001kate the time to provide us really in-depth information about their buildings and their procedures we told them it would take him 20 to 30 minutes but some of them actually took an hour 45 two and a half hours to really give us good information we vastly underestimated the time that it would take them to do it but we're glad that they put in that time we asked them to complete all of that information by july 11th so we could review it as a committee and establish recommendations and start moving forward on any issues that we needed to immediately address now the results of the questionnaire and other conversations we've had either with principals directors or with members of the emt will influence our recommendations and also updates to the incident command manual and training videos
002as noted before our incident commands manual is the backbone of guidance for our folks in our schools of how to respond to emergencies the incident command manual was updated in 2016 after we had a series of incidents in our school district that led us to see that we really needed to give more guidance to our schools and how to respond and also provide a schedule for drills so we can have that quote unquote muscle memory of our students faculty and staff to respond to any type of an emergency that incident command manual has been updated yearly actually more than yearly right personally whenever we see there to be an issue with it and the most recent draft has been sent to the board of education and to other administrators in the district so we can
003get input and have it prepared for the first day of school this year now emt and you'll see some board members are on enz have um met last week to discuss the review the rollout of the information about the facilities our character education life skill programs procedures let me run down really quickly what we've done and the ongoing tasks we've done an audit of employee card access permissions basically we wanted to know who has access to our buildings when and why and then what level of permission should be granted to employees as we move forward we've done an audit of our visitor check in compliance a big shout out to susan our parent engagement coordinator who has undertaken that to make sure that all of our schools are aware of the process that we have
004to approve our volunteers and have parent check-in when they're at the school as a visitor we've done an audit of emergency drill compliance we've done a development of life skills and character leaking programs we've done the incident command manual to add two new protocols a hole and a run hide fight we clarified the differences between a shelter in place and a lockdown we did have the creation of a public explainer video of some of those new protocols and we worked with our local law enforcement agencies and our principals to identify external doors that are open in a lockdown we are distributing to schools new lockdown and inside threat cards and shelter in place and outside threat cards and all clear cards this is what we basically serve as our signal in our schools if there's
005an emergency all they got to do is swipe a card that sends out a message to all of our folks who need to respond in a hurry we've distributed new cards to our secondary schools is that right and we'll continue in distributing those to our schools in our middle schools and our elementaries um we are pl have planned a quote-unquote secret shopper and a random checks at facilities we've assigned these to various emt members what we mean by this is during after school during school before school various members of emt will be asked to go to randomly selected schools circle the building check all external doors to see if they've locked and all of our emergency systems are in place also perhaps to put a pebble in a door close the door and see how
006long it takes for people to figure out that not all doors are closed that has been assigned out to various emt members that'll be done after school starts we have a good idea of if we have the right things in place so we have exterior doors all locked at the times that have been prescribed um you'll see here that we have the telus telecenter you system pilot at seven schools this is just with our own phone system how they can use it to communicate with each other in an emergency within the school and we can bring something to the board if you would like in the future we've done it to emt they've taken a look at it it's a really slick way of folks to be able to communicate with each other within us
007within a school and how to do broadcast messages within a school in the event of an emergency kirsten and i are also working on re-recording all of our emergency notifications if you recall a few years ago we recorded about 10 to 12 messages that we could upload and send out within seconds and we did so in response to any possible emergency that we could see happening we did that because we have found that our community tells us they want information fastest so we did kind of a catch-all message for say a lockdown or a shelter in place or an evacuation and then we had them translated for our communities and it could be delivered to the parents in the labors that they speak at home if we don't pre-record those it takes us a second
008to write it record it and send it out what we have now is a system where in just a few moments we can identify what the emergency is what the response is kids send in just a few moments our parents will get a robocall a text and an email we're going to change some of the language we learned from luvalde the message that went out to parents in uvalde was much like our message that we have now which is our school has gone into a lockdown students and teachers remain safe we will give you more information as it becomes available that's what parents got but by then they'd known that not all teachers and students were safe we want to change our language so we don't happen to give that information to our parents in
009an emergency we'll be re-recording those we've collaborated with our local law enforcement partners to do trainings at our schools most recent at sandy where they did an active shooter training at mount jordan middle school we're preparing messages for parents gardens employees about our safety review we're ongoing a c stack which is the threat assessment training of our administrators and staff we're doing our prepare crisis prevention and response training risk management student services and school personalities a national school safety conference and brought back very incredibly information um we are talking about hall monitors and dr mcgill and his team has prepared modules of wall monitors so all of our home monitors have a good idea of what they should be doing to be the eyes and the ears and the hallways of our schools and even
010discussing how to expand the role of a hall monitor and provide additional training as well as opportunities for them to meet together talk about current and common questions and issues facing our schools and how we can have a system of safety advocates so to speak in our hallways that are trained the same way know all across the board what to look for and work together on solving some of these system-wide issues and we also submitted a grant through the school violence prevention program spread through now responses to from principles that we thought we wanted to put on the table we're not asking for a response we just thought you might find this interesting we asked if principals thought a restriction or prohibition of cell phone use in canyons district schools if it would reduce bullying
011and harassment in our schools 27 of the 41 said yes 14 of the 41 said no now please take note we did not do a yes or no should we ban or restrict cell phones we asked a different question but it still does start a conversation about the use of cell phones in schools we also asked about the cost of school resource officers we have wonderful partnerships with our local law enforcement uh agencies and we have 15 sros we asked our principals in your estimation should we invest in additional sros 24 said yes 17 said no now this is another one would you support implementing student uniforms as a supplement to the school climate and to more easily identify visiting students 24 yes 17 now it would be interesting to know those are all high
012schools and middle schools and the 14 was elementary schools so clarion i do have that information yeah i will give you that please send it to all of us yes i will yes uh recommendations that we are making all canyons district wear their badges at all times we have already implemented this we are creating substitute access cards and id badges for substitutes teachers and staff all visitors to our schools and facilities will check in at main offices and receive a visitor badge all volunteers will continue to undergo background checks and check in at the main office to receive their volunteer badges why if there's an adult in one of our buildings they need to have one of these and if they don't it should say substitute if not it should have a sticker that says
013visitor that way all of our children and our employees know that they have gone through the process to be approved to be in our schools jeff can i ask the question we know that the substitutes substitute and we know that we have a list of who they are so why cannot they have a picture on their badge a substitute on their batch there's no reason they can't this is all recommendations if you would like us to move forward with something like that we can ask hr if it would be possible our idea was to make the substitute cards a different color and so when they got to the school in the morning it was coated so that they could then get into the interior parts of the building so if the substitute needed to get
014in the faculty room into the faculty restrooms into their room or they needed to have a key card to get in from the playground it would be coded for that particular school but the color of it would indicate to anyone who knew that say orange was the substitute color they would know that they were the substitute if not every time they were substituting a different school we'd have to recode the card no i didn't mean to code the card but just to have them have their picture on it that said substitute and then they actually carry two right one for that day for that school and one that's their identification because like if you did have a shooter in place then if the police came in they would have an identification card with their picture
015to identify that they are a substitute so what's up on the list we'll talk about it good suggestion or you can bring it up because chlorine is a member of emt as well granite does that for all our subs okay good idea uh the other recommendation well what we've done is we did an audit of all of the key card access we've done a review of the permissions and we will review this annually we're suggesting that we have an all access all the time card but that's for a limited number of administrators in our district we'll work with the superintendent and the business administrator on who should have that access then i'll access 6am to 11pm local access all the time such as a principal or a head custodian local access 4am to 11pm such
016as for a coach hour and then local access say 6 am to 11 pm and then we'll talk about monday friday access and sunday sunday access those are the levels that we're proposing of course they can be fine-tuned but that's those are the levels that we think will best suit the needs of the people in our community without just opening the door access to everybody um we're going to limit exterior master key access to building administrators and assistant facility managers that's the recommendation that we're making annually review the employees with alarm code and card access this is something that we find important we should know as a district and our building administrator should know who has key card access and who has code access we want to determine the adequate number of walkies for schools
017to have at elementary middle and high school levels we are proposing that elementary and middle school external doors remain locked during school hours and accessible by card access only with exception to the secured main entrance security vestibules may remain open in the morning to allow students to get to class on time but for no longer than 10 minutes after the morning bell access to the school from within the office should not be programmed open that gives kids 10 minutes to get class after the bell after that they'll have to go to the main office high school external doors we're asking for all the external classroom doors to remain locked the exception would be the main entrance and other doors indeed necessary to permit students to head to lds seminary or ctec or the field houses
018but the exterior classroom doors to remain closed locked we're recommending to build a timeline for moving all schools onto the same surveillance system we want to train district and school administrators principals assistant principals head secretaries and hall monitors how to review access surveillance we're creating a central command structure and emergency operations plan for the district office in the event of a natural disaster or a crisis affecting multiple schools the plan will include alternate means for communication and we're also suggesting to create unification standards for schools to use following an evacuation to break school closure this was a heavy lift now of course we're making recommendations we're presenting it to you now we'll give you these uh we'll send it to you tomorrow's recommendations if you have any questions please contact one a member of an
019emt contact me contact ryan contact the superintendent leon we can talk through these we won't move immediately on some of these recommendations but if you would please think about it we would like to move forward because we want our schools to be as safe as possible i have a few questions you've gone through active shooter drills with sandy and draper yes is there anything in place to do that with schools that are uh served by upd yes okay yes is a good answer when an employee terminates employment does the id badge get turned in yes i've worked for 40 years in the district i'd like to have that from my book of remembrance can i keep it okay the the procedures we'll put into place we are going to renew our emphasis on the car
020key card access authentication so in the rare instances where somebody said i would love to keep this for posterity we will say thank you but no this is something that we need so is there a timeline so i had my picture taken in um i haven't had it retaken so um you know 20 whatever years later did we have them renew their pictures so that they look like their picture i look nothing like my photos no we can't i think that that's something we can put on the table so that we have fresh photographs of our employees we do a life touch photo offering every single year for yearbooks so it is something we can definitely put in as some as a measure so that everybody's key cards have a relatively recent photo thinking that
021match also what they are like i know i know somebody who was a principal and now they're a coach their idea says principles still that guy's a coach and mine is a teacher now so mine still says coach but it doesn't say teacher so maybe we can update what position they have to when we update pictures any other questions president tahi i'm okay so my yeah thank you so much and like you said it's a heavy lift but i think i let it grow out i think you're only beginning of heavy lifting here and and i appreciate that and i think the board appreciates that i i think it would be helpful if we had this type of a report especially with this list of recommendations so that we can keep updated so the public
022can keep updated if we maybe on a quarterly basis i've had a report back at board meetings so we can maybe set that up at least for the foreseeable future so we on a regular basis we'll have these kind of conversations and updates so we'll be happy to come back within your report yes uh final comment just hoping that that note of talking to steve bailey as far as the surveillance goes perfect thank you yes steve really i just want to express my appreciation we've had two years now with covet we get to this summer everything we're going to take it easy and we did this measure feed with them i mean this meeting meetings a lot of people during the summer time to get this done and i'd like to express my appreciation to
023all of our staff and board members who participated in that i think we've got some good stuff and putting out a lot of positive things point out a couple of things we focus on too which is in the audit yes i've it was eye-opening and i'm glad that we focused on facilities and our procedures and of course school school climates so important for school safety i have really appreciated the sense of urgency associated with this we have moved fast very quickly and i am probably the worst example of wearing these things today they had a luncheon over the transportation department and i thought after all the discussion we've had this summer i found mine dug it out and wore it superintendent noticed that i had it on and i think that as board members it
024behooves us to actually wear our id tags when we're in the buildings we should set the example you're right because we should thank you let's see um clarine and then amanda and then sorry i'd like to move on to the next item i was just going to say be glad that there are seven board members and not just one because i've been making you put up 12 foot fences so we've been like we were prison and because i'd like to see it safe then there's one way in and one way out and that's how all my kids went to school and they seemed to manage just fine but anyway just thankful there's seven of us i was gonna tell you i liked the videos and i think that those will be really helpful you know
025similar to some of the discussion we had about making sure that parents are aware of what drills what expectations what things will be happening i think those will be very helpful for parents to go over with their kids and have discussions i really appreciate the support it provides thank you anything else present to you no thank you so much to you and the team and everyone involved and we will look forward to seeing you reporting back on some of these so anybody on emt would you please raise your hands thank you everyone these guys did sachi oman's work thank you so much thank you okay um next item board on on this agenda is a report on district library services so while getting the presentation up i will turn time over to gretchen lightsaber and
026who is our library media specialist so gretchen we'll turn the time over to you so i'm going to start with the requisite joke why did the school librarians buy so many books good job they had no shelf control [Laughter] you're in a competition now today actually marks um my first anniversary with canyons i walked through the door a year ago today so thank you for like letting me take it slow and um um so i wanted to take us back to what school libraries was like when i walked in and today we're only talking about the state of our elementary libraries because i was given 10 minutes so um i'm going to do my best but we're just talking about the 29 elementary schools had a total of 16 022 students our typical kindergarten student
027was born in 2016 and our typical fifth grade student was born in 2011 so i hope that puts everything in context moving forward i believe that reading is the most important academic skill i believe that if a student can read they can learn anything our motto in csd library services is to read is to learn we have an identified problem within the district this is probably not means to you but according to our cadence data 30 36 of our elementary students read below or well below grade level that is that number is two percent higher than it was in when our fifth grade students were in k1 and 2 may not seem very high but it's 320 students which is the equivalent of edgemont and almost the equivalent of sprucewood at 36 we have 5768
028students who are currently reading below or well below grade level at the elementary level i believe that school libraries can be part of the solution school libraries exist to provide equitable access to reading materials they're essential for students dr robins if i wanted to be better at passing and catching a football what would i have to do what am i doing i learned it so i'd have to practice right i'd have to practice i would need gear i would need some place to practice and i would need the best conditions for the best outcome however that practice is a little difficult and i'm going to explain why students learn to read in the classroom but they practice reading in the school library that's why we exist to help support schools and classroom teachers everything that's
029taught in the classroom can be practiced in the library and the most important things reading my son's football coach told him that champions were made in the off season which means that you know if you only play football from august to november you're never going to be as good as the other person on the field who's practicing all year round if students only practice reading in the classroom when they're in school they're never going to be as strong as reader as they would if they practice outside of the classroom for many of our students the library is the only place they have access the materials they need to practice reading if prep reading practice would like football practice two days but ideally you would be giving our students the best gear the highest quality reading
030material possible for them to practice reading however uh reading practice looks more in the picture on the right than the picture on the left let me explain at the beginning of this year we had 302 407 total print books on our shelves in our elementary school libraries which would be amazing since ideally we would have 15 books per student so that number puts it in 18 plus however the average publication date of the titles in our elementary school is which means that the average age of our collection is 17 years old so i have included in the blue binders that i had cindy share with each of you an example of a book that we took off the shelf this week at one of our elementary schools it's not that the um eviction titles are
