001all right an achievement committee excellence in um not equity equity i got to get that right so thank you for giving me this opportunity and it is with great honor that i am allowed on behalf of the board to present an award a plaque actually to one of our employees actually one of our colleagues um i don't have a script but that's okay because in these occasions we must and should speak from the heart now speaking from the heart in these situations can be very difficult because this is a difficult job that we all have it challenges our soul our mind our emotions our spirit every day and if you can get through those challenges and still look someone in the eye and say thank you with the most sincerest uh thought that's a real
002blessing and and i think we all uh can say that about steve carling everybody uh probably has heard um this is steve's last official meeting and um it won't be his last duty um but it's certainly his last meeting and steve as a plaque describes has been working in this district or working for this district for a number of years going back to 2013. and i dare say there wasn't a day that steve did not confront the most difficult challenges that this district has with a degree of optimism and forward thinking and i again without a cheat sheet i can give you just a couple highlights under steve's and carl's leadership and then steve's leadership this district has not only had the courage to confront significant challenges some that might make another lawyer wilt in
003the pressure including the death of students and having to deal with the legal consequences of that including the ever challenges that we face trying to provide quality educational services to students with special needs and to deal with the ever-present notion that yes even institutions like this sometimes fall short of the laws that require that we treat people civilly and justly and steve has had to deal with all those allegations and the fallout of those allegations and notwithstanding the gravity of those charges and those challenges steve and his team and i know steve would want me to say his team have come through as brilliant committed public servants steve um and i hope my colleagues will allow me to say this i know in a very unique way how difficult and adrian does too it is
004to be a lawyer to be a lawyer for the district i would imagine is only doubly challenging because there is so much at stake you know as a lawyer you deal with one client at a time lawyer like myself but you literally are dealing with one massive client that has multiple interests at stake including the board the community and the administration and through it all you and your team have been creative and courageous again a quick uh list of some of your accomplishments a lot of people think that we were drawn into court on special education no steve carl and their team came up with an innovative way to address the challenges that we've had in special education um and and and and i i gotta say that the appreciation for which you all got
005out of the box is to the blessing of this district another example when this district was challenged with a suit that suggested the board should not exist you and your colleagues and the council's office came up with a creative legal argument that pushed back against that undemocratic notion and you had to do it with a great degree of courage really steve the list goes on and on and on but the most important impressive part about your work and all of us up here know it is that notwithstanding the constant challenges that we all face as a leadership team in the educational issues you and your team but you in particular stood strong and hung in there since 2013. on behalf of the board i want to tell you you will be missed and your services
006are much appreciated let's give steve a round of applause speech speech speech speech it's a very beautiful plaque i'm going to give it to steve but steve please say a few words it is a very beautiful plaque thank you um you know it's really been my my privilege to to serve the the students and the families of this uh institution for for eight years it was the longest legal job i've ever held and definitely the the most uh challenging by by a lot um it is uh but it's also very rewarding the the cover screen on my phone is me sitting amongst a group of kindergartners at school 29 who i just finished reading a book and they were just mobbed onto me that that's that's what you know also makes this job so amazing
007is to see um the potential in the spirit of the kids when you go into those schools and i didn't miss a single first day of school where i was there helping kids off buses and walking into classrooms and that's what you know i will truly carry with me as much as anything else i mean the legal the legal things we've accomplished and it is a tremendous team i've been responsible for the hiring of everybody who's in that department right now adrian was my first hire when i was interim general counsel the first time um and i'm leaving you guys with a a good legacy with that i think you're you're in you're in very good hands and he has a an open line to both me and to uh my predecessor who i was
008lucky to learn under uh carl so um you know it's been it's it's been a good run and you know the the team we have here it's been it's different as as you said in when you're in in the trenches in the middle decisions rather than detached and watching it happen um you know you get emotionally involved and it's uh you know but but that can that that makes it equally rewarding when things go well and and so i've certainly always appreciated the uh the dual role that you know you kind of serve as both counselor and and attorney you know and so um i i've been i've been privileged i consider myself that to have been able to do this for for so many years and and uh you know leave behind i'm a
009strong group to uh to continue on my work i'm a city resident i'll still be part of all of this you know in this community and and you know so i it is definitely as much as i'm looking forward to my next adventure which takes me to a different part of my life it's it's bittersweet leaving leaving all this behind so you know it's uh it's become something that i certainly have enjoyed doing um most of the days so and uh you know and and so yeah this is my last board meeting i hope everyone considers that tonight as we uh as as we deliberate but you know no whatever we need to do we've always been able to just just get it done and and i think that uh you know i hope that
010we've left behind a good legacy and continue to do so so thank you appreciate it thanks [Applause] thank you mr president um you know he he won't he won't say it but you know he's probably doing cartwheels you know uh getting out of this uh getting out of the board meeting but uh we do wish you much success uh steve and stop by and see us sometime all right so the next item on the agenda is our speakers and um i'm going to turn that over to our clerk to call out uh the speakers good evening everyone uh we are going to be having five speakers this evening or five persons sign up to speak uh there are mix of persons joining us via zoom as well as in person um i do want to
011also note that there were 41 comments and submitted to the record and those are available on the website at this time our first speaker is kilolo moyo white a parent who is joining us to talk on the topic of school closure is evening good evening thank you two minutes whenever you're ready okay my name is kilo lamoia white yes and i'm a parent leader as a parent leader i represent not just myself but other parents that are part of the district and that our community members this past weekend we had an opportunity to participate in the community action initiative unfortunately many parents and family members community members left unfulfilled and frustrated why haven't parents been given specific data to represent what is actually happening as it relates to violence safety within each of the individual
012schools of the district the media has a way of distorting representation of positive narratives and over representing isolated incidences which then characterizes the entire community of children represented within the district as violent and unteachable that is unacceptable unfortunately many people who came to learn and to think about how they could help it was unclear for these uh before the reasons of not having data and information about these incidences and whether they are one-off incidences or whether they are being pushed heavily in the media for unnecessary reasons that are rooted in racism if there are higher numbers of safety issues that are at some schools versus others more importantly there is there was nothing shared about what is currently being done to address any of the types of situations that are actually happening this kind of
013data is essential for parents and community members to be involved as informed citizens to understand how they should be able to be involved in the decisions around school closures when will parents and families have a say in these decisions if this is the conversation this evening parents must be a part of those decisions and not left out after the fact thank you miss moyo white we appreciate your comments tonight our next speaker is araya cameon lin a parent who is speaking on resolution 2021 22 247. ariah is also joining us on zoom i understand yeah i am here wonderful you have three minutes whenever you're ready great thank you president white vice president elliott commissioners doctors meyer small and dr nelms my name is arya camioni lind and i am the proud parent of three
014rcsd scholars thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening i'm asking you to vote no on resolution 247. a few weeks ago my children witnessed a middle school classmate attacked by adults or older children from a different school community at arrival an rpd officer sat in his patrol car across the street and did not intervene this i think is the exact incident you are trying to scare us with a child attacked and yet no response or support from rpd as the child rolled into a ball trying to protect herself from the kicks and punches of her attackers so instead i am asking you to support resolutions that create policies and supports for evidence-based intervention and prevention i'm asking rpd to do the job we already pay you to do and i'm asking
015the board of ed and the superintendents to stop introducing resolutions the board of ed has already decided including the question of contracts with rpd let's stop rehashing this conversation and let's move on to meeting the needs of our kids please vote no on resolution 247 thank you very much ariah we appreciate your comments tonight our next speaker is lauren camion she's also a parent speaking on resolution 247 is lauren in person or on zoom okay there she is lauren whenever you're ready welcome you have three minutes okay thank you so first thank you for the opportunity to express my feelings on this topic of the resolution i'm lauren kamione i'm the proud parent of franklin ennis who is a kindergartner at school 23. emilyn who is almost starting pre-k at st paul's and lucas who's
016six months old and a future scholar as always thank you for your service to our scholars and families i get chills about when i think about what my children will feel if the first thing they see when they arrive at school is a perimeter of squad cars surrounding them and then when they have to walk past armed officers from a police force we have lost faith in will they feel scared on guard anxious my children are young and impressionable but when they grow and mature what will the effect of these early impressions be how can parents be comfortable with this if they cannot walk beside their children to provide guidance and support as they enter and exit a place that should be filled with hope and possibilities i won't be there when my precious children
017are forced to put on a courageous face in this vulnerable state i like all of the other rcsd parents will be unable to lessen the emotional burden when the feeling of being over policed falls on the young and tender hearts of these young people in our community why is the solution being considered appropriate for children who are vulnerable and in need of effective support the rpd cannot be a part of my children's daily routine especially as they enter and exit a place of learning every day the association that my children will make between fear and school is unacceptable how can we expect them to thrive in an environment which instills fear and demonstrate that those who are charged with preparing them to be successful adults have lost faith in them i'm desperate to keep that
018from happening i'm disgusted with the idea that this is being entertained why are people who don't live in our community or send their schools their kids to our schools making these suggestions and demanding to be heard i am begging you to help us put an end to institutional racism i urge you to vote no to this resolution i'm asking you to vote no for the ethical implications i have addressed and also for the other convincing arguments that the folks in my community will be making tonight thank you for your time and thank you for your service thank you very much lauren we appreciate your comments tonight thank you our next speaker is jessica fleming a parent also speaking on resolution 247 is jessica joining us in person or monsoon okay we'll give her a few
019minutes on zoom while we're waiting for just wanted to recognize that dr nelms is also in a meeting via zoom i don't know if dr jallo is also uh yes i am all right just want to recognize that they are here with us thank you thank you thank you miss fleming are you with us hi yeah sorry wonderful whenever you're ready you have uh three minutes and um welcome ah good afternoon or good evening my name is jessica fleming i'm a parent one second i'm going to need you to turn on your video i'm so sorry oh thank you okay is that that okay go ahead um i'm a parent of two students in the district one um they're both in fifth grade one at school 45 and one at school 29 and i am
020also a parent on the citizen action education committee um and i am here today to to ask that we vote no to paying rochester city police officers rpd to sit outside of schools for two hours a day when that money could be used better spent on peras or social workers or someone who is trained to help and to de-escalate which we know that police in schools leads to more criminalization of children especially black and brown children we also know that the kids the students themselves are who organized to get rpd out of their schools and i think it sends them a really bad message to just go ahead and put rpd back in schools when the schools themselves are experiencing the same community problems that rochester is experiencing rpd has already paid an exorbitant amount
021of money to police the streets of rochester and our budget is very very thin we have like four times as many students in these schools per social worker than we should have um and it makes no sense for us to be paying rpd twice first with our tax dollars as rochester taxpayers and then again with our school budget to patrol the city streets um when the community has already said that we feel like we that we as a community we spend too much on police thank you very much miss fleming we appreciate your joining us tonight our last speaker is julie rossette a staff member who is addressing the board also on resolution 247. welcome julie she is joining us in person good evening on saturday i attended the district's community action initiative i participated
022in a breakout group discussing social emotional needs and supports for our students the two facilitators that led our discussion asked us how are the children the traditional greeting of the messiah tribe warriors i will attempt to answer their questions here in september alone 76 district-wide school counselors myself included completed a total of 245 mental health assessments we've responded to 81 gaggle alerts related to self-harm and completed 880 crisis interventions these are not just numbers these are our students they're experiencing stress and trauma and pain due to the past year and a half as well as many other societal and systemic factors it's not only clear to me that our students are in crisis it's also clear that as a district we did little to nothing to prepare for the to meet their needs this school
023year a year that we knew was set to unfold unlike any other now it's november and the only solution that the district has proposed is to reinvest in the rochester police department as a school counselor who's experiencing firsthand the grief and trauma and needs of our students i find the mere suggestion of the addition of police officers as support services to be insulting the foundation of my work as a school counselor is building genuine caring relationships with my students the extremely high needs of our students this year have been almost impossible for myself and my colleagues to meet without additional social emotional supports the current support staff are struggling to meet these demands up until this point there's been little to no action in securing additional supports for our students and at the end of
024last school year and throughout the summer i participated in the forums completed surveys took notes at planning meetings all of which gave me hope and were to plan for a safe and supportive return to in-person learning we strategize ways to implement social emotional learning time in our day and assess our students needs in the first weeks of school we were also extremely hopeful about the cares acts funds that our district might finally be able to properly allocate funds to provide the additional social emotional supports that we knew our students would need instead on october 1st i received my first personnel activity report via email informing me that my position as a full-time school counselor with three years in the district was now grant funded the official announcement that cares money was being used to fund
025current school counselors came from our director in our counselors meeting in late october all of this brings me here to address you tonight as a facilitator of restorative practices i recognize the importance of accountability to my school community i know that i need to be honest and admit that we are all failing our students right now they have been historically shortchanged and underfunded education and overcrowded classes inconsistencies and teacher budget cuts in the middle of the school year can you complete your remarks i can because the time is up the action items that i came up with from saturday for myself is to keep showing up for myself can you show can you give us your comments just give us your comments the time is up can can i just finish my last how much
026time how much more time is it maybe 30 seconds just i along with the rochester organization of rank and file educators will hold my union and board accountable to utilize the additional funds granted by our state for additional supports such as school counselors social workers and paraprofessionals not police officers or any other outside security firms i ask you to remember the question how are our students and what do they truly need right now thank you thank you so at this point we have concluded the speaker's portion and we're going to go into executive session can i get a motion to go into executive session cell moved and to discuss a personnel matter matters relating to the appointment and employment of particular what steve said can i get a second second all in favor all right
027we'll return probably in about 30 minutes or less all right thank you back in the esa excuse me meeting so the next item of on the agenda is excuse me is consideration oh uh thank you commissioner powell commissioner powell reminded me excuse me uh to acknowledge the that um commissioner lebron and commissioner adams are out on excused absence so they are not here with us this evening i believe commissioner lebron joined the zoom can we confirm if commissioner lebron is in the zoom room okay so she may join again i'm just letting you know but commissioner adams is out for sure all right thank you so um consideration for uh because the consent agenda um items uh can i get a motion to discuss resolutions 254 through um 261. uh still moved all in favor
