001although I'm on my cell phone I have to jump between meetings for the first couple hours so can you guys see can you all see oh my God that kind of like harland's puppy yes this is Rosie we just got her on Saturday we surprised goodness our kids with her um my husband who traditionally does not work from home is working from home this year and so we thought if there was a time to get a dog now is it and to bring a little happiness to our children um who have had kind of their their world's uh a little Topsy Turvy in this 2020 so she's we are we are living lives I know I mean another Co puppy oh I'm trying to figure out how to share my picture well let me stop
002sharing sdy then you can share yours no I can't um I've forgotten that Sydney got a dog because harlon's dog was so cute yeah my dog's really cute but I don't know if I can I don't think I can share on my phone I don't understand that I was gonna say if you weren't on your phone you could hold the phone up to the camera but that's right I was like I there's so many there's so many complexities of this moment sorry my daughter's printing something clearly oh my God your puppy is super cute thank you all right I have to go turn down the heat be right back my co puppy is has turned the household upside down okay so let me see if I can share this this this is going to be
003like Zoom cell magic if this works um do we want to shall I text Harlen or do we want to just get started he's here oh is he here yeah oh well then was there before Sydney yeah he's been here for a while he's just you know what it is I have if I don't see your picture you're not on my screen yeah she change she Alters her view maybe for today you should change that because I'm gonna be not on my screen a lot since you're live streaming this okay we're live streaming yes yeah that's the only way we right now oh so my puppy will be yeah yeah world will see your puppy hey the world needs oh my goodness oh my gosh Sydney Sydney our puppies could be best friends they can
004totally be best friends okay that's mocha very cute okay I'm gonna stop sharing we're real people with children and pets it's okay and I same oh is my video flashing for you guys yes yes I don't know what that that's wow that looks like psychedelic I'll be back I don't sharing from my cell phone obviously is bad I'll be back okay okay so now that puppies are out of the way I'm going to call this meeting officially to order I did it before we started live streaming so just for the public to be able to hear that we are actually in session for our board retreat and we currently have three people watching via the interwebs hi people so Elena I will let you uh get started Okay I uh thank you everyone for the
005opportunity to share uh some of the highlighted work of the equity Department uh well really we became a department July first um but I'm talking about some of the work that took place in the 1920 school year as well as uh where we are in the 2021 school year I know that I sent out a PowerPoint presentation uh to everyone on Friday would uh what's the best way to proceed do you want me to walk through the presentation do you want to ask me questions about it I'm not sure if everyone had the chance to review it yeah I would prefer either just only a couple highlights but then questions okay assum I'll reviewed it but don't know it's Mar J I agree with that I'm sorry I was trying to find our agenda can
006you repeat that since you've assigned me something I uh Elena asked if she wanted us her to go through the presentation or just asked answer questions and I said if she just give us a quick highlights um because we probably already reviewed it and then so we can talk about it yeah yeah that's okay okay let me uh let me uh start sharing my screen then hold on one second here we go all right can everyone see my screen yes yes okay so one of the things I wanted to just I know you all have seen the presentation and I wanted to just highlight um was that what I felt um uh Emily hard had done a nice job of doing around the equity work for our district is really bringing about what Dr Capri
007Holland calls knowledge and awareness um so she she brought knowledge and awareness to the system about um things such as uh systemic racism microaggressions macroaggressions um and just inequities in general um and I think that all of you um in partnership with uh uh Emily also helped create the the el16 um and I I felt like when I came into the role what we really needed to focus on was creating systems um and collaboration and culture change that would really allow that allow el16 to flourish throughout the system and not just be something that was the work of one person or one Department um and um would just create some um accountability for everyone um everyone in the system and so that's a lot of the work that I have been doing over the past
008year is just uh creating those systems creating that collaboration and creating that culture change um because I think as you all know um Simply Having a policy would would not be enough to um to create some of that uh that change or bringing to life el16 that we were looking for um so I think I just highlighted for all of you just some of the systems that we have created uh in the equity um Department already um I think uh things like having um required professional development in the building and uh this year one of the things that I did is uh I created the topics that buildings would learn about in the past uh buildings would have a couple of PD sessions a year um with Dr Capri holl um but each building got
009to kind of pick what they were focused on uh which I think in some ways was nice but in other ways it was difficult I feel then to to track where the system was if you will in terms of their of their Equity work so I think by me being able to determine that these are the themes or the topics that we're going to focus on I can now start to progress monitor our growth as a system and where we need need to be able to um go next I think also just being a standalone department and um having the title as executive director allows me access into um many more meetings and conversations um than maybe I traditionally would have um uh had access to um uh outside of outside of being my own
010department and having that um that title change I also talked about being able to um really have a system where the equity department is able to communicate information to others and so some of those things that we highlighted were um monthly newsletters um just having different staff Hub sites um and also creating a district Equity website so that we could start to share with the district in a in a public facing way the equity work that that we have been doing um and then in terms of um I just talked about some shared accountability right systems that would help bring el16 to life uh I talked about this a little bit last year with all of you and just in terms of creating um a recruitment and retention group a a curriculum and instruction um
011group a family and Community engagement group and a data and disproportionality group uh we also have Equity build building leaders this year which is uh fantastic um and then um just some other highlights are uh every teacher in the system has access to an online portal to be able to hire uh on demand interpreters or scheduled interpreters um just to increase our communication with our um linguistically diverse families we're working on a an equity dashboard in home room so that uh our principles and staff can have access to equity data um and proportionality data and then just creating systems for for feedback I can show uh a couple demos oh go ahead Ron I'm just just very uh real um on your last slide your second bullet you had curriculum and retention and you just
012want that to say curriculum and instruction so yes we're not retaining um that's not a focus sorry thank you Ron well we do retain our curriculum but um we try to get it updated about every seven years so I can show you some highlights of the systems work that we've been doing and then um or you all can ask questions yeah I'm wondering if it's a good uh place to pause to see if there are any board questions questions on that yeah so um I guess we'll do the raise hand feature Harlen your hand is up so I really am grateful that you're here and doing the work that you're doing uh a couple things as you continue to dialogue today that I'll want to know um is how has our budgeting changed as a
013result of the work that you're doing because if our budget doesn't follow along with changes for instance from the HR part for recruitment retention or supporting building leaders or from a curriculum standpoint uh by what we're adopting or from a program intervention standpoint which the Bo has really pushed through uh multiple conversations regarding how we fund intervention programs then uh the work will not flourish as well as it could so if you could comment on that and weave that in as you continue the dialogue over this next hour and the second thing um this may be in there that I just missed but we've had several high-profile um I would say cultural compeny breakdowns for a lack of better description with um some student social media posting um has there been development or conversation of
014development of some sort of like restorative justice process and program or um structure by which you know we're an educational institution so hopefully we take this as an opportunity for education and that could be an element as part of the restitution or Consequences so those would be my two things that I'd love to hear more about okay um well I I can uh jump into those right now if that works for everyone just there's some things that um come to the top of my head so I think in terms of of budgeting changes one of the things that um or there's a few things that I've seen that have been really positive um so for example um we are um paying a $1,500 stien to have one Equity Building lead in every building um so
015that's uh a significant uh you know amount of money that has been put aside to help support the equity work in the buildings I'm really excited about um about where I have I Envision uh the Equity Building lead work to go um just some highlights of that is that um really in year one we're spending uh a lot of time preparing and training people to be building leads Equity Building leads in the building um and what I mean by that is we need to have uh trained leaders that are able to have courageous conversations but also at the same time not shame people um or police people into um the equity and uh diversity and inclusion work that we're doing but really to be able to have those courageous conversations uh that can help move
016the work forward in the district so this year is primarily spent on providing training um in that regard um but it also um this year will focus on those Equity Building leads being a liaison uh to the equity department just in terms of being able to share with us what is actually happening in the buildings what things they see as going well and then what are areas where we really need to to push on um and I have ideas of where I would like to take the equity building uh leader role um going forward but I think again the importance right of of just having been an elementary principle just knowing how to implement uh something well uh so that you everybody um everybody can receive something and move forward in in a positive way
017so I I'm excited about that I think a big um another big budget change that I was really proud of was in the past each building was responsible for paying uh for translations or um interpreters and this could this sometimes could be um problematic or a barrier um if some buildings had um more um were required to do hire more interpreters or more trans lators um and um there was just a training component to that as well and so there was this great collaboration between um uh Jake Cooper and uh nurmala in uh student informations where we were able to create one line item that was housed um in the business office um that would pay for all translations and um interpreters for the district and so now it's no longer um dependent on the
018building or their budget um and that has really helped remove um any type of of obstacle in in that regard and so um so far just in the month of September we've already spent uh $12,000 on hiring interpreters or paying for translations which is um up significantly from the year before so um I think that's another positive I think two other things I would highlight is uh when I oversaw title and lap last year I I looked at some of the uh dis or the proportionality data and what I noticed was that there was an over representation of elll students in that program and so I know uh I'm not I'm no longer overseeing that program but I have worked uh very collaboratively with Rich melish in teaching and learning um to um come up
019with a curriculum in our next uh reading foundational adoption um that would help um combat that that disproportionality as well as um through the mtss system that we're looking um to be able to to put in place and so I see definitely our District budget and resources going to support that uh and then lastly um in terms of um trauma informed practices one of the things that the equity department has focused on this year is really um e educating staff and building up their um skill set in regards to racism and Trauma um I think that's something that uh you know has been overlooked and so we um were able to hire a Woman by the name of Ashley mcgurt to come in she'll be doing two uh professional development sessions for our administrators this
020school year and in October she's also doing a professional development session for all of our counselors our um pbss coaches our special education Behavior Specialists our school psychologist and the equity department so those are just some highlights of how I've seen uh our budget shift to support the equity work not to mention um creating a standalone Equity Department um and increasing um my role uh in that work as well Elena I would just note too the cyborg U mobile apps was um an additional expense that we authorized moving forward for um Equity work as well and then I would just note some of the changes don't necessarily cost more money but they're very important such as doing you referenc the uh literature adoption uh literacy adoption you know taking the time to research and make
021sure that we have those um alternative narratives that are available to students again doesn't cost more maybe elongates the process just a little bit but um definitely something that has a positive impact I would argue on our equity work moving forward true I think it's it's really just about um Skilling up our staff and helping them with intervention matching and those PE and and those pieces so we're not um creating uh disproportionality um unnecessarily um Elena harlon had mentioned um also about um the issues of student behaviors on social media that have caused issues for us we used one of those as an example um in our questions for our um executive director interviews last Friday for communications could you uh and maybe you were going to get to this later so feel free to
022just say Ron I'll get to that um in a little bit but to talk about the um the racist incident crisis intervention plan that you've developed that I know that was work that started with Emily but you you just recently shared with me that you know you've taken that work now to the next level yes uh I can I will share that the one thing that I wanted to share um before I share that response plan is that when um when the racist incident happened at Liberty High School last year uh Laura Gilmore and I did create a uh re two reteaching sessions um with the with the student who had um created that video and it was powerful uh we really what we focused on um was why uh white people are not allowed
023to use the nword we also talked um about the history surrounding um lynching and the KKK um and so um and we talked about micro and and macroaggressions and I think what was powerful is that Laura and I were able to sit in on um the uh discipline conversation with the family and really um I think it was um the the parent was so grateful to have a partnership with the school and how do I help um educate my child on um on why this was so wrong and um you know just do that that ring and to have um the school approach their child in a way that wasn't um like you're you're just this terrible person and um and kind of writing them off and so um it was this really um powerful
024um collaboration with the family and the student uh the student had homework um and there was some um and not in a Cheesy way there were sort of like a pre and a post sort of assessment of their knowledge and their awareness uh around um their learning from the teaching that we did I think the other powerful thing that we did was we talked with the student about how to interact with their peers around this incident because we know that the student is going to um be talked to about this incident um and it could be by friends who maybe want to downplay what happened or saying things like I don't understand and we really helped the student uh generate uh conversation stems and responses that would help um uh her her friends sort of
025lean into this conversation and then how also uh could she respond um if she was getting being um harassed or um you know really attacked for what what could happen what her response could be um you know saying something like it's not a joke or it was just a joke or it was a couple years ago we really talked with her about um why those responses would not be appropriate um and then we also talked about who she could reach out to um if she was feeling attacked or harassed uh by um by other uh students so I I think that W that was really powerful so that um that reteaching has happened we also uh I hired a man by the name of Rashad Norris to also go to Liberty High School and just
026really support uh the staff and the students um uh with this incident that had taken place and and thankfully Rashad had been there prior to the incident happening um because I would I had hired him to really help um with engagement uh of students of color um in in in their academics um particularly kind of focused around attendance so those pieces and so it was nice to already have him on on campus I can show um the equity response plan that I have created it's it's just a draft form right now it uh there are people on this call that have not seen this form so I just want to be um uh transparent about that so I'm not I'm not meaning to catch anyone off guard but I can show the the response plan
027let me just uh stop sharing my current screen while you're doing that I do want to just say one thing Elena because language is important and I know we have the public watching is when you talk about um your training on on why white people aren't allowed to say such a word that we're talking about it's it's not acceptable within our society because I can't tell anybody you're not allowed to say that in the United States right I mean as vulgar as I think it is it is Free Speech but what we're talking about is why it's not one why it's not acceptable on our campus and won't be tolerated so in that effect it it's yeah you're not going to be allowed to use this kind of language and then it's about why it
028is an unaccept cable Behavior why so vulgar Behavior not that we're pounding on people's Free Speech rights it's a fair point um Mary but and it's also I'm glad you pointed out in the school environment there are certainly um regulations related to speech that are we and we consider it a harassment we you know there's yeah and a racial slur right it's a racial slur for sure but I mean as far as going to our policies and our procedures it would fall in line with that to me that would be considered harassment and bullying and you're going to be disciplined accordingly so I just wanted to differentiate because we often talk like we know what's what we're thinking but the public needs to hear that no I'm not here to violate somebody's First Amendment rights
029I'm talking about the use of vulgar language that we can you know we do have ways to limit Free Speech within a school setting and this would be in case of when we would do that I I think it's a good time too just to remind everybody and I've got cabinet members who will kind of be coming and going just to observe the conversation mostly today um but that to as a reminder we we do want to be careful about um protecting uh student identity as well and so just as we make reference to incidences if we can keep the language more General I think that would be appropriate but I do think that this ation is important because usually when these incidents happen and we're bending over backwards to protect privacy rights we end
030up in a situation where the public thinks well what happened did you do anything was it enough was it too much um why aren't you addressing this and I think it's important and I really appreciate everything that Elena's been Elena's been talking about that we are addressing these things it's just the public doesn't always see it because we do have have to protect privacy so it's a it's a difficult line to walk yeah especially when it comes to discipline yeah sorry an oh no I was just going to add to to marne's point about um Free Speech but you also have to remember that whether it's in our schools or it has an impact on our schools we still have the ability to work with that student and discipline so it's it's not just being
031in one of our buildings where it's not allowed yeah significant disruptive um impact on a building is absolutely the Nexus uh between what our students do and social media and so forth um if it is having a significant impact on our ability to um deliver Educational Services that is now in the realm of uh our ability to intervene yeah and on a side note about that is that the um I think it was the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a piece of that in a lawsuit recently so it's going to the Supreme Court and the nsba is drafting an amikas brief um for the court to try to save that because if the Supreme Court sides with whatever the latest decision is that goes away and that would be hugely impactful Suzanne we'll
032have to listen for that at the law conference yes ask Franc where we're at okay so Elena will let you get back to it you've probably found whatever it is you were looking to share the form while that's coming up Elena too correct me if I'm wrong you've kind of based this on our our other crisis intervention plan planning documents right correct it's slow it's slow I'm trying I'm trying everyone H it's not popping up here no um sorry my zoom's doing a little something interesting I mean you can just touch on a few of the main components if you want Elena and if to in order to move through and take more questions sorry you all um I I will pull it up when I can uh get it get it back and going
033the main components are really just walks uh an administrator through what are the steps that they would uh follow um in response to a biased or racist incident at school and it just talks a lot about um collaboration with uh the equity Department with their current supervisor in terms of what what information you know we would communicate out uh to students in the community at large um walks uh the administrator through what uh you know what sort of uh student groups should you maybe be thinking about or checking in with specifically uh so it might be um our black students where we would um you know specifically check in with them um you know maybe set you know if we're in brick and mortar set aside space um within the building to be able to
034allow those students um to meet together and be able to process um just thinking about having the administrator right I know having been a principal how um students will look to you um to feel safe in the building um and so how can that administrator uh support uh the students and just the school culture um during such an event um it talks about um reteaching um that can come along uh with these events if appropriate and um and it also um just talks about you know putting together a team of people within the building that would be responding to that event and what their roles would be um you know providing a script for how you might handle a a staff meeting or a classroom activity if that was appropriate um just in talking and
035processing this out with uh with students and so it's really just a supportive measure um that lets everyone sort of know right in the middle of that crisis it's just sort of this helpful sort of r aex that walks people through what are some um steps we should be taking into account what are uh who are the people we should really be thinking about and focusing on um and then it provides um some structured framework for how to have conversations that um are not e always easy to have or navigate not just with staff but also with students so um that's really um sort of the gist of of the response plan and it's very similar to um like Ron was mentioning um what we might have in place um you know in the uh
036event of other crises that would happen on a school campus all right I'm sorry you all I am not it's not popping up for me to be able to share my screen anymore oh here we go am I still sharing the PowerPoint um no it just sayson has started sharing a screen and it's let me see now here we go I know there was another question from director moling as well and I was going to say maybe it would be easier for her just to email it to us and then we each look at it instead of having her share it oh oh there we go there we go oh boy yeah can you see it all or can you see it now yeah yeah we can there you go okay so it just really
037it really talks about immediate action it talks about um sort of what steps you would do after the immediate action and then it talks about um you know future planning or or end of day I I kind of put in different sometimes um depending on when the situation occurs during a school day um you have to have a a different um uh plan or response and so um I just have a couple of things in there like if it were to happen before the school day started or at or at the end of the day um just because that can be um helpful as well depending on um how much time you have to plan or prepare for staff and students um so this is just sort of um again this is a a working
038draft we uh haven't brought it through all the necessary um channels yet but this is something for you to see uh is in the works um and I can share that out later all right um I can move on to talking about collaboration or I can show um some of these uh systems work highlights if anybody is interested did we um it appears that maybe director mulling had to I know she was kind of trying to manage two things simultaneously she's in she's in a meeting now okay and I know she had a question but I guess we'll have to come back to that one yeah uh so any questions just pop in and ask so I think Elena I would go ahead and continue forward and just be mindful and we'll be looking for
039questions too from the board okay so the next thing I talked about um was collaboration and that that was really a prerequisite for Equity uh I think when you think about Equity it's something that uh touches every building and every department and really should be weaved uh you know through all the work that we're doing and is not um something that uh myself and uh the two uh tosas or teachers on special assignment in the equity Department uh can do on our own um and I know that that's not the vision uh that we have anyways in terms of achieving our Equity work so um I really wanted highlight The Importance of Being able to collaborate with other departments um so for example if there's pieces that uh people are concerned about in terms of
040curriculum curriculum and instruction that would really be something that would be a collaboration with the teaching and learning uh Department uh since they oversee curriculum and instruction for the district um also if we're talking about uh you know something like Recruitment and Retention um again that's something that uh the equity Department could collaborate on um or around and there are there um Partnerships we can develop in that work but it's also important for human resources uh to lean into that since they really oversee uh Recruitment and Retention for the district so just um pieces like that that ensure that that Equity is happening um throughout um our buildings and throughout our uh various departments so some of the highlights um that I really talked about are um I am part of the executive um leadership
041team for M multi-tiered systems of support which is really um an inner an intervention system um that would be focusing on achieving Equitable outcomes for students um I'm you know collaborating with uh the counseling uh department and pbss around and special services around trauma and fored practices especially um uh racism and the trauma that that uh that that causes uh I'm collaborating with the special education department around um some of the disproportionality um sanctions um that we need to address um I appreciated the the partnership um with executive director uh Donna Hood around our high school students um and uh partnering with them around what supports they need for uh the upcoming election or um in terms of the current events that are happening in our world we've partnered with uh teaching and learning um
042especially the edtech department around providing canvas support uh to all of our families but really a targeted support to our uh uh linguistically diverse uh families I think in um collaborating again with teaching and learning around those teacher development days that happen around uh the non-student days um I appreciated um being able to um collaborate with uh Deputy superintendent um Josh Aly just in having check-in meetings with the Departments that he oversees which allows me to be able to be informed by their work and to inform them of the work that I'm doing and then see where there um natural places where we can collaborate or work together um and then you can just see some of the other pieces uh that we have provided um uh collaboration support around the district in terms of
043curriculum or professional development uh and those pieces so um again these are just highlights um there are countless others um but just really I'm feeling um uh invigorated and um about the amount of collaboration that's happening in the district because I know that that is the only way that we will really you know also help see el16 come to life so Elena what would since I didn't see a board hand go up Marne I'm just gonna jump in there if that's okay um what would you say first of all I guess just to go backwards we've seen a significant to get to director gallinger's question um uh expenditure on equity in The District in the last five years um I guess probably going on six years now not not to mention all the PD training
044the contracts with um cultures connecting uh Dr capric Holland and Elsa um but really just on the Staffing side if I recall and maybe I got to go back more like six seven years now um we were a02 Equity um in our budget and now we have what seven FTE because you have an admin support person supporting your department as well right Elena correct correct so s FTE um and then um the expenditures on some of the other stuff you talked about so it's been significant it's something that we're gonna have to really take a close look at obviously this spring when we are um when we're looking at our budgets and um in terms of prioritization so um and then the question actually that I had Elena is what would you say are one
045or two of the the the the real issues that um um you think about in terms of work that needs to be done in terms of the equity department and uh I don't want to say keep you awake at night but what are the things that you know you you kind of checked off some of the work product you've been doing but what kind of is just in the back of your mind um concerned you and and where do you think we might need to uh direct maybe more resources or re priorit prioritize resources too for Equity going forward I know that's a big question something for you to think about but and I Know It kind of goes to the heart of what you and I spend a lot of time talking about in
046our meetings so maybe I'll just set that out there for you to ponder because I see director gallinger had a question anyway and it's really about their questions today okay and uh go ahead harling I just want to say a big uh shout out to our superintendent you know this work that the board has done and where we are today wouldn't be there without that board superintendent partnership as I said before I see you as our chief Equity officer because if the superintendent doesn't value Equity doesn't matter what really happens like it's just not going to have the meaning that it has had so I've been so grateful uh to walk along this journey of equity with you and the support that you've lent and the elevation you've done of the conversation the dialogue the
047budgeting uh from your level has been um so amazing to see so it's a model for the rest of the state and I do believe that this work is ever more important in this ER of our pandemic so thank you no I app I appreciate that um Haron and and I I agree it's been a uh I think it's shows the power of a collaboration between a superintendent and its School Board um you know you provide the the vision and the direction through your policy and it's our job to bring that to life with the hope that it's going to have a positive impact on our students lives and um and and I do feel good about that I I I think it's a good time to remind us all though that um as Dr
048Holland has told us from day one this is challenging work and um we are seeing a little bit of that play out right now as our one of our high schools has embarked on um you know the diversity unit and some of the training and um I know the board is aware of the the materials the the FAL or supplemental materials that were created by the humanities Department there and you know it's tough we've heard from a number of people who are very concerned that just don't um maybe share the same values that are laid out in el16 and and that we know that um in our our community there is a um diverse view of opinions um on issues of race and Equity um but I I think it's also important for the board
049to know we've heard from a number of students students and families who have greatly appreciated that work and I just think as long as we go into it with our eyes wide open not everybody's going to agree with the work that we're doing I think it's going to take courage um and um I'm proud of our teachers they're starting to step into that space which even just a few years ago I think teachers were just so uncomfortable that they didn't even want to frankly I think that sometimes they wanted to ignore issues of race that came up um whether they be microaggressions or in some cases even macroaggressions but we we we're empowering them and trying to educate them so that they they can feel confident addressing those issues but um it certainly um stir
050up some controversy with some there's no doubt about it so um I appreciate H I will tell you I appreciate Elena building the department around the board policy I think that's the appropriate way to do it and I appreciate having the policy because that grounds Us in what our values are going forward and helps us when we have those tough conversations with Community um folks who just frankly don't don't maybe share as I said the the values as they are outlined in that policy or maybe don't agree with some of the premises of that policy as well so there are times uh particularly with Equity work you know you just kind of have to buckle up and um and take those conversations on and uh use them as learning opportunities for everybody Elena I'm looking