031necessarily like dating themselves but we know that 80 percent of the non-fiction on our shelves are outdated or irrelevant at the beginning of last year we had no school elections were under 10 years old we had 12 schools that were between 11 and 15 and we had 17 schools that were 15 years or older we have one school that's in excess of 12 years based on the number of books on the shelf and the age of those books we have two collections that are in such poor condition that it would be more um it would be less expensive to actually replace the entire collection than it would be to update what we have on the shelf that data was comes from a side that a slide that looks like this in your blue binders each
032of the board members has this information for each school where your students um for your constituents are enrolled and leon and dr robbins have slides that represent every school in the district so you can see this school is merging uh they have 10 items per student the average age is 2006. that means we're a learning goal and actually this school is working towards being exemplary but we are looking at a 20 000 investment by their principal at the end of last year so through some meeting work that needs to take place we'll see where they land at the end of next year you also have a slide that looks like this for each collection um okay where your constituents attend um weapon development's more than just purchasing books content development is actually a science it
033takes some knowledge about reading trends and types of information that are available to students to develop a collection that meets the needs of today's students and the students of the future um in your binders you'll find information that explains how this data how that includes data and i would be happy to meet with you and talk to you about each of your schools with your interests a win for our students would be that they would have access to current high quality collections in the future but that would take an equitable funding model and an additional investment by the community ideally if i wanted to be better at football i would have a place to practice so if uh reading practice is like football practice this is the reality for a lot of students in that
034the entry gate to their practice field is locked the typical elementary student attends library once a week as part of the brain booster rotation which means that at some of our schools the library is actually closed one day a week and some of our school districts close two days a week a typical library brain booster class is 30 minutes long which includes 10 minutes of transition time to and from library to classroom so it means they actually have less than 30 minutes in the library and it often includes 10 minutes of face-to-face instruction and 10 minutes to browse and borrow books so we've just determined that we have almost 6 000 students that are struggling readers i have trouble finding books in 10 minutes that i want to read so we've given students 10 minutes
035or less to find the book along with all the other classmates line up have the book checked out and line up again yeah so our students did not not read any book to the students that time too so really they only have about well you have 10 minutes to do some kind of face to face instruction so that's typically when a book might be read um during that time they're not read across the school district on the elementary level the instruction varies by school and by the person that's giving the instruction okay so um there's so our average elementary student has 10 minutes a week to browse the collection we just said there's 10 000 books in every collection and they we've given them 10 minutes to find something we wanted a win for our
036students would be a discussion about changing the scheduling so that students especially those who are struggling have greater access before after and during school i want the optimum experience when you're practicing you want to be able to feel confident that you're getting everything that you need to be successful um just like our kenny's football team however it's less ideal in our elementary libraries little bit of a backfire comment now um the information landscape that our students are entering is more complex than ever before access to reliable credible verifiable information is essential for civic agency and action our students are not being prepared during their library time uh to enter the minefield that is the information landscape uh you can see these are the four standards for library instruction the reading engagement information and research and
037media literacy yet we've just determined that our students only have 10 minutes of face-to-face instruction which is the equivalent of five and a half hours a year a win for our students would be the opportunity to receive effective information and media literacy instruction during library time our end goals for library service it's to have a greater investment by school communities and an equitable school library fund model that would provide resources needed to update the elementary print questions a reconsideration of future school schedules in order to provide students with greater access to the library before after and during school and a district-wide information and media literacy framework that informs how students learn to locate evaluate and use accurate information the progressive equality school library program is to provide equitable access period to everything information materials space
038instruction and most importantly so that students have the information and stories they need to make their hopes and dreams come true if i want to learn what it's like to be a youtuber and i'm in third grade i want to find a book on how to be a youtuber if i want to find a book on you know the hottest um k-pop group if i want to find a book on esports if i want to find a book about something i'm really interested in i want to be able to do it at my school library i'm hoping that you will join me i'm inviting you and pleading with you as a policy maker and people who make decisions about budgets to help us um improve the situation through our elementary school library so that our
039students are prepared for middle school and we thank you so much i think lord do you have a few questions or comments perfection yeah so i love your end goals so what we can do is a board to help you with those goals you have a plan to give to us as to what we can do to support you and maybe a budget cost so we can sort of take it out over a couple years so um currently the we are well funded it's just not equitably distributed so the state gives us a dollar ten per student which we receive after the c count every year the high schools they receive 17 plus change per student the middle schools receive 15 plus change and the elementary schools receive 12. the problem is the high schools
040have the largest populations and they get the most money so they often have money they can't spend and we could spend it all and then some we also have in the past allowed the library instructional technicians to manage the selection of titles purchased at the school level i do not think that that is the proper way to move forward we have just brought on a licensed elementary teacher librarian who will serve as the purchasing agent for all 28 of our schools in this upcoming year so she has nine years in library services and will be able to help us with our goals to improve our collection development both in purchasing and in maintenance can we do anything with transferring the funds or is it attached 17 to high schools 15 and 12 and change that
041easy they just buy me what we can change that easier so is this an allocation that we can maybe move around based upon based upon that so it's it is that's how it's funded to the district and it's up to the district no that's just how we validate them your state funds everybody the same the state funds everybody the same but that's only only one dollar that's only about 30 000. we probably have access to the data of how frequently those libraries are used i would assume that the elementary library is used more frequently than the high school we have probably the highest rate of circulation in the elementary schools but if you look at your data they're we're just circulating the same books over and over again i'm just saying if we're if we're
042allocated 17 per student to the high school my assumption is that the high schoolers are not checking out as many books frequently as the elementary schoolers our circulation data would agree with that yes they're checking out different kinds of books i think some of the books that they have in the high school libraries are more expensive some of them textbooks are actually you but she's just saying the data does support that so it does make sense to reallocate well when you look at a elementary school every elementary student does go to the live that's right and we encourage every student to check out a book at least one sometimes more than one yes at the high school not every student closes the library every week not and available one to take home but if they
043only check out one then they don't either have one for class or they don't have one for home so can we get to the point we can check out too so this year i'm providing guidance that every student first grade through fifth grade can take out two books so we haven't had anything standardized where there's been guidance given to all of the library it's and so i've spent the last year kind of gathering data about how different libraries are run um we've found out a lot of things that were disappointing we found out that some of the library it's were actually encouraging kids not to take books home over vacation because they were afraid they were going to get lost instead of where i would have said take care books we found out that like
044through purchasing some of our library it's have like they don't believe in superhero books so one of the libraries doesn't have any superhero books i don't know what they're reading so um we're buying new superhero books but um it just hasn't been a priority in the district and there are some things that are systematic that are actually not beneficial for our students so i i know that the administration at each building decides how many minutes they go in there based on their brain boosters right and so so um and also based on their aids that work in the library and how much money they have i'm wondering if there's a way to have them have a double time to go in like one time to select a book in one time just to read or
045something so because almost every s what we're finding is every school schedule is slightly different so we've talked about the typical we do have one or two schools where they have an hour and and then we have some schools where they not only go in with their class of maybe 30 kids but they also go in with half of another class so there's 45 kids in the library at one time well i forget to read during that time so um it's just a variety of experiences that our students are having which we consider to be slightly and mont has a comment too i want you to know i 100 totally agree with the idea that if you can't read you can't do much of anything if i can't read math is really really hard i
046can't read science it really gets tough if i can't read i can't succeed anywhere but i want to go back to your uh football analogy i was not much of a football player okay i'm not six foot whatever you know me neither i will tell actually where i learned how to snow ski and i will tell you where i learned how these waters be and i will tell you where it was to play golf and that was in my own home with my own parents working with me and the whole i see what we've got there is somewhere somehow we need to solicit the support of parents to read with their own kids to make it happen so having parents read to children is the best indicator for success on standardized testing i mean and
047we would love that and we think we can help do that several initiatives there's got to be a very very high correlation between the kids at the math wizard and his parents reading with him at home or her at home and somewhere somehow i think you've got to get in libraries oh my gosh salt lake county library you can get any ebook you want them you know and have access to that there's a lot of work to be done i consider it job security i've survived the first year i might find the next room my wife's not special and that's what she said as long as they keep raising the kids this way i'll never be unexpected so that comment was a perfect segue to what i was going to say i was headed the
048right in the same direction i think your presentation is brilliant gretchen and i think that the next place is to go to the parents we need like a library media campaign you know where where where this information where it's getting out you know i mean what's one of the number one problems with with the kids we're raising today especially the young kids they're always reading graphic novels right and to try to get them to move over not that we'd rather that than nothing right but but you know i think lessons and you know even at night with parents to come and talk about the importance or some communication home that we have that we have really great communication to get parents really excited about this i think building more time into the schedules is super
049important and i also think in light of what's happened in the last year with the discovery of some books that parents were concerned about it would also be just so great and informational for parents to know hey you can actually go on their account you can put hold so your kids don't check out books you're worried about because when if if you are not informed as a parent and you're getting this communication we're going to go to the library more and your kids are going to check out more you know some of these parents that have been following these things in the news their first reaction might be fear right uh oh are my kids going to get exposed to books that i don't want them to expose so i think i think that educational
050tool too of how to put things on hold and just really work as partners with the parents as far as encouragement and battle of the books we have in some of our elementary schools we don't have it and all that but i heard we're getting it back so we're getting it back we have several reading initiatives yes one of them is called book blitz junior which is the canonized version of battle of the book it's being offered to every every elementary every elementary school is a choice it's an opt-in um i'm presenting on thursday to the ptsas about that opportunity we have some non-scientific data from oakdale last year that students who participated in school level in third fourth i think it was fourth grade yes did better at the in their reading scores at
051the end of the year then so we're hoping to bring that opportunity i mean we have a lot of ideas awesome but i've only been here a year and some of my five-year plan got moved up okay so so that's i know we're yeah we are but so let's just finish um clarine amanda and then so i was just thinking and adding to what you were talking about as maybe there can be a before school parent library check out or an after school parent library check out at every schools it wouldn't take only well we don't we're not staffed that way right now so that would be a discussion with the principals and the administration yeah but yeah yeah i mean so at the elementary school i worked at in new york we had our
052book fair on a night we called books in basketball where the there was actually a parents versus teachers in admin basketball during a literacy night which was also our book fair so there's a lot of things we could do to raise um the excitement around reading and books in our communities but um we have to start somewhere and it's easy to start in a collection oh and thank you for the book i just went to sixth grade and we have to the solar system and we'll use this photo yeah well you should check the publication date i think it's in the 90s almost 100 years ago i really care yesterday 2002 edition all books are good books and i have a ton in my own pluto was a planet unless so it changed real quick
053so to mont's point i in terms of having the parents read to their children i do think one of the things that i've read through board docs was also about how many languages different languages we have and i think it stands to reason that we need to make sure we have diversity of languages available for so i'm going to pass this out i actually have two really great plays that we had in our libraries this year one was where we provided a book dogman in chinese to student that's his language and then the very impressive statistics from east midvale where they circulated 59 books in arabic one in dinka two in french seven in japanese even though no student in our school currently speaks japanese at home they circulated six books in in kenya wanda
054five in dari uh five in russian 208 spanish and 12 and sweaty awesome um i have one of these for i forgot to get them in your binders well i'm i'm friends with one of the administrators at juan diego and um one of the things that he shared with you we feel very strongly that some of their strong a-c-t scores that have happened in their high school is due to a practice that they have of making sure that the high schoolers have a full half hour of reading time every day they go into the auditorium the kids have to turn off their cell phones and they're expected to read and it's it's something that's essentially important and it's institutionalized and all of the students expected and i've often thought would we be well served by
055doing something like that you know whether it's high school middle or elementary i'm not sure but i think you know i recognize that not every parent especially if you're working multiple jobs or if you don't speak your child studying in school it makes it harder to read to them although i would say that they should always reach them in their native tongue if at all possible but i think making sure that your structure set up for kids where daily reading becomes a habit i think would be the file um maybe that's something that we think about i have really fond memories as an elementary school child participating in a readathon every year with my elementary similar to the battle of the books and i was introduced to so many of different books that way and
056it did motivate me to go into the school library or um and that brings me to another point i know that there are times and depending on who's stopping when and how that is working that some of the students that i've talked to or their parents have said my kid didn't always feel encouraged to go into the library like sometimes they feel like they were bothering the librarian or that you know they might be getting to school early and the librarian's not prepared to you know so watch them or whatnot i'm wondering if there's anything that we can do to adjust our policies to make sure that the libraries are always in open space even if it's during lunch time i don't know if they're maybe they shouldn't be allowed to eat in there necessarily
057but if they have extra time that's a welcoming place for kids and in my opinion but right so elementary's a different beast than secondaries so um and it just takes uh kind of the will and the planning of the administration to figure out what that looks like in each campus but it's hard to fake reading for 20 minutes you can fake reading for 10 minutes it's hard to fake reading for 20 minutes so it's called drop everything and read for your time which um is a practice in other locations where students have that 20-minute period where they read all the time and that way you know they need resources to continue that practice and they get them in the school steve my book is so old it's only in roman numerals so so that's how
058that's how hard it is i i took a book off the shelf that was the addition i spent my first babysitting money on my question other than that thank you i'll read these books many of our young children uh have that are falling behind parents that don't read english is there any programs that we're working with those parents that especially at the young age they just started garwop learning to read english with their children the principle of copperview reached out to me because even though she has a high percentage of students that are multilingual learners they're almost all spanish speaking and so we're updating their collection to provide a number of books that are in english and spanish so that the student could read with their parent would just be one side would be in
059spanish and one side i'm just wondering is there is there any books that they're written that help teach parents teach their own kids and they learn english at the same time so that they can sort of learn it what their kids do would be beneficial to the to the individuals to know english also but especially for later on with kids i think a lot of parents would probably love to spend more time with them reading but they're reading in their native language not what we need to do tests on but i do appreciate this opportunity to speak thank you for having me well thank you for putting all this together i mean you've had an amazing year and and i think it's this is exciting right i think we can all see the benefits of
060putting a little more energy and attention and resources so i you know i look forward to the next year if not soon thank you okay board that concludes our study session working with the meeting let's reconvene in the other room um we'll take a five-minute break and we'll reconvene for the business meeting um matter of business is to approve the agenda for tonight's meeting august 2nd and i will ask for a motion i'll make a motion to approve the agenda for which i will opening of august 2nd 2022 thank you is there a second false second thought thank you any discussion to the motion see none ask for the vote all in favor please say aye aye any opposed okay that motion passes thank you next we will be led in the pledge of allegiance