028well and then any questions about resolutions 254 through 261. um i think i had a question on um 261. when i looked at the attachment excuse me um i wasn't clear about just get to it the exception form and um so can someone explain because i see this is the first time i've seen this kind of um resolution deadline exception form can someone explain what we're doing here and who is the do we have information on who the new associate director is that's what i was that's what i was unclear about good evening commissioners i can speak about the deadline exception form we have a timeline associated with the developing the development and submission of resolutions we actually have a resolutions calendar that we have to follow if there is a resolution that is submitted
029after that timeline there is a resolution deadline exception form that must be submitted to provide the rationale for why the timeline wasn't adhered to and so that is the explanation so with board docs we are adding that documentation for your review as well so do we know who this person is or do we need to does that need to be in the resolution of who the person is i do believe that is another resolution um that is included looks like it's resolution 261 that the deadline's for and and the resolution itself is down there it's h in the packet it's to a point it looks like stephanie thomas as one of the csc chairs so so resolution 261 was for the exception i think the exception was to allow resolution 261 to come in since
030it was late that's how i'm reading it that is correct okay so we didn't need to to have in this particular in the resolution the name of the person who's the new uh director that didn't need to be in in this resolution her name is in the resolution itself commissioner just not in the um deadline exception because it's not enough okay all right thank you um any other questions on these resolutions all right hearing no other questions can uh all in favor aye aye aye any opposed the voting is live on board docs i'm still waiting for one more sorry i wasn't logged in sorry if you want to verbally until you log in i can take your vote it'll only take a second oh no problem there it is okay sorry there we go
031voting closed okay thank you uh we have a motion for resolution 260. so moved can we get a second second any questions are resolution 260. hearing none um all in favor aye any opposed all right are we going to the main point yes yep okay that passed unanimously okay so um can i get a motion to lift from the table the resolution to authorize agreement with the city of rochester uh police department for police services at arrival and dismissal resolution 247 from the october 28 2021 business meeting still moved second second okay okay any um questions or comment on resolution um 247. but this is just a lift from the table so yeah say that again this is just to lift that resolution from the table okay at this time we'll do the vote all
032right so can i get a motion sorry moving too quick okay that closer now the resolution is now back on the table okay so do we need a motion for this so can i get them second uh any questions on resolution 247 i um i i had one i know the survey was done are we going to get the results the public going to get the results of the survey before after we vote the results of the survey are now public they are yes on board dogs thanks commissioner malloy is there any way dr meyer small that you could discuss some of the results with us prior to our vote i would respectfully defer to chief meriso lopez as she needed to provide support outside of our 11 secondary schools during arrival and dismissal times
033if you are in favor of continued rpd support outside of our school buildings please press one now if no please press two thank you for your feedback we also sent out the survey in an email format to the families who we have registered emails for and families were allowed to vote once so they either voted by phone or they voted via email we received a total of excuse me let me tell you the totals first we also administered this survey in spanish and again this is new technology that we are utilizing so we are working on additional languages as we proceed with this tool we had a total of 4125 uh 1 900 excuse me 2 000 oh no i'm going to have to do math i'm sorry commissioner malloy i want to be exact
034with these numbers we had a total of 2136 families respond of that number 1906 said yes and 230 said no in addition we had 2410 staff respond said yes and 191 said no so what percentage of our families engaged in this survey so the english the english language survey we had 8.7 one of our families uh participate and our spanish speaking survey we have a total of 4137 families registered as spanish speaking as the primary language 435 total respondents and that's 10.5 percent of the total spanish-speaking population and although i responded to the survey just as a parent in the district what was the time frame that parents had to respond to this survey we left the survey open for two days thank you any other questions yeah i have a comment president white thank
035you vice president elliot i just want to make clear some in the community have described this as a hobson choice we either have police officers stationed outside our schools and no social workers inside our schools and additionally people have said we should not have police officers in our schools because we need social workers in our schools let me repeat this is not a hobson's choice these are not mutually exclusive choices we need counselors and social workers and psychiatrists providing important behavioral and mental health supports for our children in our schools but we also need our children protected from those that do not respect human life and our community and sadly they are out there my colleagues and i have seen and perhaps some some of you have seen through personal cell phone footage the kind
036of shooting that has taken place right outside our schools sometimes it has looked like scenes from movies like new jack city but it's real and anybody who knows anything about weapons the movie industry would make you think that you can point and shoot and kill a particular person but what is most likely to happen is that one of those bullets that we witness being shot from a gun as a person ran in the opposite direction it's likely to hit an innocent person and sadly because this stuff is taking place on school grounds it might be one of our children so we can we should and we can do both that is provide protection and safety for our children outside of schools and also provide for their mental health and support inside our schools we do
037not have to choose we can have police officers outside of schools and social workers inside our schools additionally it has been said that the money being spent is allowing the police department to be paid twice let me also in the police department so what we have been told by the rochester police department and the mayor of our city is that the police officers that are stationed outside of our schools are there because they're there on overtime the balance of the police officers that we need to protect us and want us to protect want them to protect us are in the are deployed in their regular assignments the police officers that would be surrounding our schools and not uh surrounding them like a moat i think somebody suggested as if there were our children were somehow
038surrounded by the police we're talking about one or two one or two police cars outside of our schools those officers are there on overtime while their colleagues are working their regular shifts there just aren't enough police officers on duty and and in fact i have been told by a number of people not only the mayor but the mayor-elect that they don't even have a sufficient recruitment class to fully employ our police department so we're paying them because they are there on overtime which is their contractual right you also heard the results of the poll now nobody up here is going to make a decision just because some citizens have said they want police outside of schools but we're all elected officials and we're charged with the responsibility of at least listening to those that we
039represent these voices let's be clear are very loud the results of the poll are overwhelming 4 000 people who we are charged with providing protection and service have said to us unequivocally in a poll at least 80 percent of our parents and caregivers and 90 plus percent of our staff people which we are responsible for have said to us in no uncertain terms they believe having police outside of schools is part the operative phrase here is part of the answer by which we provide for our children and our staff people in our schools let me conclude madam vice president by saying i have seen as a civil rights attorney the suffering that comes as a result of police abusing our citizens i dare say i have seen it in a way that it has become
040a part of my personal and professional psyche people who have actually lost their lives to police officers i am also regrettably in the position of saying i have also seen what is what happens when students die or are injured on school grounds that is also the result of my role as an attorney in this community we do not have to accept either one we do not have to have lawyers that sue police officers we do not have to have lawyers who sue school districts because people die we don't need that if we have a district that understands this isn't a hobson's choice these aren't mutually exclusive approaches we can protect our children outside of schools by collaborating with the police department and we can protect and enhance the lives of our children by having social
041workers counselors caseworkers teachers who love and embrace our children and provide them the behavioral and mental health support services that they need thank you man and vice president thank you mr president i'm going to see if commissioner lebron is interested in sharing her thoughts around this issue i am thank you um so a couple of things i just want to note based on that survey that we actually don't have all of the emails and correct phone numbers for our 23 plus thousand parents um it was a mute point to actually survey staff because their collective bargaining voices were very clear in their letter that they supported sro so i don't know why we went and did that unless you all are looking for an out to use and fluff up the numbers but i do
042want to uplift the fact that all of our parent organizations both in the district in the city of rochester and those in monroe county that support our city of rochester parent organizations submitted a letter to this board adamantly against it and so some of those parents are they're they they didn't even receive a vocal call or an email um and someone like myself i received it twice so i would not jump to conclusions that this is the best data and the best survey possible out there um furthermore when we talk about harming children and we're talking about black and brown children i know for a fact certainly we're not talking about the police are not going to harm black and brown children we know that they harm black and brown children um and if the
043police were a preventive measure both in the city um to both prevent violence or stop violence we would not see the violence influx that we've seen in the city of rochester especially over this pandemic year in addition to that i do want to add to this notion that no these are not mutually exclusive i'm always going to never support police officers in schools i've quoted and cited multiple data points people can do the research for themselves you don't have to take my own ability to go and do research to understand that police officers in schools in contact with students does not lead to positive better outcomes for black and brown students and um i just want to uplift a couple of things that city council said last week on record is particularly willie lightfoot said
044why should they city council vote on allowing overtime for police officers in our schools if the school board couldn't muster up the leadership to make the right decision and have cops and want the police there because they couldn't get to four votes and this had to be tabled and so to patterson i would echo back that we as school board members can only do so much to keep our school environment safe but if there is an uptick in violence which there is and an uptick in gangs in the community in the city of rochester that they are the elected body that need to address those things not the rochester city school board but the city rochester city council they were kicking the can back to bello kick the can however y'all want to kick the
045can but it falls on your shoulders you are the elected body for the city of rochester and the community deserves answers on what you are all prepared to do to address the needs in this community around violence and obviously it's not the police because again if it was the police we would not have violence we would have less they would prevent it we wouldn't see it it wouldn't be happening but we continuously see it and it's been increasing um so to my colleagues voting tonight to those who said they want their true authentic parent voice please listen to the parents who have come out of their way to come speak to this board who have put it in writing who have sent messages who have as a unit and a collective sent us letters asking
046us not to support police officers outside of schools and because it's not mutually exclusive one or the other all we are sending is that we can quickly get overtime money for police officers but we can't quickly provide mental health services for our students that's the message that we're sending thank you thank you commissioner lebron let me just see if dr jallo would like to offer any comments no thank you not at this time all right thank you dr nelms what about you um yeah um good evening board i wasn't expecting to make a comment but uh i will i have been pretty open and honest about the need for support outside of schools before the starter school at the end of school i think that having officers outside of the school before and after it
047shouldn't be as polarizing as it is but i also understand some of the community concerns it's also encouraging to know that the data suggests um that there are a large number of parents who see don't see that as being problematic so it's a difficult decision for the board to make um this is again it's a polarizing issue within the community but as someone who does bus duty morning and evening and and stand you know with parents outside and staff outside it has been a resource for the school it has not been combative students have not appeared and haven't surveyed all the kids but they're so i said earlier different board meeting they're across the street in a parking lot not even on campus and when they do get out um it's only been once or
048twice they've engaged you know productively with helping stop traffic and making sure that kids who are coming through neighborhoods and going across the street are crossing safely so again i just think that we heard from people tonight in public session we've heard from parents at east saying that it's a good idea to have uh officers um before and after also from parents saying that they don't want that so i don't think any decision the board is going to make tonight it's going to satisfy everyone but my major concern right now is making sure that we can provide us a sense of support for our students and staff before and after school and i also want to say long term as a community we can't have a situation where we never trust the police at some
049point we have to work towards having better relationships with them in the community in the community and and them with the community that's critically important um i think i've said to folks in in the past i have a number of law enforcement relatives and friends and so i've seen um really good officers with good intentions and i've also been fully aware of officers that do not have the best intentions but i think in any industry you can make that that statement about people who say they're here to protect and serve this community um so again i i i don't uh envy the choice that has to be made tonight by the board of the report if the vote's going to be taken but i do want to reiterate that i think having officers outside the
050school allows us to focus on healing and caring that's going to occur inside the school with our incredible social workers counselors and staff and other individuals who are here to support our youth thank you dr nelms anybody else commissioner powell uh yeah let me start by saying that there's nothing that president white has said that i could argue against i wouldn't i'd love to have a lincoln douglas debate with you but i would have to choose i would have to cover areas that you didn't even cover in your remarks because i can't i can't argue against the topics you did cover i also want to say not to be argumentative with another board member but from a statistical standpoint the return on this survey is really quite remarkable most surveyors do not hope to achieve
051as high a percentage of responses as what is here from from the families category and to have an a as high a response from the spanish-speaking families is also really quite remarkable so i commend the communications department for their work and marisol in particular for presenting that information to us they said i i can argue against it if folks wanted to sit through a debate in particular i i was concerned hearing from parents who just let me say it differently in particular i was concerned of hearing from white parents about concerns that their children would feel that they were walking into a hostile environment by walking past police officers culturally that doesn't happen culturally our white kids see right past police officers it's like they're not even there and um and and because they've never
052had a bad dealing with the police officers what worries me is that we're not hearing anything from families of color that would convey one way or the other whether they perceive that experience to be detrimental to them and their children and i that silence to me is deafening and it hurts um the the the story that um president white told of seeing on video you know shootings on the run like some wild west scene or something is very very compelling towards changing my initial position one student dying on rcsd property or adjacent to it is one child too many and that i and the idea of not doing everything we can to prevent that scares me so i would ask in in the instance of the wild west video that i saw they don't have
053standard arrival dismissal times so my question is for the north star location is there an adaptation of this to make sure that we have police officers um on a broader timetable than just uh an hour you know an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and that just because there is no like one single arrival time in one single dismissal time is that right is it am i understanding that correctly no i think you're referring to all city high school commissioner powell not um north star has already consistently yeah the one next to the church that we saw the video of right no so yeah i beg your pardon so your question is is what is their flexibility with that particular school i don't think there is i think it's you know
054around where most when most of the students would be coming in um mike correct me if i'm wrong okay well that's going to remain an ongoing concern because i believe the video that we saw was of the middle of the day like 11 o'clock in the afternoon and so when i think okay well we need to do everything we can everything in our power to prevent that we conceivably would have spent you know approximately a hundred thousand seven hundred seventy eight thousand dollars and and still not gotten the coverage where the likelihood is highest of based on what we saw with our own eyes of it happening again so um perhaps you can give that some more consideration but i the obstacle i have is that you know the city of rochester got cares money
055same as we did and to the extent that the violence in our streets is a product of of the covid and lockdowns and and remote learning i feel that the city should be stepping up and using their karzak dollars to to pay for police of course it's not free of course we have to pay overtime to police to to do this but unlike a sporting event the arrival of our students at schools and the departure from schools at dismissal time is not a special event it's integral to the fabric of our of our community and and it seems to me that our our police generally speaking should be attuned to that and should be you know doing everything in their power to protect our students as they come and go because they spend a lot
