School Board Workshop - February 2, 2021

001good evening everyone thank you for joining us for our school improvement plan meeting um we have a little bit of board business before we get into the presentations um our uh first i'd like to read a statement from the state uh good evening um it is now 5 31 governor inslee's proclamation 20-28 in response to the coven 19 outbreak temporarily suspends portions of open public meeting act the park this proclamation requires that all attendance in an open public meeting not take place in person but occur remotely including the board directors and the public our meeting this evening is conducted via zoom audio webinar and i'd like to call to order board members that are here um so just say i and i'm and i uh ginny sorry i couldn't get to my mute here rob

002here julie here rachel i'm here and mike here oh and lori okay so now we'll be i'll i will um say the pledge of all allegiance and you can silently join me i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay thank you very much okay um next up we need to adopt the board agenda do i hear a motion for adoption of the agenda so director gren waltz moves for the adoption of the agenda sounds like it's been moved and seconded um i will now um do a roll call of your vote or i or nay um i'm an i um ginny hi rob aye julie hi rachel hi all right it's

003been passed and accepted okay next up we have the board consent agenda accept the board consent agenda sorry vic don't pause because then i start okay uh i'll second thought victoria yep i don't see a board consent agenda on the agenda oh remember the superintendent where it says it actually says motion to approve board consent agenda but the uh number three says superintendent so it is actually for the board consent okay so the consent agenda we have a motion and a second okay i'm and i rob hi julie hi rachel hi ginny hi okay great now i'm going to recess the meeting for a couple seconds and then we will um move into our board workshop which will um be centered on school improvement presentations okay so i'm bringing us back in from recess so

004um first up is danny from evergreen high school you're on danny great well uh thank you um very much and i want to thank uh all the board uh and superintendent merlino for the opportunity to speak i can give you guys uh kind of an update of where we're at and where we're going um you know obviously uh covet has been difficult for everyone especially as pertains to school but at ehs we're kind of using this as an opportunity to springboard our focus on equity we as you probably know we put together a school equity team made up of teachers and classified staff as well as administrators and that's led by charlie tumulty and um he's one of our associate principals and that team has been working to put together and facilitate monthly professional development

005sessions around equity uh most currently uh they've engaged our staff in writing their own racial autobiographies as a way to help staff members talk about their experiences with race and i also want to thank before i forget clarissa hightower and the whole cni team not only for helping us kind of put our our professional development plans together but also for just kind of being a sounding board for our team and bringing us the courageous conversations professional development that we've all been able to engage with um excuse me beyond that um we've our instructional coach uh lacey you uh has been instrumental in our development of our equity work uh lacey facilitates a regular book club for additional professional learning for our teachers and actually all of our staff around our around grading we're using the

006book called grading for equity by joe feldman the group uh has begun implementing new grading practices that have provided students with more opportunities to demonstrate their learning and and find success which has been especially important right now during kind of remote learning and and kids having to adapt so much um and then lastly uh one of the things that we have noticed about our staff at evergreen is that we don't completely represent the diversity of our students if you look if you look at the diversity of our staff compared to the diversity of students it it's it's not even close and so diversity and hiring is one of our top priorities not only is it a visible gap but but when we talk to students and parents this is one of the things that they

007also bring up as a barrier to some student's success basically when when kids see themselves in the makeup of the staff they feel more comfortable to learn and that's really what we're all about is is finding um ways to to improve that for kids and so um that's that's been a huge focus for us uh anytime we're doing hiring and luckily we're we're able to make some hires here pretty soon at least at the classified level um beyond our equity work we've also been focused on our classroom instruction together with our teachers last year about last year we came up with three guarantees that we that we're able to make to all of our students every day regardless of the class they're in for every lesson every unit and those those three guarantees are first

008communicating the why uh and and the meaning of the lesson or the unit basically that's that's where our focus on on meaningful learning experiences comes into play secondly is modeling engagement so teachers actually modeling what engagement in the material looks like for kids and then focusing having having lessons that are focused um both on on literally literacy skills like reading writing thinking speaking listening as well as sel standards because of covid obviously we needed to adjust to what our implementation looked like just because we're in remote and we're not we're not actually in person and so especially when you talk about engagement that looks a little bit different online than it would normally in the classroom but we've been able to use uh instructional rounds that we've been doing daily uh as a way to

009identify and celebrate teachers who demonstrate those three guarantees um and we're we're actually trying to increase the leadership capacity of our staff we've we've kind of tapped them to do more presentation of their best practices in their classroom during meetings and trying to trying to build that capacity in them so that it can really be kind of a grassroots movement for our staff going forward we're working hard to to increase our our enrollment in our high rigger courses by our minority populations if you look at that that report or if you look at at the enrollment report of each class uh there's there's an obvious um disconnect between our high rigger courses versus our basic level courses and so we're working hard to change that um we've really started doing that right now around forecasting

010time um and so we're we're hoping for some success around that and then uh additionally we're continuing our work around freshman success and developing supports to ensure on-time graduation help kids meet their post-high school goals and so again i want to thank you for the opportunity to share and also let you know that we can't wait to get our kids back into the building we're really excited about that and you know we think that's going to make a big difference thank you danny thank you okay next up we have allison from cascade middle school all right hello everyone uh i wanted to start by also saying thank you to the board and superintendent merlino for the opportunity to share a little bit about cascade uh we're very proud of our students for persevering through this

011new learning environment and the way that they've adapted this year and also i just want to say really grateful to the cascade staff for both their flexibility and commitment to learning new things and supporting kids in any way that they can uh so at cascade we have um we have some core building values of care belong and learn and so we use those three values when we are talking to kids about things and we also kind of bring that through in terms of everything we do so our professional development our staff learning all tries we try to we try to cluster it all under the umbrella of care belong and learn so our first goal um in our school improvement plan this year was around care and that is to improve our sel practices in

012class so last year we had a home room where every day all of our students were getting the same sel lessons and this year we've transitioned to teachers teaching individual seo lessons in their classes so our mid-year results show that 93 of our teachers are intentionally teaching the seo lessons in their classes which exceeded our goal for the mid-year point one of the things that we do at cascade is um we use a pbis reward system so we have a pbis coordinator who coordinates activities and rewards for students who are meeting our school standards of care belong and learn and some of the successes with this program this year are our teachers have awarded 183 442 pbis points this year so students are able to spend those points um in our cougar store they are

013able to go to holiday sales online reward events different things that they can do to positively engage with our school community another thing that we're doing under sel is we hired a new lap counselor right before we went um we went to remote learning in march and that counselor is exclusively focused on sel support for our kids she targets smaller groups grade level check-ins each week lunch bunch and then connect students who need additional support with outside counselors our second goal belong is around equity and so we have developed a lot of different opportunities for both our entire staff and then smaller groups of learning around equity this year so the way that we um structure our leadership teams at cascade is that all of our teachers elect into different leadership teams this year one

014of the leadership teams that we added was around equity and this teacher team um and some administrators works on leading the professional development around the courageous conversations topics uh and related full group professional development so this group has shared data started conversations with all of our teachers around equitable grading practices we have also used the joe feldman book as our resource for that um in addition to our large group work we had two volunteer book clubs this year uh we got this park but we got this by cornelius minor and culturally responsive teaching by zoretta hammond and these are smaller group opportunities these are volunteers and we're trying to just build our collective capacity amongst our staff to learn and to lead so we also were awarded an esd grant this year around inclusionary practices