061by kirsten stewart associate director of communications and join me in reciting the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of america and to the republic over which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice thank you next we will turn i will turn time over to jeff haney and kirsten stewart from the communications department for some recognitions and start of the school year plans can you believe it we're already talking about start of a school year mr haney sure it is hard to believe that we are back for our 14th school year in the canyon school district as you all know we were the first new school of this victory to be created in utah in nearly a century and we have started a lot of traditions to make the first day sometimes
062even week or even just the ramp up to the school year as fun as possible please remember tomorrow night is the second annual new employee barbecue last year we held it at corner canyon high school we've moved it to alta high this year we will roll out the red carpet for our new teachers who started this week with the canyon school district we would invite you all to come line that red carpet and give high fives and cheer our new employees to canyon school district just like last year we have ordered about 500 hot dogs and to serve to all of our new employees if you don't come then we're going to have to eat them elsewhere and i don't want to have any left over so please come bring your families welcome our new
063employees to the canyon school district you'll see here last year's event i think that's mrs oakes and mr wrigley waving hello to all of our new teachers please come tomorrow wave hello to our new teachers get to know who they are welcome them we'll have food we'll have music what was that 5 30 is when we start and then we'll close up about 7 o'clock we'll have cheerleaders a drum line we have a dj vendors local businesses in the area to welcome all of our teachers to give them idea of where they can shop and recreate and do fun stuff all around the place all around our valley so please join us 5 30 7 p.m alta high school to welcome the new teachers to canyon school district then maybe i shouldn't say this well
064i guess august 6th is canyons district night at rio tinto stadium it's our back to school bash it's that one last hurrah for the canyons district families who want to go to do something together as a family right before school starts we partner with our professional soccer team located within the boundaries of canyon school district they offer discount tickets to all canyons district families the a link to those discount tickets can be found on the canyons district website but if you want to go act quickly i looked the other day and there are very few tickets left and they look like a sold out stadium for canyons district night with real salt lake on saturday august 6th that's this saturday then red carpet day is on august 15th that is the first day of school
065for the 22-23 school year in the canyon school district per tradition we are rolling out the red carpet for all of our students they are the stars of the day after all and all of our schools in the canyons district we're arranging for real and monarch players to be at various locations to hand out pencils and give fists bumps and high fives to all of the kiddos who are returning to school we're arriving for the very first time the the first week actually it's the end of the first full week of our kindergarteners journey in education we ask all of our schools to do kindergarten college ready days they all get their little blue wristband that says i will be college ready in the year that they will graduate from high school they do fun
066activities to look forward to the day when they walk across the graduation stage it goes with the canyons district division administration of making sure every student he graduates from high school college and career ready and then we want to remind you also of the ribbon cuttings that we have planned on august 10th and august 11th diamond ridge and entrada will move to their new home the old bellevue elementary school and at glacier hills elementary the newest elementary school is will have its ribbon cutting on august 11th so please join us at these community events to celebrate either the new ho well actually new homes of the school communities the new home for diamond ridge and entrada and the new home for glacier hills which is the consolidation of the bellevue and the edgemont school communities
06789 was the time again yes christian 5 30 yes so 5 30 reception that's kind of the the walk through and then after that half hour after that as we'll start the ribbon cutting it's going to be a very busy few weeks the ramp up to a very exciting school year so president tiny thank you for this time to make these announcements about how we'll celebrate back to school in the canyon school district thank you very much um it's it's exciting busy time fun time okay um we've now come to the patron comment portion of our meeting while not required by law the board often designates time and meetings to listen to the patrons of the district please be aware that patron comment time is limited to residents and taxpayers of canyons district students and
068parents of students and current employees of the district patrons may provide board members with written documents these documents must be submitted to the board secretary at the meeting over here and emailed and or emailed to the communications department by noon of the day following the board meeting tonight we've had four individuals sign up to address the board so each of those actually three of them are individual one is a group but those representing a group will be given four minutes and individuals will be given three minutes um it's the board's practice to listen and take notes during patron comment time the board of education does not discuss matters that are not on the meeting's agenda nor engage in public comment on individual students to protect their privacy or employee issues if a patron wants to
069comment on a district employee's character professional competence or mental or physical health the board requests that those comments be submitted to the board in writing however if the patron determines to verbally comment on those personnel issues the comments need to be civil and refrain from personal attacks insults defamatory or slanderous comments about an individual the board of education would like to make it clear that critical race theory is not part of the curriculum being used by canyon school district there are no plans to incorporate it into the curriculum or instruction in kenyan schools the board of education values input on all sides of issues to maintain decorum and respect we ask that those in attendance refrain from applause or other types of demonstrations during the patron comment time as well as throughout the meeting so
070um first is stacy peterson and then jessica smith and then jessica anderson and then steve banmaran stacy peterson my name is stacey peterson i'm a mom in canyon's district i have two students um just at the beginning of this school year as we are prepared to start i just would make a request or a plea really to um to the board and to administration and to the teachers that they involve the parents as much as possible i know that um it matters so much to me when i know what's going on with my children and what's going on in their classrooms i was remembering when when this board was reviewing the wonders curriculum and as i was looking at the process it was outlined in the documents to approve a new curriculum and at what
071juncture the parents came into that that whole process and it was really late and i just felt like it it would have been so much of a better process that the parents were involved in the beginning now we're looking at this new life skills curriculum coming in and it's i i'm i don't know if parents have already been involved i certainly haven't yet but i don't know if parents were involved in helping create it or review it here we are starting school so i assume we're going forward with it i would just make a plea that the parents be able to see these lessons before the children see these lessons i mean otherwise i feel like i need to opt out because i have no control of what's going on but if it would be
072possible i know we have the technology to be able to see the lessons so that i could talk with my children before they go and have this lesson at squirrels so they could review it afterwards and be able to say you know let's talk about what our family feels about that or let's talk about what your teacher said i just think um in in my mind there's kind of been some trust that's been lost and kind of what's going on in this black box at the school since i can't go there all day long and see what's happening um and i think if the parents could be involved more kind of beforehand and as it's happening that that would help and i i was in the study session i heard mrs nagar say you know
073some of these parents are going to hear new library books coming in and i saw that chart 1700 new library books and i like weakness oh no how do we look at all those but i i think if we can better work together to serve the students then everybody will be strengthened and we'll feel better as a team to support and help and help the students so i just would appreciate that if in the back of your minds as you're making decisions and the teachers and administrators we want to help we want to benefit the students we want to support the teachers and the administration we just want to be involved thank you jessica smith and then jessica anderson thanks for letting me speak tonight my name is jessica smith and i'm a mother of
074four all here in canyon school district so um i also watched the presentation that you guys were given in there by gretchen and i really appreciated that but i have some of the same concerns as stacy um and i on slide 17 i think it was she talked about having an exemplary goal and how that goal would require weeding out over 1900 books and then purchasing 1700 books and so she talked in there how she has hired someone that has nine years experience licensed um but my question still is how are we vetting those books and how are we choosing those books um and i also heard ms nybar's comments and they're saying um you know the process that we have been using is obviously not working and we need um to have a different
075process in place because i know i've speaking i've spoken to my librarians and they said that they chose books based on reviews and so obviously we can't trust all the reviews on the internet and so my question is um how is she gonna read all those books in their entirety or can we have volunteers i would love to volunteer and assist in that process and i know lots of other people would love to volunteer in that process as well just to have the best for our children and then along those lines i also wanted to bring up um just like the overall library book situation um i'm confused as to why our district has continued to keep books on the shelves and in digital platforms that are so unmistakably not age appropriate for children in
076grades k through 12. public school is supposed to be cr are supposed to create a happy healthy and safe environment for all its peoples continuing to ignore the law and provide books that contain pornographic and explicit behaviors and language is blatantly obvious and intentional you are providing an environment that is unsafe and you can do better we all can do better this is for our children your children your grandchildren would you read to your children and grandchildren the words in the book all boars aren't blue that another parent read at a board meeting of course you wouldn't because you said it couldn't even be read in the board meeting this is wrong like plain and simple pornography is pornography and allowing these books to come into our schools and then remain on the shelves after
077knowing what they contain is grooming our children and is illegal again wrong is wrong and you are on the wrong for keeping these books on the shelves they are not appropriate if you would not watch or read it with your family children or grandchildren then it shouldn't be offered to you to mine please stand up and do what is right we deserve more from our elected officials we entrusted the safety of our children to you have the courage to choose our children and get these pornographic and inappropriate books off of our shelves in digital platforms thank you thank you jessica anderson and then steve van maren i'm jessica anderson i have three children attending schools in our district a few months ago i addressed the board regarding pornographic material that has been found in books
078in schools in our district i read an excerpt from the book all boys aren't blue that graphically depicts incestuous sexual relations between two teen boy cousins the book contained more sexually graphic scenes with even more explicit detail than what i read that day it appeared to stir shock in the board based on nancy's attempts to silence me and mont's questioning of how this book got on the shelves in the first place i left the meeting with hope and faith that the appropriate action would be taken by implementing policy that not only allows for books to be challenged and removed but also a policy that prevents pornography from ever entering our schools through library books books assigned in the classroom or any other means what followed were ridiculous claims that i am a book burner quite
079the contrary i am a lover of free speech who believes that if you want to read filth you have the freedom to read filth go to your local bookstore and buy all the porn that you want whatever the cost to your soul may be but i will not stand by and allow you to use my tax dollars to write to provide pornography to my innocent children the policy that has been implemented since it's insufficient and lacking to say the least how is me being able to challenge a few books a year except acceptable to you as board members and to us as parents there should be undoubtedly be policy made that provides a clear way for preventing pornography from ever infiltrating the systems that are shaping the minds of our beautiful children studies have shown
080time and time again that the harmful effect harmful effects of debilitating are debilitating for those who are exposed and to become addicted and become addicted to pornography and yet i have heard from countless librarians teachers parents and students debating that the pornography is justified by the book's overall literary value you have to be kidding me right how genius of satan to deceive in this way this is a black and white issue under no circumstances is pornography ever to be made accessible to my child at school i urge the board to do everything in their power to implement better policy policy that ensures the safety of my children while they are in your care if not i and other parents are prepared to follow the lead of parents in the alpine school district where lawsuits were
081filed thank you thank you steve van maren thank you madam chair board steve van maren taxpaying resident kids are out of school one grandson excuse me great grandson coming up um i'm not going to speak on content i want to speak on process i'm so disappointed that the libraries are not open during the summer at least on a limited basis how can you prac practice football and this excuse me reading in the summer without a practice field 10 minutes to read in a week or to find a book i'm sorry something needs to happen can you please find some money to support more library time before and after school was suggested how about during the registration period for i don't know i guess everything starts up early but maybe during the registration period in early
082august let students come in early and find some books to get started just general frustration with the limited access thank you for your time thank you okay that that concludes our patron comment time and we appreciate all of those who have come to the meeting and have taken the time to address the board thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments with us um next on the agenda are the consent items and i will ask for a motion to um on the consent items and in making that motion will you please read each of the items listed i can make a motion for the consent agenda to be approved which will include item a approval of minutes for july 12 2022 item b approval of higher and termination reports item c approval of purchasing bids
083item d approval of student overnight travel and i would like to pull off item e for further discussion so that would not be included thank you is there a second to the motion okay we have two seconds i yield my second tomorrow okay second note by mr millerberg thank you okay any discussion to the motion to this motion to this motion which is pulling that one off okay all right seeing none um we'll i'll call for a vote all in favor please say i any opposed okay thank you that motion passes and now um mrs oakes um so we pulled off item 7e for further discussion and i believe mr millerberg has a question or comment on that item this is a tried and true and tested uh argument i make every time we want
084to change these but and i'm sure most of you could probably recite it without me saying it um but when we approve our schedule for board meetings every year i then plan the rest of my life around that schedule the proposed change will make it so i would not be able to attend the proposed meeting i believe it moved it to november 29th i will not be able to attend if the board chooses to do that okay thank you and um just kind of a reminder background for the board we do approve our meeting schedules about a year and a half or two in advance and and it was just noted that this at this particular time we put two meetings back to back in december so um yeah so we're just kind of bringing
085it forwards for your attention before we get to december and notice that and then um talk about it and as mr millerberg had um noted that he would not be able to attend if we did move it to the 29th so any other thoughts we can leave it as as scheduled or we can make the change but that's kind of the background mr wrigley i thought we also had some discussion that we wanted to give some more time in regards to the holiday wasn't there some issue in november um i i think what you're pointing out is november 29th would be the tuesday following the thanksgiving recess yeah which gave more time whatever any any thoughts mrs nybar i just have a thought sometime um i do think it was a good catch sometimes when
086we have meetings uh within a week apart some you know we'll have an assignment that the board asks for some of the administrators here at the district and that's a hard turnaround time just a week uh we're we're talking about i hear there's maybe some question it wasn't that you know i wasn't the one that created this possible change but when i saw it i noted that before our december dates we had one week right after the other rather than the every other week which i assumed was why we added the 29th isn't that what you just stated nancy um just trading december 6 for november 29th yes so we wouldn't have two weeks in a row in december so i do think that makes a lot of sense i understand your frustration with your
087schedule but i do think that does make sense rather than have it you know within a week of each other and my argument is not that it doesn't make sense my argument is simply that we approve this and i think board members need to have confidence in the schedule that we approve so when they do go out and plan the rest of their life they don't feel like they're a slacker for not being able to do that i am required by law to keep my license to practice to have continuing education i schedule it the week after thanksgiving every year and so therefore i am totally unable to do that and i guess maybe it's a good gift that somebody finally found it but i think it's unfair to tell people they've got time they
088can use for their personal use and then on fairly short notice eliminate that are there other thoughts or comments arnold i don't see a need to move it either um that puts three board meetings in november and one in december but that's what we were trying to avoid to begin with when we had the other discussion so i don't see a reason that we need to move it i would favor cancelling it um can i make a comment can i make a comment can you guys hear me could we do that and only have the one meeting in december rather than two back to back what about our schedule that we the state regulated schedule we have of certain things we have to talk about would that make a conflict for december at all um
089i i think it's not governed by state regulation i think it is up to us i i just mean of our you know how we have a rotating schedule of the topics we go through at certain times of the year does that mess us up with anything if we were to eliminate the december one and the november 29th no no that would not thank you from mrs oakes so just to verify i my recollection but now i'm looking at my calendar and it says something different are we still actually having a board meeting on the night of the election on november 1st i thought traditionally in the past we don't exactly so this this year election night is november 8th oh you're correct you're right it's the week after so we would then have three
090in november one in december i personally am in favor of it i think any meeting that i can eliminate in the month of december is extraordinarily helpful because that's a crazy time for a lot of people but i can totally appreciate your point so other thoughts mrs nybaur i don't want to have a meeting that mont can't attend especially when he's so responsible about the schedule and if if we don't have any any pressing need to do those two meetings back to back in december i'd just as soon eliminate november 29th and do the one in december if if the other board members are in favor of that is that a motion um um mrs schill mr show would like to make a comment and i think mr wrigley has a question i just have
