001[Music] the corvallis school board meeting for december 9th 2021 is called to order if you're willing and evil please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flood of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all call is taken and we have every uh all board members in attendance uh through audio and video and we do have um director of vincent adams and vice chair sarah syndrome mcdonald and chairman in the board meeting oregon law in the boardroom oregon law public meetings uh allows to oregon law allows public meetings to be held entirely online in the interest of public health and safety for all community members especially for immunocompromised individuals and their families the corvallis
002school board will continue to hold its meetings online public comments is available at some of our meetings information about how to provide public comment is available on that prevalence school district website additionally the board's public meetings are live streamed on the district's youtube channel and a recording is posted to the same channel typically the day after the meeting i am very grateful that this technology makes it possible for more community members to view and or participate in current school board meetings given the flexibility provided by oregon law with that i want to welcome everybody who's joining us and watching uh the meeting and also i want to welcome staff who are joining us as well for the events of tonight uh the first item in the agenda we will be joined by nikki mcfa felon
003and middle school and high school principals for the school improvement plans and i apologize did i miss uh pronounce uh nikki's last name yeah awesome well welcome all and uh ryan yeah so again as we did last month with our elementary principles we are still having our principal groups by level present a shared school a district improvement plan for all intents and purposes because it's full schools or three schools at the level and so they'll be presenting tonight we'll follow a similar format um with a lot of the data coming from meat truth um as that is one of those pieces of qualitative student perception data that we have access to and so with that i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to nikki and our middle school principals who will be presenting
004first um good evening everybody good to see you this is really in the hands of our middle school principals lee santee who is also some of the data and then let them [Music] look at it and think about what their growth areas were from the data and i'm going to let them take it over from here all right hello everyone um first of all thank you for having us this evening here to present a little bit about what's happening in middle schools across the district i'm just i'm alicia ward satay and i'm the principal at linus pauline middle school and i'm just going to start off with a little bit of data so in our slideshow are we going to put that up yep there we go all right so on our second slide um
005we are just going to look uh at some enrollment so um as i think it's pretty well known um linus pauling has about 250 more students than sheldon but those are the numbers that you can see there on the graphic um i think another something to um also remember that those numbers those percentages for students navigating poverty might be a little off um remember all students are receiving free lunch this year so um just that may not be as accurate as we would like it to be then looking at our emerging bilinguals um lp has about on twice as many emergency emerging bilinguals as sheldon but then as we get to the end here we both have about the same percentage of students in special education at our schools so that's just a real quick
006run through of the demographics for our both of our schools we can go to the next slide and then just quickly uh looking at the next slide um just wanting to point out a couple things at linus pauling we have um about 24 hispanic latinx students um and then but looking at sheldon sheldon has um more asian students at about seven percent um i would say and i i spoke with sheldon both of us would say that these numbers have stayed pretty steady over the last few years and so um this is pretty reflective of what we've seen um in the last couple i would say even at least at least following two or three years so all right i'm gonna turn it over now to darren um so um to continue on thank you
007i'm darren bland i'm the principal at shaolin middle school and if we go to the next slide um it's a pretty simple one it just talks about that we got together and we decided to connect our sit plans to the board goals we use youth truth data as indicators and that's where we're able to go through and have all of our students fill out the survey and use that survey to give to guide us in our work and from that we came up with our goals that are going to come slowly i guess okay so we'll work together to ensure that students experience classes that really make them think are able to be themselves at school in the classroom and with their friends have learning experience that focus on solving real world problems and know
008an adult from school they can talk to especially when they are feeling upset and we're gonna go dive deeper into each one of those as we move forward [Music] so this is still me academic achievement and celebrations one of the pieces for this if you see right under the title it says my teachers explain things in a way that i understand in 2018 we were around the 30th percentile and the most recent data has us at the 67th percentile um that's something that we had been focusing on in the classroom and as we worked with teachers and the next one um talks about what they do in the classroom and does it really make them think currently we are at 48 our measure is by may 2022 to get to 57 the things that i
009see at sheldon middle school that make them think and this is really important this year is in our sixth grade math where everyone is leveled together they are doing a lot of differentiation and that's one of the biggest things that can really strive and push that work forward so they can meet all the students at their placement and where their needs are and then this is the second year technically because last year during our six weeks in build covid year we did everyone grade level for language arts as well but being this the first year in the building doing this it was a great opportunity for us to continue with that and then again differentiation so we're able to meet kids where they are and really make them think um the gap and the difference
010between one student to another in the classroom has been greater than it ever has been before which i'm sure you've heard and are aware and so this is a high level of work for our teachers and they're really working hard to make this happen and i believe i throw it over to greg hi yes thank you uh i'm greg hyde i'm one of the two actually can you go back to that prior slide thank you um we're just going to talk a little bit about last linus cloning's perspective i'm one of the two assistant principals at last supply middle school and when i think about celebrations things the things that we are doing really well is having learning targets and student-friendly terms chunking large and complex projects and concepts for students sharing information and multiple
011modalities and allowing for student discourse and then the things we're really working on this year um is to increase those low floor high ceiling activities so we want all students to be able to access that learning but we also want to be able to challenge our fast learners so extension problems that allow them to expand their thinking and justify their reasoning one specific example is that we're using is the claim evidence reasoning that's part of the amplified science curriculum and then you know we're having a lot of questions that uh promote perspective taking and open questions that allow for multiple solutions and allow students to draw their own conclusions and so that's some of the work we're seeing and that we hope to continue to get our academic achievement up i'm going to hand it
012off to my partner lisa thank you greg i'm lisa kraus uh the other assistant principal at linus pauling and i think we can bump up to the next slide thank you we're talking about equitable systems and particular celebrations while we acknowledge that this would also be an area for growth for us i do want to talk a little bit about what is happening with our library and i do i just want to i've had multiple conversations with our library media technician and she helped me out today and yesterday and we were talking about dr rueden sims bishop who coined the phrase windows mirrors and sliding glass doors to refer to how children see themselves in literature how they see themselves in the books that we put on the shelves and it is one of my
013primary goals said kelsey ward our library media technician to be able to connect every student to books that reflect their own experiences and help them to learn about and empathize with others and to that end we've seen a huge increase in books that we've purchased it's a very exciting i mean for me it's very exciting our list of books um she also shared with me um a video of jason reynolds and he is a nationally renowned writer for youth and he is the national ambassador of young people's literature designated by the library of congress we have many of his books on the shelf and students right now in the 8th grade social studies class are currently reading stamped and he worked on that project with a very well-known author as well so for us and
014what we've done in our library is a huge celebration i'll hand it over to john thanks lisa i'm john strawbridge i'm the assistant principal at sheldon um what i really wanted to speak to was really the amount of time that our district our board administrators have put towards our equitable systems within the last five years for sure has been a really big push and it's nice to see this data here kind of keep edging its way back up and we're certainly going to continue that and i really appreciate that one thing that i'm thinking about lisa was talking about about books is the book studies that our our staff has been engaging in at least last year that really is a shows the amount of commitment that our staff have for our students and understanding
015different races and really having that be a focal point for a celebration as well i think we go to the next back to you lisa am i doing that you go ahead and i'll follow up all right perfect um so what we want to do is we want to look at um our students of color specifically our black students to see um if they feel you know part of the community or their school's community and currently it's it's at 42 feel that way and our goal is to get to that 50 percent there um some of those strategies you'll see on the right-hand side is some feedback clearly the curriculum and materials that we focus on focus on the voices of students of color being found within that material and that's been a really big
016push the last few years which is really really helpful darren spoke to this a little bit about the dropping of advanced language arts as a strategy as well and having really more differentiated instruction to help our students really feel part of that and being meet them where they're at we can also think of math as another area like darren said one thing that we're really really focusing on is during our homeroom or equity lessons that we've been doing this these last two years have been really targeted and really focused most recently on native american month in history we have speak up for equity as well that's kind of out there for our school for students to really show their voice especially being an ally to students of color and then part of our observations is
017when we go is we're looking for all those voices from students in that material and how they're showing students and specifically black students within the material and i would just add thank you john and i would just add something that greg referred to earlier and questioning techniques that teachers are using so students perspectives can be heard and and in addition to that um to have teachers and students be a little bit more aware of what what's currently in that 5d network and um seeing who who has who has power in this classroom who's participating um and then in addition to that i want to mention that we are continuing with our character strong lessons um each week in our pride class and in addition hopefully this year our um our students will be able to
018participate in the african-american youth leadership conference that often takes place and we hope it will take place again in the spring thank you so this next part is about connecting to what you're working on in class and real world problems the places you see it which are sometimes the easiest if you will are in our electives i'll give you an example that's a non-elective and that's one of the areas that we're really trying to push is then our core classes but in steam class which kb runs which most of you may know because she may have presented um she did a mars rover and had the kids out there going and tracking the movement and then they put it into coding and then they see if it actually works when they go do it in
019digital media we have what we call cctv they do weekly announcements with a green screen they have kids who do the writing do the filming and then ones that are on camera doing the interviews and such in math um i went into a math classroom and they were working on budgeting and as they were going through the budgeting they're talking about okay so what do i want when i get older right what type of housing what type of car how much do i need to make what type of job would i want then and then going through a budget piece for that and then to add in which sort of counts in some ways we had a pause activity today and i will let you guys know that there was some nail swan pieces to
020the paws activity it took some coaxing a little bit if you know my personality but i had a couple of sixth graders who asked and i was like i don't know i need to check on some room so i went checked on some rooms and then came back and now i have my nails all done for tomorrow and for the board meeting and thrown over to greg all right um so real world learning you know the our stem and science classes are using those engineering standards to solve problems and we're seeing more and more real world applications incorporated into our core classes and math classes um in our pe health class they did a great activity it's it was called the game of life and they really they had to do some budgets and learn
021a little bit about finance around their personal life and um and then we decided you know one of the best one of the best ways to get a real world experience is to engage the community we're really proud of our art students who have engaged the community by visiting the grace center they've also produced their own artwork on holiday cards and shared caring messages with community groups and then our leadership class is doing some fundraising activities i believe they're even collaborating with the high school i'm one of those so those are some of the things we are celebrating and i guess i'll pass it off to lisa for the next slide i'm sorry greg i didn't think that was my slide but um i could go ahead and talk a little bit about social studies
022and what they're doing in social studies um and you stole my um the game of life and i did see um our health teacher have students actually build budgets and explain why it was maybe not so important to spend 110 a month on their phone when they still needed to pay for rent and groceries beyond ice cream that kind of thing um but also i just want to mention our social studies work and they are currently reading stamp that is the young adult work uh written by jason reynolds they are talking about real world issues regarding racism and they're bringing that current events right into that classroom um i think maybe i have to look to see who's next i am not sure well if we go back to the previous one we can show
023what the data showed so 15 of our students um talked about being able to design a solution to a real world problem um that's something we really want to increase with a goal of um our strategies on that is to really give positive feedback anytime we see staff who are doing it they sometimes don't even realize that they're doing it as real world so really saying hey that's a great job that you did there talking about it at staff meeting celebrating it and then on the other side when we see a potential missed opportunity then also giving that as feedback and then lisa might know who do i throw this to alicia you throw it to me alicia all right okay so the next one next slide please okay so um this slide we thought
024it was interesting we had quite a conversation about it um just um talking about so this is showing how many students know someone outside of school that they can talk to that they can talk to about any problems or being stressed et cetera et cetera and so it's i think it's really good to acknowledge that we have students um with folks outside of school that are helping and supporting and we really appreciate that and i think it's a good um for us to know that so that we can really focus on also providing those folks within the school to make sure that all of our students have adults that they feel comfortable talking to and reaching out to when they are feeling upset stressed or having problems so that is why that slide is in
025here it might seem a little outside of the box but that is really so that we can see what's happening outside and then know what we need to do inside the school so our next slide please and so what we're looking at with this is is again focusing um on what we will see hopefully in may of 2020 and this is focusing on our black students who res and who will respond that and they have an adult from school they can talk to um you can see to the right some of the strategies that we are looking at survey to identify which individuals have trusted adults and then connecting with individual students to make sure that there is a connection with adult i would also say i think working on just strong systems within the
026school and making sure students know their resources know who they can reach out to all the way from you know our student center to our counseling centers to mental health therapists our skills trainers also as lisa mentioned the character strong that's being the curriculum that's being taught um talking about really building relationships and knowing how to build those relationships with each other their peers and with the adults around him also at both schools continuing to encourage teachers to really spend time building relationships with students i think both of us are at both schools i know we've had many discussions about just really making that a focus for our teachers and and really giving them um giving them permission to take time to build those classroom cultures that we all know real really help students move
027forward academically and so really taking that time to build relationships with students and then again at both schools continuing to recruit higher and re retain staff of color that reflect our student bodies and that can make connections help make connections with all students in our schools so those are just some of the things that that we're working on um to do that now sheldon i think i think you covered a lot of the things that um we're doing together and that one thing the idea of connecting one-on-one with students who did not have a trusted adult in school i've seen that in practice at the high school when nikki was there and i was there with aaron and we really focused on having one adult have have a student and it was probably one of
028the most magical things i've ever seen and i remember my my student specifically who i had that i was connecting with and when you're able to kind of create that bond there is that inclusivity that happens there is that community that's built and they're using that community that's built within our staff when they're kind of focused on that there's just a great positive vibe that comes to school when you do something like that and so i'm really excited just for us to really have that focus again um because i thought it i truly think that is one of the reasons our graduation rates were bumped up as well was due to that sole focus on an individual student from an individual adult and again i thought it was magical so great okay i think we're
029at our last slide here the thank you and any questions so there you go i really appreciate the presentation and the hard work as i wait on board members to raise their virtual hand i want to uh thank you for caring for the students the whole students and their whole experience uh investing in worcester's survey to show us uh where what we're doing and how we're doing uh is paying dividends by uh what i'm seeing here so really thank you for uh using the tool and incorporating it in identifying measures and strategies and with that i'm going to hand it over to uh by sheriff's office mcdowell that then yeah thank you all so much um for your presentation and for um working with our students this year who were having some challenges um [Music]
030it's interesting to me look at this data because it was the current data we have is from may of this year which is right when students came back to school um and so i looked at it and i thought you know there's two things that can be happening they could be truly accurate so i guess there are three things um one is that it could be artificially inflated numbers because students are still so happy to be back at school that they were really positive and um you know the other is that they you have students who haven't been in school in the classroom for a long time so that really understanding how to answer those questions could have been a problem so you i just as we go forward using that information this year you
