RTM'SD March 10 School Board Work Session Meeting

001um no i think bill did bill pull that up having a double duty here tonight no problem at all easy i'm doing like don't worry um i believe all the technology is ready um we do have some presentations tonight and i will vacate this spot unless the projectors scroll through their own pages all right thank you also very much for coming we appreciate it welcome to our work session for this evening and we're going to go ahead and start off with our finance and operations okay last friday we had our bid opening for our summer capital projects it was a very successful video there they are okay um we had really good competition i'm pleased to see that numbers came in good one project this is for the penn pancreas mechanical this project came in

002substantially under budget for several reasons number one the budget established back in 2017 was extremely there are also some work that was included in that budget that we have done already so it was set at 2 million for the bids came in at 307 000. so lane mechanical projects again this which just came in good too [Music] nine fifty one six and came in this is for similar reasons um this is probably just a very conservative budget set up back in 2017 and did the facility once you hired the architect we would do the spoken word again [Music] lane and rose tree this one you can see came in very very close to a little bit over about four thousand dollars but well within range last one is national repairs for speedy lane and ocean

003masonry and this one here came in a little bit of our budget that's substantial 38 000. again everything any questions on projects themselves to the capital project report okay the first four project obviously the first four projects are the ones we just had for our bid opening indie lane parking those were received february 2nd contract was awarded we've issued a notice to proceed and that is currently in the shotgun submittal progress and that will be a summer you for 2020 from the last summer we're still continuing we're making progress again we'll work on second shifts pretty great holidays and hopefully get this done by the end of may the lobby's pilot repairs we should be starting those roof repairs at the elementary soon as the weather breaks and the shades for media elementary are in

004fabrication and i'm still told that we're on track to spring great installation everything i'm hearing is that we're mostly on track so that's something very very positive yeah are there any questions for the finance side you're talking about in general in general um questions if you would like to scroll down just a little bit i just want to make sure recognizing that one the one that says lockbox rfp that is for taxes that's where the taxes get dropped so that's just it's a two year so that that contract is up so that's what that was yet i think they come in next week okay so they'll come to us before the next legislation yeah and then my quality is just related to that the aed i just wanted to make sure that because the ones

005we had are right we have march 24th [Music] okay let me see any questions or concerns before then we have some uh are you going to go through this line item by line item or not can we just jump in and ask questions you're welcome to jump in and ask questions at this point because the board members have had a chance to look at this before go ahead i do have a question about line item 17 i don't see a cost associated with edgemont township reimbursement agreement do you not know the cost at this point because my understanding is these township agreements uh usually have you know hard and fast costs associated with them thank you matinee editor mr belgium do you want to take that did dr scott leave that information for you all

006right and i don't know did dr scott mention that to you when she shared the agenda no i don't know if we could use the microphone because i know it's really hard otherwise my phone blows up and people cannot hear us over there so uh let me just look at it because i think we cut a chart for it but there was like a filing fee associated that's a different situation we'll try to figure that one out [Laughter] did you hear that i heard there was a filing fee yeah i think it's 1 55. so that's the cost currently just to file yeah okay thank you and thank you for your patience technical difficulties yes um 17. did that answer your question uh yes i was just curious to know what that cost was there

007thank you okay certainly and yes ma'am you had your hand up as well yes i did i just want to make make it clear the edgemont supervisors are going to be paid for site work building work for the new elementary school that's what the cost is for it's for them to review it they don't want to do the work but to review it right okay thank you all right mr seventeen um um let me be sure that everything i'm giving you is accurate so you can also send an email just to make sure so this is a preliminary cost yes this is the filing thing and then once they and it sounds to me like you're moving forward with building on this site correct so this site is not an issue edgemont is where this

008new school will be built that's correct that's correct so it's the submission so then there are going to be costs associated with edgemont doing its due diligence correct and do you have any idea of what those costs are there are there are set reimbursement costs in terms of the cost for them to like review a plan those costs are they're actually part of i think edgemont township's code but that the school district has to pay and to reimburse them for correct any township in which you submit an application has those costs thank you can't see everyone perfectly as you had your hand micros yes yes with a few questions um diana lembo uh edgemont township uh my question is how can you justify millions of dollars in taxpayers money for projected school in edgemont township

009where zoning regulations clearly do not permit it are you going to request a zoning change for the present r1 district to allow school use that would open up a majority of education residential properties for potential school use if you request a zoning change for only the parcels involved that would be spot zoning how do you think you can legally do this when educational institutions are not permitted in the r1 zone thank you ma'am i don't know if either dr d or um would like to answer that at this time part of that application is a application for a conditional use it's not a change in zoning it's a conditional use and that's for the township to review it's not allowed it is not allowed in our in our in that zone it's strictly r1 so

010you are seeking a zoning change whether it's a variance a conditional use a single use exception and it's a spot zone which is illegal in the state of pa so i don't know why you spent all this money to seek something that's not allowed in that district and we have a group an email group save edgemont googlegroups.com we would appreciate a reply because there are many many residents in our township that do not want this school in that district thank you are there other questions i'd like to know who did the legal uh research and due diligence on this policies is there legal legal resources recourse on our research okay so who did the research i can totally address that i also want to make sure they're clear that we're focusing on the finance aspect

011of it but for this particular case of course we have our solicitor uh school district solicitor right tom kelly who's also been in consultation uh with ezra and others so you know we do our using legal counsel i don't know again or dr g well the school district solicitor is a well-known entity actually comes to every single legislative meeting so every school district will have their own solicitor so that would definitely be part of it um you know it's tom kelly esquire so that's definitely something you can find of course i have a lot of information as well on the room to grow website but beyond the school the school district always has a solicitor so yes sir yeah i attended the hedgemon council meeting the other night and they said that the application you

012submitted wasn't complete and it would be have to be redone but during that process and after the meeting i spoke to somebody about the zoning and uh they reinforced what diane said that zone one are one and it could not be used as you guys prescribed it today so can you explain who you contacted to uh get this zoning change the best i can say right now is that it's been left with edgemont township and then they will have to get back to us about that so you know as dr david linden said that that has been submitted and they have to get back to us and then about the zoning variants so you have asked the towns about a zoning change a variance right just like you've already said so that's what we're looking

013at okay moving on anything else regarding minus which is what's before is right here all right yes have they done updated projection costs for this elementary school since with all the inflation passed for uh 24 months to show what the actual cost to build this school is versus going back towards and looking at adding the fifth graders at springfield and doing some work here and saving the money we have a beautiful facility here i remember when they put the pool in they could buy this and there was some black about the amount of money spent right so do you like you know we've done any research about it since inflation yeah you're asking okay i'm to leave that to miss cusick since she's head of operations for this so our consultants regularly are updating that

014information and will soon be coming to the community with that update um as you know there's going to be a meeting with edgemont township where some of this will be addressed i'm happy to address it online too this is not currently on the agenda for tonight but we have done studies that looked at all of our parcels to see if we could do additions we have done that research it has been done and the board has decided that that's not the direction we don't have the space and it would end up costing more in the end 80 acres here you're telling me you don't have space here we have done the research and it is all on the room to learn room to our website and you can find all the studies there so you

015don't have room here to add a grade to eliminate the need for a new elementary school that is correct and that's on the website space isn't the only issue the community wants to keep the current great configurations that is an elementary school from k-5 that's what the community wanted that research was done tells us that research was done with stakeholder groups back in 2016 2017. i don't know what kovic has to do with wanting a different grade configuration that's a great configuration the growth and population is not there both rates have declined so looking at that we've got to look at our expenses so inflation has taken over supplies [Music] but that's the answer that to be so now moving on do you have something yes i did happen to go on that website you

016were talking about as far as your uh the demographics of what you show for the population growth and it looks like you're not going to outstrip the current uh amount of of classrooms and and increase your class size for five years so you're looking at eight years out for a school that takes three years to build so i'm not sure i i you know would really didn't come here for this but i happen to look at it today and it just doesn't make sense to me why you're gonna spend 40 million dollars for eight years from now and that's why your numbers we're already at capacity we've had a mod there a double mod there for two years we are at capacity you shut down classes in media elementary there's plenty there's room there there's

017room in other schools we have not shut down classes in media elementary okay we are at capacity in every single one of our elementary schools or above capacity we split the last large classroom space at glenwood this past year to turn it into two classrooms can i i wouldn't say one thing granite mall social media used to have space like granite lawn ball you're familiar with that time sir we are familiar but i am going to be pretty firm on this one it's a work session and part of what happens okay we need to focus on the agenda that we have okay if you have a question related to the finance here but we just don't have that right yes that is probably that's but it's not related here if you want to discuss possible

018venues like we have had in other meetings we can do so yet again in another meeting but right now the classic before us is are we going to be okay with even um the board approving township looking further and that's the issue before us and the board has asked and answered the questions they have okay unless there's anything more related to the budgetary comparison report or what's on the screen we're going to have to move on okay yes sir so without another no that's not what i'm saying i don't know what he's referring to referring to the edgemont township reimbursement agreement yes those costs are that's the agreement to pay the cost that's under the township code the edgemont township code that's right they're going to bill us right any other questions all right sir

019yes is it on your site or is it a record of the vote is the board unanimous there's not a vote going on right now sir there's not a vote going on right now no i'm not instagram but i'm asking is the board unanimous on the decision to build a new school in hedge fund is it unanimous what a whole board or people are descending from that it was you know it was unanimous it now but i was a resident of vegetable for eight years and my kids all right one more time but i i lived through those years of elementary school living in edgeworth township and the team and you moved all right so moving on any more from finance and operations thank you very much thank you have a good evening all right

020next up we have our education and wellness okay that would be good uh while she's scrolling i actually only have two items on the agenda which we've had a moment to review so if you have any questions required thank you very much yeah okay eab globally you can see there eab is an educational consulting firm that we are seeking to contract with um in particular coming out of our coded protocols and trying to get back to what we consider to be normal i've used this resource before um not a contracted service but i've used some of their materials before and i found them to be very effective pragmatic and of course research based on this company that has then connected with dr d mario linen and we had several meetings with them and in particular

021um we're interested in the research current research that they can provide as well as professional development and consultant services one of the things that we are looking at in particular for the short term is helping teachers recover teacher burnout is a real phenomenon this group has surveyed and began research and strategies to combat teacher burnout right now and as we discussed this um we know that all the initiatives that we have in front of them in front of us will not be effective unless the teachers are healthy and ready to go so um that was the you know that was the impetus for this particular contract any questions yes and then we were um the contract would be 24 000 for this year 24 000 for next year with an optional third year [Music] each

022year [Music] i think from if i may dodge i think part of it is [Laughter] yeah so the focus next year in particular is kind of getting ready to do the next strategic plan so our strategic plans ends in the year 2024 so next year will be all about getting work to kind of reformulate what those strategic goals are going to be so that's a professional organization that helps districts do that and they gather a lot of research and sort of best practices to inform that strategic planning process this year really the focus is trying to be intentional about building back teacher capacity especially from having teachers kind of needing to do a lot of intensive instruction around academic recovery as well as current academic skills certainly meeting the social emotional behavioral needs of students

023um and so it's been a big lift and we anticipate that remain a big lift even into next year and we need them healthy enough to really be able to do all this work okay all right and then so next up i'm sorry i'm curious to know is this a budgeted item or is this a new item for this year this is a new item um but we did have because of the finances that we got from our grants we were able to move some monies into professional development for this and will the grants cover that cost and how about in subsequent years because you're talking about two second year you're talking about potentially a third year yes right so your grant monies right the grand money actually covers three years so yes we should

024be good thank you okay um so as you know um in line with what um dr debrielle linda just said in terms of student wellness as you know we conducted the youth truth survey this past fall so tonight i'm going to introduce rob harrison here in just a minute and in advance i want to thank mr harrison um the youth truth survey itself you'll see how extensive it was and we received a mountain of information and breaking that down and putting together a presentation um is certainly a lot of work so thank you mr harrison for that and then following mr harrison we will have our inclusivity and belongingness report from the bciu and then at the end of those and we'll talk about how we're using that information so um good evening everyone thank

