001Hello. Welcome to the Madina City Schools Board of Education meeting. Uh, this is a meeting of the board of education in public for the purpose of conducting the schools district's business and is not to be considered a public community meeting. There is a time for public comment during the meeting as indicated in the agenda. Let's say the pledge of >> allegiance, please for it stands nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all. >> Mr. Chambers, will you do roll call, please? >> Mr. here. >> Mr. Hair >> here. >> Mr. West >> here. >> Miss Pritchard >> here. >> Miss Smuyer >> here. >> Thank you. >> We need to do an approval of the minutes of several meetings that we had last month. the organizational meeting on January 13th, the tax budget hearing minutes
002for the fiscal year 27, uh minutes from the special meeting on 11326, and the special meeting work session minutes on 129 of 26. Do I have a motion? >> I'll make a motion to approve all four sets of minutes. >> Is there a second? I'll second to approve the meeting minutes, please. >> Any questions? >> Okay, Mr. Chambers. >> Mr. Per, >> I. >> Mr. West, >> yes. >> Miss Durley, >> I. >> Mr. Hair, >> I. >> Miss Smooyer, >> I. >> Thank you. >> Okay, >> I'm stuck. Are there any additions, removals, modifications to the agenda? Hearing none. Okay. Move forward. I need a motion to approve the consent agenda. >> Go. >> I'll make that motion. >> Any second? >> I'll second. >> Thank you, Mr. West and Mrs. Durley. Go ahead.
003>> Mr. West. >> Yes. Mr. Durley. >> I. >> Mr. Hair. >> I. >> Miss. Perchard. >> I. >> Miss Suyer. >> I. >> Thank you. >> And now it's up to >> Unfortunately, we lost uh in the past month uh one of the members of our B family. Uh Courtney. Courtney uh recently passed away. Uh she served in our district uh as an elementary teacher in multiple buildings uh within Madina City Schools. Um in addition uh her children attended and uh continue to attend uh our school district. So, if we could have a moment of silence uh in her honor. Thank you. Uh next, I'd like to invite Principal Perry uh up to the front. uh and he's got a whole crew here uh to talk about uh some exciting things going on at
004Fen Elementary that age. Okay. >> All right. Thank you to the board of education for having us here tonight. Uh, I'm really excited about all of the deeper learning taking place at Sydney Fen. Um, our staff's commitment to our district goal and every grade is focused on creating deeper learning experiences for our students that not only enhance our um, instruction and deepen our instruction, but also allow students to lead and create their own path. It's truly a work in progress, um, a reflection and even sometimes revision as we all know. uh but one that our staff is dedicated to and one that will continue to impact our students moving forward. So, I'm really excited and tonight we're going to showcase our fourth grade um fourth graders and also our fourth grade staff. Mrs. Chelsea White
005is here. Mrs. Gmer and Mrs. Connie Smith and Mrs. Merkel could not be here tonight, but she's obviously a part of this great team. I taught fourth grade, so I'm a little biased. I think fourth grade is the best grade. Um and I do miss it. So, I love getting into the fourth grade classrooms. I also want to thank our FEN parents and our students for being here tonight and taking time out of your schedules. Uh we do appreciate. We know it's a commitment, but we we do thank you. And also to our FEN students, thank you. You're going to get 10,000 PBIS points for being here tonight each. >> Are we good? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. I thought you'd like that. Um and I think tonight's presentation, as I get ready to turn
006it over to them, is very fitting as we celebrate our nation's 250th birthday this year. Um, I'll turn it to our fourth grade teachers. They'll tell you kind of what they've been doing and our students are going to showcase the amazing work and passion that they have um for their deeper learning. Thanks again. >> Good evening. Um, this is our deeper learning unit for Fen Fourth grade. The inspiration for it happened back in November. We were looking for a way to connect what we had just finished learning in civics to the real world. U Mrs. White mentioned an article she had read in the newspaper about Mr. Isabella running for uh councilman at large and that sparked the idea of inviting him to come to speak to our classes. At the same time we were
007planning our next unit which was the American Revolution and we really wanted the students to understand that people they're going to be learning about were just ordinary individuals living their everyday lives at the time that all these historical events were taking place. They weren't historical figures yet and it wasn't a famous time period yet. And then it just all sort of clicked together for us. Um, Mr. Isabella is an everyday person working to make a change in our community just like the individuals that they were going to be studying about from the American Revolutionary era. And he's just someone who saw a need and took action. And we realized that that was a perfect way to connect our civics lessons with our history lessons and our CKLA study of the American Revolution. and also showing
008the students at the same time that they have too have the power to create change. Click this is our guiding question throughout the entire unit not only of our civics unit, our history unit and the CKLA unit but also the project that they were working on. How everyday people shape extraordinary events. So we started with Mr. Isabella, the councilman at large. We invited him to come to speak to the entire fourth grade about some of the challenges that he noticed in our community. things like the broken sidewalks and the heavy traffic in the square. He explained that these concerns inspired him to run for city council so he could work toward real solutions. Ed also shared his background as an engineer and how that prepared him to approach his issues thoughtfully and practically and how