051at this I just my one question would be um where the work with human resources is yes so I have appreciated being able to uh be able to partner with human resources I think one significant project uh that we have partnered around are the cyborg mobile uh Equity modules that were created and and so really uh uh executive director Natalie fer and myself uh led a steering committee um that was made up of many different departments throughout our system to create those modules and make sure that we were sharing um the same message consistently um out to buildings and across departments and so that has been um that has been a wonderful partnership I also think that what came out of that partnership was uh we created two Equity modules that we will use uh
052to on board uh any new staff to our district just so they understand um our lens and our foundation and our road um around equity and cultural competency and so being able to embed that into our uh new hire Academy has been fantastic and I know that I that uh executive director fer and I will also continue to collaborate around um how to start to make this training um more embedded into the work of our our classified staff as well so I've I have appreciated her partnership there um she also partnered with me around um being able to uh create uh the the verbage for uh the stien for the Equity Building leaders and I know that um we will be partnering with her also around Rec Recruitment and uh retention goals um so one
053of the things the equity department is focusing on really is um creating a um a cohort of uh teachers of color and really uh supporting them uh and I know that I have um been in talks with executive director Fowler um around some um ideas around um potential exit inter exit interviews with staff uh around um hiring practices and um and I'm excited to see the collaboration um go further I think to be honest I also want to recognize that her plate has been incredibly full um you know over the past six or seven months also with um with bargaining and helping to um create uh us and those pieces to support um learning during covid-19 so great thank you any other questions okay I think we can go on one of the the quotes
054I had here is that culture is not an initiative culture is the enabler of all initiatives um so even though I'm a person that is a a big believer in systems I know that if you change systems but you don't change culture you really haven't made a change and so um I think just really being able to change our culture um District culture um in terms of an equity framework and an equity mindset is significant um and the and the culture change is really also where I saw el16 come in in terms of of the different categories which are environment and culture family and Community engagement data and disproportionality and Recruitment and Retention in terms of environment and culture some of the highlights of that work um again are around um building professional development we've
055partnered with cultures connecting um for the last uh three years um we've really focused on professional development around microaggressions racial slurs and bias um focused around we've also focused on cultural competency um hot moments and and counternarratives um in terms of um our work with curriculum and instruction we have already um set goals um over the course of the next uh couple of years where we're looking at our um adoption process uh to look for for bias or inequities within that uh adoption process um we're also um creating a a K12 uh scope and sequence where we can really highlight um and call out where we are teaching um teaching about microaggressions or social justice or racism or bias um and those pieces within our curriculum so we know um where there's work to do
056and and and where we're we're doing a good job um just um in terms of creating listening sessions um with students staff and Community I know the board um has done a lot of work in that regards uh the equity department is also doing a lot of work in terms of of those listening listening sessions through our Equity Building leaders through our uh student Equity team um through the interdistrict student council a and um and through our uh teachers of color um cohort and then also through a lot of the um Family Partnership work that Lorna does in the community we really we really receive um quite a bit of of feedback um there um tryy uh just being a part of the mtss executive planning committee I think will help change our environment and
057culture in terms of how we approach students that are um struggling in school and how we uh set students up for Success um by creating adult expectations that every student should um benefit from um just we've created um a really robust religious calendar that really um highlights what some of the um educational impacts would or or considerations um should be taken into account when it comes to um different religious holidays or celebrations and we created that calendar by meeting with students of different different faiths as well as um parents within the community of different faiths and so um we've been able to share that out with teachers and that has been um really productive and helpful um I think also um what has been touched on before is that these are really topics that um
058you know as as a culture we're not um we haven't grown up talking about or really knowing how to have how to have dialogue about and so I think um in just creating like the different book studies and movie clubs and these Equity modules we really are helping to build knowledge and awareness among our staff and um and also help give them um the the tools they need the skills they need to be Advocates um for this work and so I think these are just some of the ways that we are helping to build an environment and a culture um that really promotes el16 within the district I think that's right we uh as far as the calendar we've been asking for that for a while um our back to school lands in in September
059which impacts um you know some of those events that people are have to go to or things like that impact the Jewish community disproportionately and so I'm really pleased to hear that we're going to a calendar that really represents our community of diverse uh Fates and they'll be able to have an understanding and and and perhaps even a way of celebrating with the whole Community around that I would remind everybody that um your December board meeting date changed as a result of that calendar you'll be having a Wednesday meeting in December because of the start of Hanukkah which would be on your normal Thursday date so um it's it's actually impacting even the the board meeting schedule as well that's great any other questions I would just note too um president moraldo on the on
060this you'll see the the bullet item on school resource officer changes and I know we've got an agenda topic coming up tomorrow um related to that as well so that's been a nice partnership between the equity department and um Dave our SRO and then more importantly with our city Partners as and that'll be that'll be an important discussion for us to have tomorrow as well as we um try to Envision what that role may look like going forward in the district too right yes just one thing to point out with that is that um I am I have been asked by the uh police chief uh for the city of issaqua to um join in on the to be a part of the hiring committee for the next uh police Commander for issaqua and so
061I will be doing um participating in that hiring committee on Wednesday um and it has been a nice to develop a relationship uh with him um and you know to see uh some of the fruits of that just in terms of even um being included um in this uh this hiring event um I'm also part of a a community Equity Group um which uh we helped uh a form and there is um a member from uh that community group that is also going to be um helping uh with the interview process and I know that that um our Equity Group had partnered um with uh the police chief for isqua um just during a community engagement meeting and so just starting to see some of those the the fruits of those Partnerships pay off as
062well that's great okay okay so next I just wanted to talk about family and community engagement uh just some of the highlights there is again doing uh mini building professional development sessions where we might have uh student panels talk about um cultural differences or what it's like to be um a a student um you know navigating the American school system we've done um professional development around culturally responsive uh teaching practices communicating with culturally diverse Families how to just navigate um different cultures and then um I know as a principal uh we did a couple of of parent panels at Endeavor um and I've heard other principles share as well that those are um significant in terms of just giving uh authentic feedback and a conversation to what it to what it's like to be a
063parent that is navigating um the American school system when that wasn't necessarily the school system that you um that you grew up in and maybe just some of your own deep culture around um how you would you know even interact um with a school system and what would be sort of culturally appropriate and not and just giving our um our staff that insight and that feedback um which I think helps both students or both staff and families have um more insight in how to really engage with one another um around um education so that that has been really fruitful um we have put on uh eight different um Family engagement events um sorry y'all uh which has which have been very um uh helpful and and insightful for our community uh one thing I just
064wanted to point out is that uh our uh enrollment verification process is done via Skyward and Skyward uh recently has um has terminated sort of their uh collaboration with Google translate and so um the equity Department put on uh a couple of days of live um enrollment verification support um really to support um All Families but really targeted also at our our culturally and linguistically diverse families um offered that support in person um as many of our families may not have the technology at home to be able to do that uh that registration process um without that support um we also did a couple of um uh Zoom sessions um individual Zoom sessions where the the team from the equity Department met with many families um to support them um you know being able to
065get through the enrollment verification process so that was just one one example uh we also recently did um an example on um how to interface with canvas uh for our sixth grade parents as this was um something very new to to them uh not having had uh a middle schooler the previous year uh and so and we've um our department has also figured out a way to be able to hold these Zoom sessions and hire interpreters that exist um at the same time as the presentation so what I mean by that is um when families sign in maybe I'm speaking to the families um and hearing the the conversation in English but the other there might be a group of families that are simultaneously hearing the conversation in Spanish or Mandarin or Japanese and so
066um we have figured out how to how to do that via zoom and with our our interpreters and we've also supported buildings um and being able to do that as well the the most recent one was um at isqua Valley Elementary where they were able to host their curriculum night simultaneously in many different languages so that that was really um fantastic um we've also in terms of District trainings we've done some cultural competency trainings for our par Educators also for our registar and our nurses um really with a focus on hot topics like different cultures might um approach um menstration or or um you know some mental health pieces differently than the American culture would and so just helping our nurses know how to navigate those conversations uh with families has been helpful um we've
067done some small group meetings you can see here um I've really appreciated some of the the work we've started to do with PTSA just around equity and helping bring them in as as partners in this work uh and then uh in the spring this was a significant lift for um the equity Department was just in terms of supporting the communication departments with uh all which helping to translate and doing rooc calls in um preferred languages around all of the different covid related information that was coming out and also collaborating with cultural Bridges so that we can make sure that we are using all of our networking abilities to get information out to as many families um as possible so those are just some of the highlights of our our family and Community engagement work um
068so yes okay I'm not seeing any hands up this would be a good time to ask questions I'm seeing none okay very very best your there's so much information right now yes and and I know I'm looking forward in January we can show more because this is really just highlights that I'm showing here uh so in terms of uh data and dis disproportionality I think this is really um something that I see as a much larger uh lift um lift for the system so I think um one that I'm excited about is I have talked a little bit about this mtss executive team um that we have which is made up of the equity Department teaching and learning uh special services and student interventions and really what we have talked about is using um mtss
069as as a vehicle as the vehicle to really um launch uh information to the system of about data and disproportionality that we're seeing and then also to use that system to um intervene based on the data or the disproportionality that we're seeing so I think that is um that's going to be fantastic work and I'm excited to see um the um some of the proactive ways that we can really ensure um that we are um intervening without creating inequities within the system um I've also needed to work with Home Room to create an equity dashboard um that we can share um with the system at large um just so that everyone has access to that information um in an easy way and um can share it with their staff uh again I know as a
070principal I would pay to bring in my building leadership team um early in August and and would and the whole point of that meeting was really to walk them through the data um within our school and to help them um look at the data answer any questions that they had and then also equip them to bring that information back to to their building teams um and I think that that um we can only increase in our our skill set of of looking at and responding to data um as a system overall but just the ease of access to that data is crucial um I talked just about uh title and lap and and the work that we're doing there uh I think in terms of just having really great conversations this school year around attendance
071um and having an equity lens of making sure that we're not penalizing students for asynchronous uh attendance um I'm excited about the engagement work um that is happening through um some of the tiered teams that we already have in place so an example of that is really pushing for um you know making sure that when we are reaching out to families we're reaching out to them and their preferred language that we're reaching out in multiple modalities that we are documenting the uh the outcome of those reach outs and that we are ensuring that um access and um that access is not an issue as part of their engagement work and really expanding the definition of a engagement from just a traditional um you know view of you know are you just actively participating in the
072work but also to expand that definition to include access as well and then um again the the cceis which is just the the special education um disproportionality piece of just um looking at that data and partnering with them on how we can um embed and continue to talk about um culturally respons practices um and Equitable practices in terms of intervening when students are struggling either academically or behaviorally okay any questions from the border or from staff okay so I guess you can move on to recruitment and retention so some of the the highlights there are we um we have a staff of color affinity group uh which is which is critical um just so our um teachers of color have a group that they um they can connect with um and just feel like they're
073not alone to get support from and even just the process through um maybe some of their uh experiences um not just with staff and students but also with uh families in the community um so I think that has been really um crucial we we've also done listening sessions for staff of color just to hear their um feedback on what their experiences uh have been like um and just some of the things that they that they've highlighted that um we are working hard as a department to address is um just needing to have differentiated uh professional development um as oftentimes uh staff of color are entering at a different um on-ramp um than other staff in these discussions um or sometimes they experiences um they feel more vulnerable talking about um certain topics um with white
074students or white families and and how do they navigate that um we're also participating in a in the Puget Sound ESD educators of color cohort um we're we're putting together resources for staff of color um and then like I already had talked about just differentiating PD for staff of color so um those are some of the the highlights that we're doing um that I feel like I could share right now at this time okay okay I'm not seeing any hands raised so no questions okay and then I just end with this so great Mar I I did have one um thing that I would ask Elena just to comment on if she could and that is um some of the challenges um of promoting this work or doing this work Elena in our current remote
075setting with our students not being able to come to school and just anything that you might share about how your work has been impacted by the pandemic and um issues that maybe that's created for you or your department yeah so I think that um I mean just speaking transparently I I feel that people are everyone is you know just is really overwhelmed um by the pandemic both in their uh professional and personal life it's just taken a toll um on people and and some to a significant degree and so I think um it's um you know it's just keeping in mind um the bandwidth of people um to be able to tackle all the things that that they need to be able to tackle I think even alone you know taking a brick-and mortar system
076and and pushing it uh to be all online is a a significant lift and um oftentimes I think people are you know not always running at Baseline and so um just having to be able to read the room and know what um what people can and cannot digest I also think um for our staff of color in particular uh the things that are going on um uh politically and um and culturally are C can be very traumatic and um fear producing and overwhelming and then you know having to shoulder that and then come to work and and do all these pieces and handle Co um Can can uh can be a lot for people I also um I think that these are also talking about Equity talking about systemic racism talking about microgr questions are
077topics that are often new for many of our families um and um and sometimes these topics have been um have been made political um and so that can sometimes interfere with um with having conversations because now you're talking about politics when really um we're wanting to just address um you know factual inequities or exper lived experiences um that people have and so um so that can be a challenge I also think um we um the amount of of FTE and and support that have been has been poured into the equity Department over the last few years is significant um is just significant um and I would also say we I still you know were a small but Mighty Department um and there's there's really three of us that can um significantly sort of mobilize around
078the system and so just um being able to address all the work that needs to be addressed as well as be um open and flexible to um different interruptions that come up and and I don't say interruptions to be negative or positive just to be reality um can sometimes stretch us uh very thin as well um and so I think those are just some of the things that come to mind um when I think about you know challenges um in regards to to equity okay any other questions or comments we have four minutes left on this topic Suzanne um I just wanted to say to Elena that I really appreciate this update there was a lot in here that I didn't know about and I think you know when when we have periodic system failures
079when kids do things stupid on social media we see that it's very visible in the community and we don't always see all the positive work that's going on behind the scenes and this is you know this is not work that we do overnight as you say we've been working at this for what six years but it's there's a lot of progress being made a lot of the progress is slow but it's slow and steady and I just find this all really encouraging and really um we're definitely going in the right direction we're definitely making a difference it's like turning the cruise ship it takes it takes a while but um as I said there was a lot in here that I was not aware of so I really appreciate getting this update and just keep
080up the good work thank you anyone else hi it's Sydney um and sorry I had to to drop out but I was here for the beginning and the end Elena and so um and I was able to go through deck as well but what I loved about where you started today was the level of specific operational action um that's where usually where my focus is I think in this work it can be I don't know tend toward the philosophical or even metaphysical when there's real um specific action that can be taken so hearing about the build building by building contacts and being able to enact a um a network of people for me was really important to hear as well as the other thing that was great was um uh that you were taking more
081direct I guess direction of what the professional development work uh that's happening is in the buildings I think that that's all really important so thank you thank you anyone else well we really appreciate the time that you've taken to share with us and the the work that you've been doing is just um fantastic and um yeah we look forward to seeing you know how this year um increases over what you've were able to do last last year and um just how it's going to impact students so we really really appreciate it we're at the point with our students where we have to look at every every small bit to be able to um to help them you know when you have a high graduation rate it's like what do you have to do to get
082Farther Along um but also the success of all our students is what's vital and we've seen our our opportunity gra Gap grow and that's been disconcerting so I think this is a real effort to ensure that you know when we when we're talking about students we're talking about each and every student and how we can best meet their needs so thank you for this work thank you for the opportunity to share thank you and with that we're going to take a 15 minute break so grab some more coffee if you need it like I do a snack that I don't need so we'll be back here at 10:45 thanks for okay I have that it is 10:45 so the next item on our um agenda was the review of the eel's now I have to
083find which ones we were going to talk about I know el11 was one of them yes el11 and el2 and I had sent the list a long time [Music] ago Bernie the other thing we were going to do but I don't think you have it on this agenda was to talk about um NS one and the mission and how me how we might want to approach approach revising that yeah I I would agree that that's another Diane are you able to find I'm not able to find the email that I sent you that had the agenda topics well let me see if I can find the document I'm looking for it right now too Marne I I thought I kept it with my agenda copies but I'm not seeing it there but I know let
084me oh that's right I have 500 emails from Marne I know this is where I'm like wa a second Marty if you click on your calendar invite there's a link to the agenda there yeah the agenda just has the high level and when I had put whatever I put together and sent you had the details oh got it had of the elel that we were going to do pardon me for not being as prepared as I should be Sydney must have changed computers because she's back in her shiny floors think I found it Marne amazing how that teleportation happens going from cell phone to computer type retreat in and that should oh I found it here I'm in see if I can share here because that has the specific ones and then you can go
085to the school district site and pull them up so we can look at the same document at the same time did anything come up it did it's really small for me so how do I see if there's something I can do here to mine's full size Marne it might be on your end I know I don't know what the deal is that helping at all oh it's because I changed from full screen to window view yeah now I have it so um the the first one actually is probably better well I think I put it first because we're going to talk about el16 um and so I wanted to go through and we we talked about how we might want to look at the Els in relation to is it supporting the work of um
086el16 but I think maybe that's the last thing to look at the first thing to look at would be el2 and el1 around these two particular areas where we talked about we've had discussions over the past year so um el2 I got to bring it up on my end so E2 um the first one we wanted to talk about was the third bullet or number three which is permit any form of illegal discrimination and I know we've had some discussions around this so that is um I mean obviously we have a whole thing about not breaking the law in in our um executive limitation for our superintendent um and obviously that would include not permitting any form of illegal discrimination so one of the things we talked about is how can we go beyond that
087to set an expectation that um we want to go above and beyond what might be considered legally an act of discrimination I would just going to say I think the whole concept of legal discrimination is a little weird um and I would I would need more information about what that would even mean right how can you have discrimination can you have legal discrimination well so what we had talked about um before was if it's not pervasive you know a one-time something so I think too bad Lisa Heckman isn't here because she was fully versed in that during our our Appeal on that and during the appeal is like well we don't believe we met the threshold that we would be legally sued for discrimination yet clearly but does that just go to the definition of
088discrimination yeah I think to the legal definition right we should go back and find that appeal letter I'll look for it I know um and this was an issue that um Lisa had brought forward um with because there was some concern raised by I know legal council as it related to creating a a a different standard and I think the opinion was we certainly understand why the board would want to do that I just I think we want to make sure that whatever you do you go into it with your eyes wide open that it could create you're creating a lower bar if you will um is was my understanding of it in terms of um people's um legal options or responses well the the challenge of being anything other than the legal description of
089it would be the interpretation of it well and we can leave this bullet in here and yet speak more to having an additional bullet that has more ideas or more thoughts around you know this is a treatment of people and you know a culture that treats you know shall not permit an organizational culture that treats people with disrespect indignity or discourtesy that's it could go straight to that just the interpretation is not adequate to catch all of that or do we need to be more explicit do we need so and that's why we're having this topic is do we need to change anything do we want to be measuring things more carefully and then it might go to the next one is how do we deal with complaint so how do we know that those
090are out there and then it's a matter of this is whether or not he's in compliance this is a compliance-based because it's an executive limitation so if somebody fails to treat somebody with respect does that mean he's out of compliance or is it because we talk about organizational culture so at what point do we would we as a board say it has to be oh it's it's not pervasive throughout the culture so then these incidents don't matter it's just this one has bothered me that how do we really measure it because people get upset people complain incidents happen and we don't know about it so I think in in reading it let me go back to I think in reading it the the central because I went first to the bullet right that bullet three
091permit any form of illegal discrimination which is um is one definition but I actually think that the comment above in the main part does not permit organizational culture that treats people disrespect and dignity or discourtesy is maybe more of the value statement in it and then the below seems like we're trying to get into I don't know maybe a more specific find point on how we will know if someone was treated with disrespect and dignity and discourtesy so one clearly if it violates the the the legal and maybe that's the way that three is written like it violates the legal definition of discrimination I think it may just be a grammatical thing in it but I think because and I think that's certainly fine but but it's not the whole it's not the whole that
092we're trying to express I guess from a cultural or a values perspective so for me what I think would be good to see here is um like in two it say a process for Effective handling of complaints I would like to go into a bit of more of what I think effective handling would mean so and that may be here later no okay that's all of it which would potentially mean like categorization of complaints um by the type so do we know how many complaints that the individual leveling them believes were discriminatory in nature some sort of theming of those complaints so of the ones that were discrimination we know how often someone is saying that the their complaints are exclusion from activity versus um you know discourteous treatment or you know chil environment things
093and that then lastly that we have some way to review that level of categorization to determine if there's you know like systemic pinpoints like we get most of them in certain buildings or certain grade levels Etc so for me it would be about getting into that effective handling piece a bit more to get at what you're saying Marney yeah I I think that so then kind of what you're talking about is we need a more robust interpretation of that and that we're in sense we're not feeling and and I would say I would definitely agree that I've not felt this entire time like the only complaints we ever talk about is we'll be told oh here's how many formal re complaints we've gotten and they've all been resolved or and only two are outstanding well
094what does that mean and resolved according to who and resolved how and how did that any of those resolutions impact the system right so I don't know what it is in to even resolve a complaint you know I've talked about I had a complaint regarding how a teacher behave treated my daughter and I'm sure it was resolved in that the it was closed but I don't know that it was I don't know what that means um I apologize I I did um ask Lisa Heckman if she was available and I see she's going to be zooming in if you wanted to um I'm trying to articulate um this idea between um illegal and legal discrimination as it related to um one of the appeals the board heard last year I think there really what I
095I just kind of wanted as I said I want the board to kind of go into the conversation eyes wide open in ter because I know it did raise the eyebrow of of a one of one or two of our attorneys when we we talked about some of this and I so um I just wanted you to know that's why Lisa was zooming in now that was a request that I had just made of her if she was available for that yeah so hi Lisa hi thank you for joining us because I know aren't you supposed to be in another meeting right now I am yes around attestations and uh watching covid because that's become my life these days yeah yes um well some of our conversation while Ron was trying to get that we
096kind of moved on but I'll go back to our discussion was um clearly illegal discrimination we would want to maintain that but how we get to it kind of is up in the top sentence about uh not permitting an organizational culture that treats people with disrespect indignity or discourtesy and you know looking back to like that one incident how would we have known about it if it wasn't appealed to the board so if that had been a complaint and then it got marked in the resolved bucket and the person didn't escalate it to the board for one re reason or another maybe not understood maybe didn't hit the date that she needed to do it by how would we as a board have ever known and would we consider that resolved so there's a number
097two is the handling of complaints yeah so there's a couple of different places where those fall in we've we haven't so there's places where in the different monitoring reports where we pull out uh parent complaints there's a place in the monitoring report where we pull out those specific two discrimination and then there are those right where we have shown and and then there is the columns where it's misconduct against a staff member and so there's there's multiple places where it is completely reasonable to report that if you're wanting specifics around um was there misconduct and was discipline right Meed out and everybody agreed so it didn't go any farther um that it was um disputed as it was uh in this particular case so I think it I think if you want to narrow or
098determine what it is that you want information on um we've got it in order to be able to get it to you traditionally we have only reported um you know misc the misconduct cases depending upon how they are resolved that's in I think it's el3 and then um it's rare right that we have had a discrimination case be appealed as in this case uh to the board which it this one was reported um underneath the misconduct in that particular um in that particular e rather than called out specifically for discrimination so I think it's going to depend upon and it'll depend upon some ongoing work sorry I'm just I'm thinking through the process being asked the question because it it will it will probably be best if it comes in under a parent complaint as
099an appeal to the board because all of our pieces would have been the initial complaint would have included discrimination but the findings were not right did not include that necessarily and so that that is the place at which there is a disagreement and I don't I don't know how to capture that other than as it does come to the board which is one of the final checks that we have on the system so but for I guess for for me and maybe I'm trying to figure out how to verbalize my my my want of this item my want isn't so much a knowing that a specific inent of any type occurred and was resolved and what that looked like my want is what is the what is the system by which there's an analysis across