031are there lessons that we learn from kids who had been in online school for almost a year and then or over a year from march um and then came back and we saw these improvements in how they were reporting their experience in school and if if that sort of positive view is really being reflected in what we're seeing this year in our classrooms that um i'll do my best to answer that one well it is a big question but i think it's um so this is you know the the data that we have right now um is is really student perception data more so than academically again some of those things that we've had years and so while i think that um there may be some of those pieces that kind of change the margins
032a little bit in the unprecedented tiles i think it also provides us with some trim data that we can really focus on and i think what i'm appreciative about is that this has allowed this group of principles to come together and say here's what we see in our data and here's our intentional steps we're going to take this year so i think that while the data may be again they have a little bit wider range than it typically would um because of all the things that were happening at that point in time i think it's allowed us to be more um kind of just discreet and what we're looking for and what we're coaching around and what we're supporting in our schools so that aspect of it i feel pretty pretty good about so again
033when we get to the end of this year in the spring of this year and we do this again again we'll have we'll have better trend data because we will have taken it sort of pre-pandemic right coming back and a year later and so then i think because we're going to continue to use this year after year that i think we'll begin to see some better um the other thing is is that it's based on national norms and state norms and so those things are also a little bit a skew just because you're coming out of the panther thank you darren you want to speak to that yeah just to the inflated deflated at least for the areas that i presented i think that my teachers explain things in way i can understand was inflated
034in some ways because they really had to work at that online right so we had so much time online they had less tools in their tool belt to be able to make them and help them understand so i think the explanations were even better so using that is great and conversely deflated real world learning um when you're online only is more difficult to do right and so i think that number was lower when you look at it and see 15 percent was shocking to me for some of the things that we do but then thinking like all the things that i see how can you do mars rover when you're at home and how can you do cctv like we tried to do as many of we could but there's not that same buy-in and
035ability to be able to do it so i think there was some of that all right we'll go to vince and then shawna vince so i just want to first express you know reflect back and express some appreciation um i remember the moment when director ed jenkins coined the term equitable systems in obsession with war and i remember it being an aha moment and we didn't know exactly what equitable systems would be but we knew that we had to have a system of systematic approach to developing you know an education system that supports all children tonight i'm seeing this being reflected and what's being delivered in classrooms and i was particularly impressed by you know the the discussion around using literature and literature instruction for empathetic perspective thinking and how we're delivering that to kids
036and so i wish ed was in the room with us right now to hear uh what you're sharing because it's just deeply actualizing when we come up with this crazy idea for how we can change when you have actually done it and so yeah i'm just really delighted to hear uh hear this report i have kind of a nuts and bolts question um early on in your report you were talking about you know in-grade differentiation and you know maybe some challenges around that and i just i want to get a sense of what does that look like what does that look like right now how are we doing in-grade differentiation for all our kids i think it starts with our teachers being allowed to take risks because i think that's how they are able to
037do that is really try some different things that they haven't tried before i think there's professional development i know there's been a group of math administrators and teachers that have been working really hard on that specific question of how to do that and you know i know nikki has been really really helpful with that in providing that opportunity for our teachers and our administrators to think truly now outside of the box of what we've been doing for a really long time i'd like to approach that too that question vince i appreciate it if i'm in a let's say a language arts class or even in the social studies class we have access i mean our access to the reading materials is all online and so students can have the lexile that best matches their current
038reading level so they could all be reading the same text but it's at different levels and and that is readily done in both language arts and in social studies and i was going to show this later um but i think it was in the interviews greg that you and i were in with lp students in math we had students share about teachers who have the opportunity um are you ready for more that's kind of how it was phrased at the end of um some math work and the students described that you know when they got to that point of kind of um getting through the day's work they were always offered this these challenging sets of problems beyond not even just problems but um that used the same math but used different math and they
039were like some of them i'm super excited and some are way above my level and too hard and i enjoy just like trying to do those so that's an example that that greg and i both just heard about this week in math so thank you thank you for that response again i mean you know for the board you know you see the sea staff responding on the malt you know multiple levels you know at the system level where we're building systems of professional development building and we have systems of curriculum all the way down to you know the specific level but the assignment so just thank you for the comprehensive and detailed work that you do um it's really impressive thank you uh next up is dr shannon comedy shanna thank you sammy hi everyone
040i wanted to also express my my gratitude for all that you're doing all of your incredibly hard work and supporting students families and educators as well and i'm especially grateful as a parent of a middle schooler who enjoyed pause day to day but was not the one to paint your nails darren different room but i'm sure she'll be glad to know and hear about your nails and maybe even be looking for them in the halls tomorrow so i have two questions one just i again gratitude for the attention to equity and really embedding equitable practices throughout so many different aspects of the work that you're doing the relationships and the curricula one of my questions was about the metric that was focused on students and particularly the numbers that you pulled out around black students
041looking at whether or not they find community and i'm curious about for black students in particular as well as for others how is student voice being used to help inform what that means for students notice some of the metrics that you're looking at have to do with really looking at representation representation in the curricula is there any way that student voice is being used to really learn what does community mean to them and what would make a difference for them so i'll pause there that was my first question i think one of the things that um at least at linus pauling this is our first year having a safe um group and so we i'm really looking forward to as that develops and as we get going um with that is to really hear those
042voices in that group our safe group is completely made up of students of color and so it'll be you know as we move through the year it'll be interesting to get more involved with that to hear student voice and to really bring some of these questions to them because john i think those are like that's a great spot to bring some of these questions to you and and to you know have them even go out and find answers from their peers and to bring that back to the group and and do a little research for us um to kind of find that out but i think i think that to me is a really good um place to to hear student voice and to really be directed and how to move forward with that so
043for for me that's that's one source of student voice and i would say at sheldon we have the safe group as well as equity team um and we have several other clubs and clubs is kind of where we are able to get some of that information back from kids and then we go into building leadership like linus pauling does our club leaders are there to be able to share out information or when we do our building-wide equity meetings with our adults then they're able to represent multiple groups and at all times we keep equity at the forefront we're making decisions whether it's schedule change whether it's what electives to put in what we're doing for our various um equity work within our pride at linus pauling our home room at shaolin we always are using
044student voice to the best of our ability and seeking that out thank you for sharing those examples is it okay if i ask my other question sammy um how about we go blue and then i go back to you awesome uh next up is uh come right here literally right there so uh thanks sammy and that was probably good timing because it's tied to um some of the demographic kind of questions my questions um i appreciate being able to see the experiences of black students but i'm wondering how those experiences show up for students that are less represented um how they're how they're feeling um so students that are in that really small percent population and what that looked like if you don't have it right now it's okay but that'd be something i'd be
045interested in hearing more about um and what kind of supports in place for students that may not feel like they belong as much because of their representation at their schools lee do you want to speak to that one yeah i can i can totally speak to that there is a number of different ways that we can look at this data and it and it really comes down to asking good questions so i appreciate um that that attempt to dive in deeper and and i think um that is a great question back to the board in terms of what are those what what more do you want to see and what do you want to know because um we we have a lot of power in this data there's a lot of information um and i
046think it is really important that we start asking those questions of hey i'm curious i want to hear more about this and then going back to um how does that inform the questions that we're asking students and and trying to get more narrative because this this is very much a survey of you know score one two three four or five um but there there's a lot of narrative story behind that so um i will um be happy to work with the team to get more specific information on any questions you have okay thank you yeah i think um i'm asking because sometimes it's it's hard to know if something's working for students that may need um to feel a little bit more supportive and that's where that question is coming from it's not like a
047critique of the presentation at all it's just more like that curiosity and how are these decisions impacting students that aren't represented well like in the student population but also by um by staff and faculty or staff and faculty obviously i work at osu but my staff um but that's um that's where that question was coming from as i was really kind of thinking about students that may not feel as seen and how that might be showing up and also students from the lgbtq community as well and um that was it but thank you for looking into that in the future and i also wanted to thank you all for the incredible work you're doing i know um you'll work with a lot of students and some schools are a little bit squeezed into over there
048alicia so thanks for all you do for that age group i know that's that transitionary phase too for students so yeah back to you thanks sammy so the other question that i had some of the things that we've been hearing from you and the incredible work that your staff and educators are doing relates to differentiation and you mentioned differentiation from low floor to high ceiling while also acknowledging that these gaps are perhaps greater than ever experienced or in quite a long time or in our history that we know of and so i'm just curious about how your educators are doing with that in terms of feeling supported in terms of emotional labor emotional load also acknowledging that partnership with families is a little bit harder in this context without being able to have families in
049the building and just checking in on on well-being and support and what might be needed and how those needs are being met right now i can jump in and say that you know we've our students our teachers have been teaching heterogeneous groups for a long time like in science and social studies and even language arts for a few years now math is the most recent change at sixth grade where they have truly heterogeneous grouping and so um so i'd say our teachers are pretty experienced at that the one thing that's been really interesting is when we meet in grade level teams they're less struck by the wider the wider gap and academic skills and more struck by the softer student skills so at eighth grade team they're talking about student uh lagging skills that normally
050are being discussed at sixth grade or seventh grade and so in a seventh grade team um it's the same deal you know there's a lot of sixth grade and even fifth grade behaviors sixth grade teachers at middle school do a lot of heavy lifting and they teach a lot of soft student skills and that was that was hard to do last year and so that's the most striking thing is those soft skills kids are about a year behind and that of course impacts their ability to gain the academic skills as well i was just going to add in that the care and connect that we did for our students is also for our staff um you know as we came into this year and we jumped into school days that were pretty typical length after
051they had done six weeks in building and then we jumped into it so the care and connect and time for them was also important as much as we could give back to them very much appreciate the school board the adjustments especially here we are the day before the two-hour early release of giving that to them because that is really big for them um being able to grade and provide that feedback that really is quality for each one of the students is a higher need and more differentiation for grading than it ever has been and then also preparing for a lesson is greater than it ever has been before because just like greg was talking about never been in elementary school but i'm pretty sure our sixth graders are working on fourth grade skills and standards
052right and we're all like moving one or two years before so they're working on things that they never have before you know and so being able to do that and differentiate while also taking our sixth graders who are at seventh grade and trying to push them and also have them feel like they're challenged so it's just a wider range and i feel like they've gotten their groove and i feel like we're in a different place today very much than we were at the beginning and i would just add that i would agree with that and and that you know just kind of i think we're having to pace ourselves this year right we have lots of great ideas lots of things we want to do but we also want our teachers to have that time
053to really be able to dig in and to support the students where they're at right now and so it's just really around facing ourselves looking at what are those essential things that we need to work on and moving forward with that not not throwing everything out but really kind of looking at our systems reminding ourselves how can we make things easier organizationally for students for our parents and and really moving forward in that sense um to really kind of remind ourselves all of those things and helping like greg was saying helping kids with those soft skills to be able to move forward so it's about pace and it's about just maybe slowing down just a little bit thank you all really appreciate it so i want to go back to the question that dr whitewater
054raised and and lee santee great response in this this question of data and so you know once again the administrative team has gotten out ahead of the board which is a great thing that's wonderful you are doing you have pivoted essential change to to uh make for a make up our lack of strategic data to guide your decision making so you know the idea of using uh student experience as an added student factor for academic outcomes is really i'm really brilliant and it's interesting i recall when we when we talked with the primary team you know i was kind of i was gobsmacked and i was like i don't know how to govern that you know because there's a really different way of thinking about data and so uh i think that that needs to
055be a deeper conversation i you know clearly the board i don't think we're still just trying to get our heads wrapped around this and i think i'm thinking about our strategic planning that we're looking forward to um clearly this is a strategic change for the district um i think it's brilliant but i think as the board navigates this i think it's really essential that we have um the administrative team and our educators alongside the board to support us as we learn about this and incorporate it into our governance framework so thank you and that's just kind of a note for the superhero but um yeah brilliant work yeah just to respond to that um we have kristen miles coming back in january from osba to continue that community engagement component and then in february lee
056and lori and i have been meeting and looking at the youtube data as well as initial star data and by then we will also have graduation rates from last year so we've been working to put together a presentation to bring to you in february perfect great setup for thinking about what the next few years will look like well with the 50 seconds i have with middle school uh principals and assistant principals i want to say thank you for your time thank you for your efforts and uh for caring about the students and about uh for caring for the teachers and staff you're doing phenomenal work uh this journey is really hard uh kids in middle school as everybody will remember these days uh with so many things uh and i am certain they will remember
057uh the educators who cared about them and who have made their stress or anger uh better and who helped them celebrate accomplishments uh and relieve them from the worries that they're going through and all of that is possible through this mindful work uh as i talk about uh stress anger or celebrations these are we can't quantify those but the way that we're doing this we're measuring it we're building strategies and we're helping students to have a better experience and i'm very very proud to see this uh deep analysis and work and engagements up the board uh asking you those questions and we're fully in supports of what you do thank you very much and with that uh we will shift gears through high school presentation and we have 45 minutes for that sounds good so
058those middle school folks have a great evening and thanks so much [Music] all right so we're going to turn it over to our high school team now um to share as well and just like middle school um i'm going to let them just um just take over and i'm not sure starting so i don't have i'm starting all right perfect uh good evening and uh thank you for having us uh as you know this has been a challenging year um our staff has been working very hard through this pandemic and i do want to acknowledge that we're hoping that our school improvement plan will help support our students and helps them get to the struggles of this pandemic yeah joining me tonight are from college hill eric wright from crescent valley aaron mckee mark henderson
059nicole hendricks and jennifer still and from chs matt boring jermaine joseph hayes and whitaker and i'm salvador munoz i'm one of the assistant principals at chs with that i will turn it over to matt thanks al thanks everybody who i can't see now because the presentation is dominating my screen um being here yeah i just wanted to talk a little bit about um why we're all here together there are three high schools that are different in their own unique ways chs cv and college hill but we are truly working together and um if you hear anything different it's not true i am i talk to aaron two or three times a week some weeks two or three times a day we are just trying to navigate this craziness together and it's super collaborative i call
060eric right all the time we are invested in our college hill kids who are celebrating their successes we are commiserating on the challenges and coming up with plan c d e f g h whatever to help these kids graduate it is a very collegial and positive and collaborative environment i love that to give you a few examples that are concrete this year we we have an eighth period orchestra class at chs which the chris james has agreed to travel over to do to mitigate travel back and forth for our kids super collaborative aaron mckee and i have really done away with any restrictions on can a kid take a class can a cv kid take a class at chs or the other way around there were some pretty restrictive policies in place that weren't student
061centered and they're gone we just get on the phone talk to each other yeah we'll take that kid bring her over bring them over bring him over it doesn't matter so it's really really positive and i really respect the administration at at the other schools and we truly are in that together so there you go next slide thanks matt i just wanted to remind everybody there's four high schools in the district we forgot about corvallis [Music] i really do appreciate working with matt and aaron um as we you know transition kids in and out of corvallis online to find what best fits for our students um so just like the the middle school we're going to take a quick look at some demographic data um keep in mind that again students navigating poverty those numbers
