001hello one two three microphone test test test microphone test um i very good hello this is a test of the microphones for the board meeting for tonight this is a test one two three four microphone test uh so can reconvene our meeting to open session the board has been in executive session since six o'clock to discuss three ten-year candidate um matters a litigation matter and a contractual matter we could all stand for the pledge of allegiance [Music] i 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 [Music] we could have introductions dave hirst wendy sampson jonathan fishbein catherine natto jody monroe holly dellenbaugh christine bear meredith moriarty willow bear judy kehoe [Music] first up
002on the agenda is the approval of minutes um it is recommended that the board of education approve the minutes from the october 6 2021 regular board meeting second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes uh next up are our meeting reports and first is our superintendent's report uh sure thank you um we had a homecoming last weekend we had a pep rally and we had the uh release of part of our new logo from the athletic department so brittany can you pull that up thank you oops um [Music] it signed me out a while ago too so um [Music] so [Music] oh there we go [Music] just adding to the excitement of the unveiling yes this is the suspense yes okay there we go um so we released the new athletic
003logo which i'll show in just a second at the homecoming at the pep rally this weekend we are uh expected to release the new district logo in december as part of our website redesign where we'll have some standardized icons and banners across some of our social media platforms the new district website we are expecting will be ready um in january and we'll have some newly designed print publications i know some people have asked are you taking all the old eagles down we're not planning to do that we're just planning a refresh now with some new logos that we can use moving forward so there is no plan to someone asked me about the eagle up on the high school we're not planning to take that down uh so we're go we will have a a
004mix of those so can you go to the next slide so this was what was on the football field that was shared and these are the logos that will be available for some of our uniforms uh and some of our athletic um attire and the boosters will likely use that as well so i've i've seen a few of them already on social media so i'd like to thank boces communications staff and we did have small groups of i know some board members participated in that to do the you know look at the very small details of the eagle eye and the colors and what they symbolize uh and through that everyone kind of was quiet about it which is what we wanted to do the launch but there were a number of people who provided
005feedback and i think that the communications department at boces did a really good job of reflecting what the feedback that staff and community members had to say so that's one of my reports i'd also like to thank the community for coming out to vote for the capital project we had a very good turnout the approval of this bond will allow us to continue to keep our facilities current and make improvements for our students staff and community i'd also like to thank the district wellness committee for actively working to offer wellness activities for our students and staff one of the first events that the group sponsor was to support breast cancer and i'd like to specifically thank jen murphy our pe facts and health supervisor for helping to organize the bethlehem team in participating making strides
006against breast cancer walk which took place this past weekend in washington park i'd also like to congratulate our girls tennis team who won the sectionals and have advanced to regionals and they were playing this afternoon is that correct did we know how they did i don't know how they haven't heard we haven't not heard so more on that and i know many of our other teams are beginning to participate in sectionals so i'm sure we'll have more announcements and finally i'd like to this thank our board of education this is school board recognition week and so we have a brief presentation to thank you i know the hours that all of you put in particularly during coven has not been easy so i really appreciate the support and thank you for your service to the
007district so thank you that's my report thank you anybody have any questions for jody next up is our board report i'd also like to thank the community for coming out in support of the bond and for exercising their right to vote wanted to recognize the middle school garden club i happened to be at the farmer's market this past saturday and stopped by their their table there if anybody has a chance to do that if they're they're probably given the amount of produce that they seem to be generating in that garden i would think that they would be there again but it's amazing how much of a harvest they have had um so i definitely commend them uh on that both the students and their advisors um and i wanted to make a note that the
008nisba virtual morning meeting that they are putting together in place of the conference that the in-person conference that was canceled is this coming monday i think you can still sign up ahead of time if you would like to participate i think it's from 8 to 12 on or thereabouts on monday morning what else and um wendy was going to share a brief uh report out on the annual business meeting that took place on monday yes i got to be the voting delegate for bethlehem at that new york state school boards association business meeting and the usual resolutions for advocacy for the school boards association positions um were you know voted on and so some of the resolutions that were adopted for this this year involved proposals that would allow students with disabilities to be tested
009at their developmental age which is a wonderful thing to be advocating for but state ed also does it does do that every year and and the us department of education usually denies that that waiver but we're still going to be advocating for that anyway also another position is that we're going to the school boards association will support proposals that would increase state and federal reimbursement for school meals and nutritious snacks for all students that's something every school could use they're going to advocate for some certain changes in open meetings laws which i don't know if they'll go through or not but they would like to make it easier for people on on school boards to you know attend via video conference which is always a good thing in case you know you have to be