056more time on the city streets not on our property than they do on our property if they're walking to school they're you know they're walking for blocks without the benefit of a police officer parked across the street or or whatever so the only mitigating factor that i can find to to say yes to this is that it's a contract for a one month in duration right this is just going this is just a 30 day contract 30 days yes i guess from the standpoint of it being an experiment of sorts or a stop gap measure i can i can abide it but i'm really not happy with the choices that i have presented to me so that's all i've all right thank you commissioner clark thank you vice president elliot i just want to indicate
057that this has really been an agonizing decision for me over the last week and one and this is one of the reasons i asked that it'd be table last week was so that we could get parent input and i think the administration has done an outstanding job in soliciting that parent input but i do understand both sides of the equation but i also want to acknowledge the close to 100 emails that i personally received regarding me this issue all in favor of not uh having the police in the vicinity of the schools but it is i mean but but it is a complex issue and we've all seen the videos we know that there's actually been gunfire and we need to do everything that we can to protect our students but um one of the
058things that i feel um conflicted about this is a problem that was created by the an image problem created by the rochester police department and it was created by them because of the way some of them have traditionally treated black and brown individuals i know personally that uh basically the uh they they really don't i mean i really don't see the de-escalation when it comes to our population and i think the the police department needs to get more involved in restorative practices conflict resolution and de-escalation for the entire community and hopefully there's some kind of component that could be added on on to this so that uh the entire community feel that when we see protect and serve we believe in me protect and serve everyone and but at the same point in time you
059know what the level of violence we've seen at some of our high schools and that's another question i would have can we target it more at to certain high schools where we know these incidences are happening but at the end of the day you know i i would not feel comfortable not voting in support of this knowing that uh innocent lives may be a danger endangered basically given the um the video and the instances that i've i've seen and heard about thank you commissioner clark um before you commissioner malloy thank you just to make a brief statement um first of all this resolution is not putting sros back in our schools and although my children have a very different cultural experience and you know my son got along with his school's sro just fine in
060fact he wanted to become a cop when he was in kindergarten based on his positive interactions with sros but we removed them from our schools and i voted for that so as a mom and teacher i absolutely agree that kids need social emotional supports in their schools not cops and i've never argued for putting cops into schools and i actually voted to remove the sros from our schools last year but there are two separate issues at play here the violence in our surrounding school neighborhoods and the needs of our students inside of schools and although i do support the superintendent's proposal to allow temporary rpd presence across the street from schools to address the need for a quick response from rpd and they're not on school property and this is as a preventive measure for
061some of the recent gang-related shootings and weapons incidents at arrival and dismissal times i believe that cops do not belong on our campuses the city and rcsd work together to ensure faster responses in light of rpd's own shortage of officers by having close proximity to campuses if immediately needed and this is an entirely separate issue though than what we need inside of our school buildings our students well-being inside of our schools is critical adequately staffing our our buildings and providing essential social emotional supports must be our top priorities as students return to school after almost two years of interrupted learning restorative practice and in-person instruction is critical for our students and staff members who are deeply hurting we must begin targeted investment and same building alternative programming that provides for the unique needs of our
062struggling scholars together we can advocate for this and see it to fruition so i want to thank all of our community members for their commitment to restorative practice and the needs of our kids we really are all in this together and we have to unify to effect change and i believe that rpd outside of our schools at this time is part of that collaboration thank you thank you commissioner malloy i have a couple of questions um the resolution um indicates one hour at one school and i'm wondering if in fact that we are utilizing these resources um as effectively as we can i'm not sure if what one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon the impact that that would have for 11 schools and i think commissioner clark mentioned a little
063bit about about that and so um and then this is only for one month so i i'm i'm concerned that where will we go what's the next step that if we're only talking about one month what is that going to deter so commissioner okay the the thought around the one hour is to be there a little before dismissal once because students start arriving either walking to school or getting dropped off and then by 30 minutes after the we basically have our all of our students off campus at that point so um that's the the the theory of action so to speak around that one hour to be there a little before dismissal and then and then certainly be there until all the students have more or less left campus and and they're going to remain
064in their cars though absolutely unless there's some sort of a of an action of a criminal nature than that i think that's that's the sole intent so so do we need 11 do we need to have police presence at all 11 high schools we have had incidences at all the schools to date so that's why we selected the secondary buildings the high schools as well as number three school our six our middle school our current only middle school that's why they were selected um i think after after a window of time we shouldn't be able to reevaluate kind of where that is but based upon the data that we have are based upon the information that we have we've had specific instances that all the i the way from my vantage point is much like
065the um contract with blackhawks the the 30-day window was allow us to evaluate whether or not this is a a process or or a program we want to continue with so we don't sign on for a long term commitment we really just uh it allows us time to kind of really evaluate its effectiveness and then we come back to the the board of education if we choose to continue this relationship for you to deliberate again and make a decision with a with a recommendation the same would be true for our outside security um those two were they're aligned purposely with this own window this own time window right i thank you i'm just um i'm concerned about the the efficacy of this what is what is going to be the outcome of this and i
066guess i don't want us to um spend resources when you know it may not have the kind of impact and then what does that mean um for succeeding months you know are we going to be spending this amount of money um in in succeeding months if we do this i guess i just still have these questions particularly with this particular resolution if it's going to have the kind of impact that we um that we wanted to have so um i guess i'll just ask you to respond madam superintendent with that as well i heard from mike but what's what's your thoughts around i just don't i don't see it having the kind of kind of impact that we may want it to to have and and if it's just the police presence and police can't
067get out of the cars and while i do believe there is some value in having police presence to deter some activity i guess my concern is is that this is only going to be for 30 days but mike was saying that we make reevaluate this and you know the question becomes if the city is willing to continue this as well because they're they're they're short staff is this something that they will continue so you know i have you know these questions about this particularly about it for this short amount of time the one month and that is one month in the morning and one month in the afternoon so i for me i'm sort of i'm not sure about it the way in which the resolution is crafted so it's difficult so a few things
068vice president elliot i i certainly echo dr nelm sentiments around this is a difficult decision because we know that law enforcement is polarizing in urban communities and particularly polarizing in our rochester community we did follow up as it was asked of us to administer the survey and you can see what the results are it did not cover all of uh all of our families so i just want to insert certainly here that that i would just ask our families please make sure that your information is updated and that we have accurate emails and accurate cell phones so we can reach out to you for a variety of things as far as the 30-day nature we had so many things that were happening at the start of the school year and we know that we've had
069some incidents that were very troubling that involved weapons and that were frankly scary for us to see this was just an opportunity to try and and i'll reiterate what commissioner malloy said this was not about sros and i just want to make sure it's very clear to our community this was not the path and this is not a precursor for me to go down the path as far as having sros this was just to have a police presence near our schools to respond because we were seeing things that were coming from our neighborhoods and coming onto our school campuses i do also agree with what commissioner powell said around can we continue to have conversations with the rochester police department about how they can work their schedules around being in the vicinity of our schools
070and things of that nature as we move forward but i think this is a good measure for us to take a look at we will make sure that we're evaluating we'll take a look at the incidents that are happening on our campuses and uh what's going on and then we'll we will absolutely circle back but this was just a short-term measure to have presence near schools not as sros not on the campuses but to just have that presence to try and potentially thwart some trouble that could be coming on campuses but i understand where you're coming from as far as your concerns as as well as commissioner clark's concerns but we will evaluate we'll take a look at this but this really was just intended to be a short-term uh measure because we were just
071seeing such an uptick of violence and it was very concerning to myself and the team so what outcomes are you what measures are you going to be using to judge whether or not the use of this funding has has had impact and and the amount of time that has impact what measures are you using what indicators to determine if this is effective for that great question vice president elliot we need to look at the time frame when the um when rpd is at arrival and dismissal and all we can really do most simplistically is to take a look at just activities that are happening at each one of those 11 locations and to see what's happening do we are we still having the same amount of fights or disruptions or individuals from the neighborhoods of
072the community coming up on our campuses and we'll just have to measure that very carefully i think that's really the only and really the most um direct way that we can take a look at this um and as far as measurement so i'll just end by saying this one thing i think that uh as opposed to us um having police officers in all 11 high schools that because i don't think and you all can correct me if i'm wrong i don't know if there is the level of gravity in all 11 high schools you know there may be a fight here and there but that may be something that the counselors or the school can address but are there schools for example like franklin and what we saw you know what we know about old
073city you know those are two that we may need to ensure that we have or east for example but we may want to ensure that we have the police presence but is it necessary actually to have the police presence at you know all the 11 high schools is that something that we uh need to evaluate not and i'm not sure which schools for example school without walls um or soda you know some of these schools you know i don't know if there's been an uptick in those programs or not but for example school without walls you know if they've had no incidents per se do we need to have a police presence at school without walls for example so schooled out walls is not one of the buildings that will have a police presence at
074um the other buildings that you mentioned we certainly have had incidences um including school of the art so i know no building has really been immune from some sort of a of an incident during the first two months of school and that's that was the basis for why we while we had selected those particular schools all right thank you we have no other questions we will um i'll ask for a vote all in favor of resolutions 247. all right aye aye any opposed nay okay and i'll go with uh yes so madam superintendent uh you know i'm asking that you know we come back after a month and he you know give us the evaluation of this also you know provide this information to um um the community because this is a difficult situation um
075but of course you know we've got parents who've said yes but we've got other parents who said no with this but they're not inside the school they're on the outside and i do think that there needs to be a a visible presence to try to deter some behavior that may happen if there were not any police so president wang yeah madam vice president as you know this decision today which i i am extremely pleased that the board has moved in this very cautious direction but it didn't just happen as you know we've had a number of meetings with the mayor and the chief police the superintendent yourself and other staff members and that the audience in that group the participants in that group have grown to include mental health and behavioral support officials from the
076superintendent's cabinet as well as from the mayor's cabinet so i think the decision that's board made today to authorize for a period of one month 30 days 30 days 30 days the engagement of the police for this purpose can and will lead to an evaluation of those services i also believe given how we got here today it will lead to a broader discussion about how we provide for the protection of students in and outside schools and i want to specifically tell people not only will we be monitoring and managing what happens as a result of these interactions over the next 30 days but we will continue to broaden our discussion about what the city and the school district and most recently as i mentioned today in a officers meeting what the county can do to
077provide critical behavioral and mental health services for our children inside the schools let me repeat this has never been a hobson's choice these are efforts and initiatives that we can as a community pursue together some people have said that police cannot prevent crime you all may recall i know i do about 20 something years ago this community including those at city hall and grades engage in an extensive aggressive effort at community policing back in the 90s the homicide rate was just one short of where we're at right now and the former mayor of the city of rochester bill johnson determined to engage the police the schools and social service providers in addressing crime and violence so i am not one to believe that this community can't return to the days where police social service providers
078and school districts work together to make this community safe it has happened before it can happen again and i'll just end by saying this um one thing that you know in the media you know we've got some people who are calling our students criminals and i remember when i just used the term about our kids who were going through things knuckleheads and one of the um one person you know challenged me about using the term knuckleheads that we don't call our kids knuckleheads but we've got people who are calling our students criminals and so i do take exception of that and i want to put on the record that our children are not criminals they have some issues that they're dealing with there are a lot of people who are going through issues um and
079but with our students who are the most vulnerable the term that is used to label our kids as criminals um i really take exception to that and really would like the person who said that i bought our children to apologize about it thank you man and vice president can i also add because i think this is important and you all know i never miss an opportunity to say thank you the mayor of the city of rochester has actual leadership in having this conversation along with the superintendent as an ongoing part of how to address the problem i also might add vice president elliot that we have an incoming mayor who i believe uh was was brought up politically in an environment where we believed in community policing and we believed in collaborating of course i'm
080speaking to our former of our former president of the school board malik evans so i think we are coming into an era with the current administration and with the administration that is coming forward that understands that it's important that police and the school district and the city hall and county work together collaboratively to address this issue of violence thank you mr president um so um resolution 248 can i get a motion for resolution 248 still moved second any questions about resolution 248 all in favor aye we have to wait for the um okay i believe commissioner lebron is now out of the zoom room correct i'll have to mark her absent can you let me know if commissioner lebron is still in the zoom room he's not thank you all right okay passes all right
081thank you uh so now we're gonna go to the reviewed acceptance of the esa minutes from october 12th of the esa committee of the whole can i get a motion seconded all in favor all right all right any any uh and he knows okay thank you do we need to have the okay okay okay passes all right thank you so i believe that concludes the voting on resolutions and we'll go to a academic update by uh dr kathy black superintendent of teaching and learning just want to congratulate you on that thank you a little celebration we heard that yay good evening commissioners i come to you bringing november academic updates we will begin as we always do grounding our work and our guiding principles you'll see the update that we made to highlight the key
082language that you need to be using as we venture into our schools and classrooms and we prioritize academics as we respond to our social emotional needs so as we begin we know that every child deserves to engage with grade level content every day we know that our students must engage in high quality culturally responsive experiences where they are affirmed seen and valued and that we have an obligation to provide an equitable experiences to every student across the district that is not dependent on where they live and where they go to school i'm grounding here because as we add additional information about our academic progress these ideas and principles will become more clear as we move through the presentation and through the remainder of our school year as we know in the academic overview our world
083lives in the intersection of curriculum instruction assessment and you probably can finish where professional development sits so our overview and highlights are grounded in those things our instructional highlights and forgive me to be using notes as my eyes are giving me a little bit of a moment so we hosted a number of our school visits this year our first round of school visits for our receivership schools school leaders were able to present in highlights of progress around the demonstrable indicators schoolwide initiatives and conducted classroom visits which means that our school state teams that visited us were able to go into classrooms and see instruction happening this correct connects directly to a question that commissioner elliot uh raised in our previous session around the robust instruction that's happening and so i wanted to just share around
