001yes okay john finally updated nice you're good it just went live it is live because it's not there it's just starting so yes i do see it now the stream's coming in okay i'm gonna close that and it's still streaming all right we good to go we are good to go great welcome again everybody i'll call the meeting to order and ask everyone to stand for the pledge please 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 welcome everybody thanks for being with us tonight um before we start i actually just had a fairly quick comment or a couple of comments to share um i think most of us are aware that it's
002been about a year since the board has been able to convene um which is really quite remarkable and um if you're watching you probably know that the board can only convene as a governing body in this sort of setting in a meeting because we are governed by open meeting laws and so we haven't we're the only entity in the district that doesn't get to get together um and so i miss everybody i miss my colleagues greatly and i just wanted to take a quick minute to tell you why so john you and i are the ogs of this board of education what our eyes have seen we've been through the good the awesome the bad the ugly and the pandemic um john to me is quintessential canandaigua he knows everything and everyone his knowledge of
003the workings of the district is surpassed only by his understanding of and support of our understanding of everything legal he is a fierce advocate for constituents and his beliefs but most of all what i miss about you john is your sense of humor he is the king of one-liners timed perfectly keeping us laughing um john's loyalty he pulled the curtains for linda maltese's shows long after his kids were out of her classroom and up until she retired and then did the same for kendra drum is just remarkable and so john i hope you will be frieda to my terry good thing we're not in the same room beth and i have been friends since the day i moved to canandaigua in 2001 and our daughters hold just as precious a friendship beth and i were
004co-brownie leaders and often co-parents as our husbands worked very long hours she knew pretty much everything about my life and i desperately wanted her join me on the board so she could know that part of my life too professional dryer weddings funerals and the six o'clock news beth has a heart of gold and miss the way she's never met a problem she doesn't try to solve she's an incredible team player always taking one for our team representing our district's needs to legislators and local board organizations cheryl teacher leader ray of sunshine grandmother extraordinaire and one of the most genuinely fabulous people i know how many districts can boast a board member who has taught in the district for decades served as cta president seen more than john and me put together served on the board
005retired from the board and come back to serve on the board again to bridge a gap year how lucky we are to have the benefit of cheryl's wisdom her reverence for excellent public education and teaching her complete reliability and someone who is simply unflappable for so long michelle michelle was born to be a leader in the field of human resources her perfect combination of high standards and appreciation for the imperfect beings we all are make her completely approachable and able to offer astute observations and meaningful advice on really any topic i can think of she's generous with her time and knowledge for the benefit of the district and an advocate for all students her ability to articulate with passion and clarity and balance is an enormous asset to our board jen a self-professed geek whose
006knowledge of higher education and the workforce have helped to shape who we are because of how well she articulates and models where we want our kids to go always ready with a word of support and encouragement always a proponent of our people and how hard they work always willing to share her vast experience from her teaching her field of engineering and her particular interest in gray matter the ability to productively navigate the increasingly disparate points of view and opinions that haunt our country have made us better her selfless participation on our covet 19 task force has also made us safer megan does the work of angels she objectively has some of the most emotionally challenging and draining work days of any of us and she still shows up whole positive forward thinking and kind always
007i love her focus on mental health and her determination to see us make value the way she helps us the way she insists that we get better every day and the way that we support our students staff and families and the way we treat people milton brings all of the thoughtfulness and value of a slightly different pathway through education to our district his laser mind and work ethic catch discrepancies and errors and his kind soul brings them to our attention and well the kindest of ways milton has a way with words and the ability to work through challenging issues and questions with a calm and caring focus i knew he would be outstanding because joe del forty would not step down from his place on the board until he found the exact right person to
008run did he ever and julianne brave enough to join this crew during a pandemic no less julian's background in teaching in higher education and her devotion to the issues of diversity equity and inclusion have allowed her to hit the ground running and be a high impact board member from the very moment she started her service i cannot wait to be back in person with all of you i thank you all for the work you do i think we've all had the vegetables without the dessert this year we've had the hard work and the feedback that's sometimes heartfelt and difficult and sometimes expressed in challenging ways and we haven't had the antidote which is being in the buildings with our kids and our staff and so i really commend each and every one of you for
009your persistence this year and for the incredible goodwill that you've shown throughout thank you jamie all yours no genie there's no way any of us could do this without you we're going on 16 years together here you're still my kids emergency pickup if they ever go back to primary school [Laughter] the way the way you keep us together the way you've kept everyone that's come through here the way we've worked to keep our upper corner i'm looking watching youtube so jamie is in our upper corner the head you know how we all worked as a team to win the lottery with him you know the only thing we are saving on kleenex for the district not buying them for best but i gotta say you you are you know the top of our of our
010mountain john thanks everybody all right jamie all yours no way i want to follow any of that but that was that was perfect just perfect um carlin you know so you know welcome to the group carlin and one thing i knew um when i came here three or four years ago as i was lucky to work with some pretty special people and so hopefully that gave you a glimpse of the people around this screen uh that are really special i've learned a lot from them and them and and i'm hoping you'll get a chance to learn a lot from them throughout this year too um so i wanna just jump right in i'm gonna share my screen i know we don't love it when i share a screen because we can't see each other but
011it's easier for me to kind of do my talking points when i have a screen to show you so can everybody see this okay if you give me a thumbs up just to let me know all right great um you know i really just wanted the picture of brian amesbury getting hit with the pie in the face uh let's just jump into this now i want to give her updates around covet vaccination how we're doing things along those lines to start with what we believe based on the numbers that we have right now is that as of next week so after february break we'll have 65 of our staff with their first vaccination at least which is really fantastic and none of this happens without the the help from thompson hospital and the local department