062are likely underreported because of the universal access by all of our students to um the free lunch uh in the emerging bilingual column those numbers um are specifically related to active eol students who are in an active ell class and then the students with or the students who are on ieps are all of our numbers are very similar but also note that at corvallis high school and crescent valley high school we've got uh life skills and wing students counting at those numbers so that's what we have there for the data and i'll pass it on to uh eric wright for the next slide you can see just our numbers of our high schools hi again i'm eric wright college field principal um uh you can and i could walk you through all this data but
063i think it's i think it's interesting to see that our our district is um still a district that is a lot of white kids in corvallis that is our that is our community and our students of color are increasing over time and i think that is a great opportunity for us to have more perspectives and more ways of looking at things and and more ways for finding more kids to be successful and i think if you were to look at our staff our staff does not yet reflect the growing uh ethnic diversity of our students and that's something that we as a district are still continuing to work on it is if i'm honest it's a challenge still to find candidates of color that want to come and work and live in corvallis that's something
064we have to continue to work on as a community and as a district um but i think it's a fun and exciting opportunity because it means we get to really make changes in our community to build a community that is more welcoming more um more excited about what people bring to the table more willing to learn from one another and seek answers um i think if you look at some of the things i think uh um you know there are there are more asians on the north side of town and there are more latino students on the south side of town and i don't know if that is surprising to us but nothing that we've seen year after year i think that that that split is um is something that has been around for a
065long long time um i think that has to do with housing prices and it also has to do with our dual immersion program that we have that goes through our elementary middle and on to corvallis high school and i think it is fun to be to hear conversations more about really seeing those things as assets and strengths i think the conversation used to be more around well it's harder to teach these group of kids or this group of kids poses this challenge and i hear more conversations now with my colleagues around here's a great opportunity to learn from kids in this way or to find creative opportunities to make this happen or to find literature that celebrates that and so for me i just that's been really exciting for me and i've really been proud
066and encouraged by my colleagues so on to the next slide okay so the next few slides um are going to we're going to go through our school improvement plan goals now these goals were developed using the current youth truth data and board goals so now our main goal wasn't to just improve the youth truth data but to use this data as a measure of how well we're doing and achieving the goals that we set for and now the goals that we set for that we developed um are to ensure that students experience classes that really make them think and are able to help the help help them to be themselves at school and in the classroom and with their friends the goals are also meant to have to help the students have learning experiences that
067focus on solving real world problems and to also know about programs that service the school that can support them when they're feeling upset hello everyone emmett here uh so the next this next section is going to dive into the areas of focus the four main areas of focus that we've chosen so before we do that i'm just going to take a half step back and look at you truth data we've mentioned that a few times so just frame the structure of it and how is that linking down to the board goals so if you go to the next slide so the youtube data as you heard it's student voice it's a national non-profit it's a survey that's done online it actually provides really useful reporting and data analysis tools once you have the data and
068then a database where we can make comparisons within the state um to school size rural versus urban so it actually provides a larger data set our data alongside uh other tools and we can do that statewide um the data that we're using for our focus areas is from the may 2021 survey the conversation was raised earlier about um it was a challenging year and that obviously is a variable in the data but the one thing it does give us is a relative assessment across all the indicators in the survey and then the ones we're choosing from it gives us a starting point for that so in parentheses you'll see for the different schools uh the numbers in the survey so depending on the questions there's a whole series of indicators that the students answer so
069for example in chs it ranged from 498 to 675 depending on the question so the survey is broken up into ten areas you'll see them down below and a number of indicators under each area the four that are underlined uh that's where our four areas of focus come from and they link them to student achievement equitable systems real world learning and health and wellness and the first one that you're going to hear is academic achievement okay our academic achievement goal um much like the middle school is to provide as many opportunities for our students as possible to have experiences that really make them think um and our primary strategies for that are just providing quality feedback to our teachers and professional development to our staff at cv our admin team is working closely with our
070teachers and challenging them to think differently about how content is accessed by our students and to think about how we assess students and and differentiating that assessment one example that cv is one of our teachers outfitted the room in wall-to-wall white boards and so at the very beginning of each class the students come in they're all in groups they each have a role and they they immediately start solving problems on the whiteboard and it was such a joy to watch them because they're interacting with one another they're helping one another they're teaching one another supporting one another and then with that same teacher she's now experimenting with group projects in place of standard written assessments i think this is just gonna really help our kids think more creatively think more collaboratively and really have some
071great experiences matt oh yeah i'm up and i'm not talking about this life i'm still talking about academic achievement but um i just want to say a couple things mark i do acknowledge you as a high school for corrales and the same thing um goes with the collaboration piece um we set up some parameters around if a kid can transfer from corrals online back to the home school vice versa and um but really as the year has played out and it's been a challenging year as as sal mentioned at the beginning we take individual kids into account and their stories and um it's been great working with counselors and mark to to find solutions that really help kids so i feel bad about that omission but um know that that's part of that collaboration um
072and i think the example i want to use to talk about academic achievement also harkens back to eric's rights comment that he made about you know sometimes certain types of kids can be termed difficult to teach and that kind of thing because of what they're bringing to the to the classroom and whatever a great example of dispelling that narrative is a course we've had for a few years now it's in its third year and it survived covid called college now writing there's been um we've offered writing 121 credit at both high schools for a long time but it's mostly been in an advanced placement course that really wasn't accessible to to a whole lot of kids and bonnie arning one of our teachers said i think i can i can help any kid achieve writing
073121 credit i want i want to create a course that has no prerequisites we will take anyone i will take anyone and i'll make it work and that's what's been happening and you know and and this isn't a mystery you know when kids have a little bit of say in what they write if they can write about what interests them you know what most of them can write and they can write at a level that deserves college credit so that's that's been a um a great thing and i would piggyback on that um going into the next school year we are eliminating our lowest track of language arts classes we will differentiate within the classroom and get rid of that and we really think that in terms of academic achievement every kid deserves a class
074that will challenge them and actually make them think and so that's my it's my example and my celebration of this the kind of this idea of having classes really making kids think at college hill is i i enjoyed what you said there matt too i think um in a lot of our writing opportunities we are trying to make sure kids are considering their audience and i think for a lot of time a lot of years in schools kids would write reflection what they read in a textbook or they would write a literary analysis or they would write a book report or something and we are trying to get kids real world writing opportunities and like math said when kids are bought into what they're writing their writing skills emerge in really exciting ways and one
075example that is really concrete in our government classes towards the end of the class each student has to write a letter to a senator about an issue that they want to advocate for and i i'll share with the board that someday but this i just have in front of me uh a letter that uh one of our students juan padilla wrote to uh senators merkley and wyden about advocating for the continuation of the daca program and it's an amazing piece of writing that he wrote that looks really globally looks really personally at his own story and then also is it really a call to action and i just think again we can help kids have writing that considers their audience that they can take and make something that is personal their writing skills really emerge
076and they really get to think about not only what they're writing about but also who their intended audience is and i think that's a skill that's really going to take them forward both in their thinking and also in their improvement as writers and so i love when we can have that opportunity to do writing that is real and concrete and not nearly academic so so we're going to talk about equitable system systems and this slide shows um that when students were asked uh how often do you learn about the lives and experiences of people of diverse countries high school students in corvallis school district ranked in the 85th percentile which is really good um it's well above the state average there's 50 oregon schools that use youth truth data to just give you a kind
077of perspective and the average is the 75th percentile of all the schools nationwide who use youth truth data so that is a celebration um i think that just bringing racial equity into the curriculum is just really exceptional teaching some great some content areas i know are easier than themselves to it easier than others i know that i've seen some really good stuff in world languages there's one particular teacher that is always doing something that embeds you know different different countries and and it's really a joy to watch uh she does a lot of fundraising where the students are interacting with international companies um to provide uh something there's one called like um it's called the stone stone team international spanish in spanish class and they they raise funds to buy stoves for families in south
078america every year so that's really an a neat project that they work on and then she also does like bucket lists in mexico city the sites that they want to see and it's kind of this virtual tour she does a really good job of bringing technology into her classroom so really fun class to visit but also i've seen some really good things in environmental science and even art classes so our teachers are doing a really good job with this and i know that the kids are seeing multiple perspectives and really enjoying the content so um jermaine i think i'm off to you no uh go back kim hi hi um so going along with what um jennifer was saying um what i wanted to also add on to that is that when you think about
079our world being so interconnected one thing that is really exciting to see in some of our classes at chs is that um teachers are really building those skills and dispositions that students really need to be good global citizens so how do you foster dialogue in the classroom around really any content area um do students have the ability to converse with people with different backgrounds can they investigate the world and are you ultimately going to be change makers so i know even in a lot of our classes the warm-up activity often involves just like bits of news or celebrations from outside of the united states which i think is really important um i'm not just relying on u.s media it was a joy for me to see that because it's all about perspective shifting so i
080think when you can expose young people to the world outside of corvallis outside of the u.s then they really are equipped to go out and ultimately make the world a better place i know that's aspirational but we want that for our students so next slide please okay so um a lot of the um the things that um we are doing at chs is also happening at all the other high schools which again is need to see because we do really have a very collaborative relationship and that's been nice for me to join onto a team not just here at chs but to really feel like i have such um great relationships with all the administrators i think that actually makes our collaboration more effective when um you know we can share ideas and also commiserate
081so in terms of equitable systems um i am still involved with safe um in my admin role but we really have um a grown group and we have two mentors caroline hey and anna zachariah so for this goal um similar to lp we are looking at when black students specifically ask if they feel that sense of belonging like do they really feel a part of this community we want to see that number go up because when students don't feel seen that can be really damaging not just academically but socially as well so we're hoping to continue to really be supportive of the safe group and um bring these student voices into conversations that we're having around a lot of different things that affect all our students because i feel too that when you talk about
082diversity and bringing in different perspectives everyone everybody benefits at the end of the day it's not just check in the box so safe is growing and they've been having their meetings um they had one at chs and one at cv um and it's all the schools coming together and having that space um at chs one thing that's been new this year as well is we are using our advisor periods to do equity lessons so um these have actually been developed um really collaboratively so our equity team um is made up of admin and teachers and these lessons are really tailored for our students and um when we meet as a whole staff we're actually able to go through the lessons and before delivering them to the students because i feel like that also allows some
083internal work that needs to actually happen to deliver the lessons with fidelity and and really ultimately to infuse this work into everything that you do as an educator so again it's not just checking the box it's also taking these steps to to hopefully someday not need an advisory period to do this work because it's going to be in everything that we do every day but i think that's a great start and um we have done two so far and trying to bring in staff feedback and and really most importantly i think student feedback on um is it making a difference is it is a change in the experience that our historically marginalized students are having in our school so that's just a couple of things happening at chs this year that we're hoping to grow
084and continue and i think jennifer is going to chime in now thanks jermaine um yeah i agree with you i this the team and the team that we're um presenting with it's invaluable you know bouncing things off one another so i appreciate you surfacing that and i want to say i'm grateful to work on these slides with you so um it's been it's been fun to talk about what we're going to talk and what we're going to say i guess one thing our staff at cv decided over the summer is that all of our professional development was going to be around professional development for our staff was going to be around our equity work i think it's really important and we've we've really spent a lot of time so far this year being intentional and
085thoughtful about how to deliver that so that's that's been good work we have a new equity court equity tosa this year julia blue arm who's done a fabulous job she left off christina stone did it last year and julia has done a great job of picking up where christina has left off and really extending us um and you know pushing our staff where we where we need them to go so that's been great and marcianne rivero kuchi has been a great support too so i just wanted to give a shout out to those guys so julia also advises the black student union latino unitas and she she's a safe coach and so um been it's been a pleasure to kind of partner and work alongside julia um she's an extremely thoughtful person so i've learned
086a lot so in addition to doing like equity walks and looking for things in our classroom observing lessons um one thing that i've been thinking about and i've been having conversations with both julia and marcianne and student leaders is um we i appreciated the question from from shawna earlier because that's what i had intended to say so i appreciated that um we're looking at where you know what groups of students do we have where mostly white students are represented because we know that representation matters and so that comes those conversations have just started and you know i know these slides are um focused on our black students but we're really talking about bipac students um and where where are they represented in our leadership groups our student leadership groups and how um how can we
087i guess get the information from each group back and forth and still maintain the entire excuse me integrity of especially our safe group because i know that's kind of a tricky thing to do because the power of the safe group is the integrity of the group and the privacy of the group and so i've been working with um some student leaders who actually are members of the safe group and core council and leadership class and trying to talk about like how do we how do we shift some of that information some of that membership and representation um and still keeping the integrity of that group so that's that's on the plate right now and we are making sure to have um the voices of our black students and our equity lens questions at the center
088of that so those conversations have just get are just getting started it's very exciting work and i'm i'm very happy about it i think that that's going to be a very productive productive conversations and hopefully we'll be able to move the dial on how bypass students feel a part of the school community next slide okay real world learning i i know that i'm one of the three people that's going to speak on this one i'm aaron mckee and the principal of crestonville high school and a lot of what i'm going to speak about is i'm sure going on in all the other schools and some of that i can speak to for example our career and technical education programs those are obviously lend themselves to real world learning but we have construction going on at
089our school it is allowing for greater ability to do welding in autos and i know um that we're working with college hill and eric wright and kevin skillings to have uh the students and programs that they have there to come over and use that space um and so it's it's under it's an underutilized space and that's a great opportunity for that space to be used and that's we think of students in corvallis school district is all of our students it doesn't matter where they happen to go to school for most their time but they're all of our students and when matt speaks to the relationship that we have uh that's the way we look at it and it's um really a lot of fun to work with the other schools in corvallis so we um
090some other things that we're doing we uh our science and engineering program that we have part of getting the demographics i know that there was a question earlier about students that are historically underrepresented in the middle school um presentation there was a question about what are you doing for students that are historically underrepresented to feel like they belong in in different places and i'm going to answer that a little bit with this what i'm sharing here so in our uh science and engineering we have two instructors uh stephanie and adam and these two instructors each year invite uh middle school age students to come up and and see the programs and see the students in the program and you know when i was first working at crescent valley we would have an idea class um
091which is the intro to engineering class that have 60 students in it and it may have five female students in the class and um there's still a lot of room for improvement but it's about one out of three students in the class now are female and and i think that that's that's because students are coming up there's a field trip it's hard to do that during a covid time but um a field trip of middle school students coming to crescent valley and seeing other female students or other students of color in the class and feeling that's the place that they belong and they in their take in those classes and then also having an instructor one of the instructors stephanie does our our welding and metals and that that helps with getting representation uh that's
