answer those questions for you thank you so yeah some of the things that came out in
008the presentation in the fall initially we gave sort of a background on reading in general across the United States if you will so some folks had questions on what did it how did it evolve here what went into the decision-making process and then sort of where are we now so the first few slides I'm going to kind of try to get to that so if you go back um I figured 2000 is a good place to start so back in 2000 basically teachers developed their own units and they were aligned to the New York State Standards but we did not have a building level or a district level curriculum so teachers were basically able to use whatever resources they saw fit to teach to the standards around on the district develop pacing calendars that were
009aligned to the standards and developed a balanced literacy approach to approaching the standards so that meant using things like Words Their Way guided reading read aloud shared reading shared writing and Writers Workshop which came out of teachers college and that was sort of the precursor to 2006 adopting the teachers College writing units of study so that was just now we have at least one formal program to kind of overlay on top of those Concepts um and again 2014 we adopted the reading units of study again another component to lay on the top of those just again so that systematically all the teachers were now starting to use the same resources that's not to say that weren't they weren't still supplementing with other resources that had been developed um prior 2018 um we recognized that we
010needed a formal phonics unit of study again teachers not the teachers weren't um teaching phonics it's that again they were using their own materials so we made that again more systematic so here we are now teachers college did release a fully updated version of their units of study so one of the highlights of that which has sort of gotten a lot of negative press from their original iteration was that no longer do they use the 3Q system which is asking questions like does the word look right does it sound right does it make sense so they've moved away from that and it's become as you can see phonics was always part of their program it's just become sort of more structured we also at each grade level use teach Like A Champion book study so
011each grade level has a single book that they do a very in-depth analysis of and it involves both reading and writing to handle that and then we also have some supplemental Phonics work that we are looking at called Hagerty so this slide was presented but like all of these components um so we do have sort of our district core components which are the teachers college and I'll speak to some other areas but there to sort of hit at all of these items in the Scarborough rope um which is sort of analogous to in math we have um sort of computational thinking and then we also have conceptual understanding this sort of Falls along those same lines right the computational thinking is sort of your phonics and word recognition whereas your conceptual understanding is really your
012language comprehension so in some ways it is analogous to the way we math has been approached but we are really are putting a focus on early foundational reading skills phenomic awareness decoding including explicit phonics instruction encoding matching sounds to print morphology word study and again the ultimate goal is really to develop our students ability to understand imagine and think critically about text right to discuss and make reason text-based arguments and become motivated readers which is associated with better comprehension and the way we do that is through these different domains but really it's we we really focus on a lot of Developmental writing read write discuss revise formative summative prompts so as I mentioned for Reading Writing and phonics we are using the TC units of study notice phonics there's only a formal program for grades
013K2 we've seen through our data that 95 percent of our students are um fluent in phonics and phenomic awareness by the end of second grade so there are obviously still some third and maybe fourth graders with lagging skills that we do address but it's through typically at that point they're doing something like the Sunday program um for economic awareness again we also have Hagerty that we are using now um Kilpatrick's fast our past rather which is a phonological awareness screening test and decodable readers and then in terms of word work and spelling K5 we use words our way and then for grades three through five we do have a grades three through five spelling curriculum that was developed by our teachers and I'll explain a little bit more about the structure of how those types
014of things occur in a minute so here's just some snapshots of what some of our the teachers College units look like you can see that um I chose to focus on K1 and 2 because that seems to be where there were a lot of questions in terms of Phonics work and you can see that phonics and words work is is definitely embedded Within K1 and two you can see familiar um sounds and blends embedded within here so another question came up about well how exactly do we decide like what programs we're going to use are teachers involved do teachers get feedback in this process how how does that whole thing work so at the K5 level we do have a language arts cabinet all of our curricular areas have cabinets and those are sort of
015the decision-making bodies when it comes to curriculum and assessment for the primary or for the elementary level at the middle and high school level obviously we're departmentalized so those are the bodies that sort of make those same decisions but the cabinets um it doesn't matter the discipline but the cabinet this consists of the content area supervisor so in this case language arts each cabin has a principal liaison so Dan hash is a supervisor and Laura Heffernan is the liaison which is why they presented back in September um our elementary assistant principal for mtss because as you know tier one core instruction is what all students receive through the classroom programming obviously that's part of our mtss process so we need Jens feel to be involved and then each building has one primary level so it's
016K2 and one intermediate rates three through five representative and they meet they get feedback from their colleagues at their buildings they bring things back and when it comes to making curricular changes or assessment changes if we're going to do assessments say across the district that's the body that makes those decisions we also have monthly grade level meetings and we are rotating the supervisors through those meetings so they can have grade level specific discussions as well so you know this particular month kindergarten might have been with math first grade with pla second grade science and so forth and then each month they rotate through so that every Supervisor has a chance to meet with the entire grade level over the course of the year in terms of Assessments there was a question about what assessments do
017we use and what do the assessments actually measure so for grades three through five as you know we have the New York State Testing program which measures Reading Writing language speaking and listening I ready focuses solely on reading but it does measure phonological awareness phonics high frequency words vocabulary comprehension both literature and informational text um we've also implemented something called esgi which allows us to take really any type of assessment and build it into this platform which allows teachers to very quickly capture data this has been very very helpful in terms of our progress monitoring so some of the assessments that we've been using are segmenting syllables short long vowel sounds CVC words sight words blending short vowels and then final model teams and then finally we have Dibbles which again is another progress monitoring
018tool and also another diagnostic that we use after the i-Ready Benchmark for students that are in the um sort of the needy sort of low yellow to Red zones on the i-Ready assessments and those assessments are delivered by our reading teachers so that we have consistency regardless of what grade level within a building that the reading teachers are the only ones trained to do that so we get consistency and you can see that that deals with consonant names sounds vowels names and sounds spelling sounds reading and spelling so one of the things I did want to point out is that if you take a look at tcrwps a teacher's college reading and writing program so this is the year prior to covid how schools that use teachers College performed versus schools that did not or
019schools overall right so New York State under 50 percent of students were considered proficient in ela whereas of all the teachers College schools now that means the all is they might not have received any professional development they just purchased the books right um it's you can see it's about eight percentage points higher um than New York City and then the ones that are truly embedded with Teachers College where they come in like Troy is an example of a local District that does this Teachers College has people that are basically stationed there on a regular basis pushing into classrooms helping teachers really Implement with Fidelity and you can see that their success rate is even higher and just real quick review of our numbers because sometimes you start looking at these um you know and I'd