091a question of leon and our superintendent in regards to any if what effect that might have on any of our purchase orders or anything else you need to get done during that time so we would go from under this before we go from november 15th to basically december 13th uh four weeks uh what's the holiday in there we can make that work here i don't know i don't wanna i wanna rick wants to um so let's see mrs schill's trying to make a comment but we're not hearing her so let's um see if the i.t mrs schill are you unmuted okay um you know i'd like to give her a chance to make a comment but i'm not quite sure how we can do that okay so well while we're figuring that out i think
092mr millerberg has another thought we're just kind of talking amongst ourselves here that we could cancel the one on the 13th and have the one on the stick [Music] and that does away with the concern about going all the way from the middle of november till december without having one from the 15th to the uh to the sixth okay um that's an idea let's see so i've just called mrs schill on the phone let's see if okay mrs schill um yes i was going to actually propose what mom just said that we meet on december 6th and just have what that one meaning in the summer okay so okay so i just had the same idea he had that's all thank you thank thank you um [Music] you know if if we were to do
093that then um we we could just keep the 13th on the books and then if it gets closer and we don't need to conduct business we could cancel it i mean it's it's kind of hard because the last couple of years we've almost needed every meeting and then some so i don't know so should we should we for now keep it as is yes not all there's a schedule at all no alteration to the schedule just the 6th and the 13th and the 13th okay all right so um so procedurally if that unless someone wants to make a motion to make the change to the schedule we can just move on okay no motion all right thank you that that concludes the consent agenda agenda and now um we'll turn time over to dr amber
094roderick landward director of instructional supports to for the early learning plan annual report for the 2022-2023 school year thank you president t good evening board this time of year we get to talk about early learning and before i jump into that i just want to give a shout out to all of our elementary teachers today concluded our two-day english language arts curriculum training that we've been doing all summer so as of today we have trained nearly every single elementary teacher between june and today they have all come with incredibly great attitudes very open-minded and extreme excitement for all of the new curriculum i spoke with a number of teachers today who expressed that they were overwhelmed and excited and ready to dive in so i just want to shout out again all of the learning
095that they've done over the summer before their contract has even started and i'm just really grateful for their dedication and since we're talking about early learning i thought it would be appropriate to share some gratitude so i want to give a little bit of background about the early learning program this i think is the fourth or fifth maybe sixth year that the state has required that local boards start approving these plans as you know every single year during the legislative session this program gets bigger and bigger so has encompassed a number of bills over those handful of years and now the early learning program which was formerly the literacy program it is moved to the early learning program because it now includes math so i wanted to just highlight a couple of things in your
096copy on board docs you do have some hyperlinks up there in the top next to the title you've got the link to the actual code that encompasses the entire learning plan usb also released an early learning technical manual earlier this year and it includes all of the previous state legislation requirements that have gone in to this particular plan with the exception of the current legislative session so i imagine that will be updated but that just gives a lot of additional background the overall purpose of the learning program is to improve early literacy and early mathematics and classroom instruction and student outcomes for kindergarten through third grade the requirements of that plan and the funding attached to it requires a specific plan that's submitted to both the local school board as well as the state school
097board there are state-specific requirements for literacy and math and then there are also local goal requirements for literacy and math as well the state also has outlined through legislation and now utah code specific implementation requirements around using evidence-based curriculum interventions and specific assessment and other progress monitoring requirements as well as put in place a system of support for leas that do not achieve their goals i wanted to draw your attention also to some of the implications from senate bill 127 that was passed during this legislative session because it was the most comprehensive additions to the early learning program that we've seen in the last five years the summary of those implications as well as the bill are also linked in the top of the slide for your reference but the new requirements that i wanted
098to highlight this year include the requirement of a diagnostic reading assessment for all students who are below benchmark this has actually been a practice in canyons for about nine years now so we were already meeting this requirement also the requirement to progress monitor students who are falling below a benchmark what that accountability looks like the state has not defined again this is a practice that has already been in place in canyons for a number of years they also have very specific requirements for evidence-based versus evidence-informed materials particularly for literacy that include organized curriculum that aligns to the science of reading again something that's already been in place both in our curriculum policy and in our practice in kenyans for a number of years but they do have even a panel that we'll be reviewing and
099approving curriculum that is outlined in our plan they also embedded in this bill the legislation around continuing the professional learning in the reading of science which is what we've been participating in this year in the letters initiative that you've all heard quite a lot about and added a component for professional learning and change management for elementary administrators and then finally the implication that impacts our schools is that usbe has included the appointment of literacy coaches to support the lowest performing schools in the state we have one school that falls into that category and that is midvale elementary and so they were appointed an additional coach usbe did find that when they posted these positions they had trouble getting people to apply because most of the districts had higher pay skills than the state office did
100and so then they changed the implementation structure and are now just giving the districts who require the additional coach because of the school's performance we can hire the coach they just have to approve them and they get to provide some directives in how they are utilized in the school so that is new and like i said some of the biggest additions that we've seen to the early learning program in the last couple of years what you also have in board docs is a copy of the actual plan that usbe requires usbe also opens up the opportunity for leas to submit the plan for pre-approval so that has been done and the state or the plan that you have on board docs has been pre-approved by usbe pending your approval there are three sections that you'll
101note on the plan the first is for early literacy that requires us to outline our evidence-based curriculum the assessments and a brief description of our tier two and tier three interventions and the progress monitoring of those and then similar for early mathematics uh the piece that is different in section b is that there's also the requirement in talking through the specific integration of some of the essential components of math i would anticipate next year that we have additional requirements in early mathematics around more evidence based as well as some specific state requirements in terms of growth goals and then finally section c has the local goals you'll notice that we are required to have one goal in literacy one goal in mathematics and then we can choose to have a third goal if we would
102like the requirements for the plan are that we meet both the state target which is at least 60 percent of our students in kindergarten through third grade making uh progress forgetting the term all of a sudden sorry making uh basically a typical progress or better sorry just left my left my mind for a minute but we do not have that goal yet for mathematics did i see a question okay so um in previous years i've shared with you how we've done in our goals to date before getting to the new goals and the plans so i'll walk through these really quickly you have our trends here but this is the state required growth goal for literacy and again the requirement is that 60 of all students make typical or better growth and that's all based
103on acadiance which is a required assessment for kindergarten through third grade last year we did meet that goal with 67 percent of our students kindergarten through third grade making that typical or better growth our local goal was that csd will increase the percentage of kindergarten students who are at or above benchmark by two percent from the middle of the year to the end of the year you'll notice last year we did not meet that goal we had a decrease of four percent from middle of the year to the end of the year and then in first grade our goal was to increase the percentage of students who are at or above benchmark from the beginning of the year to the end of the year by 22 percent and you'll notice we fell short of that
104goal as well so we did not meet two of our three required goals which puts us in improvement as we look to next year our literacy goals we chose to have an additional goal in literacy given the stat status of things for the last couple of years usbe also has a very specific way that they would like us to calculate our goal based on those trends so that we're not setting goals that are not attainable but ambitious yet also realistic and so i've got that formula listed there so our goal for the upcoming school year will be that csd will increase the percentage of kindergarten students who are scoring at or above benchmark by two percent as measured by correct letter sounds in acadiance and then also a similar goal for first grade that we
105had this year and that we will increase by 22 the strategies that we've outlined in our goal are to focus on the implementation of our evidence-based curriculum for explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction that you all approved last year continue with supporting the letters professional development for teachers in the science of reading and to continue to provide the ongoing coaching in the science of reading skills for math we hope to increase the percentage of our first radio question before you move over to math so going back to letters last year we had a difficult time getting subs for them and we stopped working with the fourth or sixth grade teachers correct they stopped taking letters they actually never participated in the uh training but they did participate in the online modules for the schools that
106requested that additional training okay so they did the online modules but they did not do the i mean the training the all day training so um this year are you going to have them do the all-day training because they do have the modules done and are we what is our plan for i know this is you know our plan but what is the plan for the teachers if we don't have subs once more two to do what we need to do very good question so with regards to the fourth and fifth grade option so those schools that requested to have their fourth and fifth grade teachers also participate in letters training we did propose an option for them to support their teachers in getting that training after school so that we didn't have to ask
107for additional subs because we were unsure whether or not our sub pool would increase so continuing with year two for our kindergarten and third grade teachers we are hopeful that the sub pool will increase um if it doesn't i would anticipate that we will be in a similar situation that we were this year where many of us were out subbing and supporting the schools as well as the continued reliance on our emergency subs and community to help us with that volunteering so if they're doing it after school are we paying them their salary um stipend where are we paying them the hourly professional development statement that is a really good question i would have to double check that i can't remember where the principles landed on um as we were working together on that proposal
108and did they get they can find out for you they did get the stipend for participating in the online modules that was the same as the kindergarten through third grade teachers okay and then we just don't know how they got paid for doing it after school they haven't participated in that yet so that is something that is on the table right now for them to participate in in those schools again where the principal requested that they participate thank you go ahead um so is now a good time if there are questions about the literacy portion of your plan okay this is diabetic okay a few questions it looks like a really great goal um the early literacy for first grade students who are scoring at or above benchmark is growing by 22 percent my is
109the goal my only question is in the duration of a year what is the average growth because they do grow in the duration of year i'm just wondering what's the what is our average right now now we're asking for 22 like what was it last year for first graders so this is the trend that we've had for the last handful of years so last year uh we grew 17 percent and you can see what that has looked like okay so we're looking at a five percent increase okay and then what about the mathematics do you have a table for the mathematics as well because they're on a different side it's hard to the early mathematics goal we have is increasing by five percent what has it been historically i don't remember that at the top
110of my head i can look that up for you i did not include that because this is the first year that uspe has required the goal so this is our baseline goal for both the state and and how they'll be monitoring that okay thanks but i do have that trend for you i can send to you that'd be great thank you mr wrigley i have just a couple comments i'm glad to see we're doing uh diagnostic reading assessments does any of that pick up dyslexia during that period of time on our kids because i know a lot of times between they won't catch it by third and they're gone by the time they get in six or seven through high school so that should be picking it up then correct and our screening assessment um
111acadiance reading is a good indicator of that as well because remember dyslexia is defined as a general difficulty in reading abilities and so that's a really good first step is to use that screener and then being able to apply additional diagnostics that really focus on phonological awareness and phonics allow us to go even deeper to identify where those deficits may be lying i mean i know we've had several parents over the years concerned about that the other question is there was a report that came out yesterday i think it was national report on three to five years delay in education to covet do you think this has affected any of the numbers i mean the kindergarten and others and how is that affecting our third grade as we go into these this literacy goals and
112moving forward is that having an effect on on your goals and stuff it absolutely is having an effect um i think the good news is we we are fortunate in our district with um our incredible teachers and the work that they've done to just have quality instruction and now adding even more evidence-based curriculum i don't think that we are seeing some of the dips that a lot of other districts are but certainly the amount of time that students have spent out of school the amount of time that our teachers have had to spend out of school for um both health and then of course some of the state initiatives have certainly impacted some of that yeah i'd assume it would affect maybe even the kindergarteners as far as their emotional wellness and ready to learn
113that maybe why we had sort of a dip last year okay i'm hoping this year as we put this together and all the great things we're doing that we're going to probably see us move we didn't have as much drop as the rest of the nation which is a good thing to hear it is a good thing to hear and and i agree um steve i think that a lot of the things that we have in place we will see some growth and i also think that with the experience that we've had in the pandemic it is going to take time so i think we have to be mindful of that as we move forward and just know that everybody's doing the best that they can okay thank you so we talked about i'm sorry
114mrs barbara has another one other question i was going to wait till the end but steve brought it up last year we talked about and you may remember my um concern for being able to detect dyslexia early on and i know we've had this practice of interventions for reading disabilities but i shared with you some families from our very district that never did get a diagnosis and then around age 10 you know looking for outside resources and i do also i have recently spoken to families that are also looking outside of canyons with other school programs because they felt there would be a stronger ability to diagnose and for reading intervention so we've talked about this before but these these kids that have reading disabilities sometimes you're saying you know you're running this race warm
115up and just keep running faster but maybe what they need is a prosthetic limb and we just keep saying run faster run faster but the the finish line keeps moving as the standards go up and so what what are we doing different because i know this has been an issue in the past even though it has been our practice to do diagnostic what are we doing different to address that to try to be sure that we are catching kids early on that are manifesting signs of dyslexia as far as intervention goes and really being able to get a diagnosis for the families do we have a referral system what are we doing because i know you said we did have room to grow so tell me about what we're doing differently than we have in
116the past well i i think some of the things again that i would highlight that have been working for a large majority of our students particularly ones who are falling below benchmark are our early warning systems by identifying students through screening and additional diagnostics as well as at the elementary level in particular they have had professional learning communities in place for a number of years where they can continue to talk about students students progress as well as student support teams where they can talk about individual students who continue to not make progress with the expertise of people who have math reading or whatever the challenge might be that's presenting with that particular child to be able to put additional interventions in place so i think those things have all been really strong systems um i
117think there's always room to improve the tightness of those systems and how we're collecting data to really make sure that we're looking at our students uh at all angles really right i think moving forward some of the things that will be different that will help us catch kids even more are the evidence-based curriculum that you all approved last year with wonders and 95 percent it's one of the uh strongest most systematic and very targeted phonemic awareness and phonics program and rigorous in that regard that we could have adopted so i think that prevention piece is going to be much stronger moving forward than we have had in the p in the past built into those particular programs include some pretty detailed progress monitoring around those skills so teachers will have even more data at their
118fingertips to be able to really catch some of those particular pieces around phonological processing and awareness which is where again the root of dyslexia lies so i think those pieces will be different we also have all of our schools now aligned with the core program we have a tier two intervention program also from 95 percent group that has that alignment that will be able to better support filling in those gaps when we do identify the kiddos who are not meeting those benchmarks or who during those ongoing assessments that they'll be administering this year will be able to provide immediate support which i think will be really helpful so all of those systems that we've had in place we just continue to get tighter and better aligned and i'm really excited about the upcoming year for
119that reason i know i had a good discussion with alice peck and susan edwards about a year and a half ago regarding um some things that the state of texas does in their public schools with helping guide um through that diagnosis and interventions and that may be another another thing to explore is is um i know there were some materials that i read that were really helpful for me so something to think about maybe mrs oakes and follow up to that same question sorry you're gonna get more questions about disabilities that's something i care a lot about as well like i so i know that we have curriculums and systems in place i'm curious what the training is with our elementary teachers our early ed teachers and then you know i said wendy dao sitting