084some instructional highlights so we're in classrooms we're visiting my team is visiting the cio team is visiting school chiefs and principals are visiting and providing feedback evidence that's being collected is around two key areas and so as we baseline instruction around how we talk about classrooms across the district right now we're looking at the culture of learning so our students working on the related work from bell to bell the culture of learning is actually about the environment that is happening in classrooms and we're collecting evidence and looking at things like are students working from bell to bell are there clear transitions are there clear routines are students attending to those things someone said it's around classroom management but lifting up the languages around are the conditions right for kids to be working on the right
085stuff at the right time in the right way the other thing we're collecting a lot of evidence on is essential content which is that notion around grade level content our students working on grade level content in the right way at the right time of the year with the right level of materials and so principals chiefs the cao team the content directors are going in and collecting evidence in those ways how it's showing up is learning targets so when you walk into a classroom in a classroom on a board do you see a clear statement about what's happening what are students expected to know and be able to do i'm happy to report that while the quality of our learning targets is a wide range and we're working on that in all the classrooms that were
086visited by the state learning targets were posted in the five classrooms i visited at franklin lower learning targets were posted in the three classrooms i visited at franklin upper learning targets were posted and so that language around our teachers clearly identifying what students should know and be able to do is taking hold in the district and that's really exciting classroom environments again a wide range but places where there are good anchor charts an anchor chart is a way for a student to refer to some key information that helps learning so those are in classrooms but i will name that the classroom environments and the resources that are around in classrooms needs to be updated so that we have our students in places where when they look around the room they can see evidence of learning
087and the tools for success and then grade level instruction and this is where i'm really excited because in the classrooms that i visited i'm going to call some of them out an english 3 classroom where the teacher was working on citing textual evidence using an edgar allen poe short story grade level the math middle school teacher who was teaching logic functions and equations at grade level to a group of boys my living environments teacher who had young men at leadership with two cups of plants that they had grown getting observations and debating around what things they added to their plants made them grow more in capturing notes and so while there's this narrative about what our babies are doing in other environments there's a counter narrative that i want to put in that instruction is
088happening in classrooms and kids are attending to and i'll name that my edgar allen poe teacher and my living environment teacher and my middle school math teacher we're at franklin in leadership secondary schools and then i'm going to shout out a second grade teacher and i don't have it but oh i do have it i'm going to just read the quote from a professional development from a second grade teacher around grade level instruction that i think is a really powerful message about the idea that we've been lifting around acceleration which it says teacher said that we have completely changed her mind this year with grade level material even gave examples she said she would never have been on board with it until we spoke about it and she tried it and now she's seeing for
089herself the results of providing access to grade level material to kids who are not at grade level yet and so i'm lifting up the instructional highlights and there are lots of stories where instruction is happening equally there are lots of places where we have a lot of opportunities to grow but prioritizing grade level instruction in every classroom for every kid is going to pay the dividends that we need to deposit in as we look at some of our other data that we have to respond to assessment so last month i named that we have a whole bunch of assessment windows opening back around the amount of assessments that we're offering and requiring teachers and students to attend to we know that it is a lot however we have to get information on what our kids
090know and are able to do and the only way we can get it is by getting it from assessments and so our nwea window opened up on september 20th and closed on october 15th our cfa window opened on october 18th and closed on november 12th closing november 12th which is also the last day of our first quarter and then our i-ready window which is our district-wide tour that we're rolling out the window opens on november 15th and closes on december 10th as a name of terms of nwea because that window has opened and closed i want to share with you some data that we got from that tool please be mindful that i'm going to go very slow for my own edification so that i make sure i communicate the correct information in response to
091the data so nwea completion this is simply a measure of how many or the percentage of the eligible students for the assessment took it and so we see that for ela the eligible students or the amount the percentage of eligible students that took the assessment at boi or beginning of the year was 87 the amount of eligible students who took the assessment at boy in math was 86 which is an overwhelming increase from the amount of students that took the assessment last year so we're excited about that and we had a couple of schools that were very close to a hundred percent and so i want to acknowledge that as well that this was a place last year we were in a very different attending to the nwea assessment just for informational purposes nwaea is
092offered in ela so reading english language arts mathematics and in a very few amount of schools we offer in science which is tied to demonstrable indicators we typically administer the nwea assessment two to three times a year you may say why is it variable our kindergarten students in some environments don't take it at boi some do and so the ones who are in kindergarten who don't take a wo that's my two times administration or in other grade levels k-8 that's my three-time administration administration typically takes place boi beginning of the year mly middle of the year somewhere winter around january and then eoi end of the year to then get a measure of how students have grown across the continuum and then just for a note that this may be the time this year in
0932122 where you will see nwea being presented or shared as we are in talks to phase it out for this year in service of lifting up i ready which is our district-wide um tool that we're rolling out this year so some achievement data and so i'd encourage you to actually look at your screen as opposed to try to squint here um so there are three color blues i want to orientate you to the first one on the left represents the new york state proficiency data so that is the information that was gathered when students took the new york state assessment the middle bar which is the kind of blue represents the 2020 nwea projection which means that after the students took the 2020 beginning of the year nwea this was the amount of students that
094were projected to be uh at proficiency at the end of the year so there's a projection measure here that says when you take it at the beginning of the year based on your performance we think that you're going to do this at the end of the year and then that darker blue is that same thing for this year's administration i'm going to take a pause and let you have a moment to look at what you notice and in most grades you notice that our projection for 2021 is lower than our performance at the end of the year in 2019 with the exception of 6th grade and 8th grade this information tells us or verifies that we have a lot of unfinished learning to attend to which is why the idea of grade level instruction is
095really really important to provide to our students which is why you lift up the access to short stories around edgar allen poe and that canon and the idea that kids are reading at level with support and scaffolds for teachers because we have a lot of unfinished learning to attend to in this area similar thing for math and as our math data that we reported from new york state assessment this year or last year passed we know that math is an area of great concern for us and so same thing the first bar on the left represents the performance of our students on the 2019 so that school year where students were last in school full time new york state assessment in grades three through eight that middle bar last year's nwea projection that dark bar
096this year's nwea projection so similar to ela we have a lot of unfinished learning to attend to and again grade level instruction becomes ever so important let's nwea data there's lots more that we can share we will attach additional data sets around nwea to the friday letter but i wanted to put in front of us a building our proficiency as a collection as an organization to engage with our achievement data and then seeing where we are so that when we lift up instructional quality and assessment information in grade level access we know what we're attending to in terms of what our students need to know and be able to do so i'm going to make a hard pivot so that was our instruction our assessment this is around professional development you will hear me say
097this all the time curriculum instruction assessment and then pd what's important to note in this past month are two things we are feverishly working to update our three-year professional development plan so that we can get feedback from stakeholders groups across the organization around our plans and any updates or insights that they want to offer us about what they need to know and be able to do in order to deliver on our promise of high quality instruction for students so that is in the works and when ready for prime time we will share with the board for their feedback and other stakeholder groups additionally rcsd as an entity was invited by new york education department to pilot a new survey tool to talk about our professional development offerings in concert with our three-year plan we did
098submit or intending to submit very soon high level details about our plans for new teachers returning teachers diverse learners so your students who are identified with special education needs or your language learners support staff sso's a robust offering from imnt around all the technology supports and softwares that we use so we are submitting and partnering in a pilot to share our pd plans with the state hopefully we'll get some feedback and so that is professional development the other things that i want to share and it's going to be two hard pivots coming up so i'm going to go into student voice and then behind student voice new course selection and then we'll wrap but i want to just name the hard pivots we're going to make so student voice initiative really excited about this we
099shared with this with you all in august and september and i believe there was a chart from the board that said okay dr black and company we're going to hold you to this around doing this work and i'm happy to acknowledge that we have launched into the student with initiative experience really digging into how to collect and respond to what our students are saying to us i want to publicly thank our office of equity inclusion and curriculum audit our social studies department and our school principals who engage in this effort that is also informed by our board policy 0201 which asks us to develop and implement equitable practices for and with our students so why are we gathering information well policy says we do it for them and we do it with them and intentionally
100seeking and including students multiple perspectives and everything that we do and so we are in a small pilot piece but very excited about the fact that this is going on i also want to lift up dave passer who has a lot of efforts surrounding student voice in his building and so he is probably further along in the efforts than we at the district are but we are actively partnering with him to learn best practices um and you know replicate things that work well as we were so much encouraged very early on the year to replicate and not just keep recreating things so it's happening we're out there we're getting kids information they are sharing with us we are excited so the current effort right now looks like identifying methods to gather student feedback we always
101say the word survey we know the survey word is loaded but we actually lifted a survey the goals of that survey were to gain an overall sense of how students are doing being back in school in the perceptions which is really important that they have of the adults working with them the second thing was to use the data to engage in immediate and future action planning to support our students our families and our teachers implementation so students in grades 3 through 12 were invited to respond the surveys were delivered by teacher prompting and by an alert that showed up on chromebooks to make them kind of respond to the survey or to ask them to we had respondents from 19 schools and programs across the district and 550 students responded and we know that's a
102small amount of our students but one voice is as big as every voice if you think about what students need to know be able to do and experience in our schools so here are some questions and i'll take a minute for you all to just reflect on those questions that were asked of your students again grades 3 through 12 across 19 campuses 550 students what is really important to name and note are the two places where our over 80 percent adults know my name so if you think about our guiding principles about kids being seen valued and affirmed and the importance that names whole for our schools and our scholars and our kids the fact that kids are acknowledging that adults know their name is actually something to celebrate because it's not hey you it's
103not dear it's acknowledging who kids are as individuals and this is a first deposit of them being seen the other thing that is highlighting here is i feel adults believe i can learn we know from a number of studies including one called the opportunity myth from tntp that the belief in students to be able to learn directly impacts what teachers give them access to in classrooms and so if we have teachers that believe or at least kids that believe that teachers believe they are much more likely to engage with the rigorous content that they are not at grade level yet but can believe they can get there and so those are two really important things to highlight that we're hearing from our babies or our students is that they feel that the adults around them
104believe they can learn and people know their name the next measure is do they actually hear their names being called but at least we know in that they believe that the teachers around them believe that they can learn the other piece of survey data is around the academic experience and so this is again perception information from students so not quite scientific but informative just to say working at grade level so go back to our guiding principles where i believe that students or we believe that students should have access to grade level every day students believe at this point they are getting access to grade level content which is good right so if they believe it and they're working on it and they believe the adults believe in them when we update and change the content
105there are some things that are already in place for us to ratchet up or provide different experiences to kids and then i'm engaged at school and so again 76 percent of our 550 students are engaged at school deeper dive engaged in what right there's a question there and is that engagement in the thing the right thing but at least we have students who believe they are engaging at school with the right grade level content and so we have something to build upon the work we need to do so next steps for student voice include going back out and updating questions for different things we are going to think about how we increase the number of respondents increase the number of schools but this is the work the team is working on to figure out how
106we get more student voice into the experiences and then use that information to impact our decision making as we move forward so i said i was going to make one heart pivot this is the second heart pivot new course selection so this goes to that course selection guide we've been talking about in the experiences i will acknowledge the course election guide did not come to you all we are holding it back because we are adding new courses currently so we are currently in the window between now and november 15th where secondary schools can propose to the district myself the content directors new course where they want to add to the buildings where they have capacity and so you know that if we add a course we have to have an adult who has a knowledge
107of skills to teach that course and so we're in that process now the content directors are identifying additional courses for expansion in 2223 and we are really looking at starting to look at our data around our ap accelerated learning at seven and eight we have more credits that come they go into high school so all the all the things we're putting together so that we have a journey that our students go through k through 12 that starts in getting them ready for post-secondary as early as k right so just put that there the other piece of this i'll lift up an intertwine is that we did identify ways and resources to increase the amount of ap courses that we're offering across the district to meet the goal that in every secondary school we would have
108an ap set of offerings but that that does come with we have to identify the adults who have the right knowledge who are willing to go and get the additional training and certification to offer the course and i think it's important to lift that up as well that we just can't toss a course into a building we have to have an adult or build an adult or have an adult who's willing to jump out there deep in their knowledge that they've given the kids is right so that's new course selection this is a repeat again it's small but very early on in the course selection high school process we lifted up key actions around the course selection guide this highlights in your handouts what's actually occurring and this all goes back to what you've heard
109me say previously in the update of the course selection guide we are aligning the formatting the numbers the usability for everyone we're doing that we're changing language we're omitting old courses we are adding the descriptions for new courses this may also be a place to name that there was a young man who spoke at one point about a mental horse that he is lifting up the principal has reached out and we are in communication on how to make that happen but that might take some time but where there is a intention there is a way and so the key actions to just lift up around again our organization our data reviews and equity and access is happening the same thing key actions the one that is in green is we still have one school as
110a result of state support that is working on high school redesign um so that is still in process and then some of the other work that we're doing is in process which is why it's not green yet so i'm reluctant to put anything in green that we can't specifically say that is happening with fidelity and consistency that has an outcome so i anticipate coming back to you all in future board meetings and future esa meetings and turning everything green so that you all have confidence that the key actions around updating our secondary programs are in process and so let me additional considerations these are all the things that we are working on as we do this work and i'm going to read them out so that people hear them very clearly what additional pathways or