020mentioned this when I did my academic update they talk about sort of a national crisis in Reading um and math and we're just not seeing that here right our reading scores actually went up 7.4 percent from 2019 to now um so there was no sort of learning loss that everybody points to um which again that I think it's a horrible term I've mentioned this before you don't lose learning um you just might not have Advanced further quite as quickly but you're not going to lose learning but we're at about two-thirds of our students which is the 92nd percentile in the state based on New York state test results and our i-Ready is somewhat similar to keep in mind it's not Apples to Apples right the State Testing is reading listening other components whereas writing whereas
021iready is strictly reading also i-Ready we measure K through five whereas the state test is only three through five but they're fairly consistent in terms of what they're measuring and those I hope addressed most of the questions if there were others I will do my best to answer those questions yep Dave um the the teachers College proficiency slide that you had that made the comparisons what time frame was that that's the New York state test in May so just for the one year right okay well so yeah the new 2019 was the most I guess recent data that was so most people consider sort of obviously Overcoat the test wasn't given last year people try to stay away from making too many comparisons with it just because you're coming up with two years of no
022testing and so forth and was in 2019 included that increased the focus on the phonics is that if those schools I would assume most of those schools use those but 2018 is when the finance program came out and again that's not to say that phonics wasn't being taught it was just teachers were using their own phonics programs right by moving to the teachers College they blended with the writing the reading units and they gave everyone the same opportunity to teach phonics in a systematic way thank you yeah Catherine um I've got a couple questions but on this slide just to put a really really fine point on it you're saying that Bethlehem is one of the schools that has adopted the core we're in awe we received professional development when the kits first came out
023we had somebody coming here uh probably four to five times a year to work with our teachers um we haven't done that since covid but we do not have embedded people from Teachers College here on campus doing demo lessons um watching teachers coaching teachers so like schools like Troy have arrangements with that where they have dedicated people they're there all the time I'm sorry what year was that so the bulk of the professional development happened um it kind of in phases in 2000 um six seven there was quite a bit just around the writing units and then I would say and it was actually before the reading this even really came out it's probably like 13 14 at leading up to them us being adopted because we had adopted them they came out maybe in
0242012 we didn't adopt them fully until 14. so we had some teachers piloting them we got some feedback we did a lot of professional development and then 2014 with the cabinet fully adopted them for everybody and then the same thing with the phonics we had folks probably starting in 2016-ish piloting the phonics units getting feedback and then the cabinet moved to say yes this is the program we want to move forward with um in terms of that I have other questions um and then let me just say try to do some content guy with one of the board members who had asked and I really appreciate you putting this information together I know that there's it's in a lot of different places and um I appreciate your time and effort on this I mean one
025of the reasons this came out was because there was a big investigative journalism piece that resulted in a really interesting podcast called sold the story that was focusing on um a particular reading program that I believe uh you were referring to as including the three cues when you get we're giving you a presentation right um and so I was curious as to what's back on using that how are we using that how are we not using yes so that podcast was basically a direct shot at Teachers College program um I just want to be really careful so you know what was presented in that podcast um obviously there's truth to everything he was saying but there's also ways of framing the truth where you're leaving out other evidence right so um there have since been
026several articles from sort of independent reviewers that have sort of made counter arguments to a lot of what was presented in that podcast um not with the facts themselves but the way some of it was being presented um some of the the words that were used within it were very biased in that um it just it only painted one side of the story right so and Lucy Calkins agrees with parts of the podcast which is why she made um changes to her program but some of the even in some of the quotes they used for her it wasn't the full quote or it was taken out of context and she's since sort of explained well this is exactly why I've changed my program right um they almost painted it as if she never ever paid
027attention to phonics which absolutely is that is not the case whatsoever so there were some really there were some good truths in that podcast and Lucy actually who Lucy Calkins if you're not familiar is the one that sort of authored the teachers College units of study so she's made adjustments based on some of that not directly at podcast feedback but similar feedback from others right so good and I think with the the Crux of that are one of my biggest takeaways on that was the was the Leaning for her program to or the for for her program to be leaning into situational cues and clues for reading rather than digging deep in you know phonics and word decoding and and that part of part of reading what is what is better for students and what
028what is more successful for more students but then also what is going to help our our students who struggle the most with reading um so I guess as Bethlehem continues to evaluate this and one of the things I'm hearing in in your presentation tonight is like we are leaning into phonics we are leading we've always had phonics it's the matter otherwise so that's where you tell the tricky though so I mean we've always teachers have always used Finance as part of their core instruction it's just the degree to which varied from teacher to teacher right which is why we adopted the phonics units um and then in having used those for a few years now we're saying okay we have some students that that still is not doing the trick for right so we're looking
029at other phonics programs as well to help supplement that so Hagerty is one of them for students that are really struggling we have some students are taught using the Wilson approach some are taught using the Sunday which is very very prescriptive which is first um which is based on Orton Gillingham and there's a very rigid criteria to even sort of be identified for that program so thank you no thank you I appreciate that because some because because listening to you know listening to the podcast and getting into that it definitely raised a lot of questions about you know what is the what's the best approach for our students my my last question um when you would you go back to the assessment slide were you um not the charts but rather the sexual assessment of
030which ones with the Dibbles and whatnot oh yeah one of my favorites one of my favorite actors um so Dibbles if I remember am I remembering correctly that that's an in-person assessment that's the teacher so esgi and devils are both um one-on-one with the student cool and and our and Dibbles is for students who are struggling that's when we'll do a deeper assessment there esgis that also for those identified but we also use esgi to esgi to correct collect Baseline data on like our kindergarten students okay um so when we do our kindergarten screenings now we're using esgi esgi really is just a platform for housing assessments that are done face to face the difference being so the student would have say an iPad in front of them and it might show like the letter
031um a and the teacher will say read the letter in front of you and then the teacher's screen will be like yes or no and so they're tracking the data on there and a student just visually seeing it's kind of like flash cards got it but digital that way when the teacher is done all of the status in there and we have it yeah right right thank you I thank you I appreciate that I had a couple questions and obviously I've had three kids in the district that have had varying degrees of reading instruction that have changed over the years when did we introduce the hegarty um genetics this year yes so in the classroom right now do all teachers K2 use the same instruction for phonetics and introduction to reading skills okay and that's
032when did that start 2018 2018. um the only other question I really had was with regards to the explicit and direct instruction where we're using iready and we talked about this a little bit during the presentation we use iready for a lot of the diagnostic um review of a student's reading ability what are the teachers doing on an explicit direct one-on-one if it's not a student that needs additional help or AIS services so the teachers College units of study have assessments embedded within the program so teachers are assessing students constantly throughout the year so I mean one of the if you're in a classroom when you're seeing the work done many times teachers are conferring with individual students and we're working through what they're either reading what they're writing at the primary level working through