012of health they have been just such fantastic partners communicating with me daily it feels like helping to coordinate um these vaccination appointments we've actually created vaccination call teams uh and a lot of them are the people you see on the screen that are administrators and many many others where when these vaccination appointments come out we have a group text we send it to each other and we pick up the phone and we start calling our staff to help coordinate vaccinations for them for the ones that want it and so really proud of our efforts in this regard we're still meeting regularly weekly as a region with other school districts and what i can tell you is today when we got on and we we told how many vaccinations we needed canada was little to none
013and we were the only one in that boat and so that's really you know kudos to our staff for making that happen i want to talk about we're showing the graph a little bit differently this week just because it's easier to see visually but this is our student student rates and the gray line is quarantined remember quarantines is kids might have been exposed to somebody who has coveted so they put them in quarantine whereas the red line is isolation this means kids who had coveted you know known to have covet coming out of the holiday break you can see there was a little bit of a climb in both quarantine and isolation at our peak for students there were 24 students on one day in isolation in 75 and quarantine and we've continued to drop
014ever since that peak to where we are now uh today we have four students district-wide in isolation and 26 in quarantine what you'll see is a blip here in the quarantine numbers we probably saw our brave square message went out we had two classes that had to move to quarantine because of a potential exposure today and friday and so that's the big reason you see that little jump there if you look at our staff data it's a little like an ekg with quarantines what we find is sometimes it has to do with groups of them that were maybe in a place together for an extended period of time and they were quarantined together but you'll see it kind of rose with our staff the peak was 10 staff members in isolation on any one given
015day whereas we had 19 and quarantine was our peak as of today we have four staff members in isolation and six staff members in quarantine we've gone down significantly but again friday and today just being honest they weren't good days the the data we received and the information we received from public health we saw a little uptick and so i'll be really curious to see what happens with that i know when i left work on friday i was so hopeful fingers crossed because i honestly thought we could hit zero across the board with everybody this week but we have this little uptick so we need to be cautious and pay attention uh but then when you combine staff and students you can see this loyal rise and a slow steady decline with both both isolation
016and quarantine we are trending in the right direction all good news in total we have eight people um and that shouldn't say just staff members i'm sorry that should say staffing students eight in isolation and 32 in quarantine total staff and students much better numbers in fact these numbers are better than they were uh before the holiday break so you know to give you perspective and this is just another way to look at it where they're located so in the primary school you can see we don't have any staff members at the time of this reporting um and again these are subject to change at any moment in one student you can kind of look down and see you know four total at the elementary one at the middle one at the academy none at
017the cacc uh one at top center and that's everybody we don't have anybody virtual anybody out of district or anybody at district office right now there's zeros at that at those places so numbers are improving you know those are good things we want to see those numbers continue to improve i don't know about any of you but i can speak for myself i am getting a lot of questions from community members well they're improving are we ready to open fully now and i wanted to i thought this would be a really important opportunity for us to talk about why we are where we are not just here in canada but across new york state we really haven't talked about the origin of all this since probably september and it'd be a good time to revisit
018it in fact i had a phone conference with a group of superintendents over the weekend and i reminded them of this and i was surprised a number of them that didn't remember it because we're dealing with so much and information continues to change it's hard to retain all of that and i was just surprised that i retained it so um this is what i remember and this is what we pulled today from our archives on july 13th of 2020 the new york state department of health re they released the reopening guide right it was like a 20-some page reopening guide and we dug into it and there was a lot of ambiguity around the language they were using the word should and shall must was also thrown in there amongst us should and what did
019all that mean it was really confusing and you can see here around face covering specifically appropriate ppe means at least an acceptable face covering which is strongly recommended to be worn by all individuals at all times but is required to be worn at any time or place that individuals can't maintain appropriate social distance that was confusing so are you telling me we can be less than six feet social distance and and but we have to wear a mask and then greater and they don't have to it was very confusing and it goes on below here to say that we need to ensure that appropriate social distancing to protect against the transmission of cobit when on school grounds and in school facilities a little contradictory and so we were calling the governor's office and we included
020superintendents we're calling everybody and saying what does this mean help us interpret it and we weren't getting much answer so new york state education department also released a guidance document that was equally kind of vague and ambiguous just a couple days after this one on actually july 16th but because we really still needed to know what did this mean the new york state education department did contact the governor's office and did get a response they thought and on the 17th they released of july they released this statement you can see up here based on clarification from the governor's office regarding the intent of the new york state department of health guidance on their on the 13th we are providing the following clarifications look at this here in bold it says you must social distance six
021feet or barriers or masks and cover or face coverings there were oars they said we talked to the governor's office and they said it's or you don't have to do both and so at that time school started saying okay you i think we can fully reopen then if it people just need to wear a face mask and or a distance we one of the options we can entertain is just wearing a base covering and bring everybody back and we went to work again planning our reopening plans until on july 22nd the new york start state education department again in red this time released another faq upon further discussion with the governor's office schools must ensure that appropriate social distance six feet or barriers is maintained between individuals while in school facilities and on school grounds
022this includes students faculty and staff unless it's a safety or core activity that requires shorter distance so it should be a rare an extent so i'll give you an example of what that core activity might be the teacher is teaching and a student is stuck and they don't understand so the teacher comes closer to help provide a little more guided one-on-one instruction once they deliver that they then go back to their six-feet distance so the reality is right now we're we're required to have masks and social distances six feet at all times here's some other restrictions that are really difficult at the moment on the buses we have to be six feet apart or one per seat one student per seat up against the window well under that provision we can only bus brian nolan