025you thank you for having me here tonight um as mr dougherty stated i'm just going to change seats this is really complicated so just to give you some context i probably could have had about 125 slides but i backed off all right so um there's not as many but when you take a look at the information that we gathered from all the stakeholders in our community this survey was for students was for families almost for faculty and staff multiply that for each school and you have a lot of data right so tons of information to share i want to make sure you understand this tonight this is just going to be a brief overview with a focus on students okay i'm going to share with you guys some general information about um about family surveys

026and about our staff surveys but the majority of this presentation is going to be about the student surveys all right so i just want to make sure we're all clear with that okay sorry mr before you get started will this presentation be available online yes so this presentation will be available online in addition i'm going to to add some reports from youth truth to add online for each school okay so there'll be a comprehensive plan for that like you'll be able to look at all the different school data for each of the different stakeholders okay there's no way i could have put it all in here okay so i just wanted to preface with that so here's some general information we had a really good response we started out there were 5 312 uh total

027responses 1810 family members 2 900 29 79 students from 523 staff basically when i talked to youtube they were very impressed particularly with our family responses they said 44 is an incredible response rate so kudos to our community for um for answering the call i want to give a little bit of context to about when this whole process occurred it was november think back to november all right think back to what was happening in our schools in november our kids were just coming back from being out of school some of them for almost 18 months there was a time of transition that occurred for students i'm sure you heard about tick-tock right so there's a lot of things happening in schools thanks to tick-tock that was having an impact on school culture it's full environment

028our students we're trying to get back into school our principals are trying to re-establish expectations for the building so there may be some you know when you look at the data you'll probably understand why some of the students didn't um didn't respond so well to like the culture aspect um there's there's a lot of things going on so think back to that time and i'm sure you'll remember that so i just want to place a little context in there for you these are the schools um in pennsylvania that we're being compared to so overall there's 501 schools across the country that youth youth truth surveys um but in pennsylvania these are the 10 school districts that are currently using the survey and you'll see why i'm telling you that because later on we're going to

029you'll see some charts that have a comparison to pa schools okay i just wanted you to have an idea of who their schools were and there's going to be a lot of charts okay so just bear with me and i'll explain how everything looks i'm going to try to go as quickly as possible we can have some discussion of course but keep in mind to dig deeper into this data tonight is not a practical way to approach it because there's so much okay so i'm going to fly through these slides of course i'll stop the questions this is a snapshot i just said all this so we will be presented quickly so first we're going to start with elementary school student surveys um what we have let me move this around so these are average

030ratings all right so the elementary school students they were on a scale of one to three and if you look at the charts this is overall so this is a synthesis of all the elementary schools so when you see the elementary schools it's the synthesis of all the schools i did not break it down by individual schools for elementary because we would have been here until saturday okay so for the elementary schools the synthesis report and you can see these are the these are the different themes that they were asked questions about engagement academic challenge relationships culture belonging and instructional methods five of those themes are the same throughout all the surveys instructional methods particular to the elementary schools so when you take a look at those numbers 2.83 for engagement it's on a scale

031of three all right that's the average ratings that's pretty pretty solid academic challenge 2.5 relationships 2.79 i'm not going to read them all you guys can see that but that gives you an overview of all of the different schools i'm going to go and presentation over here what does engagement refer to i want to have questions in a second oh okay this is grades three through five yes three through five all right thanks uh yeah i'll have a list of all the questions for each category and upcoming slides here we go engagement theme for the elementary it's the degree to which students perceive high expectation and feel engaged with their school and their education so these are the questions that were asked okay let's take a look at those then you'll see here these are

032the average ratings and percentage of threes so what i did was i added a percentage there um you can see the ratings and the percentage is the number of students who answer with a three so at glenwood uh 87 of the students answered threes indian lane ninety three percent maybe ninety percent so that's for engagement for the elementary schools pretty solid scores the relationship themed the degree to which students have strong supportive relationships with their teachers here are the questions we take a couple seconds to read those and these are the answers here so the 87 percent answered three and for some reason my screen changed so i apologize i did have a number on there so it seems to go away so you can see the percentage of threes for each of the schools

033and this is the relationships the next area was culture theme these are the questions that the students were asked and these are results so the average rating is the chart itself so glenwood would be about close to 2.5 for the average ratings indian lanes about 2.3 you can see where they go on the scale and then a percentage of threes are what you see on there before we post this can we uh align all of the scales to be the same with the first one was a scale of two to three and this is a scale of zero to three they should all be one to three sure thanks yeah belonging theme these are the questions i think it's interesting how when you take a look at these these charts these are four different schools

034look how close they are like they're all very close to each other which i think speaks volumes about the work okay academic challenge theme readings the average on this one is not much different than the previous one but the percentage of threes itself someone's compared you're saying a two limb correct yes then instructional methods these are questions that were asked and these are the rabbit trees so they were all the student questions um the next slide up is for the staff survey the staff and they were asked quite ask questions about engaging relationships culture professional development support and school safety and that's the average rate that's the actual average number there's no percentages there so the average is a 4.01 for engagement 4.23 you can read that and obviously the scale of 1 to 5.

035so for this three family surveys 47 response rate which is very high for the elementary schools these are the results i'm sorry mr harris i'm just trying to remember it i thought it was a 44 on one of the other slides but am i missing something 44 for the entire district okay this is just for elementary thank you you see the average ratings so the principals have seen this and i'll talk about this towards the end but you know we're not just we're not just looking at this information and just saying okay move on we are processing this data the principles are working with this data um they're sharing on monday you know with the faculty and staff so there are steps happening all right so the next is uh we're going to go to

036springton lake and see how things went there so springtime lake middle school um this is a different type of a chart and i want you to understand the difference there's three columns so you have on the bottom you have each of the different themes and the left hand column is springs lake middle school so it's like the light below i guess the middle column is the youth truth survey data right comparison for all the schools and all middle schools and the youth through surveys in the middle and then the column on the right hand side for each of those different teams are the schools that are in pennsylvania and you're looking at the percent positive so the number the percentage of students who answered four or five on a scale of zero to five in

037each of those different themes and i will share those themed questions with [Music] same theme in each school but they're they're different questions because of the age of the kids all the kids in franklin middle school were asked the same questions oh yeah yeah sure yes yes yes yep okay they provide the questions i'm sorry okay i know it's there's so much information to look at we're not here to solve the problems right we're here just take a look right now just to clarify we will be solving problems absolutely not tonight if not tonight be clear yeah absolutely that's that's towards the end um here are the questions for the engagement theme and then here whoa ready this is a good chart okay it looks scary but if you take a look at the top

038okay let me explain this the very top bar says your school so our results 3.44 48 percentile so that top bar is the youth truth national data okay and that goes from a 2.94 and the top 100 percentile is a 4.14 so that's the top is all the data from the national uh gathering of data from youth truth that little line in the middle that's the pa schools and you can see that line that goes right that goes up and down right near the 3.44 the dark line of pa spools that's the median for pa schools okay and you can see the 50th percentile of the median for the youth truth is at 3.46 so for the engagement summary measure and basically the summary measure youth truth captures data and readiness from what you said

039they capture data from statistically related questions and to identify the summary measures they use factor analysis a statistical tool that analyzes underlying patterns in the data so that's how they come up with their summary measure as you can see we desegregated this by race and ethnicity this gives us an idea how all of our students are doing and this is this is the heart of the work we need to do we need to identify how our students are doing so just to be clear you're saying that's all our students in the district this is middle school oh this is still just middle school yeah we're still in middle school but that's our race correct okay yep so overall 3.44 then you can see the breakdown the next thing was academic challenge these are the questions

040and here's a summary measure 3.68 so we're below the median for pennsylvania and we're below the 50th percentile for the national survey see how it breaks down by episodes the culture theme here are the questions here's the results we're below the median pa schools with 50 percentile for the national numbers you can see how it breaks down we need to find out one right that's our job that's why this information is so valuable i really appreciate the support the board has given having this happen belonging peer collaboration questions there we did pretty well here we're above the 50th percentile at the 85th percentile for the national and well above pennsylvania so that's positive and since we are focusing on inclusivity and belonging i i want to show you a couple of charts that have specific

041questions remember this is a summary measure so here's a particular question i can usually do myself around other students for that particular question you can see the responses 57th percentile right at the median for pa schools and you can see how the the scenery broke down another sample question most students are friendly to me we are above the 50th percentile for the nation and just below the median from pennsylvania overall and then this is the final one the first for belongings i really feel like a part of my school's community nationally 73rd percentile pa schools above the median and you can see the other results but we need to ask ourselves why are there some groups at a 3.30 or lower what are we going to do to make those kids feel like they belong

042and that's what the principles all right so now we're going to go to relationships all right so that was all about belonging and collaboration now relationships with the middle school these are the questions and that theme again this is going to be posted so you'll be able to read it go deeper into this later here's how we did 54th percentile the nation just below the midpoint for pennsylvania to see how it breaks down the next theme is diversity equity and inclusion this was an additional module that we asked and they did not have a summary measure for this topic but i'm going to give you some specific questions and the responses so this question when talking to students from my school i feel comfortable talking about my race or ethnicity what kind of broke down

043there 69 percentile in the nation pretty well in pa in comparison and you can see how it's broken down so students talking to students they feel comfortable about talking about their race the next question talking to adults from my school i feel comfortable talking about my race ethnicity again 3.63 takes us at the high end of pa schools 59th percentile in this national survey you can see how it breaks down by ethnicity and race do you know how many pa schools did this module 10. oh well no i'm sorry i don't know how many schools is this module i'm not sure if they all often or not okay again we have some work to do gender identity students from my school value people with diverse gender identities so for this disaggregation i was able to

044break it out like you can see on the bottom it's not race ethnicity it'll be more relevant to take a look how students identify with their gender and how they respond so right at the midpoint for the state 29th percentile for the nation you can see how the students responded i thought this was interesting the students who the non-binary or gender non-performing students have a better feeling about this than the boys [Music] yes this is copied and pasted right now yeah yeah i'm sure i must say youth truth is very responsive so i call them and they get back to me really quick with answers um when talking to students from my school i feel comfortable talking about sexual orientation and sexual orientation was not a subgroup that i could tease out so just again

045let me pa school it looks like we're doing okay naturally okay i just want to be clear we're talking about pa schools the most it could be would be those 10 school districts voted in okay and students from my school value people with different abilities so i could break it out by special education and general education students this is the result so from a national standpoint 45th percentile there was not um a cohort for pa schools in this one so i had to use suburban schools you can see how that looks and that's suburban schools across the nation not services so for the for the middle school 45 response rate was pretty solid and here are the family services these are the average ratings i didn't get a percent positive just the average readings so

046you can see what we're doing well you can see where we need to work staff survey again you can see what we're doing well okay now we're jumping in pancreas this is the same chart that you saw from springtime lake middle school the left-hand side is pen crest the middle is youth truth data and the right side is uh the pennsylvania results so you can see from the different categories how we're doing i just had an overall question i know in the beginning you practice all the same you know think back to november what was going on when we're looking at pennsylvania schools and across the country as well do they all take it at the same time no so was some of this i mean it could have been a different precoc what are

047we talking about yes so they have different schedule times for the survey to be taken throughout the school year you know so i'm assuming that these i have to ask that question because i'm not sure about when they're comparing this data so i have to find out that question was it all last i don't think it was all i don't believe that it was all in november because there's there are people who were taking this survey throughout the school year we happened to squeeze into the november window so i had to find out about that it was just last school year it wasn't other school years for these results yeah they may have a long longitudinal database that they're using for this so i'll have to find out that would be great just just to

048get an idea because because i know this year is is different but it would be really helpful to know examples that happened right we need to work on sure all right let's ask another question so these group these categories are bucketed but it's not how they were presented to the students right they just answered the questions is that there's a long list of questions and then they did the factor analysis and they said you know we've looked at factor analysis these things clustered together in terms of ratings by the students then they need these things based on the sum of things that were in there correct no it's the other way around so they have they have validated statements that reflect a certain fee and they're interspersed throughout the survey so there are questions that

049are aligned with for example the theme of engagement and then that may be question 1 10 24 48. it wasn't presented to the students these are the questions on academic channel yeah then can we find out what the factor analysis is that they were talking about that you mentioned when you said you were reading from their statement that they used chapter analysis is that to determine these is that they would they used to do the value of the instrument to find out which questions fell into which category they established what those questions were for each student yeah right before they took the test okay you mentioned something about factor analysis yeah they ran the data and also you can just find out what what they were looking at yeah it's those particular questions so so