010away and just some other very basic general things to you know use data efficiently to work for changes in the foundation aid that benefit all students and that provide greater equity in programs for all students child safety zones and so kids i have to walk so much because of all the busing problems that are going on they want to advocate that local school districts have more control over that um and that's always a good thing as we're concerned about that ourselves here in bethlehem and you know maybe one of the last ones that's um that was interesting i thought was that they want to support getting rid of school level expenditure reporting which is very cumbersome on our business office people and and the districts in general so you know a lot of good legislative
011agenda items came up and so now we know where the school boards association for the state is heading this year great thanks wendy you're welcome um and thank you for uh for serving in that capacity for us this year oh there was one more that was really interesting too policy changes to streamline the teacher certification process for teachers who are coming from out of state and those who have previous teaching experiences having been a teacher the reciprocity process is uh is hard sometimes to to get out of state teachers um hired in new york state so anything that can make that easier because we need teachers in our state thank you um and then the last thing that i have is that we did meet our the policy committee met on monday um and just
012briefly we discussed a number of uh recommended um updates recommended by nisba to several different policies including the code of conduct and the smoking policy as it pertains to the district so you could look to see those likely on our next agenda um christine so i was just gonna add that i went to homecoming on saturday or it was saturday friday it was friday and it was nice to see all the kids in the stands i mean they were it was packed it was a full house and um while we weren't successful i don't believe we were successful in a win that evening um it was it was nice to see so many people out and socializing and eating at the food stand and everything so it was nice and then jodi had mentioned the
013girls they had won the um section two championship against burnt hills um saturday at central park and then i believe they're going to regionals on set this coming saturday in utica i believe i don't know who they played today but that's what i heard on monday so congratulations to them that's great anybody have anything else they would like to share i also went to saw the farmers market stand and what i found fascinating and wonderful is something i've seen before it's not just mark teaching the kids about um the art of growing food and composting and everything that goes with it but he was also teaching them how to make change how to run the business of of a stand and to to see him that interactive was just wonderful and the kids were just
014also wonderful i mean dealing with them as a customer and you know interacting with them i was very impressed with their composure and especially with the way mark engaged them and made everything a teaching moment yeah i would agree who's helping them be really good sales people i think i walked away with a butternut squash i did not originally intend to buy [Laughter] [Music] anybody of anything else great next is the student senate report i don't do we have anyone from the student senate with us tonight hi it's so exciting we've been having we haven't had somebody from the student senate in so long um hi i'm elizabeth baldwin the secretary of the student senate sofia soca our president regrettably couldn't be here tonight but our updates is the past two weeks we've been working
015hard to plan a fun and exciting pep rally while also following the covo guidelines we were given that happened last friday on the 15th and went quite smoothly although it looked different from past years it was nice to have the community together again projects we're continuing to work on or are organizing a veterans memorial and a courtyard outside the guidance offices for students to work or distress mr irons our supervisor and mr domel have a meeting with the district architects in two weeks to get more details on both of those and that's all thank you unless there's questions thank you very much thank you next up on our agenda are our presentations this evening and the first one is the 2021 board recognition so mrs painter is here can you show us some spectacular artwork
016so what we did in as jody mentioned it is board of education recognition week so what we did was we put together a small gift for you and this is all artwork that you might write some notes to somebody send out a personal note to someone these are note cards from students last year um these are from our capstone art classes is from ap studio and r and our senior portfolio class so what you'll find in these note cards are images of artwork that really reflect the students ideas and contemporary issues that students are going through today so some of the ones that you're going to find this is ellie cromling ellie's at suny new paltz studying illustration right now and gabe diamond is at hudson valley community college studying graphic design as well this
017is semina it's hard to read from this far away um selena is studying at akuni school in new york city she's also studying photography and she's also studying some biochemistry and this is maya lemov maya is taking a gap year before she heads off to hamilton college she's studying in rome right now and elora robinstein she's actually at a think tank program so she's in alternative direction but she's doing graphic design at this think tank program that she applied for and shayna obre's um is that oberlin college and she's studying art history and creative writing and i also put in a few more slides on there but these are not ones that are in your note cards and we actually had several students this past year that have gone on to study art in all
018different forms so he morgan's at syracuse university studying fashion megan's at rit studying graphic design [Music] maddie kaplan is that suny buffalo and this is olivia berner and olivia's at um sage college actually i know most of these kids which is great because i can tell you exactly where they've been but um so each one of these there's a couple more on here um this is down your wand trump and she's a fit person studying fashion aiden rafi is one of our special education students who's studying graphic design um and many of the students that you're going to see here these are all students that have graduated right through our capstone programs this is osha kessel zosia is at brown university taylor davis so had all these students create these for us to tell us
019a little bit about where they're headed this year so what's nice about your note cards is they really reflect what the students are thinking today so thank you very much for your service to our school and we just wanted to make this for you as a small gift of our appreciation up in the district well thank you so much i know i use them every year oh good [Music] thank you thank you very much thank you so and also part of school board recognition week is board members contribute uh different books to our school library so i don't know how you want to go if you want to go around and yeah show what you're donating i'll start and then um i was i was excited by my uh by my list of books this