023maybe 20 or 22 students you know thank goodness our parents are transporting a lot of them and we're under a hybrid model under a full return we couldn't bust students any longer we would not have the capacity based on this these guidelines we have to follow another one is meal consumed on site kids have to be six feet apart they take their mask off it's in the guidance they have to be if everyone was here we wouldn't have the space to do lunch we just wouldn't uh and so when people ask right the vaccinations are here things are headed in the right direction can we fully reopen now we can't even have that conversation until the state level changes these guidelines the six feet and a mask the busing provisions in the meal provisions those
024are the primary things that keep districts our size even a little smaller than us and bigger in a hybrid model some of the really small schools that are fully back even some that border us they have class sizes in the 9 or 10 range to begin with we don't and we don't have that luxury so what we do know is almost all of our staff who wants vaccines they have appointments now and we're really thankful for that really it's almost 500 out of 731 staff members we believe based on our data could be higher some of those appointments aren't until march some of the first doses at some of the pods maybe in the carrier dome and think are the fair grounds or places like that we're being told the vaccine's 95 percent effective but
025can vaccinated people still carry and transmit the virus i don't think we know i don't feel comfortable answering that at this point we're really unsure of whether or not we can fully reopen this year i think it's probably unlikely but i would not close the door on it but you know so much changes in such a short period of time but what we also need to know is it all depends on really the governor's regulations first if he were to change those regulations then we need to survey our staff students and parents what is their tone and tenor what are their sentiments around this how are they feeling what's their readiness level and then can we make a schedule work usually building a schedule takes almost all summer we built the schedule in response to
026this in just over two weeks and that was people dedicated strictly to scheduling with no school in session we have school in session and so how long would it take to rebuild a schedule while we're also trying to service school in session those are all things we don't know extracurricular involvement could prove that school is safe and it could lead to more loosening of regulations so we know the so-called high-risk sports have begun in fact we have some competitions happening today let's see how that goes if there's no uptick in covid uh outbreaks or isolations or quarantines maybe that tells us that it is safe and it might be okay to start loosening some regulations you know it it'll be interesting to watch and i think there's a lot of attention being paid to the
027performing arts right now you know right now they have to operate 12 feet distance for chorus and band myself included many others actually have a meeting with some local legislators friday with greg kane our lead music teacher webster's lead music teacher who's also a resident here in canada and webster's superintendent to talk about these ideas we talked about it last week with some legislators so if we could get some leniency in the performing arts can that be done and not see an uptick in coping and so if these things happen it only proves that school can do it safely and effectively and maybe ought to look at different regulations as we move forward but regardless no matter what it's our duty to try to find what ways to provide more opportunities for kids we've done
028the braves bonus days at the middle school and the academy we were set to kick those off at the primary school in elementary school last week but we had a snow day they are set to be kicked off this week so we're expanding that and i'll show you some academic data during another presentation that might point to maybe that's having an effect for kids we expanded classes and spent in special ed program we've brought back more students four days a week in different grade levels who have special education needs and so we'll continue to look at those things what else we're in some very initial brainstorms and conversations around do we do spring break academic camps do we do evening school or summer programming expansion partnering with the ymca for example again we're already authorizing
029and working towards that and so there's a lot of things we're trying to do to build capacity even if we can't fully reopen so i threw a lot at you there and i want to continue to update you on our coveted numbers our vaccination progress a little bit later on we'll share our academic data and other presentation but um if you're not hearing it already you're likely going to start hearing from community members that do believe we should be fully reopened five days a week and um i think it's important to know that there's also community members that they don't know that they're comfortable with that shift yet you know they think the hybrid is safe and they have a comfort level there and we have some that have picked virtual and so no matter
030what we do just whenever i decide at the end i'll i'll certainly say it that way is not going to make everybody happy um it's not a fun position to be in but before we i'll go back to before we can even consider anything different than what we're doing now things must change with the state regulations otherwise we're kind of at a stalemate this is where we are so i'll stop talking now i'll stop sharing my screen so that way if anybody does have questions i'll i'll attempt to answer them as best i can questions or comments from the board okay well this jen so jamie i would just like to hear some of your thoughts um the covet 19 committee talked about this a little bit at the end of last week when we
031get together it it seems to me that some of the things that we will uh be supporting as we move into high-risk sports um present some opportunities for exposure that are not equal across music or even putting kids in the classroom so you can't put a kid in the classroom less than than six feet and you can have a mess but i can if i'm running a high-risk sports team i certainly am going to put them less than six feet apart for more than 15 minutes so to me there needs to be a discussion on this discrepancy of some of the new york state requirements thoughts there's an ongoing uh discussion around that in fact uh julianne and beth with our uh meetings with senator helming assemblyman gallahan this these points were raised that there
032is a great disparity between those i actually did one of uh i haven't done them all year long but we just kicked them off again today the cars fireless fireside chat with some of our musical students and we talked about some of these discrepancies and things like that it's tough and i joke with the students today kind of we literally have kids that are wrestlers that will wrestle and then they can't come and sing unless they're 12 feet away from everybody else it doesn't seem to match up the only thing i can say and i'm this is not my stance per se but what i hear is you know extracurriculars are choice whereas some of these things we're talking about in school are music for example are credit bearing and so they're not necessarily choice