120down um i know that we've also kind of talked in in study session before also about the importance of making sure that an iplc is in the secondary level that there's discussion with teachers about how to be able to recognize those things what is the current council or training for teachers um across the board when they suspect or they're seeing data i mean are they encouraged to pass them on do they do they understand clearly what the process is how to be able to help that child i i believe that that they do so again we're fortunate at the elementary level all of our teachers kindergarten through third grade and then a number of our fourth and fifth grade teachers who have had advanced training in the science of reading which letters is focused at
121its root again in a lot of those signs of dyslexia so i think that we have even more understanding now than we did before last year at the elementary level all of our teachers who teach reading and some of our ela teachers at the middle school have had the opportunity to participate in some extensive training as well around the science of reading which again includes some of those indicators around dyslexia because we have pretty solid student support team practices in place in all of our levels that again is a great process that teachers use to identify students who need more support often when students get referred to those teams they are asking for more support in gathering information and so that's when they again solicit the support of the expertise that they have access to
122both at the building level and at the district level to come in and provide more assessments or observation whether it be around reading whether it be around math whether it be around language development behavior all of those pieces and across all of our departments we provide supports for the schools in gathering that information so that we can make the best determination about what the school's needs sometimes that's additional intervention and support sometimes it's looking about whether or not there's a presence of a disability and whether or not they need specialized instruction that would warrant an iep all of those conversations are occurring in that student support process thank you let's hear about math so math we kind of started to talk about this looking again at our baseline year and our goal focusing on first
123grade students and uh hoping to grow from beginning of the year to the end of the year by five percent on the measure called advanced quantity discrimination which is part of the acadians math suite which is also a state required assessment the strategies that you'll see outlined in that goal also focus on continued support to implement our evidence-based tier one curriculum for mathematics and then ongoing coaching to be able to provide those just-in-time supports and make sure that our tier one is robust there so that is our starting point questions anyone on the math question mrs nybar i'm gonna i have one other thought could we consider possibly forming a small committee with parents whose children have diagnosed reading disabilities because this is something i've heard a lot from a lot of parents actually is
124a hope that there can be a little more help with diagnosis and earlier intervention and that might be really helpful because a lot of times when you have when you're a parent of a child that has that struggle you then kind of become an expert you read about it and you try to find all the resources and i just can't help but think that there may be more we could be doing here as far as that that's a great idea awesome thank you so much okay um i just have a couple of thoughts um i i think this is great and it's i'm i'm glad that the state has put this process in place that we look at this every year and that we become more targeted and intentional in in our efforts and um
125and you know even though we didn't we didn't meet two of those three goals i'm i'm [Music] glad that we're saying that right we're admitting it and we're redoubling our efforts for that um one thought too that i had is this spring as we every spring as we read through the school community council their trust lands and tssp plans quite often they have goals along these same lines so how much is this plan communicated out to the school community council so they're aware of what these goals are what these measures are and things like that i i just think that might be something to consider for a kind of alignment of effort um if possible i mean just not that we would ask the secs to make these goals but so that they're aware this
126is what the district is doing i think that's a really great point nancy and i i know a couple of isolated situations where principals have brought these particular goals to the table but it's certainly not something that we have required so i don't think it's something that's happening across the board but i think that that's a really good point we typically once the plant has been approved by you all and submitted to the state we share these goals with our elementary principles and we have lots of dialogue with them um but i think that's a really good point to bring it into the public view at the school as well and and i was thinking just as a piece of information and data for those councils to consider as they do their work i think
127that's a great idea um and then and then also this is this is for the board because um we do need to approve this plan and if if no one objects are we okay to bring this back at our next meeting because there is a september first deadline for us to take action on this can we bring this back on consent everyone okay with that yes mr millerberg help me better understand the process that takes place you test the kids beginning of year you test them end of year beginning middle and end so the teacher has no other benchmark really to look at other than middle of year they don't know where they are as far as attaining goal no those are how do they track to where they know if they're being successful in
128the reaching really good question that's a a very fair question mont and i'm glad that you brought it up so that we can clarify so the benchmark assessments are like taking your temperature three times a year to really see how we're doing with the general health of reading and math and so those just give us an indication of risk and growth and then our teachers are collecting data every single day on the progress of their students in literacy and math whether that's with ongoing assignments that they're collecting feedback specific assessments that they've developed individually or with their team they have access to assessments within their curriculum programs progress monitoring assessments that are also directly tied to the benchmark assessment so they're certainly not short on data to be able to assess how their students are
129doing and to be able to make those adjustments with their instruction regularly with their intervention groups and they do a pretty good job of that in plain english when they finished four percent below goal that was no surprise it shouldn't have been they could see that coming from the beginning of the year to the end of the year they knew they were running behind schedule i i wouldn't say that they knew it from the beginning of the year that that was going to be the case i think that all teachers are really skilled and hope that what they're putting in place is going to increase the skills of all of their students uh again this year we had many challenges with students i mean i don't have two years exactly i don't have to explain
130to this group but i i wouldn't say that they assume that because the students are behind in the fall that they're also going to be behind in the spring unfortunately that has been our trend which signals to us as a system that we need to figure out how to tighten some things up to be able to support those students who aren't making progress so at least by mid-year they knew they were behind the eight ball correct okay if not sooner okay and any other thoughts or questions okay we will look to bring this um plan back on consent agenda so and as you mentioned earlier the actual form that the plan is filled out that will be submitted to the state board right is on board docs and we'll we'll plan that for next board
131meeting then great thank you um next on the agenda item 8b information on middle school world and u.s history textbook i will turn time back over to dr amber roderick landward director of instructional supports hello again on board docs i outlined a document that hopefully answered the questions that you had during the last board meeting regarding the social studies text so i highlighted the background of when we first adopted the text nine ten years ago now and how that came into play with the reconfiguration and then the rationale for moving forward with the licenses across all eight of our middle schools and the six-year agreement so that we could ensure that access for a longer period of time i also outlined the specific access to the demo accounts so that we could make sure that
132you had access to those as well as any parents who wanted it before their students were able to access this fall but that will also be an access point that will remain for them through their student login and through canvas so at this point i will just turn the time over to you all if there are any additional questions or clarification that i can provide questions board this is naibaur thank you so much for including that access that's fantastic and and so great to to involve the parents to be able to look at that i just had one quick question i noticed that if changes to content are made they're done over the summer and in our last meeting i think you were saying it it's been a few years since we did the original
133lens of looking to adopt and i was just wondering have there been changes to the content in the summers and and specifically this last summer did we get a report of that so the curriculum uh from when we adopted it originally uh to what we have now the platform itself has actually changed significantly because when we first adopted in uh 10 years ago the digital access was essentially a pdf of the textbook that's what the digital access was back then it's obviously evolved it's much more interactive and gives teachers more options to embed the digital tool within their instruction so those pieces are different the actual content um the biggest changes we figured it was about uh 90 the same and the 10 percent that is different was in two ways one in the lesson
134structure we in the original purchase there was a separate ancillary resource called the inquiry journal that has now been made part of the lesson structure instead of a supplement which made the teachers very happy because they ended up creating their own anyway as the resource continued to get used and used over time so that's one of the big changes to the content of the lesson structure the other is that there were additional resources for primary sources that teachers were having to bring in that were recommended in the textbook like a digital copy say of the constitution for example of the whole constitution um those are now actually part of the resource that the teachers don't have to find them and embed them themselves so those are the two biggest changes okay so no changes we
135have to worry about as far as age appropriateness or propaganda or anything like that okay thank you thank you mrs oakes so just to clarify i mean because i've had a lot of similar questions so with regard to the online content um how does this differ from some of what we saw that was problematic with the second step can you clarify that i can and that's a really fair and good question that i think we should clarify so uh first off i want to highlight that the publishers that we go through for our curriculum adoptions that are district-wide in core content areas are generally very big publishing companies they publish more than just one resource they publish extensive resources they have very big staff they have a lot of curriculum developers they have a lot
136of educators on staff they're very familiar not just with the content but all of the pedagogy and pieces around best practices and all of the contents that they're developing curriculum so i think that's a really big piece so when we are looking to purchase curriculum from any of these large vendors they also have the resources to customize and meet the demands of a lot of school districts that are our size and they're also um they make a lot of money and so it's in their interest to respond to our feedback but also not to be changing things so i know that we've used the term dynamic curriculum with online resources a lot of board meetings and i'm not sure that that's the most accurate way to describe our digital resources for these district-wide adoptions because
137they aren't really dynamic they're not providing a lot of ongoing changes um to the content most of it is in like i mentioned before usability and functionality of the resources the other thing that the advantage of these large publishing companies have is when they're developing curriculum the things that they're embedding in terms of links or additional resources they own or have purchased copyright rights to the material so they are not taking kids out of the curriculum they don't want us to leave their curriculum because they want us to continue to be their clients right so all of the links that are included in the curriculum there aren't even really links they're links to another part of the program that is interactive in terms of the tool so i hope that that helps um so that's
138why i said i don't know that i'd really call it dynamic because we're not linking to websites that we don't have control over that the publishing company doesn't have control over to be able to keep the product what it was when we purchased it okay so point one parents can review any changes it's available to them at all times to be able to view correct point two it does not go to outside sources it's all embedded within it it's not taking students to other you know often other tangents outside of what that particular publishing company has already decided as part of the curriculum okay and generally speaking yes okay and so how have when we're talking about the policy we have with regard to um online components of curriculum have we followed that with this
139is is that you know is it being transparent enough for the the public to be able to see at any given moment that they can be aware of have you ever had something come up with this particular curriculum for the secondary level that's raised an eyebrow or that's been concerning is it ever something that would reach the level of the board that we need to make a decision on our review publicly really good question so the textbook to date is not something that we have received any questions of concern about at our level for even those schools who have been using the digital licenses for the last couple of years to my knowledge they have not received any questions or complaints either and if people had those questions or concerns what would be the best
140way for them to approach approach you i mean do they go through the principle do they approach isd like what's the best way so i think that the recommendation if i understand that that actually came from the board that has been published in a lot of our communications is that we always want to encourage the interaction between the parents and the teachers because they're really the most active partners in their kids education and so having the conversation there first to determine um what what was seen that they had concern about the purpose behind it whether or not it was justified or not and then continuing that conversation if necessary with the principal and then our department to be able to look at those resources and and make any action that needs to be made at
141that time okay another comment this is my power thank you um i'm just wondering you know you've said there isn't anything offensive you feel very comfortable with the content changes how hard would it be though also just to have an update in our bulletin when we're approved reapproving curriculums with any updates just to know and have a little report sent to us so we can have a detailed list of what the content changes are you know we are elected we're accountable it would just feel very comforting for me um to know and that way i would know there would be a thoroughness to make sure that we don't have any additional content that people may find objection to or feel that it's very subjective or can be offensive to maybe certain values i think we
142can certainly look at what that would look like in terms of an annual update and how we might want to provide ongoing updates and information i think something to uh we'll just have to figure out what that would look like something to keep in mind any curriculum that we adopt uh we are not using all of it the entire year that's just it's humanly impossible for a teacher to use every single resource that comes with the textbook especially now with all of the ancillary materials that come with a textbook in a program it's it would just be impossible so knowing that even when we adopt a curriculum or a textbook with a digital resources we are not using all of it always that's why we have the instructional guides where we highlight and prioritize the
143parts of the resource that we think make the most sense for teaching the standards and then teachers again use the professional judgment based on their students and their students needs to be able to continue to access so given those things i think we can still figure out a process of how we would want to include a regular update with any things that we learn about updates to the curriculum that'd be great and just with the content you know the the extra link is the constitution usability stuff we don't we don't need but just because you don't want the bug fixed memos that you get like your iphone yeah but that would be fantastic and i think we've learned some things and it it doesn't hurt to have as much transparency and accountability as we can
144yeah thank you and along those uh lines again i just want to reiterate that the benefit of having these digital tools are that any family can look at all of the components of the curriculum at at any time and so it is always available for our families to be able to view okay and and just a follow-up thought on that um as in our policy and the exhibits that accompany the policy um if we were to incorporate something along those lines like an update that might be the process to go about figuring out how to do that is through the policy to add just the idea of a regular update to the board would be included there i think so policy committee we can talk about that or maybe you can make some recommendations to
145policy committee of what would be reasonable i think that's a great place to start okay thank you uh superintendent did you have a comment did clarion did you want to go did you sorry i didn't i didn't see well no i was just i was just thinking um usually when i get a textbook the textbook stays the same was what my brain was saying and then you have the supplementary material that comes with it it usually stays the same i haven't seen them change a text if it's a real textbook i haven't seen them really change the information in the textbook even when they updated the math which took them years to update it was still the same problems all they did was add some color and some graphics in it but i'm also thinking
146that the teachers the teachers are amazing and i would hope that as they're going through it the first year um or any year they would be more than willing to call call isc and explained to them that there's some pieces in there that they don't know are what we should be doing or shouldn't be doing and that we don't deviate from that textbook because that's what really gets us in trouble but um i don't know i was just wondering how much it would change in my brain but yeah that's a a fair point clarion and i i don't believe that the content really changes all that much most of the changes like i mentioned are in terms of functionality of the digital tool that said everybody makes mistakes so often there are typos sometimes unfortunately
147even in our math texts we've caught wrong answers in the answer key to math problems so those would be i would still consider those content changes because that's not necessarily functionality but that is a content change that is necessary those types of things thank you superintendent oh wait sorry another one i just was going to say that social studies in history even before they were online i was a middle school teacher those contents do change math not as frequently but social studies and history certainly does and they do try to update those with current events after it's been a few years so i think we have more of that in those books than other than like a math that's all thank you superintendent yeah thank you amber i appreciate all your work on this um
148just two comments one one is lessons learned you know from second steps and i think uh first and i appreciate you you've um addressed this but you know our eyes are on on dynamic curriculum and i think that's you know that's been a wake-up call for everybody in education i think you know this shift and just the political divide that our country is experiencing over the last few years i think across our country you know um the reality is is that this has got to just be something that's automatic that our eyes are on our own dynamic curriculum and that we're paying close attention and you're doing that and secondly um you know this concept or idea of parent access i really appreciate you putting that in there and as we remember for me you
149know that was a deal breaker with second steps and i i just i'm serving notice to any vendor you know that says hey we want to limit access or not create demo accounts then that's we're not going to do business with them i mean i think that's got to be up front or that's you know that's a deal breaker that demo accounts are available 24 7 you know all the time to our parents so thank you okay thank you so much we appreciate thank you additional information and discussion okay next on the agenda item 8c tier 1 life skills supports for students beginning in the 2022-23 school year this is a first reading and i will turn the time over to dr brian mcgill director of student services thank you president tingey canyon school board