020year um you know you don't you're not always familiar with all the books on the list but there were a few i was like that i was particularly excited about and including a spider's life because i like the picture on the front but i was excited that and my books are going to slingerland's elementary library to be donating a copy of stamped for kids i actually read this with with my own kids uh so i was excited that that was one of them um and unplugged by gordon corman which i got um rave reviews from my 10 year old so i was excited to be having that one in the pile and then hijack which i just think um looks really cute it reminds me of kind of a mo willems elephant and piggy style
021of a book so i like that one a lot so christine you wanna go next sure so i am donating books to the middle school or they were donated on my behalf and they're all uh books on diversity which uh the the titles and the content is amazing the first book is empowered black girl which is about the mental social and physical health of a young african-american woman and talking about confidence and beauty work resilience um it it's a good topic we have threads of peace which is interesting it's about the connection between uh mohandas gandhi and martin luther king so it was an interesting tie and not their own autobiography but just how they were connected the awakening of malcolm x and how he became who he was from a young age and then
022uh the book called the only black girls in town talking about a girl who was the only black girl in her community and then meeting somebody from a different culture and how they were different and forged a friendship uncomfortable conversations with a black boy and this one i definitely i'm putting on my reading list the black friend i'm being a better white person and it's from the perspective of a black person and how uh white privilege has influenced um certain types of biases so i think this is a good addition as well to the middle school so thank you meredith um this year my books are going to the high school and they're all non-fiction books um so it's really interested to see all these books the first one is called on the outside looking
023indian it's about an indian-american woman who had a fairly strict upbringing and in her 30s she decided to have a typical american teenagehood and her adventures with that and and how she came to terms with her upbringing i have finding latinx a search for the voices redefining latino identity um it talks about different uh communities in america including an industrial town in upstate new york so it sounds like there may be some interesting reading there i have a different mirror for young people a history of multicultural america this looks really interesting talking about a different viewpoint of american history i have house of sticks another memoir by ly tran it's a story of a woman who came to america from vietnam as a toddler and how she adjusted and her family adjusted to living in
024america uh the making of asian america another uh story another excuse me uh history um talking about how um there's new uh immigrants coming to america but also the deep roots of asian americans in our country and then finally i have the sum of us what racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together um talking about how racism is not an issue um for just black people how it it is painful for our entire country and all of us and how it affects not only the dysfunction of our democracy but also it's a moral crisis for all of us so it looks like a really powerful book that um i wrote all these down and i'm looking forward to reading as well willow mine are going to eagle elementary school this year i was
025excited to have a k5 group because i was able to read most of them ahead of time which i haven't been able to do in the past the first one is see the cat three stories about a dog and it's sort of a take on like the c-spot run old primers that we learned to read from except it's really pretty funny uh two early reader picture books ties travels and the bear in the family this one made me cry over the weekend it's called i talk like a river and it's sort of autobiographical story about a young boy with a pretty significant stutter and how his father helps him find his voice we are the water protectors which is inspired by um stories of indigenous people's journeys through north america and really at its root
026is really a book about how important our water systems are and why those are important to protect and paper sun which is the story of tyrus wong who was a young chinese american who immigrated here at a young age and it's a story of his journey and how he became a very successful hollywood artists in america catherine well first of all i just wanted to share that i'm delighted that anybody would donate books in on my behalf anywhere you know books and libraries have been such a big part of my life i found so much solace and joy and refuge and everything so just thank you this is exciting for me um so i've got some great books that are going to ellsmere elementary uh first one r-e-s-p-e-c-t my friends respect by about aretha franklin
027and i've been singing this song now all week thank you so that one's heading over there 21 steps story about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the soldiers that stand guard day and night around the clock we move the world a really empowering picture book that just talks about how small actions add up and what we all can do to make a difference in our world we are still here native american truths everyone should know and i was super excited because right on the front cover we've got the whole nashoni flag as well we're on hodashoni land here right at the border of the mohawk people the mohican people so that's powerful i think to have in our schools as well just reminding us that we are that not we excuse me that we
028still have uh we have rich native history and we still have native people with us every day working and so um that's exciting and then flip how the frisbee took flight yeah there you go somebody invented that and then finally dolly madison the white house and the big tornado so thank you everybody who put these together this is delightful jonathan my books are going to hammer grow this year and i'm very delighted because it's the first time that my books are going to hammer grill and that's where my kids grew up and it was a delightful experience for them um and i'm also delighted that the new principal is being received so well and you know is such a positive influence there following dave k's big shoes um i the first book i have is