033sounds with students it's much more small group at the primary level but so they're they're constantly doing sort of formative assessment which is you know might be in small groups and then more detailed assessments at the end of units um there are assessments built into the program and then the I would say a real heavy piece of the assessment comes with the book study um but I'll share um maybe small Pages because I haven't like Snippets I can share out some pieces of what the students are exposed to when they're doing the book studies I think they'll give you a better idea of how deep the assessment is when they're doing that so A teacher is able to assess how a student is reading not that they can actually tell you what the words are
034that are in front of them but they can assess directly not comprehensive computer right okay um thank you I had just a couple one is um could you send the presentation out sure to the board especially I'm sure Willow and Meredith would like to see it but certainly that's easy a couple so the detail into the slides yeah for sure um and then the other one I think will also be um well hopefully is easy as well which is would you be able to send um send us a I don't know if there's a table of contents or some elaboration on what the units of study for the writing what what that consists of um kind of like what what's Encompass yeah I can send alongside I said I'll send along some samples of I
035think I can pull Reading Writing and phonics units of study some samples and then the [Music] um teach Like A Champion some pages from what a unit looks like in terms of working through those books sure okay go ahead would you go back to the Bethlehem assessments uh how we're doing awesome um I just want to point out like this is this is fantastic and our teachers are doing tremendous work in the classroom and they're being supported by a great administrators and um I just wanted to to say thanks and to be clear like when asking these questions as part of a part of a larger conversation it's part of understanding what is or isn't happening here and also just understanding um how do we make sure that we're continuing to grow those really successful
036successful blocks and what other ways either just by shining a light on things or asking questions or providing encouragement can I as a board member support programs that are going to continue to support our kids and again especially those that are struggling so deeply appreciate the time you put into this thanks Steve no no oh next up is our our board report and I just had two quick things um one I wanted to congratulate the cast and crew and directors and all the parents that participated in the um musical of middle school I had a chance to watch The Wizard of Oz and um and uh and I thought it was terrific and what it might be the um hopefully the last official outing for the Middle School auditorium as it is now and then
037second I saw that there will be information if it's not out already they'll be coming out about the lab school barbecue in March so keep an eye out for that information if that's something that feels to you anybody else or something go ahead I actually I don't know if I got out of order on the agenda can I ask one more question of the administration not on the reading button other topic sure is it an okay time go for it sorry thank you I just wanted to follow up um reached out we went in Albany County we went into you know the covet High Zone again and then out of the covet High Zone again which is fantastic um but in doing so maybe um want to follow back up on the air filters and
038air purifiers that were in that are in the classrooms um if I'm not mistaken Albany County granted us the funds or the purifiers themselves and I was just wondering if folks could speak to the replacement cycle of those like how often they have to be replaced are they up to date is there anything that we need to be considering for the budget or for anything else on those so um my understanding in speaking with Nick and John can add to this is the filters are supposed to last for five years in the current purifiers we have my understanding also is that the filters are quite expensive over 200 and so by the time that they would be replaced the machines probably would be not I'm not sure that we would it would be of value
039to replace the filters at that point um is that your understanding so the filters are actually roughly 200 excuse me 290 um 290 yeah yeah okay but I think the machines only were 450 or under 500 so the ROI depending on you know your machine and your filter component you know one of the things I want to stress in terms of the filters they're high-end filters almost like a HEPA filter um with various layers of of fair uh mesh and fabric for for collecting in particulate so it's not similar to your furnace filter that you sort of can see through their their high end so that's why the life expectancy is longer and that's probably why they're more expensive so then in a couple years we'll have a conversation about what to do about those
040cool so thank you and are they uh uh you know what I don't know if you don't have the answer to this now that's fine but are are they continuing that we have 500 of them are they largely operating well are we seeing them yeah the only thing I was the biggest um I think complaint when you try and put them on the higher levels they're just very loud in a classroom so they generally are on the lower uh middle range during the day just because of that are somewhat disruptive all right so are you considering not replacing them when the useful life is up in five years or I haven't even I haven't even thought about that oh no I was looking at you John because I I didn't know because you were saying
041they're like 500 a piece and to be determined um okay thank you thank you uh next we have our student reports do we have anybody here from the high school student Senate hi good evening recently in student Senate we've been continuing to plan our Snowball Dance which will be happening on February 11th and any high school student can purchase a ticket through my school books in advance for the dance they're ten dollars each and tickets will also be sold at the dance but because of the weather we do encourage our students to get them in advance so they don't have to be waiting and can just get right into the dance and additionally we have approved two new clubs for the school including dance club which their goal is to provide an inclusive environment for
042aspiring dancers and their friends so that they have a opportunity to learn and choreograph their own dances not determine based on if you have enough money to go to a private dance company we also approved and Jewish food Club will be happening where students will students will bring it will bring in various Jewish food Cuisine and other students will be able to try it and be able to try new food into new cultures food after school and we are also continuing to plan the eagle challenge in April so thank you thank you from the middle school student council here tonight supposed to be I'm supposed to talk next up is our presentation this evening and we have our state of the schools presentation by Ms Midland good evening so tonight we are doing our annual
043state of the schools presentation and the district's mission is to educate and prepare all students to reach their potential discover their purpose and be engaged community members tonight in the state of the schools I want to touch a little bit on covid and what the year is looking like this year our strategic plan and annual goals School the school climate survey some safety updates where we are with our Capital project enrollment projections and this is really the kickoff to our budget development process so what guides our decision making we have a five-year strategic plan which I'll talk a little bit more about uh that we help develop our annual goals and action plan and that guides our budget development however we've also learned through covid that we need to be prepared to expect the unexpected
044so you'll see in tonight's presentation we've had to make some shifts in some of our planning as we move forward in regards to covid I am happy to say this year has been uh much more of a typical school year our student clubs and activities Athletics our musicals have all returned with no restrictions there's definitely a noticeable difference in the hallways in the cafeterias in the classrooms and certainly we still have our challenges uh as Catherine just said we still have covid around we've also seen increases in flu and other respiratory viruses so although our attendance rates are certainly better than they have been in the past there are still impacts to attendance because of some of the illnesses particularly in late fall and continuing into winter in regards to the Strategic plan we implemented
045our strategic plan back in 2018-19 as a five-year plan our mission statement as I just read we updated and we adopted four core values of academics character community and wellness with covid as I mentioned we have to turn a little bit and change so we did revise our goals and reset our metrics and now our strategic plan for five years is from 2021 to 2026. it does include 53 metrics which I'll touch on shortly to help us measure progress and identify areas for improvement our first core value of academics instructional and assessment practices that are aligned to a strong and relevant curriculum has 23 measures that we're targeting as we move forward and I'm not going to go through all of these I think everyone is familiar with the metrics but I do want to