150we're coming up on the nine o'clock hour i feel like uh it's a seventh inning stretch i should be singing uh neil diamond's sweet caroline maybe dr robbins can lead us oh no no that's that's sung in boston so we don't really do that in new york good point um and also before i get started i just wanted to express my gratitude to stacy and her parent public patron comments as a parent myself having lived in the draper and sandy community and having kids in canyon school district we're always very appreciative when our school principals and administration and teachers involve the parents uh in the decision-making process of things so i just wanted to express my gratitude to her and we we do have an advisory committee so hopefully you'll learn a little bit about
151that as we go through this presentation here tonight so um in terms of setting the stage there's just a few foundational items i wanted to speak to the first of those is i want to give thanks and credit to our work groups we've had about 25 educators who have committed time since the latter part of june over the summer and in creating a lot of lessons that are in draft form which again we'll bring before our parent advisory for feedback input and refinement but i just want to tell them thanks because they've really put their heart and soul into this and our team leads our specialists that span over my department uh wendy dallas department federal federal and state programs special ed and instructional support it's been a true collaborative effort as we've been working
152together i also want to just preface that life skills support is just one small fraction of the larger picture of creating a portrait of a graduate for canaan's school district in terms of what that framework is going to look like so i think there's a lot of things contextually that principals and schools in terms of programs can offer that support a lot of the the lesson creation as it relates to life skills and skill development in fact as i was going through and the three lessons that i pulled out for example here tonight reminded me a lot of uh when my both of my children were at willow canyon they had uh you know be responsible respectful and safe and we really appreciated that as parents because it allowed us a forum to have that
153conversation at home and so the school would send home information you know this month we're focused on this and we could sit down with our kids and have those direct conversations and supporting them so that they're better students at school and hopefully fingers crossed better kids at home right so it's kind of fun seeing that also we're proposing a field test so that we can get that advisory feedback we also want to go about getting some quantitative and qualitative feedback from our principals our teachers parents and students as far as as far as the process goes and doing a field test would allow us that opportunity to be able to do that this year that would also allow us to adjust and expand and improve as needed um and then lastly i just the last
154thing i want to say before i jump in is again with it being internally created um it's first of all there's been a huge savings financially because we're not going out paying a vendor a half a million dollars for a product and the other nice thing about that is we do have control over the content in terms of what's being provided for our children so i think those are key components as we get started here this evening so just i'm going to do some introductory slides and then i'm going to turn some time over to amber to talk a little bit about the crosswalk for our skill development and a curriculum creation and alignment and then i'll do some wrap up kind of similar to our last presentation first off just in terms of definitions
155you know life skills can be seen as skills necessary or desirable for full participation in school life and one's future college and career pathway and in order to contribute as a respectful and civically engaged citizen and that's our hope through this is that our students behave better they become better thinkers they learn more that it creates to a positive culture and climate at the school um and that students are respectful of one another in the hallways in the classroom so on and so forth so life skills are comprised of really three different types of skill sets so thinking skills uh which again goes back to that critical thinking creativity problem solving decision making uh personal skills such as self-management responsible decision making and then those interpersonal skills um communication empathy understanding teamwork service cooperation leadership
156so on and so forth our purpose is to proactively teach skills to prevent challenges that occur when skills are absent or not automatic and this last year for a good part of the year we were without a curriculum and resources and we all know what the discipline referrals looked like for both office as well as school-wide and also our issues with attendance kids being tardy to class so on and so forth so what this does is it kind of focuses on the purpose of the portrait of a graduate so if you look at that key on the upper right you've got mastery autonomy and purpose and what we've done is we've kind of devised these draft lessons around the purpose for students so that hopefully it motivates them and engages them in becoming better learners
157and better contributors at their school and in doing that they're contributing to the positive behavior intervention support and again creating that positive school culture and climate um we want to complement as i mentioned up front what is being taught at home and personally as a parent like i said i really appreciate it willow canyon for the messaging they sent out and for the opportunities that led itself to have those conversations at home with our parents or with our kids supporting students and striving for excellence in school and in all aspects of their life one of the key things that i've found being an educator over heading into my 26th year which by the way it's gonna be weird heading into a school year and uh not opening a school per se um but i love
158fall and i love football so the canyons principles are pricing me on the sidelines of some of their games but the key really to all all kids success i think both in school and life really comes down to one key component and that's intrinsically motivating kids in school and when kids become intrinsically motivated the light in essence turns on within them and they want to be the best learners they want to engage they want to do well for themselves instead of you know requiring those extrinsic rewards or other incentives things of that nature and i feel like with the life skills it lends itself to provide that opportunity for our kids to become more motivated and more engaged in their studies and in all aspects of their life so we've looked to try to align
159as best as possible to the human centered supports component of the kenyan school district strategic vision and plan um and then also as part of that initiative in there it describes uh creating and having social emotional health and development for life skills within them our targets explicit skill development and critical competencies again are tied back to the portrait of a graduate developmental research that isd has taken on and then just looking at our data trends that i've already made reference to so this just kind of shows you a conceptual framework of what we've done in terms of creating uh canadian school district life skills curriculum units or critical competencies and so what we've done here is we've looked at the strategic plan the priorities there the pcbl p20 competencies which takes a preschool through higher
160ed in terms of those competencies and skill sets that at each level kids need to learn to be successful and then we've also combined that with the associated skill sets for that particular competency so the five kind of core areas right now um that we're looking at is helping kids make responsible decisions again kind of helping them choose right from wrong and obviously having parents be a part of that process along the way is critically important building resilience as we know that that's one of the key indicators for students actually finishing college is not so much tied back to test scores and or even really gpa but rather their work ethic their discipline uh persevering and the real resilience that they display in school setting goals for personal growth um you know critically important there
161right we all have long-term goals for ourselves in life and for our children and helping them to develop that through smart goals which is one of the eighth grade lessons that i'm going to show again is important understanding and serving our community you know one of the things i loved you know i talked about the context of what can enhance or encompass um these lessons and one of the things like two of my favorite days at alta high school was we we would do a veterans day assembly every fall and in november we would have all of our students who had connections to family members friends neighbors within our giving community and we would invite them in we would we would provide them with a breakfast thank them for their service um we would ask
162our students to to dress up to honor the veterans and about 90 percent of our kids complied and did that and i'm telling you just just how impactful and how powerful that assembly is um i was proud to be a part of it and i can't tell you the number of veterans that came up afterward who are currently active and then some not active they just really appreciated you know what we did for them uh and honoring them as part of that so as we talk about things like serving our community and service and recognition respecting others you know which is that last bullet point there i think there's things that principals and schools can do programmatically to help support and again provide context for these life skills at the bottom there you'll see each
163unit will have required and optional lessons to support classroom needs digital citizenship skills will be integrated into each unit and amber can speak to that a little bit closer so i know isd's had a integral hand in that process and then just to show you um this associated skills so for example taking that respecting self and others and resolving conflict the things that we want kids to aspire to be is be positive right to be honest with each other to make righteous decisions um to have integrity to develop healthy friendships at school cooperate with others right that teamwork that collaboration because we all know that's important not only in school but as they venture on into their career pathways setting personal boundaries i think that's important for kids to understand too respecting again themselves as
164well as other students communicating effectively and a couple of lessons that i'll showcase here um highlight the importance of listening and uh and focusing on your learning um and as i was telling my wife that i was bringing up two lessons on listening she's like well maybe you should pay a little bit more closer attention to those lessons themselves maybe you should sit in a workshop on that so and i just turned her and said it's called selective listening so um and then teamwork and then leadership obviously leadership is a huge critical pillar for kids finding success again both in school and life and i think we as parents aspire for our kids to lead in some capacity and to be engaged and to be connected and be involved in school so as it relates
165to the developmental targets um i'm going to turn some time over to amber and she's going to share with you a few slides and then she'll turn it back over to me so dr roderick landlord thanks brian and i just want to highlight as we have been thinking about this curriculum one of the things that we have taken very seriously is the board's commitment and all of the work that was done with the strategic planning to really think about developing skills in students that we can monitor and see and that they will leave our system having and so to just echo what brian said about the benefit of developing our own curriculum is that we can have control over that content that said we also don't want to lose sight of what canyon pride canyons
166prides themselves on and that is developing a curriculum that is really high quality and still aligned to our policy and that it is incurred in some research and standards and has an evidence base that we can look at so as brian mentioned as we were looking at how to organize these units we really took guidance from the strategic plan that pointed us in the direction of the portrait of a graduate the portrait of a graduate has defined competencies as well as some skills listed and we looked to further refine what are the skills associated with those particular characteristics and how can we narrow them in a way that allows us to look at a progression across k through 8 so that we are being systematic and thoughtful in developing skills that students need to be
167successful we believe that the life skills curriculum is a complement to what the parents are doing at home and that we are focusing on some of those really key skills that both our data and our students present to need for in terms of being able to develop some automaticity so that they can be successful with their academics as well so you have a document on board docs that is called developmental targets that really provides a little bit of an overview of what this curriculum entails so in order for our writing teams to successfully write lessons that progress across k through 8 we had to identify some targets to be able to get more concrete about what that progression looked like so this slide just has a snapshot of the larger document that you have access
168to that highlights for each of those critical competencies or units as we've organized them in terms of the curriculum specific targets that highlight what students should know and be able to do over the course of those grade level bands so while you have a developmental learning target or many developmental learning targets listed under each grade level band depending on the specific grade level you'll see something much more specific and concrete related to that target that then it uh of course expands so this is again um a little bit bigger lens for those developmental learning targets and then each lesson gets more specific in terms of the criteria for that particular learning so taking those developmental targets our lesson writing teams organize their lessons as we started the process in organizing that work we decided to
169look back into the wonders materials because as you recall when we adopted wonders for english language arts we kind of ignored the sel lessons because that wasn't what we were looking to consider at the time and then i believe a couple of you said is it worth looking into that when we do get to the point of writing or selecting the curriculum to be able to support life skills we did go back into that and we are recommending that for kindergarten and first grade we use those lessons those lessons are organized in a format similar to what we'll be writing for second through eighth grade which i'll get into in just a moment the lesson structure is a 15-minute lesson organized each week and it has these five specific components so the lesson begins with
170the teacher in an engage together section by building background knowledge on the specific skill they then explore together often this is done through a media based investigation where the teacher shows a video or shows and plays a song and then they provide some more explicit learning through the connection component where the students are engaged in talking about the video or the song some lessons have a role play others there writing a reflection again writing kindergarten in first grade keep that in mind and then the lesson ends with a mindful moment where the students are taking a deep breath pausing to reflect on the lesson so very short lesson and then reinforced over the course of the week and then there's a specific family component built in that parents can access teachers can send to parents
171it's available both ways that highlights what the skill is and provides some options for parents to provide reinforcement and application at home so here's an example of what that lesson looks like the philosophy that the publishers take with the wonders curriculum around these life skills is organized around the whole child component which involves the social emotional learning lessons that i just mentioned have the specific components habits of learning which become that reinforcement in the academic components and then the classroom culture which is again part of that collaborative pbis and loving to learn learning culture that is set up the lesson plan you can see how it's organized in those four components and again um all of this is even accessible now within the program because we're using the ela portion so that is our recommendation
172for kindergarten and first grade for second and eighth grade we will utilize those lessons that are being drafted right now as brian mentioned by the writing teams and we have supported those teams with a specific lesson plan template because again we have high standards for our curriculum and canyons and so we wanted to ensure that we were organizing lessons very systematically and in a fashion that was consistent and part of a routine that our teachers could easily implement while also meeting the specific needs of the schools as identified by these particular skill components so the lessons will be structured in a 15-20 minute lesson that is taught each week and then has reinforcement the lesson structure was designed specifically around components for building community and a responsive culture which is similar to what our elementary
173schools have already been implementing with their morning meeting structure and to what our middle schools have been implementing in their advisory time period so we really wanted to focus on taking advantage of the strengths that they already have in place with those structures and then focusing the lesson accordingly so the 15 to 20 minute lesson that will occur each week will begin with the greeting the students again to immediately set that positive tone create that community and continue to build safety and respect within the classroom the lesson then opens with a sharing component and the opportunity for students to connect and build that classroom community and then the teacher will move into the explicit part of the instruction where the learning activity encompasses some interactive components around building those specific skills we organized the lesson
174template for the teams to create a much more interactive and cooperative experience so that again we're focused on building these skills cooperatively and then the lesson closes with a message to wrap up the learning and to challenge students and commit to the practice the lesson then includes specific applications for the teachers to include to reinforce and practice the concept and to encourage the reflection as well as the ongoing reinforcement of those skills so the lesson occurs once a week but then that reinforcement would occur daily and this is where we can start looking at some of those specific ties to where we would communicate and provide that support to families each week with those specific skills so with that we have the lesson plan this is not the template this is the actual lesson plan
175we're going to walk through these for a sample of our third and eighth grade lesson so what we did here is we provide you with three sample lessons uh this being the third grade what was kind of fun for me uh is we're again in the process of trying to like finalize these drafts of just getting some core content together so you have something to work with with the advisory committee and something finalized hopefully at some point to bring to the board so we can implement this stuff come september so teachers and students have access to it um but it was really interesting pulling these lessons because these were actually lessons that i did in elementary school back in the day and uh that's going back decades i won't mention how many decades but it
176is going back a few decades so it was kind of fun to be able to see some of the lessons that were tied into this and kind of walking through that um lesson and kind of reflecting back on my own personal experience of having been in elementary school so the lesson itself shows you the lesson plan template um two components that i've been that we've been talking about in mtss and adding is a row that actually aligns it explicitly with a strategic plan language um and then another role that i think would be good from the advisory group would be to get a parent reinforcement component so as we have that advisory group we can get feedback and input from parents on how they could reinforce a lot of these lessons at home as well
177so this third grade lesson is a ball toss where the kids learn each other's name so it's kind of fun because it integrates the movement into their learning but you can look up there at the topic the learning intention that kids can practice their listening skills and learn strategies to focus on attention uh the tie-in with the portrait of a graduate and like i said in this particular instance the activity would be ball tossing or ball rolling from one kid to another saying each other's name so they can kind of get you know familiar with who each other is an introductory activity um and then to expand upon that uh to make it more challenging as you can look in the learning activity there there down towards the bottom you can play what's called my