100multiple instances determination of I determination of um oh I guess pervasive not to overuse the word systemic but uh pervasive occurrence of a particular kind of of of a particular kind of incident and that there are is muscle in the system to identify um just determine what needs to be resolved within the the building the system to correct for that incident and that we can monitor that going forward and so when I look I was just trying to look at the monitoring report at least the way I'm reading it is I believe we have a way to catalog the instances and to your point we have a way to raise the in an individual instance if there's disagreement but what I'm left with trying to figure out is where where is the point that we
101review across multiple determine what needs to be done more broadly and work through the broad communication of Correction so I think that there's I'll just give you my experience I think that there are multiple places where that happens with employees that happens within Human Resources as we then um talk and work with that now it would be Elena cidos and the executive director of equity um before it would have probably it would have been Emily and TLS to say hey it looks like we need some more professional development in this particular area because here's the type of concerns that we are getting right it's it's the it's the third one I I'm totally making up numbers but it's it's the third one that has this level of of concern or this type of um difference
102and say it it's not peer-to-peer but there's a power differential at at work as well as well um so is that power differential between a supervisor and a subordinate or is that power differential so you know even broader between say an administrator and a student or is it between a teacher and a student so those pieces happen in part within Human Resources if it is student if it's student to student or or that peer type action we that comes in through um generally it's going to come in through harassment intimidation and bullying and so the administrators work with Stacy zachow and then I would have been previously now it would be Mandy Dory would be pulled in if we are starting to tick those discriminatory um words so that we can catalog it according to
103our uh civil rights officers um even if it's a even if it's a student interaction so there's that there's that analysis too and then that is pushed out to the appropriate um executive director of of the appropriate Ed level to make sure that they are then working on um you know is it is it information that is getting pushed back out to building principles and again that we have to develop for teachers um one example would have been I think it was about 18 months ago um a different case that I had worked on again it was a parent complaint bringing forward about a feeling that their child had had a disperate treatment and what we found was the communication tools that we had been advised to use from the legal side of the house
104we needed to adjust and adjust our practice as we brought on Swiss and as we brought on um the the discipline communication to families so there was another to your point Sydney check on the system where we said okay here's where we need to go back and look at how look at how many times we communicated in X fashion and it wasn't making a difference so what are we going to do what what are we going to do differently the next time we've seen that and to my understanding the interactions and the steps that we were taking in interacting with families around words that would have landed Us in that discrimination realm be it racist be sexist um whatever the the category was we we then adjusted how we were interacting with students using some
105of that Swiss data and then going to be working with going to be working with staff we ended up in covid so I'm not sure exactly how far that ultimately got in this last year but that certainly was part of the structures and plan so there is there is analysis that happens at say say the assistant superintendent executive director level that does coordinate to try to push back out uh New pieces for either professional development or considering a focus and training that teachers or par professionals or administrators may need so at least I I've finished because I think you're what you just got to gets to what I want to know more about so it may be different for others so I'll just finish my thoughts here I think the more we at least for
106me it would be great to have more visibility to that analysis review course correction cycle um because versus I'm not saying it's not important to look at the individual instances but for me that's how I feel like I would better understand are we are we a learning organization are we learning what the concerns are and are we driving specific course correction there um I believe Jake also joined us because uh when he knew we were having this conversation just wanted to share some things from a risk perspective concern that he had it doesn't exactly tie into where the conversation is at right now but I know that was something that he wanted to be aware of and so I I believe Jake is here with us now but um ince myself as the wet blanket
107yeah I would say Jake let the conversation flow a little bit because we're not exactly on that I will I will book my head up as needed okay Harlen great um so I wanted to bring this up because I really think that you know I agree with what's been said so far I would say first of all when I'm looking at el2 I think the word illegal is what kind of throws me like is there any form of legal discrimination because I don't i' want that either so I think cleaning that up by removing the word illegal might help um but I think that I wouldn't have any appetite for having a uh difference between board policy and legal definitions um I don't think I think we pay an attorney fees we don't need to
108pay more to defend something that would not be supported by the court of law I do think it does hinge on number two though um because I think it I think that first of for me I would reject the interpretation of what is been stated I think that's part of the problem we've gotten the results based on the acceptance of the interpretation and it's the formal handling of complaints and I think we're trying to get at the bigger picture of sort of you know what is the pulse on the community because that's ultimately and in our buildings that's ultimately going to be what drives culture but why I initially brought this up was I believe that we should consolidate el2 and l12 um it's never made sense to me why there is treatment of people
109treatment of students differently when treatment of people refers to students and so to separate out treatment of students from learning environment and so I would recommend that we push a bunch of the el12 into el2 and then move like one and four out to the culture one I mean to the learning environment one on E12 and you know maybe learning environment if it's just learning environment could then be the framework for any new homework and Grading learning environment type policy work that the board may want to do so my recommendation would be a consolidation of el2 and el12 because I think they've been artificial I that's part of sort of we getting this I think it's hard for the administration to as far as the work that they're doing to try and provide evidence so
110that was my hope today to have a conversation on doing that work of combining those two so you want to um would you like to have a subcommittee to look at or a committee to come a subset of the board to look at what of the pieces of el2 cons a learning environment you know Mar back in February I think Carlin and I met and talked about a lot of this in the context of grading and homework and putting something together and because I've got a whole set of notes on this and one of the notes I had was combining el2 and el12 so I think we did a bunch of the brain harlon and I met we talked and then I think the board I think we brought that back to the board and
111we did a bunch of brainstorming and then I think it it just kind of sat there happened but I'm remembering it more in the context of grading than around this particular item I I did want to backtrack though and say one thing about um the bullet number three which is I think the reason it says illegal discrimination is because there that that's a distinct thing that has a meaning in the legal sense discrimination has a very well-defined meaning if you say permit any form of discrimination I mean you know I can say I'm discriminating I like this kind of food better than that kind of food it it doesn't have a prescribed meaning and I think if we just said prohib permit or fail not fail to permit um any discrimination you get in a
112weird Netherland of what does that mean so I think illegal discrimination is probably okay but I don't think it's enough I think need to get at something else but I don't think just the word discrimination is going to do it I agree with that but that's why I would rope in the all the student pieces too like I think in this e of el2 four and five I don't think belong here as far as the I think those are more culture these are more treatment of people things and I think that I would recommend we merge them before we change language of particular bullets or that's part of the process I mean spending the work on Words Smith in a bullet seems premature to do it when we could do some combining Harlin can you
113repeat what you just said about the the bullets one four and five I'm not sure which direction you're trying to move with those three so I think that we should break it up into treatment of people and learning environment oh should be two of the big buckets and the ones that are in the treatment of people including students go in el2 bucket and the ones that are learning environment Go in the el12 bucket and okay when I just curs we look at it one four and five looks like they would probably belong more in the environment bucket and then a lot of the middle part of el12 with the really focuses on students would belong in the El two bucket H so I am almost there with that one except where my brain is trying
114to go with that I think it's 0. one I'm trying to flip back and forth I think that's when it says like confidential information um where would we put and maybe it's already in another EO um I guess there's the learning environment there's also the administration environment so it's not just student confidential information it is family confidential information or um uh teacher confidential information like I I don't know if learning environment there maybe to me then seems like there would have to be this um professionalized Administration environment because there's more to me that first bullet is getting to more than just like student confidential information we already have an e that does with a District administration we just did the we just approved the one for personnel Administration and that one covers that one you're
115right this one includes students and staff but we just did the one for staff uh let me look at it yeah el3 three admin okay let me click on the L3 sorry I'm not you know fully versed in all the bullets and all our E's yet yeah Tak me like five years so that's why we Ray on Suzanne that's why she can't ever stop yes yes yes yes okay you're muted suzan and we maybe it's because she was saying bad words to me I just saying I don't remember all the bullets and the numbers either so so for me that um the one about the confidential information I think really there's there's almost a sense that there's an operational executive limitation and we've kind of split up some of the operational things so you know
116one one El that doesn't have any bullets next under it is the executive constraint which basically says you know prevent any practice activity decision organizational condition which is unlawful unethical unsafe and a violation of board policy to me some of that maintaining the information some of the legal things might fit under here like that's part of obeying the law right adhering to furpa keeping records PIV private and confidential so it may be adding that under el1 which has never had a sub bullet in its life I I would say though um kind of in keeping with Harland thinking there um by the with the uh suggestion of some combinations in el2 and el12 maybe el3 also needs to be part of that conversation because I do think you you know as I'm looking at it
117you could almost pull that first bullet from el2 and drop it into el3 if if you wanted to separate out here are the the managerial procedures that we do to either process complaints or maintain people's confidentiality those are you know managerial tasks their uh processes and procedures you'd put in place but that you could keep them separate from the way that you address the individual whether it be a parent or a student so I do see some logic there and I I guess I would just suggest maybe we it's not just be about el2 and2 it might el3 and potentially as you just said Marne um el1 could also play in almost like just a reorganizing of I don't think there's anything that you necessarily want to lose but they may not be in the
118right places and my understanding Ron is they were created that way because parent rights and student rights are two separate things right um that makes sense they parents have different rights than students do when it comes to that doesn't mean they'd have to be in different Ys though no no I'm just saying that's I think that's why they were bifurcated that way or originally is because legally parents often have a different track than their students do right and stud differ I would say that you know we're trying to get away from just the compliance part to the culture piece if we keep focusing on the compliance then we're never going to get to where the board wants to get to and that's and that's kind of why I'm on the phone is because this is
119a Ken you my advice to you as your risk manager and your Chief Financial Officer of course is going to be boring and legal and not create a standard of care any greater than you would need to because your policies are just like city ordinances um they are what we come back to and adjudicate against so you need to be very they are a legal it's a legal framework that we are bound to and then can be sued against or for um so that's just you know I that is why I po my head in and I'm like oh you know changing the standard for discrimination makes me very nervous from a district legal and Financial IAL exposure standpoint anything greater than the legal threshold and that's that's just the hard that's the hard uh
120risk management and finance facts not not that um not trying to perpetuate or change cult cultural um ideals but you know my job is prevent organizational risk but Jake you weren't part of the conversations so I don't think that that was where the board was so confus sentence not inaccurate I think Jake may be responding a bit to what um I was trying to interpret and and I apologize because this goes all the way back to the discipline appeal from last spr I was trying what the board was talking about there and so I may have not clearly articulated I was struggling a bit to understand where the board wanted to go I think well I mean there there are some things like especially now that we're collecting that Swiss data you know to get
121an understanding of what's happening in a in a school building or what's happening in a classroom and how do you how do you mitigate between you know staff members whether it's you know a classified member whether it's a bus driver whether there's a certain level of what would be considered discriminatory from a legal standpoint and then there's the just not kind towards children or just not kind towards parents or or just you know something that's unprofessional in their Manner and how do we get at that well and who gets at that more importantly Marne is it the governing body or is it the managerial administrative body well I mean it's you know this is an executive limitation saying by the way don't fail to ensure that so it's it's the it's us telling this superintendent
122that this is the kind of culture we want to create be kind to children I don't think it's a tough one it's this is a school system but we get complaints every year and I think Mar's point I mean it was a pretty significant one that we had to hear in the springtime it was it should be something that we're all talking about and saying does the policy reflect our values and does it have what it needs to have not just legally but in order to support the learning environment that we want and so I think no matter what whether this changes any outcome or not as far as the written words on paper I think this is a valuable conversation for us to have as a leadership yeah and I think for me what's
123really important is I think at least what I believe is that we have the systems in place to facilitate adjudicate resolve the individual situation we just happen to see the ones that might be most extreme but that doesn't create an environment where the for the next kid potentially and so what I'm most concerned with is what is the what is the parallel system that is reviewing for four themes and ensuring that we have a regular rhythm of determining what course Corrections need to be taken more broadly it's not just hey in this case we did something we resolved it we took some action but we in another building another place are having the same experience these these instances should allow us the opportunity to pick up our heads and say okay what is a broad
124brush and so instrumenting that system is what I think is critically is is what I want to see more clearly called out and we do have the broader language in the first sentence you know where we say um not permit an organizational culture that treats people with disrespect indignity or discourtesy which is what Marne was talking about earlier but then the bullet points um you know get more more legally and more you know what are the rules what is the system so we we've got all the words but maybe they're not in the right place I I and I think that culture any individual organizational culture you can say that's building whatever moves the line of what discourtesy is right I mean depending on what's happening in any particular place that line can and does
125move for people to be like well I you know I didn't say and they may repeat with some extreme example because that's where their local culture puts it I think we have to be much more explicit that there's a way in which we look at the culture more globally and establish what the lines are um otherwise you're you're going to see it move locally being discourteous will mean very different things to many different people it does now for sure yeah I I think if if I if I could I I think uh Sydney you've kind of hit at the heart of something and and I apologize some of this I have to go back in my mind literally 15 years to the development of some of these policies and practices to try to recall what
126what was at the heart of it and and a lot of these remember too kind of came in as boiler plates from uh the Aspen group as well and um came from those recommendations um one of the questions I guess I have is and I've heard the board talk about this a number of times is um kind of what data the board might be looking for because where where we really have gotten into struggles historically um is trying to scratch that itch of the board in terms of what data will help you feel like we're either making progress or we're in compliance here or we're not and I know there was a time and Suzanne you can probably recall this where there there was a real push for it to be things that were quantifiable
127we don't want stories we need things that can be measured and counted and I think that drove us in the direction of compliance more I mean we could we could actually count the number of formal complaints that were um filed and and were they resolved are the the number of hearings I think where we struggle was how to capture kind of the the just countless numbers of um daily interactions many of which I'm sure feel at least on one one side of the relationship or the other um disrespectful or discourteous um whereas the other side of that conversation maybe well I wasn't I didn't feel like I was being discourteous at all I thought I was just being perfectly so it gets challenging and I know we've spent a lot of time trying to wrap
128our heads around that but as the board does this work it it would be helpful if if we could get some guidance on just exactly what kind of data would would the board be looking for I know more often than that not that's been our job as the staff but that would be an area where I it I know it would be helpful for me I'll speak for myself um as we um try to interpret what the board is looking for or our interpretation of what we think the board is asking for and then just how to act physically capture it in the form of data for a monitoring report yeah except I think that's backwards because I mean I understand why you want to see it um but if we if we craft our
129Els in terms of what can be measured then we're not really reflecting the value of the board and the board may have values that ultimately are really really hard to measure but it doesn't mean they shouldn't be part of the e so unless the cost of governance exceeds the value of the data well that's that's that's just a part of gathering the data that's we can still have that on there and it you know the Gathering of the data might have to be you know stories or anecdotal because you don't have physical data doesn't mean that we don't sit back and say this is important to us now this is a conversation that I've had my whole time around the board um about how you all want to see the daytoday administrative activities and problem
130solvings we do because unfortunately you only get to see the appeal because you're the highest governing body in the land um and so we get all a little nervous just to be honest with you how to articulate our dayto day I mean there literally a day does not go by where I don't get a complaint or an issue that we have to solve locally and you heard me opine on that a little bit in our uh discussions about this issue before so that's why we get a little nervous because we like what do you want to see um because our job is to solve problems every day or else we wouldn't be on the payroll you do bring up a good point because our view is somewhat skewed because we only see the appeals and
131the appeals are like the worst of the worst the things where for whatever reason the parent or the student was unhappy with all the attemp at the dist that the district made to solve the problem and I'm not faulting the district for that but I'm saying that's what we see and and we need to have a better sense of all the things that don't reach that threshold and I don't know how to measure that so I'm not jumping in on that but but that's the I think that's the source of the frustration is we only see we're off on one really skewed end and we don't see the rest of it yeah Harlen you've had your hand up uh so in an Ideal World I'm not asking for this so but uh the Swiss data
132is really helpful although a lot of teachers have said that it's really cumbersome so like if there was a some sort of automatic processing of parent and student complaints that went like that all of our teach that are our principles get that went into some sort of sorting process that we then sort of got the sense so you could see Trends based on like what sy's talking about that would be an Ideal World I'm not expecting that but I think there was a mismatch between the few formal board appeals that we hear and what we feel in the community and so for those of us that still have kids in school it's not all happy gol Lucky out there and just because parents aren't complaining formally doesn't mean that they're necessarily happy with things or
133feel like they've been done right by some of our staff and so it's being able to create an formal process so my recommendation would be this that if each year that you announced and educated our parent community and our student community on an informal reporting process that you created on our website kind of like you have for the sort of um any sort of safety thing but if it was a informal complaint or concern how word however you want that was by a parent could put in or a student could put in and then they would have to choose a category or other and I I think it would create I would feel more comfortable because I could then say to parents hey you don't feel like complaining to your principal it's like not to
134the level of that but still you have this concern that it would give families and students a way to speak up because right now we don't have a if you see something say something culture we just don't right maybe there are some buildings that do but I haven't been in one yet and regardless of what's in our um executive limitations people sense if I say something there will be retaliation against my my student every single person I talk to yeah Sydney yes I I can be very clear and specific in the data I would like to see in this way my concern is that of how do we demonstrate continual awareness and continuous Improvement so what I would like to see is categorization of instances whether you tear them you know solved at in classroom
135solved in building solved at whatever the escalations are I would like to see them themed and get some sort of ability to see a heat map of themes where do we most often see our instances that require intervention um you know where do we what are the themes of them whatever the categorization is whether that's maybe probably categorization that already exists in Swiss or someplace else but what is it by those themes and then what is the comparator across dist across buildings what is the comparison across uh racial and ethnic group breakdown and what specific actions are taken at what interval systemwide to address the themes we see I want to know whether it's uh monthly quarterly half yearly yearly that there is some form that convenes to review that data and I want to
136know what specific actions are are taken planned deployed and I want to know adoption of those items deployed so if we see we have systemic discipline items across these sorts of buildings with kids of these sorts of backgrounds um that we can identify that across multiple buildings I want to see what the group of very smart people that get together think about them and I want to know how we deploy that across the system anecdotal not in not interest well quasi interesting to me it might be interesting to hear one or two of the very hottest themes but I think we can get from the detail dayto day to systemwide action in a way that we can absorb and understand that we are a learn listening learning and continuous Improvement organization Lisa you had your
137hand up well I think I think Sydney had had just cleared up had cleared up some some things and she got me thinking about okay how do I do that at the classroom level because that's that's where so many pieces are taken care of that we never hear about no administrator then gets their hands in mind on Etc because it it is resolved and and and moved on um so I think so I think I I think Sydney just gave me some more things to to think about so I don't I don't have another question we do know that some of the classroom interactions when it's because I think part of the treatment of students is student on student treatment as well is it not or do we not that'd be the discipline report is
138a lot of that I mean it's not always student to student but um yeah I as I've been listening it's some type of a system I'm referring to them as treatment complaints so it could be student to student it could be staff to student it could be student to parent you know it got me even thinking when I first came to this District you were one of the first districts to adopt a civility policy that was described to me at the time as a butress for staff primarily against the community because people people felt like the community was coming at staff so hard that and being uncivil towards them and and that was kind of I mean that was the way it was articulated to me I don't know if that was exactly what was
139behind it or not but um so I'm I'm just kind of trying to glean into the conversation I'm hearing things like um a desire to um collect the data around treatment complaints both you know we have a system by which we collect the form the informal um a desire to know well what what's typically done um when there when there are these issues and then I just wanted to touch briefly on what Lisa said because I actually think the vast majority vast vast majority of issues related to the treatment of I don't like the way you talk to me or whether it be staff to student student to student parent to staff um staff to parent most most of those there is no record of there is no system that that is captured in it's
140dealt with right there in some way shape or form and and this goes back to what we've struggled with over the years is how do I bring data forward then because a monitoring report is just that I have you have to all have something that that you know if I make a claim you're it's h you're going to say well okay so superintendent the you said that how do you prove that and that's where you start to look for evidence that can help you with that I do think and I'm going to just to clarify when we talk about creating some kind of a reporting mechanism are we are we talking about a an anonymous reporting mechanism as a way to measure what's happening in the system or are we or is this a reporting
141mechanism kind of like a a um anonymous tip line uh but maybe not Anonymous I don't know just some clarity around that as the conversation goes forward too so I think that um as I've thought about this I think this really becomes sort of what Healthcare has is you know they try and focus on the near misses to avoid the actually Sentinel events and so every health system is mandated to have a reporting system so this isn't something that has to be necessarily created and it's basically where you can be anonymous but it's ideally not Anonymous and uh it's not just people who see it happen report it it's people who participate in and it's creating a culture where it's you don't get in trouble for self-reporting types of things and it's really getting at
142a safety culture but this in this sense it's not safety that we're going after it's kindness I guess or um civility but it could be some sort of uh process by like that so I think these things exist on the market that could be catered towards education and what I would want to see then is is that it's something that our students and our families are educated on every year because if you don't measure it you can't analyze it and you can't change it right Sydney I think you're um I just to go back to this idea of I think what we're grappling with is how do you summarize what I'll call both structured and unstructured data to to get at what we're trying to talk about so obviously we have systems that where there's
143a lot of structured data you can roll up and report and that's why in my description I get to the what is the actual Forum by which you bring people together to go through the structured data you have and come out of that with conclusion and path forward for me that conclusion and path forward is equally data because you would have said we would have known who sits around the table to make that that those decisions the representation across the district and then the summary themes and actions have just as much have much more richness to what are we going to do about the problem in addition to the data but allows it to be presented in a way that's concise so I think the question from my perspective is how do you augment that
144structured data that we're all very used to working with in into regular forms by which you bring together the brain means of people experiencing from the classroom level to the building level to the district level to figure out what is that structured data telling us that we want to take action on and what is the action so for me if you can combine though if you can get to that sort of view it combines that want of structured data and a simplified version of unstructured data that is no longer um anecdotal because it it is the culmination of multiple brains together so I think there's absolutely a way um and I think in these problems we're talking about culture discrimination these very tough and very human problems It's gotta we've got to come up with
145not just the the structured data but what are the um rhythms that go into place in order to underpin the right conversations and the right muscle that you have toward continuous Improvement a lot a lot of what the board wants unfortunately has been fragmented bya statute so we have a Safety Committee at every building pursuant to L and requirements we have grievance procedures in our collective bargaining agreements I mean everything is fr I was trying to figure out how we would combine the two student discipline just to be clear Swiss is a uh collection of student behaviors not staff behers um and sometimes student discipline which we have um like I said we have our we have our grievance procedures and human resources which are separate but part of your monitoring we have our lni
146requirements we have safety and we have discipline committees at each building um so the hard part is we're already these disparate committees and their review of data Sydney exists um but it's all you know based on either legal framework required by Statute um or there's just how our systems are currently built um for a lack of better descriptions I want you to think are they analyzing but are they analyzing the data and actually making absolutely potential changes like hey this is what we've seen we need to do this yepd multi-tier systems of support and Lisa can help me fill in and run a little bit that's what they do they analyze Swiss data there's a hot spot by the big toy as an example right um that team in turn decides how they're gonna uh
147deploy their pair of support maybe little Johnny um has been in trouble a lot and he might need a his own little plan who knows what Johnny's up to as part of it um they may Reach Out to my office or used to reach out to HR determine if we have appropriate supervision um do we need to change how playground structured we're doing that work every day um every time we get a call um our job is to solve it but right now it's all siloed and just based on um I think the work that's being accomplished at each building and I don't know I'm still trying to figure out what value besides that you you don't get from some of the macro data if you see spikes in I get no value telling me
148there were 69 Grievances and 17 of them resulted in discipline of a of a right I me because some time some years that may be appropriate sometimes it's a strategy of the Union groups where they're going to grieve everything um you never know um so because we don't know what's we don't know the data around it so I I to me it would be more important to say there were 13 complaints regarding um you know know like a teacher inter interaction with a student or insensitive or whatever we want to call it inappropriate language towards a towards a student or inappropriate language from a student towards a staff me there's there's literally none of that for us to even say okay what are you actually seeing are the issues and then are you creating professional
149development are you having building specific discussions because you're finding it in this building there seems to be a culture as Sydney was talking about your organizational C cultures you can have them very different from building to building each one has its own culture so I guess that's that's what I'm saying there there's not all that information is there and un least I know you were looking to say something no that's that's okay I think I think I had a a question around there there's going to be a level that we could break down just your point right now their market around that we could break break that down to here's here's what these uh different complaints were that that came in and when we were doing it in the aggregate like that probably are not