033uh and so maybe that's where a little bit of the reluctance is but i don't disagree with you at all i think there is a great disparity and in fact tonight was the first time i saw on some social media push towards our local legislators that their need the governor needs to consider the six feet in the classroom rule maybe it's just masks are a must but i'll tell you that's going to make a lot of people very uneasy jen so one other thing that the committee talked about that i think bears some discussion across the state is the idea that in college for high-risk sports we have to test team members to allow them to play those sports yet that isn't a requirement k-12 so that means that i could have a senior playing
034the high-risk sport in canandaigua gets no testing um three months later that student shows up in college and that same kid would need to be tested routinely to be on that sport so i reached out to the department of health i actually wanted to do that i wanted to test students on competition days and coaches and the department of health reached out to the new york state department of health and the new york state department of health said the rapid tests are not authorized to be used for those purposes i would love to do that the issue is we probably could find them where we could purchase them when i've looked into it i was originally told there were five dollars each the ones i found are actually 15 each and knowing how many you
035know it's it's a decision you have to make do you if we're the only school doing it that's the other piece if we're the only school doing it does it really do anything for us or not stuff i struggle with every day if if we're the only school doing it it's not worth the time to do it because we're not playing ourselves we're playing we're playing other teams what is interesting is those rapid tests are allowed at the college level maybe that's where we need some advocacy to me it makes all the sense in the world we could be identifying students that may be asymptomatic or staff walking around or we could be demonstrating that infections aren't there at all and this is actually safe either way we win and uh i agree i would
036love to do it and one last thing the the rapid test certainly aren't as accurate as a pcr test swap test um but it's better than no test at all and the fact that you can do it rapidly means you could do it more often so the more you do it the more accurate it is any other questions or comments beth i just wanted to say that until i met with six legislators last week i didn't realize that most people don't understand that we are under this six-foot rule and that honestly it doesn't matter what our best intentions are we physically cannot bring kids back under these rules and the people i was talking to was like what what do you mean um and you know like jamie said there are places that are pretty
037close to us that are back and nobody has i don't wanna say nobody the powers that be haven't figured out that that's because they have they just have a smaller volume of kids to begin with so i think the more we can you know share that with pretty much anybody the better we might all be singing the same song thanks beth i plan to actually uh use a lot of this in friday's communication just that's kind of a peach piece so people understand why we are where we are and what we need to be looking out for anything else okay thank you very much do you have anything else for us jamie no that's plenty carlin welcome so there's actually a lot more going on right now um we just did the orange crushes we
038were putting those together to safely hand out and sanitize we were putting them all together today so then they're safe for tomorrow um for valentine's day and a lot of people we had we tried to do it and a lot of people actually participated in it so it's good to see some student activity going on um we also had some people from our student government go to a conference last weekend a free conference for some training and some new ideas to bring into the school so hopefully we'll be using some of those things to help get students more involved with each other um ski's team and the swim team have their sectionals um this week the ski team has their sectionals tomorrow and i think we have around five or six people going and they
039all are seated to do pretty well so that's exciting our swim team is doing our sectionals on wednesday and we have 16 swimmers going so that's really huge and it's really exciting my little brother's on the team so it's um the musical we've finally got um pretty much this week we've started actually doing things on it they i've got more information today because i was there working on choreography with shaman and it's called misbehaving in the 20s and so basically we're recording uh everything in small groups we're going to be recording we recorded all the auditions and superintendents daughter was helping with some interviews um when that audition process was happening as well and it's gonna be kind of a um recording the auditions and then kind of seeing like through the director's mindset how
040he's envisioning it would be in performed so it'll cut from part of from my understanding it'll cut from part of the audition tape of someone singing or something like that into a group doing a solo or a group doing a duet or a dance number and things like that so today they started bringing in different people to work on those individually and we also started working on choreographing with a small group of people to get that set so that's really exciting so we're doing that all safely um and so and along with the sports opening up too oh there's been a lot of buzz about that within the student body a lot of people are really excited about that especially with the start of the new semester i think it'll help a lot of at
041least student athletes keep on track with their grades which is a little bit important so it's important it's good to see that happening and i think everyone right now is excited to see where we're gonna go with the second semester so a lot of good stuff going on great that that was probably the most exciting report of quite some time that's awesome thank you for sharing all that really appreciate it uh let's see we have board minutes up for approval i'll ask promotions please jen and milton questions or comments all in favor a post that carries unanimously deb and our strategic plan winter update there you are matt i'm here that's us uh mr far would you like me to share my screen to start or how would you like to i could share it
042if you would if you're okay with that go ahead and we'll set up for it all right let's do it everybody see that okay yes all right so this will be mostly matt speaking but let me just uh kind of start strategic planning as you know we went through a whole revision of our strategic plan uh we have this nice document that shows our vision one community transforming lives our mission and rich explore and empower our district values and within those three values the learning community and whole child development there's there's things in there that we value and then beyond that we have our goals and so ideally what would be happening is we have these district level goals that would be supported by the building level in departments grade levels and then that right
043now there's individual learning plans that every one of our administrators has to support our advancement of these goals it's all everyone's working consistently towards the same goals values metrics and using the same formats we're not perfectly there yet this little thing called covid came in as we were rolling all of this out but we are still pushing forward we are still moving in this direction and i feel like we've done a lot of things this year that actually perfectly support our goals so if you you don't remember we have four primary goals to enhance our organizational systems and always improve teaching and learning to continuously improve our district operations to cultivate an equitable and inclusive school environment and then to continue to expand opportunities and so matt will talk about what we've done this year