092more diverse in a class uh when the instructors are like that so um additionally we have um culinary and and that's the a program that we have had students from corvallis high school come over this year our numbers were limited on how many students we could take which was unfortunate um and then the health ox is is uh health occupations where students learn about all different kinds of um programs that are in the community that have to do with health profession and we have two health classes and we have two because i think we have i think either 14 or 18 students from corvallis high school coming over for that program as well um and of course they see what's really going on in the community and field trips once again we're not able to
093do those that's a big part of those classes um i'm hoping that opens up so these kids can get out in the community and see what's going on and then in our other classes like um the world language i know that jennifer mentioned some stuff that's going on in there we're we're doing some zoom meetings where we're having um pen pals as and uh students talking students from another country now it's late for them it's kind of weird how that works as far as what time of the day the class is but they've figured out a way to have pretty regular zoo meetings where they get to speak with other people from another country and that's been real exciting um in our language arts class i went into a class on november 18th and the
094discussion was about julius jones and the oklahoma governor whether there was going to be clemency granted and that and then the students were doing a writing um about historical events and justice and on that very same day the a few hours before the governor uh grants clemency and so those students were were looking at the history on justice and they were looking at something that was going on right now and and definitely real world and i went um one of my social studies teacher with the help of somebody that's actually in this meeting is um doing an indigenous people's history of the united states for young people um and putting that in the context of what's going on now and and and and how kids are navigating that and another social studies teacher was having
095students um arguing different sides liberal and conservative um arguments and and and the students weren't necessarily um getting to pick which group they were in which was fun and the whole point of that activity was to uh have civil discourse um i i have a bunch of different examples and this actually was really excited about talking about this but i also need to understand that there's other schools that would like to share some amazing things too so that's enough for now but uh i would be happy to talk to anybody individually about stuff that's going on go ahead oh go matt you can go all right i'll go um yeah i'm going to give it a couple examples and and some of it kind of piggybacks on what jermaine was talking about our goal ultimately
096is not to just talk about racial equity in an advisor group once a month we think that it should be incorporated into any class anytime because that is that that is just reality um i i happen to be in a classroom observing um lindsey ford a science class and they were talking about um the effects of the human impact on on climate change and no matter what you really think it's obviously something that is real and she um she was talking about um she used portland oregon as an example it was really interesting because it was very timely she talked about the heat dome of last summer when it was in the hundred and teens in portland and she started the lesson showing a video of the decision to to make i-5 how it was
097back in the whatever whatever that was i don't know 1950s whenever and a very deliberate decision to sort of redline the entire city of portland oregon between the the north west side and the northeast side so pretty compelling piece of history there and then she showed some research by portland state professor from last summer and he was measuring ground temperature during that heat wave that heat dome and he picked two very affluent neighborhoods in in portland northwest portland and two less affluent in on the east side of i-5 and the the ground and he was measuring ground temperature ground temperature in the affluent neighborhoods was 99 degrees on a day when it was 113 that was just the temperature and on the other side of town 160 degrees and the next part of the assignment
098was to use google earth imagery and look at those neighborhoods and the neighborhoods where it was 99 degrees and the elevation was about 500 feet higher it's all trees and parks the other side of the freeway it's just all concrete and asphalt and she was able to to teach what she was trying to teach around climate change around climate segregation but also incorporate seamlessly some really real issues about racial equity that aren't just happening you know somewhere in in alabama but in portland oregon and um i thought that is a great example of real world learning another one i was in a social studies classroom roster felt was using uh the avid strategy philosophical chairs where he poses a question and kids have to physically move to one side of the room to represent their
099opinion about it and the the question was should the government regulate social media well that's relevant right now and so kids had to be yes or no and then the next step is is kids talking about it and kids were were forced to defend their opinion to talk respectfully to talk clearly and to think about why they believed what they believed and in listening to their peers some would switch sides and those are all skills just talking about something that could be uncomfortable listening being open to another perspective those are skills mostly adults in the united states don't have anymore so i would say that is an example too of of real world learning and those are the kinds of things that excite me do i walk into every classroom at corrales high school and
100think what is going on in there is relevant absolutely not you know education for the last 100 years in the united states isn't relevant it wasn't relevant in 1985 when i graduated yeah i'm that old but i mean kids ought to walk out of our classrooms sweaty because there are so many real world problems that need to be solved right now that extend to every content area that we offer and so that is our goal that's we're working towards that we're battling parents about that we're i don't think we're battling the board but i don't know i mean i'm not sure people want us to be relevant because then we need to be real and we need to admit we haven't been relevant for real so sorry i'm a little passionate about that i also
101got my booster back and i thought so i'm done matt don't ever apologize for passion we love it um a couple examples of real world learning at college hill that i wanted to share one you may have heard that we started a new program this year the the corvallis construction program it's really cool to there's a group of students who are taking this year and really learning a bunch of different uh hands-on uh skills that'll aid them in being people that can really be successful on a construction work site they're going to be learning woodworking they're also going to be learning some automotive skills they're going to be learning some basic welding skills we're also going to be learning some drafting skills really fun to watch those kids really engaged in that learning for an
102extended part of their day they're really feeling some pride in themselves it's fun to watch these kids that started the year really the narrative they told themselves was i'm not good at this and i can't do that and this is hard and i have anxiety this and now when you walk into class they say come here let me show you what i'm making and um you know it's it's really pretty cool to watch that year two of the program they're going to be designing and building micro shelters to donate to the unity shelter so that folks will have a place to live it's really fun to watch those kids be a part of this solution you know there's a problem there are people in corvallis that don't have somewhere to live and to sleep that
103is warm and safe and these kids are going to be a part of that process and so i'm excited to get to work in a district that gives me the opportunity to help kids do things like that um we also we just a group of our students just finished um being the teachers for salmon watch which is a program where all the fifth graders in the district go out to clement's park in philomath and they get to learn about the salmon life cycle and college hill students and urban farm students together this year partnered and they were the instructors so they got to go at first walk through it and become the masters themselves that they got to teach the fifth graders and i got to watch their senior project presentation because all students that
104cover collegeville do a senior project and it's a service learning project and they the way they spoke about their experience was amazing they talked about feeling proud of themselves they talked about being confident because they not only knew things but they had to figure out how to teach other kids how to do it um some of them have used this opportunity to say they want to go and become teachers in the future uh one woman young woman said i really want to be a nurse i feel like i could use this to help people understand their health care better and one young woman who wants to be a park ranger in the future peter said i learned a lot about the directions i can take to make a difference in the world this experience really
105showed me a motivation perseverance and a deep care for our natural resources can lead to a fulfilling meaningful job i think when kids can take that connection with here's what i'm learning now and this is what i can see myself doing in the future that i couldn't see before i think that's when it really hit real world learning and exciting ways so thanks let me do this work one other thing i did want to say i want to give a big shout out to aaron who is an unbelievable problem solver because we're trying to think about doing things like automotive and welding i don't know if you've been in college so recently we don't have a phenomenal welding lab or automotive studio but aaron said we got a space we got to figure out how
106your students who are our students can come over and use it and the answer was yes right away and as as just a partner in education it was really fun that there was no sense of this is our space and maybe there's a chance you could use it it was very much welcome we want a partner these are our kids together thanks erin very much eric you keep doing mic drops okay so our next few slides pertain to our goals around health and wellness now when you think about the number of issues and the intense struggles that our students nationwide have had to face in recent times um a celebrate worth no or a celebration worth noting is that when the high school students in our district were asked how they feel about their lives
107our students ranked 71st in the 71st percentile for positive responses the statewide average fell within the 55th percentile with respect to the districts nationwide who participated in the youth survey now this isn't to say that we don't need to continue to prove and prove in this area there is plenty there will always be room for improvement in this area and so our goal um our goal in this area is is revolves around having students being able to find know where to go for help and where what when they're feeling stressed and where they're feeling struggles so as you can see here oh i'm not popping up on the screen uh it's okay you don't need to see me i guess uh the 30 31 of students respond that uh when they feel upset stressed or
108having problems um uh their school does not provide the services to help them um and that was a drop from the uh 2019 survey uh which was 38 at the time we're aiming to get back to 38 and hopefully go higher than that you know because we feel like we should be providing services to our students so some of the main strategies that we're going to implement for um to get this increase um is we want to expand on the mental health supports provided to the students currently both schools have school counselors that have the open door policy where students can go and and receive support from them both schools also have a substance abuse and misuse response specialist and new this year is that both schools have their own full-time school-based therapists cb has
109a counseling intern and both schools um have the sources of strength um program in the school at cv this year we're dramatically improving the delivery model of our sources of strength program by embedding aspects of the curriculum into the freshman success classes we also hosted an adult training in october and we will be hosting a peer leader training in january and our counselors are currently recruiting and selecting students for our sources of strength class that will start second semester um and at chs we uh we've added another section of sources of strength so we have it we're offering it each semester now we've been doing it we've been having one session for a couple years uh but this is the first year it's grown and uh the class itself is doing some campaigns they've had
110two so far uh the first one was uh get getting the word out and uh they did a few things i'll share a couple pictures here at the end but uh they addressed the spartan and uh sources of spring t-shirt and they also hit some rocks around campus to you know as a competition for i believe it was what are found five would get a prize t-shirts and things like that they also had a message in the daily announcements for that week and provided posters for the classrooms the other thing the other campaign they did is what are you thankful for and during lunch they had some other students out at a table and staff and students were invited to to write on a sticky note what they were thankful for and then they created
111a mural with that and just so that you you all know uh sources of strength is research-based and it's to prevent suicide and to help with uh to prevent abuse and alcohol and drug abuse as well and so that's a pretty powerful program right now for our students we're looking to expand this and really i'm going to get ahead here but we'd really like to see it at the middle school level as well we i've reached out to sources they do have a bilingual curriculum in the works right now so that'd be great especially for lp to to implement if if possible and we're providing trainings for peer leaders as well we want to grow it similar to what abbott has been where everyone can use it and take parts from the wheel for example
112our winter smiles program that we're running right now that could fall under generosity on the wheel and that's how we want to start growing it and promoting it where if a different group let's say the green club wants to do something on what is it healthy what is it i'm drawing a blank here uh i got to look at the at the wheel here healthy activities i knew it was healthy something uh that's why i have the wheel up in my office here um so as we if they want to do something surrounding that then they they can they can promote it that way so if a teacher in class wants to run an activity and relate it to the wheel that's great that's how we want to see it grow so that more than
113anything students know that they have trusted adults here and they have peers that they can trust when they are struggling as we know getting out of the pandemic that that's very relevant right now and that uh that you can go to the next slide i just wanted to show the two of the things you can't see this on the shields here for the spartan uh you can't see on the other side there was there's a t-shirt on the spartan and i should have gotten that angle but this one was also pretty neat and then you can see the campaign there i think a couple of the sticky notes fell but uh you know going up and reading some of the things on there is also pretty neat um so yeah that that's that's all i
114had there we can go the last slide i think for questions now wow thank you thank you everybody uh so i took the liberty and uh adding 20 minutes to uh the meeting time so with the uh consensus of staff and uh no ditching from the board uh we have 16 more minutes uh for a q a uh because i i know i know the board will have bad comments and questions but i i want to speak to matt's passion and step back and you brought really great examples applicable examples uh matt and uh aaron and uh everybody you ha i feel i feel confident to speak on behalf of the board on this you have the board support on providing relevant education that's applicable honestly i think there's a public mandate from the people
115uh requiring us to provide public education that actually works that actually will help them succeed and i don't say that as a hyperbole i say that reflecting on feedback from a father who told me we should have taught the child their his child uh consents better before it's become too late or another father who uh told me maybe we should have uh told them how to respect others and respect people from different backgrounds at high school before the cost of the disrespect uh it cost them their their uh career uh so really grateful for the work we do um and and and i know sometimes as parents we might see the education looks like different than how we had it i am not a parent but i can't empathize with uh some who would see
116it that way but that's life uh i i reflect on louis armstrong song that they will learn much more than we will ever know and i think to myself what a wonderful world that's the fact of life and we are getting better at doing this work in terms of uh sexual education in terms of racial equity in terms of um every facet of life where our kids will come back to high school and say thank you for teaching me this it worked so really thank you for doing this work that's all what i want to say and i'll open it up vince and denver sammy you kind of stole my thunder there but i i completely agree you know i'm as i was driving uh back to hear from from john day i was the
117i was listening to the radio and there was a report uh the ceo of instagram was testifying before congress and and the comments were really about how he just really did not acknowledge the impact that social media has on the lives of children of you know team and i think that you know as marketing algorithms push us content that further pushes us into these tribes that has fomented this uh this political divide that we're navigating especially school boards and school districts all across the nation right now i think it's incumbent on in our institutions to teach children how to have real conversations i i you know when we came up with the idea of real world learning or a district goal i mean that was the intent that they would learn things that things like
118construction and drafting but also to grapple with the problems of their community in the world and that is complex because you know what they're not going to be in high school all the time they're going to have to go in the world and deal with these things um so the future is there so absolutely i mean we have to be relevant i mean that's why we're here the world is not abstract it's real so um thank you so much for this report i i don't even i have so many notes here you know i i go back i'm going back to the um essential skills reports that the board you [Music] know special skills report because of course graduation rate is the goal is the golden standard for for school system performance right and so
119we always had our essential skills and i always have been proud of this district and particularly this team because when we got the essential skills report which really described who wasn't going to make it over the finish line it was clear that each of the administrators knew those kids stories and so i know that this team has been one-on-one with kids for a while but i'm just i'm really struck how we're taking the next step how changing our system to meet the need of everything not just about what we do personally but we're actually going to build a system and you know the examples that i have here you know matt your example of just eliminating the lowest level of ela you know just saying no we're just going to have high expectations for the
120children we're not going to use the soft bigotry of low expectations to hobble our children we're just going to have those higher expectations a great example always writing now is another example that came up how we're transforming the system so i'm just very enthusiastic about this report um i do have a question and it's really it's probably not directed to the administrative team but probably more towards the superintendent and it's really about it you know and this is something that's been nagging at me during the pandemic you know is there are deepening mental health needs for our kids um state and federal systems are not adequately supporting children the children's mental health needs and it's going to education systems at least our school has been has stepped up to do that work and so as
121we expand that on this how do we sustain this level of mental health delivery so um at this point we've really been able to utilize um sort of that transition from what was initially a pilot working more towards utilizing medicaid dollars and moving more from our general fund but we've also had this infusion from our federal dollars um as her threes as an example which has allowed us to do some scaling so i think that for now um we've been able to expand um in a way that we wouldn't have been able to as quickly which goes to dealing with the pandemic and moving through that and supporting kids um in terms of long term i think that's work that still has to continue to take place um for us to be able to say