150going to be able to identify any any singular person which is part of then handling the confidential information my question really was on the side of when when there is the accusation of retaliation that that retaliation also has its own definition and so if we're saying that retaliation is that apparently no movement was made because I think sometimes we forget that the absence of ongoing action is the solution the the the the the action got stopped so I'm wondering if part of what we need to communicate as well is what what is retaliation I know we needed to do that with staff because just having somebody withdraw from the lunchroom was seen as was seen as retaliation when it was like wait wait they're they're actually not interacting with you anymore that that that is
151a that is a positive move from what it what it is so it might even be helpful to hear from all of you too a collection of what of what parents are feeling is retaliatory so that we can figure out for our own selves dealing with the definition are we at least speaking even the same the same terminology on some of those pieces to know where some of the weaknesses might be in our system well two thoughts that I have on that if I can remember them um one is that because we don't have a mechanism by which a parent can really raise a concern or or a student could raise a concern or or a staff especially like a staffto staff thing that there's not a place for them to raise that concern anonymously
152in some way that I don't even know if they you know I think a lot of people say I said something and it seems like nothing's happened so I'm just not going to say anything anything anymore so I don't know that we know that things are getting resolved maybe that one instance of yeah we put a you know that teacher got a letter of formal complaint in their in their file and then and the difficult part here is marrying the fact that the person who made the complaint is never going to know that result right right that's and that's just the way it is and how do we communicate that out um but because there's no F no way of knowing like um is did it happen again or you don't know of all the
153little instances that's that that one pizza I think that's difficult for me retaliation is really ends up what if I as a parent said something to a teacher like hey I've noticed this or this I have a problem with how does that get back and is is the student then negatively impacted such as you know um maybe just a harsher treatment or not being called on at all in class or or paired up with with people that they don't they know that they don't get along or whatever it might be there's a lot of things where parents are just concerned that hey my kids's not you know when you do a a analyze my writing and give me a grade you're going to be harsher than you are on other other people unfair treatment so
154I think those are the kind of things that people surmise are retaliation right because I over my years Marty I think I've only seen at least it can speak to the history I've seen very few if any founded retaliation cases that we've investigated right I might be misspoken but Ron do you remember very many founded there's not that oh I I have a and I know that Sydney has a question up I think um it would be fascinating when the board does listening sessions with staff to ask them their thoughts about these claims of retaliation because I think you would you would get a a pretty robust push back from your your rank and file teachers out there I think many of them feel that that is an accusation that gets levied towards them uh
155with very little evidence um because and I I heard some discussion that kind of floated there um so you think I'm retaliating against your child because I made them work in this work group and they had to work with a student that they didn't like um often the teacher would argue that was not driven by retaliation at all they'd have their own rationale for for what they did that's where this starts to get really complicated um because parents are retaliating cases I've SE well I I mean it's you know I mean I do think it's I think it's difficult and I think this conversation is reminding me how we tend to end up going back to things that can be that that that H can be measured that that aren't just asking for people's opinion
156about something because again you could ask the parents opinion about something you could provide the same exact scenario to the teachers and get a very different response from what they perceive is happening it's just it's complicated I keep looking back back over the previous monitorings as we're here and you know it just reminds me of how difficult this is I know that there are our parents and sometimes students who feel like they're not being treated fairly um and it's just hard to pin that down and then to be able to collect data related to that um I is a challenge so I think we have focused on trying to establish the culture which is why every single administrator goes out goes through the handbook which the handbook is a reflection of our culture and our
157our behavioral expectations clear spins a a tremendous amount of time with that every year and then once you set that Baseline of what your behavioral expectations are you try to to enforce those and you try to live up to those um but I I certainly hear what the board is saying in terms of feeling that there's just a you're just not getting the information um that helps you feel like you have a clear understanding of how these types of treatment issues are being um addressed and resolved out there and I'm gonna stop and because I know Sydney had her hand up yeah I do want to say complaints complaints in a written fashion they are they do arise to a different level than one that's that's presented orally legally speaking they trigger certain things and
158just you know anonymous complaint we don't give as much difference to as one with a name on it because quite frankly it is anonymous and we can't follow up any of the accusers so there there are there are different complaints when they're filed in a certain manner do triggle trigger a certain level of response based on statute if they're written or if they're anonymous because Anonymous complaints and then in my mind the other thing that I would want to sift through is a complaint versus a concern um those are different things to me like you can make things better or why didn't my child get x y and z is that really I mean I don't know where those fall into this conversation either well and I think that's the second piece of our question
159is how do we deal with complaints and I think that's what we're talking about is how do we make it because I can tell you it's hard to find like how do I make a formal complaint what is considered a formal complaint at what point is it now a formal complaint if I send an email to the teacher it's in writing is that a formal complaint or do are there magic words and I'm like and that's me as a board member saying I'm not sure I'd be able to specifically direct somebody like this is the process for filing a formal complaint I know all of our admin assistants here Marne absolutely do that the ones that have served me directly which in the time I've been in the central office I've been fortunate I've only
160had two Jane tall and Diane gurry but they absolutely know how to have that conversation when a with a parent and um we send out a lot of formal complaint documents every year too um or direct people to the link where to find them and it's true I would say the vast majority of them never come back in you know they for whatever reason they have that conversation they review the document it's either they just don't want the work that they have to do or they they I don't know something changes or they feel it gets resolved well that gets into if you create such a bureaucracy that people don't file complaints that I'd have a problem with it Suzanne yeah fa point I'm sorry didn't Sydney have something Sydney I'm sorry Sydney yeah uh
161yes so I feel so I I feel like this is the most robust conversation we've had on this topic um in my time and I feel like getting down to this specific example of of retaliation so when I talk about what are the themes that we're seeing of things that are have lack of clarity need to be addressed would Propel us forward as a collective this idea of retaliation just came up for me that's what I hope to get out of the monitoring conversation because again this isn't this isn't a math topic this is a continuous Improvement and a culture topic that we'll have some math that backs us up so in any way that we can say hey this is again we've triaged through these complaints we've reviewed to see that we have a
162couple of key areas pinch points hot Hotpot are however we think about it where we need to dig deeper have more thought on bring more people together what whatever that is to me that's a Val that's the more valuable conversation so and it would be go like so our three themes coming out of this quarterly meeting is retaliation is one of the items we've chosen to focus on and we got there by looking at this data in the the complaint information this data in the student behavioral system this data here this is these conversations with people leads us to believe that this topic I'm using retaliation is is one that we need to have you know Advanced focus on and is in our top three on this item of complaint I have to be honest
163we in the LA in middle school was a complaint filled World in our family and I just have to underscore there is no way of we we come from a trust and believe perspective so if we've told the teacher if we've told the principal and they say they've taken some action what we don't have another reason to take um another step we we we trust and believe something has happened this other conversation I'm describing which would be you would be looking at what is the actual on the ground themes that are coming up and hope that there's a greater action taken like should I I I am actually sitting here thinking should I have gone and found the formalized form for Mis you know what I believe was discourteous treatment of my daughter in middle
164school last year if is that my path and if it is then I don't think we're doing the right thing from communicating that with the community so e so either we've got to say it's got to be formal it's got to be written for it to get into the machine and therefore we're going to do a better job of sharing that up front or we have to have some system on the back end that we can share share and give updates out of that says here's how we're able to collect not only the regimen and data but also the additional Rick Rich discussion data to determine what we do we got to pick one or the other because right now I feel like we're stuck in the middle and I also think another area in
165this whole thing treatment of people that we never talk about is favoritism and how that shows up in the classroom I got to tell you probably the worst thing that my kids experienced wasn't necessarily how they were directly treated suffer there's definitely one instance I would say it was to that but it's more how others were treated that they never got when I as a parent go into a you know into curriculum night and my husband and I are the first ones there and we say this is who our student is and the teacher really doesn't have anything more to say but five minutes late walks in another family and when they say this is who my student is oh love that guy everybody loves that guy yeah I was absolutely it still to this
166day breaks my heart because you know what it told me that he didn't care about my kid at all he didn't have a single word there was no other parents there and he didn't have a single word to say about my child tells me a lot and that I think is a huge problem that we hear that's probably the number one complaint I hear from parents is that I go into class and those are the kids that are get all the good treatment and the Stu and the parents really or the teacher really loves these kind of kids and my kid's not one of them and they're not getting the same level of support they're not getting the same level of acknowledgement and I don't know where that lands that is a really good point
167Marney and I and I just want to do the flip side of that one just because it just to wrap your head around it I have a fifth grader who is the kid every teacher loves who is the kid who has the glowing personality that every wants to be be around and I don't think they hold him accountable enough to what is his actual progress and that's the conversation we're having right now which is he he flashes his pearly whites and tells some cute story but he's still not doing his math homework and we have to dig into that so I think the favoritism thing Cuts both Cuts both ways and having one who is the consistently the feedback is I just love having him in this classroom but I still can't get the math
168homework done so I think it cuts both ways well but he's adorable to he so you know well he would be my whole life oh Logan he's a like I need you to like I need the same accountability system as well so I think it's a it that fa that favoritism Point goes really to the heart of what we're talking about like how do we collect these these pieces that I don't know like I've said those words to my teacher like I need you to hold him more accountable here's how he gets out of doing the things he's supposed to do but they love himm isn't anywhere in our stuff Carl harl and then Suzanne you hear from a liberty parent now at isent and then me is Skyline Theater pattern I I would agree
169I think that that that is a pervasive culture in our district that I think has to do and I wish I wish rich and Elena were in in this conversation because I think it has to do with their 90% white teachers because as we become more culturally diverse there are the kids that the teachers want to work with and then there are every other kid and our teachers need to do more of their part to actually create that welcoming environment for every kid that they're not doing especially for these buildings that have uh very ingrained staff like Pine Lake Middle School for example and I love Pine Lake and Pine Lake has been a great experience for my kiddo and for lots of the kids that I know but it's not a great experience for
170every kid and especially not for our kids on the margins and the kids that feel like gosh I'm gon to go e Catholic because I can get more service and support there and because they can afford it so like money is not a factor for them like I want to go for whatever the best environment is for my kid and selfishly I want that to be one of our schools see okay I had like five things that I wrote down while everybody else was talking um but what we go back to the the initial problem which is we have this this very strict system of formal complaints that we have data from and then we don't have anything else so I kind of liked harland's thing that they do in the medical community of how
171people report and it can be anonymous or whatever I don't know if that's feasible in an environment like this or not not I think one of the issues that you have is anytime you have a disagreement between two people there's a bias in the person who reports it if Sydney and I have a disagreement you'll hear my side you'll hear her side they're going to sound different and so depending on who's doing the reporting that may not actually be a good reflection of what actually happened um but the flip side here is you know you talk about well does it rise to a formal complaint and who files a formal complaint um we have very good experiences in the district we had one when Jared was in elementary school that was absolutely awful the teacher
172did something just totally um wrong for for being supportive of a student um I complained I went to the principal we had a convo with the teacher and the principal the principal was basically yeah and fine with what the teacher did and we were very disappointed we were very unhappy me my husband my kid never would have occurred to me to file a formal complaint a bad thing happened nobody cared we were going to tough out fourth grade and and I think that's that's what most people are going to do a formal complaint it's it's in intimidating you don't know what's involved you don't know what they're going to ask you to do or you going to have to prove something you're going to have and at the end of the day it's not worth
173it right it may impact your kid unfavorably and everybody just wants to move on so um I what we're all struggling with is how do we how do we access the data that doesn't rise to a formal complaint and I don't know what the answer is I know you know there's a lot of downsides to a lot of the things we've discussed but but I just think that relying on formal complaints does not get at the issue of school culture at all um I would say um somehow capturing that is um you've touched on it Suzanne is part of the challenge I mean so you could create a system by which if you you know I think I heard Haron speaking to this earlier um if you feel that a treatment issue um hasn't been
174adequately addressed here's a place where you could you could Lodge that it's less than a formal complaint um the flip side I guess is I'd have to provide that option to my teachers if you feel like a Ab Community member is not being fair with you or is it making allegations directly at you you would need to have that opportunity too we're now creating Data Systems and and so there there's that um you know I can all already you're asking me to do what superintendent thely on the part of Staff um and but I mean that's that that's one way I guess that we could go about that the other concern I I have is let's be clear the vast vast majority of these maybe to not to people's satisfaction are getting handled at the
175personto person level they're not even making it to the building principle I'm sure um we collect this data we are we following up on it are we investigating um I can see that it could create um a lot of a lot of workload I guess for building level administrators and um Deans and the like and my only concern about that too is I move forward um in planning for for next year um I may have fewer of those types of people out there to do some of that so these are just some thoughts that come into my head I I understand what the board is certainly trying to get at and we we have literally had this conversation as a Cabinet um multiple times trying to figure this out because a lot of what you're
176describing you can imagine would be very interesting to the principles and to the superintendents too wouldn't it be nice if I knew exactly how all of these intera actions were taking place I'm left to kind of believe the majority of them must be satisfactory handled or more of them would be coming my way but that is simply a belief I I don't know if people there's a larger number of people just suffering in silence if you will or if in fact you know when somebody like Sydney follows up with the teacher if you if the complaint stops if your child doesn't continue to say yeah this continued to happen do you just make the Assumption well the teacher must have done something and it got worked out and everybody's moving forward I don't know those
177are just some Impressions that I was having as I listened to the conversation and I agree with you Ron so our reporting system is called Midas and certainly we're looking at how we do it because it from the corporate level their words it's become weaponized and and we certainly don't want that culture either uh but they certainly I feel like have gotten to the place where they do a really good job of filtering so out of the roughly six I get in a month there may be one or two that actually are actually very pertinent to a patient safety concern and you know we go through to Sydney's point a formal root cause analysis process whenever a sentinel event or bad outcome happens so for instance like when the incident happened last spring we would
178have gone through a formal process where they put a team together and look at it to see like so what are the system things that are in place that need to change and so we've changed a couple policies as a result of that effort and so I think that would be something that would be helpful as well is that when we have these Bard level appeals we could have not just a debrief which we've been doing because we've been wanting that but some sort of a formal review or root cause analysis conversation on what brought us to the Point how do we prevent this from happening again I I love what you just said harling because I think the thing I'm trying to tweeze out is the difference between what is the action what is
179the specific action taken with the specific case to from what is the systemic indicator that gives us that we have to go and do some greater analysis on right in the example that I said I we had a class classro change so we had a classroom change we accepted a classroom change so that's how you resolve the specific item right that I'm complaining about but I also have to hope that that circumstance is getting raised and is reviewed from a a broader systemic um example and maybe combined with is that similar thing happening in other in the other middle schools as well so we know we need to take some action so I think that's where we're that's where I feel the tug and I think Carlin just described it nicely which is what's the
180resolution of the specific incident and then what is our process to have the broader conversation that says what what does it mean more broadly for the system and I think if you were going to do a root cause analysis and I was thinking of the last couple cases the one from Newcastle and Grand Ridge in particular um you're going to have to have legal council involved um because if there's ongoing litigation and you do root cause analysis you're going to want that to be privileged I mean there's a lot of things that would go into into that um and not that and you have a board attorney for the first time you we made a switch after we had some trouble in using our traditional firm a few years back but that has caused problems
181as well because she doesn't necessarily reach out to us as much as uh Council that we may be used to working with or you know it feels very siloed which is good for when you're trying to explain that your due process rights are nailed down right um but at the same time when you're working trying to work with Administration to tease out information or provide Solutions in root cause analysis and that's not the best Avenue to do it when you have that separate attorney in there so I just would advise you you know if you're going to do root cause analysis and we have pending litigation yeah you want to make sure it's privileged um and done bya an outside investigator Etc so unless unless the issue itself is completely done because you're just going
182to use that'll just be evidentiary matter in a future legal proceeding but Jake what I'm trying this is this is what I'm trying to get to which is I think there is a way and this actually the call I had to step away today is a similar sort of discussion I think there's a way to have a conversation without specific attribution my interest is not even about the specific attribution um which is certainly get us into all sorts of individual where are we at in the in actions that could be taken I'm specifically trying to get out of the conversation of specific attribution into the conversation of here are the types of things that are problematic which of those do we think Rises to a a course of action or we're seeing it show up
183in different places enough that we should be having a conversation about those types of concerns not the specific attribution I feel like that's where we get a little stuck right so we could be talking about things like favoritism or things like hey it seems like in this building there's several teachers that are making comments or disregarding um you know invisible disabilities that's right and so they're being they're not being sensitive to students because they're not recognizing the disability those students have uh so that's the kind of thing and I think that's where you get at once you see a series of hey we seem to be getting a lot of these com informal complaints what are we going to do to address it you know we're getting a lot of informal complaints that kids are
184spitting on each other in a covid world that's horrible you know things like that so what would you do systemically what kind of lessons might you choose to have because you see these behaviors in kids you know because that's a lot of the complaints that parents give too is they're saying hey this other kid is doing this thing to my kid oh yeah kid kid on kid and so if we're not collecting that data in a way that allows us to do any type of analysis to then be able to say well our SEO lessons for the next three SEO lessons are going to be you know playground interactions or how to not spit on your friend well and I think at the building level Marne they they do that through Swiss as we talked
185about right which is new for a lot of the buildings but that's the kind of information then I would hope would show up then in the end so it's and the hard part is it's it's against every fabric of our being we don't want stuff to go to the school board we want things to be solved at the closest as they are to the problem so like everything we've been trained on so like building administrators were like all right that that administrators handling their buildings we haven't had a lot of complaints everything seems to be smooth going great they had a great curriculum night we got positive feedback so all the all the SI all the all the data is pointing to a smooth running building I mean we administratively we want to so our
186job is I said to fix issues we don't want them to com to the board because right I'm coming to the board I'm talking about when you're giving us your monitoring report how can you get us the data of what what good things are happening in the oh I know I know I'm saying but I want you to know that the culture of an education administrator like anybody in management is to fix the problem and not have it go up the train of command Jake by the way we're at 125 and so I think that there was a building up on the plateau that is in my neighborhood that I think that there was not understanding or appreciation by the central Administration that there were problems in that building as early as it would have
187been had there been a culture in our district of speaking up so good this is this is the this is it right here right which is it's not it's not um it is not believable I'll just say it that way it's a to me it's a credibility question all the problems happen all they all get solved and everything's amazing like The credibility would say is man we're running really well here are the problems here's what we still see to be done and here's how we're going after doing it this idea that we just keep running that's ex what you said Jake is exactly what we're trying to get under oh I know that's what I'm say I agree I I I told you it's against our our our mind our mindset is to fix the
188problems and not have them go up the chain just because my complaint didn't go up the chain doesn't mean I Was A Satisfied parent and trust me I let other people know well you it could have gone up the chain the variable I think that's hardest for all of us and you've seen it in your hearings is sometimes The credibility of the complaint um you seen some wacky do you've seen some wacky hearings I'm not saying you Suzanne but you know that when your kids involved and other parents are involved there's a whole lot of things to Wade through um and that's why it gets complicated is because that everybody's probably half right in some cases or maybe it's completely but it's so and that's when it comes to you all you may or may
189not have known and some sometimes you're fortunate enough to get drug into that um cacophony of parent complaints and email strings because I know har and Marne have been drug into some very interesting email strings over the years um but it's a I think it's a fascinating place for us to to talk about I just don't really have any amazing suggestions for you to solve the issues not surprisingly we're not wrapping this up so harl I'll let you go and then we're gonna have to wrap this up because sure I Jake I think I mean my goal would be there be zero board complaints because they are all being dealt with but they're being dealt with in a that's proactive and welcoming uh it doesn't mean that everyone's going to be satisfied and that's okay
190too but there needs to be a process by which people are heard and it shouldn't have to rise to the level of the board or a quote formal complaint before action is taken when there's bad culture in a building and I feel like this district and every school district in our state because this isn't unique has that inertia to to be proactive in that way because of the mentality you just mentioned yeah that if we if we a if a a problem boils up that we fail right right but that's not I don't think that's how any of I can't speak for the board but I don't think that's how any of us see that I certainly don't see it that way no hopefully what comes to you is the complicated issues that where both
191parties have a legitimate argument and you are the true Arbiter of the the issue that's what I hope comes to you right ones that we really couldn't solve okay so it is 12:18 we have a hard start at 12:30 because Mary ferus is going to be joining us um and I think it's just the six of us right so none of the other staff you get to go off and have your lunch and enjoy um so I think it'll be the six of us having our discussion so we will come back at 12:30 exactly can you parking lot this conversation then Mar that's why I made sure we had a big parking lot because I knew this one wasn't gonna get done superintendent have did you make a decision as a body on the exec
192session tomorrow that would kind of help my planning for this SE I had not even heard of one you're muted you're muted I sent a um a message to you president moraldo suggesting that during that three o'l time slot we may want to U proactively just say uh may have a need for an executive session bargaining update I know our team is going back into bargaining this afternoon um I know you just had an update Thursday but they met all day Friday as well so I was just wondering if we wanted to do that and then we would be uh we could have uh Diane add that to tomorrow's agenda we'd be 24 hours well in advance that way too I think it's a great idea yeah that's acceptable okay and I know Dian is
193here in the call so we'll just update tomorrow's agenda and I would suggest during that parking lot time maybe 3:15 we just add possible executive session for bargaining update thank you superintendent sorry to selfishly ask that question but I no is a good it was a good thought J I wasn't reading my texts I was paying attention to our board retreat good well when you're managing the meeting I know you have to do that a little more so okay so we have a 10-minute break sorry that it's short but you guys there was a lot of conversation thank you all I appreciate the conversation enjoy the rest of your day thanks what okay it's 12:32 hello Miss Mary how are you I am great how about yourselves doing well is it okay if we're chewing
194while we do of course gonna have to course if we were in person you would be so why should it be any different online right yeah well Marne was kind of a Taskmaster and she only was like nine minutes for lunch so I know well no they just kept talking and talking and I'm like well we have a hard start at 12:30 so it's up to them I will have to step up at uh 10:5 and make sure my student has logged on to her afternoon class because I think she's about to fall asleep for that so I promised I'd do that um so um Mary how would you like us to start would you like us to go around and introduce ourselves um well actually that I had a little check-in exercise um wanted
195to go um and just dive in since you've already been working a bit today um so not knowing how you started off today um and I hope that each of you has a copy of the agenda um so that you can just track along to what I'm uh trying to do and keep us on track with um and hopefully meet your your expectations for outcomes of this Workshop um so uh since it is uh indigenous people's day um I'm not sure if there was a land recognition done at the beginning of your time together if not I would like to do one at this point okay thank you okay um so we are all uh today um in Milo location and your location we are on the lands of the duwamish and the Coast Salish
196tribes the duwamish are an unrecognized tribe though they are an actual people group that walk among us and I just want to take this um moment to um ground us and Center us uh on the fact that we are on Stolen lands and that we have benefited and continued to benefit from um the stewardship that the uh duwamish and the coish have traditionally um been responsible for for these lands that we continue to enjoy today um and from there as a checkin uh what I wanted to do now that you've had just a little bit of a break um I find it helpful to let people um self-identify uh how they're showing up to this time together and um I if you would like to just share your name how long you've been on the
197board word and one word or phrase that describes um how you're showing up at this particular moment and if it's okay with you I'd love to just call names since I can just watch you across my screen um and and call them off would that be all right that's perfect okay all right so Suzanne you are up first and you're on mute I just figured that out sorry and my response was why me um Suzanne Weaver I have been on the board for I don't know 14 years I think and one word of phrase for right now um a little frazzled that's fair uh next is up up is Marne um Marne moraldo and this is my 11th year on the board and right now I'm coming tired sleepy got it um next up is
198going to be Sydney followed by Ron howdy so Sydney mullings I have been on the board now about 18 months um one word or phrase um we we're organizing in my house awesome next up is Ron followed by an I'm Ron I'm the superintendent this is my eth year as super superintendent uh it is my 17th year um in the central office and my 20th year in the school district and I'm coming today uh a bit curious I guess I would say about this process and then the next is an followed by harlon I'm Ann Moore and I've been on the board nine years and um I guess my word that came to mind today is encouraged because we've had some really excellent conversations here so far in our Retreat great okay and then Haron
199followed by Diane Carlin I wonder if he has not stepped back yet it doesn't know he's on mute Mary I'm actually um Ron's assistant yes I know if you're on here it's fa game this this is part of how we recognize all of us and our um and our humanity and our participation oh okay okay well um yes I'm Ron's assistant I've been his assistant for going on eight years now and it's it's been quite the pleasure to serve both Ron and the school board members thank you all wonderful thank you Diane um next then is Stephen followed by Donna I think this is the first time I've ever been called on in one of these uh Stephen Collins I've been serving the board members for the last six years as the IT staff uh