044this year to to kind of directly advance those goals and then i'll come back and talk about how we're doing this year academically so matt back to you thank you jamie uh good evening everyone so as jamie just reviewed for us uh we do have our four strategic goals if we recall in the fall we started the year talking about some of the different initiatives and we heard from each one of the building principals and some of our directors about some of the specific uh initiatives underneath each one of these four goals tonight's presentation is is an update about where we are at the winter point of the school year and so a lot of the activities that you see here are a direct result of us trying to be responsive to what we're seeing
045from our students while still maintaining our building plans and still maintaining the focus on these four goal areas so tonight's presentation will talk a little bit about what's happening from the office of instruction so there are some more district-wide pieces that are occurring but still some progress updates from each one of the buildings uh i certainly won't go through each one of the bullet points if you recall in the fall each one of the principals took the time to talk about bullet by bullet by bullet for every single one of the different initiatives they're focused on which is appropriate because they're really proud of the work that they're doing uh but a lot of these bullet points simply highlight and ex and serve as an extension of what's already occurring uh so for you know
046of course our first goal first and foremost about improving teaching and learning you can see a range of activities on this first slide um you'll notice that there's some pretty overarching trends on all the slides but this first one really encapsulates a lot of what's occurring and that's that responsiveness to what we're seeing from students we spend a lot of time this summer trying to evaluate and anticipate where there could be some potential gaps for students knowing that we went through the closure period from march to june and so a lot of the different pieces here are either the direct result of some of the information we've encountered so for example there's continued curriculum work you'll see a variety of different resources and training that we've provided the students in the areas where we were
047anticipating deficits such as reading and phonemic awareness all the way up to thinking about math and gene mckenzie working with the interventionist to seek the opportunity to have some additional professional learning through a math recovery grant uh which we not only have been awarded once but uh pursuing a second opportunity to be able to be awarded additional training uh through uh the program that she was able to uh get some real explicit training for intervention staff and then we're trying to be strategic in other places where we're using our tech integrators to improve and enhance the quality of instruction at the middle school or trying to be strategic with our physical education staff and ingraining digital digital citizenship which is obviously taking on a new form as we're having the students engage in instruction in
048some form either virtually or remote for the for for the entire district it's kind of taken on a new meeting but we can't lose sight of some of the important instruction around digital citizenship as the state has recently uh released computer science standards in addition to uh thinking about digital literacy for our students and we were well ahead of the game as a district with our own skills map but we have some future work to do in this area to align the state document to our own and as jamie highlighted in the opening we're continuing to find ways to get students more connected to school uh with our braves bonus day and additional instructional time for students to engage at least in instruction and work on wednesdays so that really highlights a lot of the
049main focus areas for goal one so jamie if you can go to the second slide please for gold two um and again some similar themes here you know we're trying to think about ways in which we can continuously improve district operations uh trying to streamline certain processes one bigger picture component again working across buildings is trying to figure out how we can enhance certain processes with academic intervention services multi-tiered systems of support and you'll see that in a variety of different buildings we're trying to align and streamline those processes so they're more directly meeting the needs of students and at the time that we're spending as professionals to problem-solve in these areas for students academic or social emotional needs that were being more strategic and streamlined with how that looks but we're also getting better
050at documenting and progress monitoring students as we try a variety of strategies um to to help close gaps where they might exist and then we're uh in terms of trying to communicate with families uh we'll hear actually in our next board meeting and update from caroline chat and about uh trying to be more strategic with communication and we really walk a fine line of trying to make sure that we are communicating enough information to families but we certainly are conscious of not over communicating and inundating and i think we're still trying to find a sweet spot with that we kind of err on the side of let's make sure we get information out to folks uh but not for the intent to overwhelm so a lot of our building functions we've tried to find ways
051to be more again streamlined and strategic and i think that's leading to a continuous improvement outside of that um you know we're still working you know brian nolan is working directly with vern uh and seth on all things with needs of transportation ppe uh and of course we're all aware of the central receiving um center construction that's ongoing and hopefully uh will be completed by may 4th that'll be another example of outside of the academic realm uh ways for trying to streamline uh and improve district operations so jamie uh goal number three please um and this is a big piece um you know this this took on a whole different level of importance as we went through uh last spring end of the summer and started this school year with trying to cultivate an equitable
052inclusive school environment you know when we had this goal initially at the outset of last school year um it meant different things to different people but as time has passed it's certainly taken on a whole new level of importance and is just as part important as anything else in relationship to teaching and learning because without this it becomes even more difficult to try to have an environment where students can can learn successfully so you'll see a range of activities of course we talked about things more recently we're trying to include things such as restorative practices at the middle school for example but we know that for antenni is facilitating our diversity equity and inclusion committee uh and doing a lot of great work on that front but uh we're not only learning as a district
053but as a leadership team and so we're trying to find places and spaces to continuously come back uh to this as an important learning goal for ourselves in order to advance the work but you'll also notice things at the academy for example where a student generated survey survey was intended to try to help assess students perspective on just how equitable inclusive the school environment is there's a lot of good information that came from that that i know that the administrative team at the academy is is currently pouring over in order to help try to determine next steps and ways to try to help enhance that equitable inclusive school environment our final goal mr barr please uh this should come as no surprise because i i know as a district this is something we we certainly