122with um say strongly that this is something that's easily sustainable or at least sustainable in such a way that it is now paying for itself through some of our billing and some of those practices so i just would say we're moving in that direction but that works on that so i hear maybe that there's a you know thinking about you know always been the the question is how does the board support the district um because you guys are doing the hard work and so how do we support you and so i see an advocacy role for the district ensuring that there's adequate resources for for educators to be able to support our children i want to make sure that that line of communication is open and then superintendent and the administrative team always feel welcome
123and let us know what you need so we can go fight for you so thank you for all that you're doing um just amazing thank you vince uh up next is blue and that's reason yeah so i wanted to um first say that i meant to email you earlier in the week eric to let you know i was thinking about the staff over at college hill with uh ruth and lost the new as well matt um and just wanted you to know that i've been thinking about the staff a lot this week um and hope for strength for everybody in the community um but i was listening to the college credit writing and as somebody at teachers in higher ed i was like oh my gosh you're prepping them so well and then i was
124always about the students that go don't go to college and then um eric you came in with the um the writing example of writing to a senator and i was like those are such amazing examples of how writing is showing up in different ways that are really applicable to different paths in one's life that can be applied across the board and i just wanted to highlight that piece again because a lot of times people um sometimes don't realize like that the writing piece is so central in education still and how it's applied in different ways so i really appreciated hearing that and also um the emphasis on mental health as well in um salvador i think you were the one who presented on that right that there's going to be more um more offerings for
125sources of strength and especially coming back to in person and so that mental health support um and that just piggybacks on what vince said to you about like that that's so important i'm glad it's happening um but the other my question is like how i know that the um data that we've seen i'm i'm not going to ask the same question because you all heard it and aaron you did a little bit of um explaining some of what i asked to the middle school group but um i'm wondering how students are feeling about being back in school as far as like um because i know that was one of our concern or i know it's one of my concerns but that students are going to be back in person we know they're going to start
126experiencing um microaggressions and bias and is that impacting their learning that you've been able to notice so far and then i had one more follow-up thing that's really super brief i promise sammy it'll be brief i think i'll answer that or try to answer that i think for everybody back in school students and and staff nobody was able to really wrap their minds around how hard it was going to be i think there were hopes that there'd be a sense of normalcy and and um bouncing back or whatever that hasn't happened it's it's been difficult i think for our students of color and even in in nice buttoned up corvallis oregon we're faced with the the same things that are happening across the country and and a small percentage of our students feel emboldened to
127to say and do anything no matter what it makes other people feel and that it's tragic and it's and it's not okay um and it's real it really is i think um what we're dealing with at chs and and i think actually we're being um fairly proactive about it it is is really trying to break down the years of lived experience of i'm not going to tell anybody about this because nothing's going to be done and that has been true and we need to own that i need to own that um and but we're slowly breaking that down we've had some things done but students are and i and i understand it reluctant to come forward with about these microaggressions or macro aggressions some of them because their lived experiences nobody is going to listen
128to me or do anything about it i'm really proud of our equity team and of our equity ptosis for instance of it was mentioned earlier um there's a there's a form students can can't fill out that to express concern and it it has to force some feedback or some some resolution i've urged some students in a couple racial issues one against a staff member another against a student please file a formal complaint because it is written down and it has to be dealt with and if you don't like the resolution i present it goes above me um and so we're trying but it is um it is really hard to be a student right now no matter what your story is um i met with a student today i've been trying to reach for two
129weeks now and she's really been struggling went into her senior year with a 3.8 gpa and he's failing at every class senior and i and i finally was able to to connect with her going through it a change in identity that's been pretty traumatic as well but i said how are you what how are you today and she said functional i said tell me more about that i haven't felt functional in a month and um that's a kid who had been successful by all the you know traditional terms you would you would call successful so if you go you step back from that to um the student who had four five six aces against them before covet and and put them back in school that's that's where we are in terms of the mental health
130and i love the talk about relevance and things but on a lot of levels what we're teaching is not relevant to these kids staying alive staying healthy is more relevant than solving for x and um so that part of it's really hard and heartbreaking i think but it also um i do think we've we've slightly rounded the bend where the things we're doing around racial equity for instance are are not just performative um they're starting to be real concrete actions um but that is a long and slow ending arc i admit so that was a long answer to what i think your question was luke thanks matt yeah i was just wondering like about that impact on the academic part and yeah i think yeah go ahead basically i was just i was gonna say
131thank you for ask that because i think it has been it's been hard i think the last two years were really hard for kids i think um as kids didn't have the the social arena of school i think kids dove into even more so into the world of the internet which can often be fractious we can isolate into spaces where people think just the same way as we do um and i think kids aren't necessarily adults are necessarily equipped to navigate that and a lot of our kids certainly are not um i can say that i honestly don't know that i feel 100 equipped to talk about the lived experience of our students of color who may be experiencing microaggressions coming back to school but i know that is our responsibility as a school to
132bring to light things that are hard and have conversations about things i loved i think it was at cb where they talked about kids speaking from someone else's perspective politically and arguing that i think that's a skill we have to continue to help kids to be able to put themselves in someone else's shoes for a few minutes and see that someone can disagree with you and still be reasonable someone can look different than you or have different ideas from you and you can learn from them instead of film them and put them down and call them idiots i had to watch a really hard situation on a school bus this last week where kids went really quickly to name calling and kind of abusive talk to one another instead of asking questions and being curious
133about why someone thinks differently than them and i think that's our prerogative that we have to do as educators if we want kids to be able to navigate the world outside of school and to survive school as learners and so um i think that's our job that's it coming up on us to do every single day to bring to light those things that are hard to take challenges and and don't let them be hidden away in secret and so i see us doing that a lot more we are far from from having arrived but i think that is the work that we have to be doing so thanks for asking that question that we have to be really cognizant about i just wanted to try i'm sorry i just wanted to chime in one thing
134um i i i've seen those two things linked together microaggressions and you know mental health and actually the last safe meeting was on microaggressions or racial abuse and i think that um some really important conversations that we've had is how we're going to disrupt the bystander effect because i think that's one of the tools that we really really can can use and um and sharpen so that's that's an angle i just wanted to surface i uh i i want to share a little too and it's not because i just want to give war stories but to answer your question um it's been more than just micro it's been just flat out aggression what you see in our across the united states we're seeing in our school that um and it's not just students um i'm
135receiving emails from parents they're they're just flat out angry and and they're they're angry with with our students that have been historically marginalized actually not being marginalized it's the best way for me to put that um it's on race when i talk about that the um the indigenous people's history of the united states for young people right i've had um messages from people that have said why are you teaching that in this class that's offensive though and i won't get into much more than that that's what's been um stated um and this is an approved and recommended text from ode okay this isn't just some outlier novel this is um has been vetted approved and recommended um we're talking about a student using a restroom by their gender identity and getting email from people that
136are very upset with that with a student being able to choose their own restroom based on identity and those and then of course the masking or the immunization um of course you've all seen those emails it's been sent to all of us so so microaggressions or whatever the language that we're calling just aggression um yes but more than that and yes we're having the conversations which is great i also watched that video so did matt we all were involved with the bus video on students from our school it doesn't matter what school you're going to they're all three schools represented in that display of how to be angry at others and so it's really hard right now but our students that have historically been marginalized i've been living that every day so yes it's it's
137harder for me but it's hard for the right reasons and and i want school to be a safe place for all our students thank you i know we have to move on right um the only comment i had was i really appreciate you all taking time to answer that and for um the patience board of hearing that because i think it's important for us to know as a board how we can help advocate for you all too so that comment the events made about better supports what are things that we can advocate to help there be stronger supports to address some of the things that are impacting staff and students and so that's that was all and the super quick thing i wanted to say was i really hope someday we get a presentation about
138salmon watch because i've heard i bring it to the they bring it to a background something to make you all smile um i've heard such amazing things about salmon watch and i think that it would be cool for if folk haven't heard about it to learn about it more that's all thank you thank you uh i want to recognize we do have uh several board members on the docket spot we're out of time so i apologize uh especially for director terry stones and shawna uh with that i wanna say really thank you uh principals assistant principals and the army of educators and staff behind you and alongside you who are doing this difficult work relevant uh public education during a pandemic that keeps every single student uh safe alive and that they belong is a
139hard work it's a moonshot but it's doable because the people i see in front of me here on the screen and the support from the board so really thank you for your work brian yeah so one of the things that i know has never lost on you um but the way that this team has is working together in an alignment um i've said it before but it is not the norm um oftentimes with comprehensive high schools there's competition and there's competition amongst administrators there's competition around resource and that's what you're more likely to see in a school district without multiple high schools and that is not the case here and so well i know it's not lost on you i think it's even more important now having come through a pandemic and the challenges that
140these administrators just opened and honestly shared with you i think that we're in a spot to be able to think about that differently because of the work that people are able to do together and i think that that's going to continue to set us up to be able to move through this um in a way that's not the case at other places so again thanks to this team for for being that group thank you well on that note i wish you a wonderful rest of your evening have a good night and uh i know nikki you're gonna stick around and uh there's no objection from the board uh should we have uh five minutes uh recess or would you like more all right the board will stand at ease and we'll come back in five
141minutes all right the board will return to return and uh i want to uh move the agenda to math curriculum updates i recognize melissa harder amy lisa and nikki mcfarland uh thank them for their course that was shared in advance which is available to the public to view uh through uh the packets on the cabral school board meeting uh meeting agenda and uh and it's over to ryan and melissa for a presentation regarding this topic great yeah so actually i'll just hand it right over to melissa and the teaching and learning team to provide a free conclusion wonderful thank you [Music] so thank you for starting by mentioning the um the school board the report that we did for the um for the school board it is filled with a lot of information and tonight's
142presentation is really kind of going a little bit beyond um but picking up on some of those highlights of the report and also ensuring um a lot of what we did in our equity lesson report which was just a few weeks ago and that is tying what we're doing to our school board goals to ode um and ensuring that we're in alignment so i hope that you can see that as we go through the meeting or through the presentation tonight um our focus is going to be on k-12 and um after we're done we're going to have an opportunity for some questions so all right the first thing that i'd like you to do before we get started you're all gonna need a piece of paper tonight so if you are one of our board
143members we encourage you to get out a piece of paper if you're a community member watching and here we have some some people out there watching tonight get a piece of paper ready in a few minutes we're going to ask you to do an activity um and the reason that we're doing that is because if we're going to talk about math and we're going to be expecting our students to do math we need to do math too so we're going to do a little bit of math later on for the record it says 8 45 pm while we're doing this activity so one of the things we're working to address is math anxiety and so how you're feeling right now is a normal feeling and it's something we're also working on to address exactly yeah
144i have that a lot okay i'm with you all right we're ready all right um hi again everyone i didn't leave um any of the times that you all thought i might um so i just want to talk a little bit about what we want math learning to be like um so we want math to be visual to be collaborative and be engaging when i have spoken with students at all of our schools they have talked a lot about the the value that they gain when they get to collaborate with peers um they've talked about how seeing and hearing how other students solve problems allows them to see a different way of thinking and maybe even see a different way of thinking that works better for them so students have been describing to me something
145similar to what mark described in the high school presentation about having other students up at white boards solving problems helps them to go oh that's a different way to do it than i did and i actually like that better and it's also engaging to to look at how different students approach problems what i also hear a lot about are the contributors to students having a really positive mathematical identity so students have across the board tell me that they love math when it's explained well and they know how to do what's being asked of them students like math that is at their level or just a little above their level so they have that level of challenge that we all get when we're learning something new we're gonna watch a little video um that compares some
146math learning experiences to give you a visual for how we'd like math learning to look here in corvallis so if you could start the video that would be great [Laughter] [Music] were you all hearing it oh okay sorry we were airing into the boardroom we can start again [Laughter] um [Music] six [Music] yes all right well that was a short video but hopefully gave you a glimpse into two different ways that our students can experience learning so in that picture there on the slide the still of the video right students are at desks in a quiet classroom working independently versus what we want them to be doing is working with one another and creating visuals that help them to understand a concept more deeply we feel that those practices help students to see themselves as
147mathematicians um as i've been talking with students over the past couple weeks that's a question i've asked them like how do you feel about yourself as a math learner how do you identify or do you identify as a mathematician and i have learned a lot about those things that contribute to students who struggle in math and who are excelling in math i've just heard a lot about those contributing factors to to their own mathematical identity and we want all students to feel like they're good at math and can be successful in math next slide right so continuing on that theme of uh vision and what we believe we we truly believe that um in all students having access to high quality mathematics curriculum effective teaching and learning high expectations and the support and resources needed
148to maximize their learning potential and um it's a lot of a lot of words but that rings true when we are doing this work this quote actually comes from a book called principles to action ensuring mathematics success for all and by nctn national council teachers of mathematics and we've read that book probably four years ago as an elementary team it's a book i i reference a lot we have extra copies it talks a lot about the eight mathematical teaching practices and it provides some really good clear guidance for administrators policymakers teachers so i can i can i can share it it's worth the while and that quote um really does um talk to you about what we truly believe i think next slide all right it's time to do a math activity so take your
149piece of paper and you need four boxes and you can do this any way you like some people will draw it some people will be very precise and fold it hot dog as we used to sing in the elementary school and then hamburger like this um and that will provide you with your four quadrants you have a math problem on the screen and it is five times one-fourth um i would like you to take this four-section piece of paper and answer that math problem in those four different ways give a visual solution write a story give a different visual solution and solve it numerically we don't have a lot of time so maybe just kind of at least hit a couple of those and then we'll talk about your experience so we're going to be
150quiet for just a couple minutes everyone break because it is almost nine o'clock and we're doing that um we can stop where we are but um in um in a classroom setting to do this it's kind of it's a fair model or a diamond math paper um doing this activity would allow students the opportunity to take that math problem and um and kind of bend their brain around multiple ways to solve it which is what we really want to see our kids doing taking different opportunities to try new things um to also we didn't do it in here and may not have done it at home but also to collaborate with a partner talk about how you solved it how i solved it engage in that conversation um one of the things that we like
151to talk about um kind of at this level when we um we learned about the diamond paper is asking some questions about you and your experience with that so as you were doing that math problem when you were in those four quadrants just think to yourself um which box did you go to first which box did you did you do first in this model and um kind of think about why like was that because you were most confident in doing it that way so thinking about no so thinking about where you went first and um which box was easiest for you or the most enjoyable for you to do um think about which was the most difficult why do you think it was the most difficult for you so these are more of kind of
152an analysis of your own learning um which are also questions you can ask kids too and asking kids to be engaged in their own learning about why it is that they did things the way they did when they answered the math question so there's just so many different levels of doing this with a problem at like four times one-fourth we are trying to activate kids multiple parts of kids brains encouraging multiple connections creating deeper connections to math um which all results in grading learning and that's um what we are excited to do with all of the um the different pathways and new ways of doing that that we're going to be talking about tonight all right so as um the last few presentations that we got from us we um you okay sound was a