200with the district for8 now I believe uh and I'm editing processes and videos and uh working on single sign on stuff nice to see everybody awesome thank you Stephen we can't do this without you um next is Donna followed by harlon I think I well I'm Donna Hood I'm the exact director of high school education this is my 11th year in the district and I have been in the exact director of high school education role for three years um I think I would say appreciative I think uh collaboration is is at the heart of what we do in the esqua schools but today I'm in particular appreciative of the collaboration there are some things I could not have managed uh nearly as well without my my trusty colleagues and harlon are you with us it
201might have taken him longer to get his food warmed up okay all right well we'll um incorporate him in and uh when he does join us and um so thank you everyone for taking that moment to um uh introduce yourselves and again this is part of how we this is part of how we collaborate this is how we part of how we're inclusive and recognizing that everybody is showing up um bringing different things with them and that that's just okay um and so hopefully we'll be able to make some um hopefully have some uh in a little more in-depth conversation than you may have had about your self-evaluation because I've had time to look through um and crosswalk your evaluation with some of your governance documents um which was very interesting and so hopefully we'll
202be able to do some analysis as we get to the the crosswalk part of this so you are not um none of you are um new to this um you are one of the boards that has a four-year trend line of doing this which is great because um it allows you to see some progress and um it's the investment that you're making in your uh your board self development and so I just want to commend you for that UPF front um I just also want to make sure that each of you does have a copy of the actual survey document because you're going to need that when we're when we break you out into your pairings into um chat rooms to to talk about different pieces of this so I just want to make sure
203that you you all have that and that you all have um a copy of the three-page document that has um space for you to write down your comments for areas of strength and opportunities for growth and areas of opportunity for increased cohesiveness or Effectiveness um and when we come back together from each time you break out in different pairs um youve you've already been um assigned pairings that um Stephen is going to break you out into rooms for and it will be a different person each time so you have a chance to talk to your different board members and um you somebody um or both of you can be taking notes on that because when we come back to our big group um discussion Diane has graciously agreed to um be the person who compiles
204what you say onto one document so that you have that as um a record and a um reference point for you going forward through the year and so just with saying that um I just I don't want to make any assumptions though um is everyone familiar with the this framework that we're going to be going through um and particularly I'm going to start with page three which is the your aggregate data it's the summary that U page that you all have on the large document hi Haron welcome um so if if you can pull that up um I just wanted to go over this because this is your summary document but like any piece of data it's important to disaggregate it um to see what is actually underneath some of these ratings and um just
205ensuring that you are aware of the you know if you've done it always um you've got your your green rating you know most of the time blue sometimes is yellow uh red is never and then black is uh don't know or don't have enough uh information to evaluate um and you can see your trend lines um each bar is the different years the bar at the top is your most recent evaluation and um just want to pause at this point to see if anyone has any questions about this and what we're looking at okay um if not then the the way we're going to proceed with this is you've got your um summary actually the other piece I wasn't sure if they sent to you did you receive um uh the document that's uh five
206pages and it's a a survey score ranking and it literally ranks everything from your highest score you've given yourself to the lowest one on all the questions okay I wasn't sure if that was something that was sent out to you um so just so you know that is something I will be working from and I am glad to forward it to you so you have it um but it was very interesting to look at how you all ranked yourselves um in um just literally using um uh a total scoring and doing um standard deviations of it so that's that's how they figure this out it is helpful for um looking at your highest scores your lowest scores to see if where there are areas of Divergence um where there are some areas of Disconnect and
207where things also um align and feed into each other so since um you didn't get that I will um forward it to Diane uh while you're in your first breakout group so that you can um have a copy of that available to you also okay so our process is going to be um you're going to be um you're going to go out into um chat rooms three different times you will be paired up with um another member of the board or the superintendent it will be different um for each of the three rounds so you have opportunities to talk with different people and for the first round you're going to be looking at um what you've identified um from your data as not only what your strengths are but the second piece of this is
208even more important than that which is what do you need to do to continue um having this as a strength you know if we don't focus on something then um things can fall by the wayside so if you're doing something great now that you're identifying what needs to be in place for that to continue so it's those are the two pieces that you'll be um talking about for about 20 minutes and then we're going to be bringing you back in together and we'll have a full group discussion and what you share out from that is what Diane will be um documenting on the same form that you have um that you'll be taking your notes on and then we'll do a second round doing the identical process but it's going to be looking at U
209opportunities for growth and again what needs to happen um for that to take place and then the third round will be um looking at your areas um where there's some Divergence and What needs to happen uh to increase cohesiveness once we do that part then we're going to be having the conversation that I hope will be um hopefully will be um insightful and um an interesting dialogue for you to have um where we'll be crosswalking your evaluation with your strategic um and governance documents um to see where what you're identifying um is showing up in the the documents that you have and that you've been working with so does anyone have any questions about this it's a pretty quick overview but again I know you've done this before so I didn't want to make any
210assumptions Sydney you have your hand raised in the little box thing did you mean to still have it raised okay okay all right so you're um going to go out into your chat rooms for 20 minutes and the first um pairing up um because Stephen is setting up three rooms and so you'll just you'll need to remember your room number for this round so that you can put yourself there um and we will be giving you a banner message for with a two-minute warning um just so that you know when you're um when time is coming to a close so um in chat room number one is really quick before you do that so for the general public that is is watching on our YouTube channel or watching this in the future uh because we
211are separating out and we not are not in quorums in those settings because it will be two board members or less we are not required to have that as part of our um public meeting okay thank you um so chat room number one is going to be uh for this round is Marne and Sydney chat room number two is harlon and Ron and chat room number three is an and Suzanne so Stephen's going to set it up you'll just need to enter the the breakout room and I will see you back here in 20 minutes thank you Stephen no problem um I'm just pre- assigning them as they go so um I'll be on the meeting until you guys are done so if you need me for anything just holler out okay and so you
212got my email with the different rooms yeah okay perfect yeah I'm just pre- assigning them and then it's soon as this one's closed I'll just do it again it's awesome thank you so much um didn't mean to put you on the spot for that but you know this is what inclusion is if you're part of the team and helping make something work then everybody's voices should be represented somehow so well thank you um uncommon occurrence for sure yeah well that we're trying to make that uh this is part of the work I do trying to make this more the norm and not the exception so you gota you got to model it by it right right so Diane I'm going to email you that document I was referencing um that's five pages that's this the
213um the highest to lowest just so that they it can be sent out to the board okay I'll send it to them collectively right now okay awesome and you're all set up with the document you need for when they come back well I um so do you want me to use that same form that just has the questions yes please okay sure and then hopefully that'll just you know so you don't have to recreate anything and it's just there and it looks sounds good okay so I'm gonna exit myself here for a second to um I need to shut my blinds behind me although it's probably prettier to look at those trees than it is me so oh no stop yet well I mean blue sky is always welcome let's just all right so I'm
214gonna duck out here for a second my video Dan I got to get you one of these lights these guys oh yeah yeah I don't I don't have that for sure yeah they have them at Costco oh okay they're inexpensive we could probably oh I can pick one up the next time I'm there there yeah it also charges your phone so oh wow that's very cool so it's over in like the business section yeah yeah it's called Uh the AI oh okay light like like a u d uh o oh okay TT l i t e and you can like change the tone of it and stuff so if it's like you know it's got warm light and there's cool oh wow oh that's great yeah not bad uh I'm here if you need me
215okay thank you Stephen yep that's for Mary they're just about to cross two minutes back you're the best Marty back you all were uh Johnny on the spot here it'll be interesting to see I had to go get my daughter up from her nap and make sure she got back into class so she took her her lunch lunch break uh looking at her eyelids she still had her she still had her eye mask on top of her head I hope she removes it before she turns the camera on well if she doesn't it may be the only time that happens so you're doing this all day today and also tomorrow tomorrow okay well we know school board members are hardcore yeah and I could not fall asleep last night I've just I have such sleeping
216issues so it was probably around four four o'clock was the last time I looked at my clock yeah well if you watched that Seahawk game last night the adrenaline surge would have kept you awake for a while just from that I know I think it was what's it uh oh the guy from Sanford and Son what was his name yeah there's a mean that's like I just watched a Seahawks the Seahawks one FR Fred Sanford it's the big one Sanford my heart my heart it's the big one like will you stop doing this Seahawks uh it's not a legit Seahawk game if we don't have a heart attack all right okay an you are muted I I I came in and I heard you guys talking about the Seahawk game and it nearly gave us
217a heart attack oh my gosh that was stressful exactly I age with every game at this rate we'll be ancient by the end of the season and I was like okay and I was saying I didn't want the season truncated um maybe I should maybe I should reink that well Mary you would be proud of me I am going to retire my Richard Sherman jersey I actually bought another one of a player who is actually on the team oh good job it it is a classic he is gonna be a Hall of Famer you're gonna we have to hang on to it I know but I got I got a locket one oh look at us love it love it okay well I hope that was enough time to um I know it's usually never
218enough time to have these discussions but um uh what we're going to do now is Diane is going to pull up the same document that you've been working on and is going to uh start or unless she uh yeah I think she was going to pull it up and then we'll just go by um the I'll just call out the room that you were in and if somebody from your team uh could just share with us um what you've identified as a strength and how to maintain it and so we're going to be populating this document so you have a complete one and if somebody says something that you've already that um that you've already Al also discussed um I might just just reference it so we can put like a little star asteris next
219to it so so let's just start dive in with um room number one Marne and Sydney what would you like to share with us I'm gonna let Sydney she's better with words okay let me find my document uh let's see so we we recognized can you hear me yes okay um that the items where we had strengthen were the operational Financial policy driven compliance driven items um and um and that we think the strength or why that's the strength that maybe the thing we keep doing is just the idea of monitoring itself and that that's a structured way in which we approach the world that we get to have these evidence-based conversations and we make a review of those items a priority is how we keep it going into the into the future and then
220we started doing some conversation about comparison we had a few that right next to each other were like highlights and low lights which is probably not this part of the discussion but we've got some interesting items where we're juxtapose right next to each other some highs and lows that was interesting great fabulous hang on to that because yes this is going to be something that you'll be um diving into in another section was there another one or was that kind of like a combined we combine it all into that one was there anything I missed Mary well and then we we talked specifically about listening to public input oh yes and we listen to a lot of public input um and a way to be better at that is actually soliciting public input so because
221we listen to what we're given but we're still wonky on soliciting okay great great observation and then the operational stuff another reason the reason why it's a strength that we need to consider is because that's exactly what we're elected to do manage the district okay great um okay let's go to uh group two from the uh room two harlon and Ron who would like to report out for your group how about I'll dive in and then if Haren wants to um fill in um we talked about one of our strengths a as a group is um based around our relationships and our relationship you know we value that we value and um work on that and it leads to cohesiveness um good honest conversations I would argue um good problem solving comes from that as
222well and then kind of related to that too we also talked about how um kind of our our resource and budgeting conversations have gone well the the uh Direction guidance from the board related to budgeting priorities following kind of the priorities of the district um we had before you got on Mary we had quite a conversation with our um Equity Department um a department that didn't even exist you know five years ago so um and how that these these kinds of conversations and being able to have good Frank conversations have led to um budgetary um changes if you will um as we've directed more resources and we talked about directing resources um more through our our title and lap funding towards specific areas there was a time when I came to the district where it
223was always about equal if every every building gets a halftime counselor as an example um and we have gotten much more sophisticated in our approach today um to differentiating by need and um a lot of that comes from conversations like we're having today and the relationships that we've been able to build um over time that that was kind of my take away from that I don't know if Harlin had more to add and and how do you uh just to to transfer it over um to the second column what needs to happen for you to be able to maintain what you've just said as a strength yeah one one of the things that I talked about Mary and this is a tough one during covid is um you you know us Mary as a group
224we travel together we we I I was sharing how the conferences that have always had value from a professional development standpoint um missing last Springs conference um and I know we're going to have a virtual conference coming up next month but those conferences also provided us with opportunities to be together face to face to have conversations um that often you know they may even start about somebody got a new dog or or something but you know it's really hard for us not to most roads lead back to the issaqua school district and and um how how we serve it and and um so I mean we're going to just have to continue to be creative in use of these virtual platforms until we can um it's appropriate for us again to be able to spend
225time together because there there's a lot of for me um over the last seven and a half years that's been very valuable those opportunities whether we're at a regional meeting whether we're at a state or a National Conference um that or or these Retreats that we do we um that time that we get to spend together I have found very very valuable helpful for me to execute my job um but we're going to have to continue to find ways to develop relationships and we're fortunate that we're not a bunch of new people this would be a very we noted we both noted this would be a very tough time to be on boarding new board members right now yep yes yes very much so um thank you I appreciate that um and I just want
226to pause for the for a moment Diane are you having is are you um able to keep up with um what the conversation is for noting it or would you like us to revisit something I just want to make sure you uh if we're talking too quickly or if you need clarification for something that um U recognizing that uh that might be a need well I am having a hard time on my screen sharing I was trying to share the document so I don't know what you see um we are seeing the one that says areas of strength okay okay good so there was a part that um Ron was talking about just before directing resources and I believe that was about um collaboration with the board uh it was the relationships as a group
227cohesiveness um which leads to good problem solving yes was what I had Ron did I capture that yeah yep and collaboration would be part of that too Diane yep but okay all right are you caught up Diane yes okay fabulous um and so the the second part of that on the resource and budgeting process and priorities uh roner Harlen how do you um how do you see maintaining that as a strength so I think that that that's where the equity policy comes in and also one of the things I one of our strengths that ties to this is is that how we do our sip plans and review them as a district is is unique and then after after we hear from every feeder pattern sit plans we then debrief them as a board and
228cabinet and from those discussions it has come through on hey what what does Equitable funding really mean and what are the regulatory requirements that we have to do versus what is the flexibility we have to equitably serve our students across the district because as you know Mary serving uh kids or families poverty when they're spread out across our district in in small pockets is often more challenging than if they're localized at a tot of one school so how do we drive those resources is to support every family that needs in our district so what I would say how do we continue this as a strength is one as a policy governance board to continuously monitor our el16 which is our Equity policy and then two to continue to annually uh debrief on our SI plans
229after we've heard all of them so we can get to the so what do we do about the conversation so it's not just oh we heard all of this but now now what do we do about it and I think that pivot that we made probably about three years ago in my mind has been very powerful and so when I looked at it once we were talking about I think it was particularly like question 52 and 63 really got at those as far as as you look at the progression over the past four years all right wonderful um thank you both uh and so let's go to um breakout room three an and Suzanne well and of course the downside of going last is Ron stole a whole lot of my thunder it's not the
230first time you've done it by the way I do have a tendency to do that to director Weaver I apologize um it was interesting because we started out we were a little unclear about the question and we were looking at our results and I personally have a problem with surveys that have things like always and never because it's really hard to answer always so at first we were saying well we should just look at the the always and the most of the times together but when you do that you just end up with wow we're awesome um so we did finally start looking at it um through a slightly different lens and just as with um Sydney and Marne we we looked at standard three saying wow you know that has a whole lot of
231green and you know my first thought is well a lot of that just reflects this the um the awesomeness of our finance department but in fact I I do think by virtue of our policies we make the values of this board extremely clear and I keep saying I but obviously this was an and me this was a group conversation um and in fact one of the things we did last year or the year before was to go back to our executive limitations and actually um articulate the value that each El reflected this is the value of the board this is why we have this El um and so I do think that from the district's perspective it's really clear what the values of this board are and so then we got to thinking well why
232are we so good at this um we absolutely zeroed in on the same thing that Ron said which is um the whole we travel as a pack we have a lot of relationships we have um there's a lot of trust I think between the board and the superintendent and also amongst the board members um the one thing we thought about that he didn't mention is the fact that um we have a lot of uh consistency in this board there's three of us who've worked together for nine years harland's been on the board for five Sydney's the only one that hasn't really worked with us for a long period of time so you know how would this continue to remain a strength is clearly never let anybody leave the board oh did you did you all
233hear Suzanne say that but I'm not but um that was a little levity um the one thing um that Anne mentioned that I haven't heard before is um that as a board we're pretty good at staying in our lane and knowing knowing what's board work and knowing what superintendent work because I think that's where a lot of boards get into trouble um so honestly I don't really have a lot to add I I think that um what Ron was talking about with the cohesiveness of the board the fact that we travel in a pack the fact that we have really good relationships um has helped us tremendously and I also totally agree that it's really much more stressful in the era of covid where we don't we don't get those relationships as much as we
234did great um any youone have any um additional thoughts that this discussion is bringing up for you before we go into your second round of this I was just happy that Suzanne didn't say remove the outlier of Sydney because she's the short-timer no then we'd have somebody even shorter but also we really really like you so we do and and you know it's it's actually helpful to have somebody that is a short-timer because they raise more questions that sometimes we think oh well we already we already knew that but it brings it up in a new light and lets us talk about those things that sometimes we otherwise wouldn't so we appreciate you well no and there's also the obvious uh excuse me I'm new what why do you do it this way and we
235sit there and go yeah we actually have no idea why we do it this way so yes there's actually a bias on the list of 20 biases um that have been identified one is called the curse of prior knowledge um where once you know something you assume everybody else knows it and then that can um impact communication issues um because we're making assumptions about things so it is important to have the different perspectives represented so go Sydney yeah um okay and so um with the good at staying in our lane that to me if I'm transferring that over to the second column that's also then um piggybacking on the fact that you are a policy governance group you have policies that de um are very clear at delineating who's who does what so um an
236I don't want to put words in your mouth but would that be the connector on the second side yeah I I would say so yes okay all right terrific okay um beautifully done um and you do have I'm not going to make a whole lot of comments about this right now just to say that you are a very highly functioning board um and with that continuity and you have a lot of things that you scored yourselves very high on um and so that makes this conversation um a little more challenging um just because of what we're going to be trying to to parse out um okay so round two this time you're going to be looking at and thank you Diane for pulling it up this piece uh that's tight with red on opportunities for
237growth um and again it's the same thing looking at um what your data is telling you and then transferring it to where you aren't just identifying this um here's thoughts we have about how to um potentially address it so your groupings this time in breakout one room will be Sydney and Ron breakout two is harlon and an and breakout three is Marne and Suzanne again you'll have 20 minutes with a two-minute warning and Stephen it's I'm turning it over to you rooms are open thank you Diane did that work okay okay once you got the document up yeah yeah it was just fine okay great and like I said if we're going too fast or if you need anything repeated please don't um hesitate to interject well I I figured if somebody thought I was
238missing something or leaving something out they would um you know give a holler and let me know and Mary I don't know if I mentioned to you um because this is an open public meeting I just wanted to you know we're streaming it live on YouTube okay yeah Marne had mentioned that and so yeah so I I don't think there's a lot of people watching it right now but uh I we're probably going to um end up posting it on our website when all is said and done great okay yeah wonderful you know there are some benefits to the um technology that we have access to that's right definitely been seeing an increase in uh Community participation in board meetings and other things in a number of other districts so right right always a good
239thing yeah all right take a little break here okay you have about a minute and a half you can tell who's trying to manage the meeting I'm the first one back every time come on come on oh we just waited until it kicked us out you jumped out right away two minutes ahead of time different rules different I know board members have if it if it comes up I'm like finish what you're saying I'm out I noticed because I was in the room all by myself there's this giant picture of my head like oh how my teeth better than a mirror oh I finally unmirrored what I was you know because you have that option to be able to have the mirrored view versus the straight on view and it drives me crazy when I
240see like what's on a shirt backwards drives me crazy so I'm like ah I'm going to unmar my view okay I don't wear things that have writing on me got my Seahawks I saw that that looked cute thank you so you and I both got the same Jersey how fun is that I know I almost wore my jersey today I didn't because I knew you guys would give me crap for it being it's still Sherman but no no he's a my son and my my son and my husband still wear their Sherman shirts I just happened to get Wilson so I've lucked out on how many years I've been able to have it Suzanne my other Jersey is a is a Sherman jersey oh funny I mean my husband and I had a conversation I
241said well I think I want locket but is is he gonna like retire next year is he gonna get injured he assured me it was gonna be fine I feel sorry for people that got a uh what is it Dak pres Prescott yeah oh how I haven't read the paper how bad was that I don't know but it was going wrong way it was a compound fracture and a a broken ankle oh yeah and at least was not the guy maybe this was another Dallas guy where he was laying flat on the on the ground and his foot was going that way that was that yeah that was it was it was gruesome that was watch it out that means it pokes through the skin and somehow the field contaminated so yeah well my son
242for Christmas wanted a Hollister Jersey because Hollister went to Wyoming and he thought it was a big deal there was a Wyoming guy on the Seahawks and I'm like you know so so when summer came and and Hollister was kind of on the cusp and we're like no they've got to keep Hollister on the team I spent a lot of money on that Jersey totally understand okay it's good all right so we're going to do exactly what we did with the the uh first round um but um Suzanne I'm gonna let your group start so that you're not following Ron this time yeah except this time we're gonna let M talk okay um so we had a couple of things we'll speed through all of them and then people will have less to say so
243the first one was what we noticed is that we were really good at making decisions internally and we were not so great about actually getting external feedback so I think it goes back to what do we do well we do well operating together and working together really well and so it seems we have a bit of a problem involving the public in those decision making process so um we thought that was something we need to be better at is pushing out information because we make decisions in ter and we understand why we make them and not necessarily share that with the rest of the world why did we why do we feel comfortable making these decisions and then soliciting information from the public actually before we make those make those decisions um what what would
244you do to uh uh address that uh if we knew we'd probably be doing it already how to better solicit information from the public we've done thought exchanges we've done um Community listening sessions but you know we've done that on some big items but how do we how do we make sure that that gets ingrained more systematically this is something we can come back to this we'll we'll we'll uh highlight this as a parking lot item okay okay uh then the two more were around setting goals one setting goals for the our board self-improvement and Suzanne and I had a very Frank conversation of we have 11 straight years of board of Distinction it's so we sit back and go why should we focus on our Improvement it's fine so I think getting a better
245reflection of ourselves and that's why I think this is really important because we don't necessarily dig deep into our data to look at where do we need to improve and then around round setting goals the other one was setting goals for the district and this is I think a Reliance maybe an overr Reliance on policy governance um and so I told Suzanne I was going to bring up the phrase I say all the time reasonable progress towards what so we base our work on our ends and we say to the superintendent yes you are meeting reasonable progress on this end yet have not established quantifiable information of reasonable progress towards what um and then the last one was a more of a question because we rated ourselves low on um evaluating staff based on Student
246Success and kind of the question is well to what extent can we actually do that and if so how okay all right um Mary yes um could we repeat that last one please evaluate staff based on Student Success thank you and then to what extent can we do this and how okay all right thank you group three um let's go to um harlon and an so I'll start and harlon can chime in um much of our conversation centered around like and Marne touched on this community engagement you know um engaging with the the community um as a way to to hear from them um especially like in reference to our conversation before about the culture around a school right we desire a culture around in our schools of kindness and respect but then we need
247to hear from our families um is that what they're experiencing in the school so it's it's there were several questions in the you know' 67 69771 that all had to do with um Communications and engagement with our community um and so that's something we talked about is a we need to improve and then um as a a piece of that related to engaging with the community is helping the community understand the board's role and responsibilities what the board does versus what the um the district does through its operations so those were the couple of things that we centered around okay and do you have any um suggestions or recommendations on how the these could be addressed not entirely um it you know it goes back to figure out how we can hear honest Reflection from
248our families okay all right okay harlon do you have anything you'd like to add I think that how they can some of them can be addressed is we certainly can have more uh sessions out in the community in our buildings I like that b goes and around the cycle and they are doing a meeting in every building over the course of like threee period to get out and they really spend half the time doing the tour and engaging with staff and then they do their board meeting I'm not advocating that we do that but I think there are various models by which you can increase engagement um the board doesn't routinely ask the community for feedback we rely on the district so it's not surprising that the board is or that the dis that we
249have a perception that's real that what does the community think the board does and what are their roles and responsibilities that shouldn't surprise us because we don't go and routinely do that so we have had focused listening sessions with students and with teachers and with community members a couple years ago on Equity but like Global beyond that we haven't really done they've always been topic based like whether we me like a bell schedule change or a you know big policy change and maybe we need to get into more of a routine process I think our hope is that with the hiring of a new executive director for communication and digital strategy that is going to help with that because Ron's plate is just full and overflowing and I don't know how he can even like
250keep the plate upright but he he needs help and I think he was really really smart to engage the board and say hey this person is a key board like visible role and Communicator so maybe you guys should be involved in this higher um and hiring process so I think that that is going to um help us know what our blind spots are and how to better professionally address them great thank you and Sydney and Ron do you want to go around you want me to why don't you go ahead Sydney and I'll fill in okay so we um we kind of grouped our the the low items into three groups one being we've already talked about the goal setting and strategic planning with goals the other being around Community engagement and Outreach and vision