050for engagement they identify like these four questions on the engagement questions and they did their factor analysis on those four questions to get the summary like this is this is the summary of all that and then obviously there's data for each individual question you're going to see in a second the whole idea of a factor analysis is you look at the themes you look at the items which are clustered and you say what do these feel like as opposed to there's four themes and we're going to test them i assume that the fact analysis is based on these questions but apparently there's some other factor analysis i think there's um pretty significant research behind this truth um and that may even be you could probably post that because there's probably several research articles that talk

051a little bit about the development of the survey but i yeah i was thinking that i [Music] there is a appendix at the end of every report that goes through all those details so when i post it online i make sure that i have all that information i have a question were these surveys uh filled out in the classroom yes thank you the student loans were yes the family ones were done at home yep and for the teachers we actually provided time in school for teachers to do it but the students weren't in the classroom okay so this is the engagement theme summary measure for pancreas high school and this is what i was talking about with the summary measure this is where they did factor analysis we fell below the midpoint for pa schools

05214 percentile across the nation you can see how it's broken down by race centers these are the questions you can see these are the percent positive so you can see how we do against other schools in this section you can just read that typical uterus in the middle pa's on the right side this is academic challenge you can see where we stand 25th percentile for the nation and below the midline for pa schools and broken down by the city and we have some work to do these are the questions for academic challenge culture theme let's see the questions here i think when you take a look at that bottom one it's probably indicates that some students were frustrated as the principal was trying to establish three established roles in the building at that time baby

053other schools that took the truth survey about the same time trying to return to the classroom or anything like that is are the people behind this survey gathering that data to kind of give us a better read on how many other schools we're experiencing numbers that typically look low but might be due to the time that the test was taken that's a question i want to ask yeah i think you're right now yeah that's a good question i'm pretty sure they can tell us the dates of administration for each of the pa's courses this is belonging to beer collaboration so the 60th percentile across the nation above the midline therefore pa schools [Music] good evening everyone i just wanted to let you know just kind of keep an eye on the time this does wrap

054up our parents teacher conferences for tonight as for the week i appreciate you staying uh late being here last night and tonight we will see you back on monday once again this does conclude our parent teacher conferences so if you are still here in the building this would be the time to wrap things up and to head on out have a good [Laughter] for belonging and i did add a few more particular questions because it's the focus of ours so you'll see specific questions and responses i really feel like part of my school's community a student's not telling a part of their school's community they don't belong they don't feel like they belong i can usually move myself around other students at this school again you can see the results students are friendly to me

055and this is the relationship these are the questions for relationships and the next one is college and career right now we have some work to do wait one of the things that would be you know we're seeing the same format of slides over and over again it would be helpful if the different ethnicities were listed in the same order each time rather than being highest to lowest because that way when you're flipping through you can see if there's a particular group that goes up and down or if there's one that's always more you know towards the lower end but when they switch their position around for every page it's really kind of hard to track that from side to side would that be possible i'm sure it could be possible but this is this is

056a report from the future that they give us this is these are the slides these are the percent deposit is for the college and the particular questions of students in every grade or were some classes for seniors for example i guess i'm just going to response the relevance of some of the questions so if a ninth grader about the question about figuring out their careers is it possible that they would say no because they've not had that exposure yet in november of ninth grade sure so i'm just sort of wondering right into kind of root cause it's whether or not the exposure to like the college application process needs to start earlier whether there needs to be um that clear exploration he's more embedded in ninth grade so that's kind of root cause analysis in

057terms i have a question on that yes you notice college and careers so i'm assuming you're not just steering everybody to college no is that correct correct you're talking about trades and technical training outside of school i know i want to just make a statement on that when i went to springfield high school chippenham's father was my guidance counselor and we used to sit down with them each year and talk about our career goals but where we saw ourselves we're going to go to college what we're going to do are we doing that in our school here i don't know i mean that's a question i don't know is that something you're doing they have junior interviews every student's establishment in junior year what about different times we're really short on trades and some of

058these kids really don't like school academics right yeah so for example prior to kobe we actually started taking the eighth graders to the technical school um the plan was to then have parents come because the technical schools of today are very different than that of the 70s right and people kind of have that in their mind but getting kids to kind of see a wide variety of post high school options and the conversation with kids isn't necessarily everyone has to go to college the conversation with kids has to be who are you what do you like to do and what do you want to do in terms of spending the dates of your work life this is something you're gonna do eight nine hours a day and you gotta like it so you know certainly

059with some of the kids that i worked with who really didn't enjoy school i would say to them like you realize if you go to college it's four years of this and you're probably going to land in a job that feels very much like this so if that doesn't feel good tell me let's kind of figure out together what is it that you like to do if you're creative you like to work with your hands if you um like a sense of something being built and finished that's a different kind of conversation than you know go to college and get a liberal arts degree yeah i think your numbers would go up if that's something absolutely and i think that partnering with the trades unions and schools in the area to have a day where

060you have different people there from different trainings absolutely your parents guess what you're going to spark interest and we do have like we do have career fair now even at elementary school which is amazing because parents come in and um the kids kind of rotate through they sign up and they rotate different kind of um career segments with parents talking about what they do draw their numbers your numbers yeah forward thinking and the career technical school it's phenomenal um they were just kind of featured on a segment we should maybe i'll kind of post that to the website too um they did a whole segment on the pair of technical schools in terms of the ems program and just the amount of materials they have and the amount of expectation for kind of reaching this

061level of proficiency it really is an amazing program so very different from what it used to be you know 20 years ago yeah i i will say to you to what dr g said about the elementary school um serious frustration but quite honestly cobra put a lot of those kinds of things on pause we couldn't have people coming into the buildings regulations certainly to have those talks who couldn't have those kinds of field trips and those interactive experiences and when you're a child that year and a half is a long time right so that's part of it is getting people back into that spirit of doing it it can feel like ages when it was two grades ago um so so yes i mean those are definitely we need to do more of but we

062were doing some more of it and then streams are starting to cope it so we need to look at this and see if we can get back on track i have a question so i wanted to know to what extent um we're including hbcus in our college process and bringing them into view for our students of color so is that happening on a regular basis we're bringing colleges into the space for the past couple years but we have brought in colleges for the college reps come in and visit and they sit down with kids i don't know exactly if you have hpc use in i can find out for you about that um i can definitely tell you that i just talked to michelle the other day and we're trying to arrange a trip for

063students to go to each hbcu in delaware um these creators are ninth graders so we're making progress and just so you know sir um on this survey 82 percent of the kids um plan to go to college here from smart district yeah i mean i'm just saying to say an idea i don't not looking at the vocational training as the people that are not as smart about the in crowds not in the you know bringing up trades is not like oh you're not good enough for college oh no no no i just want you to be aware of it yeah no no i mean because what i saw i'll tell you questions they built the the luxury dorms at webster and then now high rise storms in derek's history so the kids were in the

064in group had to stay in the twelve thousand dollars dorms versus six thousand dollar dorms so you were looked down upon because you were going to you were gonna live in the six thousand dollar courts and they created a a class system at westchester which people noticed and people looked at it today with the schools college they automatically think they're better than a lot of the kids they look and say oh i'm not going to say i'm not going to college i'd rather go be a mechanic well are they looked at differently are they look oh you're not smart enough to go to college that's where we've got the perception is that we've got to have career paths for people and not everybody wants to be pumped in a group and say well of course

065i can go to college i want to go to college definitely i mean i think i think we're all in the same case that at some point it's a societal change and it's a culture change we need to make i do also want to go back to your question um because i think it's a really important one about the hbcus i know in the past that we have but i do um i don't have the figures for you right here but it is something i really think that we need to make sure we're making conservative systematic effort for so um i don't have the information for you right now kelly but i will definitely make sure that you know we make a note of it i think it's an important question to ask them to

066contribute students of color feeling like people are you know seeing that they have representation that's really important so oh it's an awesome educational opportunity as well for anybody i went to howard law school you know hbcus are fabulous option for any person who would like to go to college so so i think it's a really important question to ask and i just want to let you know that i don't have the numbers for you but um like anything you know i'll make a note of it and we'll follow up on that and i would also encourage you there are a lot of parents in this community who have attended it attended hbcus and or are connected to people who fraternities and sororities have attended and they can bring people and we can get some and

067we can get cheney right up the street in westchester and um lincoln and people have connections and so rely on your connections to get better absolutely and this isn't related to students per se but um i will say too it's something that i know that our uh tom hopper of human resources has done a lot of work trying to have also um with chain for example getting more teachers coming from those schools as well so it all it's all important and i just wanted to make sure that that's part of their i don't have information for you right here but it's definitely something that we should to make more use of it's very important yes ma'am there's a flip side to this is students who have not done well in high school understand that there

068are colleges they can go to if they want absolutely the goal is to make sure that every child is able to do you wouldn't a good right you know because that's what people and other parents live in right is that they think back to not too long ago when you had shoving people off with different avenues so it's a delicate thing to do but you really want to work with a child to make sure that you're eating where they're at and that you're pushing them in a way where they can succeed and thrive and that they should so it is an amazing community college really i mean like people who are in other areas just don't have access to a community college censorship is what we have and it services dollar county it services chester

069county there are opportunities for dual enrollment for kids when they're in high school to get credit for high school as well as future college courses and many of our students do take advantage of using delaware county or attending delaware county for their first two years of school it's much less expensive and with a certain gpa they can transfer to other institutions to get their full bachelor's degree so there's a lot of options even within our what i was thinking of yeah it's a wonderful facility absolutely thank you please go ahead all right so the next topic is uh diversity equity inclusion and they don't have they don't have a summary theme for this but they have i can show you some specific questions and answers uh from pancreas high school so i want to fly

070through those um so in this time like when talking to students from my school i feel comfortable talking about my race or ethnicity you can see how it breaks down 69th percentile in the nation again there was no pa cohort here so i used suburban schools i'm talking to adults from my school i feel comfortable talking about eraser ethnicity you can see the difference students from my school value people with diverse sexual orientations i was able to break this down my sexual orientation in high school and you can see the results again no pa cohort subverting schools students who are school value people diverse gender identities and that the high school is able to break it down transgender and not transgender let's see where we are have some work to do different abilities i was

071able to do special education students and general education students these are the percentiles and the questions and i'm going to go quickly because i've been doing this for 45 minutes so these will all be posted on the website um these are the quick family survey responses and you can see the results there was a common theme of communication and feedback um as one of one of our lower survey result hitters didn't do too yes and there are specific questions in that group that you can find out too yeah survey all right so that's that's that's all lots of data i apologize for that but there's so much more and we'll put those results up on up on the website by school so what are we going to do with all this well we have another

072presentation coming up that's going to talk to you about the audit that the dciu did so that's going to be part of what we're going to be using to help us move forward but this data will share with building principles and they process it with the leadership teams and on monday march 14th during the pd day they're going to be processing it with their faculty and staff and they're going to develop goals based on the data and that's going to become a part of what we're going to be doing next year right so that's to me that's the building level teachers need to see the information they need to see what their kids are saying and they need to make the adjustments they need to make so that's going to be exciting on monday i

073think if you if you find this stuff exciting i find it exciting we're going to have teachers working together to try to solve these problems to try to figure out what we can do to make our kids feel like they belong it's like they're included in our buildings and we have a good start with this data um in combination with the review of the audit at the district level um we're going to do some action planning for the spring and beyond and again like i said we'll put this information on the website 15 minutes i had so much data i'm so sorry we wanted to hear it so you don't need to apologize i'm glad you've shared it with us it's important for us to be aware but thank you for your support i mean

074we couldn't do this without your support this means so much to all of our kids knowing that the school board supports these initiatives it's not even an initiative this is the way it's going to be and we have to do what we can to make these kids all kids feel like they belong all right that's our job i think the exciting thing is we feel like maybe for the first time in two years a professional development day is going to be about something other than crisis management and correct like the work that we used to do you know the things that we could attend to the things that every educator comes into this field wanting to do and finally we can begin to have these conversations again it's been you know it's really remarkable i