153little funny there um tying everything that we're working to at our level down to the teacher and student level back to board goals and just how much we appreciate that and how much we utilize the board goals to help guide all the work that we are doing um so we've listed three of the board goals here academic achievement equitable systems and real world learning and just to give you that analysis of how these board goals that you're creating are aligning to the work that we see and the work that we're following nationwide so this this chart um it comes from nctm again and they're key areas to to get to where we want to do of equitable access to high quality mathematics and learning and so academic achievement goals aligned to grade level content and
154how students must be focused on grade level mathematics and when we talk about grade level content and what that is that some some ideas that that nctm has about that are we can get that way by keeping joy and humanity in teaching and learning we can focus on and teach to students strengths we can work collaboratively with grade levels and math departments we can eliminate tracking of students on the basis of perceived abilities so utilizing that through line in equitable systems we talk about equitable and effective instruction and how all students should be positioned as competent confident and capable learners that are that are very capable of doing math and what that looks like some strategies that we will undergo and are currently doing that are inviting students into mathematics making connections explicit we heard
155that i think earlier tonight we heard that last week when our last time when the elementary principles presented and ensuring grade level instructional experiences reflect the true rigor of the standards i think um thinking about that problem you just did we could experience that in a less rigorous way where you're just learning um a rote formula when it's this i do this and and to go deeper to really have that conceptual understanding is really critical and then um the last connection where we made for this one is real world learning and the um potential for advocacy around this and how students should be engaging in the work that supports equitable access high quality and meaningful mathematics and some strategies and things to be aware of um in this area include identifying barriers um and challenges
156using the mathematic practices to to reflect what we're doing and begin conversations like we are tonight um pursuing professional development activities that um develop our our leaders and our teachers so i think our intent behind this slide was really to continue to align our work to your work in the board so um yeah i think we're ready for the next thing okay so i'm going to talk about our approach to change um i know that um the board and our teaching and learning department have gotten a lot of emails from parents feeling like this change is happening very rapidly and i would say this is my sixth year in the district and i think the evidence was clear to me that we needed to change something from the moment i walked into a high school
157math course because i noticed that the enrollment in our courses um across the board did not represent our demographic so i was you know was able and continue to be able to walk into classes and identify whether they are a low track math class or a high track math class just based on the color of students skin so that's like an initial piece of evidence that has stood with me since i came to the corvallis school district six years ago we have other pieces of evidence that we're looking at including student achievement data concept gaps qualitative data that our teachers have given us when i brought teachers together to talk about math pre-pandemic in every conversation i've heard teachers say well the kids told me they never learned that and when you have you know
158teachers from grades 8 through 12 together that just repeats on down through the grade levels well the kids can't do this they told me they never learned it and teachers are saying well i taught it and so the question becomes okay so if you taught it and students didn't learn it what do we need to change um and then um as i talked about earlier you know we have students who have accelerated um into these upper tracked math classes what we're finding though is there is this attrition as we get into the 12th grade so students lose the love of math and the drive to do advanced mathematics based on what i've heard from students right they love math when they can do it so some of our evidence is saying they have gaps um
159that are leading them to not you know continue to love mathematics and feel successful in it so and we're going to talk more about examine the evidence in the next slide but i just want to say like it it may feel like i said that we are changing quickly there are lots of pieces of evidence that we need to change and so we're going to talk about a focus for change we have a few different areas that we are working in how we're going to implement and support that change over the years and then how we're going to analyze the impact of changes in mathematics practices and pathways so now we can go to the next slide i know i talked a lot about the top but i feel like it's an important place to
160start and it's still me so i'm kind of just um this slide goes into it kind of has it all written out what i was just talking about on the previous slide about the evidence so we have disproportionate representation of students of color and students navigating poverty in our low math tracks it's very predictable um our teachers again have shared that students have math gaps in their courses and then we also know that less than 40 percent of students on track to take ap calculus in eighth grade actually enroll in the course i think another interesting piece of data is only 60 percent of students seniors go on to take a fourth year of math we have three credits of math required for graduation but we know that students that are college bound typically are
161required to take four and we have a lot of students who just aren't taking that fourth year so i have some questions around that like is it losing the love of math is it not seeing it as relevant um and i also wonder you know what percent of those students are actually retaking math because they're part of that 20 that failed algebra 1 in their 9th grade year so there are a lot of questions i have but i see many you know there's a lot of data that says we've got to make changes in our math practices because we are not serving all kids well so from here um like we looked at that theory of actions um cycle that um nikki presented first um we want to now determine a focus what what are
162we going to do and what i wanted to um focus on we'll focus on too um within that theory of action is is we're not just going to look at something decide to make a change and then walk away from it and find something else to do we're going to analyze that impact and we're going to then make continue to make change if we need to or um really kind of uh focus in on those things that are working well and continue to do them and see how we can expand them to different um grade levels so here in our determine um a focus slide the first thing that we want to do is adhere to grade level content and for a lot of people especially folks who've been um emailing in there seems to
163be this misconception that by adhering to grade level content in grades k through 7 it means that we're going to hold back a whole bunch of kids who are ready for more things that's not what we're doing we're differentiating in classrooms we're creating a low c a low floor and a high ceiling so that grade level content is accessible to all students in that grade level and then when they feel ready to do more they can do more in that classroom the other thing too to talk about and we're going to get into it in the next slide is you can't just change the pathway and then think oh it's all going to be great the kids are going to work and they're going to all succeed in 4 years math we understand that changing
164the way that we um create a pathway for math um also it is also our responsibility to ensure that our staff are ready for it and that our staff are in the classroom trained and ready to go we can't just change the pathway and expect the teachers to magically do something some are great and talented and they will but a lot of people are going to need some support in doing that so unless we change practice in the classroom as well nothing's going to shift um so we understand that but we'll see that as we talk about implementation um the what we want our kids to be able to do is um to solve problems in more than one way which you all did on that um worksheet just a few minutes ago you solved
165a problem in more than one way and you um kind of access some real math rigor in doing that one of the quotes we have from the um the stanford conference that we went to define rigor as students understand and can flexibly apply methods to different situations connect ideas approaches and representations it's not about how hard it is or how far you're accelerating in math it's about how deep can you get into the learning that you're doing we want to improve mathematics literacy by engaging students in relevant open-ended math tasks i didn't have a key for any of you in your activity today i didn't show you what was right and wrong about the way that you did that math because that's not the point the point is about um exploring yourself but you know
166the exploration for yourself um and getting to that place in that and then we want to restructure math courses and that sequence k12 so that we can align new standards coming from ode which were adopted in october with what's happening um for our high school math pathways and we're going to get into that here in just a second okay so i'm going to talk about implement and support um so in order to support changes um we have three three practices for our department and our principals and our teachers to engage with so first is engaging families in conversations about math practices a lot of the conversations have have arisen from parents with concerns who have reached out to administrators or reached out to the school board or reached out to teaching and learning um what
167we want to do is is engage families with hands-on on math nights at the elementary level we haven't done that yet and all you like honesty because people are exhausted um and we are everyone is busy in our department and at our schools and and need time to kind of disconnect so we know that that's work that we need to to get back to um we also are connected with folks at western oregon at oregon state and at u of o who have been doing research around math practices and that can come in and speak to families about these changes this isn't just like a corvallis thing um when i talked earlier about the evidence there is evidence that detracting is good for students who are struggling in math and also students who are high
168achieving in math so we would like to bring in in experts to spot to speak with families and then the other thing is you know i have been engaging with students um about their math learning to just really understand um what's going on for them i think what's been interesting as i expected to hear a lot about connections to real life or like whether that was there and um and whether it felt relevant to them and that's not what students are talking about they are really talking so much about their math identity and what helps them to feel like successful mathematicians and i i just i found that fascinating and it's consistent in every student interview i've done so that's one part of our implementation plan another part of our implementation plan is providing ongoing
169professional learning uh related to growth mindset and math so there is a lot of thinking among students and among parents even that you have a maths brain or you don't have a mass brain and we want all students and families to to see see their student or see themselves as capable of doing math i know when i was a school administrator i met with a parent about a math grade and they said well i yeah i get it like i'm not good at math like that was their response for a while that why their their student was struggling in math and so we have some work to do around mindset with our students and families we are also providing professional learning related to teaching heterogeneous groups to increase teacher tool belts for differentiation um we've
170talked already about making sure that students are engaging in complex math tasks so those are ones that don't have a single answer and then also math tests that have multiple entry point points so that low floor high ceiling approach and just getting back to like complex math tests i know i just want i want to address a lot of what's out in the media so there has been a lot about like there's no right answers in math um now and math is so different and that is not what a complex math task is about an example like a really simple example um to to get you thinking about it is you know when you ask what's the area of this shape and it's a four by four four-sided right angle shape like a rectangle or
171i guess that would be a square or four by four square there's one answer right it would be 16 or whatever the units are but instead you can ask the question give me all of the the dimensions of a square rectangle that have the area of 16. so those are like just examples that get students to think in different ways and and they still have right answers but there are lots of different right answers and again when students have the opportunity to engage in those kinds of problems they get to see different approaches by their peers and get them to think differently and have different methods for approaching problems and then one more piece of professional learning is related to the addition of data science and i'm going to talk about that a little bit
172more when i get to talking about restructuring math pathways so that is our third strategy for implementation and support and changes in mathematics and the the math pathways guidance from ode is on the next slide and includes the data science if we could go to the next slide i'll talk a little bit about that so this um this is from the ode guidance this diagram and i'll walk you up from the bottom so the green section um talks about at the very bottom is our algebra that is our ninth grade standards what we are moving forward with is that we have all students together case seven and then in the eighth grade students can go into eighth grade eighth grade math or algebra one at the eighth grade level that is different than the ode
173recommendation and the reason we're going with that is we want our students to continue to be able to access advanced mathematics courses so then from algebra currently we have students in year long geometry the ode recommendation is to split um to is to have geometry just be one semester of learning and to add in a data science course for a the other semester of learning there have been some changes to the adopted standards um that melissa spoke of that were adopted in october and this is work that like we that i have planned to do with our teachers is to talk about these pathways um and how how to make sure that we we can teach the standards in deep ways even if we are only doing geometry for um one semester so that's some
174of the work ahead i think some of the other work ahead has to do with those three green arrow boxes that are above the burgundy and orange boxes and so what those are all about is three different math pathways so you have that calculus pathway on the left more of a data science pathway to ap statistics in the middle and then a quantitative um kind of this that is a pathway on the right which is more of an applied mathematics pathway that could include something like construction geometry so those pathways those dark blue and light blue boxes are work that i am getting into with teachers in the new year so in january i'm pulling together a team of teachers from from the high schools to talk about what we currently do how what what
175we currently do that we want to keep doing what we currently do that's maybe not working for students we want to stop doing and then what do we want to add in to ensure that students continue with learning math i was i remember being in a board meeting earlier this year or perhaps it was a letter from a parent talking about how changes in mathematics we're not supporting um you know our efforts in in steam and not supporting advancements in science i think if students are not taking math that's not supporting it and we really need to develop math pathways that encourage students to continue learning and loving mathematics i think yeah i think we're on to amy at the next slide great so um as as nicki and melissa pointed out in this cycle
176um the the last portion is analyzing the impact and i would say the last is kind of also a precursor to the first because this work will probably never truly be done so as this piece of analyzing our plan um is looking at these three things that you've seen um before these are kind of like our if-then research statements if if we are doing all the things we put in the report and and and everything we presented tonight what we then will hope to see is successful completion of algebra one by the end of ninth grade um our pre i think nikki mentioned it earlier pre kind of pre pandemic data for that was 20 of our kiddos were failing algebra one and ninth grade so we have we have some numbers we have some
177data that we're looking at and we'll continue to monitor that i think um the the other two should look somewhat familiar looking at our sip plans from elementary and middle and high and talking reflecting with teachers and conversations about what we're seeing in classrooms and we will also be monitoring you know who's taking what and and what's that look like nikki melissa lee marcianne and i we we're trying to spend as much time as we can out in classrooms as well so together being in k-12 classrooms seeing what we're seeing doing the research and continuing to come back to what data did we say we're looking for and and and how is that looking and what do we need to do next so um yeah i think i think melissa we might be ready for
178the last slide yeah last slide wonderful wow this is great this is great but this is the prompt for us uh for the questions and board members uh we have 11 or 12 minutes um uh i think we need we need lots of time on this because this is exciting sarah yeah um you know we're getting lots of emails there's lots of anxiety about those those works and as a parent i share that anxiety like kids in a school that was not trapped i had one kid who came home crying missy was so bored i had another kid who said i'm not good at math but these are the kids in my class who are yeah and so their experiences kids who have totally different comfort levels with math neither one as well and i
179think the anxiety we're seeing from community members that we're getting emails from are you especially these levels that are not tracked how are we going to make sure that those kids are not having that experience or one kid is somewhere there and cheers on another kid is like well all these other kids in my classroom because then we've not tracked but we're not serving them and that's what i was saying before is we can if we just say detract and everyone's in the same grade level but we don't give teachers the um the professional learning that they need to help within heterogeneous settings if we don't provide the different types of resources manipulatives and um and opportunities then it's not going to happen um we have the same conversation out of how many years ago
180when i was at catherine jones harrison when we talked about inclusion over students and life skills you can't just take a group of high school students and put them in a general classroom and call it inclusion if you haven't given the teachers in the classroom the skills that they need in order to figure out how to include those students in a in a way that makes sense for everybody and so if we're not doing that it's not going to happen so my argument i think would be for those families who've had that experience where the kids are bored to tears you know there probably wasn't much happening with regard to differentiation um and that is a tool um that some of our teachers have and they have it down and others need some help with
181and we're ready to do that with um our title money we're using our title two funds to find professional learning at a pretty high level with regard to teaching heterogeneous groups the other thing that stands out and i think it was nikki that shared this is if you look at all of our classes um especially six twelve but maybe even four or five twelve that are tracked it's it's math and that also is the class that has and needs the most interventions and so we're already doing it and it still isn't working so just keep that in mind i think that was you nikki nikki can you say say that one more time in your the way that we were talking about yeah i don't think that was me that said that but i mean
182one of the i've been working on this scheduling team with counselors and high school administrators and one of the things that was talked about when we were discussing where intervention fits best into a high school schedule um a counselor said you know i just find it interesting that math is our most tracked course and also the course where we need to do the most intervention so i found that interesting i think another thing that is you know interesting that um that greg mentioned in the middle school uh improvement plan is that we have students grouped together um in in heterogeneous groups in english language arts in social studies in pe in science and in music at the middle level and and for some reason there is this um you know need by some folks to