015and so we've developed an inclusionary practices leadership team that's 14 staff who are focused on analyzing our current systems and planning for next year's professional development around all different types of equity we've also started a new food pantry and clothes closet this year and we've tried to improve our community outreach and our communication with our families to date the set team this week had 116 students on campus so we're trying to do home visits and reach out and connect to the students who we know need additional support right now during remote learning and then finally our third goal learn is just all about our academic focus so this year we're specifically focused on improving outcomes for our students of color our eld students and our students receiving special education services the way that we're focusing

016on this this on this school is that we're trying to develop some teacher changes that will translate into academic growth for our students so this is our first year in the building of co-teaching in ela and math and so in building those partnerships we have a team of teachers um another teacher leadership team called our instruction for all committee and they have been designing small pieces of our professional development and using um universal design concepts for all for all of our teachers we're focused on aligning our plcs and um this transition to remote learning has been a catalyst for collaboration and um developing common lesson plans for our plcs and again thank you for the opportunity to present around our care belong and learn priorities thanks alison um kathleen from image hi i also want

017to thank the board and superintendent margulino for providing me an opportunity to share a little bit about image and i also want to have a shout out for our image staff at our image families because i think they have all learned the true meaning of flexibility and i just greatly appreciate our community um i first want to talk about our equity goals um during you know our goal of course is to create access for all of our students and during our remote learning this year our set team did a fabulous job we met daily and looked at the student engagement and participation data and really worked hard at bringing in all of our kiddos and by the time we got out of our set groups all of our at-risk kids and our moderate-risk kids had

018opportunity to come in and be served in person and while we didn't get the increase in student engagement that we had hoped we did see that our kiddos that came in and were supported by staff did do much better on their the days that they weren't in here so it was great having them in here and you know helping them access the um technology was a huge piece actually because of we had a few little glitches here at um image with our new building and a lot of our kids just they just couldn't get connectivity so um that was that was an awesome experience to have um the other thing is that we we recognize that we have a lot of work to do yet in ex providing access to our kids and as we

019do in more with the district and courageous conversations there have been times where we've actually felt shame you know we know we can do a much better job and we are really grateful to um the district leadership for providing us the support and everything we need to guide us through this process we also look at equity through the lens of social emotional learning and this year our school counselor has done an amazing job at helping our kids adjust to the new world around them she brought in some curriculum it's called choose love curriculum in a brave new world and it was written by a non-profit group and one of the people that helped write the curriculum happened to be a mom of a student that was killed during sandy hook and so she um really

020works at helping kids recognize their feelings and having a growth mindset and so we've noticed some real um benefit to having that curriculum in our with our kids this year um we are really focusing on the three signatures of social emotional learning that create the strong classroom community you know we have our zones of regulation that we continue to work with helping our kids recognize their feelings and and learn how to recognize the signs of when they're coming out of you know being out of control and we've seen some huge gains with some of our students using that curriculum and our pbis we continue to have high common expectations for our students and we really work hard to celebrate their successes we are excited this year about our new fountains and panel curriculum we've kind

021of gotten into it last year the resources that are provided that the literature is so rich and it really lends itself well to um incorporating diverse culture and ethnicity and it helps kids you know see themselves in books and connect to the reading and um we're we're looking really forward to getting more into that into the book clubs and this year um i'm not sure who was responsible for it but we're really very appreciative for the new additions in our library there are hundreds of books that not only look at culture and ethnicity if they look at gender and all sorts of of different things that our kids can relate to and so we're excited about having them get into our building and be able to access those resources we also this year um have

022done a work a lot of work like we all have around in our professional development sessions and um like most of us we have equity teams that come together and we look at the modules that the district provides us around courageous conversations and we tailor it for our building needs and it's been interesting to see um like how we're evolving some of our teachers are doing really well at seeing um you know the disconnect like we brought we had them bring in their student data and we looked at it and asked them could they predict the outcome by um by demographics or by race and some of them were able to see that connection and really um see the importance of well we need to fix this right and then we have some that are

023still evolving but i know that if we continue the work we're doing um through our courageous conversations and the support that we're getting from our district leaders that we will make will definitely make progress um we have a language a language specialist this year in our building and i can't say enough about her she has done an amazing job of reaching out to our school communities and different groups along with our our fcrc coordinator tons of home visits and outreach just trying to pull people in and help them access and have everything that they need to be successful here at school we are so fortunate to have our kids back i cannot thank the board enough for allowing us to do this because if you could see their faces and maybe you have had a

024chance to go in and see them but particularly at image we have a new school and just the light in their eyes and their smiles i love giving tours like today um we gave tours to our third graders and they haven't really gotten to see the building because we have to kind of keep them in their little cohorts but when we have done the tours they are so excited and i i just know they're going to take huge pride in our school and in themselves and so i'm very very grateful it's an exciting time to be in education and i'm looking really forward to the progress that we're going to meet make in our our community here thank you very much okay tracy you're up from hartford good evening ah thank you for letting me

025um be here to share our story at hearthwood i am super nervous tonight however i always look forward to this evening because i live listening to what everybody else has to say and i always love to share about our wonderful children and staff here at hardwood so our journey in equity this year particularly is really thinking about um access for all of our children and what does that look like and how can we make it happen for everybody um and um really thinking about each child individually and what the needs are and how we're meeting those needs for each individual child so when we think about access for kiddos um it started in march obviously as we go remote and making sure that all of our children had access to chromebook and that they were

026able to log in and then this year um the same thing but lots of so many home visits um with whether it was our associate as a principal and myself our fcrc coordinator our counselor our school psychologists class teachers everybody making an effort to reach out to our families to see what's happening and that they're not being able to access is it that there's not technology at home is there not wi-fi do you not understand and really just checking in to see how everybody's doing um i think the cove has been hard for everybody but there are so many bright spots that are coming from kobed when i think about what has changed within just our thinking process and how we approach um access so the fact that we have reached out to and have

027been able to have this connection with families that we haven't had before is amazing just that families can call anybody and get the help that they need and they feel comfortable coming into hearthstone and that has been a long road that we have worked really hard on is that all people all everybody are welcome at hearthwood um and that it's been a long journey for our families um to feel as though they're welcome the school's open and even though our doors are closed our school is still open over here for you um so that that was our big big thing we saw a huge increase in attendance with our children even remotely because i believe of this attention to making sure that everybody's okay and that access was available for all whether it be hot

028spots or um even our secretaries were jumping in this is how you get into google classroom this is what it looks like now when you get into google classroom you have to go to this tab and as you do that so everybody was making sure our children had access to learning and then thinking about the high quality of learning and just the belonging in the classroom so um knowing that our children were far away and they're all in their own homes and we are guests in their homes teachers are super cognitive of um just creating that wonderful culture that happens probably much easier maybe i don't know in the classroom than it would um remotely they spent a lot of time making sure that happened even remotely so now as children come in amazing it