251sharing Clarity of roles and then the third which is a bit of the outlier in that in the low-rated group was the board the board orientation of new members of which I was actually surprised was in there as the recipient the most recent recipient of the orientation of new members so um what we discussed is we think that one's probably an outlier because I I mean I get to tell you did a good job so you did good you did a great job um so I think the other two are similar to the statements before us I think we did talk about back from the strength side that this strength of the group acting in a as a single voice of decisions made that we don't have you know a lot of dissension or speaking
252against a decision that was made overall so we stay with it so if we as the things we could do in going through a goal setting exercise that that process um would be healthy for us to be able to share what do we think are the important goals um what might their um their potential Target outcomes be in order to create that shared vision and then leverage our strength for um supporting the message after and then on community engagement when I wrote down is as you know that we have to continue we didn't get to like an answer of what to do but that we need to continue to problem solve and be open trying new things in the in the community engagement piece um would you add anything else Ron um just um a
253couple of thoughts not just from our conversations but um Sydney was right in terms of capturing um the cohesiveness um of the board but I I didn't want to um confuse that with the board doesn't always agree there there is disagreements among the five board members I think that lead to some good creative problem problem solving um but that when a decision is made that's when they behave as a single body and I think that that's important um I I to the community engagement piece it just struck me as I thought about all the public input the board has taken and the thought exchanges and everything but the that so much of that is driven by a topic and um and often driven by the district I'm wondering if there's an opportunity here for the
254board to generate and create um I mean it's a survey tool if um would be one way to go about it but specifically to the types of things that the board wants to hear about maybe they are aren't tied to a monitoring report or uh any initiative in the district maybe the initiative is simply the board wanting to hear more from the public to help guide its decision making so it was just something something that struck me as I as I listened to you all talk there um and then lastly um it occurred to me also as we do get closer to hiring new leadership for the communications uh Department digital um strategies probably setting some time aside on the front end for the board to sit with that new individual and because I I
255know I can say she because we interviewed three female candidates that she would um uh probably appreciate some clarity around um kind of what are the expectations um of the system and I I think that would be helpful to me as well because I think there'd be a tendency to think well what are your expectations is this person will be a direct report to me but I really do want this to be more about the district the board and the the message from from the system than just me so so I who Marne I'll I'll mention that to you as we we do some future um agenda and plannings as well that I think um once we get that person on I think early on I would like in in their orientation process to give
256them some FaceTime with the with the school board definitely okay all right um very great job being reflective um on this and I can just tell you we are tracking with um me as the outsider and facilitator and what I was seeing so um I'm looking forward to the conversation we'll we'll be having and um the recommendations piece is just to to force you to be thinking through something that we're not just um identifying an issue and admiring the problem but looking at what are some things that we can be doing to um address it and the the interesting thing about your Workshop most boards when they do this self-evaluation Workshop they combine it with goal setting and so they do that as a part of the workshop because it's giving them uh data that
257and information that they need um to to do some things to focus on this so I'm I'm glad that you um uh identified that a goal setting exercise or process for the board um would be a logical um next step to do because this is really good reflection that you're having okay so we're going to do our last round um of this and uh again uh 20 minutes with your Pairs and this time you're going to be looking at the last section which is um areas of Divergence um that you can see um often times we call that the rainbow um if you're looking at the the questions and you see lots of colors across there um that that that's um a clue for it um in uh your particular case because you have four
258years um I was looking at movement um on um questions and and looking at that and seeing changing color structures um so uh again approach this however you would like um but this is going to um be your your last round and I I also just want to let you know if you need to take a bio break or a break of some kind um since I didn't build that in this I since you're you're out in your breakout rooms please feel free to um decide as a group if you'd like to do that uh while you're in your breakout rooms and and this is our last time in a breakout room um then we'll be um just um steamrolling through um with the rest of this and and doing some analysis so your last
259round um in room three is going to be an and SD room two is harlon and Marne and room three are Suzanne and Ron I'll see you back in 20 minutes Mary yes ma'am you had room three twice uh three did I say okay so Sydney and an is room one harlon and Marney room two and Suzanne and Ron room three thank you uhuh for hey at least this time I said I was moving to the next room and didn't just leave I'm learning you're on mute yep thank you I was and that's ironic what I was saying was this uh technology is an awesome opportunity for learning for all of us that would not be how I would describe my relationship with technology well my my real relationship with technology I describe as a
260LoveHate relationship um but it has been I it has been forced upon me and uh I have learned more in the last eight months than I have in as condensed a time in years best decision I ever made was Marrying an engineer honey things aren't working yep yep my phone call to it is a text to town stairs yes I I love having a young men in my life like that I think every uh every uh home needs either a teenager or a 20 something with are you talking about like Tech Specialists yes yes don't put it all on men I'm the tech specialist yeah no I just said people who are in the a teenager or someone in their 20s every home should have one my daughter is way better than my [Laughter] kids
261my daughter is fearless like you know the next thing I know she's like oh yeah I had this new my you know my writing pad and it had a new firmware update and until I just search on how to downloaded and just does it on her own okay that's awesome I come from a generation that read manuals I don't think they even publish manuals anymore suzan Suzanne I love manuals I read manuals my wonderful wife will buy me things and still get the manual for me because she knows I want to know all the features exactly how they work you have a thing for two years and you're like oh my God didn't know it did that too I want to know from the beginning my iPhone oh wow that is impressive voice do not
262read manuals they just you know they grab your phone they go there you go I like I don't know what they did I don't know how they learned what they did they just do it pushing lots of buttons I've checked all the manuals in our house I'm like why are they I'm like our house is 13 years old and we still and I don't think we have that refrigerator anymore why do we still have the manual love it okay so um let's see what you have come up with this time and let's just go to the group um group one which was Sydney and an Sydney's gonna share for us she's come up with a great idea oh um after Ann got to live through all of my life real life excitement so what we
263we were trying to figure out what's the best way to organize ourselves around the rainbow answers where we have disagreement and some we've already talked about and some we haven't but we decided to focus on one because it was an example of certainly feedback we've been getting to date and so it is this one oh andn will remember what number but it's 50-some publicly recognize publicly recognize the schools in improving student learning um and how that's really an interesting point of what is a board are we doing can we do should we be doing in order to tell the good the good news the the good story and and what an you know what an opportunity to open up a channel to the school buildings open up a channel to the community and um in
264order to share the good stuff that's happening and more publicly or to publicly talk about that we tend to spend our time zeroing in on the last mile the why it isn't working the final you know 8 five 6% and so what uh where we landed was you know could we could we create hope which is a thing that came up in our regional meeting you know is part of our job creating Hope by sharing like shoutouts of good works as part of our regular um our regular board meetings what would you add am oh I think that pretty covered pretty much covered it we were we were looking at how we can um recognize where the good is happening even though we're always trying to improve and make things better but where is it
265good now great all right um Diane you have all that yes thank you okay all right just wanted to check all right um so let's check with um harlon and Marne group two um we talked about a few things um we found parent involvement in curriculum selection was one area where it was kind of a rainbow uh formulate a district plan I'll try to talk slower Diane I'm sorry the second one Marney was formulate a district plan okay and then the third one was seeking community and staff input on decision making and we've talked about some of these and we thought the reason that there is there is this wide spectrum is because we have a different viewpoint on our role in those things so I don't know is that something where we need to
266become more cohesive or is it okay to have diverse perspectives um you know especially around the seeking community and staff input um I think there's different viewpoints on what type of input is needed for decision- making I think we actually have done a great job on some of our large initiatives if we look at our Equity executive limitation if we look at changing the schedules for our high school if we look at um shifting uh our bell times especially shifting our bell times it was through that Community input that we changed the direction we were going we were going to flip it to where elementaries were going to start early and the secondary was going to start late and based on input from the community was like wait do you know what that does to
267my schedule um so and then when is it appropriate where a lot of our we talk about wanting to be evidence-based so when is our input really from those evidence-based sources as opposed to feedback from various viewpoints so I think that you see a Divergence in that because one different items might require different input for the board and we may not necessarily agree on how much that is so I don't know that it gets to how can the board use these areas to increase cohesiveness unless we start to talk about what is it we do differently and why do we do it differently or why do we have that different perspective okay great is that it did you want to add anything Harlen okay all right thank you Marty and you were tying all three
268of these together under that right okay just want to make sure I was capturing that okay um all right so let's go to um uh to Suzanne and Ron well I can start um we actually did talk about a couple of the same questions that were already mentioned um another one that we spent some time on um well actually one of the things we noticed is we don't really have a lot of rainbows which I think goes back to the sort of cohesiveness of the board but so our rainbows were more like green blue yellow um but one of them we talked about was question 62 which was regularly evaluate and adjust resources and strategies for closing the achievement Gap and we thought that some of that had to do with well what does regularly
269mean because we had two people that thought we always did it and one person who thought well yeah maybe kind of some of the time and I think it has to do with what we definitely done it and if you look at um from 2017 to 2020 we were a lot lot more yellow and blue and now we're more green and blue but I think we probably have some board members for whom yeah we do it but it isn't enough and so it's sort of the question of what does regularly mean and you know is is the response adequate um the other one that we talked about a bit was where did it go um oh another one that's sort of evolved over time which is 67 in that the public is well informed of
270the board's roles and responsibilities and in a previous session Marne and I were reminising about the time we took the show on the road to have everybody meet and greet the board and find out what the board does and like three people literally three people showed up because no one cared and no one really cares what we do I would argue that they probably don't know what we do but I would also argue that they know as much as they want want to know so um that was one of those interesting kind of funky things we also talked a bit about the communication input stuff that other people have already talked about so I don't know Ron did I cover it was yeah um yep questions uh info to the public on question six and
271publicly recognizing for improvement 55 Public kept well informed 67 so definitely a Communications theme there um that you know we we don't we're not all of a common mind I guess is the best way to put it around how we're doing some of those specific functions um I and to Suzanne's Point too about um it's interesting do people really care about what the board of the role is and I would argue they do but it's somewhat situational when I have any when you're changing the belt times and it's going to influence me negatively or positively well now I care and I want to get interested and I want to know who's going to make that decision and how how is that decision being made and how are you going to communicate that decision so I
272I think people that the public kind of EB and flow out of that concern um depending on situations within their own life and how things are going for them as well so um but I did I did tend to notice that they they kind of um clustered around some of those communication strategies as well which has been a bit of a theme for us the last few years Mary that you know challenges with communication you know um you heard the earlier talk we're in the the process right now of getting a new executive director of communications and digital strategies I think that this is one area that I can say for sure in in my tenure as superintendent which is only seven and a half years long I've seen the biggest changes have happened in
273public Ed have been around communication a lot of that's driven by social media and and um just kind of the when I started my announcement was made in a local newspaper okay that newspaper no longer exists so that that right there I think highlights the the uh and that paper had' been around for 125 years years prior to that so I think that highlights the dramaticness of the change in communication that might be reflected in some of the our responses that we're seeing there on these questions okay all right um want to give you all an opportunity if any of the things that the other groups have brought up is um triggering something for you before we um start doing some analysis of all of this well I think on that for me on that
274last point it seems we talked more about the like identifying the thing and not as much about what we think we want to do about it so we probably have some more time to spend there would you like to offer anything Sydney for any of these points for consideration so many things now [Music] um yeah I mean I think I I guess what I I wonder on some of these is it's about what is our shared understanding of the item so that at least we're all consistently [Music] rating um against the same criteria with the same criteria and so I think think there's may be an opportunity to take some of our rainbow items that we pulled out here even if we did in some sort of Rapid Fire way just come up with like
275what is what is our definition of good here that we can all agree to or or not agree to and then go forward because I worry that if we if we don't do that at least agreed to level setting or agree to a level setting that we'll just we we keep the rainbows because like I may have thought it was bad then something happens and I now think it's good but it's not related to someone else's definition well and that's I totally support the idea that shared understanding comes from shared terminology um and knowing that so that is a a really good point um and and I also see this as an as not an either or but an and um because you do have different perspectives and give and you you would have a
276different perspective probably on some things given your tenure on the board because you're seeing some things differently you know going back to that curse of knowledge um bias that people can have and so this is why it's important to have that you know Divergent doesn't necessarily mean that's bad you know it's going back to what you were you were all identifying earlier on um perspectives and the value that that they bring um however there is a very strong case to be made um and I do it a lot in uh diversity equity and inclusion work is making sure that we're sharing the same um a Common Language um when we're talking about something um so that we we are we can move forward um knowing we are referring to the same thing so that's a
277that's a great um Point um anything else okay so um we have uh Diane has emailed to you the um the ranking sheet which is very interesting um given some of the comments that you all have made and things that you have identified um I don't know if you um want to pull that up in your email uh but I'm going to um do a little bit of you know feedback to you from my observations of looking through your data and what was jumping out to me and we we definitely have some parallels um but I also have a couple of questions that I'd love to or thoughts to to share with you for you to just Ponder and think about um because it it is very interesting and and I I think it's really
278really valuable the fact that you have four years and there's actually some trend lines that are fairly consistent um that are that is um that it's just interesting to to note there aren't a lot of school districts um that have a long trend line to be able to look at things plus the continuity that you've already identified too so there's a whole lot of factors going on in your particular composition Mary yes mam sheet that you sent out is that compiling all four years worth of data no it's just this year it is just this year okay this year there isn't a way that they can do a standard deviation across all of them I I have to um in order to do that which I did do for a district I have to get
279it for each year um but they needed to do a comparison because we had an opportunity to show what they had done in March and what they did in a August pre pandemic and responding to the pandemic and it was fascinating to look at how things had moved um and how they were very responsive to a very different environment um so what I so on your highest scores and what I did was um I I pulled the the top 16 on both your highest scores and the the 16 on the the lowest side um just to to see what was what was coming up and it was really interesting that on your highest scores um and just do you know overall because you are a board that is um highly functioning your scores just overall
280are um higher than a number of districts that have done this so just want to set that as a um a parameter for you because you're already working in a space that's um already fairly high level okay um so when I look at your highest scores the first six were all from standard three which um is all of the things that you talked about um related to um fiscal issues budget issues your facilities um all these things that you have some very strong structures in place uh for monitoring and so you're and you recognize that as a board um so of your of your top 16 eight of them came out of standard three um your the the first six and in on the entire list and then the other three were related to um
281uh the superintendent and the recognition of roles one of them was your board PD which you already identified you do things as a group and this is important to you and then the third one was um the board's respect for the team and others so all things that are consistent with what you identified what was interesting also is that you had zero in your top 16 score that were from standard four which is accountability so let's just you know set that aside for for the moment um you had one in standard two uh which is high expectations for student learning and you had two in standard five which were around engaging the the community and it was in um communicating your fiscal um situation that you felt you did a very good job of that
282so when I go to the other side of the the scale and look at the the lowest scores um it's again you have identified um some things that were showing up for me your lowest score you gave yourself was um question nine uh which is in standard one and the um the school board School District governance part um providing responsible School governance and it's setting goals for its Improvement and you have identified that that's something that you want to take a look at because when things are going well um is there it it begs the question do we need to do much to improve and the answer is yes um there we can always improve um and it just might look different um for you than it would for someone else the um in uh
283standard one in your lowest scores uh under this the governance piece you had four of them standard two which was the student expectations you had um two standard three the one that you've also rated your your highest fairly consistently you had two items um in that and um they were um having policies for evaluating staff based on Student Success number 36 which you've raised the question how do we do that within the board's role responsibility um and then the second one was um have a process that includes community and parent involvement in s selecting curriculum which was something you also identified um uh when you were were doing that and that was um question number 41 under standard four on the accountability um you had four items and um the one that was your second
284lowest overall was uh question number 62 on regularly evaluates and adjusts resources and strategies for closing achievement gaps to maximize their effectiveness so that was one of and that was one that we've talked about a little bit around equity and there's not a lot of very um overt Equity related questions in this which is something I've asked wasda to take a look at but there are two that are are overt and that's um number 62 and number 64 and both of those fell into your lowest 16 in how you ranked yourself um number 64 is uh model cultural racial and ethnic understanding and sensitivity um and then the in standard five there were also four that that um came up up on your lowest and that was under that's the relationships um uh and engaging
285the community representing values and expectations which you have also identified in here as an area of wanting to take a look at so um for me it was it this was good to see that the things that were jumping out to me as an outsider looking at um trend lines looking at um how you were ranking yourself that you've done a really good job of identifying both the strengths side and what you know needs to be done to maintain that but also identifying um some significant areas where um work can be done on improving that are focusing around standard four which is um the accountability piece and standard five uh in particular um and the this it was interesting that the questions in standard one that uh you pulled on the lowest ones were also
286related back to um uh items that would would fall or be connected to standard four and five do anyone have any thoughts about this I do well I have a I guess I have a question that more of a general question first which is you mention that we're our scores are in general I guess bit higher and I was just looking at the numbers again as you were talking with our lowest score is like 2.36 I think uhuh um which is actually a pretty high number so what is I don't know how if I'm asked this this an average across boards or how much above average are we operating um the fact well see the thing is on your high ones you're really high on your standard deviation you're at a 396 for you know
287a a couple of these even at the top so that already moves everything up higher um and it by the time you get for a number of boards by the time you start getting down into the the lowest rankings they're in the one point something so um and again you you every board is different so I want to be careful about making a comparison um there's just so many factors that go into you know board longevity and continuity and Trust amongst the board and the superintendent and the structures that are in place you know there they're so many things so you what I try to do is just for you and your situation these are the things that as you have evaluated them that are rising up um for you all to be deciding how
288you might want to um address them did that answer your question um um well sort of you don't want to compare yeah all the children are beautiful I get that maybe I'll try a different way I'm trying to get to is um is I'm trying to think of a word so in my I'll use my corporate speak for a second like we do Employee Engagement surveys and yes I get my individual results which will tell me like my high my strengths and my lower scores but it's usually relative to some number so I can know hey in my case whatever our lowest number is it is your lowest but if we look across other organizations it's actually Five Points higher than other organizations or 26 points lower what I'm trying to understand is um is
289where do where does like that low are these low numbers like something is on fire and we're performing well underneath what might be considered good by whatever I don't know how to phrase what good looks like in this case or is it literally like it's it's about self-improvement and always striving against ourselves to get these numbers up I guess I want to know if there's something is a red alarm I want to know yeah it's the lad bar is yeah it's the ladder this is for the board that's why it's a board self-evaluation you all are ranking yourselves in different um standards that have been research validated and so what you do is you looking basing it on uh looking at yourselves and so that's why many boards when they do this they include as
290part of it a goal setting exercise because they're like okay for us this is what is Raising to the top for us of what we think we should be focused on based on how we have evaluated ourselves I yes totally get that what I'm struggling with is in my mind is there are items that say our our score is a 2.5 and if that item is already well above what would be considered high performing in the standard that may not be where we spend our time there could be another item that our score happen the absolute value happens to be 3.5 but there's finding in the research that um High performing organizations consistently score at 38 to be successful so I'm just trying to so so that we can pinpoint where we would spend our
291energy I was wondering if there is a when the standards were created if there's any sort of research or or aggregation of over time that says Where would be the points that you would you know distance from an average or something else that says these are ones to go focus on because the absolute number I've just found historically isn't always the way to get there right yeah and there isn't and for exactly that reason because again we've got 295 school districts that are going to be with an a unique combination of um govern a governance body and so it's got you you focus on what the the standards are the the items that have been identified by research that show you're a highly functioning board that is going and that your governance practices are going
292to have a positive impact on student achievement so it's from there and then within that this is where your relationships that you have with each other and your deep knowledge of your local District come into play as to what you want to be focusing on and full will and knowing and I I need to caution people about this all the time because particularly when we start talking about this we can look at it and go well I want to do this this this this and this well that's not realistic and and it's even less realistic in the time of covid with all of the things that are are going on and I mean there are boards that have literally shifted their entire strategic plan um to be responsive to the current environment that we're in
293you know and just recognizing and communicating to their Community we are not in a business as normal situation and this is and we recognize that and this is what we're intentionally making decisions to do to respond to the current environment that we're in know um and it's that's because we're we're all in the same storm although we're not experiencing it the same way um that has resonated with communities does that help okay building on what Sydney has said though you know I think she wants to know what's the variance from the mean and as as they're trying to objectify this like the researchers from Montana it's probably good for their next step for as you do more of this work and as they get more boards with large cohort data then actually look at the
294variant like create what the mean is yeah it's going to be arbitrary and then look at the variance from the mean and see when you see those gaps does that actually translate to difference in cohesiveness or achievement or Community engagement you know those those those strains within it because that's actually very important because then districts and Boards could Target specific things and interventions to address those so I think that what she's bringing up is really important for the next step of this because I know you're we're only a couple years into this work but would be to say hey let's see what the mean is for our 295 School dist what's the variance and then what does that variance translate into impact totally agree with you harlon and that is part of the conversation that
295we've been having as we're we're wanting to review this because your your points are well taken and people do want to know you know what are we working towards so appreciate that and that kind of lands on some of my questions that I had for Tim early on after I took this I'm like you know all the questions are how often do you but not how effectively do you and those are two different questions and I think that we might do something often but do we do it effectively or we might not do something very often we might not get public input as often as some people might like but when we do it do we find it effective yeah and then I know Suzanne actually raised her hand so I'm sorry no that's okay
296I just I'm fundamentally confused on what these numbers mean because I'm looking at this like question 44 says it's an average of 3.96 and a standard deviation of 0.2 and 47 is 3.91 with a standard deviation of 0. 28 but when I go look at the questions we all answered always on both of them so why are they different what am I missing about what these numbers mean and that's a question I'll have to take back because I didn't design this I'm just trying to to work with what they have as we're going through this to try and give people you know trying to get towards what both harlon and Sydney are are um have brought up is what are we working towards um and at this point the the issue really needs to be
297what are you seeing yourselves which you've done a very good job of identifying in the conversations that you've had and from what you've identified what is it that you want to be um focusing on um to improve your Effectiveness as a board and again this is we're not um you this this Workshop like I said most of the time this Workshop is set up that it leads into doing some type of a goal setting process for boards but this one is just for you to have a chance um to walk through and talk talk about it and look at what um try to try to have a um set up some possible questions or follow-ups for you about what you want to be doing this year related to your Effectiveness and I think related to
298that question because I I actually had the same one Suzanne is if you look at our very last item that was that was highlighted green number 18 treat all individuals including fellow board members with staff students and community members with respect that one had three green and two blue yet there's quite a few standard four that had four green and one blue and yet didn't rise to that top actually have a lower calculated average so I found that really confusing there's something funky with these numbers or they don't mean what we think they mean or they're picking up the six mystery person I don't know oh which might be yeah well you do that you don't you do have an inconsistency there with six and five at different years maybe over more than one year
299that it's no and that's why I asked that question early on was it just 2020 because the numbers weren't tracking for me yeah no it's it's based on 2020 um the interesting thing that I noticed when I was looking through it was um that the the the lowest 16 numbers uh when I was looking over your foury year not just at uh 2020 they were fairly consistently um you know spread out with not very many always many more um most of the time or sometimes uh than some of the other ones uh so I just I thought that was just an interesting side note um as I was looking at it um the the other thing that I was wanting to do was I wanted to see where how you were evaluating yourselves was lining
300up with some of your governance documents and what they say so it was interesting and I and I don't have access to everything but um the public facing ones that I have this is why you know I'm just going to share with you from the information I had access to what um was coming up for me you will probably have more data or an underst story around that but again for somebody looking in from the outside this this is what I was seeing um so the first one I looked at was your executive limitations monitoring report from November of 2019 and it was interesting this is this is standard three which very clearly the way this was evaluated um doing a really great job and a number of the items that were your top ones
301came out of standard three um and then uh the thing I noticed that wasn't in here and you've already raised it how do we do this was the uh question 36 um have policies for evaluating staff based on Student Success um there's nothing in here related to that so you wouldn't have something that you're evaluating it on so it would come out lower um the second one I looked at was your gp2 governing style um this came out of standard one and this or aligns with standard one and there were four items on there um related to um lowest on the lowest end of the scores and including the lowest one which was question nine which was the setting goals for our own Improvement um which is not mentioned in your gp2 document so um
