001the athletic director we have school counselors we have we also have parents as well on this committee and most importantly we have a student represented and so the hope is each year we will continue to add students as well we also at the bottom of our home page if people would like to report a dei concern they can click on that button and report a concern that's going on in a district and that concern goes out to the chair and the co-chair so we can touch base with that parent if they choose to leave their information there's also an exit survey for parents and students when they choose to leave the district for any reason we want to ensure that they're not leaving the district because of dei issues so all of our executive board
002participated in a protocol that was led very well by aisha this summer we were looking to discern our shared values and find common ground to build on we did that as started to build our vision for this work together and we built these statements which i feel like are more than just like word salad they're meaningful and they do direct our work we refer to them often so i'm going to read them with you um the mission is that the dei committee mission is to embrace diversity while providing a sustained commitment to equity and inclusion we will demonstrate this by building meaningful relationships with everyone in the bulldog community and that statement grew out of our vision statement which says the diversity equity inclusivity committee of the stonman river falls city school district will intentionally
003promote equitable opportunities for student and staff through its school community partnerships thus increasing student achievement and enhancing social and emotional learning we will create a new climate where diversity equity and inclusion drive our decision-making and policy guidelines we will model integrity and transparency while creating a sustainable culture that values and understands that diversity equity and inclusion are essential to creating a safe supportive and empowering school environment for all students and staff we will accomplish this by one celebrating diversity as the differences that exist in our community intentionally building relationships with students and family creating pathways of growth and understanding through the use of curriculum classroom instruction and professional development for all stakeholders in the district generating an equitable environment at every grade level we will hold staff and students accountable for bringing needed change to
004our district currently um we gathered a lot of information and started with a group of action plans and i'm going to explain kind of how they all look and work using the student experience and climate and culture as an example so they all look kind of the same at the top you can see who the subcommittee members are of each of the action plans who's working on them and then that mission statement is there again which is to embrace diversity while providing sustained commitment to equity and inclusion and we'll demonstrate that by building meaningful relationships with everyone in our community follow that format but they're all focused on different areas i'm going to go ahead and expand upon this action plan a little bit longer because it's going to lead into the survey that has
005been recently rolled out rolled out in the district so if you look at this action plan we wanted to institute a district student survey for the students as well as the staff we also wanted to continue to review our discipline data as a whole to ensure that there was no inequities not just in terms of race but in terms of student abilities we know that sometimes students with ieps could be suspended more than their their regular education counterparts so we want to ensure that there is equitable opportunities across the board and there are no big gaps in suspension we also wanted to ensure that there was an area to report a complaint form which you've seen on the website so that has been accomplished as well as an smf exit survey because we know that
006some of our kids were going to bulldog or online or transferring to institutions so we wanted to ensure that they were not transferring because of those reasons in this action plan we also have school-based dei committees we know that we cannot as a district start a new initiative and not involve our students as well as our teachers so it's important that we are established in school-based dei committees kind of like student council we also talked about scheduling as well as programming in this action plan going on in year two and year three so those are all there if you note on the net action plan there's timelines for every action step as well as who's responsible as well as a measurability piece it's important that we are capturing and making sure that our action steps
007are measurable because if they're not measurable then why are we doing it right i'm going to go back to the slide that's going to lead me into the panorama survey the panorama survey came into fruition because becca fermanski she is the gifted coordinator and myself we were sitting and we were having conversations about the fact that there has been multiple suicides after graduation in our district some of our students have left the high school and have committed suicide and so we had heightened concerns about the social and emotional learning of our student as well as the the environment in which they were learning and we wanted to know if they had a sense of belonging if they had positive student and teacher relationships and we really wanted to understand a root cause of why they