029is amazing to have them and kathleen i agree with that it's the best days ever since january and the children are on campus um the as they come in that that culture has to be created again because it's a different space but there's half of their children are there and they have new classmates because some have chosen to go remote and some are staying in in person and then there's only half of them there so but that has happened much easier because of the connection that teachers have been able to make with their children and their families so um thinking about access is just amazing but also thinking about um reaching and and um reaching and teaching each individual child as we move along and thinking about what those specific needs are for each child

030um knowing what our end results are as far as standards go but then thinking about what's the show coming in with today thinking about trauma and firm practices um thinking about just the whole child in the house to say it at the moment um but knowing scl knowing um that it's important that we oh well and knowing that all of us probably are dealing with at least some form of anxiety and possibly some form of trauma at this point based on our covid society so teaching through all of that and making sure that children's needs are met here at school our fcrc has been amusing at supporting families and making sure that we are connecting and making sure that people and children are connected and i have to put it out there our kitchen manager

031has been fantabulous at making sure all of our families are fed and that they understand that they can come at any time that the videos open and get the meals that they need for their families we have families coming from all over we are feeding over 350 this summer so um she's done an amazing job at making sure again that access is there for for all um i have this long list of things but the other piece that we're seeing is um and and watching kids come to campus kids haven't been in school they haven't been in the classroom they haven't been in the school for 10 months and that almost 11 months and so you think that didn't hit me until they started coming back in january and they've grown our little bitties have

032grown so much within that time it made me realize how long i mean it's felt like years and years but it did make me realize how long it's been since we've had children in classrooms in school building and um how excited they are to be back when we i asked them every day i've asked what's the best thing about being back at school what are you most excited about being about at school and there are two things they always say being in class with their teacher and being with friends so thinking about that social aspect but then thinking how important the teacher is to our children and their learning and that has become not just to the children but to the families because of where we're guests in their home and um and again it

033goes back to ensuring that access for all that lots more i can say that i will end my time thank you very much thanks tracy all right stuart you're up and running what's going on at fur crest i'm glad you said fur crest because i thought i was either at orchards or riverview look you're moving i'm moving around i would also like to say thank you to everyone the board mike um the cni team um you know when we first heard that we were transitioning to um in personal learning there was a lot of uh at least for me a lot of anxiety however with the heavy lifting uh that our cni team did uh made it smooth and and the transition to have our k and one start off and then go to second

034and third and so on we had the systems down so just like what everyone else is saying it's so awesome to see the kids at school i also want to give a shout out after school today i was making my way into the building and i was talking with one of our full remote teachers and he pulled me aside and he said hey i just want you to look at this tool that i'm doing and i just had a moment of just kind of pause and i just appreciated that he showed me the tools that he was doing and the heavy lifting that their our remote teachers are doing for our kids and families who choose to stay remote because i think that's important that we of course our doors are open for those who

035want to come in and also um our computers are open too for that um learning to help our kids to receive the best education um our our theme this year at fur crest is let kindness ripple um and that's because what's going on in the world today as we know and i know it's simple we always talk about kindness we always talk about being kind but we want to make sure we we ripple it out of fur crest we ripple it out of vancouver vancouver we rip out of clark county and so on that one small touch can make an impact in many different lives and that's what we need to do and model that um one other analogy i just wanted to uh talk about is just something that we've talked about with our

036staff this year and it's not my analogy uh staff hears a lot of analogies uh from me but i heard this analogy once about some people trying to move a grand piano and they were having trouble moving it and our um what i what the staff here hears me saying of lift where you stand and that's what someone said when they were trying to lift this grand piano they said stand together and lift where you stand and um because the cni team our staff many of us have worked hard to lift lift where you stand and we wouldn't have been able to be here and to help our children receive the education that they deserve without our phenomenal evergreen staff so i just wanted to say that um right along with what others have been

037saying i think a big word that we've been talking about is access to learning a huge another uh word that we come across as asset based thinking for all learners so that's been a focus and of course our courageous conversations around race and equity i can tell that as we started this work around courageous conversations um it's been hard and difficult to have these uh conversations and i would say for me as a leader it's been hard for myself but hopefully i am modeling what that practice looks like so we can be comfortable talking about this and like others have been saying is talk about our own racial um biography and going into that we came up we with our equity our with our um school leadership team we came up with a equity statement

038that guides um what we do and we it says we will partner with all members of our school community to encourage equity by inviting asking listening acknowledging and responding to all voices and one of the things that i can tell that our staff is um one of the words that keep on coming up right now within the equity statement that we tend to live by is the word listen we just want to listen to especially our different cultures our families of different colors especially our black community we had uh clarissa come and speak to um our school leadership team uh just because we wanted to listen we wanted to learn from her her own story but also how that story connected to our district's vision on top of that we also listened to one of

039our staff members who is a person of color and she also did a phenomenal job so we're just kind of listening and learning and just really learning how to have these uh courageous conversations um amongst ourselves um one of the other questions that we asked about access you know we said you know do our students have access do the do our students have what they need to access the remote learning what about the internet what does teaching and learning look like in the remote setting and what does partnering with parents look like now and again how can we listen better to our families one of the things that we came up with we came up with something called uh cocoa and conversations and that was just listening and partnering with our parents um this whole

040remote thing was new to all of us especially our parents who now we are partnering side by side so what does that look like so um every wednesday not ever uh yeah every wednesday for a little bit we would um open up a zoom and we would just ask we'd have a little presentation and we would just um listen to our parents and um just respond to their questions um a lot of the questions and then what we ended up doing we tailored it so we had um one of the sessions was on technology how to keep our kids safe using commonsense media that platform uh one was on uh zones of regulation you know we heard a lot of our parents saying um what we need right now we need skills because our kids

041are having concerns with you know staying engaged how do i get them to attend you know sit still and so we would um we did that and just by partnering with our families um and so um our number one goal and i won't talk a lot about it because i didn't write it i didn't include in this part was engagement and core instruction that was one of our goals this year as a staff that's kind of a i always tell our staff a moving target because it's you know what is what does remote learning look like in like a in the setting what is remote learning 2.0 look like what is small groups and reading look like we're just trying to move as the more information we learn from our cni team how do we

042help give that to our staff and and and little by little um again how are we responsive uh to our kids um one of the things i want to focus in on is our goal about um using achievement level descriptors or we call them the alds to deeply know our language learners and their needs something that we're really trying to do at fur crest this year is just really lay the foundation of getting to know our english language learners um right now we have about 20 percent 77 78 uh kids out of it's right now we have a total of 393 kids we're down a little bit of course in enrollment but we want to lay that foundation of what does through the lens of reading writing speaking and listening what is it like a

043level one level two level three level four kiddo look like who's exhibiting to certain behaviors and speaking and reading and so um our goal this year and i'm glad we didn't bite off more than we can too um is to really lay that foundation is to really understand our english language learners um and i mean it helps out all of our learners so we're going to under help our staff understand that and then next year i don't know quite yet what we're going to do but we'll do something around of course uh english language learners and maybe we'll jump more into the shelter instruction practices but i'll have to uh talk with um of course our our team um who and i just want to give a shout out to um who i i believe

044they're they're here um because there's no way that um i would hope i would never say i in this sentence because it's a team efforts we who um we do this for um our kids so that is the the fur crest story um and as we're ever evolving too so thank you thanks stuart okay lauren what's going on in endeavor thank you victoria good evening to all the board members and superintendent merlino and all others here tonight thank you for giving um us our time to share a little bit about our school um for sure this has been a challenging and different year yet i think that there's a silver lining to it because we've been able to lean into our equity work with our commitment for change uh inclusiveness has always been an important