046point out a couple of things in our academic metrics we are generally measuring assessment data so we're Dr Hurst mentioned the iready data that is our primary diagnostic data for grades three through eight and if you recall at the onset of our strategic plan and metrics we did include the three through eight New York State assessment data and Ela and math uh but if you recall also the assessments were changing quite a bit we had a lot of opt-outs during a period of time and so we decided to go with iready which is a nationally norm-based diagnostic assessment is our data we certainly can revisit the state assessment data if it com becomes more reliable in the future when we look at our high school data you'll notice that much of that is based on
047our Regents results and we did have to do a bit of a reset with much of this data because we had data that we again developed back in 2018-19 and set our Baseline based on generally a two to three year average with covid we didn't have many of these assessments so we set a new Baseline we have an actual measure and then we have targeted measures so I think we talked about this quite a bit last year with our administrative team during our summer Retreat really I think after this year we'll have a better Baseline to consider and perhaps we'll still need to make some adjustments with our Target data but we're kind of doing the best we can with some ongoing challenges still with the pandemic that's all right um the one thing I
048want to point out on this slide is when we're looking at our assessment data we are targeting specifically achievement gaps and our gen our largest achievement gaps we've seen historically has been with our special ed population and our economically disadvantaged population so that is an area particularly when Ela that we did see an increased Gap in again it's still you know going through the pandemic some of those students were challenged to receive some of the instruction when we were remote we also only have that data currently for grades three through eight because we didn't have Regents exams for a couple of years so we'll look at revisit that at the end of this year as well moving on to character positive character traits are essential to becoming contributing members of society and we have three
049data points that we're looking at under character uh one of the areas that is a big emphasis of the district uh is to look at extracurricular participation there's tons of evidence that indicate students who are involved outside of the classroom are more successful in school so we do have that and that's directly reported from students from the student climate survey which we just administered and I'll talk a little bit more about in the next few slides we also look at our Dasa Invader incidents again with covid those were probably a little off so we'll need to reset those at the end of this year and we do also track students who are registered to vote through our social studies Department on to community our goal is to strengthen family school and Community Partnerships through transparent
050communication we have five data points that we measure in this particular area the top area is done through our budget exit survey it's a question that people who complete the survey are asked to rate the quality of Education provided by the school district as outstanding excellent or very good we also track the number of Voters you can see last year we did have an increase in the number of people turning out to vote in the school budget and the percent of a favorable budget vote we track the community service hours relates to our students and also the number of community members receiving information from the school district and that's taken from school messenger which we are also going to be changing for the coming year and I'll talk about that during the presentation as well
051and finally Wellness enhancing social emotional wellness and balance for students and staff by supporting active Healthy Lifestyles and promoting positive behavior in this particular category we are actually tracking 22 measures most of which come from our student climate survey so this generally is students reporting out in this particular area of metrics these are questions directly from the student climate survey where students report how they feel about a particular statement you can see that our goal is to increase these we'd like to generally get most of those above 90 percent down the road so the one good thing I'll mention just about the student climate survey and we'll talk a little bit more about that later on in the presentation is despite covid we did the survey last year and we actually did not see a
052tremendous negative impact with much of the climate survey the other piece of this area is in attendance and I just want to mention with attendance that because of covid these numbers are will definitely need to be reset because this data is from last year you can see the significant spike in chronic absenteeism but we that's how we had to track it so I think at the end of this year we'll have to get go back and revisit those numbers and that will probably be our starting point moving forward and tracking that information even though I do anticipate that our attendance rates will still be a bit higher than they were or absenteeism rates will be a bit higher than they were prior to covid but I think we need to kind of get a number
053and move forward with that this area is also where we track our suspension data again through covid these numbers we wanted to take a look at at the end of this year to get a better Baseline we do again track these and break them up by students with disabilities and are economically disadvantaged students because those are also the two subgroups that we tend to see higher suspension rates with as well and moving on to our annual goals one of the things that I think covid taught all of us is that more is not always better and streamlining things with more of an emphasis in Focus probably is where we should land and so this year what we decided to do instead of having a lot of different goals is to have three goals that are
054outlined here that all the schools and all of the staff can get behind in support in goal one which is to cultivate culturally responsive faculty staff and classrooms you'll see we identified specific areas and actions under each of our core values of academics character community and Wellness and to highlight some of the action steps for professional development in our first goal all staff will participate in targeted culturally responsive learning we're looking to do Equity or learning walks which are walk-throughs in classrooms using a culturally responsible responsive classroom checklist and looking at our healthy environments where lessons classroom building and buses that encourage student interaction in regards to some of the professional development that has taken place this year we've done fundamentals of diversity Equity of inclusion the impact of micro micro aggressions addressing unconscious bias
055language or gender training Equitable practices in the classroom and also grade level book studies the equity learning walks that I mentioned basically are walk-throughs in classrooms and in buildings to look at what we see and what we hear happening and it's a short video that highlights some students talking about diversity equity and inclusion in the year 2022 where we have recognized the obstacles that students face in education the importance of diversity becomes prominent we as students deserve to see and feel representation not just in our student body but also among the staff I feel that a lot of high school students nowadays really struggle to feel like they're accepted and welcomed into their communities regardless of what they look like when you don't see anyone who looks like you it's sort of a feeling like
056like I shouldn't be here and there's nothing to corroborate or support the idea that you it's it's okay to be here it's okay to exist they didn't see what I was capable of they just saw me for the IEP that I had a disability our generation will be the next Senators lawyers doctors Architects and professors until then it is up to our Educators to ensure that we are equipped with the tools and skills to maintain the promise of the American dream I really do feel like education is the basis of improvement and without an educated Community you're going to have a hateful Community give the students the building blocks give the environment and the people within the community the building blocks to be able to succeed I feel like a sense like a signal to
057the child of like someone is rooting for you in order to get a multi-faceted and comprehensive education you need to have a multi-faceted and comprehensive cultural perspective teachers have to be open to learning about their students it makes us seen and you know it doesn't only make a scene it makes us feel seen as we highlight the immense impact that equity in our environments has made on our youth it is important to note that our mission is not done having a diverse staff is the most necessary thing that you need in order to establish diversity to establish equity and to establish inclusion and to really help students of color feel seen feel heard and be seen and be heard it's a very nice feeling being able to walk into one of my classrooms and seeing
058a guy who has experienced the things I have who has that same cultural knowledge as I do and if more kids had people who they could identify with I feel like they would open up quicker which would lead to better results in school we will continue to strive to positively impact our students learning experiences by implementing as diverse of a culture that we can for future leading generations of our country if we don't address the topic then we doesn't really get talked about you have to be willing to unlearn and relearn you're supposed to be trying to get us to express ourselves out in the real world how are we able to do that without having it in the school I see diversity through different types of people and you know each person has a