008were committing suicide before it got to that point we know that covet 19 has put a strain on students families parents it's put a strand on me i know that so we want to definitely make sure that mental health is at the forefront and we're checking in with our kids to ensure that they know that they have a voice they know that they are being heard and if they express concerns that we're going to do something about it the survey asks questions about topics to get more insight on students well-being and other indicators so in third through twelfth grade the survey the third through twelfth graders are taking is around the sense of belonging social perspective social awareness challenging feelings emotional regulation we know that if kids cannot emotionally regulate themselves and deal with childhood
009feelings that's when they often become more suicidal so it's imperative that we are asking them questions to kind of ascertain where are they at in terms of emotional regulation and what supports we need to be able to offer them teacher and student relationships we know that is very important because a lot of times when people think about taking their lives if they have a relationship with a trusted adult they know they have someone that they can talk to as well as teacher expectations how do they feel about their teacher expectations for them are the expectations high are they low and so being able to kind of talk through that the survey is really amazing with the fact that we have the ability to filter by student we have the ability to filter the responses down
010by race we won't see individual responses we'll see group responses we can filter the survey down by graduation gear by disability status in order to to determine the gaps that need to be addressed um and then from there we can create action plans around what needs to be addressed at individual buildings we may see that students at kempton have a strong sense of belonging but we may see that lacking at the high school so that will show us the gap so we can create action plans around it and create more sustainable programming to support students that are experienced so experiencing those things the second survey that was only given to 6th through 12th graders was around the area of equity and inclusion those were not race-based questions those were questions around what they see in
011their buildings in terms of diversity were they represented in the curriculum do they feel comfortable just conversations around that and so i know it's been questions about that also all survey responses are confidential no one at our school will see how individual students respond we will only see group responses and it's a third party company that is actively managing all of that and next wednesday we will receive training around the data that was collected as well as instructional implications and things we can do to support the data as well so with that we have the five step process we typically use the five step process during our tbts and our dlt process and our blt process and those are just ways that we can track our academic data we track our learning we look at
012our learning targets we collect the data around the learning targets and determine how students are performing and progressing we analyze that data and then we create shared expectations and then we implement those changes across the classrooms and then we go back and we revisit that data so how does that all tie into dei the survey is the bread and butter the survey is going to really show us what we really need to do and dig deep into in this district to support our kids and to support us and in order to do that we definitely got to use a cycle of inquiry to determine what are our next steps that is basically the importance of the survey and how we're going to use the data so just a little more information the dei committee executive
013committee and our district administrative team have both already started this book study which is called courageous conversations about race we chose this book because it is closely tied to academic achievement and continuous improvement as well as having difficult conversations the book provides a couple clear frameworks for having what we know to be challenging conversations sometimes one of those frameworks is on the screen it's called the um courageous conversations compass and what it does is provide us with a way of thinking about what we're saying and being sure are we talking about a belief an intellectual statement a feeling or a socially based action which is helpful when we're discussing um questions and things that are different and new the next framework that the book also offers are some learning norms which are good reminders for
014teachers about how to manage our own learning during discussions i think as educators we're always telling students to embrace discomfort it's part of learning but as adults we have a hard time doing that and so being willing to accept these norms and step into them helps us have a kind of safety net we're learning as we go and so i think there's not necessarily a solid ground work when we're having discussions with each other and this provides some safety and guarantee that we'll keep having the discussion oh and the dei school-based committees are just starting so that executive board and the administrative team are close to halfway through the book with a little bit of difference between the two of them and the dei school-based committees are starting the book studies in the coming month
015so we're making progress here's a complete list of our executive board members and ultimately the goal of dei is for all of our students and staff to feel safe accepted and respected and we measure what is important so it's important for us to update our action plans and part of our vision and mission is to be very transparent with the community and continuously give you updates on where we are at in the dei process so thank you for listening us to us tonight we appreciate you so that was amazing and i can't tell you how impressed i am how many hours and hours you guys have spent you know what you've done is i kept on waiting for the okay this is what we're doing right now you know but what you've done is you've