045characteristic here at endeavor and one that we've worked to develop and maintain since we opened endeavor 12 years ago whether it's our special ed students social economic race creed color ethnicity national origin sexual orientation gender identity language height weight age physical or mental ability we strive to embrace and respect all at endeavor and so this year i challenged the the entire staff to not just say our equity statement believe it wear it show it in our actions with our students and families and this is a big challenge because our staff doesn't look like our families or do we have life similar life experiences and the majority of them don't see or understand the challenge of this when it comes to serving our students and families we're getting there it's a work in progress so in

046may we announced the need for a living equity team and the team was all volunteers 16 people including our associate principal and myself four classified and 10 certificated staff made up the equity team excuse me we met during the summer doing a book study on white fragility by robin d'angelo it was impactful to say the very least we took a deep dive journey of the heaven heart and explored our biases and challenged our own personal beliefs we all came away bonded together with a new commitment to our staff our students and our families and from these meetings we morphed into three cadres still under the equity team but three quad cadres that drive our school beliefs and actions and our goal to be culturally responsive to all families and students through our three focused teams

047professional development outreach and student voice and then i'll share a couple a few intentional moves that are cadre planned um of course we did the book study and we're still going through each chapter with the whole staff and our cadre leads each small group we also created an equity resource library and read articles around equity which is why our the book study we plan on finishing it in march administration we met with every grade level every group an entity in the school to reflect as a team to monitor progress and to hear what they're thinking around the book study with white fragility i wanted to be clear and not miss one person in our school one compass pointing in one direction every staff meeting we've always opened up our staff meaning sharing something that exemplifies

048compassion and we now include reading aloud our equity statement by a different staff member each meeting we continue to meet with our russian and spanish parents monthly over zune to answer questions and build relationships our first meeting with our hispanic parents 20 parents came 18 to 20 parents came the last meeting this last month um 30 parents came and they the interest just keeps growing so um that's reaching out to them so we're excited about that before school we messaged every parent letting them know we'd have translators here at the school to assist them with questions and registration i wish we were that smart 12 years ago and even longer than that when i was at image because we had so many parents coming here to use the translators our russian translators our spanish translators

049there was a lineup because so many parents had so many questions and so we're going to do this every single year um let's see in october we had an endeavor fill your bucket parade for our families and that was a good success huge success our staff pd continues to focus on equitable teaching practice that best serves all students through using esi elementary sheltered instruction we realigned ourselves to the checklist for preparation and teaching of lessons so those are a few things i want to share i guess in closing just our thinking today so we understand everyone has differences and we value and embrace those differences the diversity of our community makes us richer and stronger we are learning to be more intentional and how we support students at endeavor rather than looking at our students

050with broad strokes we we're trying and starting to see how individual students and families are affected by the data collection and decision making that occurs in our school and in our educational system we are constantly asking ourselves if this is what is best for students we must de-center our focus from our own functional knowledge of running a school and position ourselves with the student and the family and what they value and help school work for them not trying to make them fit into our way at endeavor in the school system so that's where we're at today thanks lauren thank you victoria okay now we're gonna have rebecca sharing with us what's going on at burton hello good evening school board and um superintendent rolino um i'm really excited to share the work of our staff

051at burton this year our staff and our families have been rock stars throughout this pandemic and have continued to focus on what's important for our students although the pandemic has had lots of created lots of challenges for us it also has given us lots of new opportunities we've had the opportunity to build relationships with our families and our students in ways that we haven't before you've learned to appreciate how much we love just being in school and reaffirm what we love about education and being educators at the beginning of the year our school staff chose the theme for the year and what we chose was we got this and we've definitely had to remind ourselves of that lots of times throughout the years as we air throughout the year as we've um you know embraced

052new changes and taken up tackled new challenges but we did um maintain some of the same goals in our as our school improvement plan for last year the overarching goals were very similar um as we shifted to distance learning we continued to focus on equity in the literacy instruction by focusing on consistency and practice our focus kind of shifted to planning together as a team what should be asynchronous and what should be synchronous making sure that all of our students were experiencing a similar instruction within the grade level and also just using the expertise of the whole team and the skills of the whole team to make the education for all the kids at the grade level the best it could be um we we had focused we had been focusing on having meaningful work

053as part of the workshop and we continued that as well it's really important that the kids have meaningful work during distance learning because um otherwise they really don't want to do it they don't engage in it so we need to make sure they understand how the work that they're given is making them smarter and getting better at learning and so we had to think about planning for meaningful work and um providing all the needed support that kids are going to need at home especially our language learners so our leadership team shifted a little the way we did instructional rounds this year because we did them in virtual classrooms as well and um we were looking for evidence of the practices that had been that we've been working on and we also wanted to find ways

054to encourage our staff and and notice and name all the great things that they're doing so we did rounds every week and throughout the rounds we did see some trends in um in what students were doing lots of reading and engaging in conversation around text making meaningful contributions to discussions teachers were doing a great job of utilizing their small group instruction time and meeting with small groups of readers and so our next steps were just focusing on having worthy work during their times that they're not with in class and also um more embedded opportunities for formative assessment how do we know that the kids are learning um and um and acting on that so over the summer we had several book studies that were well attended by our staff they were optional but you wouldn't

055have known that based on the attendance um the focus was on culturally responsive teaching and racial equity we looked at three different books white fragility culturally responsive teaching in the brain and then we read a um a non-fiction or i mean a fiction children's book called ghost boys that was also a good topic of a good catalyst for discussion um these book studies were impactful and created an opportunity for both individual growth for students or for staff in understanding their own biases and also a commitment to racial equity among the staff our second goal this year is around belongingness we know that relationships are the most important um keystone to learning so we want to make sure we want to make sure that all of our students feel connected to their teachers and to burton

056as a school community and we knew that that was going to be even a new challenge with the remote environment we want to make sure that students know that there are many adults that care about them and that we're all on their team um and so this was um this was you know super important um with them being not with us so um i feel like building relationships has always been a strength of our staff but we did have to find some new strategies to connect with our students virtually um and through our instructional rounds we did see teachers using all those signature sel practices the three practices we saw a lot of engagement in community circles which were strategies that we had been working on and we tracked the students engagement and participation with

057our set team daily up until this transition to in-person learning and we had different levels of intervention based on where the challenges were some of them were school-level interventions and some of them were were teacher level interventions and so we worked hard on creating some good interventions that would engage students positively and so now that we're shifting into in-person learning uh we're continuing our focus on meeting our students sel needs and incorporating those culturally responsive practices into our instruction so much like my colleagues burton has had a strong focus on equity this year we're grateful for the courageous conversations training and the district's support of looking at data through an equity lens we conducted the equity audit this year and one of the big areas of focus we came away with is wanting to work

058on some parent connectiveness so we want parents to feel like they have a voice in our school we um we want to hear from them so we worked with clarissa to create a survey for parents to guide our next steps in this work we have it translated and ready to go we kind of wanted to time it after we transitioned in person learning because they've been getting a lot of emails lately we don't want them to miss the survey we want them to be able to take the time to fill it out and so um it should go out next week we're really anxious to hear from families and parents and get started on our action steps with engaging parents so thank you for the opportunity to share our work with you tonight i do