075actually thought it was encouraging to see the numbers look great on engagement but two years ago it just think about the professional development they've had in the last 18 months it has all been covet related you know how are you re sequencing units of study how are we doing academic recovery and teaching what has to be done this year what are we doing in terms of distancing and all the operational changes that has been the focus of td and that's a very different kind of conversation and the ones we were used to having together and very top-down professional development so it was basically admin saying you guys got to figure this piece out like and and you know until we get to the next chunk and then you guys have to figure this piece out

076and so that you know that's not the way we typically work um i think the return of the professional development council where teachers are at the table and they're kind of talking about what is it that they need in terms of professional development and having them have some control and voice in that in that planning of professional development really important important for them to have agency um and capacity um i'm sure this is this is going to happen once the teachers and everyone we talk about and figure out what to do it's just really important to make sure the community knows what we're doing and maybe come you know in front of the board again and talk about some of those specifics i know it's just the beginning stages but i think that's key right

077we're listening to what the students need what parents need what teachers need and then for the community to actually see this is what we're doing um in a real clear way for everyone right the identified identification of those specific goals and and probably some of those action steps right to meet those goals and those goals may be different at each building depending on what their data is setting and where they're going to try to prioritize um you know what's going to be the most impactful way to begin this work together so we uh we just met today we're building out a new website i think you probably know that and there's going to be a whole section about inclusivity and belonging it's going to it's going to expand what we have now so that type

078of communication is going to be critical in our website that's just one piece of the overall communication but it's something that's going to be do you think i better we started a sense of belonging belonging a survey was done in 2016 it was yeah 2018 right so you know we started that work and what happened in march you know you had one year and then it began to fall apart so it feels good to kind of get back to it for sure all right well dr monday i know we have a question in the audience but we're first going to go through board questions and i know mrs has been waiting um was there one particular piece of the survey the numbers that took it that made you think okay something is working out here

079i feel really proud about this i think the relationships between students you know after everything that's happened over the past 18 months they came back to buildings and their relationships are strong you know based on the data that we read so i was really happy to see that you know our kids are getting along well um may not look like that in the middle school cafeteria but maybe they're getting along really well you know but uh i think that was that was really i guess something i'd like to see um because it's about the choice yeah i think that belong that relationship and engagement was dramatically surprising to me i thought that would be um how much they wanted to be back how much they want to be here and um even their reaction to

080some of these things coming back field trips and dances and you know it hoops you know seeing them kind of really begin to reconnect and dive into that is just making me smile i'm really excited because we do this next year and there's going to be an additional piece of those charts that say comparisons from last year so that's going to be interesting to see how how we do next year timeline november again yes i was just going to add to the things that you might be proud of as i talk with other school directors from around delaware county everybody should be so proud of the work that's going on here workstream media has been so far ahead schools aren't even beginning this type of work yet because it's i i would be really proud

081of that just that you completed this in such a not great time if what you started was put on hold but the minute that you could get back to it you're back at it i just thanks to the administration for the hard work that goes into it and i think you should feel proud of where you are i never did a communication survey or audit um through donovan was that showed up i couldn't find that we shared in august yeah we shared it important to try to identify what does it mean by communication you know maybe it's like getting not from the superintendent that it's not five pages long you know it may be that their expectation of progress reports at the elementary level is different than what we're delivering right so it's kind of

082trying to identify is it the frequency of the communication is the form of communication um this data is so helpful uh one of the most important things is just having the information now um and i think that one of the most important pieces for me is the data on race and ethnicity and seeing some of those disparities um and so it's kind of a two-part question one is um maybe it's part of what you're going to post is the data broken down by race technology at the elementary level as well and then um from their communications perspective do you plan on putting together a really brief summary piece you know here the main things that we found just so that someone's not going to be throwing the reports they'll be able to see sort of

083what goes to the top um youtube provides us a summary report for all the uh for all the different schools and all the different surveys so i'm gonna take that and i've done a lot of it already but it's still a lot so tweaking that to put it on the website but when you take a look you can when you disaggregate the data i mean you can do it by my gosh there's so many different ways you can you can click a button it goes from gender it goes boy girl it goes ethnicity and race grade i mean grade level so there's so many different things you can do so trying to pinpoint on one or two of those things is going to be the key questions in the summer report are there trends um

084by race and ethnicity that start in elementary and we see sort of carry through you after more questions then we'll have it for the audience there but i just wanted to make sure also to what the shaker was just saying um for the communication if you could make a note somewhere because i think it's important for people to be mindful that this is just the first piece that we'll be doing this again next november because i think that will be really meaningful to sort of get that information and people should know that it's not a one and done that's really important to have that kind of context now i know obviously you have some audience questions anyone else before i open it up i mean i don't know what you're gonna see from now till

085next november you just get the data down no absolutely but it will help us figure out if there's a coven the impact covid might have so absolutely it's more than that but i'm just interested too and how much is just returned to school right um what kind of impact anyone all right i know miss seventeen you had your hand up first i actually have two i have many questions but i'll limit it to two my first question is is the youth truth survey the only game in town or are there competitors there are other surveys you could use and how did you select this particular so this was selected and i'm going to defer dr d marine you selected the survey a while back so then yeah we i mean we looked at different instruments

086and we wanted one that was taken by enough surrounding districts and we would have a good comparison and it's probably the most widely used survey my second question is you um issued a family survey and there were buckets but we didn't see specific questions behind the buckets i have one question where in any of those categories was there a question asked that got at this type of question what families what parents thought of the education their children were receiving in rose tree media yes there was there was a specific question that speaks specifically specifically to it yes and we'll see this on the website yes and we'll see the responses yes thank you yep i recall i think it was a very positive response look forward to seeing it all right yes ma'am we're my

087name yes okay uh so i have a question regarding um the comparison of data between the amount of representation that exists versus who took the survey so for example he took asian population or black population of the percentage of that population do you know how many of that group took the survey so for students well i'll start with students because that's an important well i guess all the students but for our family so for families do we know what percentage of families within um ethnic diversity took that survey i believe i can find out when people took it they identified their race gender so i can figure out how many people took it identified as asian right or black in compassion yes because that's important because if you have you know let's just take the

088number 10 families 10 asian families and only two are filling them out that's cute that right right so that is really important to know really holistically how we're doing and also why are why are certain families not answering you know what what what do we need to do to engage them more um and so that's a really big question i have around just participation amongst our ethnic groups that's a great question thank you um okay so now obviously uh inclusivity belonging program review is up next we have dr joyce mundy and rebecca smith they will go through um the report which will include the process and then once again at the end we'll talk about um action steps i'm going to turn it over to you guys i'll be right here i do have a

089few hard copies of an executive summary anybody interested okay hi everybody really excited to be here with tonight um my name is rebecca smith i'm the coordinator for teaching and learning intermediate um i'd like to start by first thanking you all for investing in your district's time the time and coordination your district administrators and your building principles put in to and all of your administrators and staff for um ensuring that the process went well as we get started tonight um so much of a program review uh looks at what your district is doing so we thought we'd start with uh your framework for civilian belongings have a common understanding of what we're working with and we can see right from the social media school district website there is a clear and very apparent commitment to

090fostering inclusive spaces where student belonging and divinity is honored beyond just a statement of commitment grocery beauty school district has developed a comprehensive framework for following dignity and sensitivity the framework includes 16 different components so just as a precursor to what you're about to hear it makes both the work very comprehensive and very well thought out and also very complex to support this framework there's a series of objectives to ensure equitable access to all students to encourage and support culturally responsive teaching ensure that beliefs mindset and practices are grounded in equity principles and to foster a sense of belongingness for all students through healthy respectful caring and safe learning environments to guide all these goals and strategies um there is a series of strategies mentioned in the conference plan to provide staff with professional development

091to increase awareness and offer strategies to promote equity and inclusion for students fully implement a multi-tiered system of support and of course engaged in community and supporting district and building wide equity work this has all been supported over the last several years since 2018 through a comprehensive set of systems um first establishing and building building and district level equity teams expansion of the family alliance for respected equity groups fair there's a group for each building development of a social emotional and ethical learning curriculum that is caught taught at all levels and of course designation of a board ad hoc committee to review and support relevant district policies with connection to equity and including students and student voice and that is through both student training in areas like this so that there's student leadership and seeking

092student feedback through serving like we just heard these so given all of that work um there is sometimes a need to pause or reflect and conduct a program review a program review um is essentially a process that evaluates where we are what we've been doing and how well that's going um and that helps us to identify the future direction um and also what our need and priorities of our programs are so for roastery media as as mentioned previously the work since 2018 has been robust and embedded in district initiatives in the time frame uh there of course was a global pandemic and so much of the work was interrupted and it also has made our world and student needs much different than it was 24 months ago so this program review is really and truly

093an opportunity to reflect and evaluate where we are to incorporate the experiences and perspectives of all stakeholders in the district um and to really look at the truth data that we heard in so much detail through an equity lens as with all of our program reviews um we really do ground all of the review and recommendations and priorities that you're about to hear in research and best practices this also includes state and federal mandates that may be important for districts to consider so to start for the last four years the pennsylvania department of education pde has put out a plethora of resources and guidance to support equity in schools and includes this definition of equity this is directly connected to the federal every student succeeds act which was passed in 2015 and the every student

094succeeds act has incorporated considerations for equity in districts as part of that mandate it is also important to consider in the full report there is a much more comprehensive research section um this remainder of the research section i'm about to share what's important to understand our presentation tonight um these categories here have been identified as categories that schools who are working on establishing relevant culturally competent curriculum and equity in schools may consider operating within with the exception of status quo schools may consider a variety of these categories at the same time so food festivals and fun is exactly what it sounds like um it is how schools celebrate around holidays how schools incorporate food and activities into their daily life intercultural teaching and learning refers to when teachers and staff are learning about other cultures

095and thinking about how that reflects in the students that they teach human relations is when diversity is celebrated as well as when teachers are able to use personal and student experiences to teach one another selective education is often what happens when there is a specific incident or specific need and the school develops a certain program in response to that so for example girls who code or girl stem robotics teams would be an example of selective education and transformative education is accommodating a set of much of the practices before as well as a deep consideration for how these things tie into typical academic standards curriculum the next few slides um we'll refer to research from the floyd cobb and john crown apple both belonging to a culture of dignity there is a much longer section of

096research in the report on this and we wanted to do this specifically because we know much of the inclusivity of belonging work in the district has been rooted in this book already and so you'll see that we did not want to take the district in a different direction and really rooted a lot of our research in the work that you are doing um this book is absolutely a well-respected resource in this area among schools um the specific slide was not invented by john chronicle um many of you probably know maslow's hierarchy of needs which is from the 1940s um it's often presented in a triangle sometimes a ladder in this book it is presented as a staircase um and this is included because there is an ongoing dialogue in schools about their role in serving

097student academic needs at first their emotional needs and really the point here is that uh if you look at it as a hierarchy of needs as mass i would put you do need the belonging component to fully reach the school achievement component and ultimately that self-actualization which um the book and advanced level referred to as reaching your fullest potential um so let's see this quote from the book belonging has been neglected in the name of achievement which is an environment where only the achievement cheating belongs so you could consider how if we took the belonging step out of the staircase how hard it would be to step up to achievement from just safety um and finally um within the research there can be a tendency of volunteer equity work falling to women and people of

098color um it is sometimes typical and appropriate for schools who are just starting out in equity work um in early stages to include early adopters and people interested in the work to make sure that you make early progress um kovid was definitely an interrupter to bring more people to the table and increasing systems and social media so we're including this in the research section on collective agency because you're going to hear in our recommendations on moving from what the research would call when some of us are brave to when all of us are brave that's not to indicate any any sort of lack of interest but to build systems and mechanisms that will increase participation so before we get into the details i just want to talk a little bit about our process for the

099review so you can understand when we talk about the data kind of where it all came from we in every program review or almost every single program review that we do we use a mixed methods qualitative and quantitative approach that includes interviews focus groups surveys excitement of each school building and a review of district documents as you heard in the beginning um it's important for this particular program review the survey mechanism was the easter egg survey so a lot of the information that you just heard will also tie into what we're about to say um and the focus groups and the interviews and site visits really add so much context to the raw numbers so if we look at the survey it's telling us what's going on a lot of our focus groups and surveys