059different experience I need people to understand that deaf people are on the same level as hearing people we're not different we just can't hear that's all we're getting to know other people and how like learning things about them makes me like learn about myself there are those who have a mindset that's willing to change and if you could at least get through to those people it's worth it and it's worth going through knowing that you know my younger sister and my younger cousins won't have that experience or if they do it'll be less frequent finally I would like to thank you for listening to our student voices and understanding that as a listener you are contributing to furthering the potential that every single student has to succeed thank you and I don't know if you
060recognize the background was our library four of our students participated in the making of that video so I thought they did a great job [Music] in the okay on to healthy environments looking at lessons in classrooms that encourage student interaction so some of the things that we've done to date we've had high school students do read alouds visiting Elementary School adding a more diverse age-appropriate reading Collections and in seventh and eighth grade we'll be presented by Capital rep with Harriet tells it like it is our next goal of increasing academic rigor here some of the action steps that we plan to do or have already completed related to this particular goal and to highlight some of those uh Dave talked a little bit about this you've heard a lot about tier one instruction where we
061setting expectations for what every student receives in the classroom and highlighting our best practices and sharing of best practices for all students to be able to succeed and just as a reminder of tier one versus tier two and three again tier one is core instruction for all students that is what the majority of students would receive tier two instruction students may need a little extra that could happen in the classroom or out of the classroom generally in the classroom with a provider perhaps pushing in in tier three is very small percentage of students one to five percent who really need that small group in or one-on-one interaction with intense intervention services quality tier one instruction some of the things that in Bethlehem you heard a lot about our reading program so to highlight some of
062the other areas our science teachers are implementing new curriculum aligned to the New York State Standards we also in talking about math we all had in addition to i-Ready our teachers are using Tang math and First in Math our subject supervisors are holding the grade level meetings with elementary teachers to work on curriculum and assessment and align teachers the use of specified curriculum and we have 10 Elementary co-taught teams who are reviewing i-Ready data New York State data esgi achievement Gap data to also develop targeted classroom interventions for individual student interventions we this year I think this was talked about a little bit in the reading presentation but we've spent a lot of time focusing on our youngest Learners in kindergarten we're currently began in September where all students were getting intervention in for reading
063occupational therapy speech and language in social emotional teaching within the classroom also the speech Department in motor speech and motor Department are working on intervention service interventions related to research-based strategies for our youngest learning if you went into a Kindergarten class this year in the fall particularly you would see kindergarten centers focusing on problem solving cooperative play motor skills and reading and writing onto our older Learners you saw this slide in the academic update I think it's a testament to our students and our staff we have the highest participation rate of students taking and challenging themselves with AP courses and I think more importantly we have the highest success rate in students achieving a three four or five on these exams talking a little bit more about tier one best practices for our social emotional
064curriculum and I think there we're seeing some positive results with this based on our climate survey results this year we did also introduce What's called the past survey it's similar to a climate survey except it's used for all students K through 12 and it's really focused on how is the student feeling how is the student feeling about school and we're administering that in the fall in the spring so we'll see how those results compare to the climate survey just on grades 5 through 12 we administered in January our community our continuous Improvement at the elementary level is identifying best research-based instructional practice using data The Continuous Improvement at our secondary level is centered on grading for equity also our secondary ELA teachers are updating their scope and sequence templates created by the elementary school teacher
065so there's a Continuum K-12 and our science cabinet has created assessment rubrics which are specific to the new science curriculum and lessons using a one through four scale and finally our nurses have been working on updating some of our seizure resources for teachers to use in working with students who have seizure disorders also with healthy environments so if you aside from this room if you go around many of our buildings you'll see a lot of new furniture flexible Furniture which allows students to participate in more collaboration and just be in a more aesthetically pleasing learning environment cell phone use also is an area that we're looking at currently Elementary and Middle School devices are not used during the school day at the high school we ask students to put their phones in a sleeve in
066the classroom while instruction is taking place students are however looking are able to still use phones in the hallways study halls lunch and Library so one of the things we are currently looking at are called Yonder pouches they're currently used in more than 1 000 schools are we have had some students and staff visit a local school and be in they've been in touch with some other schools who've implemented this essentially what would happen is if we implement this students would receive a pouch all their devices would go in those at the beginning of the day it would remain locked through the day and at the end of the day when they leave or if they left during the school day it would be unlocked our third goal of increasing Community engagement increasing Community engagement
067identified here are some of the things we're doing in this goal and to highlight some of those experiential learning our goal is to provide more experiential opportunities for students and community service one of the areas that kind of came out of covid was to try and engage our older students our high school students to do more community service in our elementary schools or middle school when possible we're also looking to expand recruitment pathways and increase we have and continue to increase accessible communication including translation services and ADA compliance we also are re-establishing the Green Team and many of those efforts and our goal in community engagement is to reach out to our parents and community members to try and engage them back in our school Community because for the last couple of years that really
068hasn't been much of an opportunity so some of the opportunities our students have had these are high school opportunities where we've had guest speakers in our science series as well as in our Excel program to talk to students about their personal experiences or their Pathways in their careers uh lab school is also a program in the high school that involves experiential learning but also brings in a sense of community so there's a short little video uh from the president of lab school I'm the president of lab school and here are three reasons why I think life school has helped me at BC reason number one lab school helps you establish a community within the high school this community slash family will stay with you all the way up until your senior year reason number two
069lab school allows you to step outside of the high school learning environment and participate in other learning activities such as field trips or community service reason number three lab school gives you a huge leg up on your research experience I was never confident with writing or presenting personally I am now able to write eight to ten pages and give an 8-minute presentation on a topic of my choice confidently because of lab school and those are the three reasons why I think lab school has been a great fit for me at BC uh this photo is actually a picture of some of our high schools it's all right trying to move me along um uh out of our high school students who went to hammer Grill to talk about their personal immigration Journeys uh this is
070part of the fourth grade curriculum on immigration uh in elementary school I mentioned expanding our recruitment Pathways so we are working uh on an agreement with Clarkson for potentially creating a teacher Residency program at BC this could offer a full year of classroom apprenticeship for pre-service teachers they would work an entire year alongside a highly trained Mentor teacher and teacher residency programs usually require candidates commit to teach in school for a minimum of three years accessibility I think everyone is aware we launched a new website in the spring of 2022 we're striving to ensure the district website is accessible to all individuals including those with visual hearing motor or cognitive disabilities most of the information is HTML not all of it which can be used for with screen Reaver screen readers and we are working