059want to thank the cni team as well as my call um like my colleagues did and the district leadership um you know this is no small task um you know shifting to in-person learning and the the support we got from them and made it happen so like today's groundhogs day and it it felt like groundhog's day because we had our sixth first day of school today and we have finished up our now everybody has come to school and we've we've seen everyone smiling faces behind their masks and their excitement and despite all the regulations we have to keep everyone safe they are happy and thrilled to be at school and we're thrilled to have them thank you thanks becky janet let's hear about home choice academy absolutely well thank you as everyone else has said

060school board members mike merlino district office leadership for the opportunity to come and share about home choice academy so i'm going to kind of put around our two goals working on effective instruction from last year and continuing this year as well as in the equity lens family engagement and now i'm going to talk to you about the then and now at home choice academy we saw a large increase in enrollment this year from our 157 that was estimated to our high was 265 in december and so that increase in numbers also was a huge increase in the number of staff so certificated alone we had seven and a half staff last year this year we have 13 certificated and what that is affording us with this growth in student population is the ability to start

061building a system-wide approach to our effective instruction and a system-wide approach to the equity and family engagement because in our building and program our families are taking on the partnership of being a learning coach at home and so with this large increase we've really been working on how do we beef up and shift the way the full remote program is um being kind of handled on a day-to-day basis and because that's almost 60 percent of our overall population is our full remote learners and so we've gained and this is a shout out to our district since last june and up through december i have gained staff from crestline from cascade from not cascade way east from york and then from burton and then hired a full-time counselor and the people that came from in-district over

062here to home choice academy have been top-notch have been so enthusiastic even though their life had totally been flipped upside down and they just jumped right in and have kept the ball moving smoothly helped to created such uh richer and deeper conversations within our professional development because it's bringing in perspectives from the outside and widening it from five to seven people at a meeting to now they're 16 to 25 when we include classified staff so i just i look at this year and all the shifts that everybody's been doing and when we look at effective instruction and when we look at family engagement the first thing comes down to building the positive and supportive relationships with the students and with the family and our kids for the most part are thriving we do have a

063number of kids that we identified from the beginning of this fall and are still identifying on the student engagement team to get them coming to school and today i think when i wrote up my mid-year snapshot we had six middle school kids identified and only three were coming today we had six kids show up and five of them were brand new and because we're looking at the equity lens and wanting to make sure that just because parents have signed up for a program not all parents are capable or able to be that learning coach at home which we would want at home choice academy but we're looking at how do we make sure all of our kids are benefiting from the education and the support um so in looking at our progress monitoring you can

064see from the fall i ready scores till winter we are on the upwards trajectory in reading 10 k-8 from fall to winter and in math is 13 k-8 i have to tell you the caveat is the highest number of kids that are showing in green as you would probably expect are k-2 kids when we get up into our middle school population that percentage is flipped and so there are more kids that are needing interventions and additional support than there are kids that are performing right now at grade level and that ties into our um discipline dispropor or disciplinary part i can't even say it at this time discipline proportionality report um where the kids that have come to us were struggling in school to begin with and so what we're trying to do with relationships

065with having effective instruction through the systems that we put in place what's going to be taught at the core level and then now that we have a half-time academic interventionist then we can start looking at that tier two and tier three and so i really think with adding all of our staff working with their students working with the parents we're turning into a program as i heard lauren talk about let's provide the education that the families need rather than trying to fit them into what our educational program is and i think we're filling a gap and we're continuing to grow and learn within how to help support families not only if they want to come here but also to help support families if this isn't the right program because i have at least two families

066to call this weekend really have the dig deep conversation of um we want to help your child learn but there's no evidence that the learning is happening with any of the curriculum and the assessments and so whether or not it's time to look at going back to the neighborhood school with having kids being on site two days a week so at home choice we're trying to wrap around all of our neighboring schools and um support each other so that the kids are the ones that win at the end so thank you again for the opportunity for sharing thanks janet okay heather we've saved the best for last what's going on at legacy tons of great things are going on at legacy good evening everybody it's good to see everybody's faces um i feel like these

067might be faces i don't normally see on zoom so this is a nice little change of pace so uh as those who were lucky enough to read the sip plan we didn't do a lot of changing to our sip plan this year i um put the analogy in our status update it's like when you're on ship and you're leaving port you have a destination in mind and you chart your course and you set it and that along the way you may need to change a few times to go around weather or to like restock supplies but your final destination doesn't change and we view our signals in that same way and our destination didn't change but the changing conditions necessitated a brief change of course and so we did add a goal to our student

068success goal too which was increasing student engagement in remote learning um we've said by 10 because we we want to be able to measure it the unfortunate part is it's really hard to measure that with the remote learning from last year because a lot of students who would not have passed actually got passing grades uh based on the um recommendations from ospi but uh we have been doing a really good job on that and then we are still continuing with our legacy five promises really focusing on literacy across the content area i do want to share just some of the really awesome bright spots that we are seeing at legacy right now our f rate um when i last checked our final grades aren't due until next tuesday it's currently down 10 from 2020 we

069were at 9 two weeks ago i suspect will be around five percent at the grading period our four-year graduation rate increased um almost 14 percent last year obviously there's that asterisk there because we did have that little bump from some of the um ability to wave credits and some of the grad wrecks that we were having difficult time with students once they went to remote learning we have re-engaged 65 students who had been disengaged from high school since we started our open doors program and that means 65 students who did not have high school diplomas graduated with a high school diploma and we expect we'll have about and i actually think we're probably going to be toward 35 by the end of this year so that's really awesome news uh the other part of our

070good news when we think about engaging our students in the remote learning is um on january 10th when we looked at our data we had 55 percent of our legacy students had accessed in-person supports at some time during that first semester and when i looked today at that data we're actually getting closer to almost 70 percent of students who have access coming to campus and getting help we have on average between 15 and 20 students every single day at legacy working and so that is something we're really proud of and supporting those students um the equity work we have uh embedded into this year which has been really great because it fits with what we're already doing and what we've done is we've our team made the decision to and to embed the equity work

071within the work we are already doing with our professional development because the team felt as though if we can't get our staff to really address the inequities that are going on in our classrooms in things like grading and expectations and classroom management and discipline patterns then there's really no way we can expect that focus on equity equity to go beyond those classroom walls and to enact a change on a larger scale so we've embedded this into the stuff that we're already doing talking about common grading practices and we are working toward that and really examining um is what we are doing helping or hindering our students and how can we provide a consistent experience as far as grading and and what that looks like across the board for our students and an experience that is

072more equitable and so using um like danny had mentioned the joe feldman book um grading for equity that is uh a text we are using bits and pieces of and then our anchor text actually for our equity this year just throughout the year is me and white supremacy which was uh suggested by one of our group members and we are doing it as part of our staff meetings that we hold twice a month and then our early release also and so um let me i'm just trying to look at some of the notes that i had right um talked about our f rate and our student learning so the the remote learning really gave us an opportunity to kind of pause and look back on what we did last year and look at our data