029if i were a tree and it's about um two siblings imagining what it would like to like what it would be like to be a tree a long day um my favorite one of my favorite books i haven't read this one but i as growing up mars was my favorite planet and this is a rather silly story but it's um full of great facts about mars and why mars and earth are such good friends baloney and friends is uh really for the younger folk four to eight and it's basically three stories in one and at the end you can learn to draw all the characters with step-by-step instructions which is something i need when i'm drawing characters brazil is a fact book explaining the history geography and culture society of brazil which is a very
030interesting country one book that really caught my eye was the elephant in the room um it's it's um it's basically uh an immigration story and it's also um what's interesting it's in interwoven with a little girl who um the elephant in the room really is an elephant and you'll have to read it and find out if it fits in the room eyes that kiss in the corners is about a young oriental girl who notices that her eyes are different than her peers and through her mother and other powerful women her life she learns to really appreciate that her eyes are different that they are beautiful and it brings her a great sense of of beauty in honor of herself and self-empowerment and it's a wonderful book i hope every girl in the school gets to
031read it wendy all right my selections are going to glenn month this year which is wonderful we have a lot of grades four through six kind of aimed stories we have the blackbird girls which takes place in the ukraine in 1986 around the chernobyl [Music] disaster and the unlikely friendship that results between a jewish girl and a ukrainian girl who our neighbors and both of their fathers work in the in the nuclear power plant the only black girls in town which is i think also coming from christine um one african-american girl gets a new neighbor who's also african-american and all sorts of mayhem and madness ensues because they're very very different girls i also have the eyes that kiss in the corners like jonathan again story of asian um an asian girl who learns to
032appreciate her differences this would be my favorite the story of kamala harris and that's a nonfiction book and a good role model of our first female vice president and the last one is fred's big feelings kind of based on mr rogers which is a character that we all um hopefully we all know and love many of us in our generation do um we want to keep that keep that um sentimental alive without being kind to everybody thank you so much from all of us i i know i love being able to have the books donated every year it's great that's one of my favorite things that we get to do as board members so thank you thank you for your service i don't think you know the general community knows how much time board members
033invest in the school district so i really appreciate you and i know the staff support and appreciate all the work that you do next up is our strategic plan update yep okay we good thank you so um i want to begin with the strategic plan update but before i begin the presentation i do want to recognize charmaine witches singer who is out in the audience she was part of the strategic plan development and i did invite other members to come and hear some of the updates and she was the only taker so i appreciate charmaine coming okay so next slide so the original strategic plan was developed and introduced in 2018-19 part of that plan included a new mission statement and a reset an update of our core values and at that time we identified
03472 performance indicators because one of the conversations we had in feedback we had from the community as well as the group was that in order to really make the strategic plan meaningful we should have some metrics that we should measure along the way so we've had a little bit of an impact by covid as you all know we started out in our first year progress and some of which we were able to set benchmarks right from the onset and some we still needed to develop those metrics as a baseline so in 2019 that was the first year the targets we hit about 43 percent of the metrics and at the time when we set the metrics some of them we didn't really know if they were accurate uh metrics accurate targets i guess i should
035say because we had never done this before we revised some of the metrics in 2019-20 based on some of the initial initial data and so 10 of those 72 original metrics were revised removed or combined based on some of that preliminary data and then covid hit and unfortunately we were not able to measure many of our metrics so 61 percent of our year 2 metrics could not be measured and 92 of the original metrics were impacted in some way so what we did is we decided that we really didn't need to do anything with the mission in the core values we went through those we felt that they still were part of what we all stood for but we did decide over the summer to make revisions to the metrics which is the area that
036we knew we needed to address so in our new measures we have 52 of them and we still have the five-year plan to measure those out through 2025-26 so our mission is to educate and prepare all students to reach their potential discover their purpose and be engaged community members our core values that still hold true are in the areas of academic character community and wellness and since we implemented the strategic plan all of our action plans or our goals each year are focused on these four core areas so i want to talk a little bit about some of the changes in each of those these areas so in academics one of the things we removed from this area is we removed the new york state testing and the reason we removed the new york state
037testing uh was because we've not had consistent testing uh since covid but even prior to that we had some opt-outs uh the tests changed and so we have the i-ready diagnostic in reading and math for k through eight now those are national norms kids are taking those three times a year and we believe that those measures are more reflective of our instructional program and more reflective of the data that we can gain from them for example in the new york state testing we didn't have any good data for the k-2 population because we didn't have assessments in those areas this provides us with information on phonics instruction fluency all those skills that students need to become good readers and these go all the way through eighth grade so you can see our baseline we have