054pride ourselves on and we really haven't rested to try to figure out you know previously as we think about last school year we tried to figure out how we can continue on certain traditions uh and keep kids connected so whether it was graduation or the egg drop i mean everything we try to think about ways to continue to keep students connected to some of the things that they're used to doing but we obviously got creative with some of those things and a lot of this holds true this year as well we've talked pretty widely about the additional day on wednesdays but as jamie mentioned in the opening that hasn't stopped us from thinking about can we access time over breaks may might we consider using time in the evenings etcetera uh to try to help
055kids stay connected to school but we also know that these opportunities are for a lot of kids what really helps them stay connected to school you know as carlin pointed out there's a whole there's a buzz now of some of the things that um we haven't seen as much of in the past and i think that's a huge thing for students that they they're not just at school for academics but there are the social social um and um extracurricular activities that we know help our kids have a successful school experience so many of the things listed here we're starting to uh again try to think differently about how to engage kids in these different opportunities while still you know trying to adhere to the different parameters that you know that are asked of us to
056uh to maintain so um a lot of work has gone into these four goal areas so i think the big question that you know jamie's gonna talk to us about here in a bit is to what extent does all of this work then translating to our student experience in terms of their academic performance uh and so i'll turn things over to jamie to help lead us through that conversation there we go thanks matt uh so how are we doing for this school year i guess is the question we'll we'll tackle a little bit now we're looking at the data a bit here so let's just jump right in the first slide i want to talk a little bit about is attendance student attendance rate this year versus last year and what you'll see is the
057blue line is last year and the red line is this year and so uh what you need to know if a student misses a day it equates to approximately seven classes and so if you look at the first one to five weeks and you see this year versus last year is pretty similar students missed a little over two days on average in the first five weeks across the district but you can see that gap is widening as we go on at the academy six to ten weeks again if you consider a day about seven classes last year they missed about two days whereas in that time frame whereas currently now a little over three days that they're missing and so this includes the remote days that they're attending so we do an analytic of you
058know are students logging into their device and how long are they in their device doing work we're able to see that and so what you can see is this year at the academy kids are missing more school you know maybe one and a half times amount of school as compared to under normal circumstances obviously when you're missing school it's harder to learn and and it's just you know digging a little bit of a hole for the students that's the academy middle school again you see a similar trend here i want to go back to the academy you see the trend widening a bit which is concerning we need to pay close attention to that but at the middle school you'll see that the gap is widening but then it starts to close and one of
059the things you may or may not know but that started happening is the middle school team worked closely with tracy lindsey to pull analytics as the day is happening and the staff over there starts calling students during the school day who have not logged in to encourage them to log in to talk with their parents to you know try to get them to engage in the work and so we're seeing maybe a slight downward trend so maybe that activity or that action has caused a you know a trend in the right direction but nonetheless kids are missing more school under the current model versus the old model looking at class averages again the blue line is middle school for this chart and the red line is the academy if you look at the vertical line
060right down the middle this separates last year from this year and so to the left of the line is last year and you can look at the averages throughout the quarter in the progress report so for the first two quarters and then over here you see averages from this year and you will see the middle school last year was here and took a drop by about five to six grade points from year to year so far through the first two quarters the academy going through here last year the first half of the year to this point and what you'll see is that the academy there was a drop of about five points for the first quarter four or five points they've actually narrowed it and it appears as the discrepancy between last year at the
061second quarter and this year is a is less than two points i believe it was less than two points yeah less than two points great point so they're closing that gap might that have to do with uh braves bonus day at middle school and academy and you'll see here the blue line and the red line look at the sharp incline right there might that have to do with the braves bonus day what we know is we have over 100 kids in each building now signing up for those days they've been going on since before the holiday break and they know about 80 to 90 percent of the students that are accessing those days are students who are struggling in some classes and so they're reaching some of the students that need those days the most
062now what we wanted to do next is dive into a little bit of the comparative data and so this is a male and female chart and what you'll see last year uh there was a discrepancy between where the females were scoring on grade level in the mail and how the boys were and then going into this year you can see that gap widened a little bit between how the boys are doing versus how the girls are doing the females seem to be doing a little bit better in the remote model versus the boys but they're both they both declined by a couple points this year versus last year and so looking at uh everything you've seen so far probably not a big surprise you know that the grades have dipped a bit but these are
063overall averages all students when you start breaking it down further it becomes much more alarming and so this next chart is really our students who are designated as economically disadvantaged versus the ones that are not designated economically disadvantaged the red line as a student are the students who are not designated as economically disadvantaged and you will see at quarter one last year they had a 91 average this year 88 quarter two 89.8 87.8 they might have dropped by a point or two year to year but the students who are designated as economically disadvantaged took a sharp decline quarter one to quarter one nine points quarter two to quarter two seven points but that gap is closing again i'll ask could this have something to do with those braves bonus days in getting into a routine
064we certainly like this upward trend here and we want to continue to watch it but you can see the gap that existed last year is unfortunate this is unacceptable and and we need to this is why when we go back to my first part of the presentation what's so frustrating is the disparity between what districts our size or larger are able to do or in other districts they're back five days a week because they don't have nearly as many students and my heart breaks for these students who are struggling it really breaks for everybody that's stuck in this position but this is really a sad statistic right here that we need to figure out the other one is our students with disabilities you know so students who have an iep if you look at last