073and think about how we continue that forward um and what we're doing is really planning for next year and really again thinking like how do we bring this equity into our classrooms for our students and one of the things we've really talked about is thinking about using collective efficacy and creating a state a standardized assessment system so that we can think about the educational instructional lift that we are putting forth in our classrooms and how do we measure that what does that look like what does that data look like how do we know that that's what's happening and what do we keep tweak or abandon in our classrooms and part of that is using things like standards-based planning doing some more focus on again what are we having students do do we have levels of

074of the um descriptors and do students know what they're working toward and so embedding that into our work and we're just continuing it throughout the year our teachers are really making those connections with our our students and trying to create that personal capital and that social capital so when they come back to us we can get back to the the hard work that's going to happen i think when we get back to school which is a lot of emotional and social emotional work that's going to have to be done with students across the board and but we're looking forward to that work and our staff is just doing an amazing job they have really powered through and all of our staff come to campus two days a week and work with students one on one

075so that we're getting that extra help for them and helping them be successful and and keeping them engaged in the not just education but also in the the relationships that we really focus on at legacy we're excited about our new building we were there today it looks amazing i can't even believe that we're going to be there in august moving in and i just cannot be more thrilled about giving our students and our families this amazing school to come to every day to uh be proud of and so i thank everybody again i've thanked you for the last three years for that but thank you again for for really putting um our students at the at the top of um the line for for getting new a new school so i appreciate that thanks heather

076we're excited for the school as well can't wait to see it have you been there have you taken a look i haven't i've just helped help them when they were picking out all the colors and different things but i haven't been in the school yet and i just am so anxious to see it all pulled together you all should come in march when we go we should have this i think that would be great to have the board come and just see just how beautiful that whole campus is with all the three schools it's it's just unbelievable it's extraordinary yeah yeah it's gonna be great okay well thank you heather um so now we have we're gonna open things up for questions i'm sure the board will have a few um so go ahead who'd

077like to start things off i don't really have a question i bet i'll go first real quick and just say that um i would just like to thank all of you for the tremendous amount of work that we know you are putting in and you guys are doing it incredibly well we couldn't have asked for anything better and supporting your families your students and your staff on top of everything else so i i would just like to say thank you so very much and also um hearing every single one of you guys brought into that right spot um or what you have found to be the bright spot during all of this and i absolutely love that because it's you know we can always just keep dreading on all of the bad stuff but we

078got to find the bright side of some of these things and i think that all of us have learned best practices through all this and are pulling away things that we would have probably never have had the opportunity to implement so thank you thank you thank you for everything you guys are doing hey ginny rachel hey everyone i don't have any questions but i do want to thank you all for all your hard work and for presenting to us tonight it's always interesting to hear what's been going on and see you guys like yearly essentially to get that update on how things are going and yeah i just really appreciate you coming thank you thanks rachel julie yeah um thank you as well i do have just a couple of quick questions i don't think

079they're really that quick but um maybe first for danny because um i was super excited to read the article in the columbian today about um sports in clark county getting kicked off again in the high school prep and i know that some of the sports have started and some other practices um which i am super excited about because it's been a long time we had to cancel everything last spring um i know a lot of our students look forward to that as well as other clubs and activities so how is that going and then maybe to um the second part of that for um elementary and middle school what do we do to because we have such good momentum going with after school activities for our elementary students and middle school students how do we

080regain that momentum moving forward um thanks julie yeah uh i will tell you that all of our kids and all of our coaches um and everybody really wants to get going um uh our it's going really well um all of our our teams that are able to practice right now are practicing um they're obeying all of the the covid guidelines and you know in my conversations with coaches it it's going pretty well um i mean we're utilizing facilities differently than we've ever used used facilities before um and so i mean it's it's pretty interesting to see all the different like pods of groups that are kind of rotate like today we had volleyball rotating around the gym um in different pods um uh but you know it from from my perspective and and from coaches

081perspectives i think it's going pretty well um everybody's just eager to get back to actually being able to be competitive yeah i'll just kind of uh piggyback on danny there we have um at the middle school i mean our coaches are eager and questioning uh [Music] i've had you know we've been spa a couple different things um i'm sure that once we started am i the only one experiencing some cutouts there oh no you're taught okay once we get that puzzled look sorry sorry did you hear me no not a lot of it no oh okay um can you hear me now yeah okay i was saying we've been running some of our groups virtually so we've been doing um some of our clubs and activities national junior honor society la chispa um for the

082last few months and i think those uh those students are really excited to get back in the building and start meeting in person and our coaches are really excited to start working with kids again too so as soon as as soon as we're able we'll get things rolling good thank you allison anybody on the elementary side julie did you have another question no i was just going to ask if anybody from elementary wanted to um chime in on the on the part about just getting activities back or what that might look like or it might be a while i don't know i'll pop in um i think it might be why i we haven't heard at least i haven't heard anything about it but you know i was just listening to danny and allison and

083a couple things i wrote down was you know i'm thinking is my own opinion if we can do in-person learning maybe there's opportunities to do small clubs um we have some monies always given to us to do it's about 10 to 12 clubs after school clubs or before club before school clubs and then track of course is a popular activity in the spring um and again i don't know what the guidelines will be but i think if we if we're having in person learning and we're following all protocols in at recess and everything i think we should be able to have that opportunity because i know our kids really enjoy those you activities our our uh elementary schools have activities um or you know opportunities allocated to them based on their enrollment we've always done

084that i think it's actually even in the teacher's contract um and so we've been i i would say primarily focused in elementary getting kids back in school i do think that once we get to the point where we've had them back for a period of time and things start to kind of settle in there isn't any reason that we can't consider this but we'd want to talk with the principals about exactly how they'd want to implement that um in the middle school we've talked a lot about doing intramural like expanding intramural opportunities after school and then from the perspective of actual sport competitions kind of focusing on a track season that would occur likely after spring break it's one that pretty much every grade it has access to so we are conscious of trying to

085make sure that we're providing these opportunities for kids after school at the same time honestly uh i think it was uh maybe becky who mentioned the fact that they've had six opening days um over the last three weeks and so we kind of it i know that elementary's been impacted earlier than everyone else so i think the hope is we can kind of get into a little bit of a role with just having the kids coming in a couple days a week and then start focusing because i do know that there's demand for it there's demand for everything um my own my own kids are so excited to be able to go back to school my first grader's back in school my fourth graders not yet but um we we need to do everything we

086can to provide the opportunities there's no question about it thank you okay rob you're up oh boy here we go i i want to share the esteem and and the the gratitude that jenny and rachel and julie offered um i'm taking away some things uh just from the notes i got about a page of notes from the from the evening so far is uh um hey charlie tumulty is leading equity at uh at evergreen and i know that guy that's neat to see uh i noticed from our participants list that theresa ort is attending and watching this meeting and i wanted to just kind of call out to hercules my daughter's fourth grade teacher and one of the one of the people who engaged with us uh and explained to us just how amazing she

087thought our daughter was and it's always stuck with us and rachel remembers i see gratitude for the library refresh for opportunities for in-person learning it's really helping uh helping settle some of my anxieties about the transitions uh i heard the root of behavior was deep-seated trauma i heard lift where you stand which is an indicator to me that yes in fact stuart did grow up in circumstances very similar to mine uh i heard d center focus from functional knowledge and position with student and family adapt to families and uh janet's fill educational needs rather than fitting families into an existing model these are hopeful things to me a need to connect with parents me and white supremacy thank you for the book recommendation um and a loose question i guess uh for mike that we