100will tell us the story of why that is throughout the whole program review process we conducted over 211 interviews folks groups and classroom officers that generated over 1500 individual data points outside of the plethora of data provided by the each truth survey we did seven full data sites to school buildings where we spoke with student focus groups and conducted classroom walkthroughs and boxers of shared spaces so how does this interaction look like a cafeteria or a library we conducted 10 virtual parent or guardian focus groups six of those were building specific and four of them were open to any family member who wanted to attend um and then one full day of virtual focus groups that we had 12 facilitators for and were able to talk to administrators teachers and building level equity teams across

101all the school buildings now i will turn it over to dr monday to discuss the report findings excuse me before we go on do you know um will we be posting this or able to have this posted to our website yes awesome thank you very much just i know it's oh my goodness it's always tricky when people are watching thank you all right any others and remembering tonight i'm in the interest of time this is an executive summary that provides you a really solid overview findings but the full report provides more detail on that so as we um took all of the data and analyzed and synthesized there were four priority areas that emerged from our analysis and i'm going to go into detail into each one of those priority area number one talks about

102a continued progression from theory to action the second priority area moving beyond holidays and parents the third is collective agency and the fourth has a connection to support belonging i'm gonna start with priority area one um this really explores the extent to which the research-based theoretical inclusive inclusivity and volume framework that you've adopted here has grown from theory to action we take each of the probe areas and and we did rather we take each of the topics that we're exploring and we develop probes and instrumentation for focus groups interviews and we align them with the youtube survey to make sure that we're validating you know the data across these activities the approves that we use examined the implementation of the framework itself what the activities of the school district and community level where that aligned

103from theory to action and then how stakeholders use the theory to actually change their practices and how that resulted in actions in the district that are making change so in other words we're in this area we were assessing not just the understanding of the theory the what and the why but then why and how to get results and that's actionable so we've organized this into strengths and needs and and again just really tried to do a strong summary of all of the findings within um and i think this was commented on earlier but i want to restate it again especially you said this it cannot be overstated and we do many many program reviews on a variety of topics it cannot be overstated the amount of work time investment and the quality of the work

104that your district has done on equity inclusivity belonging and dignity is an example so i i just want to leave with that because i think it's really important to acknowledge that since 2018 when you look at the framework that's been developed and the amount of work that's been done it it really is extraordinary and we are going to talk about needs and the whole point of this is to get complimentary data so that you can get underneath a lot of the things we were just talking about or we were hearing in the survey but it is important to start there in terms of strengths your framework is asset-based that emphasizes outcomes and that is a really important fundamental point when you build this framework it's included in your strategic plan as well three and that

105goal really defines what equity and access for all means and provides a roadmap for the district strategically and another strength we wanted to highlight is in the midst of everything else that has happened your district took the time to develop the social emotional ethical learning and implemented at all levels so it wasn't just the development of but the implementation of and that has had a strong impact and it showed across groups we spoke with was referenced as a source of strength the foundational work um that was done within the framework really provided a common language and a working and then evolving knowledge of the concepts of dignity and belonging so as we talked across groups people referenced not only the framework but the language that was used uh many groups said that they elected to

106do the book set from uh crown apple and they talked about what belonging and dignity meant and they had a working definition of that so there is a lot of common language across stakeholder groups that is brought to the team so their strengths are important in this priority area just thinking about the needs so there's a complexity to this work and the way that your plan is written when you talk about educational equity and that's a distinction compared to perhaps some other frameworks we look at it really thinks about you know educational equity and then spirit influences so when you are looking at the work and it's a complex task how do we make sure that we define educational equity and that we are looking at our spirit of influence and we did have some

107findings here that really drill down into that that could be explored further the first relates to academic purpose so thinking about as you move forward building systems and structures to articulate what the academic purpose for the actions that you have taken and are going to proceed to take because at the heart of this work on educational equity it's really making sure that we are identifying what are the skills and standards that we are looking to have our students grow in because we are an advanced institution so that's that's one area um the second is what um smith talked about in the research and why we brought it forward moving from some of us in the work to all of us work and i think that the findings that that we discovered and the trends that

108emerged from here where that the staff recognizes that there is a very clear commitment it's been articulated communicated people can talk about it they are interested in as a next step of planning um an articulation of what are the actions and really drilling down into and they're more interested in what's my role what's my responsibility how do we make sure everybody is held to sort of a common set of action steps so that there's some consistency across how we implement the work now um there's a perception and i know that this has been talked about before so this would be new but we did find it across our groups that the work can be compartmentalized or owned by some of the groups that are at the forefront of the work the early adopters the somehow

109in the work that would be your building teams district teams and your fair teams there is a desire and a finding section that there is interest in figuring out how all and the work and that can really come down to stating those actions that are going to be implemented and understanding within roles and responsibilities what that will look like that will not be a quick chance so that is not to infer that that should be like a next step but as you continue in the next stage of strategic planning building that out will be important going into priority area two beyond holidays and heroes um so this really explores there have been there's been a lot of work done in the last few years to think about how do we honor how do we represent

110how do we celebrate voices um and as that's been done thinking about expanding the knowledge base of those that are facilitating that whether you mean the faculty your staff your administration community participation and making sure that unique perspectives are shared so this part of exams extent to which that has happened and also has that impact that students ability to view events concepts and facts through different lenses i'm not seeing them as a set of activities but really having it change their understanding so that's what this area examines so under priority area two um there as we looked at where the strengths are there has absolutely been an increase attention on um and and even by comments particularly by students they talked about how much they have been impacted by learning about experiences of highlight diversity

111but that happens for them that it is a value to them and they were able to cite numerous examples of things that they might not have thought about experienced or had reference points for there's also been an increased focus on relationships social and emotional growth and connection some of the data points around that as we look at that um definitely the c curriculum was talked about a lot but there's conversation happening in schools about longing and dignity even though the data youtube survey said here's where we need to grow there's an understanding of and recognition of that this is a value in the district so that is the strength they came through in terms of needs we redeemed this and talked about this in terms of clarity and intentionality so celebrate and represent you're there

112and see that in strengths educate and thinking about what that looks like and that ties back to against some of those action steps but particularly in this category thinking about equity activities okay so we have them how do we now tie them beyond just standalone so that they are a part of embedded and learning experiences and tied to skills and standards because that can really deepen the world increasing the knowledge about how to integrate inclusive practices beyond those standalone events so having some thought and consideration was distributedly planned i think inclusive practices are really centered around this in a large part so it's moving beyond that i'm thinking strategically about what that'll look like and there was some interesting comments and input around programming itself and thinking about how can students become more conversant as

113a result of this work particularly around challenging topics that quite frankly many adults find it hard to be conversant around right so some of the examples that were given intellectual ability gender identity race religion language some of these topics so we're celebrating we're representing but then we're educating about how to become global citizens for the world that our students and children are going to live in so that was clarity and intentionality and the second part related to and there's often conversations as as schools move and dismiss the charts you know there is the new fun and celebration but then there's conversation about well how do we make these decisions what gets highlighted what doesn't get highlighted what we're sensitive to and then how we communicate about that so the findings here were really to identify

114across buildings variations of practices because there are variations some of that you know is the culture of the building it's sort of traditions that happen and it's not to say that there everything needs to be the same because i think that's not always served us well in terms of our work in the cast on the subject but it's thinking about articulating kind of what our intention is as we select and do things um how it fits into the culture of this school system and being very transparent about how decisions are made um part of that is is really to think about how is this helping students to learn about diversity and then if we are very purposeful and we do articulate it really provides parents and families and children opportunities to think about on participation

115or not participating and should a family choose not to participate in something what other meaningful alternatives are there so it's not an outbound system so that's really around that finding for consideration for the future the third priority is collective agency what we looked at here on so much of the work since 2018 has been how do we build capacity so we were examining the multitude of efforts and how that increased advocacy by individuals groups and schools and how that started to travel less to be an organizational change and systemic change i'm going to pause on this one before i go further though and i know we keep saying it but we have to think about the fact of the 18 months 20 months that we're lost in terms of building systems internally because we had

116very important things to focus on related to the pandemics so some of the findings were definitely [Music] multiple examples given particularly by families in the community and parents and students where district personnel are living the mission vision so there were stories that this year about you know i was needed a district i really wasn't sure how this was going to fit and the superintendent and the principal both reached out to me have conversations very personalized responses to your stakeholders that showed that care for students and families is extremely strong more examples than me may typically the second strength is there's definitely been increased involvement of groups at all levels and that just speaks for itself in terms of the work that's already been done and there have been a variety of strategies to increase agency

117when you look at the report from belonging dignity and support to strategic plan there's a whole set of activities listed really going right up from the start of covet ways that students were involved in leadership academics they attended trainings that were done things that were built groups that were contacted and collaborated with that has happened so those are all of the strengths of my collective agency the needs are going to complement some of the other areas but i think the needs in this section are going to perhaps provide some context for the youth truth survey this section we really looked um at the data here and and thought about the experiences of students and we did deeper some of those questions you said like looking at why that's low or why that's fine so i'm

118going to talk a little bit about that and this comes down to consistency so dignity and belonging are important so that all students experience it but there are groups that review true survey and through our research in the buildings identify areas that they want to make sure are are highlighted as part of this report and we want to make sure in doing this because that's what we've been interested in lgbtq students the theme of non-binary or transgender students is significant from staff and students when asked about how students struggle with belonging now there's two parts to this the first part is students in a lot of cases characterize the school is very accepting in particular ways there are posters there's space stickers there is a very transparent effort to say you go wrong and that's

119important to students to see that in their environment there's policy for gender language and identity which isn't always the case in districts so there was definitely acknowledgement the work has created an affirming environment and that was the intent the opportunity for change within this recommendation really came down to and stamped standpoints for this themselves the ability to understand best practices at classroom and community level to make sure that they get the tools and the training are we doing gender neutral practices effectively are we supporting students who change their names their pronouns and they are but if there is a need to explore that further for the practitioners who are on the ground engaging with students so that they make sure students are without exception there's a higher degree so that was the finding that came

120up from staff and from students and that was true at the elementary middle school levels as well too not just high school in terms of staff science to make sure that they are doing that students express strong opinions that fernands and gender identity is important for their sense of belonging and consistency came up in that finding so that's the sort of the first answer and another area that's been talked about i think as a result of all the work you're doing for non-binary and transgender students is how are we treating traditional gender ones is that impacting the way we do academic placement in terms of objectives for uh for women for men for boys for girls and discipline adjusted all the things that may be more traditional in terms of gender or we're paying attention

121to how we do that how we communicate that and how we view that so that came up in a lot of the data that we collected the second piece race and ethnicity so there was a feeling across the state of this group so there's been progress in understanding students with experiences of outreach and they talked a lot about that the conversations they've had and the progress that's been made they talked about a continued and intentional focus to understand why students may feel less belonging despite that work that's been done they were concerned from the staff perspective student race and microaggressions deficit language and placement and advanced level courses or areas that they would like to explore further as part of their work moving forward there's a lot of data in youtube survey that could also

122be supportive but those are sort of the general things that came up in our work with stan as you saw in mr harrison just presented some students who identify as a person of color were less likely to feel comfortable talking about their race or intensity when talking to adults or other students in some cases as about non-christian religious states particularly around holidays and other related religious and cultural practices so there were instances of teachers who were curious about students religious dietary restrictions during lunches or events and interested in exploring more of that and that came out sort of as a theme and anything that we're talking about has come up across groups and across events socioeconomic status was a piece that came up and there were examples given where support by the district was provided

123some really nice examples so there's an awareness and empathy for this the the need that emerged were more systemic things in place thinking about for career costs of an issue for helping all to understand challenges around socioeconomic status there's a perception that for students that may be a hidden element that that might not be something they feel comfortable talking about or that people are talking about enough english language learners need for translation services and academic supports and we are seeing across the county this is an extremely increased need of data especially with learning learners reported english learners recorded positive experiences related to their peers but a desire to connect more with adults the last piece here is special education there was an appreciation because there's more inclusivity for special education students and events one example

124was the sensory hour carnival but there were suggestions that increasing education for peers on supports for students and learning needs as well as strategies to take that disabled sensory hour and big debit across school and district-wide events inclusion of all staff groups in the school community was a last piece in this priority area and this related to the equity work in particular that it's been really focused on professional standards being about educational equity classrooms the answer was to think about bringing more people to the table to have relationships with students um fostering connection to support belonging so this priority area and the section and youth truth really looked at how they feel about belonging so this particular area looked at positive relationships positive care culture engagement mental health and how you're including community members so