178turn your turn where the students give a series of directions the example up there is you know for example like touch your nose touch your ear roll the ball and then see if everybody can kind of follow along see if they're listening right paying attention so that's the third grade lesson again these are 15 minute um lessons over there the course of the week so the fifth grade is also focused on the art and skill of listening and uh it was fun i remember doing this i think it was like fifth or sixth grade here the lesson topic again is on listening with attention you can see what the learning intention there is that we can listen with attention skills to focus our attention so they can work towards personal and academic goals the time
179with the portrait of a graduate there but this particular game um and probably many of us may have done this in school but you start with a statement like on one end of the classroom and then you work all the way through all the rows and then as it gets to the talent you see what that end product is of the statement a lot of times it's never what it started out being right so being able to have conversations with kids on again the importance of listening uh having effective communication i think in this digital world you know having an activity like this and helping kids understand and how it applies with texting and social media which is the most likely majority used language that a lot of our kids are using nowadays when they
180communicate especially outside of school and how many times that information can be misinterpreted or misassumed or misread right and then what that does as far as communication um so those are just a couple sample lessons for third and fifth grade uh and then the eighth grade lesson again is tied into personal growth and that's just helping kids understand the smart acronym and establishing goals in relationship to that and i've used this multiple times my life i remember learning this as a student in middle school in high school and even in college and just last night i ran into one of my former students at alton who's going to be a senior next year and at the gym and we had about a 20-minute exchange in conversation and as i'm reflecting on looking at this lesson
181plan it was a lesson that i was teaching him as it relates to smart goals and training and uh working out because he has some specific goals that he wants to meet and help them get to that so again just using those smart goals to help us in our personal growth as well as professional growth or in this case school growth so again goals that are specific measurable action realistic and time bound so and in order to get to your long-term goals you got to have short-term goals to help build those building blocks along the way so implementation plan uh as i mentioned uh we're going to have an advisory review council right now i've got about 25 parents on that it's very heavily representative of the southern part of our district i would love
182to get some more parents on the north end so we can kind of keep that that balanced but right now i have a lot of parents that have interest and they're eager and wanting to help provide feedback input and reviews of the curriculum so we're going to provide that opportunity right now we're in the process of doing a full internal review so the team leads the specialists that have been overseeing the work groups uh my department instructional supports and our mtss team are all going to have eyes on the material as well as obviously the advisory committee but i want it to be of quality and i want it to be in a organizational structure so when we go to present to the parents that it's not a mess so to speak that it's cleanly
183organized to help them manage their time because they're going to be contributing their time and volunteering their hours so we want to make it worthwhile for them um again i think the end goal is to try to have something at some point in september i didn't put a specific date in there because again a lot of this is going to be time specific in terms of when we can get all the like i said the the lessons reviewed get the advisory group together might even be a couple of times that we pull everybody together for that and then again with doing a field test for this year it lends itself for us to be able to do a lot of measurements right um is it effective is it working look at looking at the quantitative
184data that we know was troubling this last year with discipline referrals and attendance and then looking at some of our early warning system data you know is it having an impact is it having a difference and sometimes we know that takes time right that it just doesn't happen overnight but i think getting that alongside qualitative measurements again feedback from kids from our teachers from parents from administrators on how it's working how it's going so again we can make adjustments and finalize it for a potential proposal for implementation next year in terms of a full board adoption um so in wrapping up we'll open it up for questions this concluding slide here just kind of gives you some visuals so we've got the strategic plan portrait of a graduate and what i've done there is highlighted
185the five competencies or characteristics that tie into that purpose um key that's up top so again each of these guiding life decisions influencing behavior shaping goals having a sense of direction and creating meaning so we want kids to be motivated in the learning and then i've just got the five unit areas listed there as well so so ammon and i are open to questions so thank you so much i'd like to give superintendent a minute first before we have questions thank you president first off um dr mcgill and uh dr landry just want to tell you both how much i appreciate your work on this and all of the effort all of our teachers and coaches and specialists that have worked on this um i just for me from my perspective from our last board
186meeting you know some of the concerns that i shared i think you've clearly addressed and i think it is very reflective of the strategic vision and plan that the board set out and i really appreciate that i appreciate the transparency i think before we get into the questions one thing that we do need to talk about is process right so you've got five focus areas obviously all of those lessons are not created at this point right or they're close to or they're in process so i think thinking about just curriculum review and adoption we're looking at a kind of a three reading process like we traditionally have and it's in a pilot situation as you mentioned so what i'm thinking here is is that out of the five then you're probably looking at like a
187cycle at least three times through the year um at least twice minimum probably three times that it would probably overlap so the board and the public have an opportunity at large to look at those plans as they come on board and then internally you're running this these feedback loops within the parent advisory and within our own um staff right is that how you're kind of seeing and i think the other part to all this too is you know we've talked about embedding this into canvas so that would provide students and parents full transparency full access and i think it would allow for a lot of integration and support home between the school and parents you know i happened to mention the messaging that little canyon elementary provided to my wife and i and we really
188appreciated that so we could sit down with our kids and have those conversations and and having a a little guy although he hates me to call him little guy because he's now 6'2 and about 2 30 and looks down at me when i talk to when i talk to him but he has special needs and we really appreciated getting that information home because it took a lot of coaching and still requires a lot of coaching from us as parents to help guide him and lead him and we do rely upon the support structure of the school and the teaching and the reinforcement that happens there but it's it's best when parents and teachers and school communities are working collectively together and i firmly believe that so so we would essentially go through three potentially three
189intervals and then we would set up for full curriculum adoption in the spring is that yeah that's kind of what we're what we're thinking okay and then i just want to make one other point too is that i think um and i mentioned this before and you know all of the data that you've shared with us about student behavior and just our attendance issues and our office referrals and everything that's happening how how needed this really is and our teachers i i think um are going to be so appreciative i i think my understanding too is that it does have the capability to be on demand so if the school you know has certain issues they're working on that they can pull those lessons as needed is that also so we're not lock step teaching
190the very same thing all the time and then one other point with that is that on on a macro level we have all of these systems in place right that are that are actively you know reviewing and changing or refining but i think it's also important right down to the school level at a classroom level that's granular that we're communicating out front to parents that this is you know here here's what whether it's a school or at the teacher level but because sometimes i think you know it's easy to you may not be paying attention to what's happening at the district level with review and you know approval but just simply knowing each week or what we're working on that week as a parent that this is what's going to come home and take a
191look at it how like you said how can i reinforce that i think that's great so is that kind of yeah i would agree with that yeah i mean at a minimum i see pulling the advisory group together probably at least a couple of times between now and and sometime in september uh after we have these internal reviews of the lessons themselves and then i think there's a lot of power in giving schools a little bit of autonomy right like you said choosing what works best and what the highest needs are for that given school community i did survey all of our elementary middle school principals and i found it interesting that their top two were helping kids make responsible decisions and go figure right with the behavior we saw and i saw it personally
192as a principal this last fall i've never seen anything like it in 25 years and then the second one of those was setting goals for personal growth for students as well so helping them grow and develop in that capacity and then i think you know the school messaging home with parents coupled with i think what our communications team could land and provide i know justin anderson uh is putting together some parent videos to tie directly in with this as well to help with that messaging and to reinforce each of these components at home so okay thank you dr meal turn the time back to present team thank you okay thank you thank you for that additional information um several board members have questions and slash comments so we'll start with mrs oaks mr wrigley and
193then mrs power thanks so much brian that was awesome this is a ton of work it's a very heavy lift and i recognize there's a lot of you that have been working on it and you've been reaching out and seeking out which parents would like to give input and i think you've done a great job really trying to do something that no district has done before and creating their own and i love that it's going to be homegrown and it's going to reflect canyon's values um i do have a question with regard to the wonders seo peace i'm wondering if there's any way for us to be able to have access or look at the kindergarten and first grade seo lessons okay i would like to take a look at it personally and also you
194know through this process similar to what dr roberts was saying and making sure that this entire adoption process is very transparent and open to the public if there's a way for the public to be able to get on and see those for that it's open between now and and whenever we end up approving this as a board i think would be important because we've adopted wonders technically everybody has access now so what i'll do is write up the instructions about how to access and where to find it in the system so that you can go right to those particular lessons that's great thank you that's all my questions thank you mr wrigley i appreciate uh i appreciate all you and your staff have done this summer we have gone through two hell years thinking that
195this would be a year that everybody can go on vacation but you and most of your staff spent the entire summer developing a curriculum so that we didn't have to go out and try to fix a national curriculum and change it so much to meet our values that would work so thank you uh i assume that your top number one goal in this program is not to be castle approved correct which is why we're customizing software we're not worrying about that and believe me uh to be completely transparent i looked at all of the language from the onset in terms of what we're developing and i think one of the advantages of being in this position again as a parent in this district and having been an educator in this district and i graduated of
196this district that i think it hasn't even probably i have even a closer lens um and you know interest if you will and ensuring that what we're providing is um meeting the needs of our kids and doing it in the right format so that was the problem most of the national curriculum that we looked at is that they met the council requirements so this is good to hear that we're not moving that direction um our teachers over this last year have gone through so much they were screaming at us for a curriculum mostly because the teacher cannot teach if the kids cannot learn and that's what's happened over the last couple years my daughter just recently took a position at jordan high with some ninth graders and she said dad these kids have no empathy
197they have no structure these were seventh graders two years ago when all this stuff happened and she was saying it's difficult to teach and we're finding that with a lot of our teachers are saying we have to do something otherwise we're leaving the profession it's not the reading writing arithmetic it's the behaviors of our students and the social emotional skills that have just sort of fallen apart so i'm glad they see that we're moving this direction i'm also glad to see that basically the stuff we're teaching the basic core principles that we should have learned in kindergarten these are not value driven like a lot of the curriculums where personal values whatever that may be they're going back to core principles that these individual students should know to be successful one of them is resilience
198we're finding that about forty percent of our students that graduate and go into college bomb out they have no resiliency skills so i'm hoping as we now go college and career that this curriculum will give them the life skills to also be not just educated but to have those emotional quotient skills that they'll be successful we often worry about reading and writing arithmetic scores but really in employment will get you which gets you canned as your social emotional skills if you don't have those particular skills which we're finding a lot of the new generation coming out don't then they're very they're not to be successful and as parents and and in life or whatever um i also like this that it's it's um it's a pilot we're starting off i mean it's impossible but this
199lesson i think there was what 500 lessons 432 yeah so i mean it's impossible to do that minimize over the summer but i will i would as we talked before i would not encourage you to do that many because we need to build it as we go so as you put together that with the parents we find out in the teachers we found out what works what doesn't work we could tweak over this next year uh and then come out with a product for next year that's that that's solid and then we can start doing the research on it that this district always does to make sure it's it's meeting those criteria the other thing i think you tried to work on that a lot of the national curriculum that we talked a little bit
200about later in me and some others are extremely time intensive for our teachers to implement a lot of those would take they've got enough stuff on their plates especially our elementy teachers who are saying i've got to have something but i can't have too much because if i have too much i'm going to break this shirt so this program's going to be it will take some additional time but hopefully be able to integrate into their curriculum not be so time intensive that they're going to take hours away learning some different philosophies so i'm glad to see that we own it we can decide what to do with it how we're going to change it if we have comments from the public saying i don't like that this particular thing we probably need to run it
201against a whole group of parents as you've done to make sure that that's that is what the public's wanting not just one or two um but we can change that we can modify that and to do what we need to do um so i i just i'm just delighted that you spent so much time not delighted anyway happy i guess that you spent so much time and i'm really appreciative of everybody who did it um i'm hoping as we move forward with the teachers that one of the things you're gonna be doing is rolling out a training curriculum will be sharing that with us as to what this will look like and how that will put in and won't be so such a heavy burden but we really do need this year something for our
202teachers yeah they just that's the main thing it's not that you know we've got a new uh reading curriculum we got a new math group we got to do this and that that's not going to break them as much as if the kids are unable to learn in the class when we present this this is critical that we move forward with some kind of a life skills program for these kids uh they're getting bombarded everywhere with inappropriate life skills uh and i'm i'm really grateful that it's based upon principles so just thank you for all this i look forward to looking forward to that what's happening on that getting our input from our families and be able to actually develop a program that's going to meet the needs of our district um for the years
203to come thank you thank you thank you thank you mrs maybar i'm going to briefly say thank you this was a lot of work and i really appreciate the extensive phone call we had together and with amber thank you so much i as we you were going through this the thing i'm really thrilled about is we've got some changes to the life skill units and it reminded me of dr briscoe and the book he used to talk about and how great leadership in schools reflects the principles and the values that of the community we serve and i think that's what you've really done as you have held on to our strategic plan and i love the lesson plans the lesson plans are simple and easy to implement for the teacher but they're fun for the
204kids okay a few thoughts i we talked about you know and you've talked about how the easiest way to implement it so the parents get their eyes on it first is to put it in canvas i think it would be great with the lesson overview if the first step is posted on canvas so parents may have the first look and discussion with their child because i think when we set this out to the public that's going to provide so much reassurance to these parents and they're going to be thrilled they're going to open up the lesson plan and go look at that that's the first step and that's the kind of that reverse classroom idea like you talked about with your son that i can feel totally relieved as a parent if i have a
205child that has anxiety oh good i get the first take at a discussion before they go and talk about it so and that's one part um i have a few other thoughts and it's about the crosswalk um and we talked about this a little bit i just wanted to go through it again maybe we can pull it up on the screen the life skills crosswalk so i'm going to this is one unit that i wish was um was carried out um with a little more detail thank you amber she's trying to go over there so it's the it's the third attachment the life skills crosswalk while she's pulling it up i'm going to read part of our human center support strategic initiative and how awesome was that that we went through and gathered parents and
206teachers and administrators and went through those workshops and gathered the data from surveys and really had it funneled down through all the lenses the strategic initiative says csd will implement tiered systems to support the social emotional and met when and mental well-being of students that foster honesty integrity responsibility hard work resilience lifelong learning personal growth service and respect and i on your units that with the previous slide you have encapsulated all of those except for the honesty and integrity when we look at the crosswalk here we see utah portrait of a graduate honest honesty and integrity and then we look at the associated life skills and in the utah portrait of a graduate it actually has these are the life skills students can demonstrate they are trustworthy ethical reliable and accountable for the results they
207produce i'm seeing accountability here um when you're saying accepting responsibility for actions in that third column but i'm not seeing i'm seeing demonstrating empathy and i would love to see demonstrates ability to be trustworthy ethical um and and uh you know as simple as a lesson plan what does honesty mean by the end of this lesson students will be able to identify what it means to be honest why is honesty important what are the consequences of dishonesty what are the qualities of honest people how can you demonstrate the trait of honesty in the following situations in little scenarios i think this will really drastically improve student life because i think when kids make mistakes the hardest thing in the world is to admit they make a mistake they want to hide it we live in