071to improve our translation services currently the website translation is available in 18 languages I mentioned earlier in the presentation we currently use School messenger is our means of communication with our parents and community members who sign up we are looking to transition to something called parent Square which will streamline the way families receive and share information with the district and the school and staff it's a little more visually appearing it's appealing it's user friendly it has real-time translation in over a hundred languages we're looking to roll this out in the spring of 2023 and have it be fully in use for 2023-24 and we have a short little video just highlighting what parent Square does parents are busy and they're getting school information from everywhere teacher apps School texts email newsletters District calls backpack Flyers
072too many methods too many places to look schools don't know if they're getting through all this clutter and noise who is saying what if family contact information is current and who's not being reached wouldn't it be better if everything was in one place so you and your families could be sure nothing and no one is missed it's time to get organized to get unified welcome to parent Square parent Square unifies family Communications from the district office to the classroom all in a single platform from district-wide alerts to individual parent teacher messages parent squares Communications tools are built to work together not piece together staff have to learn only one system parents find everything in one account it's more than messages it's also School services that rely on two-way Communications like filling out forms scheduling conferences
073excusing absences and responding to progress reports all fully integrated so parents can reply by web or app and Miss nothing administrators also miss nothing usage and participation reports let them know who's not being reached and help improve Communications equity and they can trust contacts and messages will stay private and secure tools also increase engagement and family connections with parent Square's unique ability to verify and flag updates to contact details parents can pick preferred ways of being reached and use any of their phone numbers or email addresses to log in that gives parents control and school's confidence important messages make it through with parent Square schools get a unified communications platform that saves time they stay in touch with families easily and consistently parents have just one login account to find information and communicate with schools
074and teachers they're more satisfied and involved parent Square all of your family interactions in one place parents are busy man they're regarding uh being involved this year we had our first ever BC Spirit run it was very success successful it was on uh Veterans Day it was a Friday it was great weather and we hope that we will be able to continue this moving forward in the future and we are uh back to our green efforts generally in the district that was somewhat on hold during covid our lab school students presented to Elementary on recycling are reusable trays and metal flatware are being used now in our elementary schools and uh in the middle school we are returning to composting we had an American recycles day at the farmers market and we're participating with the
075town in the first annual giveaway weekend which helps neighbors connect to recycle and reuse items around town and the middle school if you're not familiar with the scarecrows this obviously uh is a huge Community attraction people go to the middle school just to see all the scarecrows so here's a little just clip of students making the scarecrows this fall [Music] it's always very fun because the whole Community loves to see the scarecrows team building and like being able to spend time with your friends is Bob I don't know if they all get names or not uh so moving on to the school climate survey uh we just completed this in January the school climate survey is feedback that helps us better understand the perceptions of students staff and parents monitors progress as part of our
076strategic plan as I mentioned in the metrics I shared a little while ago helps us adapt to shifting needs and helps us make data-driven decision making this year we had over 3 200 surveys completed over 2200 of those were our students again this is for grades 5 through 12. that's the grade levels the surveys designed for seven almost 800 parents in over 200 staff we use Ed Vistas to administer the survey so it's easily collectible and easily able to disaggregate the data and the data is still being reviewed because we just did just close that survey a week ago and preliminary data that measures positivity is showing I'll go over in just a second so the way the climate survey is broken up is in three categories and safe and supportive schools under engagement safety
077and environment and this data is reported in what's called positivity reports so for example one of the statements that students respond to under relationships is my teachers help me feel good about myself a positive response obviously in this statement would be strongly agree or agree under safety a statement that students respond to is I sometimes stay home because I don't feel safe at this school obviously a positive response would be disagree or strongly disagree on that statement and then that is broken up in disaggregated into positive responses overall so under engagement we have cultural and Linguistics competence relationships and school participation last year when we administered this survey and we did debate whether or not we should because it was a challenging year but we still saw generally very positive responses so in 2019 through
078this year we've seen a little variation in the overall responses from our students which is a good good sign an environment this is broken down into physical environment instructional mental health as as well as discipline again we've seen consistent results over the course of the last three years and how students respond to questions related to these four categories safety is broken down into emotional safety physical safety bullying and cyber bullying substance abuse and emergency Readiness these again have been very consistent you'll see the one area substance abuse has actually improved since 2019-20 in the student responses and going along with safety just to highlight some school safety because I know that there's been a lot of questions related to this back in the fall we did hold a safety panel we talked about some of
079the drills that we do on a regular basis at all levels I also want to remind everyone that we have a district level safety plan which is available to the public on our website this is updated annually and this also provides the framework for building level emergency response plans there's a district-wide safety team and then there's also building level safety teams at the building level safety teams and the plans these are confidential they are not available to the public but they are shared with law enforcement their detailed plans for each building they include things such as building Maps emergency procedures contact information incident guides and evacuation and reunification plans an example some of the district some of the events that we plan for are listed here and many people don't often think of these as
080safety plan issues but they we plan for all of those with First Responders here's an example of a building level plan if there was a severe weather emergency so we identify what the school district's role is what the community's role is and then you'll see in the action guidelines who's responsible and what action steps should be taken for that this particular emergency some of the security upgrades we've done over the last few years and continuing uh moving forward or looking at making our entrances more safe and secure the general recommendation is to have a two uh two-door entrance system with a protocol for scanning people in which we've done at most of our buildings and are looking to do that I was part of the next Bond every classroom door has been retrofitted so there's
081immediate shut and lock feature our security badges which we all have offer more control they've been upgraded and access we also have improved camera access and those are also integrated with our badge system and our maintenance teams respond immediately to any issues with doors or windows that are not closing or locking appropriately just recently we also did hire a firm to conduct an audit of the district focusing on access to all School District buildings and grounds security monitoring Communications and Emergency Management plans so we'll be getting a report from reports from them I would imagine within the next few weeks in regards to some of our technology upgrades now all classrooms phones can dial 9-1-1 that wasn't the case in the past also if a 9-1-1 call is made anyone on the safety team is
082alerted with a text message as well as when a lockdown is called we also had two sros and I do get a lot of questions about uh sros in the elementary schools and why we don't have them so I just want to make it clear that although their primary assignment is the high school or the middle school they do actively work in our elementary schools with the building safety teams and provide assistance to the administration or staff whenever is needed we also in partnership with the Bethlehem police do have a confidential tip line This is on our website and this can be used at any time for any Community member student or parent who has concerns about someone doing self-harm or harm to others they can call this 24 7 to alert someone and moving