125our findings here definitely strengthen the positive relationship with teachers and school staff that was communicated students can identify adults at school who can help them during the time of meeting that's a protective factor identified at least one adult belonging with peer groups this is truth was extremely high that was corroborated in our activities and our qualitative events and resilience of students was a strength within the survey and as they reported being able to manage health issues themselves the needs were for adults to think about furthering and this would be part of academic experiences but knowing students experiences outside of school and outside of academics so students feel adults really help me with academics but they may not understand everything about the outside school making sure they can identify resources for mental health support belonging to

126the groups that i just talked about thinking about that versus the overall perception of belonging so really drawing down into groups and gender norms would be a need to think about supporting connection now we're going to move into the recommendations section and this really kind of takes all the priority all right so our report includes uh five overarching recommendations to guide your media school district and its continued strategic planning um i do want to say that the district has already demonstrated as you've heard us say before an exceptional long-term commitment to achieving student belonging for the purpose of academic and behavioral success um the model through this through the years the model at road street has had a variety of iterations and these recommendations that you're about to hear are designed to really create the

127next level of work that's going to support continued success the first recommendation is to continue to shift theory into action um it would be to continue to take the theory structures and the objectives that have already been set and determine what action steps are really needed to implement these objectives into every pocket of the district um and especially doing that through the lens of consistency and fidelity of practice um and also to consider the difference between diversity and inclusion efforts um the common chronicle book talks about this um but diversity fails to articulate what vision you would like to work towards um whereas inclusion is really the asset based what you're doing um so inclusion means that we agree that we will commit to changing our culture to ensure that people feel that they belong

128not in spite of their differences but because of that our second recommendation is to establish feedback loops mechanisms to address needs in real time for students the successes are evident and we had um so many great strengths that we saw in the district and included in the report um it's also important to note that this work is iterative and constantly evolving um and constantly growing so at times there will be instances when individuals may not feel honored because of a particular experience and so one topic that came up throughout the program review is to establish more authentic means of dialogue for when issues do arise um and also for when the issues do a rise focus groups suggested a way to provide meaningful training and feedback that is personalized to them um also uh it

129is important to include student voice in this um not just to collect student voice and data um but to unders make sure that students understand um any unique way uh how their feedback is being implemented or considered in district decision making um so when there is a survey what from the students made a difference and if that feedback is not considered why not um for our next recommendation provide prioritize what to do versus what not to do um whatever our theme was that practitioners approach this work from the view of avoiding harm so we know that we shouldn't use um this pronoun when speaking with a student we know that we are not supposed to do this but we are not always here at what we should do instead um and so for example one

130may not always know what terminology and language to use but not how to teach students about these critical topics in the classroom effectively um and there's also a perception across stakeholder groups that some are less comfortable and this speaks to a need for more time for staff to develop and to train on schools to be very effective in the classroom environment with recommendations and this goes back to what we talked about before which is all earn the work so this relates to systemic traction as we said in the earlier priority area really establishing non-negotiables to move forward and then giving explicit permission to do the work and and really being clear about and at a district level this is what we're moving forward with this is what you're going to see our teams do this

131is why they're doing it this is how it connects to academic skills and standards and we want to make sure that we support people in doing the work um i think that having a way to assess and we're using the accountability mechanism here about systems not people we want to make sure that if we decide on that negative on action steps how are we measuring that so if you take the youtube survey and you come up with a set of steps how are we doing that in an ongoing meaningful way so that as time goes on all are taking part and including groups who may not have participated in the current structures the last piece relates to the educational equity umbrella that we talked about and it's really about thinking how are we going to

132make the decision to formally integrate relevant resources and materials in a very intentional way and not have it be related to some of those standalone pieces so this really speaks to the teaching and learning the academic side so we know that representing students experiences honors the dignity as the work continues defining the goals within the academic framework analyzing k-12 curriculum and i know actually from our work with this district that that has already started to be a part of these processes and planned for uh well before the closure but continues to have plans in place so as that continues thinking about page 12 through the lens of equity is a starting point but then going to your skills and standards and identifying where your connections are systems driven approach can really bring curriculum topics to

133the forefront and the training teachers and the effective use of so that they're doing it in culturally competent ways so that they understand not just the purpose but how to connect it to students progress and growth over time and that way your delivery of content is not compromised the last piece i would say is um there's a framework we use for example universal design it relates to access so if you do take this curricular approach to making sure that you're analyzing it that's just what we think will work for some but taking this further how do we make sure that all can access that it's appropriate that it's multifaceted enough that we're thinking about all learners within the classroom udl is actually typically for special education but we apply some of this work as well

134when you're going to work with standards and skills and marry that to what you're going to use to deliver the work are you really doing that examination and that is our latest recommendation one final comment part of the work that we're doing here and it really speaks to the sense of connection and belonging and that we've started to work with mr dougherty mr harrison on is around middle school and high school connection and sense of belonging from the students perspective of what's really happening thinking about how to effectively build community and also resolve conflicts when they are in the realm of restorative practices so part of the work that we came on to do this work that we're going to continue to work on is thinking about how the restorative practices framework can help to

135deal with some of the things that are in all of this data and bring student voice to the table but also then have adults working with students to get underneath some of these dynamics and resolve these conflicts effectively so i just wanted to make sure you included that as well more to come on that but related a lot of what we've talked about and joyce before we turn it over because can you help me go through the last few slides for me all right um so there are a few action steps that we're going to take now and we have been taking now so i wanted to make sure that i articulate that to everyone but we also know that this is you know long slow work at times right it feels really slow sometimes

136but too slow um too many of us but there are a few things that we're doing now so first of all i want to mention that um you know dr coonrat's going to come up here after we're finished and talk about the process for comprehensive planning again so when we start this work and i remember it like it was yesterday the um the board meeting was one of my first board meetings when we put equity as one of our topics for the comprehensive plan well what i've learned and i learned probably just a couple months after that was that it's pretty typical when you're starting the work but really what you want to get to is not equity as a separate topic but making sure it's embedded in everything you do so um that's one

137of the things that we want to do moving forward in the very near future here um and again um you know reoccurring theme with much of this is theory to practice right like we know what we want to do but actually how to do that is that's really where the rubber meets the road and that's going to be the challenge moving forward there's going to be hard decisions some really tough conversations to make but we really have to come up with some clear criteria and and um you know inclusive bodies to to help us um decide on some you know whether they're curricular resources board policies or whatever those things are um but it was clear we knew this and it was clear through this review that uh we need to continue to articulate how

138to do research right on a very practical level um next one is um we would like to create an advisory board um comprised of various stakeholders to me quarterly to review progress around these types of goals i mean this to me um speaks of using our resources in the community right our who we are um and it's also this notion that we talked about before of internal accountability right we don't need the state to tell us right and sometimes we don't need anyone outside but we need each other to hold each other accountable right this is what we said we're going to do this is how we're going to do it and we said we know that we need to continue to check in with people on a more regular basis to see how things

139are going like on the ground so that's something that we'd like to start all right and um and there's a few things happening right now as you know there's curriculum development happening um we are using equity tools to examine um our curriculum documents and we will be having people review those documents right now we are very much focused on k-12 math like in this moment but you know in it is ongoing work from one curricular area to the next so that will be ongoing for the next few years we are prepared we have prepared a workshop on dignity and [Music] it's very important to me personally like i mean we say the word dignity but it's really important that we have an actual working definition of that word so that we all know what it

140means when we say it and we've really kind of drawn out the work of donna hicks she has operationalized the work herself through identifying these 10 elements of dignity well the only way to really know it is to experience it and so we've developed this workshop that we are going to do with community members parents teachers and students um it's planned for the first one is planned for march 22nd we're going to do a kind of a dress rehearsal with some of our staff internally and work out some of the kinks then we're going to do this with the community so we're really excited about it again it's one of those things like we haven't done it before but i'm feeling very confident that people will come out of that session with an understanding of

141what we mean when we say dignity and a better understanding of um how to honor dignity and how we constantly violate dignity without even knowing it right so it's um sorry i just want to make sure i'm clear that is the march 22nd that's the one that's open to the like you said or no well we have we only have so many seats because we only have so many people that can facilitate the workshop so we're going to have 60 participants for this one um mr harrison is sending out some invites to particular people and you know we're still kind of working on those invites for this initial one i would expect that this grows and i mean i would love for every student teacher and parent in this school district to have the working

142definition of dignity and have been able to experience this after we do this we will obviously have all of our resources on the website with kind of the process that we follow the questions that we ask ourselves and the concepts are really simple but they're really deep right so it's not it's not like it's not really like deep reading and hard stuff but it is um it's what really brings us all together it's literally what connects us as humans right and i think when you go through this you really realize well we really are all asking for the same things how we get there might be different so i think it sets a really nice foundation for some of the really um challenging work that's ahead and and again like when we go through that

143then we can operationalize it with you know how do we honor the dignity of everyone in our curriculum in our classroom practices and our board policies but then we know what we mean when we say so that's the purpose um well we definitely want to um we haven't talked about that yet because in the workshop itself and it does require people sharing personal stories so um i don't know for that there you go however we did talk about maybe creating another video of describing what it is and then talking through that process and we definitely want to have all the resources available for people um but i think part to that we could i mean definitely like the intro and the ending we probably could but probably for this first one um we really want

144to nail it first you know i don't know if like the first time we do this with the community it might not be like the best representation of the workshop so we're going to go through it one time and then we'll go from there and then um there are a couple professional developments that we have planned for parents and teachers understanding gender and sexuality how to talk to kids about it so we haven't quite nailed down a date but there is um someone from the dciu that will be here to do um i think two one-hour presentations for parents around this topic right now oh one two gotcha thank you okay and um and again best practices for um supporting lgbtq plus students and that would be at our may 4th in service day so

145there's a couple things that we have right there but the message was clear um from this audit that you know it has to be everyone's work and it's typical and when um joyce and i were both part of an audit team in another school district and we heard that same exact thing like the people that are part of the equity teams they feel like they're they're the only ones doing the work so we have to make sure that this is system-wide and we need to make sure that we include you know all stakeholders so um all right questions can you give me an example of how you would include equity well a lot of it's in the a lot of it's actually in the instructional practices um with how you question kids with the way

146that you deliver instruction and with the way that you group kids so that would be universal across lots of different curriculum okay so when you're focusing on that absolutely right so that so what we have up there are just the documents themselves so but in the documents um we do have to and that's part of the work from the previous slide too it's kind of create these universal standards that's kind of the use of universal design of learning of these best practices to support equity in your classrooms right and they would be universal and then some of those would be represented even in our math studies teachers communicate with students yeah and opportunity yeah obviously you know you've done a lot of work here and have a lot of data and you are talking about

147it which is which is great the one thing that stands out to me in you know looking at all the information you gather is that um the students seem to get it and i noticed from my my kids coming home how they talk about their interactions with different people different cultures they they're very acceptance of other people's gender their sexual orientation whatever they want to know about religion food music race how people you know how their culture is or what they wear in uh you know in different uh whether it be countries or just within the united states you know what what your family family believes i think where the negative perception or where any of the problems lie are really with the adults and i think the data shows that and it's where it

148comes down from whether it's the uh you know the parents or the teachers uh or what have you it's uh it's interesting i was looking at the pennsylvania equity and inclusion toolkits on the state website and one of the things that they could talk about is cultural competency and and understanding you know cultures and and and and trying to you know uh deal with that in your in your setting and the problem that i have and it relates to an individual situation as you all might know with my daughter uh with a you know cultural headwear and so forth and the the problem was you know the the teacher made a comment which went down to the students and then the students who saw the teacher then they joined in and they started heckling my

149daughter later so it was actually the actions of the adults that that were the problem in this case and i if you go through in society you'll find out that it is the older it's my generation we're the proud and it's not the kids the kids are generally accepted and when you have the principles support that and then you have comments from people in this room right now saying that they are not going to look at religious or cultural wear or headwear on a general base going to be on a single basis each individual case be looked at and be determined by that everyone here instead of trying to do what the kids do and that's really make yourself aware of what all the the cultural or some of the different practices of for instance