038in our targets in 2026 are where we would like to be or surpassed by that year so that is the big change in the academic area we still kept the state assessments for the regents exam and we have the mastery those of you who were part of the board during the strategic plan development or the committee we recognize that mastery is really what our goals should be not just passing rates so on the regents exams uh discus data points you'll see all of them are mastery rates okay next slide and there's no changes oh can you go back brittany there is one small next one um the one other change we made because we've added more university in the high school courses we originally had just the percentage of high school seniors who were enrolled
039in at least one ap course and we added the uhs courses to combine because they do offer college credit and some of those actually afford students more opportunity for college credit than sometimes the ap courses do so we did add that as a metric as well in character we talked quite a bit about this and because of kovid and the instructional model we have we believe we really need a reset on some of the dasa invader assessment data that we have going back really two years we don't believe will be very reflective of where we are now so we're going to use this year to collect that baseline data and um to clarify these are more serious violations uh that our report we need to report under the school climate uh information so we'll collect
040that data this year and set our baseline the percentage of students who regularly participate we do think that's important particularly now with getting students re-engaged in school and that baseline data does come from the school climate survey which we did not do last year we did a shorter version if you remember the school climate survey we just did a 15 question survey to get a check on how students were doing but we do plan to do the climate survey again this year and that is self-reporting by students so that'll be helpful to have that information so that data is from 2000 just before we shut down for covid so it's only a little over a year before but we think it'll be accurate and then the percentage of students who are registered to vote we
041still want to again that's self-reporting but we think it's important to try and monitor that jody could you just spell out uh dasa and vader for dignity for all students act and vader is violence and disruptive incident reports yep for the community we really didn't make any changes this is how does the community support our programs in our school through our budget vote what's our community service hours which again this baseline data was prior to covid so we'll see this year if we have similar measures we are using passport for good to keep track of those hours so hopefully we'll have good data moving forward and in the wellness area as i mentioned we didn't do the school climate survey but we do plan to do it this year so any of those baseline metrics
042and you can see these are the actual questions that they refer to um are from 2019 20. so we believe many of these particularly this year uh are very important we've done the school climate survey typically right after the holidays we might try and bump that up this year to get some of these measures a little bit earlier but we don't want to do it very too much because we want the data to be consistent from year tiers to when we're collecting that information the other area in wellness i wanted to know you can go to the next slide brittany is the attendance data so during the shutdown we didn't have great attendance data because many students who were out were participating virtually at home so we went through some of our past data to
043look at some of the chronic absenteeism or the at-risk and the chronic absenteeism rates are really the area we want to focus on particularly with our students we see larger numbers of absenteeism from our special education students to some degree our english language learners although that's i want to note that's a much smaller student population so the percentages tend to get skewed easier and our economically disadvantaged students are the groups that we see much higher absenteeism rates and prior to covid we were putting in interventions we have attendance committees at all of the buildings to review absenteeism we have more principles meetings or counselor meetings with the parents to try and stress the importance of attendance and we do think that this is an area we really need to focus on during the next year
044or two and the next piece of information this kind of goes along with the dasa and the vader reporting is the suspension rates pri this data is a combination from 2019 20 and the year prior 2018-19 and the reason we use those numbers is because we were shut down beginning in march of 20 so we didn't have a full year so this does reflect the average of the two years prior for in school and out of school suspensions for the middle and high school historically we have seen larger suspension rates again for a special education students and for economically disadvantaged students so we are having looking at that baseline and then looking at a new baseline for those subgroups this year we do have prior data but we felt like getting the baseline this year
045would be important for those subgroups so moving on to our annual goals based on some of that data we are going to continue with our five year program reviews we are doing more work with iready in looking at that data because that is our measure for the metrics we'll be using that to look at our instructional practices our intervention services for students and then we will continue to prioritize our curriculum last year we talked about taking the curriculum and trying to streamline it to narrow that down because we had limited time the teachers felt that that was very helpful they felt like it was a they were able to target instruction more for students so we're continuing to do that and looking at the new york state standards and what makes sense to maintain and
046what things we may need to adjust so we'll continue to do that also we are going to continue to develop rigorous common assessments there are new changes with the k-5 science standards the new york state assessment in science is moving to grade five next year dave you're two years two years so this year grade four next year just grade eight and then the following your grade five so they're revamping that in in our k5 science cabinet they'll be looking at those changes and aligning the curriculum to those next generation science standards we talked last year about developing a k-12 wellness curriculum that includes the social emotional learning some aspects of the dare program some of the diversity work that we've been doing so that will be something you'll hear about more later in the school