111programs we want to create within a district this goes to our ear marking of some additional funds to build portfolio programs around avid pbl ib we've actually also expanded some courses around digital music in some places and have been approved recently for three additional cte pathways to be approved at edison how do we expand successful models or programs across the district what type of supports do we offer at the early secondary grades to support students across high school planning what capacity building must we engage in to ensure that the counseling department creates a dynamic and ambitious schedule for students we know that if the schedules aren't right the access isn't right and we cannot do what we need to do and then what capacity building must we engage in to improve instructional outcomes so students
112are prepared to take on grade level and accelerated coursework and so with that that's the work that we're doing let me preview next month for you we will update on our curriculum instruction assessment mpd as always you will hear an update on the telomere project which is a way that we are jumping into schools to gather more information on how our kids learn we'll be presenting first quarter student achievement data remember that i said that our first quarter ends on november the 12th and so in our december meeting we'll come to you with our disaggregation of that data and what that means for next steps and then additional aggregate data on our cfas and what that means for our intervention enrichment and acceleration options and with that i submit my update and invite any questions
113or comments thank you madam deputy superintendent uh just one thing that i would say the the the person who is the student spearheading the mental health i actually he did a he was on the news so it's it's out there in the uh in the community and before um i open it up for questions um and i have so many so i'm just gonna i'm very excited about it but let me just acknowledge uh the two um commissioners elect um commissioner patterson and commissioner simmons so just want to welcome you and acknowledge you and congratulations we know we did it via email but just wanted to do it um publicly so welcome look forward to working with you both so i'm gonna off um ask if there are any questions um can i okay let
114me let me just start down to commission malloy thank you dr black thank you so much and one of the things i really liked about this presentation was just um it looks like there's a focus on gathering that student voice which is really critical and the perceptions that our students have about their teachers and and their schooling um and you know what i think you highlighted it perfectly too that our teachers in this district are doing amazing work you know just highlighting the science lesson that you looked at and the edgar allen poe poem um so thank you for that it's it's great to see that that work is being recognized by central office again our teachers are doing amazing things and you know teaching and learning it definitely is taking place but i would
115like to highlight that our teachers are doing this despite massive shortages so i think they should be commended even more so simply because of the conditions that that they are working under you know the shortages of support staff in other areas district-wide it's pretty alarming and i think the teachers bear the brunt of a lot of that [Music] i also want to emphasize that you know we're short social workers and counselors and need to be able to provide for our students social and emotional needs and without this students don't learn so we've looked i love what we've presented here on the teaching aspect but it's the learning aspect that i would like to see us focusing on as well when we have these shortages students aren't going to learn right and students can't learn if
116they don't have a safe school environment because of those staffing shortages some of our most at risk students if they don't have access to ratios of counselors and social workers that that we need to see in our buildings kids aren't going to aren't going to learn so i really want to make sure that we're also looking at what it takes for for our students to learn and also highlight and raise up our teachers and the staff and our paras who are doing such extraordinary work with our students despite these types of challenges and shortages you know even our cafeteria employees we're short so many challenges and hungry kids um aren't aren't learning um and if they're not eating good quality one thing i would like to say is um in the presentation on slide 19
117you said what capacity building must we engage in to improve instructional outcomes so students are prepared to take on grade and accelerated coursework and i would say that in order for us to do that we've got to just appropriately staff our buildings and focus on those things and highlight the great work that all of our our employees are doing despite these challenges so it was more of a comment than a question but thank you so much for presentation and i can't wait to see um more results and more uh your presentation in december so thank you and welcome to the position commissioner powell did you have a question all right it's okay madam yes sir um i want to say uh thank you for the work i i it's such an extensive presentation it's difficult
118to put together this is a fair word for me excitement about your presentation i've been here about 14 years and with all due respect to the folks who worked really hard to make this district better and there is some evidence of improvement this is really one of the best put together presentations connecting your action steps and the superintendent's exercise now to the strategic plan to the independent monitors plan so i'm really impressed and excited about the possibilities now nothing has happened just yet so i i'm sorry i have to temper my optimism but i'm sure you can appreciate that but i i i would describe it as excited to see that the level of planning um and and to put it in simplest words it appears that the bar is being raised and and how
119you're raising the bar in part is as the powerpoint says you're including student voice right and and and you're also using student voice to monitor and manage the students efforts to get cl teachers efforts to get close to that new bar being raised um i i also think that you are pushing the bar higher by talking about and holding your own feet to the fire by talking about new core selection right advanced placement um i think that is particularly important if we if our students are to succeed we we say we want a 100 graduation rate but that doesn't happen unless you know you're following the nwea results that doesn't happen unless you push our students to take ap courses um and and again i apologize that i to myself and to others that i
120can't put in words why after listening this presentation i leaned over to your boss and i said i'm literally tell you what i said i said she's good right um and you deserve that praise now again i'm gonna temper my remarks by saying you ain't done nothing yet right right right right i get a little snap in it but but but but i i i appreciate i appreciate the thought hear me out the thoughtfulness and thoroughness upon which you have built this effort to raise the bar so thank you for that anything else mr president no ma'am commissioner clark do you have any yeah i just um would just finish conclude by um there's one word that i saw telemore is that what it is telomere yes telomere i actually saw that word for the
121first time i know superintendent meyer small we're reading the same same book entitled uh cast by isabella wilkinson and uh i saw that word in that book around dealing around dna is what i believe it was associated with so it's just and i just read that um term this today so um i'll have to figure out more what that means but um to um to just uh to go on with what the president said um great job uh we're looking forward to it um i'm just my um thought is with the superintendent you and and the team just keep focused on the mission you know stay away from the noise because it looks like we're in the midst of doing some great things and it may seem that somebody may want to um sabotage this
122work um and so just keep focus and whatever the noise is out there that's also created by the media let me just put that out there and and as opposed to this great work that we're doing just continue to focus in on this work and out of the noise that we hear from others and also that they get set up within the media thank you dr black i just wanted to thank you for the presentation i was reviewing the survey questions and what struck me is there were several prompts in there that students could respond to but there are three in particular loosely worded you know i have a non-relative who who knows my name i feel i'm included and i matter to my school community and when you look at the research around aces
123or adverse child experiences those three prompts are the ones that have the the biggest bang to counteract adverse child experiences so to see the data where it sits and i'm i want to am i correct that that was for northeast or was that overall collective are 550 over 19 schools and programs over 19 schools and programs okay so to see those percentages and particularly as they related to those areas was really encouraging because we keep on talking about the trauma that our scholars just you know pre-covet experienced and then you lay over coven 19 on to that so this is really powerful research and work and i see dr haynes here i think it's very very excited exciting to see this work the other thing that i wanted to ask and i just want to
124put this out here because i was really excited to hear that young man who talked about the mental health course so i want to just make sure i know it's not going to slip through the cracks but i'm very very interested in knowing more about that particular course and seeing how we can incorporate that and i would even go a step further that i would want to mandate that course for all of our scholars in the rochester city school district and i don't know if it would be a a a ninth and tenth grade or focus on 11th and 12th grade because i don't know what the content is but when i heard that that got me really really excited and you know the the last thing is that you know i see the media
125is here tonight these are the type of stories that i would respectfully ask that you go back and have a conversation with dr black in teaching and learning she has she has an arsenal of team behind her but talk to our director of mathematics talk to our director of ela talk to to what they're doing with bilingual education or multilingual education because that is the way that we do effectively put out what we're doing in our district and we are doing some incredible things that just go kind of by the wayside but i i just would respectfully ask that you circle back and you do some stories about what's happening in teaching and learning to call me first and then i will direct them to the correct individuals yes ma'am yes ma'am yes ma'am but
126thank you thank you and the next um oh let me just ask if dr jallo or dr uh nems has any questions and i don't know if commissioner lebron is still on think she's gone you know for me i thought it was a great presentation thank you thank you dr nelms any questions just a comment um i actually commented i sent dr black a text as she was presenting and said extremely well done and you know i've been working here for alma going on seven years and she definitely um has raised the bar so thank you dr black for focusing on critical instruction and assessment it is so much needed and appreciated no you cannot have her at ease dpo nobody else can either all right thank you thank you dr black so the next
127item is from a systems integration i believe it is and that presentation will be done by our superintendent dr meyer small correct no um we could have this you were going so great okay um they are on zoom uh we have with us um oh so it's not dr meyer small it's someone else who's making this that is correct my apologies we have laura gustin from um who's the executive director of systems integration project and i believe she's also joined um by cynthia pace okay wonderful thank you uh good evening everyone should i be um managing my slides from zoom i just want to clarify you can give us one second okay up there we go thank you and do you have the right version of the presentation now can i confirm yes yes we
128have the update perfect so thank you everyone good evening for having me here today to spend a few minutes talking about the monroe county systems integration project my name is laura gustin and i'm the executive director of the work i want to start this presentation by asking you to imagine for a few minutes imagine a parent and a pediatrician and a principal all working together to resolve a student attendance issue imagine knowing that a family was facing eviction and directing them to the perfectly matched provider who could stabilize the household in a matter of days instead of months imagine proactively being informed when a student's parent is hospitalized or incarcerated instead of reacting to a suspension or a slip in attendance only to discover that the root cause was a significant event that happened weeks
129prior imagine student immunization records being electronically verified from nicest so no child begins to late because their parent couldn't retrieve and transport paperwork on time imagine having a collaborative table of over 400 impacted community 40 impacted community members and decision makers from the health human services and education and public sectors working together to proactively resolve pressing community issues this is the type of knowledge and connectivity that the systems integration project is facilitating for all institutions and sectors across monroe county when we talk about the system we are referencing the largely unplanned irrational and unnavigable web of services that are available to those in need day after day we ask people needing supports to enter the system including the students and families served by the school district and then we wonder why outcomes are never realized
130in 2015 ibm was brought to rochester to help us better understand the persistent and pervasive poverty in our community ibm found that while we are program which we remain outcome poor due to the very nature of the system that we systems that focus on the outcomes of service providers and funders instead of people and no real ability to measure the impact of the system due to significant data inconsistencies inspired by these findings and seeking to prevent duplication of efforts providers from across monroe county came together in the summer of 2017 to discuss how they might transform the system of service delivery they agreed that through the systems integration project they would work together to build an interconnected person-centered system of health human services and education leveraging a unified information platform to improve health and economic
131well-being of individuals and families especially those who are vulnerable or impacted by poverty since that time the impacted community impacted community members and over 200 community leaders and providers from across the health human service education public and philanthropic sectors have come together to build trust plan design and now implement the systems integration project the overall success of the systems integration project will be measured by the improved health and economic well-being of individuals and families in monroe county how many especially those who are vulnerable or impacted by poverty when individuals and organizations actively use the tools and resources created by the work of this project individuals and families will be more empowered to advocate for their health and well-being information will be shared thoughtfully and confidentially so care teams can better respond to an individual's needs
132more holistically community trends will be better identified to shape programs and responses that best fit our community's unique needs services and programs will be more aligned and coordinated across all aspects of our community and investments in our community will be better spent allowing more individuals and organizations in our community to thrive within the systems integration project we believe the how we believe that how we work is as important as the vision we seek to create early on we discovered that the change that change would only happen at the speed of trust and so the first two years of the project was spent building trust among typically siloed institutions and sectors and making decisions using a consensus framework we fully attest that this is in addition we fully attest that this is much more than an
133it project that it what we aim to achieve is not a piece of technology but an integrated health human service and education system that works for people we know that community engagement is imperative impacted community members participate in all aspects of our work from strategic goal setting to developing pilots for systems improvements to participating on the mywayfinder user design team and finally we use human-centered design in every aspect of our work which means we talk to people and providers about what they want and need from the system then we prototype pilot and ultimately implement based on that input human-centered design really ensures that we are centering community voice in all of our work beyond the explicit focus of human centered design the systems integration project practices community engagement through a standing community voices network embedded
134diversity equity and inclusion practices and a first of its kind equity review board that reviews and improves project pilots and plans using an equity lens one of our key deliverables is the implementation of my wayfinder a common view of services and needs that is available to both individuals and service providers across all sectors my wayfinder is currently being designed with input from both providers and community members and pilot implementation is planned for march 2022 for those curious about privacy and security i can assure you we've had over 20 lawyers and privacy officers meeting every month for the last two years to develop our legal framework for data sharing including representatives from rcsd and other monroe county school districts i would also note that our goal is to integrate existing data into this data ecosystem instead
135of creating new this means that core datasets such as the 211 community resource directory rts transportation schedules our health information currently held in the rio will be leveraged as part of our data model we're also building my way finder to data equity standards recently published by robert wood johnson foundation including ensuring that data is requested is but not required for services that clients have the opportunity to easily understand how data is being used and that community members can opt in or opt out of contributing their data at any time within my way finder individuals can access a 360 degree dashboard page to send a needs request take an assessment or watch videos to learn about creating an account building a care team and few future features such as referrals with consent my faith my wayfinder
136can allow school staff to see a more holistic view of students and families to better to support and help create strategies for success can see family goals and needs in areas such as transportation safety and food and view external supports and services that are already being used or that require a referral in addition to designing and implementing my wayfinder all participants in the systems integration project are actively working toward establishing a new vision for integrated service delivery at the center of this vision is the community member the community member will have control of what information is shared and who it is shared with the community member will determine to what extent they want to participate and what goals are priority the community member chooses providers to collaborate with in both setting and reaching goals and
137the community member and their chosen care team have access to the rest of a provider network to provide the support for the services required within the provider network are neighborhood hubs these physical hubs are dedicated to serving residents living nearby a hub is the center of activity in a neighborhood or area and acts as a front door for community members to access program supports and services other integral components of this model are community advocates and system navigators community advocates live in the neighborhood surrounding a hub and are advocates for the health and welfare of its community members and system navigators help community members identify and successfully access community resources necessary to reach self-defined goals and improve overall health and well-being the vision for this integrated service service delivery is currently under development and will be