016created the whole foundation and it's a really solid strong foundation and to that just like when you build a house the rest of the pieces will come in so i am so excited for what you've done um i talked at link with is it rosa you know at the football game about this and it was so fun to hear her her take on what's going on and that's impressive so my question is um as mr brent said at our last meeting you know he was referring to the district being of art it's the same thing with culture you know it's like it's like driving a barge it doesn't you can't just turn it on a dime you know just slowly do it so what do you need from us as a board so that you
017maintain the direction and the momentum you have because it is a slow moving thing you know what you need for from us so that we can support you fully that's fantastic um do you have any i know this is probably just the answers probably now because of the zoom and stuff but you know my question is what do you have planned to get it in front of the students as soon as we can uh and is bullying part of this would it be naive of me to think that bullying in the district is being taken care of by this or do we still need something separate in the district to focus on that foreign okay and um one more question go ahead i just wanted to add that bullying is um and when you talk
018to them between what's bullying and what's like event one more thing um any brainstem storming ideas or plans of branching this out into the right now i think we really want to continue to as you stated build a very very strong foundation so the work is sustainable over time and built capacity so that having our k-4 students be a part of these building-based committees and kind of built that capacity up so that when they go over to lakeview and kempton at the high school we have kids that are trained if you will in dei to support that eventually we could open up to be able to support parent meetings and things of that nature but i feel like right now we need to build the capacity of the adult in the district to be able
019to have these conversations and be comfortable when having these conversations thank you thanks anyone else thank you now it is time for comments from the audience this is where citizens have the opportunity to bring their concerns before the board of education all comments should be directed to the board individuals presenting concerns and or questions to the board may not receive complete answers this same evening the board will study and consider your concern and either have a board member or a central office administrator contact you as soon as the information you require is available uh tonight we have a couple more ground rules you know just a reminder that it's three minutes or less and if you as you line up if there are multiple people wanting to speak tonight try to keep that six feet
020distance between you that would be great so if there's a with that said is there anyone who would like to comment [Music] teachers association 3869 darrell road this year is my fourth year in this position and yet i've never stepped up to the microphone despite attending nearly every single meeting virtually or in person in all of that time i've never had to but tonight i do the sta represents 364 certified staff members from tutors to school counselors to speech and language paths and school psychologists to intervention specialists to instructional coaches to classroom teachers our exceptional staff was assigned to return to school in person during this uncertain time of the pandemic in a hybrid model this school year and we did it despite being worried for ourselves our students and our own families many of
021our members worked tirelessly with our administration prior to school beginning in august to develop the plan we are working from right now the plan that can flexibly move from remote to hybrid to full return depending on the guidance from the summit county health department the ohio department of health and the cbc that guidance hasn't changed so why would our plan in recent weeks some districts have opted to disregard the advice from the health experts and roll the dice for a full return to school which we know will and has caused mass quarantines and major disruptions to teaching and learning and operations and yet by the day as the virus outlook gets worse in ohio some of those same districts are hitting the pause button because of what's happening and rightly so we know that conversations
022about a tentative plan or enhanced model call it what you like are taking place in our district and this is our opportunity to weigh in directly with you aboard we watched you explore the full return concept at the september 28th virtual board meeting the discussion was loosely about what we are doing currently whether we could or should be doing something differently and an idea was mentioned about putting together a committee which would include the teachers if that were to happen we know that administrators and board members met together casually last week about the same topic and thoughts and views were shared but it was thought that no decisions were expected to be made but the fact is some things were decided some specifics went from the idea stage to a tentative plan framework and we
023are here tonight to implore you to not move ahead with any plan without us as your continued partners we know what a difficult time this is we are living it we know that difficult decisions need to be made we make them too every single day we are not against changes or reevaluating what we're doing what we are against is being left out of the development of any tentative plan despite the promise we've been included our staff has worked harder so far this year than they ever have before and only they can speak to the chain challenges that they face maybe this week the board can have meetings with administration about how to fix the fact that we have many teachers who have a full load of in-person students but who also have to manage a
024roster of online students for each of their classes this can be up to six classes for each teacher at the high school this is the job of two people or as we call it a 200