150black hair is treated differently than white hair you need to have a head wrap there's a lot of extra care finding out what that is and i find this the students they know we don't know and and members from the school board shouldn't make comments that we're not going to look at that we're going to look that on individual basis we're not going to educate ourselves and essentially that's what you're trying to do here is educate yourself and i think the people in this room need an education on what they should be doing and they shouldn't say we're not going to discuss this at the fairground meeting okay and that's the message that is my understanding that someone here sent out to the fair groups that we are not going to discuss anything about cultural

151headwear or anything like that would fare what's a purpose affair what is the purpose of even being here tonight if you're going to throw up a shield and say you know what i really don't want to talk about that because it bothers me and you know so let's talk about something else let's do some brass let's do some charts let's do some columns that's not what it's about you know and everybody in this room has to have an open mind yeah i think there's no issue with talking about the top of the cultural press at their meeting or any other meeting you can't talk about a specific student incident but i think even the topic of cultural press may be something that we want to address on a much more default level right so for

152example the high school has been reviewing their um dress code the students working on that without why don't you have a cultural awareness day whereas people bring in things from their culture whether it be it could be artwork it could be music it could be food it could be it could be anything it could be a poem it could be a writing could be a book do more on that level the kids need very little encouragement to do that it's the adults are the ones that need all the encouragement you know like i said my generation we we're the ones that need the encouragement because not everybody's accepting and when they what you're doing is the adults are pushing down their feelings on the children and the children are reacting to that they're not right

153when they react to each other they have no problem for the most part there's no real one answer for any of that but for the most part the kids they don't need to be taught all that much i mean a lot of this is good but kids aren't going to sit in groups and talk about things more than once they'll they'll go to one meeting they're not going to go to peace all the time and you have to deal with them on their level and by the same token i don't like going to these meetings either i don't know how you all do it i mean i think i think you bring up a really good point which you know we struggle with is that we have a certain um we know where our kids

154are at and we have a kind of educational philosophy but we're also in a community where not everybody's on the same page right and trying to get that conversation going and trying to get some common agreement so that people don't get their backs up really so like when we do the dignity workshop it's really to say this is what we're talking about and how can you argue with that right how can you argue with this core concept of dignity it's what everybody wants um and it's trying to bring our whole community along with that um so that not only is the work supported school but it's also supported when children yeah but i would guarantee you that 75 of the people in our community don't know what goes on in these meetings right absolutely true

155and that's that's why that's that communication piece and that feedback piece and that's why we said um like bill and i did a little um video to try to talk about the equity work of last year and we talked about you know we really need because then people can watch and kind of hear that conversation but there also needs to be one now about the dignity piece it needs to be one about the seb so when dr mundy was talking about kind of educating kids um to be able to converse with each other when i hear that i think about this domain of the sed curriculum which is about global engagement now that that domain is developmentally taught across elementary middle and high school with the end being pretty sophisticated skills and having kids be

156able to converse and understand what it means to be globally engaged lots of different you know with lots of different voices um and the interweaving of that suv work with the equity work that's really the complexity of doing it yeah kids are simple they don't want complexity they want they want to you have to deal with them on their level and they're you know we're the ones i still say that we're the ones that are interfering with how how you know they want to uh they want to interact with each other and and look i'll be i'll be honest i i still have a problem with the way my daughter's situation was handled i don't think it was resolved um and you know maybe i need to come to more of these meetings but to

157me we can talk about all this but until there's some real progress in how our perception is of of how we should treat our students and what and let them be that then you know they're they're still going to have a teacher holler at a kid and and they're going to have three kids run behind them and tease them because they were holiday um and that that that part of it has to change yeah i agree with you i agree with you yeah i would just like to add to that too the last four or five years in our country um things that people would never say things that people consider socially unacceptable to say um that changed significantly and there's a lot more hate speech that's considered really acceptable in our society and the

158older the kids get the more they hear it the more they see it so i agree with you adults are a lot of a problem not that there were problems beforehand but certainly um the tone of speech in our country has changed the last five years and i i'm stunned by what people think it's acceptable to to say and faithfulness um okay just be loud um it was just that this idea that i mean this this stuff is hard and i think our administration that you guys understand it because not everybody's going to be on the same page and um there are difficult conversations that are being had and will be had and um it's just it's important for people to sort of listen to one another and because a lot of times when you're

159dealing with this work people feel like they can't say something or shouldn't say something and like the part about the the workshops i can understand why they're not going to be taped right because you want people to be able to come and be their authentic selves and so there's a difficulty in it because i don't want to see that on video i don't know these people they're sharing like this but that's the idea that when we come together and we talk about it and we're honest and understand that you know people people are people and as long as we keep having these conversations then we can you know move forward that's why you know seeing all of this all the work that's going into it to move to more action because there has been action

160more action is so key and i just have to say this because i i mean people in these we see 2018 as the starting and we know why it started because of dr d marino right that's when she came aboard were you the but you were doing stuff before you became superintendent but when you see all of this and you were interrupted because of coping um this is your leadership and your direction right that they're bringing us to a point where other school districts are not even close right they're going to wish they were us not to say we finished anything um and clearly you know we haven't but that just struck me in 2018 and how far we have come and i just envisioned how far we can go now that you know covet

161where sort of the cloud is lifting a little bit uh for us and i think it points to the complexity of the work right because just think in we are in 2022 and covet certainly shifted our attention a lot but when you start the work you start at this very kind of surface level and the more that you do it the more that you understand how multi-layered it is and to try to build that into an educational program in terms of philosophy practice policy program there's so much to do and any and you have an organization of 4 000 kids at least 8 000 parents 800 employees trying to get this big ship to kind of understand where we're going and to be able to do it well so a lot of the of the

162feedback we heard from the staff in particular was well we think we can do this but is this what we're supposed to be doing you can hear this kind of lack of clarity well i want to do this but if i do this and someone gets mad at me because this is what i do i'm teaching children are you going to support me it's that complexity um and i think what what was harder here in particular is that when the curriculum department got decimated all of that curriculum work wasn't done so now we're trying to do all the correcting work which is the ubd writing and feeding in all these resources well in some ways this is a great time to do it why because now we can think about evaluating those resources through this

163this lens of diversity and equity and inclusion i think for me the inclusion piece was already there because i came from a special ed i came from this progression of inclusion where in the beginning it was well the children are in the building and that's what it was meant and then suddenly they were in the classroom and we used to call it mainstream but they weren't really included and so to go from there to where kids are meaningfully participating in a regular classroom that's a huge amount of work but i think we do an amazing job here of doing that we brought all of our kids backwards out of district placements who were um children with pretty challenging and significant needs and we built this beautiful program right so we know we can do it

164but the complexity of doing that and building the capacity for that takes time and we lost a lot of time you know professional development there weren't any of those conversations happening um so i love to see all this work it's something i've been wanting to see for a really long time and i think just in the way that we get proven emails and all the updates around polar protocol and masking pushing this out to the community honestly at whatever point you are because even over a period of time if you have just gotten this much done but you've gotten that much done share with the community because then at least we know something's happening put it out there right share give updates periodic updates and put as much emphasis on equity inclusion as everything the

165furniture the new furniture the the new curriculum put just as much emphasis in terms of communicating that to the community because then they know that that that's part of them knowing this work is value the other really important piece to this work is transparency and that is something i am really struggling with even as i i listen to the reports and the survey data i while i was here i checked i reached out to five black families in this district all of whom did not complete the youtube survey and did not complete a participate in one of the focus groups so that right there is an issue because i can't trust what i see i don't know who's who's responding to these surveys i know the families i talk to who don't feel like they're

166a part of it it doesn't just count the work you're doing so no one's taking away from what you are doing but the missing pieces are really really important and what what i struggle with and having worked with this district for for quite some time and also doing this work every day is that when there's parent pushback people don't like that and that is a huge part of this work if parents speak parents should not be afraid to speak up because people are not going to like what they have to say or it seems like um we are disrespecting the work this work is about humility this work is about taking a step back and seeing what what you know and not just looking at what we're doing but looking at what we're not doing

167and when that is pointed out and the response is aggressive or it's um falling on on ears that that are not hearing it's really disappointing it's really disconcerting and it makes it hard to have trust as a parent and i want to know that when my children walk through these doors if something happens to them that i can trust all the way up to the top that that is not acceptable and i don't believe that so with all of this um amazing work it has to be coupled with this other important piece listen to my words listen to the words of other parents whose kids don't feel like they're part of it or whose families why have those families not participated in that survey why we've got to get to the heart of that and

168i am going to address that because eleanor i sent you a huge email to which i got no response about really really important topics and that right there to me indicates where this work is lacking when you get i do this work i want people to criticize me i want people to tell me where i'm making mistakes because that's when i can improve when there's disequilibrium you'll grow but if everybody's always saying oh this is great work this is great work then you often can stay stagnant and that is my concern that yes this is great but for the pieces that are not are we really willing to be uncomfortable are we really willing to hear when we falter or we don't apologize in the right way or we don't provide a caring tone to

169a family who's been extremely harmed or to a person who's been harmed i've been harmed what are we doing with that who is checking one another if i'm at my job and i make a mistake all my colleagues know they can come to me and tell me i made a mistake and in addition to that i model for people when i make a mistake how to properly repair the harm that has to happen here and it's not just me there are multiple parents who feel this way i speak to a lot of people in this community that piece has to be fixed and i'm willing to work with people who can listen and hear but i'm really it's really really hard to work when there is a wall up and this work takes heart you've

170got to put your wall down you've got to be willing to be uncomfortable you've got to be willing to be wrong you've got to be willing to say i am so sorry i hurt you you've got to respond to emails even if you don't like the content because we are the stakeholders we're the ones here we're paying the taxes we're at the meeting and i'm a parent that doesn't complain i do i i try to problem solve all the time but when it's my time to speak up i'm gonna speak up and i don't want to be shunned and pushed aside because i'm speaking up for what is right because i know that's going to make a difference from the kindergartners all the way up to the 12th graders to make a difference in this

171next part of our generation criticism should be well received especially presented with a solution what are we doing about that and i really really want to know i don't want it to just okay it's nothing we're just going to go out about our day you had people pouring at their hearts at that last board meeting and there was no response i could not sit at a board meeting like that and then the next day see and hear nothing that is the heart that's the authentic work we can go through all the workshops on the books and all of that the authentic work is getting to the heart of people when i deal with parents at my workplace i don't agree with everything they say no way sometimes they're saying the craziest things to me but

172you know what i do by the time they're done with me they feel hurt no matter whether or not they're regardless of whether they're right or wrong they feel heard they feel loved they feel cared for that is important i want to be in the school district whether i've done a lot of work or not and feel loved heard and cared for if i say i don't feel my black children are safe here and no one responds what are we doing about that in addition to all this great work what are we doing about that i really mean it so i appreciate you saying everything kelly um there was a lot there and so i do want to make sure that you know we take the time to address those concerns i'm also mindful too

173that you know some of it feels also i'm always mindful as well because obviously individual nature also um judging also that we couldn't talk about as well legislated involving a particular student right so we have to be mindful of privacy as well i can't answer to an unanswered email so i'll since that wasn't directed to me would you mind trying to put my for just a second there thank you um but what i i will say is this um you know legislative is always a tricky situation from that perspective because we aren't able to respond at the time um i do apologize uh if that was perceived as a lack of caring um that's i'm sorry for that and i'm sorry people left feeling that the board was not carrying in that respect um that

174kid wanted that quote quite honestly of the legislative meeting it's incredibly important that every child every family member every community member we feel belonging and feel safety and and that's paramount right and if somebody doesn't then then we we have to recognize that and we have to do better and we have to make sure that we take concrete actions so that children all children truly do feel safe and welcomed and valued not just tolerated value you know that is really important and we dropped the ball on that one i i'm sorry for that you know that is the best thing i can say really at this time i'm more than happy to sit down with you or with any community member um it is tricky as a board member right as far as what we

175can say about certain situations at different times depending on the topic or individual personnel matter but we're always here to listen and and that's important and we're always here to try to serve our community and as you say you know so we don't we are also residents taxpayers um parents grandparents everything in this as well and so by being humans we don't always agree on every little thing but we love our community and we truly value the children in this district and the families and if there's an area that we have fallen short it's important for us to sit down and listen and be more than happy to talk about that with you and see how we can do better because that is something that is it's essential um it's absolutely essential for us to