138piloted along with my wayfinder in march 2022 i want to note and recognize that there are organizations currently filling the role of neighborhood hubs and residents currently working as community advocates and system navigators under other titles as an integration project our goal is not to duplicate these important community assets but instead to lift align and connect these bright spots in the system i want to use my remaining few minutes to provide some examples of systems integration examples first between march and june 2020 the systems integration was project was put on pause to support covid crisis response during that time the project office was redeployed to support the community's effort first using the existing structure of the systems integration project we launched and facilitated a tactical cross-sector response team this group of community leaders met every
139day including weekends for weeks in order to identify and troubleshoot emerging issues how do we prevent the spread of spread in the homeless population do masks work how do we acquire masks in community settings what does it mean when an employee gets a quarantine order where do we find hand side sanitizer how do we feed children how do we close the digital divide other activities supported by the sip project office during this time including design and implementing from scratch a ppe supply chain in partnership with goodwill rts and united way i'm setting up an agile project management framework to manage tasks and activities across organizations and using our experience with the mighty network tool to launch and facilitate a human services support hub which persists via maintenance from united way a few additional examples of
140systems integration work that supports students and families over the past few years over the past year include our work with the youth behavioral health pilot which aim to improve the connection between pediatric psychiatric emergency mobile crisis and monroe county single point of access the long-term behavioral health supports as a result of this project we are able to significantly re increase the number of referrals for those coming out of cpap into long-term supports as you can see in 2020 only five referrals existed between these typically siloed settings and during the eight week pilot period where we tested our referral um workflow 57 referrals were actually found to be valid and needing to flow through another example is our work with monroe county city of rochester 2-1-1 and numerous community-based organizations and neighborhood-based front doors to redesign
141the way that families could access eviction prevention services as a result of that work we have been able to stabilize 7 150 households over the past year with and getting into community 29.3 million dollars in direct rent payments and i would know at the same time while we've had the success other communities across the money country are now facing eviction crises because they've been unable to move these essential dollars out the door and so through eviction prevention pilot we were really able to re totally transform that workflow we took a process that took eight hours and many organizations to a process that took 30 minutes and then finally coming soon an important thing i think for the school board to know is that systems integration project was contracted to project management and facilitate a the
142dhs transformation work um so a lot of the tools that we use particularly human-centered design will be will be used to help figure out how we want to transform dhs over the next several years and this project will launch in november 2021. um and so again thank you for for coming and connecting with us thank you president white vice president elliot and the school board we really are appreciate the district's participation in systems integration across many of our work groups and activity and just look and just look forward to continued uh participation and support and i think also want to make sure that you know you all know that we exist so if there thing the district need us to lean in on we are here to support and help thank you are there any
143questions thank you all right the next item i'm sorry vice president elliot can you hear me yes i can i'm sorry i was going to raise my hand but i see you're moving very quickly i'm not going to join back on camera but i will make comments with my camera off okay um i do want to just thank you for inviting systems integration to be a part of the esa today so that they're on record and our families can hear from them there's a lot of work happening with systems integration and for those who know me know i'm a really big fan and actively involved and also um looking forward to the dhs transformation and that i think is going to change not only the landscape for this community and how we access services but
144for many many of our families who are connected one way or the other to the county whether they're getting child care dollars or snap benefits or medicaid and child health care plus or chip through the state there are many ways our families are interconnected to this work so thank you laura and your team as well for coming today to present and um i look forward to figuring out ways on how we can continue to uplift this information educate our elected officials and our community about the next steps especially around the my weight binder thank you commissioner it's our pleasure thank you the next item on the agenda is the superintendent's presentation this is recommendations regarding school reconfigurations for the next academic year thank you good evening president white vice president elliot to our commissioners and
145to those who are watching the presentation tonight i am going to be sharing with the board of education and our public some recommendations relative to moving forward with school configurations mergers and closures this certainly has not been an easy discussion and at times it may be difficult for some of our school communities to hear the recommendations but before i get into the specific recommendations i want to provide a little bit of context and it's important for the board and the public to understand the thought process as well as the rationale behind the specific recommendations that i am making tonight this work was grounded in data which involves income accountability status so how the school is doing academically enrollment across the district as well as in respective schools access to equitable academic programming and you heard
146dr black talk about that and she speaks with that with regularity building capacity use and condition and these are all things that the team use to develop the recommendations so as i move forward to talk about this it's also important to know that this work really is undergirded and it comes through the lens of making sure that we have schools in place that are good for our scholars and that provides opportunities for them to learn and grow and to ensure that they are college career as well as civic ready this presentation also is laying a fact based foundation for any future changes that we endeavor to make to schools and really it's important and please hear this to encourage everyone individuals groups schools parents caregivers to consider the whole district in its entirety rather than
147a specific school so just a little bit of background information as far as the rochester city school district currently our enrollment sits at a little under 24 000 students and you can see how that teases out amongst the different configurations in the district our demographics our racial and ethnic demographics and then percentages relative to students with disabilities as well as english language learners this next slide i think is critically important and this talks about the school-aged children who participate in programs who live in the city of rochester but are not attending a rochester city school district school you can see we have a little under 7 000 students attending charter schools we have about hundred students in private and parochial schools a little under a thousand participating in urban suburban our homeschool numbers sit at
148705 students and we've seen an uptick in this number our cse or committee on special education placements 426 students and then community based programs for our our youngest scholars is 1300 students if you look at just charter school private parochial and urban suburban that's almost 9 200 of our students that are participating in programs so that's an indication that our families are not choosing to attend the rochester city school district and then that overall number is a little over 11 000 students so what grounds this work we all know that we have plans that we worked collaboratively with with dr jallo our state monitor and we have 96 current recommendations that sit between the academic and the fiscal plans and a recommendation in that plan clearly states that the rochester city school district needs to
149align resources according to the fact that we have declining enrollment and i'll get into that data momentarily declining population in order to maximize access to resources and programs in schools you can see on this graph that there are nine different school configurations in rochester city school district and you see on the far left it starts with pre-k all the way through 9 12. in part the multiple school configurations have contributed to the under utilization of school buildings which leads to greater facilities and operational costs in the district multiple grade configurations impede vertical articulation and collaboration between schools because we don't have that consistency as far as how we're configured the current model in our district impedes our ability to conduct student cohort data analysis as a strategy to improve student outcomes and you saw that's
150a main focus under dr black's leadership based on the feasibility study it's important to establish school models eg pre-k 5 6 8 9 12 to increase opportunities for our scholars we are working to streamline grade level configurations in order to increase in efficiencies in the district the school of choice process is just one example board commissioners where we have over extended resources due to the possibilities of families wanting to leave a k-8 school or reaching out to fifth graders because there's one school with an entry point at sixth grade there really needs to be consistent entry points so that there is consistent messaging outreach and connections with families so as we think about the rochester city school district and if you remember dr morris a few weeks ago presented the task force updates and her
151recommendation number five was to for the board to consider pre-k through five six eight and nine twelve this allows us where possible to increase opportunities again for that vertical and horizontal articulation academic acceleration facilities consolidation as well as fiscal efficient efficiency so let's move into the guiding principles what led the work relative to the recommendations that i'll be making shortly for in total certainly access to equitable academic and extracurricular programming and again that's embedded in the work of the division of teaching and learning also enrollment and choice for our scholars and families accountability status is very important and i'll dig a little bit deeper into that we're a district that has multiple schools 12 in fact that are in receivership and that is receivership schools are an indication that we have the lowest performing school
152districts schools in the state of new york and then it's also important when we're looking at reconfiguration and merger and closure building capacity use and condition so let's start with the first guiding principle access to equitable academic and extracurricular programming we need to expand opportunities for our scholars at the secondary level so for example advanced placement courses dual credit or concurrent credit and we have some a partnership with monroe community college relative to this career and technical education as well as enrichment opportunities you have heard scholars come to board of education meetings and provide public comment where they've shared it is so important for them to have multiple opportunities in whichever secondary school they're attending there are often many references to two schools in particular the east epo that has the teaching and learning institute
153and they have some wonderful wonderful programs there as well as edison tech which has a plethora of career and technical education opportunities for scholars we need to really be able to expand those opportunities across the district so no matter where you're attending as far as a secondary school that you have many opportunities to do so and to frankly pursue your dreams additionally when we talk about equitable programming we want to ensure that all students have access to specialized programs continuums of services and athletics to really provide those bookends and those supports so that they can be what colleges and universities refer to as well-rounded and successful students enrollment in choice rochester city school district enrollment has continued to see a decline pre-k through 12 and i have shared that information education the schools that i'm
154proposing have a school choice eg participation in the lottery of less than one percent to 1.5 to 5.4 percent when students are entering grade levels k 7th grade and or 9th grade families are choosing other school options as i've mentioned charter urban suburban private parochial as well as homeschooling and we have held by law we needed to host several public hearings for additional charter schools that are on the horizon and as i shared as of right now we have a little under 7 000 students who are in charter school and we have more that are coming so we really have to take a a critical look at the type of programming and supports that we're providing to students in our district on the next slide it just simply shows you the declining enrollment in rochester
155city school district you start at the year 2015-16 and you can see um at 28497 and as of november 5th 2021 we currently sit a little under 24 000 students again we have to be mindful that in september we will have more charter schools that will draw students away from the rochester city school district and attending our schools and programs as we think about accountability status we have currently 12 schools who are in receivership so again those are the lowest performing schools we have shifted and dedicated resources particularly at the central office level with chiefs demario strickland and rhonda morian to have an intense focus on our schools at the elementary and secondary schools respectively who are in receivership they are chipping away they're working with principals they're working with staff to move forward but
156yet and still we have 12 schools in receivership additionally we have multiple schools 14 that are tsi or targeted support and six schools that are comprehensive support so 20 schools and only 14 schools are schools in good standing and so that is something that we work collaboratively with and in conjunction with the new york state department of education but the board has been very clear the new york state department of education is very clear that we have to move the needle and shift csi and tsi schools to good standing and we need to move our receivership schools up as well so this is an important target and benchmark when we talk about building capacity use and condition you can see that the way that we are currently structured with the schools and programs that we
157have in the rochester city school district we currently could host 34 000 a little over thirty four thousand students but as i shared in a previous slide our enrollment sits at a little over twenty three thousand so that's about a ten thousand student enrollment difference also when you look at current building utilization so seeing how many students are in the school and hitting the target of what the schools are able to hold schools range from five percent utilization which is ria at the jefferson campus to 104 percent which is that school of the arts so they're over subscribed or the school is over utilized we also know that when we have unders under subscribed schools that means that schools are not running near their capacity so in some instances we have elementary schools that have
158a single strand meaning one class of kindergarten one class of first grade etcetera in a building that can hold two to three strands some of our schools are at fifty percent capacity while others are running more efficiently at 75 to 90 percent capacity we did have some initial conversations around merging closing reconfiguring and our conversations ended last year because we knew that covid would continue to be an issue and we wanted to to not merge schools at that time additionally when we look at the age condition or condition of facilities we have two schools building 41 but that's rise 106. it's a wood frame building that's almost 100 years old and then when you look at school 29 it's in need of mechanical upgrades to the hvac system so our process to get to the
159recommendations for school merger closure etc we certainly did a data review we looked at enrollment we looked at school utilization we looked at the size of schools we looked at who was choosing schools and who were placed in schools through the the school choice process we also just looked at our district's history what types of configurations have we had where have we been and what has worked we looked at obviously building utilization grade configurations and then we identified schools so i know again we have we're at a challenging time in our district we have a lot going on and we've had some of those conversations tonight as well as in previous subcommittee meetings or regular board business meetings but according to board policy 7600 uh the we and we followed this we needed to have
160the conversation around this time because there's a three-month window that we have to follow so the board must be aware of the proposed plan so these are recommendations no less than three months prior to the resolution consideration which in our case needs to happen in february the month of february 2022 because if we are going to close the school we must submit that information that documentation to the new york state department of education no later than march 1st of every year after tonight of me making the proposal recommendations to the board commissioners and to the public we will have meetings at the schools that are going to be potentially impacted and we will meet with not only staff and students but also the school community to get feedback and to see what type of recommendations
161that those different stakeholders have we need to have a public hearing which will hold in december to gather additional input from our district stakeholders both internally and externally and then modifications potentially are presented to the board which we also need to present a summary of comments offered by the different constituent groups that we will be interacting with and then the board has a decision to make in february they either have a resolution to approve reject or modify in part or wholesale the plan for closure of the school building or buildings now we also know it's just important to note that the board may waive any of the above steps but as we had conversations last year it was really important to many of the commissioners to follow that three-month process and that's why we're having
162this conversation now again in i know that there is a lot going on but we need to to start the conversations in november and tonight so one last slide before i talk about the schools that are proposed this plan really is about benefits to students and we want to ensure that there is equitable program for each student in the rochester city school district we want our students to attend a school that has a plethora of opportunities we also want to make sure that there are consistent transition points and not those nine different configurations that exist in the rochester city school district and we also want to ensure that there is robust academic and extracurricular continuums for our scholars now one thing that i just want to add here because it's not um formally outlined in