047year but you can see how it combines health facts some of the library curriculum that we've developed and general mental health curriculum also the new york state computer science and digital fluency standards we're continuing to work in those area engaging in technology and in the k-12 program and another area you'll hear more about later in the year is the k-5 multi-tiered system of supports prior this we've referred to it as rti this is multi-tiered system of student services and this is to look at the whole child in regards to not only their academic needs but also their social and emotional leads and so this is being implemented k5 through our data team process and also we'll move up into the middle school it works a little differently at the middle school just because of the
048size and the structure in character some of our goals were focusing on equity and cultural responsiveness which we have been doing and will continue to be ongoing during the course of the year we've done some training and we'll continue to do training in sexual harassment and professional development for our staff and then also we believe this is really important the character aside from character it also ties into relationships social emotional areas to continue to create or create new opportunities for students to strengthen their relationships both with their peers as well as adults in all of our buildings with the community we already did as we have been looking at ways to reach out to families there's a letter that goes from the district letting families know that we can offer assistance if they need that
049that already went out we also are continuing our backpack program we continue our holiday drive but more importantly we've had many community members reach out to us and say how can we help and so we do have a system through special education where people can donate gift cards or other items to families who may have needs during the course of the year and then also highlighting and celebrating district accomplishments it seems that it's been a while since we've had a lot of these opportunities so this year we really want to take advantage and try to highlight some of our new facilities some of our programs that we offer so we're looking to do that through social medias and video and also our communications and finally wellness a big area that we're focusing on is student
050mental health and social emotional learning you'll again hear more about that with the mtss program we talked about this quite a bit in the last few years about what our counselors are doing what our coordinated care teams are doing at the elementary levels our mental health committees are doing at the secondary levels so this is an area that we are putting a lot of emphasis on not only for our students but also uh with our staff and it has been hard for staff to deal with some of the struggles so what things can we do uh things such as the wellness committee and offering an opportunity for student for staff to come together and be part of a walk that i mentioned earlier as was one of those areas we're looking at a tiered system
051of supports to monitor student attendance i mentioned this when i was going through the metrics looking at the attendance at all the buildings we have attendance committees to try and engage parents when we're concerned about students who are absent regularly and finally reinvigorating our green initiatives during covid there were a lot of things we could not do so we're trying to restore some of those opportunities that involve students and staff in our good for our school community and that is a quick summary of our goals as well as our revisions to our metrics so any questions people have i'll be happy to answer with the the academic metrics what are we using for our baseline where is that data coming from so the i ready data is from not last year we took actually three
052years worth of vibrations averaged it prior to the students being able to take them home because of cold right okay because we didn't feel that was that's accurate measure it wasn't just off of last year no no no okay yeah definitely the original baseline average we skipped it and then we continue right most of it in the areas that we indicated we would re-establish the baseline data is because we felt going back prior to covid with all that's happened maybe really wouldn't be accurate data and then some of that discipline data was a combined of 2018 19 and 1920 because we had most of the year but we didn't have all of the year york yeah testimony just the three through eight the regents exams we are still including in the metrics um no because
053we feel that the regents exam particularly looking at mastery is a good reflection of our instructional program we look at that we revise our curriculum based on some of the changes and those regents exams aside from the fact that they have changed recently overall they've been fairly consistent where the three through eight assessments have just changed so much over the last several years that we that's why we removed the three eight for now um when you say they're consistent in the past they you know every when the results would come out you know you would wonder okay where did they move the passing grade well so how consistent are they if they're are they still moving that passing grade to get so many students over the hump and passing them or has that settled down
054that's settled down and i think you're you're talking about the scaling yes and so the scaling one of the complaints at times has been that the the bar to pass them has been lower um for and it's been challenging to get the higher grades the mastery i think to get an 80 mastery consider 85 or above is a more rigorous uh data point and we think that that is acceptable for us to strive for and that has been relatively consistent and i think those scales have improved with some of the new uh assessments i see data shaking is i don't know if you want to add something they haven't really changed substantially in probably 10 years or so right um the one thing to keep in mind too again is regents exams um since they
055switched to about 10 years ago really were never intended to be out of 100 points that's correct so what ended up happening is if you think about like ap exams are scaled one to five the intent of the new regents exams was to scale them from one to five but the pushback was that well we schools use these as final exams which the state department has never endorsed like they leave it to the local decision but they've never endorsed using regents exams as final exams per se even though more than half the schools in the state do it so they had to come up so that to say that when you convert it to a numerical measure like a 65 on a regents exam does not mean you got 65 percent of the questions correct
056it's just simply they took the scale one through five and they had to come up with numbers from zero to 100 that match that um so if you look at so when people sort of talk about well gee you only need forty percent of the questions correct to pass a regents exam i would encourage you to take a look at some other tests that are considered extremely rigorous like the ap exams for instance in order to get a 3 in ap calculus you only need to get about 40 of the questions correct to get a 3 to get a four which is sort of comparable to a b in college you need about fifty percent and to get a five about sixty five to sixty six percent so if you were to say i got