183really hold on to to math being very different or a very different kind of learning and i think that comes back to our thinking about math mindset and saying you have a math brain and you don't and so you can't be together and i don't think that's what's best for kids you know i i you know i agree with that i don't think there are people who are good enough to hear about that family it's very comfortable with math i like it as a tool i wasn't the best math person but it's a tool um and so i learned it and i use it and it's fine but you know i think i think we really have and i'm absolutely sympathetic with the exhaustion piece of this um we really have a communications problem here
184because the anxiety especially for how this is going to go in elementary school classrooms and middle school classrooms is really high and then the anxiety about what opportunities that means for your kids once they get to high school is really high and you know we're changing something and that's understandable um so i think you know i am again sympathetic with everybody being exhausted but we really need to do a better job of talking to our families um i'm also you know i have gone to curriculum nights and gone from a dli classroom and then into an advanced math classroom and the population of families there are totally different and it is clear there is a problem there um but again the communication has to be clear how are we going to teach match all those
185kids and give all those kids the opportunities they need to go forward and i think what we're seeing from our families really reflects a lot of anxiety i think if we use that um just to go to what email has come to the board the families that are writing in our families from the last two schools elementary schools that we checked um so we you know the question that someone put out was you know how how long has this been you know what was just happening it's been happening it happened at you know six of our other elementary schools a long time ago yeah i'm hearing from something like that [Music] who have not been happy i mean my experience was one of those elementary schools that was detracted yeah and it didn't work well
186for either my kids and i'm hearing from some of those other schools too that you know it's not it has not answered all the questions yeah i have a story but that will take the whole time next to uh three shauna and then luke therese thanks sammy uh gosh there's so many so many things we really could talk about this um from so many angles but i i wanted to ask a question um before making a comment and my question is um how do your elementary school teachers feel about this and your and your middle school teachers your math and those responsible for teaching math do they like this model i'll just speak to elementary and then nikki can speak to that i um would say majority 90 plus this feels like what we do
187you heard from nikki we don't differentiate and sort out advanced kids math class for pe we don't we don't do that in any other way as an elementary teacher your job is to differentiate and when kids walk in the door at kindergarten we have readers and we have kids who have never seen a letter have no idea and they can't even identify their name they don't know numbers and it's it's just more of what we do it gets harder at fourth and fifth grade and so really the focus of your professional development is really on those grade levels and um the teachers who were kind of our early adopters of doing this are pretty passionate about it and love what they're doing and um and you could hear from them we probably have had them
188before because like melissa said this has been happening for quite a while nikki yeah so um pre pandemic the the middle school teachers had actually met and had a plan to bring all sixth graders together for the first term and just kind of see how they went and then sort them from there um and then and then the pandemic happened so as we were planning to for for this school year we had discussions like that was the plan going in does that still make sense um the other thing that happened over the summer is a lot of our teachers engaged in professional learning and that including learning about teaching heterogeneous groups and low floor high ceiling tasks and open-ended math tasks and so in conversations with teachers they were thinking you know i i think
189i'm thinking differently now and i'm also you know again what what they came back to um is what i heard from students students want to feel successful and i don't think teachers thought you're going to all be together um you know for the first half of the year and then you're going to get sorted out you're going to be sorted from one another and i hear from kids like things like i know i'm in the dumb math class and i don't think any 12 year old should think that about themselves and i think those conversations got teachers on board and now um you know they're saying like we're collaborating we're talking about how to weave together the sixth and seventh grade standards and make math more connected and less discreet because the way math was
190taught even like all six and one year and all seventh in one year didn't necessarily make sense because there were things in the seventh grade here that actually fit better with sixth grade concepts so they're doing more of a woven model and then looking at some compaction at the end of seventh grade to prepare students for launching off into eighth grade standards or algebra one well i appreciate you sharing that and i um so uh well before i comment on the math curriculum i want to say um that you're a trooper because you have been here and in every single one of these conversations tonight and i'm guessing you didn't sleep until 10 this morning and so this is a really long day for you and for all of the staff so um those that
191are listening or will watch this later um just please you know keep in mind that the staff they come to these meetings but they've worked a full day already and so um these are this is long and we should respect their time and ask things that will move our conversation forward so thank you for answering that question my inclination having had my child home for most of fourth grade is that i don't know anything about teaching fourth grade math and i should not be guiding anybody and how to do it i should be supporting my child in what he brings home and supporting his learning and i think it's really important for us to remember that um we have people who have studied and trained for a very long time to do this work and
192right now the wisdom from them seems to be we need to do something different because what we've been doing isn't getting us the results that we want and so i my my as a parent i hear you know oh you're going to make a change and i don't want my kid caught up in losing out on an opportunity when i think if we stop and and we don't think about the specific to just what is going to happen to my child but we think about what is going to happen to the classroom environment i don't know if my child would in advanced math in sixth grade end up making it farther in math before he gets out of high school but i do know that his entire high school experience is going to be better
193if he is if he has connected well with his peers and if he has learned to respect the skills that they have and learned to demonstrate and offer his skills that he has to the projects the groups of spaces that he finds himself in and i think this is really an opportunity to do that and kids will build some other skills alongside math and that is what excites me about it because um you know yes we need them to be in the fundamentals of math but we are not at risk of losing our entire space program because we integrated all of our students in sixth grade math that's not going to happen um but what might happen is that our kids might get through middle school um with a little bit more confidence and a
194little bit more um compassion for each other and for where their strengths or challenges lie in learning so i just want to say that i i think this is going to be and it's going to be interesting but it's not it's already been happening so it's this isn't totally brand new um but i think we need we need to do something different because what we've been doing isn't working and um it seems like uh we don't have a one sizeable fit all um solution but maybe we have a a model that can be more flexible and more adaptable to um more learning needs in a shared space so um just thank you i know this is not an easy topic and um you've all been working really long and hard on it and and then
195coming and then sharing what you know will be a conversation hot hot point i guess in the community um but i appreciate you taking the time to be so thorough in your in your presentation thank you theresa we're out of time but there's no objection from the board and stuff uh let's take a question ten more minutes or let's say 12 more minutes and uh shawna and then lou shannon thank you sami and thank you nikki and amy for your sharing tonight for your thorough presentation both the report that you shared as well as your presentation tonight and the thoughtful approach that you're really taking i really really value the sentiment coming out around math identity as well i did grow up in a math family i had a father who was a math teacher
196and wrote math books and my sister has become a math instructor at the university level and i was the social scientist in the group that have always really loved math and and seen that as part of my identity as well and i think that is so important for all of our students to have that opportunity so just a lot of folks have been talking about the emails that we've been receiving i think that this has become one of the topics that i'm most likely to be approached by parents about if i'm out at a park or at the store as well and i know that's true for other board members too so i just wanted to give some space for some of the things that i've been hearing um so some of the things that
197have come up from families i know some of you are familiar with this too but for folks who are listening in or watching later just worries about that there have been there has been research on math tracking detracting delaying tracking sometimes those results are varied depending on the context depending on the place depending on the resources available some concerns from parents about feeling like they haven't been part of the conversation worries that the proposed plan might not meet the intended aims along with appreciation for the growth mindset focus the attention to social justice racial equity um concerns like we've been hearing other board members mention about lost motivation or boredom if there isn't differentiation there seems to be a an overarching i didn't hear this come out tonight and i actually felt like this was
198being debunked tonight but this thought or this worry that this is a one-size-fits-all approach and that differentiation isn't happening won't happen or even isn't allowed in this setting or that ultimately this plan will be good for some and not for all or elevating some while losing opportunities for others and that really didn't seem to be present in the message that you were sharing and so when i was thinking about what what sarah was saying about communication or looking at communication some of the things that came to mind for me around that were looking at i love the idea of you know hands-on family nights or opportunities where and when possible and when comfortable looking at clarifying misconceptions about the program because there seemed to be just a lot of questions that folks have in worries
199of course for their own children as well as for others and then thinking about those opportunities where more supports and resources might be needed and ultimately then looking at okay how do we also look for unintended consequences that might actually come up on the flip side of of clarifying some misconceptions so that was a little bit of a mouthful to get to i have a list of questions i'll just stick with one tonight i know we don't have a lot of time and let me look real quick so i guess one of my questions is you've mentioned the supports that educators and staff may need to do this really well in terms of making that differentiation from the term that's been used tonight has been the low florida the high ceiling to make sure students
200are feeling supported challenged and that all are engaged in those conversations at different levels what types of supports are you seeing this year and also is there any risk of that we know it'll take time but i i'm also hearing worry from parents of of their being of maybe their children or children this year at the newer and getting lost especially if there isn't a lot of space for professional development we know that that's something that has been pulled back this year in terms of um need with the pandemic needing to slow down needing to meet other needs so i guess i'll end with that question of what supports are teachers receiving what do you expect this year in the coming years and how will you monitor and make sure it's effective along the way
201all right nikki and i've talked a lot about this um we have uh grandiose plans and and there's a pandemic and we are continuing to offer and this year there's probably a little bit more not mandated professional development offered because of that so we are scaling back but we're still pushing forward and i think in the coming year that'll be a little less optional and um and supportive and it's in and the teachers that attend we had a lot i can get you the number i don't have it right now nikki might know that did work over the summer and have continued and in some professional development themselves at stanford around math and um they it's exciting once you start to kind of unwrap and think about this in a different way teachers get really
202excited and i think we saw evidence of that of those sixth great teachers that came back to nikki were like wait this is we can do this so we are continuing it's probably not as robust and we part of that feedback our principals understand this they know where we want to go and what good math instruction looks like and so what we can do even though it's a pandemic is get into classrooms and provide feedback and support that teachers want and need so i i think yes and we're not doing as much as we probably wish we could right now and we're not fully slowing down nikki what do you want to add to that yeah i mean i think what i'd add is yeah we're getting into classrooms i've been talking with students and
203a concern with all with our work across the district is when it happens in pockets right so i shared earlier about students um saying you know when i have that opportunity like are you ready for more it's so great for me when we think about serving our students who are ready to go a little bit further and that is that's not every single teacher's practice and so like for me getting um getting time talking to students helps me to know what's working and then i can share that back with with staff and say this is what really works for kids you know that are struggling in your math class and they're ready for more in your math class so that's one thing um as melissa shared we also have dedicated a large um part of
204our title to funding for professional development i have a lot of math teachers um in the high school who have signed up for professional learning on teaching to heterogeneous groups so they know that that's a growth area for them and that the detracting has not yet started in the high school so that that is teachers saying oh yeah i need to get ready for this and i'm going i'm gonna take this on um and then also we have math teachers signing up for data science to be teachers of that course so there is a multi-day course um to get teachers ready for that that includes the curriculum the middle school teachers have taken on a bit more on their own um for several reasons so one i said that even before the pandemic they were
205making you know they were getting ready for some changes then they did some professional learning over the summer um i think the other thing that is happening in middle school math is that we adopted a curriculum a few years ago in middle school math called poor focus that is a lot of just like um practice of functions and problems and teachers were saying like this is not getting our students to the mathematical thinking and reasoning that we want them you know we're it's not getting us where we want them to be so our middle school math teachers have been using a lot of supplemental materials for a while that that that are like their foundational ideas that low floor high ceiling task so i just feel like our middle school teachers have actually been in
206this experience longer because they they saw that their that their adopted curriculum wasn't serving kids well and like we we know we have more to do with our teenagers thanks for sharing those examples thank you shawna and uh the rest of the board if you have additional questions please feel free to send them to uh kim the board secretary and uh we'll make sure the answers are shared with the full board whenever they are available uh lou i thought you were telling me time was up um i knew like for me i know somebody else said something about earlier perhaps i'm getting a little bit loopy too um about not really being able oh i think it was true it's like not being able to teach kids math um i love math i was in
207like advanced math as myself growing up and all the christ going into college and stuff like that and i seriously cannot wrap my mind around it because i'm not immersed in how math is taught now so i feel like sometimes we're bringing in our own um perceptions of how math should be taught when that's not how it's taught anymore and i feel like this is a good example of that and has led to a lot of deficit kind of conversations in the community about something being lost instead of looking at trying something new to support more students and so i think that it'd be great if we can start changing that kind of framework of like we're losing something or an individual is losing something instead of seeing what's being gained by the community that
208will help us look at this conversation a little bit differently and i have a interlocking kind of question nikki earlier you said that it's not just csd that's doing this kind of work and so it's like the two-part question is like one um is there a growing trend that other districts not just um in oregon budget in other areas are going this way with math is that the direction like the future of math basically and and knowing that there's those pathways into advanced math later on how can we help community understand if that is the future that math is going that those are still options for students to be prepared for yeah so i have shared some communication with our middle school parents that said these are the courses that will continue to be offered
209and um students will still be able to take advanced mathematics ap calc ap stats our honors math courses as well as our college now courses so that's been out there but again i think we have more communication to do this work is happening in oregon the other big place that's happening um and where there is also a lot of pushback is in california um if you're you know involved in public education you know new york california and texas often drive the direction for education san francisco unified ha um did detracting they're you know they're really detracting in math they're a very large school system and there's a lot of data out of that system showing that detracting um serves kids better on both ends um in addition like for smaller data sets you know yeah
210we we went to stanford and we we heard about these summer camps that were offered by joe buller where they had students um that were you know struggling in math and high achieving in math and all groups showed big gains on their their kind of standard standardized measure of student achievement like a i think it was a standardized test that they took before and after um so that was interesting to see that's a much smaller data set but again the larger data sets out of california are some out of some of the larger school districts like san francisco okay thank you i think that's helpful to know that this isn't like an anomaly nationally or even in the state and that this is um if this is the direction it's putting students in corvallis um
211at the same kind of level as their peers as they go on to other aspects of their life after school too thanks well thanks team i really appreciate the discussion i i got to learn a lot about this from the report from the papers and the articles shown through the reports uh truly from the communication that we received over emails from uh parents and resources that they brought up and their voice and from the presentation today um i just realized uh detracting might be a misnomer or a general award that doesn't capture the depth of what we do there is i don't want to use the same word but there is some fracking and understanding of where each student is but we don't uh we don't uh we don't use that against their peers or
212against them we give them an in-depth learning uh i just realized my in my own schooling it was detract until i went to orientation here in a college that used the american system and i i was a good kid my uh my dad and my ninth ninth grade teacher ahmed surosuru in saudi arabia conspired with each other and my dad told him i know you can't pull him out of class and it's a class size of 40 students but here's what we need to do and i did not know that until the end of the year uh they were like give him more activities and uh mr ahmed sular would give me the assignment for every chapter give me a 10 multiple choice questions and we don't have multiple choice questions in math so i