163my presentation i did say that i am recommending proposing and this dovetails with the presentation of dr morris that we would be a district of pre-k 5 6 8 and 9 12 but there are some schools that at this time we're not recommending to change so that would be world of inquiry school 58 which is the k-12 school the reese's program which is pre-k k and one for our little ones our youngest scholars also um wilson foundation which is a pre-k eight school because if you remember we were overjoyed when that school was authorized by ib or or yes by ib we have both the pyp so primary years program and a middle years program so if we had that school go from pre-k eight to five that would really be difficult to offer those
164programs and we really do indeed want to have a robust um continuum where our students if they start in kindergarten in a pyp program that they take that all the way through wilson commencement and they earn an ib international baccalaureate diploma program so that we're not recommending to change that school and then also at this time not recommending to change school the arts um and east epo certainly is not in my jurisdiction but they're currently six eight so that would remain as well as uh 9 12. so what are the recommendations that i'm making i'll start with elementary and there are eight schools and then we will move to the secondary programs so you'll see that we looked at um school number seven and rise community school number 106. school number seven is a csi
165comprehensive support school and rise is in good standing what we are proposing is that school number seven would close and rise would move over to school seven we are unable to merge these two schools because there's not enough just physical space for the two schools to come together in that school let's just talk a little bit about the decision-making process because i know that that's something that's important certainly number one those two schools are close geographically in location and as we have conversation about zoning that makes sense to to make the decision with those two schools rise as i noted earlier wood framed school that's over 100 years old so certainly the condition of that school as well as the accountability status of school number seven so rise would move over to school seven and
166we would have we would continue a school in good standing moving to the next recommendation we look at school number 29 which is a school in good standing and dr charles t lunsford school number 19 which is a csi school in receivership so again lowest performing school before i talk about this this would be a merger i do want to uplift and publicly acknowledge the work of principal silas and what she has been doing with her team although a school in receivership they've worked very hard to address the demonstrable indicators and we have we're seeing some improvement just recently president white vice president elliot commissioner lebron and commissioner elect simmons we were at that school and we heard from the principal and the staff and we took a tour of that school um and so
167i do want to uplift that and just be very public and explicit about that work and and i really am very impressed with the music focus and emphasis that they're working to embed in the school but with these two schools there would be a merger so school 29 would quote unquote move into school 19. these two schools could merge together because there is enough space decision making points here again close geographical location we're talking about the condition of the building which would be school 29 which of the mechanical issues in the hvac and then the accountability status so we would ask for us what's called a school accountability review from the new york state department of education and then we would know what would happen as far as what the academic designation for that particular
168move recommended move the third move would be flower city school 54 which is a tsi school and the montessori academy school 53 which is in good standing we're recommending to the board of education for consideration to close school 54 and those students would participate in school of choice and we would move the montessori academy onto the school 54 campus again unable to emerge these unable to merge these two schools because of space decision making points here include we be able to expand a signature program you heard me mention we right now have a little under seven thousand students who are participating in charter schools or other school programs that are not the rochester city school district the montessori program is a program that is well regarded well renowned and we think that we can we
169can draw some students back into the rochester city school district by really fortifying and providing the resources for montessori and again we would need to with montessori moving that's a school in good standing and so we would uh we are endeavoring or proposing to make that move and then the last elementary move is school 25 which is a school in good standing merge with school 39 which is a tsi school so 25 would move into 39. um we would merge both because there is room in the two schools for them to fit into one campus decision making points here very similar to the previous mention is that we'll capitalize on some on signature program with the steps program in the the speech program that's at school 25 the accountability status is a good standing school
170which is important and then prepare uh the building where nathaniel rochester sorry nathaniel hawthorne school 25 will start preparing that to become a middle school and i'll talk about that momentarily so those are the eight schools eight school pairings that are my recommendations as far as elementary let's move to secondary school proposals dr alice holloway young school of excellence school three and northwest located at the douglas campus my recommendation to the board is to transition those two schools that are currently seventh and eighth house seventh and eighth graders that we would have six through eighth graders so again shifting into that middle school model and that would happen i'm proposing for next year leadership academy for young men oh and those two schools are tsi and csi respectively so i don't think the accountability status
171would change for those schools it would just be that we're expanding to middle school leadership academy for young men which is a csi receivership school this recommendation here entails closing the school for the 7th through 8th graders students would participate in the school of choice process decision making here is um it's an undersubscribed school there's only about 550 540 students in the school as well as the accountability status i have to lift up here under uh prince principal jenga st louis she's been doing a great job in concert with her staff with demario strickland working but yet and still it is still a receivership school so the recommendation would be to close that school further northeast college high school located at the douglas campus which is a csi school and in receivership we would move
172that school to the charlotte campus and have a social justice focus so current 9th through 11th graders at northeast would have the option to move to a new campus or they could participate in the school choice process decision making points here northeast school design is better suited for younger students if you walk in the hallways you can see that that's more suited towards middle schoolers or junior high school students it also expands the school focus on student voice and again you heard dr black in her presentation earlier talk about the work and that under uh dave's leadership that that really has been advanced very significantly in that school and so we could again make that a a very or extremely attractive option for students and it will it will allow for increased extracurricular participation right
173now they're a little more limited at the douglas campus but you have lots of options at the charlotte campus and then the final proposal for secondary rhea is not a school it's a program they don't have a designation so that's why you see not applicable to shift that program over to wilson commencement campus newcomer students would in 6th through 8th grade would move to a middle school model and 9 12 would be at wilson commencement decision making points here include the fact that we can enhance the international baccalaureate high school experience and can begin shifting potentially to an international high school focus how powerful would it be if our scholars at wilson could take some of their assessments in may in a in a different language other than english so that's the thought process there
174so that is the uh there's eight schools for elementary and then we have uh five schools that we're recommending for secondary schools when you look at this movement when you look at these changes we're really only suggesting that two schools would not have sc students scholars in them any longer and that at would be school 29 and that would also be school rise which is 106 or formally known as school 41. so next steps are as follows we need to have state stakeholder engagement to react to the recommendations we'll have school community meetings the chiefs are working with the principals so the dates will be determined and set where we'll work with the different school communities that i mentioned we have the date for the student leadership council so that's right around the corner in
175november we have plaque our parent group also in november the bilingual education council december 14th our special education parent advisory group december 13th we would have the public hearing formally with the board of education on december 15th and then a final board vote february 22nd as i conclude my remarks i just think it's really important to share that as i've been in schools over the past several weeks and months in person i've had multiple conversations with our our scholars both at the elementary and the secondary level and really these decisions are based in part on the the conversations that i've been having with our students i know that some of these decisions certainly are difficult or challenging to hear but really the bottom line is that it's trying to figure out the best ways to
176support the 20 almost 24 000 scholars that we have in the rochester city school district this is really important work i have been charged by vice president elliot and other commissioners that we do have to restart recouping students back from charter schools and that we have to figure out ways that we can effectively do that and this is our attempt as a team with me making these recommendations to the board to do this and so with that vice president elliot that concludes my presentation thank you thank you madam president um madam superintendent excuse me for that um but just just one thing for the for the public who's listened to this can you describe what uh csi and tsi is please sure so csi is comprehensive support improvement and tsi is targeted support um i'd
177ask one of the chiefs or doc i'll ask dr morris can you just go into detail what that specifically means good evening commissioners so a comprehensive support improvement school is a school where the all student group is a state level in a particular subject area so for example if they do not meet the standard in the all student group for english language arts the school could technically become a csi school or a comprehensive comprehensive support improvement school for a targeted support school it is one of the subgroups that has fallen short of state expectations in a particular subject area so the subject that the sub group is underperforming is the area that the school would be identified for for accountability status and that would make it tsi for that area okay could you also explain
178receivership what is that receivership um is a school that has been underperforming as um as analyzed by the new york state education department for a significant amount of time so they've had struggling schools and they've had persistently struggling schools but that's after a long period of under according to the state education department's criteria for performance so based on that the identification of the school could be for receivership in order to get off of receivership the school district would have to be able to certify that the school has changed their accountability status after performing at state level for two years in a row all right thank you so i'm not sure there's going to be some questions i'm going to start with commissioner lebron do you have any questions for the superintendent yes i do and
179thank you for starting with me because i am going to log off and go to bed after this because i'm not feeling that great and we hope you're feeling uh good uh commissioner thank you um vice president elliot i'm actually i'm going to reach out to you later this week i just needed some more time to rest but sure i did want to make some comments on record um and i'm glad that 7600 was referenced because i actually discussed that today in a live and i i know that the superintendent met with board members both in groups of two or three i know my meeting was individually and i was driving um there's some things that have bubbled up even in that conversation a few weeks ago with data right so i hear that you
180make decisions based on data but i have yet to speed the actual data for myself and our policy 7600 also says that here to have the academic and social history of the schools under consideration i want to note that you noted two schools won't have students rise in 29 but mergers still lead to a school community being impacted and closed the physical condition and limitations of the building i what was presented tonight was like a lump sum summary i know that enrollment's been declining i i've literally spoken about this multiple times um and and for many reasons many factors as well but i just want to again quote the the data that we have not been given yet and i think that these are really big and impactful decisions and we should have this data
181this data should be made public the community has the right to know how these decisions were made beyond a glaring you know absence of data of saying we looked at this my team and i no we need to actually see the actual numbers and the information that you made the decisions and how schools were selected because i can pull up reports that actually identified other schools including when we had our interim superintendent here before he left he gave us a list there was a list of schools that bohem bargain also recommended so i just need to see and understand how people are coming up with these particular schools and databases i will not be supporting some of these and some of these i will and when i get there i'll get there and i'll be
182very public about it but the building to which students would be assigned the financial impact of the school closures on the district the alternatives to the closures that are available to students and their families and at this time i do want to uplift that in my one-on-one with the superintendent and her team when this conversation was being held and had i didn't want um to uplift that receivership schools again we make these decisions but families also have rights under the school being in a receivership status and then if the school building may be closed for academic reasons that the plan consider whether the school has had a new principle in place for two academic years or less whether the school has third as a receiving school for students responding to the building due to a
183school closure consolidation within the last few years and so forth um so those are the data points that i would like to see for every school that is mentioned um as either merging or closing um and again merging is the closure i want to uplift ria i the fact that we're bringing up maria after we just traumatized ria and the real families i can't even begin to imagine whose logic it was to say that ria would be better served in a higher ibm program our students from korea are coming from refugee backgrounds and have not been exposed to education in the united states and so on top of being transitioned into the u.s and to the rochester community and the public education system in the u.s and many many many times not speaking not even
184a word of english we want to put them in an advanced program building space to further separate them from their families their siblings the community that they may know um and not understanding how our systems work and where refugees come here and where they get place for housing i these are some of the things like who are making these recommendations and why are they making these recommendations and it leads day in and day out for me that these are people disconnected to this community that there's just no other path that i can conclude to that people who are connected to this community can make people recommendations and decisions so there are some again that i will support some i will not i do want to also uplift and i'm going to end with this because
185we're going to have long it's going to be a long three months of conversations around this um i do want to uplift montessori school because miss harris papan you know she was also a principal that was basically moved out of her school school one and put over at montessori and then montessori has not been provided the services and the support and the funding and the trainings that they need and this is not just a transition from one principle to another the montessori is a special program and if we're going to say it's a special program regardless of who the leader is at that time they should have all the same access to resources and support from this administration and administrations in the past and that has not been the case so i just want to
186uplift that because i do think that ms harris pepin does the best that she can with the limited resources that she gets but when there were other people there in leadership they didn't have the same limited limitations that she's been given so i just want to put that out there and with that i'm done thank you commissioner lebron commissioner clark yes i had a couple of questions and thank you superintendent for going through the uh the the strategy my first question is how does this address the structural deficit that we know that we still have that we need to eradicate in the next two to three years say that one more time i'm sorry how does this plan impact the structural deficit that we have as a district that we know is going to come
187back and bite us in the next two or three years so is this plan designed to address that so where it focuses commissioner clark is the fact that we have underutilized schools so we're focusing on looking at how do we increase that not fully to 100 but to maximize or to increase that the next step is to do an analysis relative to the moves that we would be making so that will be embedded in that process for us moving forward okay thank you the second question is currently our student population is 23.65 is the plan based on maintaining that population or increasing it through aggressive recruitment efforts to bring back charter school and other students so the goal certainly is aggressive recruitment and and if you remember just going back to that utilization slide we
188still have a 10 000 student gap at this point so we have room to definitely grow vice versa president um yes thank you um i appreciate that i am not doing my job tonight no that's don't worry about it goodness now you know my pain at times no no no worries please no need to about it um you know i i made some comments in our officers meetings which i find extremely helpful and productive and i don't need to detail them there i do want to highlight just one of many good aspects of this plan although like others i look forward to the conversation that we will have over the months to come about this and i yeah i appreciate you putting us on a time frame that is consistent with the board policies about
189school closure so that's first to be respected and appreciated the one thing that i would like to highlight and offer some suggestions is you know i'm often saying replicate best practices don't recreate things that are already invented there was a guy in in this community his uh his name he's moved he was a lawyer i think at harris beach one of the large law firms i'm looking over at steve and adrian i don't know if they know him but his his name is jack hurley and for many years willa you might or cynthia you might remember his name for many years he is he what he was and i think still is a practicing lawyer at a very large law firm and he ran i think it was called the law and government school over