083on to the capital project we have the plan that was developed in 2000 or 2019 and it was approved in 2021 the project is not to exceed a 40 million 693 000. uh we did review the scope in the fall obviously with uh the prices of things our budget is up so we did have a couple presentations to discuss changes to the scope of that you can see that since 2020 the CPI is up significantly as well the project currently is still at State Ed under their review but the goal is to once we get approval from State Ed to move forward with that with the hopes of beginning construction this spring to stay on the time frame the project overview consists of 32 and a half million in hard cost construction uh 5.9 in
084incidental cost and then about 2.2 for a contingency currently in our time frame again we're hoping to go out to bid sometime in February we're hoping that we receive approvals by the end of March with the goal of beginning Construction in the spring the time frame for completion of the project is fall of 2024. and we have some slides that just highlight what areas will be under construction and when the time frame in the areas that will be worked on during designated times have been shared with all of the buildings uh is if all goes according to the time frame so there will be certainly areas that will be not usable so there may be some fields that are not usable which teams may have to uh you know find alternative Fields the Middle School
085auditorium I think is listed on the next slide will not be accessible for a little over a year so we'll need to consider that for music in in performing groups most of the other buildings uh will not have significant areas that are unaccessible but we'll make sure everyone is aware of those areas generally the the bigger areas like the auditorium or the library have the most impact on the building so we'll work with the administrators on relocating activities and events for those and onto enrollment we always work with the capital region Planning Commission on getting our enrollment projections so they generally do a five-year enrollment projection report and the highlights of our most recent report which was shared in January is that enrollment has declined since 20067 just over 21 percent over the next five
086years the total is expected to decrease just about under two percent with the most significant decrease being at the high school level and that's simply because the these the declines have already been seen at the elementary and middle school level so the total enrollment projected for next year uh is about 4 100 students you can see the decline here just in graphic form this is the five-year projection and looking to really level off from the peak back in 2006 seven and the capital region commission gets their information from a lot of different sources but they're essentially they look at Birth data over a period of time and you can see that enrollment the birth data in the district has declined slightly over the course of uh the last several years you also see the same
087in enrollment in the New York State fertility rate again significant or slightly declining fertility rates over the course of that same time period I don't remember that in my slideshow see they are trying to get me to finish I know thank you I'm going as fast as I can we're also they also look at in housing and housing new units so new units expected to be built as well as the housing market so the number of existing home sales uh has slowed the past two years there was a moratorium that has ended so that may make a slight difference in enrollment but I don't anticipate that will make a significant difference in the next few years foreign what we do use that for is to begin our budget process so in looking at our budget
088obviously our goal is to balance our budget and our goal every year when we finish is that our expenses equals our Revenue our current budget is uh just over 102 million and last year we were very fortunate and that we did not have to use any of our fund balance which was great so we're hoping that we'll see uh have a similar outcome this year looking at the education and value at Bethlehem if you look at how we compare to the state in Albany County you'll see in the state the average per pupil expenditure is about 22.8 thousand dollars Albany County is just over 18 000 and we compare at a little over 17 000 I think that's for yeah 2019 data that's the most recent data available and we look at our budget expenses
089there's generally five areas we are most prominent aspect of our expenses is instruction and Staffing and then our larger sources are in student transportation Debt Service and just general uh miscellaneous expenses and similarly for our revenues we rely on really two sources of revenue our state aid which we did just get our state aid runs today and property taxes we do get a little bit of revenue from our Pilots our payments in lieu of taxes and some other miscellaneous Revenue but primarily property taxes and state aid are main sources in our budget history this looks at a 10-year average you can see that our average budget increase is just about one and a half percent even though there's a few fluctuations from year to year the average is about one and a half percent over
090ten years and similarly with our tax levy history that's just about it uh one and a half percent over a five-year period the gray bars are the Mattel or the maximum allowable tax levy the tax cap and the Orange is the levy that we actually went out at so you can see every year we've been either at or below that cap and as I said the state of the schools is the really the kickoff to the next phase of our planning and our budget development for 2023-24 so our next next week's meeting we will do a budget overview we'll also then begin with our technology and our transportation budgets on March 1st we'll be discussing Athletics and operations and maintenance on March 15th that will be our instructional programs which consist of our general education
091and special education programs our goal is to adopt the budget by April 5th with a budget hearing on May 3rd May 10th is I meet the candidates night if that's needed and May 16th will be the budget vote so any seniors who are eligible to vote Mark that in your calendars and I think now You can conclude and I don't know if anyone has any questions for me um just and they're they are hopefully quick ones one is with parent Square um is that something that community members who don't have children in the school would be able to sign up for I'm just thinking there is a feature right now okay for like District Level news and information yeah just in the interest of keeping those people who we don't have children in the school
092buildings anymore informed of what's going on yeah um and will that also I thought I saw something on one of those slides that will take the place of those reporting and actions forms yes so we can we have the ability in parent Square to add forms to that to automate that process so yes there will be a lot of forms that now have to be sent back and forth or even through email that will be much more automated and you can do it on your phone or through email whatever your op your choices it will also replace things like I know teachers use various things like remind app and class dojo this would replace those as well so parents will go to one place if you have more than one child you'll be able to
093access all that information for all your children there um and then on a totally different topic with respect to the equity walks um when we're done with those would we be able to get a comparison to where we're at compared to the last time that we did those so there's I think there so there's two different Equity walks so when we were working with generation ready we had Equity walks which were done prior to covid and we actually had uh Harriet come back and she I think thinks she still has one more building to go but she was going back through those so we will have some comparison data from prior to covid and now based on a similar outcome the equity walk that rubric you saw is really paralleling our observation rubric that we
094use for teachers many of the the pieces in that particular rubric is very similar to some of the Danielson rubric that we use to evaluate teacher so that will be done kind of in conjunction with classroom observation so that's not a building ride yeah that's not a building equity walk but we did we will have the equity reports to share out for the buildings yep who else has questions I had two and they're similar to yours it sounds like Christine's are similar stuff mine are very similar to yours just the parent square is that going to be available for Coach communication with parents and you can use it for clubs and activities so hopefully that will help streamline that communication and then the other question is an equity question as well when you were sharing
095the goals some of the slides had increased sharing um of knowledge or information how are you going to measure some of it such as grading for Equity so how are you measuring that in the classroom or overall as a district I don't think it's part of the equity law per se because it's on more of an individual classroom level but I think there's an interest to understand how what are our goals from information sharing to actually implementing and seeing some change and how are we measuring it right so some of that with grading for equity in continuous Improvement their targeted instruction targeted questions as well and feedback and it's done by department so we'll be looking at what changes are departments making and also what changes uh might we be making as a district and