302not a surprise that that would be showing up low if it's not something that's um been identified in one of your documents that you're using uh the next one I looked at was uh your uh delegation to the superintendent uh which comes under standard one uh also oh a couple other things I was noticing was just the dates they were last reviewed so the governing style one we were just talking about um it has a date on it of 2015 um as the last time it was noted that it was monitored and revised so maybe it's not a uh that hasn't happened or there is a more recent copy but this is what I had access to um on the delegation to the superintendent under standard one um again three of the highest scores were
303in there question uh questions 19 10 and 11 which were all about working with the superintendent um having trust and uh um and a common commitment uh the delegation piece that the board does and honoring superintendent roles and responsibilities um and so that was definitely you know you ranked it high because this is something you've got laid out very clearly here um I also notice that the last time this one was revised and approved was 2016 but again you may have a more recent copy but this is the one that I had access to Mary I think on that sometimes we review them but we don't revise them and I'm not sure if Diane picks up the date of the review if we don't make a revision okay I may be wrong but um because
304I know Le like on the GPS I know we've reviewed probably not this past year but certainly two years we've reviewed them yeah I can attest to that yeah yeah I I only I only updated on the website when there is a revision okay um because it's uh pretty clear on the Govern learning style one it will say if it was um monitored no changes monitored updated monitored no changes right date on it there was a there was a point where I I was afraid that the page was just going to go on and on and on um and so I I made the assumption that every year it's it's revised I mean not revised it's reviewed but um I stopped noting it on the on the form every single year okay okay so there
305like I said there's there's often an understory for things I was just looking at what I had access to yeah but I do know that the past year maybe two years we have not taken the time during our Retreats because our Retreats have been full of other stuff that we haven't done our systematic let's sit down with our books and flip through and look through every single one are we doing this are we not and doesn't need to change so it's probably been two years since we've done that okay and I chose not to do it at this Retreat yeah okay all right so there I said so this is this is why we just talk about some of these things um so the next one I looked at was your end results composite which
306has the mission academics and Foundation citizenship life management and personal awareness and um that's student related and um that one is correlating to standard two the high expectations for student learning with clear goals and um clear yeah clear goals and plans um interestingly um for this one only one of the questions for standard two showed up in your highest scores and that was number 32 which was re reviews the board reviews student achievement data um regularly um but two of them showed up in your lowest scores um uh number 26 question 26 um including stakeholder um stakeholders in revising or looking at The District's vision and question 28 uh collaborate with staff and Community to formulate a district plan with goals and outcomes um it also overlaps with standard four which is the accountability one
307um and the question I had was how is the district being held accountable for meeting student learning expectations in this document because it's stating what you want um and maybe that's just you know the the nature of it being an ends result composite um but where what's the the how that's going on um yeah that one and then the last one I looked at was your um oh wait no second the last one I looked at was the equity um internal report and um I was just looking through that and highlighting that um the question number 62 which was the regularly evaluate and adjust resources and strategies uh for closing achievement gaps um was your the second lowest score and like I said two of the equity ones were in your um lowest 16 but
308there wasn't a um in this particular document what an equitable allocation of resources looks like is not specifically addressed and so that would correlate to it maybe coming out lower on something and then the last one I looked at was your Global governance commitment gp1 um and again this one on the date the last date that it says monitored and no changes is 2014 um and this one correlates to standard five on engaging the community and representing their values um so again not knowing if this was the most recent document a question I had was have the community's values changed since 2014 um and again looking at four of the the the lowest scores were in this particular category um and you already identified that there's um some things that you'd like to take a
309look at related to it so um I just wanted to um show you I had looked through some of these things because usually there's you know you can see if there's correlations or not between higher and lower scores what the governance documents are um where a focus is on things um and you're pretty much in um you know what youve identified what you've self-evaluated is where there's um some areas for improvement pretty much correlate to at least the documents that I was had a chance to look at so would definitely invite feedback from you well I think one of the areas um number 62 that you talked about our second lowest regularly evaluating and adjusting resources strategies you know we had a discussion today we got an update from our Equity team uh Equity executive
310director about how how are we adjusting resources and so that was really helpful I think we might have different answers based on that feedback um but we still need to have a better understanding in fact I think it's our either one of our discussions today or tomorrow about our you know analyzing our SI plan because how are we how are we adjusting our strategies for closing our achievement Gap when we're not closing our achievement Gap and I think it's we'd be hardpressed to say we were all always in that because the achievement CL Gap isn't changing and I don't know if other board members agree it's like as much as I think we are interested in making that change and trying to oversee that if it doesn't change can we say that we're adjusting our
311strategies and and resources is where the rubber hits the road um because as soon as you start playing with and people tend to think of resources as money well definitely anytime you're dealing with money um if somebody feels like they're going to be losing something um you will get a reaction but resources also includes your people time your spaces and power and privilege and all of those are resources uh when we're looking at this and um I would say the the barometer as to whether you're really adjusting your resources from what I've seen happening nationally is when you start getting pushed back on the decisions you're making to reallocate resources for historically marginalized groups of students you will know you are authentically doing it when people are pushing back on you because they're feeling like
312they're losing something instead of understanding what Equity actually is um and the narrative and understanding The Narrative um that we have a responsibility to help people understand which is when you're focusing on a particular group of of students that have specific needs it does Ripple out and benefits everyone one and I think harl were you wanting to say something I saw your screen lighting lighting up I was I was saying that uh I think we actually have seen the needle move on certain buildings and so we've targeted based on buildings and I think that that we do I think that's where the tracking the data talking about it globally is a sip and it's really delicate balance because it's not like we want to come across is we support this and there isn't a shame
313element in talking about data openly and so it's having that fine line of balance of talking about it and having the District administration support and intervene that it look like the board is saying like you must do X or you're not performing to what we expect I think that's the hard part um but Mary we certainly had those uncomfortable conversations I think our community knows exactly what it is they've been like this close to my face like yelling at me when super had to separate us so yeah like said I'm I was just reading from things that I had access to and so when you when you mentioned this morning that you had had an update from your Equity Department I was like awesome so probably what I say about this is going to be
314a little bit dated again this is what your this is what's available to the public to see um and so um perceptions are going to be what people can see um and an interpretation of that um one thing I really would encourage you all to think about on the roles and responsibilities um this has been a pretty foundational thing that boards have had to go back to um and Co has been highlighting that because people think that boards can do some things that we've never been able to do um and the to help I've actually spent some time with different parent groups going over what the roles and responsibilities of a board are um because people think we can do more than we can and they don't understand for the most part that you have
315no Authority at all unless you are in a publicly noticed meeting with a quorum it is not like you know a congressional elected official or one of our state representatives who can do and say whatever they want and their vote is their vote and um that is it is what it is it's this collect collective governance structure um and uh it's and now that in many places we're seeing more public engagement because of the virtual nature um it has created some either some great opportunities and some challenges for different um boards as you have more people showing up um in some cases than you've had before which is a great opportunity to tap into um so like I said we're we're just in a different environment I completely agree with what Ron was saying on
316the communications um piece this has been a huge huge shift um and just in the way we're doing it but also how how it has identified the digital divide for particular groups um and how are we ensuring that they're not continuing to be marginalized in the the environment that we're working in right now okay um so with the the with what Diane has put together for you um it's a really nice um compilation of what your thoughts have been and you know this has been more of a time for you to be able to discuss do a little analysis just kind of sit and think about it um and I would want to know from you now um just as on an accountability side um what you would want to be doing with this information
317now as um a followup or next steps I can go I mean I think I um I found this an incredibly useful conversation and I think I think we may have gone through this not in this level of detail a year ago but I know we did the assessment a year ago and certainly at that point I knew a whole lot less and had was still scrambling to understand what all your names were um but I think it's been really helpful to ground in what's important and what some standards are and what we need to do next so very appreciative of your your help taking us through the discussion um I I really do think it gives us an opportunity to to talk about which of these items in here do we want to set
318goals around I don't think it should be all of them a short list um but I would love to pick three maybe that we want to set um some tangible goal around and and have that as the next conversation yeah but definitely I thank you for not saying any more than three I've been telling everyone right now no more than two to three just don't take off more than you can chew right now because even the work that you're doing is going to have an impact on staff um who also are um stretched with capacities so um be realistic and uh give yourselves Grace in that process well picking three for me was like out on a limb I really enjoyed the conversation everything in me was like I'm glad this is over let's not
319do it anymore so three means I think this is super important and I want to spend more time on it which is a lot to say for me at the moment well I think I'm one glad that we are going to have more conversations around the Sip data and how it relates to closing the achievement Gap how it relates to how we're spending resources and really getting deeper in that um reallocation that we were that was shared with us earlier so I think that's work that I'm glad we're going to be continuing just in this next couple of days um what I think that getting a clearer Sense on what and how we communicate to the public and um and that work I think will be able to commence once we have that executive director
320of communications and digital digital strategies in place and that it has kind of been stagnant and on hold i' say for quite some time for at least a year I mean we haven't really talked about how can we better communicate and engage our public um but boy we know now how vital it is not having anybody in that seat for the past four months during the middle of all of this of all times to not have that person um that's been tough um and I think the final one that I I've wanted for a while and I think it was probably when I was with Suzanne that we were talking about we have our ends and it goes back to the you know reasonable progress towards what I've had that conversation for a long time
321but we we kind of say well we don't have a strategic plan as a board because we have our ends but I don't know if that's necessarily true it would be like a pilot saying well I know I'm going from Seattle to New York without a flight plan and so I kind of think that at some point we need to be working with our superintendent and whether the board owns it or the superintendent owns it at some point we have to talk about what is the flight plan to get us towards how much reasonable progress towards stuff in the next five years and having a an actual strategic plan and that's board work and superintendent work and that's collaborative work that will have to bring somebody in to help us to to do and I
322know that Federal Way's done one so I can look to a policy governance organization that's created a strategic plan and I think it's been something that's what was that Yakama has two and so to really talk about can we get there because I think that's part of the communication then out to the public is that we've sat down and said okay it's more than just are we making reasonable progress towards each end but a more cohesive idea of how we think we might get there an Haron Suzanne thoughts well I I I go back to the our community engagement and our communication I think that so many of the items touch on a piece of that that working on that not solves many problems but moves us in a direction towards an improvement in in
323that will touch so many so I think that's where one of the big places I'd like to focus yeah I would Circle back to Mar's comment about the Strategic plan and I think at one point a couple of years back we had said well okay the board creates the ends the superintendent who's in charge of means creates the plan to get to the ends and I believe that that work started and there was discussion of strategic initiatives and other things around that and then as with so many things life caught up and covid caught up and I think that sort of got left somewhere I know the work was started but but I don't think the work was ever completed or we never got to a point where we needed to sit down with the
324superintendent and say okay what does this mean and where do we go from here so um I would I would Echo with Marne on that although what an said about Communications was certainly good too and why is the sun in my eyes what is that big yellow ball in the sky that's a good thing not really I got to move it if I if I might I'll just uh remind us that um yeah the work for the Strategic framework and I was always cautious cautious about calling it a strategic plan because I did view that as something that the board would have taken a bigger role in really was and we did hire a consultant and we created this strategic framework and and some of the things you might recall and a lot of that
325was driving that frankly was the pending McClary decision because we had anticipated that that was going to as it did Drive some uh new revenues into the system so just as a as a Touchback reminder to the board some of the items that were in this strategic framework included the um our our early learning plan which resulted in the formation of our um dual language um K class now K1 our uh preschool uh our expanded seats in ecap um you know it goes all the way back to the implementation of walk kids and full day so that that was exciting um another component or offshoot of that oh and then the the creation of a a um a safety uh director of safety and that would be Dave montavo today the equity Department you'll recall
326we had the um each each department had to submit um a one-pager as a component of the Strategic framework and when you look and then the final piece of that was the Strategic Staffing plan which we were about to implement the last chunk of that for this school year when last spring obviously as a result of um the co and the closure I I put the breaks on most of those new positions to be hired for that and um so we're we're in a place now where I think given the covid realities it is time to um to rethink about that but I'm and I know the board had mentioned this as part of my evaluation last spring I I think um well that that process frankly served me well because it helped me organize
327all of those initiatives that were coming at us and and everything and um um I still I I still have that I think recently I actually I think Marne I sent a part of that for you for the um for the work that you did for the application for the um yeah um the this board of Distinction app but I think now it does feel to me like it is a time um for the board with in in collaboration obviously and uh likely with a consultant to actually formulate a new strategic plan for the district and I think it kind of goes hand inand with how you might want to revise some of your Els as well kind of to the earlier conversation we were having around the treatment um Els if you will treatment
328of people treatment of staff app so um it feels to me like that timing is right I know that that again was a discussion last spring the the biggest challenge that I'm having with that right now frankly that because that would be the kind of project you'd be kind of sinking your teeth into about now is we have this other project that we're trying to figure out and it's called the reopening of schools and um it has sucked a lot of energy out of the place I mean I'll be honest I'm getting text right now from the team that's going to be heading into negot NE iations here in the next few hours um so having said that it is something that I've had my eye on and in fact I even um and I'm
329doing this collaborative work right now with some of my colleagues from uh s spu um and thinking about how to pursue that and approach the board with a plan around um how to pick up and do some strategic planning work I know when Federal Way did it Suzanne they used um a group out of the University of Washington to to Aid in that so thought about that as well and I'd reach out to Tammy Campbell when when when I have a moment to talk to her about something other than um reopening plans in Co well and I think there was probably a brilliant communication strategy somewhere about gee we had the Strategic framework and it had all these strategic initiatives and look at all the great things we did around each of these strategic initiatives
330and sort of you know toed our own horn there and and I think I mean we did it but we didn't do it as a a strategic thing right so that's just another it's another one of those things where we just haven't quite tied all the pieces together and I wasn't necessarily implying that you should drop everything and do it now no I no but I understand what's on your plate yeah no I think it's a good conversation though I really do because to to have some way to organize the thinking in the work I think is helpful arand do you have any thoughts like to share I think we all have limited bandwidth right now and I think our Focus has to be on the recovery process but what we can weave into that
331as a board is the community engagement piece and that will only help us with the with the recovery process so I would suspect that we be best served over the next 12 months to focus on the community engagement piece which will serve as a foundation for us even when we then pivot into strategic planning um but I I think that I would not think it would be wise for us to start a strategic plan right now when we don't even know what our enrollment is going to be next year so I think there's a lot of recovery part that has to happen and I think in 18 months we'll have a better vision for where we'll be structurally before to actually feasibly make a plan that's just my opin so I've written down four different
332things that have come up um one is Communications with stakeholders um and that does absolutely feed into the community engagement piece that several of you have mentioned um a strategic framework SL plan and the recovery process I there literally that has been one of the goals that districts have come up with is because this is so timec consuming it's like why are don't add something else on top of it this is your work um that you're doing so um I I'll be typing those up in um my notes um and Diane and I will be sharing all of this um with you and I want to respect your time now that we're up on um 3:32 and I want to commend you for staying engaged I know how difficult this is um doing this all
333day and uh and I enjoyed being able to spend this time with you one thing uh just so that you'll know also is coming uh wasda I'll be sending out to Diane a link for the online evaluation that wasda always asks us to have people fill out so that we can continue to improve and know what we um should be doing better um with providing these services and um I wish you well and uh thank you for all the work that you're doing on behalf of kids in your your district and this has been this has been great and I hope that uh I I wish you well for your the next day and going forward this year if there's anything else I can do to assist you I would be happy to do so
334so Marne back to you thank you thank you so much for bringing your expertise and all of that and your time and digging deep into our work to be able to help us dig deep into uh what we need to do because no matter how good we might think we are there is always room for improvement always so I think we had some really great deep conversations today that we might not have had had you not been here to facilitate that so I really appreciate that my pleasure be well everyone bye and before we go to break I know Sydney you had your hand up so I wanted to give you a chance to get it out and then we can take a oh I I was I was just reflecting at how much the
335conversation we just had fit into guess these phases of postco that we've been talking about in my in my day job this idea a of really dividing out our work into this idea of respond recover reimagine and if we were to I think lay it out that way for our public those are all things we you know we have to do but we'll move through those phases and the Strategic plan is really in that reimagine um so it's like we have line of sight to it we know it's coming but we're you know we're still responding and recovering right at the same time and then but we have our eye to the reimagine so I was just saying it set off a a light bu of my day job while we were talking I love
336that that's a great way to frame it okay I want to be respectful I you've already lost four minutes of this break at least it's not 20 minutes of a lunch break you lose Ary can you can you find out what those numbers mean on that sheet that Mary sent us because the more I looked at them the more they made no sense I think they really were a culmination of the past four years yeah they weren't quite I tried doing some of the math it was close but there were some that even the way they were ranked like something that got all always was ranked lower than something that got four always and one sometimes so yeah there's something wrong and I think it is probably using other years but if we could have
337some clarity that'd be awesome and it may be using the mystery sixth person that never showed up on the things maybe they're in there somewhere that could be too anyway that's my request if they weighted the questions differently which would go to one of Sydney's questions like which of these should I be more concerned about yeah like there should be some weight to some of them that they weigh more than the others so just a thought okay take your break thank you to Dian note taking yes thanks Diane my pleasure good to see you rich apparently your machine got updated huh yeah I thought it was just saying that it needed to update Zoom but it did a lot bigger of an update than I thought like oh CRA mine did that Friday when I
338was turning it off it was perfect though I was like go ahead update I'm going home for the weekend but sometimes those updates one that happened recently took hours to do so yep all right and are we we are recording for um is this going YouTube recording or is this we are Live on YouTube live on YouTube yeah I was say live right this minute all right okay sorry for my delay I was a minute late okay I had to give my cat his meds that do other people hear that feedback yes it's not me then good that like high pitch squeak yeah the high pitch squeak what is that I'm not hearing that here what it is oh it's Rich it's me Rich I don't know it might be me did it just come
339back yeah it's back uh oh not hear it I can just barely hear something not have that feedback you're just gonna have to mute I think until you're ready to rock and roll oh and definitely rich but it's gonna be rich who's gonna be talking it is problem we're all gonna agenda item like he's got a dog whistle or something I can so maybe exit and rejoin or turn off your tea kettle what it sounds like now you know how stressful this is for Rich right now right he's got all of you as here and uh he you know I have ttis so it doesn't make any difference to [Laughter] me you can you're just sharing with us what is that coming back is that coming back just came right back keep talking you can
340drown it out yeah as long as you start talking maybe then we won't hear it that's the other you know the mom the mom thing of learning how to just tune out the things going on in the back seat my husband still he's like isn't that bugging you when they're fighting I'm like yeah at some point it just drowns out and now their noise Ary when we got Zoom bombed you so channeled your inner mom I was waiting for you to say don't make me turn this car around turn this car around I will end this meeting right now so good well that's so well I'm gon try have to restart my computer tomorrow again and see because it wasn't doing that earlier today so we're fine fine fine okay so rich um I don't
341think you should be nervous around us I'm not too nervous no this is this is all right I think Ron was just deflecting he's nervous because his boss is here not us yeah that's moment of honesty everything everything makes me nervous these days my goodness nothing's predictable anymore so okay well did you want me to go ahead and jump in ra thinking yeah I think it would it would be good Rich because I think honestly I think there's a number of places this conversation will go today but I think um obviously I know one of the things that rich really wanted to share was kind of his thinking about how these sips might look in in the covid world minus so much of the data we've become familiar to to have and everything and then
342I think Rich there'll be other questions the board might have that will go beyond just what we're thinking about for this year and um just more in general let's kind of just see where it takes us but yeah and and I do want to touch on that before you get started because it's one of the things during our last discussion that the board just have when we were doing our self evaluation second from the last was uh regularly evaluate and adjust resources and strategies for closing achievement gaps to maximize their effectiveness so we're going to want to have a conversation about looking if you look at our overall data it's been somewhat stagnant um we need to take a look at maybe building or region specific to see where things are moving but overall how
343do we get to closing because really I my opinion is if we can't a close achievement Gap in the isqua school district who can and so we'll want to have a bigger broader discussion about that and I would want you to be a piece of that since your team is vital to us achieving that so but with that we'll let you go because the first part assessment it's going to be key yeah yeah and and some of what I'm talking about will kind of hint at some directions on some of that as we're trying to move forward in some purposeful ways um introducing some tools this year that might help us with that achievement Gap issue so I'll go ahead and share a screen I've got a a document here I can kind of walk
344us through um and um so for the school Improvement plan this year we just were thinking about kind of like yeah what do we what do you want to hear during those School Improvement plan presentations and what what data can we use to monitor um achievement our Gap and engagement um and so um looking at it we you know the timeline adjusting the timeline because we don't have usually principles are talking sip in August when they have when they're looking at the SBA data so they're they would have that data set and they'd be able to start having leadership team meetings around school Improvement planning and their growth goals and whatnot um they didn't have any of that data this year so uh we our timeline is off so we've we've pushed the timeline back
345um by a good month and a half um for us to get the Sip conversation going on the school end and then have it ready for the school board um and thinking about what the content of the Sip would be sticking with overall achievement uh Gap closing data and then um seems like engagement keeps coming up G in this remote learning world how do we make sure that students are engaged so the third area that um as our Ed Planning Group talked about was thought the school board might be interested in hearing from each school around their strategies for engaging students making sure that students are engaged in schooling at this time so those are the those are the three areas of the content the format of the Sip would look fairly similar um but
346we'd have some different data and so for the data we were looking at some different sources of data um and we were looking at some diagnostic data for the fall so for El Elementary we have four sources of data that we can grab from five including attendance uh Lexia is a a reading foundational skills oriented assessment that we have um and it will give us some early reading indicators uh for students so uh what we'll have is every month they create kind of a new Benchmark of where students are at so we'll be able to look at September once we see what September looks like if we have any gaps we might choose the October Benchmark instead but we would have a a baseline out of Lexia for for phic awareness phonics the basic reading
347skills so early reading indicators uh we are going to do the f&p fall Benchmark assessment where uh we we had it the window ends at the end of this month we needed to give H quite a long window for teachers to complete this and they're learning how to do it uh remotely so it's a one-on-one our normal one-on-one FMP assessment and we'll have that for grade one through five this year for math we have the I reading fall the I ready math assessment fall diagnostic so we added I ready math this year as a tool to help personalize learning and do intervention in math and it has a a really nice diagnostic assessment that we'll be giving three times or two to three times this year um the good news on the math the I
348ready math diagnostic is it has a really high reliability rating and correlation with the SBA so it's been about 85% predictive of scoring on the SBA the Washington Kids kindergarten assessment we're working on that now they have a little bit of an extended window so that um when that window closes we'll be able to grab all of the Walk kids uh data and provide that as normal so with Lexia FMP and I ready math we should be able to break it down by actually I know we can break all of those down by grade and or by race and program as well as grade and overall school so we'll be able to get some Gap closing data on where students are at and who which and identify which students have been most impacted or have
349um growing gaps due to the covid epidemic then for engagement we're mostly just looking at absence uh we're working on absence reports so that we could have percent of regular attendance but what's been more interesting as I've been looking at this um is the sorry see a typo um is the average absent count through October 16th so pick a a fall uh measure the absent the absent counts for last year are obviously thrown off um we can we can get last year's uh attendance rate and put that on there as well if we like um what we thought would be really important for principles to see is what the first six weeks of attendance looked like this year so they could identify any student that had lower attendance and and address that we are actually
350seeing right now really High attendance rates so that that may or may not end up being the the data that that um that is most revealing so I want to pause there at the elementary because I don't want to throw out so much that we can't see if there's any questions on Elementary um data so we could have some baseline data on students so I guess my question is like with the I ready if that's been done this year are we going to more so look at so we get our the S smps are going to be in January are we really going to say well the best way to focus is rather than look at last year which we don't we weren't collecting data we'll just look at the first six or eight weeks
351of this year is that what you're expecting then yes and we'll have so yeah we we we will have all of these um over the next couple weeks like we have the I ready math diagnostic data ready um principes went to a training last week to look at the data and um get the first look at that type how what they can learn from that data um on the on the engagement side um and I believe it was all grades of Elementary we did the family family connection meeting I guess I'd like to understand what was the percentage that actually took advantage of that um that's was a good question so with all if I can ask um a question so with the Lexia and the I ready math those you're giving to the kids