213had to do this process of re-engineering the problem rather than just solving a problem i learned a lot and because i did not finish all 10 chapters he did not give me the five points of participation really he told me he needs to really work harder and i went back to my dad this is like if you show up you get the five participation points and uh he told me yeah i talked to him during the pta that's what's going on so i think you'll be fine and you did like eight out of ten it's fine and i still remember those chapters are mathematical logic i love mathematical logic probability and statistics i loved it so much and as soon as i went to orientation here where there was tracking and because they were using
214x rather than seen in arabic and it goes from left to right rather than right to left i was one of those kids in excuse with the language but the dumb math kids so i was in the math 101 and every our zero zero one and everyone else was zero zero two and uh i almost failed i got d and i had to take more classes to uh catch up and i got my engineering in uh uh in my phd in engineering but i still reflect on the time where the chairman of the department told me you gotta be in the zero zero one you gotta be in your 101 and as he was closing the elevator he told me don't ever think about going to college grad school and uh i really want to
215see him i tell him two things tracking really gave me a huge math and anxiety that i i reflected on tonight and also um i'm just so grateful jack conspiracy my dad and my teacher did together while they had a class size of 40 kids so that's the story sorry for taking the time but i'm so appreciative to see that we're doing the right thing it will take time and it's a huge shift but we really need to understand how it works and we need to communicate well and i think we're doing a good job at that through this presentation and reports i look forward to hear more from parents uh both quantitative and qualitative data as well to see how we're doing but uh my understanding we're gonna have uh lots of success in
216our students so thank you so much all right up next uh well thanks nikki and uh me and amy uh if you want to stick around you're welcome if you know have a good night thank you next on the agenda is board policy acb all students belong revised first reading as a a context uh we did adopt all uh every students belong well we adopted all students belonging to policy and the legislator passed a modified uh what is now law required for compliance with division 22 that's slightly different than the ode permanence rule and the board policy that we adopted earlier this year uh so that's i'll hand it over to ryan and melissa if you want to share anything all right it's just a first read so um i i welcome any um questions
217or additions i'm here to take notes and i'll bring it back to you for action when it looks like how you want it to look wonderful thank you vince so it's interesting that one of our administrators and i'm beginning whether it was eric wright or matt warren one of them brought up the response or the question of how do we disrupt the bystander effect and so there is mention in the policy and in about response and i'm curious about an expectation on the board for [Music] some sort of training for staff and potentially even for students learning how to disrupt bias incidents [Music] so this came up for me and i have i made it you know it's it's all right i'm still learning to navigate we're gonna come out um [Music] snap will be
218your adequately trained to respond to bias processed by its incidences and using adding that that provision in the policy which then gives staff you know superintendent and staff the opportunity to revise the ar or make whatever response appropriate to be compliant but i think it's important that that we have some sort of training for people in navigating these what may be intense social interactions and doing it safe for the person who's experiencing that violence and for the person who's intervening as well yeah so um i i'm going to turn it over to molested but she's the one [Music] so we um we started off the year with uh training on bias for all staff so um and part of that is how to step in but that's going to expand and become um more of
219an interactive professional loan presentation in next next school year so we're getting ready for that as well um i have trained all the administrators twice on how to do this but the second time with a lot more um opportunity to kind of talk about real life examples because we and our staff our administrators have and i have walked through them together and so we learned on uh how we need to do them in the best way possible to respond to our kids um it has created um i've created for them templates check off sheets uh temples for writing the investigation um who you need to talk to i track everything when you ask at the end of the year how many bias incidents do you have i'll have that information for you and kind of
220what the the general um you know kind of trends and what the concerns were and um i'm feeling a lot of confidence in our administrators right now um they i told them just call me we'll get it together and it's happening and i feel really strongly that they're gonna do a great job this year and i'd actually say that was the third training because they went through a final training going back to the forums going back to the checklist um at a levels meeting recently so yeah really um i think that there's clarity about how to access um and how to provide have support in that process i talked to a principal uh just yesterday who was navigating the bisons students building and he said i sat with the um the person causing harm and
221i asked these questions and he was using sentence frames that we had created on a racial language scale on how to respond and he was asking those questions so they're using the tools that we put together did we did that i did that in um you know collaboration with martian as we're putting together those kinds of tools that principals would need to have those conversations with our heart and that's why we're here to walk alongside them if they need assistance in doing what they're doing with their buildings so another case of that out ahead of the board and so i would say that i would suggest that we strengthen the policy we change the ar as appropriate but by adding putting in the stipulation there will be some sort of professional development so it mirrors
222the practice that's happening in the district i think that's a policy level probably [Music] okay yeah so that makes sense wise yeah sorry um thanks for bringing that up vince because i feel like what we heard earlier was one of the questions i asked especially at the high school level that there's a lot happening and i felt um i felt this sense of stress coming through around this and like what to do and um melissa i don't know if the trainings are just for the administration or if it's for teachers too but i think that some of the stuff that's happening in the classroom like in real time um that's not getting reported like how well are teachers supported in um with this policy uh to not only recognize it but to like intervene and
223um that's really hard and it can cause a lot of discomfort i understand but for people on the receiving end their entire learning is also disrupted so that's kind of a i actually have a question about like the um disciplinary piece of this our non-disciplinary piece of this as well um but i'm kind of curious about the level of training for teachers because i heard a lot about the administrators yeah so the last administrative training that um ryan was talking about when we were going through forums one piece of it um nikki watched the administrators through a set of slides that they could use with their staff um to train their staff on exactly what you're talking about when you hear something um you know how how to interrupt that and how important it is
224to be that ri that does interrupt for the sake of the rest of the classroom we had a great conversation about how um how that didn't work in one real situation we were dealing with and how that administrator has um has worked with his staff to ensure that that happens the next time because of how important that was especially to the students in the situation so that training is there and it is ongoing and we've even talked about you know doing some sort of a refresher for all staff again as we come back in january just because um it's we should continue to have these conversations so people can feel comfortable to do that interaction the other thing i feel uh positive about is that we've also created training for our athletic coaches that has
225this component as well um recognizing that that's a different environment that also needs um where not necessarily always educators and so needs additional discrete examples and so that's something that we're working with i have been developing is going on into the training for winter sports so can i ask the whole question on that luke can i interject the question sure so does that include when traveling to other schools because you know so i don't think it included that confinement how did that because this is a topic that has come up in the board had a discussion two months ago about how to navigate when bias incidence occurs while your team is on the road uh saying well the other other district did not uh comply with what we believe was important we need to have
226success and i know are our staff prepared to address that situation when it happens and do that is about protecting that student or you know creating a place um that's safe for the person who's been harmed so that's that's the number one thing that you do so i'm kind of focusing on that with people thank you lou yeah um and in the policy it has um it has the response to use the symbol to hate um the district will use non-disciplinary remedial action whenever appropriate um i don't really i'm trying to imagine how that would um operationalize like what does that mean and um we can come back to that when we go through this um next time too but the other part is on the ar um with the reporting so um i have
227a question of when like there's nothing here about how we as a board will receive this information because they are like how often will we know like we know quarterly or yearly are like what is the what is the process for us to know what's happening in the district under um this policy um because right now it's just like the process of filing complaints um but these ins you said that these incident reports will be um our bias reports will be stored of course the data but then what happens with that data so um that's my question slash so okay so i i don't i i would wait and ask you how you want to do that reporting out or reporting back to the board and just kind of feel that out for what it
228is that you like to hear and then think about what's reasonable yeah but then the other part as far as the bias incident too um we've you know given instructions on how to track that in our student information system so it doesn't go away it's tracked somewhere that it will stay in addition to you know the the tracking that we're doing just in my office which goes into a little bit more detail about what happened and who responded and how those responses went so as far as regularity for a report to the board let's work through that during the fact that okay and then again for the session yeah right thank you um and the reason i asked about the um the non the disciplinary piece is because like there's no like information about like
229any progression of like if this behavior continues or anything like that and i don't know if that's in the other policies that we have like i know there's bullying policies and everything like that but does that linger we're following that progression though in the template when we in the work that we do we have the you know we have the um what the immediate consequence is going to be what the educational component will be for the person causing harm and then um the next is what if that behavior continues what does it look like what's the next step and then also addressing the system like the culture of the school is there something about the culture of the school that's created the opportunity for this to happen so there's there's more levels to that and
230that's what we're doing in our in our processes i appreciate um explaining that mostly because i think like sometimes people think like oh it's not that big of a deal especially when it's a microaggression when over time those things compound to the receiving person and those can have like extremely devastating effects on mental health and suicidal ideation and so making feel like people in the community understand like trying to educate students but if that continues there's other progress of just like any of the other disciplinary um thank you yeah so uh i have a suggestion or a question um the ode generate uh call that three symbols and then a catch-all uh statement that is qualified by two criteria uh the legislation called out the three symbols without qualifying why it's a it's known why
231but they said one two three these are the symbols period uh they are hate speech and they did not use the criteria i'm thinking we should keep the three symbols for sure because we have to follow the law yeah and we should add a fourth which is the criteria so basically it would read something like i can work with it later on uh the three symbols and any other symbols whose display and then the one and one so kind of returning that into our policy yes we're turning it into our policy uh still we're still complying with the law yes and we're adding a little bit more scrutiny and uh according to the experience of the former permanent rule which i understand is legit because we passed it and it's based on uh good practices
232in other governmental uh agencies in the nation right so that's my interest that's uh okay for us to do and if he's deported too i think that clarifies that symbols yeah and it's relevant the policy will stand the test of time yeah okay that's a great suggestion sammy yeah thank you all right that's any further comments or questions on uh all students blogs uh all students belong which will change into every student's block seeing that we'll have a second reading and i want to give this awareness whatever you haven't said for the second reading we might need to vote we will need to vote on it uh for the deadline of january 1st 2022 and if we still need to work more we might need to have uh another review uh period just to have
233this expectation for us to comply with the law uh that there is a minimum we need to vote on before the new year it will come back next week that's on the agenda for next week so wonderful wonderful thank you so much on that note uh i'm sorry your hands are up i just wanted to make sure the community knows that we're voting on this next week so that it's like super clear like if you want to provide feedback you should send that in to us asap i just wanted to make that make it make sure that it was reemphasized that way it's not a surprise next week yes thank you um all right that not any board member comments or future agenda items that you wish to be considered in the future okay yeah
234um i want to again appreciate my expressed my appreciation to the administrators who came and presented to them and for all the people working in our schools being kids when i start thinking about like my sixth grader who hasn't had a normal school year since she was in third grade and my eleventh graders who had a normal school year until they were since they were in eighth grade you know the the soft skills and the social skills and all these things that kids didn't miss out on i'm sure make working with kids challenging and different this year that's ever been so thank you for all you do um i have a couple comments i wasn't here last time so i'm building them up um a few things in the news that you impact schools um
235in different ways one is there been several slightly looking at especially like county wide data and really taking vaccine data down to county levels rather than whole states and and evidence that counties even high population plans with high vaccination rates have substantially lower death rates and lower inflection rates but then counties with lower vaccines and really looking at counties where vaccine rates are over 80 um so especially now as vaccines are available to our um kids five to eleven i just encourage our community especially as we think about new variants to continue to get vaccinated um it is how we're going to keep kids in school how we're going to be quarantined and how we're going to keep our community at large safer um the other so if we go so um two things one
236is that we continue to work with the health department to see our progress and as of last thursday we are applied to elevens we're at about 38 while the state was at 22 so good job ben county uh we've had since then two clinics since then that had good turnouts and then also as an fyi that on next wednesday and thursday at osu at ch2m hill alumni center from 11 to 7 there will be opportunities for folks to come get boosters and that's um no no need to schedule ahead of time you can show up to those two events over those two days and again that is the 15th and 16th from 11 to 7 um at ch2 and hill alumni center and just an event today the age range changed so 16 um to
23717 year olds became eligible in that week as well yeah so lots of shots yeah we i think we've in my family i had 10 shots divided in various ways um the other thing i've been thinking about a lot is the horrible meaning of mission and how that student accessed a gun that was made available to them and was not secured and then there was another story that didn't make a big splash about an elementary school student who was found to have alerted a gun at school that knew that child had had access to them that had showed up at school or did not no one was harmed but it's still a terrifying situation oregon recently passed a law that requires guns to be locked up in a safe over the gun law when they
238are not in the direct possession of the people who have or who are supposed to have access to that so the owner or somebody who that owner has designated to have that gun in their possession this is a really important law for our schools because the vast majority of guns that are used in school shootings are accessed by students who can get access to a gun from a family member or an acquaintance that would not prioritize responsible gun owners do not leave their guns unlocked that anyone can access them and when they do they leave themselves open to a situation again that ends up in a school or have provided a gun that ends up being used by a family member person to commit suicide because they're right and there's that's um a huge contributing
239factor in suicide risk and in oregon now if you have guns that are not secured you can be held um liable for if those guns are used in a harmful way and the penalties increase if a young person gets access to those guns so i think it's just something that really needs to be aware of this is now oregon law and it is an important law for protecting our schools and protecting our kids especially vulnerable um so that's those are my things thank you sir series and then luke just wanted to give a thank you to all the volunteers who turned out for the clinic uh vaccine clinic at lincoln and garfield we were able to attend and it was just a really great community event we also got to tour lincoln elementary which was
240very fun and my son attends garfield and so uh principal hale was giving us a tour and so he said okay quinlan i want you to pay attention and then tell me all the things you see that look familiar to you from your own school great question by the way and it was really fun to walk through the building and have my child make connections about the kinds of learning spaces that exist across our elementary schools that are that are similar the feel of the library the kind of furniture that's in the classroom the music room um so i just uh that was just really exciting um you know these spaces that our kids learn in the the space matters and um even even my little 11 year old uh can see building to building
241how the spaces have been set up to um to be similar and to create you know the similar shared learning experience so um great job to the district for making that happen with new buildings and with existing buildings that's that's impressive and thank you volunteers and please come out and please get vaccinated and if you come to one of the clinics at the school they'll give you a really cool button and they even have little stuffies for the kids so we have a brand new stuffed tiger in our house this week so um anyway just a lot of gratitude for all the hard work uh on both of those so we will plan to we'll announce next um at the board meeting next week the dates for the visit um the tour of garfield in
242january and bessie coleman in february so you can get those on your calendars as well find yourself hello i i was just gonna say thank you to all the um staff who helped do the tours of lincoln um i think i was in one of your tours later ryan and you're like wait did i say this one so thank you all for like um giving the information to multiple groups of people and um opening the space for community to see it and um and parents to see it and it was just really cool and i appreciated that i can't wait to see the other ones and um really enjoy having the video up too so if there's goku couldn't go on the tours um that's a great video i showed it to my child that
243goes there and she was like i already seen this video it's on the screen i was like oh sorry so but um i think it really highlights some really awesome parts of it and it was just amazing to see how much was done so also the continual thank you to the community for investing in the bond project in general to make this possible because it's every time i look at the schools driving around town because it's all over the place right it's not just next door for me um i'm always thinking of how grateful i am to be in a community that shows this much care for students in their spaces of learning and so much appreciation in the community as well thank you and with those words of gratitude and seeing there's no further
244uh business in front of the board uh the board now is adjourned