057sixty six percent of the questions correct on a test most people would not consider that to be like the most distinguished score but an ap exam is so there's there's a little bit of misinformation in terms of how things are scaled um the the zero to 100 is really just so that schools are able to use them as final exam grades in theory all scores from 65 through 84 say are equal they're all a level three right so they then had to kind of just divvy it up so that you could make but in in reality there's no difference between a 65 67 and a 69 they're all a level three so if that makes sense so but they have not changed that scale in about 10 years the 85 and above right and the
05885 and above has always been riggers that was one of the complaints was that way it's super easy to pass these but it's really hard to get 85 or above right um so that was another where the rub was yeah thank you other questions thank you i was just wondering what type of response do we get on the student and parent climate surveys yeah we get a great result from the students because we have them do them in school otherwise we would be concerned more with a high school students that we maybe would not get the return generally the parent survey responses we do get a pretty good return we tend to get a better return with elementary parents so we'll hopefully maybe because it's uh we haven't done it in a couple of years
059maybe we'll get a higher percentage of parent responses this year uh and we can try and encourage that a little bit more and the staff there's a staff climate survey as well and we always get a pretty good response in most areas with them they are anonymous obviously people can opt out of it but we generally get a pretty high percentage back yep thank you for putting the time and effort to put this together that's a lot of information i wanted to say that i think it's great that we're adjusting the curriculum based on targeting like what's most important i thought that was really a good opportunity for us i have a couple questions dave i think this one's for you so it seems like now we're having a heavier reliance on the i ready
060since we moved the k the three through eight exams out do we ever do we calibrate that data that we're using with like the performance of the students in the classroom to make sure that it's on target if we're using it for this type of metrics so and we also we do try to correlate it with the state assessments too so i don't want to say we're completely throwing them out the state assessments it's just that because it's somewhat unreliable like for a student to student it tends to be reliable when you look at an entire cohort it's not because so many kids don't take it so that's where that comes in but yes we also look at classroom performance we have students that also are tested using like f and p measures in reading
061we correlate it with that so we try to correlate as many of the measures as possible because to rely on one single measure doesn't make a whole lot of sense right because you really want to look at multiple measures to ensure that you're getting a clear picture the reason you use that as a metric is because that's the one assessment that is nationally normed and it's not subjective like so f and ps are great but it's somewhat subjective in that three different reading teachers could give the same student f and not necessarily come out with the same reading level um so that's why we choose i ready um just because it is standardized it's normed um and it's consistent and the i ready is really on the metrics is a more broader base like this
062year we also have implemented the sunday reading program so we're curious to see how does the i-ready data align with some of that information as well but that's really looking at individual students or individual classrooms as to where the needs are so on the 2026 the revised goals how did they compare to the goals up until this point did we decrease them did they stay steady did they increase the metrics so some of them prior to we were on target for meeting them some of them we were not and again when we established the metrics some of them we didn't really have a good idea we you know if you remember for example the graduation rate is still on there and we have a hundred percent as our goal because we felt strongly that our
063goal should be to have every student graduate from our district so some of them may be unrealistic and when we set some of the metrics we thought that they could be a stretch but we felt that it was more important to try and stretch to get there and if we didn't meet them if we're making progress that's a great measure even if we're off target i think now based on some of the initial data we have a little bit better sense of the progress we can make than we did when we first established them so this is really the only second time that we've reset the goals yes which makes sense and to do it now after like the last year and a half right but i was just one i would i was assuming
064that maybe we were a little we were not as realistic as we should have been in some of the goal setting and so and the targets that are set we use for most of the targets um there's sort of a target theory called halfway to 100 right so if your baseline is 50 right your ultimate goal might be 100 but you know halfway to 175 so that's where you set your goals at 75. right so you're using this halfway to 100 as sort of your your standard measurement um to shoot forks over five years that's typically something you can strive for whereas in other areas you don't want to do halfway to 100 like graduation rate you want to get to 100 like getting halfway there is not good enough so that's kind of where
065we started with all most of the measures was this um halfway to 100 right um is how we computed it right and then i think this uh i only have two questions left we started out with 72 then it said we revised like 10 came down to 62. but then after this year we were down to 52. yep do we have a list of the ones that we removed from there that you could share with us i can send you the metrics that we have from last year i guess any all three years if you wanted to see what the comparisons are some of the changes in the metrics we made based on the school climate survey so we just changed the language to align with those questions and some of them after we established