176be able to move forward well you know i agree with that and i understand your limitations but it's east also you know you can address things in generalities without being specific uh in in the school setting and just say you know there's weren't these certain things we're not going to tolerate or uh you know there are certain things that we were going to be accepting of and we're going to try and do so you can there there are some ways around that you can do in the school setting to address some of these situations and i think that you know that's really something that should be more you know should be explored absolutely and i do want to say it does get a little bit tricky right as far as in the school setting that

177tends to be how it is divided right school boards tend to oversee policy sky-high overview admin has to handle the day-to-day operations um it's a team it's a partnership we work together but i'm just saying that that's part of it as well is for us to make sure that we work well together to sort of you know do this kind of important work and that we help make sure they're in the school setting that you know that kind of messages is pushed forward um so that does make it a little bit tricky i know sometimes it can be very frustrating when individuals um right to do of course at all school they come board meeting you know different meetings can address certain types of things quite honestly i mean it's not always the most um

178satisfying right because when you come to legislative uh you have three minutes or five minutes depending on the situation and then that's it um it's not the time and you'll find the center of the school boards as well or there's a back and forth dialogue but beyond that as far as having the chance to sit down um you know we are always available having the chance to um your talk with the school individual school setting i know admin is often you know very keen and well certainly your board takes a very seriously european consultation um i'll just try as well so um so so anyway there is that that disconnect that can make it a little bit tricky but it's something we're we're truly committed to and um it's something that i know as fellow

179board members and admin we've spent it it means a lot to us it's something that's wonderful we joined the board is to try to help our families yes susan thanks for that response i want to say that um [Music] actions speak louder than words right and so when we when we see that and feel that then we will i will definitely be the first one to say i feel that and see that if you can't discuss thing and again we're talking about this situation i have other situations as well right this is not the only one sending an email or reaching out to a parent goes a really long way after a board meeting like that and you had a variety of issues but one issue was particularly centered reaching out to this family or

180reaching out to people who have poured out their hearts is just one way that somebody on the board or somebody in administration can show we love you we care for you we're sorry this happening so everyone can say we care we love we care about this work it actually comes out in the actions right so when my son says oh mom we have career day today at the middle school and i'm like oh great what did you say and he lists all all the people and there's not one person of color not one that is an intentional thing you've got to go seek out in the community and say where are the black owned businesses where are the bypass businesses where the lgbt cube is you've got to be intentionally about that otherwise you have

181an entire white panel of career people and now the children of color are like where are the people that mirror me and the white children don't have any window into seeing successful black people successful entrepreneurs that are plentiful in the media community there's a whole history of black his uh black history and media there's a brand new heritage park in me do the kids know about this right so when we have i love christmas music i'm a christian woman but when i go to a concert and there's 15 i mean german but eight christmas songs two you know jewish songs it's pretty much a christmas song right and and i'm like here i don't know if everyone knows there's 29 holidays in the month of december not that we can represent every holiday but like

182what are we doing to bring in everybody's bringing something that represents everyone and and i i just want to say this because when you are not of color you don't have to think about it when you are not in the minority you don't have to think about it so you are either going to think about it because you really really care about it or you're going to be you're going to think about it because someone in your life or you've been unpacked in some way and that's why i always ask i always ask white people how many people of color are your friends how many people of color sit down at your dinner table how many people of color do you travel with because those are the life experiences right then you're going to know

183about my all of my plenty of boyfriends i tons they all know about my hair they all know about my my coat switching they all know about uh my husband's family use from ghana west africa and that my kids have day names that each represent the day of the week because that's part of the beginning they know that because they have people in their lives to have that experience but should we either have to seek that out or you have to live it or you have to just genuinely care about it and that's what i cannot tell is happening sometimes in this community when things go down a certain way so i know i didn't want to cut you up i just wanted to be able to finish that statement because i i feel so

184passionate about this work i will do this work to the day i die not just for my children for every single child for white children for black children for asian children for indigenous people who whose lands were stolen and we don't we rarely acknowledge i will do this because i love this and it's going to positively impact and make a difference for every child and every family to say i am a part of this and i belong here so if i see something that's not right i'm going to call i'm going to say it just like if i'm not doing something right i want someone to tell me so i can be better and i can be my best and i want to see us be in a space where we can have check and

185balance systems and tell each other when we're wrong and honestly apologize to people and make it right and then we can move on but we cannot move on when this there's all this slipping under the rug or lack of transparency i don't trust and lots of these parents in this issue do not trust and i want to see that change and it's possible it is possible they get a commitment and it will happen and i'm telling you anyone i know if i see it happening i will get everyone on board when i see the right work happening i spread the word i very much appreciate everything you just said kelly um i will say sorry i'm very tired um i will say that um everything can't happen at once and mistakes are made i'm sure

186mistakes are made more frequently than we care about it's not gonna happen all at once i said earlier that i was so proud of this district because they started the work earlier than our surrounding districts dr mundy supports that she knows what's going on it is going to unfortunately take more time we have 200 plus years of history it was 400 years of history in this country you know we in our community are going to solve everything at once all of this work that you're seeing though every person here don't really want to speak for my fellow board members but i'm going to everybody is here because of the work that's being done we support this 100 not everybody who would come onto this board might be of that mindset and we do hear from

187the community from those people who don't agree with this who ask a lot of questions and tell us that we're making other kids feel bad we hear that so i would just ask for please tell tell us when we get things wrong yes absolutely but also give some breaks and understand that it's not going to be overnight we're just not going to get it overnight there are people on this board that you don't even know are part of minority groups or have relatives who are in minority groups this work is deeply personal i think to to many of us if not all of us so i would i would just ask that also i do agree there's a disconnect um you know and a lot of misunderstanding unfortunately about kind of what the board says

188and how we get involved in replying or not replying honestly you know we're not always given information of the students involved right there there are some things we might not know because that's you know we shouldn't be privy to those things until it raises rises to a certain level um so so sometimes that might might be the reason um but in talking to us and asking us questions you know maybe we can do better at getting to an understanding so that you realize when we're not answering why maybe why um i will stop now yeah i would like to i would want to respond to that really quickly and like i said when i'm speaking of the the voids i'm not just counting the work that's been done so i want to be really clear

189with that and i also want to share that i i started fair single-handedly by myself seven years ago and so i've been on this journey with with many people for seven years right so i know it's not going to happen i i acknowledge that but there are some things that are obvious that cannot happen let me just finish there are some things that are obvious and tone and all those things that cannot happen if you want people to feel included and feel cared for and loved i'm not speaking to you i'm speaking about a very specific issue and i still haven't heard from eleanor and why i haven't gotten response from my email but that's what i'm talking about i think when we i think when i'm speaking i don't want it to feel like

190it's coming to every single person i'm speaking in generalities and when i say that i'm saying that very specifically i'm not going to respond to an email that starts with calling me a white supremacist because i'm white what you're repeating to say that's not an email i said your actions were supporting and again if you know this work you know this work and that's what i'm saying do you see that i'm not going to respond to an email so that right there that right there i didn't call you white said that your supremacy and your actions were supporting white supremacists that's what i said it's not me i think we need to it's another thing that maybe having a conversation uh privately could help because we don't want to i don't think i'm not gonna

191i'm not gonna get a response i'm sorry sure i've listened to you i just think that's something that maybe um bringing that up now it's not going to be very productive because it sounds like it's an issue that you have to deal with uh privately um hopefully in general we want to advance these issues for everyone and i know you know people there are that that's an issue that's important to you and privately is probably the best way to deal with it right instead of bringing it to this level because that was an interaction and both of you can you can go back and forth about what you meant to say and people who know me no i don't like you right this board knows i don't like emails you send me two pages and

192stuff right call me or talk to me um because that works better because i think you're sometimes you know what you say is taken in a way that you didn't mean it and that happens i mean when you think about this work it happens so being able to have an open dialogue will be helpful and i do want to echo what you said about this board and the commitment to this work i mean i see it i was on the board there is a difference there is a different level of commitment and interest and people take it personally and want to get it right and when we get it wrong you know we want to do better right um so i think that's important for the for the community to hear for the community to

193know um and we want to listen to everyone because not everyone's on board with this they really aren't um but their voices matter too in terms of what they're saying and how uh those students are feeling because it's so complicated um and you want to get it right all the time and you know you won't um and we just have to just like the administration has done every day you just keep you keep doing it and it's not saying that people can't question or challenge etc um that's gonna happen it's gonna happen on all levels and all groups of people people who agree with the work people who don't agree before um that's just the reality because this is a diverse school district versus others but it's the first people have different political views etc

194and you know they all matter and i think it's important we try we try to keep trying when you get knocked down and just stuff that gun does it all and you know say okay let's let's start again let's figure out where we need to do better yeah i think there's um we sit there as we are completely stone-faced but inside many of us are wanting to jump out of our chairs but unfortunately we're bound by these rules and at the same time those rules make us seem very uncaring when people come and pour our hearts out and so maybe as for we can figure out some other way to make it look like we don't seem like we are not listening not hearing and don't care because i think that's really important and it's

195feedback we've gotten over and over again so somehow within the boundaries of what we're allowed to do we should be able to show that we do hear people that we do you know are paying attention we do read everything like that everybody else board reads every single email we get and there's gotta be that there's gotta be something that we can do that's better than what we're doing right now in terms of expressing that i i appreciate you guys one response i appreciate that because then again that's solution oriented and that's moving in the right direction i'm going to respond to el more again and i'm going to just say this one i'm going to say this one last thing because i understand this this is about the issue no no i understand i just

196want to say understand that people want things to be to be private but they they can't always work out that way and when i just want to know what the check and down systems are when a parent brings up concern and there's no response and that when we're okay with that okay so i am bringing that up because i would like to hear an answer it doesn't have to be tonight but i would like to hear an answer as to how a parent can email a superintendent all that was in an email several points which was only one was brought up several were brought up in the email but only one was addressed how we are okay with that not being addressed so we don't have to discuss that tonight but i would like an

197answer as to why that is okay and or i would like a response to my email okay um sorry keep hearing like nevermind all right uh we can certainly respond um as far as the difference between the board and check and balance the board and administration i'll be happy to do that offline i am just mindful that it is almost 10 o'clock at night and we're in the midst of a board meeting and we have um more things to cover that will sort of encompass the entire district beyond one which one issue is there anything else dr mundy or you would like to share with us thank you so very much yeah i would just like to thank um dr monday and back to smith again um for your work and i'm really looking forward

198to our continued partnership so thank you thank you first of all the 22 calendar you'll see that on the legislative agenda we saw it last month and we'll vote on it this month so just a heads up on that one dr coonrock's going to come up just to give you a little heads up about the comprehensive plan he is all things comprehensive plan okay and then that will be the end of our good evening um late night um uh so just as we uh mentioned at the um meeting last month uh converse plan is coming up is due in august to the state um at one point we'll be or sooner i'm going to be making appointments to the steering committee state regulations basically safe there needs to be certain members of the steering committee

199that are appointed by the board so there are parents of children attending the school um that are appointed by the board local business representatives that are appointed by the board and community representatives that are also appointed by the group so i'm just going to letting you know this is going to something's coming up and will be talking with you and then also presenting on the names to be approved by the board on a future date um the other thing to mention with the comprehensive plan um very quickly when you look at the comprehensive plan in the regulations it's actually made up of five plans um and the state put them all together instead of having them as it had been done 10 years ago being submitted in five different emails five different locations submitted plans

200many of them that were redundant with at least parts of their information one of those is a special ed plan and that's something that's done somewhat separately and it's turned into different times here hi again um so as i mentioned before special education plan is also due but it is on a different timeline um and the thing to understand about the special ed plan in terms of this go around is that this is really still a delay from the plan that was due in 2020. so when we developed the plan it's really going to be a summary of what we've done over 20 28 and 22 and then what we will do 22-23 and then we'll be back here again next year to do a plan for 23 to 26. um and so that timeline

201brings us to board presentation in may um our plan is actually due july 30th but because we don't have a july meeting we need to present it that may committee so it can sit in public view for 28 days and then it can be approved at the june legislative meeting thank you all right thank you very much that's it for education all right human resources please thank you we're