208this world where everyone wants to be perfect and on social media these kids think they're going to be perfect and look perfect and everything's going to be perfect and i'd love for us to have lesson plans okay sometimes even though you think through your decision you make a mistake that's okay then what making mistakes is part of growth and learning and it's okay but what we need you to do is be honest if your friend on the playground starts bullying someone you need to be honest and confess you saw your friend bullying think of how quicker all everyone can heal and move forward and less time and resource we take with administrators and teachers investigating and figuring out what happens so i think that that teaching the importance of honesty and when you make a
209mistake to be honest um and i would love to see that in that in a concrete associated life skill and lesson plan um and then just the other idea is under service when we look in that third column if you scroll down by service we have these are the concrete skills use apply display empathy where are you i think you guys scroll scroll down right there right there right there yep okay so third column these are the life skills we're teaching use apply display empathy if you're empathetic maybe you're more likely to serve people respecting diverse perspectives i think that goes more under respect than service demonstrating compassion for others that one's fine demonstrating cultural competency and understanding i think that goes more to respect than service hearing others perspectives again to me isn't reflecting
210service so i would love for that to tie more into the service and talk about how students can look for ways to benefit the classroom or the playground and do something nice not expecting a reward or not expecting praise and if we can really hone down for these kids what does it mean to better those around you what does it mean to look at how to help the whole and look outside of yourself and so i would love to see a little bit more concrete life skills on that way something interesting i was just reading an article in forbes the number one character trait employers look for in successful comp in successful companies is if the person they are interviewing demonstrates honesty and trustworthiness which you know seems like an obvious thing but that's a
211life skill and i think our kids are really afraid of admitting sometimes when they make mistakes and that's where the dishonesty comes in and i think that will help them with the resilience but anyway thank you so very much i really appreciate it so excited to see this well and i and i appreciate your feedback and input um i mean that's the beauty of this is the fact that we it's ours right so we can customize it and we can make improvements and we can refine it we can add where there may be gaps right and then the other parts of this too is again this is just one component of a larger framework of what we're creating as it relates to a canyon school district portrait of a graduate right so i look at
212something like service you know a lot of us aren't going to learn service in a 15-minute lesson in a class every given week right and that's why i think it's important for principals as they roll these out to contextualize that in terms of what that looks like in their giving community for me i probably you know as far as in school learned the importance and value of service by being part of the peer leadership team at alta high school and and honestly that experience and the learning that took place uh by going down to our local elementaries and working with these kids who saw us as heroes and helping them with uh self-esteem and you know building self-confidence and just playing games and making connections um it was so rewarding right going back to what
213you talked about doing things without expecting some sort of external reward right and honestly it's the it's the very reason why i stand here today and it's very reason why i chose this pathway as an educator is the the profound influence and impact that vicky iverson who was my teacher at the time at alta high school which by the way we're supposed to be having lunch this week and i haven't seen her in like 25 years just to tell her thanks um but i think there's things that principals again can do um and they're building leadership teams as we roll this out that they can support it with the very things that they're doing in the school and make it just that much larger and more robust so that kids you know yes there's a
214lesson but we're putting it into context or providing opportunities programmatically for kids to be able to do this right and another program i can think of as link crew having our upperclassmen serve and mentor our underclassmen which is a program we started at alta so i think there's a lot of opportunities that we can support that maybe not necessarily in a lesson per se but to have it be supported contextually through other opportunities within the school or within the district so i think that's a great idea and as you were talking about the different opportunities for leadership dr robbins always talks about servant leadership and he's a he's a good example of that and thinking about these students talking about how to be a leader amongst your peers and what servant leadership looks like you
215know and as an educator certain leadership is probably one of the most um most needed so okay thank you i i just wanted to add my recognition for how much work has happened since we last met and i appreciate it and i really i really appreciate the structure that you've put together whether it's this crosswalk or the lesson plans and and i i feel like that structure um even though it's still in process right we're still kind of working on things but by doing that it does then allow for um for modifications for customization for all of those things um and and like has been said how great it is that we've got such talented people here in canyon's district and for i i just am really excited for what what we'll be able to
216accomplish and um and um appreciate the work that has got gone into it this far and and will yet go into it but i'm sorry i said and let's publish it and make lots of money well i was going to ask about whatever intellectual property rights we can claim so um anyway that's really great but but i i just kind of want to maybe clarify a little bit about what next step is and what what the board feels comfortable with with doing uh we list this is listed as a first reading um i feel like there's probably uh we should probably get eyes on it again um and so i'm just kind of thinking timing wise when is when are you thinking the advisory committee will well we have to do internal reviews and and
217so my team we have all of our wellness staff that's back our school psychs counselors social workers nurses school-based mental health professionals and so my team who are the team leads over all this are also training these staff this week and getting prepared for the school year um so a lot of this review is going to be probably happening outside of traditional work hours um so depending upon how quick we can get that done hopefully sooner versus later and then i'm intending on sending the advisor email out this week to several of our parents to see one if they can commit to it if they want to commit to it and two if they have the time and give them uh probably some example windows of when we might meet and how much time that
218the commitment would take and and i appreciate the boards i've had a lot of referrals from you guys in terms of parents in your each of your communities and some have great experience um in this both from educational lens also from a clinical and medical uh you know pediatrician lens and so we've got some great parents that want to step up and help um provide some feedback in it so internal reviews have the advisory committee meet uh get feedback and reviews from them and then hopefully bring it back before this body again so whether that's august 16th or the first meeting in september um that would be my my goal one or the other so okay board does that sound like a reasonable plan then so so we'll just kind of wait to hear from
219you when you're ready to bring it bring it back to us okay sounds great anything else all right thank you again and please extend our appreciation to the team i'll just say the team because i can't even begin to to um recognize who all was involved but i know we had we had 25 educators within our district and then we had 12 team leads that over that have been overseeing the project so yeah and yeah being a building principal always took like two or three weeks off in july and i think my mind and body's like uh when's that coming yeah my wife has a big birthday i won't mention which year this year because she'd kill me um but we've talked about maybe doing something on october for her birthday maybe take a few
220days and go somewhere fun so yeah but it's been fun i've enjoyed being a part of this process and again those that have committed time um have done a pretty amazing job with the limited time that we've had over these last five weeks so i appreciate your sentiment thank you thank you okay that concludes the items under new business and now i'll turn time over to superintendent robbins for a report and then to business administrator leon wilcox for a report thank you president just a couple of things first off um just want to give a shout out to our principals are back um they had uh their their first uh day um critical policies meeting and i mentioned this before but the last two julys over the last two years i i think you know
221i i saw them like every day in the month of july and they didn't take any time off and they were just like really burning the midnight oil remember last year this time we were right in the middle of the surge and we had all these issues and um it's just been great to see them re-energized and smiling and excited many of them have taken some time off really for the first time in a couple of years so uh just great to see them back i just wanted to comment to earlier i appreciate the comments from our parents on their input on on their concerns about the books all boys aren't blue that book actually is not in circulation in canyon school district it was originally located at alta high and deselected in january so
222it is it's not in circulation um in print nor in uh digital digital uh copy currently in the district there are 19 books that are either under review or under challenge eight of those have already been deselected and the others are currently in the process so i think you know one recommendation i i have and i think and i don't want to get into the um in a future meeting we'll be talking about the new model policy and what we're currently doing with our policy but um part of that would be um just being transparent about which books uh have been identified and where they're at in the process so i think you know our our parents and our community can can look forward to that but just wanted to point that out so thank
223you thank you mr wilcox yes thank you president tinky i just want to give a big thank you to our i.t team for our registration that started yesterday yesterday i think was our biggest one day ever as we registered nearly 16 000 students their parents got online completed the registration did have a few hiccups was slow some programming issues in the morning but it did pick up in the afternoon but again sixteen thousand yesterday another thirty eight hundred today so roughly twenty thousand we will be sending out robo calls starting tomorrow hopefully to get those completed also a big thank you to our team contractors architects at glacier hills our fire marshal this afternoon gave us occupancy for our teachers to come back and start working there later this week so he's asked us to
224keep students out till we get some more contractors out later this week but we'll be ready to go on the 15th there with the ribbon-cutting next year's next week next uh thursday is mentioned by curse jeff and kirsten so that's all i have thank you thank you okay um board member comments let's start with mrs nybaur i wanted to begin by thanking the parents who came and spoke during patron comments as well and i believe one of you maybe you're still here or it was the other person who's not here anymore sent me a elementary school book and i did talk to our steak library our steak our district library media specialist and that book was weeded out i want to i really want to thank again dr mcgill and dr roger clanwood for all
225the time as we're talking about this summer has been easier for everyone else probably not you but thank you i as you were concluding i'm envisioning in my mind a little service less lesson plan where fourth graders get excited about going and picking up trash on the playground because they're doing service or they surprise the custodian by emptying the garbages you know and getting the kids excited about what that feels like just to help the school and i your lesson plans the ball toss all of it it's just exciting because we're engaging these kids in a friendly fun way inside the classroom which will then also play over to the playground because that's when they get the other time they get the social interaction so i see this as not only a life skills but
226an opportunity for them to have more social interaction too in the classroom so i love the way you've structured that so thank you so much for that work um in conclusion i i want to thank our teachers i have a little boy going into first grade this year and he asked me the other night can we start counting down the days till school starts his teacher built such a great sense of love and confidence in him that he can't wait to get back to school and we have so many teachers that do that and i'm so grateful for them and as i drive past the schools and those parking lots that are starting to fill up as teachers prepare for the classroom what an inordinate amount of time and work and effort it is to
227be ready for the first day and and i'll be sending i'll only be sending four to canyon school district public schools this year because my youngest isn't ready for kindergarten yet and i will have two that are now postgraduates of canyon so this feels a little odd i only have four going but so excited for all the wonderful experiences they have not only in the classroom but just with student life so thank you to canyons for all the good we're doing and that's it thanks thank you mr wrigley i look forward tomorrow to our new teacher celebration as you can see i sort of got excited last year um i am so appreciative of those teachers and choosing to work for our district when they had so many other district opportunities they could have worked
228for and they chose us and i know we won't let them down on that i'm also express my great gratitude for our teachers that have hung in there through the last couple years and that are moving forward this next year this has been a very difficult year two years for our teachers our staff our administrators i'm hoping as we move into this new school year it opens up new opportunities the staff administration and the board have been working really hard to try to make up for all the damage that's been done over the last two years to be able to change the school environments back to what they were pre pandemic and maybe even better this new curriculum we're talking about life skills i'm hoping is going to help with that we've got several new
229uh educational curriculum coming out which i'm hoping is going to be even more enhanced and better and maybe get our kids back up the level uh and i am very um excited to find out that the rest of the country lost three to five years in their elementary educational level because of that and the state of utah in our district have lost very little our teachers because we fought to keep the schools open and provided educational along great educational opportunities during that time that we did not hear gal the problems that the rest of the country is so with that i thank you thank you mrs oakes thanks ayaka what a lot of my board members have said about and the excitement that comes with the new school year um one of the things that
230caught my attention with the safety presentation that was given during the study session um is specific to cell phone use i thought it was interesting all of our principals were asked the question that in your opinion would a restriction or prohibition of cell phone use in schools lead to a reduction in online bullying and harassment in canyon school district schools and 27 said yes 14 said no that makes me think a lot about whether or not as a board if we should be having a larger discussion and put that on a future agenda to discuss what possible benefits we would have as a school district in choosing to have stricter cell phone policies i know a couple of our middle schools specifically butler and draper park have done so and um for one i understand
231they've had great results i'd be interested in seeing the data associated with that um so anyway that's just um one thing i'd like to highlight and the other is i've been thinking a great deal especially as i've been knocking doors during my campaign and speaking with patrons about the importance of teaching civility and patriotism i know i've mentioned this before but i loved what um dr mcgill shared about what you did for the veterans in your area i think that's really um a meaningful experience for those kids i mean i've i've had experiences before where veterans have been in the room and when people stand to honor their service and as a young kid that made a huge impression on me i feel like it's really important for us to prioritize this experience with our
232students for them to have a deeper appreciation for the sacrifice of our service men and women um one patron actually brought up the the question about why is it in our in our senior awards evenings we aren't honoring those um students who have been admitted into the military academies because it's such a profound honor i mean they have to have letters of recommendation from governors from senators from congressmen and to be able to be admitted to that in many ways is significantly more difficult than being a national merit scholar and so i i think that is something that again i'd like to see us out on our future agenda about what we can do as a board to establish policies or procedures to make sure that our kids are really gaining a deeper appreciation of
233our nation and um and the importance of their civic duty so anyway those are um two of my thoughts thank you this mrs arnold so that um mrs tinky has time and we can be out of here at 10 because my gift to you is to be out of here at 10 i just want to thank you and we're moving on okay thank you mr millerberg i've been chuckling over here a little bit about whether i'd be able to say anything or whether i would have to walk out um i don't know how many of you are aware of it uh today was the great smoke-off and for those of you that are not aware of the great smoke-off in the transportation department uh as we start coming back for school jeremy wardell uh organizes
234a luncheon for uh for the bus drivers and people working in transportation it's been several years that he's been doing that and it's always fun for me when i get the phone call get the email that says we're going out for a smoke you want to go i joke with my wife and tell her i've been out smoking with my buddies today but it's always a nice deal that he does to build team camaraderie in the transportation department and good food too the other thing i want to mention is the amount of work that has taken place this summer with the emt group um jeff has been spearheading this to make it happen that is no small undertaking when you look at what 41 schools reviewing the safety plan for all 41 schools looking for
235holes in our programs looking for things that we could do better in all of our uh schools looking for policies that may need to be made may need to be changed and making as best we can that our kids go to school and school's a safe place i think you would ask most people what they want out of their school they're going to say i'd like my kids get educated i maintain the number one item i want from our school is when my grandkids go to school i know they are safe education to me is in second place being safe so for all those that have been working on the uh on the emt the emergency management uh what is that what's the t stand for team okay of all summer long the sense of
236urgency that's involved there is amazing the direction that that team has to make our schools safe is amazing to me as well we've been very very fortunate in canyon school district during our lifetime of the district and i believe that as we tighten up our safety policies we look at our procedures that i hope that in the future it's not like it's good planning that makes it happen because people will know that we're we are prepared okay thank you um so do i take all 10 minutes no i'm just i'm just going to um again share my um thoughts about the start of school year i it's been mentioned a few times and tomorrow's so every year i like to celebrate first day i mean to me i think it's a holiday it deserves a
237title and so i call it first day and i'm excited that tomorrow is first day for many of our teachers and educators and and employees and i i hope that they have the excitement and the confidence in us not only as a board but as district leaders that their experience will be good whether they're a student or whether they're an employee and i i'm i really am excited for this school year and especially with our strategic plan in place and and all the discussions that we've had just in tonight's meeting how how broad-based the the work of this district is whether it's our safety report or our literacy and libraries and and the life skills and all of those things just all come together and with the idea that we are creating an amazing experience
238for both the educators employees and students and families so anyway i just wish everyone well this last 10 days i guess or so of of summer and as we head into our own first days i hope we can feel the excitement and the enthusiasm and have the energy to make this year the best year we've had so with that if there's nothing else um i declare this meeting is adjourned is