088don't need to answer at this stage in the budget development but if translation services have that kind of demand i wonder if we need to add uh some resources to that but i have some specific questions for you uh and this will go out to heather and danny and um they'll help me find i've got the i've got the pictures here i'm trying to find the cascade principle allison uh allison this year and i'm speaking in my role here as legislative representative from the board and a member of wazda's legislative committee with some connections that are possible for for students maybe also home choice since we've got k-8 there they're conducting all their committee meetings remotely which gives us an opportunity to bring them and their stories without the trip to olympia so there are

089no permission slips to sign and they're doing a lot this year around student and school safety around internet equity contemplating additional funding support for wraparound services pathway opportunities graduation waiver requirements um and they have consistently loved and and lit up when they have testimony panels that include students so it's a yes no question but do the names of any students come to your mind who would have an interest in advocating with their stories would they like to speak to some senators and representatives in olympia are there teachers that would welcome a chance to prepare their classes for that opportunity yes or no danny yes and i'm happy to give a follow-up to that if you'd like but yes yes um heather you know it rob and i have an extra copy of me and white

090supremacy in my office if you want to stop by and grab it that would be lovely thank you um and and uh in the k-8 kind of realm uh do you have students who would like that opportunity because they do they do meet with younger students and uh i think it charms them a cascade uh at cascade i know that we have students who would love that we had a principles about advisory team last year um with a lot of students with a lot of different things to say so i'm sure i could get that same group for a similar group of students who would really appreciate the opportunity would you be willing would you all be willing to bring the names i'm sorry i was just gonna say allison maybe the girl that sent

091me the email about the internet concerns i'm looking at a few people laughing that are familiar with that i'll leave that up to you whether you think that would be appropriate or not yeah i'll reach out and see um if she still has a story to tell it would be nice even to share that story anonymized and paraphrased with those who are working on internet legislation there's a lot of that going on um so if they're too shy to speak and they still have a story we can still represent them but if you could bring the names of the students and teachers who are interested to um brian grimstad's attention he's building some linkages for me and uh and for the rest of the board that we could we could extend these opportunities and i

092would appreciate i would appreciate your contributions there so that's kind of the happy thought question and did you have any more to say about that danny i was just gonna oops i was just going to say um you know we've got a uh competition government um team that competes in olympia every year and they got they actually got third place this year but that's our ap government and politics class and they would pretty much all love the opportunity to do that so now one of the things that we can do along those lines is connect them with uh a student pool that uh logan andrus of wazda he's part of their strategic advocacy team there and works through the state leadership organization i'm blanking on the on the actual acronym or abbreviation there but it's

093uh the asb uh statewide leadership uh group uh and can teach them how or guide them into the issues that they're passionate about so if they want to sign up for his email list i can send those links to brian out to you right that's all right yeah i appreciate hearing that um that's sort of the happy thing and then my other questions had to do with anxieties um you know we've heard from staff in our board meetings um and parents lots of emails uh who ask for work from home conditions uh and and express their anxieties about covet 19 and and uh the dangers that they feel could you talk about roughly the fraction of your staff in the buildings um who if you haven't reopened for in-person services um continue to express anxieties

094um and those who have as they've been receiving students i think i think i heard a lot of hope in what you had to say but are the anxieties for those people dissipating as the work in person continues um maybe i could ask elementaries to speak a little bit about their experience their like to see janet nodding her head yeah um so at home choice academy we have one classroom that's k1 one that's two three and one that's four five and i know one of the teachers had requested an accommodation for a full remote however there wasn't a medical need to fulfill that accommodation and that teacher is back and that teacher is spot on with the kids spot on with what they're doing and not sensing any sort of anxiety it was more as

095we know with kids too the anxiety of the thoughts of what's going to happen is often worse than what actually happens when you get down to it i think because we have great social distancing protocols we have great you know building procedures and just consistency in how we do things what i find is that even more so it's like here's the way we do business the the mischievousness of kids i would say that would be the one downfall you don't see that because it's like okay we come in we have our mask on we walk down the hallway we use the hand sanitizer we sit in our one table and we do our work um so if anything um that's my one i miss being able to have those individual conversations with kids about hey

096so what were you thinking when you stuck your foot out and tripped johnny or whatever um but the teachers that are here in the building and my middle school teacher aren't here yet and they there's only one of the three of them that comes onto campus once in a while and so their level of anxiety is high but those that are on campus it's it dissipates because they see how well functioning the building is and the processes that the district has helped us to set up so the processes help you keep people calm and engaged would anybody else like to share a story move success or anxiety laura yeah thank you rob um i just want to share that last week instead of teachers coming in to say they were uncomfortable we had um our

097three title teachers coming in and begging to do small groups outside of the classroom because right now they can't do that they have to stay in the classroom but they're begging to meet small groups because they've been doing it through the set you know the set um pro our set program and then we have all our special ed teachers having kids coming sorry jay but they're begging to have them come more than two days a week and then we had another group of teachers oh our first great teachers of course right mike who want to have their whole class in there all 20. um and i said scott scott gave a real straight line saying no no more than 15. so now they're simultaneously teaching um online and then in class with 15 and they

098structured you know made a special um um what they call it the schedule so parents are bringing their kids in more than two times a week in first grade and we can't say no to that when we're following all the regulations 15 kiddos per classroom and we have six first grade classrooms so we've been having a lot of kids come in from the beginning we had up to 130 starting in october at any given day throughout the day and so turning to hybrid was just a natural evolution and so keeping to the requirements that's what's going to keep us healthy and so the shields the plexiglass six feet you know mass washing your hands every all of that is going to keep us safe as safe as we can be so um it's not a

099bad thing to have people coming in and begging to have more kids come on on not just two days a week but three to four and then they're asking if they can even do it on wednesdays so it's not a bad thing teachers are really excited to have the kids back it's interesting to hear you talk about first grade like that i have questions about the middle school plan and i somebody correct me if this is not a correct picture of of how that's going to proceed when it comes time uh but the sixth graders will come in first and then will they go home for a couple of weeks while the seventh and eighth get their orientation so what we have planned right now is that the sixth graders will come in in their

100hybrid group a and then hybrid group b on a thursday and friday okay um so they'll have all in and the following week they'll come thursday hybrid group a and then b uh and then on thursday and friday of that first full week the seventh and eighth graders will come together at the same time the hybrid groups and then the next week we'll just start the regular schedule everyone will be in class together okay so the the sixth graders won't miss two weeks of instruction they'll miss two days or four years or not as much um yeah there will be yeah the room i mean we're trying to work out uh how the remote students can access the learning during that time um one of the days we're going to definitely just have the hybrid

101only students in there um so that we can show them around talk about building safety procedures protocols those type of things and then the next day i think we'll be on boarding for all the sixth graders um we're trying to i mean we're obviously trying to minimize any loss of instructional time [Music] um she's breaking up so you're minimizing loss of instructional time and uh i'm not sure what's happening it's just yes and focusing on and um safe of some sel focused things um trying to welcome the kids back some specific things to sixth graders and our new seventh and eighth grade students to welcome them into our school is there a is there a flex to accommodate i guess kids in the sixth grade or whichever grade actually who [Music] really need to continue