190at marshall that's where i know him yes yeah he he he did an amazing thing he took his time i i think he might have been um allowed under some rule that new york state has to allow people to teach and he led that law and government school uh like it was his own um building he he created a moot court area where they actually had it looked like a real courtroom with the jury box and he had a great vision about what that school should look like and so i'm looking at your powerpoint i see willis shaking her head down there so i think she remembers jack you say you moved charlotte campus with a social justice focus no need to reinvent the wheel here jack really had a passion he had a plan
191he he thought it could be expanded i would really encourage you since you have a local connection here and dan his son also committed educator um i would contact dan get jack's number and talk to him about how he did that and and uh again it was a wheel that he created and had some tremendous success and i and i i might be speaking out a term but i think one of jack's sort of disappointments was that the district never really took that initiative to the next level so i would encourage you as you're developing this and conversating about all the aspects of this got it um talk to jack he he really was an amazing lawyer and really committed educator thank you thank you thank you um mr vice president mr president um commissioner
192you know who you are that's right it's not a good day for whatever reason that's all right commissioner thank you madam vice president um so i have three questions and the first is a pretty easy one how is the freddie thomas campus going to be used because if we're moving school 25 in the montessori um academy what how will that space is that gonna be a swing space for other schools how will we use that space swing space right now but the goal is to move eventually shift to a six through eight a middle school okay yes that's a benefit um and then uh secondly um just to piggyback on what um commissioners lebron and clark said i am interested in knowing the long-term financial impact um on the district so hopefully we'll have that
193um soon we have so many conversations ahead of us um clearly and with the community more importantly um but i do wonder and this is my final question sure how does all of this fit into our overall district restructuring or our placement policies you know what's that timeline you know we're losing students at an exponential rate even in the time that i've the short time that i've been here on the board um you know we went from almost 26 000 students and now we're at almost 24 000. so it's pretty alarming for me to observe as a newer board member we're going to be opening six charter schools next year and you know i think the time has come to implore the state for a moratorium on charter schools you know we have no say
194as a district over this approval process and it's not sustainable for our district so you know simply closing schools in the name of right sizing when we need to move towards maybe reconfiguring our entire district perhaps to neighborhood feeder patterns neighborhood based elementary schools we're looking at our survival the very survival of our district and we just need to have a more sustainable plan in place so again i i'm anxious to see how this fits in with the overall district restructuring thank you thank you commissioner maloyan if you're you know dr morris and i obviously work very closely together but on this particular project or endeavor we have to really be in lockstep because some of the recommendations i'm i'm making dovetail into the recommendations that the task force and vice versa so this is
195very much so interconnected to uh uh school zoin i'm sorry i'm tired but vice president school zones as well as um uh the managed choice i don't know if you wanted to add anything else dr morris because i'm cb i think this is dylan okay it is so yes as the superintendent said a lot of the decisions that we were considering as a team and the task force have related to some of the proposals that you've heard tonight so it is not a separate conversation a lot of time there was a consideration of the recommendations that have been put forward thus far by the task force and of course we will be coming back to the board as a task force for reconfiguration with some of those additional recommendations and data for the board's consideration
196as well so that can be used in conjunction with decision making going forward thank you i appreciate that i would like to see the long-term well if we can do some type of impact study on how we project uh student enrollment to increase as a result of of these measures so that's some data that i would like to see thank you so much thank you commissioner malloy commissioner powell yes thank you um so when the task force presented not too very long ago you'd admit that i was very aggressively pushing back yeah come see come sigh as the friends say madam clerk can you put that up i expect a standing ovation for this the power stand ovation for what i'm about to say from the administration [Music] so what i'm about to say is
197can you can you please put the policy 4100 is on your side okay policy 4100 says recess resources shall support k-5 6-8 and 9-12 high school programs of instruction so we need us so what i'm saying innovation what i'm saying is that for the last 22 years all of the changes that have been made by previous superintendents while supported by a resolution have been in violation of this policy uh-huh okay the policy is on your side i uh you know and i i want to give you folks the you know the benefit of hearing that from the one person on this board that was pushing back the hardest okay i take my role as a policy chair really seriously maybe they deserve the standing ovation but if they knew it was in the policy and
198they brought it to my attention then i'd say yes sure what i would suggest having pointed to this policy is that this get attention forthwith to um to so that it can move forward with your plan and whatever exceptions there's a there's a space on the opening paragraph some district elementary schools are currently configured case six sure so you have to account for the um variations or the the exceptions to the rule having said that now school of the arts is a 7 through 12 yes and it used to be a 612 and and the 6th grade was eliminated so uh and you're suggesting that it remain as is what that does though is every student that hopes to go to school of the arts has to find a a new home for one year
199when you roll this out which means probably you're going to get a lot of advocates to having sixth grade restored to soda but there it comes with a problem too it's the one school that's over enrolled and if you add a grade you you'd have to phase it in you have no room for a sixth grade and if you and if you add a grade that is fewer students in incoming classes that even have a shot at engaging in school of the arts and now would be a fine time to talk about replicating school of the arts um you know because it is an overchosen school we do have to turn the students down mind whether they're you know they get a 10 out of 10 on the audition the fact is we have to
200turn them away when they apply so all of that being said i don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to arguing for maintaining k-6 and the 7-12 i still don't i still it hurts to say it it hurts to um to see that transition going forward because when it comes to school choice the more transition points the harder it is to manage and we were in our our most efficient when we only had one transition point from uh five to six and when we introduced more k-8s and and all of that we just made our lives more complicated so um enough about that uh the montessori i i think you gave us a sneak preview of this in um in one-on-one sessions um i'm i'm glad to see this in its context
201because i see that you're essentially recognizing we can't grow montessori and we can't just absorb flower city because we don't have the teachers to do that a teacher requirements for montessori are different than others but but to the extent that they might move to a campus a standalone campus that can allow them to grow that is what managed choice is supposed to allow for is successful programs can grow or be replicated flower city was one of those city-wide draw schools that clearly it's not even effective in that role so i'm happy to see that phased out we should be talking about phasing out city-wide draw schools either by making them zone-wide or making them go away if they're if they're not highly chosen and if they're not educationally effective and the last thing i'll say
202in support of in in theoretical support of this is i've been struggling with the whole question of well you know what is the capacity of our zones i'm not getting these numbers but based on the drop in enrollment we could do almost anything in terms of closing schools so you know as long as we're you know closing across the whole district and not jeopardize the student balance we have so much excess capacity now it's just dawned on me today that that um we ought to be able to accommodate every student who lives in the current zones we could even take this opportunity to fine-tune the boundaries and and make the boundaries more effective i still object to a proposal of an east west because what you're going to do is end up spending more on
203transportation instead of less but with fewer schools you can't really justify going to a quadrant system either because you won't leave enough choices available to families so um and and i'm kind of intrigued by the idea of the aria urea going to wilson because an international baccalaureate program seems like would be a natural fit and a great place for international students who although they might be not well placed academically if they're coming to us from an a formally interrupted education background they the tools are there for them to national education as opposed to just a standard high school education and many of the ria students are overachievers that and and are perfectly capable of finishing their high school careers with you know uh college credits and and working you know towards a an ib a
204credential so i am intrigued um and lastly going back to the montessori um it has chafed on me that montessori is occupying what was built to be a middle school so a proposal that would restore it ultimately to a middle school um sits well with me so having like been aggressive and and argue to the point of argumentative when the task force presented their case i'm beginning to warm to the ideas some of the ideas that are being presented and i apologize that it takes me so freaking long to do that thank you commissioner powell thank you president white yeah i wanted to say as you all know i'm increasingly often looking for opportunities to serve the district after i leave i've mentioned participating in the superintendent's effort to get students out locations what's that
205effort called oh rochester city rcsd takes over takes over when i was at franklin at your conference this weekend or the communities conference this weekend i i offered to participate directly uh and financially in the fire initiative and then and then i want to plant a seed and it it connects this notion that we have to increase our enrollment how do we do that we have to offer the kind of programs that entice students to come back to the district we can't just get off from the receivership list we as dr black indicated we have to really raise that bar by offering rigorous and relevant programming so i mentioned earlier jeff hurley again i am going to constantly be looking for ways in which i can continue my commitment but this idea of looking at
206the wheel that mr hurley created can really attract students to this district from the suburbs imagine and i obviously you have having a social justice school and imagine further that the exemption that may not be called an exemption whatever is the state regs that allow a lay person to teach in schools and there is one and i don't know how the unions respond to that but i know there is a statute that allows people who don't have normal certification to practice in schools imagine if you had doctors lawyers all sorts of practitioners of the probation officers in a school that would really be relevant to children so i'm saying i know the board has a long ways to go you've got several months to do this but as you develop this idea consider having someone
207on your staff including dr miller figure out what that protocol that rule is that would allow the expansion of that role for outside practitioners to come in and teach kids and i'm telling you it's that kevin carson thing you build that and they will come the hottest issue in america today in rochester is social justice and imagine if you had the best and brightest practitioners teaching those areas and and here's where i'm i'm saying when i leave this board if yeah because i'm not going to hustle and figure out what that rule is because i i looked at it one time and it's it's quite a bit of work to do that there's paperwork that has to be filed but if you had somebody in chris's shop that look for the best and the brightest
208practitioners in this field of just social justice to enter into a classroom and teach in that school they will come to that building so my suggestion is if the board approves this transition to and to create a social justice school um that you put chris or somebody on your team to look for those folks and say you don't have to do the paperwork we'll shepherd you through that paperwork we just need you to get a security clearance file the fill out the paperwork that we send you we'll separate you through this process and we will have a school that i trust you people will come to and i'm and i'm saying this is another opportunity i will be one of those teachers and i know the stuff i got to talk about students will want
209to hear because my clients are those students my clients are the victims of social injustice and there's lots of lawyers in rochester and and and doctors who are surgeons who have to deal with the fallout of the increasing number of shots fired that we have in this issue there's lots of um other practitioners in the criminal justice system that putting them in a classroom would have students and their parents want to go to the charlotte campus for that kind of thing i just again i offer what little god has blessed me in terms of knowledge that is relevant and rigorous i'm down to do that and i know there are many other practitioners in this field that would be willing to do it too thank you mr president the question that i have is with
210this proposal um is um fmp um impacted in any way with this that's a great question vice president elliot that undergirded we they're this presentation these modernization projects this presentation was originally 45 slides long it was and so we had fmp so as commissioner lebron was saying we have the data that she's looking we just didn't put all of that in here this is our initial conversation but fmp considerations were fmp facility modernization was taken into consideration with making these decisions absolutely phases one two and three which is still on the on the governor's desk all right yes and then like commissioner lebron particularly since i'm the liaison for ria um you know that's gonna have some some discussion sure i'm we're prepared emotionally attached to to ria and the work that they do over
211there so just know that that i'm emotionally attached understood to real and um yeah there has to be some conversation i'm already resistant but yes ma'am yeah all right any any other questions for um dr meyer small okay i just want to thank the board for just asking very thoughtful questions and again i'm just looking forward to the engagement over the next several months this gives us some time right to have good conversations thank you so the next and the last item on the agenda is i asked um dr meyer small to talk to us about the social emotional learning the status of that there was such a um a participation for the social emotional learning section on saturday and let me just uh give a shout out to kelly briggs and her team uh
212it was a very good um uh session um and i'm looking forward to us doing more of those i think that it was just the beginning and also to dr hawkins who uh hosted it for us moderated for us and so i'm just looking forward in the future for um you know more events like that and to bring in the partners who were there uh at the um on saturday so if you could talk a little bit particularly because it was such a well-attended session i said talk a little bit about where we are with social emotional social emotional learning thank you vice president elliot so i i i attended at the beginning of the session and i know dr black might need to help me a little bit because she was there for a
213good portion as well as chief strickland but it was very clear to me that that really was a focus and an emphasis i think part of our issue because we hear community members parents say where's the seo where's the restorative practices what are we doing with rock restorative et cetera somehow someway somehow we've lost not lost we are not communicating and getting out what is actually happening because we do have things that are happening dr black and i were talking about that uh throughout that the day on on saturday and as we walked together to our cars that we've got we really need to make sure that it's very explicitly articulated here's what's happening at franklin here's what happening at school of the arts here's what's happening at school two here's here's the social workers
214the school psychologist pathways to peace etc rock restorative team do that school by school and district wide because i think people think that it's gone by the wayside we did have some reductions through our budget process uh going into this year but good things are happening there are some ways that we're looking to continue to fortify um but good things are happening but we're just not uplifting that we're not getting that out so that's one thing i think the other thing that was again continues to be very clear is we have to figure out how to make connections with our staff and their mental health there are offerings there was professional development but we heard you know what that was the summer time and now we need some different ways to access that so to
215figure out how to really tap in with our staff to offer those supports and and and do um some type of assessment or figure out what people need or a survey assessment might not be the best language for that but just spending time over at franklin and vice president and el vice president elliot and i spent some time over there with with carmine dr paluso and we talked to teachers and we heard very passionately from our scholars as well and it just continues to be um we just continue to be traumatized so one figuring out how to make sure we make much more explicit what we're doing to figure out how to survey and get an understanding of where our staff are and three figure out creatively how we can continue to capitalize with the
216city how we can uplift our connections with the county so i'm looking forward to participating in that meeting with you with dr aycock and um to just build other partnerships and then as we move into the 2223 budget process of how to make sure that we're even just making more explicit embedding that into the budget process that's that's my assessment i don't know dr black if you had anything else good okay she's like uh-huh because she doesn't want to be here to one o'clock in the morning right any any other questions okay now am i able to entertain a motion for adjournment or do we need to do some uh [Laughter] did you hear commissioner powell dr nels oh he did i did i did not know what she said she said that did you
217forget that you're not a a voting member i forgot i was so busy giving her a standing ovation for the last hour is the survey on here yeah oh paul yep okay [Music] in the meantime there was a motion on the floor from commissioner malloy was there a second i didn't hear one for the adjournment well i think we were waiting to do the survey yeah yes but we could still you know just second it okay all right all in favor aye thanks again steve you