065year there is a gap and i should know that our school really does quite well comparatively with students who have an iep and commencement outcomes we we do really well but you can see a pretty sizable drop between how kids did last year and then how they're doing this year for students with ieps again i i feel a bit hopeful that there's a climb here remember we have brought more of those programs back to four days a week in recent days in recent weeks and a lot of these students are utilizing those brave bonus days as well and so hopefully these upward trends continue but it's something we need to pay close attention to what i'm more concerned about right now is the gap here on those last two slides this one with the economically
066disadvantaged and our students with disabilities and then we took a close look this one is also concerning if we look at our students we we don't have a tremendous amount of diversity in the canada city school district when it comes to race and ethnicity but if you look at our how our white students are performing in comparison to our non-white students you can see last year versus this year the gap widened yet again and so these are all things that we need to continue to pay attention to and this is why there's a sense of urgency to if we're not going to be in a position to reopen uh more fully what else can we do to help students succeed who are struggling and that's we're not going to profess to have any answers but
067we certainly are brainstorming and talking about it often and so that's a lot of data between what matt shared with you and all the work we're trying to do this year despite the pandemic despite our circumstances and our constant viewing of our data how we're doing academically so forth and so on i didn't share data specific to the primary elementary school remember they grade based on standards-based grading there is data we could pull from there i just don't know if it'll be in this presentation format as valuable if you'd like to see me do that i certainly could bring that to the next board meeting i'd be happy to but i will unshare my screen now in case anybody has questions and perhaps matt and i could answer them for you michelle not really a
068question but just an observation and a um you know the power of data and asking the why questions is what's going to be a differentiator for for our district to others so props to you for for looking at that data the way that you did and trying to figure out what the why is and then what do we wrap around that to support those students great milton so i the data you were using was that last year's 11th graders and this year's i'm assuming you were looking at just like three years right eleven through nine so you're comparing likes to likes here not you're you've kicked out the those who weren't here or aren't here now right so it's not we're not comparing the same students here last year to this year it's just the
069entire building what are their academic averages what are their attendance rates and so yes last year last year's data would have for example the juniors and then this year's would have them as seniors okay so i mean but different courses right so i mean but but the trends are i think are telling here so even though it's not like to like we still see some trends which are troubling right john jamie we went remote when last year was march march yeah i wonder what that data would look like from the last year we were fully in school compared to a year we're fully i'm not in school because we've got to remember if you start march onward that was a crazy to start with yeah when we when we extrapolate this data out we're actually
070going to have to go back to the previous spring compare the data to make anything worth looking at because the grades for the third and fourth quarter last year remember we did a lot of different formulas to tabulate the grades last year but this year's comparison very much um you know it is looking at two different scenarios where school was fully open and we we were able to get through the first two semesters typical five days a week the first 20 weeks this year is an indicator about with this current learning model what is the impact so it is showing us a trend of pretty accurately of what are the discrepancies between how students performing when they're coming to school five days a week versus our current model where some are virtual four days a
071week um or they're coming two days and you know the remote for three other days you didn't differentiate virtual versus the ones that are two and two out no but we're going to now well the other while the other point you have people that advocate offering online even when we can go back that these numbers if you were to take these numbers and pull out the ones that were um fully online that may show even a greater gap yeah i'm going to actually talk to crazy tomorrow as we were talking i thought yeah that's a piece of data we need that'll be telling so i'll talk to tracy and we'll have him pull that as well jen so john took my first set of questions but my my second question is can we get some
072data on um how many students may have dropped out or pulled out of the class in middle school or high school decided not to take a foreign language or whatever i'm i'm really curious as to what are what our drop rate is year over year too uh yes i think let's talk let's talk a little bit more about what you're looking for for example we've had some requests for some students to to drop some classes at the academy for example but there's we have a board policy they have to take six credits and so they've been unable to um so but certainly we could see maybe students who didn't well i know this for sure some students decided not to do chorus for example under this format and so that sort of data we probably
073could pull i just want to make sure when we pull it it's it's valuable data you know careful about that yeah i i get that um i'm just curious because anecdotally i hear about students you know dropping at classes here and there um because they're having trouble keeping up or you know it's not what they want is you know in the in for example with course and things like that i'm just curious what that that data shows year over year in terms of how many classes our students are engaging in in in this strange year versus a normal year so you know what does our distribution look like this year versus last year or the year before okay i think i think i know what you're looking for let me see what i can dig
074up well let me see which facebook and then my second question really has something to do with when you say we're tracking how students log in i'm i'm assuming you're just tracking they've been there or they've not been there in a given day you're not tracking the amount of minutes or friends like that just whether they engaged right yeah they need to be logged into their system for a certain amount of minutes before to click on but it's not an extended amount of minutes okay thank you welcome other questions or comments thank you thank you matt thank you jamie thank you all the data collectors behind all of it um let's see we have a consensus agenda and supplemental ass promotions please john and beth questions or comments all in favor opposed that carries unanimously
075deb and let's see michelle will you report report out on audit please i certainly will we had a pretty jam-packed meeting covering a lot of numbers which we're going to hear more about as we move through time here and get into budget season a few highlights those mid-year state aid reductions that we thought might happen but we were waiting to see if money was actually going to be held back um no good news no state aid reductions or cuts this year but there's not a repayment schedule yet so shocker right so we're in sit tight vote on that transportation aid we do expect a reduction in transportation aid we don't get aid when we're not transporting students even if we have drivers on standby or try to find other things for them to do so