009he plans to use that expertise to help improve the community. And he was a former Fen student which was added bonus that we didn't know. Of >> course it was. So after we had Mr. Isabella talk to our students, we thought that that would be a great opportunity for them to come up with some some problems or issues that they saw around the community. Couple parameters was that it had to be within Madina or within Sydney Fen and um that they had to work as a team to come up with their best five or six ideas. Once they came up with their best five or six ideas, we we put it up at to a group to decide um which of these ideas resonates most with you? Where do you want to see the most
010change? And that brought a lot of really unique and interesting projects. One of which we brought here today. Um we thought you'd probably want to hear from the experts. We have uh Finn, Eevee, and Holly here to tell you a little bit more about the project that they chose to improve their community. >> Thank you. >> So, step one of doing this was brainstorming. We thought of ways to help the playground by and we decided to do a playground accessibility. We thought this was important because that people that are in wheelchairs or on the spectrum can't use the equipment we have now. We broken our projects into steps to get accessible playground equipment. We thought that we needed a fundraiser because the playground equipment. We just thought that playground was just a little pricey. So,
011we planned our whole page based on this fundraiser. >> So, then we made a presentation including ideas like the fundraiser and uh we added links for inclusive playground equipment. We are trying to persuade the PTO and other groups to fund our idea. So, we're actually still in middle of this unit, but our next steps are going to be um students will reflect and keep working on their presentation to make it better. We have a presentation rubric and then eventually the classes will get together and choose the most inspiring in uh presentation that they feel there's the most need for to present to um community members. So get excited because some of you might be receiving an email from us soon asking for you to come in and listen to their presentations uh so that they
012can really see their impact in the community. And then after all of that, they'll of course reflect on their learning and hopefully make some good connections. We are learning about the American Revolution and how ordinary people made extraordinary differences and that's what we are trying to do. This was important to us because lots of kids are are in wheelchairs and are on the spectrum can't use the equipment we have now and might not feel included. All right. So, I get to also tell you about some of the other fun things. For example, when I asked the kids to um talk about what they're they're learning, just one student came up at the end of the day and said, you know, Mrs. Smith, this is really hard, but it's really fun. And they have done some
013impressive things. So, we have some examples of some of the things the kids have worked on. We have a flyer that they would like to put up around the school, around different areas of what in our school actually is recyclable and what is not because we do have a recycling team in fifth grade. We have pamphlets. We have a raffle ticket for um like the idea of caught being good. This is like caught cleaning up around the building. Um our next slide is uh we have some ideas for kindness around the building. We have a the creation of a kindness squad or be a bucket filler. And these are tokens that kids would receive a compliment card. Um and then finally the all important recess. Recess was a big topic. You can see all the
014ideas on here already. They want to restructure recess, indoor recess specifically. Um we have a couple groups that are very invested in gaga ball rules and um how to bring some fairness to the process of gaga ball and um we also have then a a game club and even today they were adjusting because they know that they're going to get to go outside soon. Is it possible then we can do indoor games and then take it outside and out do outdoor games. So they have a lot of ideas. they have used um new resources with Canva and um they have just um embraced this wholeheartedly. So, as you heard Holly allude to, the most important thing was that we wanted to make a connection between how people in history can impact our everyday lives. Um,
015one of the ways that we did that to go with our CKLA unit and other things that they were doing within uh their social studies curriculum was students took notes when they found influential people who made a change in their community and as you can see they started with Mr. Isabella. Um, another thing that we do did was we connected it to our CKLA essays and students instead chose to write about people that they believe had the biggest impact during the American Revolution and in their last paragraph they wrote about how they too can make a change. >> Uh, some of the other experiences that they had throughout this unit, they had a virtual field trip to the uh, battlefields. uh we bought brought in a man from for Tyonderoga who had replicas and in
016some cases artifacts of things that were used during uh the revolutionary war. And then the um just the teamwork and the collaboration around the use of Canva.