102their in-person instruction is there something that that your sct teams could could notice while they're there or based on their remote learning records that that could accord them an opportunity to stay in person rather than sitting home for those four days or the fear that i heard was about two weeks of remote only for sixth graders that doesn't sound like cascades planets maybe julie has a comment about whether what allison is describing is the same at the other uh at the other five schools yeah all the schools are going to follow the same plan and the students the sixth graders are only gonna miss if we talk about what miss one day if of in-person learning but their sixth grade teacher will just be producing on those days in live remote lessons so they're not

103missing live instruction it just is going to look a little different whether they're accessing live instruction in person or that second week that allison was talking about on the seventh and eighth grade day they're not in person yet but they will still be in person live on sorry not in person they'll be live remote on those days will they uh be simultaneous with the in-person students well those wouldn't have sixth graders in person on that day so if they had a mixed grade class those are the details that the middle schools are still working out of what does it look like for the mixed grade classes how are we orienting kids to the to the schedule while still providing ongoing instruction but we did from when i talked about it last week and then met

104with the middle school principals it was shortened a week so okay let's get kids in quicker we can acclimate them a little bit quicker with this so it will take you know six days basically of instruction okay thank you very much for bringing that kind of clarity i appreciate i appreciate the refinement of the plans and and the flexibility there um we'll get detail out it's just they're you know tweaking some things and then it's been a moving target of when that day is going to be as well but we'll yeah we'll get more detail out to everyone as soon as we have it appreciate it okay thank you for your help i took a lot of time so i'm finished thanks rob um i would like to i want i kind of want to

105pick up on what rob was talking about with our elementary students and the feelings of the teachers i we didn't hear from too many of you and i you know we get a lot of information and we get a lot of people who want one thing and then one another but i just really want to get a pulse on what the teachers are feeling and how are they handling being back in school so i can speak for image it worked out well for us we had teachers that had um needed accommodations and we had just enough classes so that it worked out that they could you know that that they could have those and still t teach an image the rest of our teachers they um they had already gone to the union i believe

106and had a petition going wanting to come back before we were told that we can come back and they're i would say there um there's that one teacher here that is is not happy to be here so i think you know it's like with a lot of things the five naysayers are really really loud and they are the ones that are heard versus really looking at what the majority of the group wants and i feel confident in saying that the image teachers are very very happy to be back at school thanks kathleen i would agree that a large portion are glad to be back but i do think there's still some i know there's still some big anxieties particularly um in our pre-k program right now and i just during our meeting like 600 emails

107just came through we need help we need help we need help just um and it's good they're asking for support and help and i love that um and really it is the concern um there is that all the protocols as far as the six feet um they're three and four years old and they don't keep six feet apart but as far as teachers go masks and shields and there's a large majority of our pre-k little sweet pies that are wearing masks um a larger percentage than i think any of us thought would be able to um and keep them on because it is is a program design i mean all of our children in there right now have ieps and some of them that doesn't mean they can't wear a mask but for some of

108them it is a tactile sensory thing and for others it's just they've never had to so it's a matter of um following that and i think um and we'll get there we'll get there for sure everybody loves having the kids back that is not the question but i do believe um there are still anxieties there um that we're working through but we're working through them stuart your thoughts yeah i would i would just ask that i would just say that um lunch was uh a concern with many of our staff members but i made it priority uh both our assistant principal and myself have been in and watching kids eat so i've been into a kindergarten class today i was in with the fourth and fifth grade and just kind of watched how the procedures

109and you know i haven't really asked the staff quite yet but the procedures and the safety protocols that they followed um were awesome and the kids were just phenomenal of just following the the rules of um when to take off their masks how you know how to eat those type of things you know um and so that was a big concern um but i think again like what people have been saying it's because we're following the protocol because we're doing all that i i think right now the the anxiety has gone down i haven't heard from many of our staff but that was a big concern that our staff had yeah i can echo what my colleague said i would say we had more anxiety maybe then some schools initially but the la um as

110they come in the anxieties kind of start to diminish they see how safe it is and they they get excited about seeing the students i think that waiting for a vaccine with some of some people's anxieties some of them have family members that are um have fragile health or um they have you know fear like more fear of the virus and so there's there's different ranges of personal anxieties but once they get in they seem to be settling in well that's good how are how is the staff in general handling the protocols and because we have had a a few people comment that people are following the rules they're not wearing their masks and they're getting together for meetings without mass and stuff like that what's your observations on that i feel like we are

111doing a pretty really good job the one-way hallways were a problem to start because you have to lap the building a few times anytime you want to go anywhere um but everybody even the kids like some of the children have to when they go to the bathroom then they have to walk around the office and around the library and back to their class and they're doing it and everybody understands the reason why um the white dots outside make a huge difference too for our kids um but as far as yeah i i'm done thanks tracy just checking in to see if this the adults are as compliant as the um students are when they get together on their for us um this is danny for us uh obviously our all of our kids aren't aren't

112back yet but um our teachers have been in and out for you know various things and and the student engagement teams and all that and generally we haven't really seen any anything we've had to have a couple reminders you know mostly it's been any kind of adults not being compliant has been like maintenance workers um that are not part of our district right like third party um and just a gentle reminder but we haven't had any issues like that great thank you um i would like to reiterate what the other board member said i we just can't even thank you enough for what you've had for the work that you've put in to get us through this very challenging time and um i know we're all going to come out of this on the other

113end actually better than we ever were and i i just am so proud of all of you because i know this hasn't been easy and it has been fraught with a lot of anxiety and concerns and moving targets and and all of that so just keep up the good work we really recognize it what you're doing and we really are proud of you thanks mike did you have anything you wanted to add before we adjourn i would just agree with everything you've said um i think back to when we started making plans for returning kids in maybe june and then the plans were revised maybe in august so we're going to do this and then we got to september and october and we started thinking about okay well well we're going to maybe do this

114and then we you know it's like the group that you're looking at has been leading their buildings through you know iteration after iteration of a plan chasing guidelines chasing protocols all of these things and the reality is that there are still people that are very anxious about what's happening uh and you all get to work and there's probably anxieties within the people that on the screen as well with respect to the the the virus so i would say i agree completely with everything that all of the board members have said and just thanking the principals uh rob mentioned theresa ort who's here i'm looking at the screen also i see brandy phelps is here from fur crest need to mention her uh and then joe i don't know who joe is but i'm gonna call

115out joe also because joe's been here the whole night and he enjoys it as well um so i honestly the the and i look at i look at uh julie and aaron and jay and ruth and uh brian you know all and if there's somebody i met laurie i mean everybody's been through so much so i would say i agree yeah we're actually starting to talk on meetings with ospi about the department of health relaxing the six feet requirement like when will they relax the six feet requirement which would then potentially allow us at some point to come back in a more normal situation so the idea that they're actually starting to have those questions come up and talking about that is very encouraging in terms of hopefulness for next year or maybe even later

116this spring so i would just you know usually i talk for 22 minutes i'll stop at that thank you to everyone on the screen thanks mike okay great well those of you that are not at home yet be careful driving i've been hearing lots of rain and wind on my windows here so stay safe and we'll look forward when we get to see you in person same here this meeting is adjourned