076that's going to be a hit to us which is which is unfortunate we also expect some some reductions in aid for students with special needs particularly around the use of aids so if we if we have aids employed but they're not actually in one-to-one situations like they're designated as that's not aidable um correct matt just do a little nod if i'm saying that right okay good so um it's really tough in remote learning situations and obviously this impacts boces and some of our in-district students so something that we're paying attention to and we we're not really sure how big of a hit this is going to be for us so we're watching that carefully we expect foundation aids to be flat for the third straight year um if we do get some money in from
077the cares act which we expect there um the state is likely to just offset that money so really what we're looking at as we move not into this year or next year but as we get closer to the 22-23 school year is when we're really looking at a cliff that we're going to have to figure out some ways to manage um another interesting thing the state is doing i guess to be creative we're not really sure why is they're trying to combine a whole bunch of aid categories into one category called service aid that covers everything from transportation aid to boces aid to bus purchases the problem with that is we don't get a growth factor on that so we give up for example a two percent growth factor which is problematic so there is
078advocacy that is um happening with that to try to not have those aids all be combined ultimately what we're talking about is what i call people and programs right that's where the impact will be felt because we don't have too many different strings we can pull to balance our budget so um on a on a more positive note um we um are with the with the future projections for next year we are expecting about a million dollar increase that's all nearly boces aid though so um um you know which which will take any increase we can get but there's repercussions to that um this will likely shake out and matt we you know we can't put this in blood at this point but we're looking at a tax cap around two percent which is going
079to be really tough um in terms of what to expect going forward so we need some help at the federal level for sure and at the federal level from the perspective of we get that money but the state doesn't take it back so that is the audit report um a little bit more serious these days but we carry on you do thanks michelle i think the other thing i remember and sort of noted from that meeting was that the last time we hit the cliff we had some ability to right size um and we no longer can do that we are right sized and so um you know the clip will be really hard to confront but um as you said we carry on and we carry on with the best people in place to
080do it for us so thank you uh let's see policy beth just a quick motion on behalf of the committee um it's a second reading to remove policy 3250 student directory information because it's now repetitive with a new policy that we passed either the last meeting or two meetings ago okay and that needs no second so i will ask if there are any questions or comments all in favor a post that carries unanimously thank you uh character ed no report okay thank you uh let's did cie meet okay great this is going so well diversity equity inclusion did you all meet julianne all right i think safety did safety meet of course we did somebody's got to work around here i don't know safety did me we talked about looking by the screen with the
081notes elementary school window project almost completed 436 windows in less than two weeks phase one of our main project is at scd for final review we hope to hear back soon on that one boiler room work is targeted for the end of may and our brian and mike are talking with the pes administration while planning for that they're going to be reviewing at our next meeting the district safety plan we had building reports dealing a lot with snow and ice questions about whether pencil sharpeners were being emptied daily we do hit all the important you know michelle what everything isn't about money we somebody asked somebody has to empty the pencil sharpeners people programs and pencils sharpeners thank you very much so that was that it's a very important thing if it overflows what do
082you do you know then you've got all sorts of health and safety issues and we have to get more custodians budget goes out of whack there's a lot of things that can happen um that was that was safety but along the lines of what michelle was saying i don't know jeannie you might remember or brian we had one project at one point that was shovel ready fed money came in in a similar situation where they tried to get some money into the economy we had the shovel ready project and we were able to take advantage of that i don't remember which project it was it was somewhere many moons ago but i don't know if you guys have heard of is this federal money they're talking about is there going to be any chance that
083we can use some of that for that current project different shovel ready i i haven't heard anything i'm not sure brian or matt have but i have not brian does have the golden shovel in his office though so we can get him ready with it i haven't heard anything either now all right is that it john that said there was one one question that came up but it wasn't in that meeting but it was about the snow day and the fact that a lot of people didn't get phone calls has there been any talk about fixing a system so you can have more than one phone number get called yeah so it does um i think you can register up to two contacts last year worked perfectly we're not sure what the glitch was this
084year uh but did they have the issue on the second day john did you hear or just the first one and i for one we did our house phone didn't ring okay we get the contact for karen but the house phone didn't ring her cell phone ring last year and anytime up to this point both phones would ring because the cell phone made the the ringer may be turned off maybe in the other room but as long as the house phone rings we'll all hear it neither one of these calls came through our house phones okay so brave square has an update oh go ahead i was just john i'm just wondering what a house phone is we're the ogs we have there's a little thing with a dial on it you spin numbers like
085this and you can you can call people and megan you put your hand up were you um so the first day it called me just fine and the number that came up that told me it was the school was there and it was fine the next day the phone rang and it said potential spam yeah so then no i you know i don't answer those so i didn't answer it and then there was you know so i don't know what happened between day one and day two but the second day i got potential spam so and i think deb and dan bowman worked on that spam designation and we had to change it through verizon i believe or someone or yeah that should be corrected we knew some people didn't get the call and we're
086working on it brave square is doing this update uh i forget the name of it now uh april 4 or something like that but um essentially it allows people to make sure and verify that their contact information is up to date and correct so that we have the up-to-date information you know in a year's time people change numbers unfortunately i'm not saying it sounds like some of you didn't have to call and you didn't change numbers so we'll have to get to the bottom of what's going on there jen jamie to that end um our house phone we have one too um did not ring either but our cell phones did and it always and it's just as it's always been in the system okay thank you for that okay uh jen covet 19. did
087you all meet jamie uh took all of my thunder there's nothing more to add he did a great job okay thank you jamie do you have anything else i do not okay thank you very much everybody be well thank you for being with us tonight i'll ask for a motion to adjourn please michelle and milton good night everybody