096particularly related to either our grading policies or policies or grading practices so I think those would be the outcomes you're talking about right yeah thank you yep sure okay um this has to do with slide 30. I don't know it's very quick um it has to do with the the tier one um educational expectations yeah and it just mentions that um the expectations were being set for instruction including the use of non-instructional time and I was just wondering if you could just explain a little bit but of you know what what is meant by non-instructional time and the expectation of maybe some examples of what that would look like right so when we talk about tier one instruction generally you think of the academic piece which is largely what we're talking about but we're also
097talking about the social emotional curriculum which is a part of our tier one mtss process so looking at when you're talking about non-instructional time let's take an example of a simple one of recess are students able to transfer the skills they're learning through our social emotional quick curriculum into recess activities or in unstructured time so those are what we're looking to try and see if we're making taking gains in those particular areas and I'd say it's not the easiest area to measure because there's a lot of soft skills but I think we can measure some of those when we look at our discipline data are we seeing decreases in incidences at recess or on the buses or in the hallways which would hopefully tell us that maybe we're making some progress in that particular area
098okay thank you yep and then this other my other my only other question has to do with some of the action steps for the increased Community engagement and you talked about expanding the recruitment Pathways and some of the Partnerships that were anticipated with some colleges and um my question is are we is the school trying to explore those types of relationships with non you know sort of different Pathways like trade schools or trade unions even or to try to you know get some recruiting in in sort of a different pathway so the kids have an opportunity to explore different uh different areas so we have done some of that in this CTE Pathways that our district we can create Pathways in fact I think it was prior to covid we had some presentations on those
099there's an approval process through State Ed and looking at ways students can earn credits in more of a non-traditional format also some of those also are we work with cap region BOCES and their CTE program they really have a lot of Leverage with some of the the trade unions and things such as that to try and create direct Partnerships with in areas such as you know manufacturing and welding and culinary we're always open to trying to do that but you know it's hard it's a little harder with a single District trying to make those connections it's easier if we work with CTE to make those connections for our kids but we do have have some additional CTE Pathways for students who want to earn Credit in a more you know not the traditional path sure
100yep yes just one um the recruitment pathway in terms of working with Clarkson what do you see the timeline for something like that so there's a they're working with the state now so I don't know if you have any updates on the state we don't so our last two or three meetings with Clarkson have been postponed because the state it's sort of like a it's similar to the NSF grant that we did with Sienna for computer science it's not through NSF but it's a similar type of Grant so it's a grant through the state so that's what's kind of holding us up right now but essentially we're in a holding pattern until Clarkson can get the state to finalize their application so that we can then move forward right but the the framework of it
101is that yet we would end up with a residency teacher um whose coursework is partially funded through State and Partnerships and then that's why they have to do the three years of the district afterwards right yeah so we're hopeful that we can move forward with that Catherine um I just want a couple things uh you mentioned the updates on the website and I just wanted to say as a parent thank you um it's really streamlined and it's it's come a long way I also really appreciate all the work around accessibility and making sure that we're translating everything as much as possible for as many folks as possible I think that's tremendously important and I know the communications department and technology and everybody has been hard at work on all of those things so thank you
102um just a couple of like uh kind of basic questions I think like what does this mean going back to um slide 30 we're talking about um the science teachers implementing a new curriculum this year aligned with the new science standards at New York State and the three associated with a three-dimensional philosophy can you just sorry for those of us who aren't in science classes um what is the three-dimensional philosophy what does that mean do you want to address that I actually can't speak to that um in March 17th we actually have um Jen Gaines hosting a training cool um so I hope to learn more then great but the standards themselves and we introduced the new standards and kits Maybe three or four years ago Jen did a presentation at one of the board
103meetings where I think you're looking at owl pellets if I remember correctly um but so now one of the things the state has done is for the they used to have a fourth grade test and an eighth grade test and they're now moving that to a fifth grade and eighth grade and those both used to have a performance component to them where the students would come in they'd have to do like um sort of a bunch of Labs on a specific day and they were sort of graded on it so they moved away from that and done it's now more similar to like the high school approach where there's four they're calling them investigations that students have to do over the course of third fourth and fifth grade or sixth seventh and eighth grade and
104then the school will maintain sort of portfolios of the student work and then that's sort of what is their piece for the assessment it's not a separate graded piece right that's the big shift there but I I will report back thank you I appreciate that I love learning all of the all the new terms so I appreciate that um and then just a question about lab school how are we seeing um demand supply and demand there how um do we have any sense of what's coming in the coming school year so they're just in the process of applying the eighth graders are making their selections and then they apply to lab school so we don't have numbers yet but judging from last year's numbers in ninth grade we had a good turnout so we're hoping
105that we'll see the same for the coming year did we have to say no to anybody or was it last year we did have more than the number that we uh accepted so it's really really neat thank you and those are my questions thank you thank you very much for your presentation you're welcome next on our agenda is our recognition of public comment on an agenda item if we have any visitors with us tonight who would like to address the board on an agenda item now it will be the time to come up to the microphone next item six action items okay Finance action items it is recommended by the superintendent at the Board of Education approve the following Finance action items one through five so moved second any discussion all in favor aye any
106opposed any extensions that carries B Professional Personnel action items it is recommended by the superintendent the support of Education approve the following professional Personnel action items one through six summer any discussion all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that carries item C support Personnel action items it is recommended by the superintendent at the Board of Education approve the following support staff action items one through four so moved second any discussion all in favor aye any opposed the abstentions that carries item D other action items it has been requested that we are going to pull out item two because we have a board member who will need to accuse herself for that item so it is recommended by the superintendent that the Board of Education approve the action item one and three so I moved
107any discussion all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that carries and then it is recommended by the superintendent at the Board of Education approve the following action item number two that's the volunteer firefighters and volunteer ambulance workers exemption so this is oh sorry this is where I will recuse myself okay thank you second any discussion all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that carries item seven recognition of public comment on a non-agenda item we have any visitors with us tonight who would like to address the board on a non-agenda item now is the time to come up to the microphone item 8 future meetings and events on February 13th at 6 30 we have our rescheduled policy committee meeting this is the communion That was supposed to be on the Monday that we
108had our snow day weather event and so the policy committee rescheduled it for the 13th our next regular board meeting is on February 15th here at the high school at seven anticipating executive session at six and in the meeting after that is on March 1st here at the high school starting at seven anticipating executive session at six um seeing no need to go back into executive session could I have a motion to adjourn the meeting so moved second all in favor aye aye meeting adjourned our Pig students if you want to come up and don't forget to sign out