066them we realized we really didn't have a good way to collect data that was accurate but sure i'm happy to share this yeah i'm just curious of the changes yeah i can name them just for personal probably 10 of our best so somewhere the three through eight testing um there's four right there because we've got ela math for because do we do it um three through five and then six through eight um we also took um we had professional development in there for technology right which we do so much tech i don't even know what we were measuring anymore because it was just it was how many hours right but we do so many hours that it it's just a it's a necessary thing now so it's when we developed that metric it was kind
067of before we were so deep into technology yeah and then one of the other ones um i lost my train of thought the the professional development was one and there was a couple oh there was a couple that we were already consistently at 100 each year so it just seemed kind of silly yeah it makes sense not to have a metrics just to have one you know if it's yeah so i can share um the original the modification and the new ones okay yep i'm not sure i'm just curious about this for in-school suspension at the middle school level in the target what what constitutes like how is that measured is it is in school like just you do a certain offense you're in a certain room with a teacher after school or could that
068qualify as you're having lunch with a principal like what no and do you hit the in school versus just like a disciplinary action right so in school one has to be coded as an in-school suspension so it rises to a different level having you know lunch with the principal or after school would not be considered an in school in school generally is you're removed from classes that day so model right so it yes so it has to rise to that level i think that was all that i had any other questions thank you so much for putting this all together thank you sure thanks [Music] um before we move on to item five our public comment on agenda items uh britney pointed out that i inadvertently skipped over our minutes of the vote certifying the
069vote from yesterday so let's go back to that and it's under item 2 b it is recommended that the board of education approve the minutes from the october 19 2021 special meeting the capital project vote so moved second any discussion [Music] can we can we see them is there is there is there minutes or no it's it's just the it's the um just certifying the results and but you might be able to pull them up and thank you to our community for supporting the capital bond project i think there it has the there's like the tallying of the spreadsheet is that what you want there you go um all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes um going back uh to item five our recognition of public comment on an agenda item at this
070point if we have anybody with us who would like to address the board on an agenda item please come up to the microphone good evening my name is charmaine this is on correct i can't i can't hear but my name is charmaine we're just singer i just want to comment on two things i didn't realize this was board appreciation night when i received the invitation from the superintendent to come and hear the report out about the committee so um is a former board member i have only the smallest idea of what you must be going through and have gone through the last two years so i just want to extend my sincere gratitude for uh steering the district through very tumultuous and rapidly changing times so that's uh i appreciate all of your efforts and
071time and energy that you gave and i also just want to appreciate the district for forming the committee it brought it all back when the superintendent started showing the slides it was a very lively discussion it was an extremely large committee with good representation of students staff faculty and community members and we spent quite a number of hours debating um discussing and coming up with the recommendations so i applaud the district for that framework that they offered for input and um i trust that the plan has been in good hands and appreciate the district nipping and tucking as needed i also believe that joe allen gardner did quite a bit of facilitation and organization of that committee so i want to appreciate her also so and thank you for the invitation to come tonight to
072hear the update thanks sharmin seeing no one else uh we'll move on to item six action items a finance action items it is recommended by the superintendent that the board of education approved the following finance action items one through four point of order yes i'd like to isolate item number four so that i can vote on one through three i must recuse myself from item number four okay i'll restate the recommendation it is recommended by the superintendent that the board of education approve the following finance action items 1 through 3. any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes and then it is recommended by the superintendent the board of education approved the following finance action item number four so move second any discussion all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that
073passes b professional personnel action items it is recommended by the superintendent that the board of education approved the following professional personnel action items 1 through 11. [Music] any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes c support personnel action items it is recommended by the superintendent that the board of education approved the following support staff action items 1 through 16. don't move second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes d other action items it is recommended by the superintendent that the board of education approved the following action items one through three don't move second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes item seven recognition of public comment on a non-agenda item if we have anybody with us tonight who would like to address the board
074on a non-agenda item please come to the microphone now [Music] item eight future meetings and events our next regular board meeting is on wednesday november third anticipating executive session at six the remainder of the meeting open meeting at seven there is a meeting on wednesday november 10th at 6 pm of the district equity and inclusivity committee and then our meeting after that on wednesday november 17th which is like right before thanksgiving um our regular board meeting i'm at seven but anticipating executive sessions starting at six is the six o'clock start time for the dei committee on the 10th correct six six okay um just before we uh take a motion to adjourn um before everybody leaves i need a signature from all the board members on the document in this red folder so don't leave
075without doing that um yeah and don't take it with you and i'm not sure if we have a couple of pig students with us but i see a couple people out there if you need to come up and get a signature afterwards just come on up and see anybody seeing no need to go back into executive session um could we get a motion to adjourn the meeting all in favor aye aye opposed no meeting adjourned thank you [Music]