352now yes and the FMP as well and the FMP and really what are you comparing it against where you expected kids to be right now or are you comparing it all back to where they were in the spring were were any of these being used then I I mean I guess partly I mean we're looking for our kids on track yes how will I be able to see that from seeing the data excellent so that's a good question so the FMP we've always had the fall Benchmark and the fall Benchmark is um whether where they're supposed to be at the time of the test Administration so we'll be able to see on the FMP um how are they doing in comparison to where they're expected to be in the fall of their current school year
353the I ready um does the same they they have a [Music] um they've been you know they've been giving this test for a while so they and they have a really strong correlation with the S ba so they've created benchmarks for the fall so they they can tell us um they do give us a pretty broad range of students who are kind of on that bubble so the yellow group ends up being fairly large as we look at the data but the students who are green and blue have a really high probability of being on track to pass the SBA so that we have a really good sense of where they are compared to a fall Benchmark timing same thing with Lexia is it's you know it's been calibrated over years so that we can
354see whether they're on track to meet meet expectation in the areas that are assessed so for elementary all of our assessments will be um anchored to a the expected achievement at that time so R Rich if I if I can just to clarify so will the board see for example the um third grade FMP at Challenger X percentage of students were in this range last year X percentage of students are in this range this year I'm just trying to wrap my head around what are we going to be comparing to yeah we're going to be comparing it to standard for the most part the FMP we could because we give this every fall um so for the FMP for grades one through three we would be able to compare it to previous years kind of
355where they're at so that would be a pretty easy one with Lexia and um and I ready we do not have previous year assessments to compare it to Within isqua so we'd be comparing it to the benchmarks um kind of how what students are um meeting Benchmark which students are approaching Benchmark and which students are are well below Benchmark or or um below Benchmark so we don't but we don't have a previous year's comparison so it's new data for us so so again there would the board see would we see um you know 33% of the kids were in the the highest level 33% we're in the the normal level and 33% I'm just throwing those numbers out obviously is that how that would be displayed to us yes yes it would be displayed very
356similar to the SBA scores FP scores in the past with the the red yellow green and blue green meaning meeting standard and it's meeting The Benchmark standard for that time of year where the yellow would be students who are approaching um and then the read would be the students who were a year or more below where they're expected to be at the time of taking the test and and then lastly I didn't want to imply with the FMP data the the year-over-year comparison that that I um I'm not I'm not speaking for the board here I I was making an assumption the board would like to see some year-over-year comparison if it existed but I'm gonna um I I want to make sure that I'm not I'm not saying Rich that's what we'll do I
357guess I'd like to hear from the board if that that's something they would like and then I my question to you rich is is that a hard thing to do or is that a data set that we have access to fairly easily for the FMP that's a pretty easy thing for us to do so we can get the FMP we can get the three-year Trend like we've done in past years okay and the only difference then would be here this would have been a virtually administered FMP versus the previous years would have been in person FMP Y and and I guess at this point I I would be for Rich's sake probably want clarification if that is something the board would want you'd want to know that now right Rich yeah I I I'm assuming
358I yeah I'm assuming that you would where we have comparison Trend data you would want that Trend data okay so were you already kind of cooking that into your process then WR yeah I hadn't you know I hadn't written that one out yet but I probably would have gotten there if I we so well what have you been doing Rich I'm just well the interesting the interesting difference is that what we've provided the board before was the winter f&p for the previous three years so we've we've been able to do Trend data this is a fall FNP and the fall FNP it I prefer to compare like time to like time over three years so I do three fall fnps um I'll have to look at it and see if we if we want to
359do any winter fmps where we feel like we get an even stronger read on the students in that March um administration of the FMP but um we will make sure we get some Trend data on that thank you it's one of the few places we can give Trend data this year everything else is not we can't really give Trend data can I ask a more philosophical question about this um um do we think we plan to continue the SBA is the way we do these sip plans just I asked that given that higher ed seems to be starting to move away from standardized testing that is a philosophical question I mean for me I think honestly yeah looking at the way you've got it laid out here makes so much more sense to me than
360some of the SBA stuff to get a more holistic view well let me let me share then philosophically so let me share then with mtss is creating a whole new world of assessment for us as we as we set a vision towards mtss we're using a framework where we do fall diagnostic data and a couple benchmark assessments and looking for an assessment system that is um more cohesive and the closest we've had to that is the f&p um the IR math gives us a whole new look at at math uh assessment data in a way that's much more dynamic for teachers because they can not only they can not only see the diagnostic data but they can get progress monitoring data throughout the year and any student receiving intervention they can get weekly or monthly
361updates on how the students doing and then we' do two or three benchmark assessments meaning points where we assess every student to to to see overall growth so it is a much more Dynamic look at student achievement data and we we choose that in a mtss model choose that sort of data set because it it gives kind of livetime intervention information that says hey here's here's the the prerequisite skill that this student is missing so let's do an intervention on that prerequisite skill whereas SBA gives us a Content area or a strand to work on but it doesn't necessarily drill down to the specific skill so I do think the I ready math assessment the early returns from piloting it last year and from some feedback in the fall is that I think it's really
362promising to give us some some types of data could help us um hopefully put a dent in this achievement Gap in in mathematics um and we're looking at Lexia and I ready reading this year in the reading foundational skills adoption to decide which of those two programs could help give us that same sort of progress monitoring and diagnostic data to let us know which prerequisite skills students are missing and how we can go about filling those gaps so yes I like that data better than SBA data which is one time a year great I mean it's just it's really interesting to think about how we yes we may be reacting to the void left by SBA but for our conversation we're having before about you know some of these things may just be getting reimagined
363in the way we want to do them in the in the future so it's it's um it's a very it's a timely discussion yeah and the I ready reading assessment recently was approved by the state as a dyslexia screener so that's given us another angle at looking at that that software as well I I do think Sydney makes a good point though and this will not be this is like a little deja vu all over again for us but um you know the the movement towards standardized testing has has been a movement that's been pretty powerful really since since the early 2000s but I think people are starting to reassess that and um of course going forward at this point even for this year um it's my understanding we still are going to be required
364to administer an SBA I I don't know that they figured out how we're going to do that yet given that that's a federal requirement but as I contemplate the possibility of a new um and this happens whenever you have a change in the executive branch um they you know they are the ones who have the um the Department of Education and they do they drive a lot of this so it could be interesting to see what happens with standardized assessments over the next couple of years so maybe having our own tools might actually be prudent I mean as long as we're administering things like sbas or wasel or um msps or whatever that we call the test we'll have the data we'll share the data but whether or not we can count on it I
365don't know and it's going to be weird with that that hole in the data the next couple of years are going to be pretty weird so I appreciate the efforts Rich to bring a lot of this analysis this assessment analysis inh house because we know that's not going away just where it gets administered is the only thing that's changed so far yeah I I really do appreciate Sydney's question because it it points to why are we testing and what is that data being used for and I know that the esac and the MSP whatever it's been called has been more of a an accountability measure right um because entities outside the district whether it be the general public the taxpayers the state the federal government who's giving us tax money wants to know what are
366you doing and is it achieving what it needs to um but I think that's why you elect local school boards and I want to at what tool is going to work best for us to be able to be accountable that we're putting our resources where we need to and that we're getting to student achievement and so I think these might be more impactful to be able to do that it's it's a matter of whether or not then would the state or the public accept these as accountability measures because I want more than just accountability measures I want to act have actual measurements that we can then make adjustments for for the best of students and to meet student needs and that's what I think these do and I think in the end does it help
367us be accountable I think we it can do that too but I want testing that's going to help us move the dial and support students so I feel like I feel like we we have a pretty robust set of data at the Elementry um and we're like I said we're with the reading foundational skills we're looking at some other assessments to see what the long-term strategy for for monitoring this and doing some Gap closing um strategies through mtss using um assessment smart to inform instruction with the middle school with the Middle School it got a little bit trickier um with the math we we did purchase um Alex for the next three years for Middle School um and um so we're we're using a common assessment uh in the fall throughout Alex Alex didn't have
368as as robust a diagnostic assessment in the fall so we took a couple of their assessments and put them together and are running them through canvas so we're we're still trying to figure out how we grab data from canvas and disaggregate it so I I'm kind of hedging my bets a little bit here because we really want to get to knowing how different subgroups are doing on our our fall assessments um so we're gonna we're going to do our best but we're still learning how to pull that that data out so um we going to do a math fall assessment through Alex and of course that then gives some software to use to help do some um prerequisite skill Gap filling so they can assign to students who say are wrestling with a specific algebra
369skill that they need to participate in the current curriculum and they can do some back filling of those skills to try to try to close those gaps um with Ela we did take a little bit of an experimental route this year we are trying a new program a couple of new programs one's called called no writing it's a it's a Grammar and Writing scaffold program um particularly has a strong reputation among um in the special ed community and that I could find um particularly in followup with students who maybe have more of a dyslexia type reading challenge and writing challenge so it provides some scaffolds for those students but it has a um assessment tool um and it focuses on more of the the foundational reading skills again um to really get it at grammar
370and language ability of students but what we what we do find is that um our students who most seem to be struggling in ela and the secondary are often going to show through their their understanding of language and grammar and composition the basics of read of of language and so our Theory here is that the no Ric assessment is going to give us a way of of identifying students who are going to have some struggles on in English language arts um so it's a new new assessment to us and we are going to um pull that out and um we believe we'll be able to get that by um course uh grade level at the um middle school and by race and program as well nuela we're working on some problems with that one because
371it's new to us too and one of the challenges we're getting is just how to grab the data how to set up the assessment grab the data and use it so we're doing some troubleshooting on that right now uh Nua is a progr program that offers um leveled reading across content areas so one of the first things it does is it identifies students in five levels of reading so we were going to use their placement assessment to identify which students are reading at which Lexile ranges so um and so we'd be able to kind of say how many students are at these different reading ranges for their grade and the nice thing is then it also gives instruction in or allows for students to be be able to access social studies and science uh content
372um at their reading level so it gives a scaffold instructionally as well so that's the data that we're trying to get for the middle school right now I would say long-term I think we're gonna have to based on my early experience I think we'll continue to look at whether Alex is the right um math Assessment program and that's just one that they have experience with so um it could be a really good long turn tool for us but in the language arts I think we're gonna we're going to find that we we're not going to have as robust a data as say an SBA would provide us um and I I can't say right now that that no reading a new Zella would predict SBA performance but I think what it would what it will
373do is help us identify students that need support Rich you saw your typo under um engagement in Middle School to average absent count yeah yeah sorry yeah thank you cut and paste okay it'll be there in high school when we get there too okay okay and same thing for the attendance yeah on all three levels and Rich maybe you could give me a quick refresher because I don't remember ever seeing it with my own kids do we do because going back to the no red ink do we do like sentence structure I've never seen homework where they like build a sentence and all the defined things around sentence structure yeah when we when we did the ELA ad last couple of ela adoptions we we've we've definitely done more of an embedded approach so it's
374it's built in um and and overall we still strongly support that approach of saying that the the the time when students really know sented structure grammar those skills is when they can embed it in their reading and writing right when they understand what authors are doing when sentence structure to be effective and when they can then transfer that to their own writing so we still want to do that embedded we use Jeff Anderson's uh body of work around grammar that is what we've we've been basing it on that said we have had feedback from teachers that when a student is really struggling and needs some of that direct instruction on it that um having a having a tool that can help provide that and provide some differentiation could be helpful so no R Inc is
375also a little bit of an experiment right now in supporting students because it also has adaptive software that allows for some direct instruction based on your individual needs fun part about it the teachers report is that they also fill out an interest survey when they start the software and the examples from the reading are based on the students interests as well as their needs so they so it really gets at trying to support students um to build that that grammar instruction we felt like it would be important during this remote learning period when teachers can't be there and check their writing constantly in the classroom to have another tool that could help provide some reinforcement around grammar um so we're trying it as an experiment this year and we had several teachers who were really
376excited about using it we did um have a lot of buyin at the middle school and some moderate interest at the high school but they gave us a really great deal price-wise for to um offer it to our high school classes as well is there um a component of it rich that and this more just curiosity that is um the old traditional diagramming of sentences that's kind of where I thought Marne was going when she referenced that is you know the old school di you know pull out the subject the predicate I don't know for certain that it uses diagramming but it definitely gets into the parts of speech and the the the more specific explicit taking apart a sentence and and what are the parts and what do each of those parts do in
377the sentence so there a little bit more direct instruction but what it is is it's direct instruction for the students as they need it in what they need so you wouldn't you wouldn't use this necessarily to make a whole class assignment what you do is you give the assessment and it says hey this student really struggles with this this area of grammar so you give that student that assignment to get some reinforcement on that skill so it's it's adapted to the students need and differentiated okay so um high school high school we have a little different data set we we still have the no red ink the high school ELA teachers wanted to give the common writing assessment in the fall um that was uh working with them they were all headed that way anyway
378so we're collecting that data again um we're trying to figure out and it's a risk we're taking doing the assessment through canvas and the scoring through canvas makes a lot of sense for us but we haven't figured out how to grab the data yet so we're we're taking a little bit of a risk here um worst case we'll be able to get it by course at the very minimum um and again oh I'm sorry I I see I got this wrong this should be sas's Pearson our soft our our math curriculum we're using the the software that comes with a math curriculum to do a math assessment and we'll be able to do that both fall and spring as well to see some growth data um if we so choose so um so very similar
379at the high school the only thing is at the high school we do have some other data that we've put traditionally put in our sip that is still available so this is one of the places where we do have available of our F rate by content and grade level and then by race and program and we can continue to use the grad rate and um uh executive director Hood suggested that uh you all might like us to integrate the ospi on track to graduate data um uh go ahead and just put it right there in the Sip so we'll pull that from OSI um and of course my typo again here so so for high school we'll have have some of that course level um information um from last year hey Rich on the uh
380for the high school so this no red ink grammar screener it's only for regular Ela students so there's no monitoring or assessment of students in the honors yeah thing because because by the time you get to high school the grammar lessons tend to be more on the um on the lower end of the achievement spectrum that the teachers really felt like grammar has not been an issue in their honors and and um AP and IB classes they really felt that that it was just not a relevant assessment for them in that those courses at this point because they're they're at a higher level class anyway so that it doesn't really assess those higher L level skills that that are relevant to them so they will be all courses will be taking the common writing assessment
381which is what the teachers really felt was most um relevant information okay thank you yeah I will say that again the no ready Inc is probably more going to help us flag students who need support then it is going to give us a predictor of SBA um I have a I have a couple questions for for um for high school the on trct to graduate will that include or give a sense of the um I guess the incomplete closure that we were we've tracked a couple times just in different conversations just I don't know if that fits into that same category it the not really because the entract to graduate is just going to be last year's freshman and how many of last year's freshmen um are are on track to graduate as of the
382end of the year is that Donna did you want to speak to that one well I don't think that would be consistent with the spirit of what the emergency rules were which is why I'm saying I I highly doubt they would do that they wanted us not to give FS um so the incomplete should not count as an F in their own on track to graduate data by that logic right like it it shouldn't um I however am monitoring how we are making up any incompletes that need to be resolved keeping in mind that not all incompletes need to be resolved now they've given us permission to graduate kids with those but we are watching that really carefully and I think by semester we'll see a good number of kids who are in The Next
383Level class resolve a bunch um and we also are using last year's PSAT scores to do the same thing right now so as we walk through that it's just a matter of time as our counselors process it and then I think we'll have a big number we resolve in January through the first course passings of the Year okay so that one may not be a a sip conversation then but it would be good to just keep that have that come back again um just to see the progress and the incompletes and then on the engagement piece I guess I'm wondering about and I won't have the right words but about um progress or percentage of students accessing accessing those resources that normally correlate to success so counselor um college counselor meetings or um or oh
384the plan for your life the like college and Beyond plan or whatever it's called college and Beyond college high school and Beyond high school and high school Beyond I'm getting better I'm getting closer to the language but I think we there are some resources that we believe if accessed and leveraged give us a sense of you know potential progress or progress toward completion um that for me I guess I'm putting in the engagement category to make sure yes I'm getting to my classes but are students accessing those additional um programs if you will that are about the overarching success or or the Beyond High success and I was going to I was going to say here that um I I don't think attendance is going to necessarily be super enlightening data I think it's important
385because we've used it in the last couple years with the Sip process I'm in the Sip we've traditionally had that kind of what else are you doing part of the Sip where people did pbss or they they chose some cultural competency or they chose another area and this and this idea that with this is to be a little bit more qualitative um qualitatively what are you doing to engage students and how are you knowing that they're engaged and I I think if you if there are some things you want them to speak to in terms of um credit retrieval or a a completion of incomplete courses or um resources such as career counselors and that sort of thing we could offer some suggestions of things that they could speak to that are of Interest the
386board in this section if if if we want well and one thing that that is new this year I think Sydney that might get at your question a little bit um OPI has asked us to transform our financial aid offerings into opt out offerings so we had really really high turnout rates for that material in the past anyway and we had really experimented with finding ways to make sure that we could post them at our websites and then parents and kids could visit if they weren't free that night somebody had to work weight or has two jobs or whatever we were always thinking about that access and now we're going to actually embed that in the school day and use either cell time or Flex or Nest time to make sure that whole grade bands
387are getting that information so I think some of some of the answers to your questions will be 100% of our kids unless their families opt them out um which is really positive but I can certainly make a note for my folks that you might have some interest in hearing about that as they go into their sip plans yeah I like all of those examples right the the the resources we believe it it's like me finishing my undergrad and never looking at study abroad like I just never accessed those resources and I think we have an interesting opportunity and that people just may have less capacity to access things so if we have a sense of what are some of the key resources and the one you just mentioned is a great example but the top
388few that we think you know um kiddos who are formulating good plans are progressing toward graduation would should could access and get a sense of what is the um consumption or adoption of some of those I think would be be really helpful to understand I I worry that um I worry about this in my own house but I worry that we've only got so much capacity to get through the actual kind of assigned school day that we're missing the signals for the additional um items or look forward items uh for sure I I guess the one comment I would make is um back to what Donna was saying that it it wouldn't be logical for OSI to count incompletes as part of the on track let's keep a close eye on that because just because
389it wouldn't be logic doesn't mean that's not what they'll do and you know we'll all scream at them and then they'll they'll fix it but I I do think that's something we want to keep our eye on um you know I'm curious too and it just came to mind because we're talking about all of this you know we know for a fact now because the data is in that um next year could likely be the largest kindergarten class in the history of America because this year's a lot of people chose to keep their kind kindergartner home I'd be curious how many incoming College freshmen chose to opt out of this year um or at least this fall you know or taking a gap year or whatever I I don't have any data on that but
390as you know we've we've maintained and enjoyed one of the highest um graduate into four-year College rates of any District in the entire State and I'll be curious to see what happens to our numbers and and it's a it's a logic thing actually if if you know if a family decided not to do to start this year I get it I I get it on the kindergarten side I'd get it on the college freshman side if it was the right decision for that family to make so I don't I wouldn't read anything into that data it's just those are that that's data we look at so that the idea of this um just to get just to kind of close out the zp conversation and the idea of this year would be that they'd be
391using fall data to set goals for this school year um probably staying many schools will probably choose to stay in the same areas of emphasis that they had planned on being in but I do know that some principles are um looking at the data and being a little bit more flexible and dynamic about kind of how they're they're conceptualizing their sip so we'll see kind of where it lands on that it also means the next year would have sip data that would need to show beginning and end of this year and so that they can report on how it went this year and then if SBA happen we can pick up the SBA data again for future years so it's going to be odd years for for sip I'm sorry Haron you you were wanting
392to say something so you're saying that there's a good correlation at the elementary level between some of this assment data and how kids would perform in SBA so does that mean that I think what I've had trouble with with this whole remote thing is is that so sure we're hearing from a lot of families that there's more teaching happening but I'm not confident until I see some of this that there's actually more learning happening so will this be able to answer that question for me because I have very significant concerns about you know I think people there are some even within our uh teacher ranks to believe like oh it's going to be the same like I'm doing the same amount of work so therefore must I'm going to get the same results so I
393mean how are we just sip aside how are we actually assessing like are our kids actually learning I think for the for the math the I ready um assessment will will give us a really good early indicator on the math assessment Lexia will get us um it's a reading foundational skills so it'll get us to fluency in in Reading which is a really big big deal and that's why the whole dyslexia law was passed is is we needed to measure fluency better so Le Lexia will help us with that some schools are going to switch to a few schools or a few programs are going to switch to I ready reading but it's a very similar measure but we'll have that measure for reading fluency and math and that will I I really do believe
394that will let us know whether learning's happening um it'll be interesting to see how much we embed Alex and use Alex to help with math assessments at the middle school and um and how much we use the SAS assessments at the high school because they do give some some opportunities for some online assessments to to measure learning um but I will I will say that I think most of the teacher teams that we're currently surveying teachers right now TL is but we've known that the biggest question that we've had since last spring and throughout this fall is that question of how can we most effectively assess learning and how do we make sure that it's actually student learning we're still struggling with parents we're working really hard to ask parents to let students make a
395mistake in I ready or in Lexia that if they not sure where to click on something tell them where to click on it but then back off don't give them any hints because when you're using adaptive software if parents give hints then the software thinks the student understand something that they don't and that's not helpful for the teacher to identify learning needs um We are continuing to use I think the FMP has been a workshop for teachers on how to assess reading remotely and I think that's been really good for us to do to sit there and listen to a student read online oneon-one and ask them to then describe their comprehension to that text is really critical so I think we're getting some really good information in those early years um and we're working
396really hard with the middle and high school teachers too to say okay how can we do this assessment what does it mean to really know whether students are learning because we do know that a lot of teaching is happening but it's a question is that information going to be released to parents because I think all of us would like to know because still haven't been told the answer on is there a Gap in my kids learning from last spring yeah we fed some language for the I ready math assessment because it's our first time and we we are looking for confirming data on the day-to-day observations um what we're what we're trying to say is and there is a pretty broad the only the only challenge with the fall assessment with I ready math is
397the what we sometimes refer to as the bubble group that group of PE students who kind of live right at standard it doesn't it doesn't really it just indicates that this is your bubble group this is your group that they might be okay or they might not be so get more information and that's that's actually I'm really happy that they put it that way because it it tells us that that this is the group that you really need to be watching more carefully because you're not sure where they're at the ones in the red we know they're about a year behind and we know that we have to intervene with those students and the students who are well into the green and blue we know that they're they're meeting their benchmarks but it identifies a
398pretty large group of in the yellow so what we're trying to feed the teachers is in this first assessment as we're learning how to use the data and everything we need to indicate to students when we or to parents when we have multiple pieces of data that confirm yes the student has some areas they need to be really working on I think by January we'll be able to really report that very clearly to parents I think that through I ready I think as we get closer and closer to conferences we're going to have more and more confidence as we see their dayto day assessments as well so um so we chose not to go ahead and send I ready reports I will say that we're still we had to work on how we do assessments
399with our elll students online that created another layer of complexity that were still that teachers really wrestled with and um and then we also had some issues with the I ready testing where we had some again some parents who who um did not follow the directions to step aside once the student started the actual math so that's why having confirming having more than one data point is important for instruction Harlin I appreciate your question because it's gone back to a foundational if I could wave a wand and change our language I would love to change from talking about teachers to talk talking about facilitators of learning because that mindset completely shifts if my job isn't to just instill this knowledge and hope you catch it to ensuring that whatever it is I'm doing you're able
400to move along the pathway of learning and I think it is the biggest concern you can be the best teacher out there and know all the pedagogy to share that information but if it's not connecting with the student if they're not learning that's at the core of what we're seeing and now is a challenge that's the biggest challenge to this system is I think we've done a lot of help and we're hearing a lot of stories about work that teachers are doing to teach and I don't know if they have all the foundational things that they need to facilitate learning and if we look at things with that mindset how does that I I think this is the hardest time to really grasp that but that's ongoing that's ongoing work for me I think when
401we look at our sips if we really want to see change it is changing that mindset of I'm not a teacher I'm a facilitator of learning and the shift is on what is the student doing not what am I doing as the one giving the information so thank you for that question and I had a I had a great conversation with our elementary instructional coaches today and they very much using different language but they very much were having this conversation how do we help teachers now go from getting their feet under them for instruction to really back to what we what they do in the classroom which is confer with students and do those small groups where they're really their primary task is to monitor the learning that's happening and a lot of teachers are
402making that shift right now but the coaches are instructional coaches and I know our principles are working really hard to try to help make that shift now just like in the classroom and when you're working with those small groups it's about monitoring their learning and having them demonstrate their learning and then you guide them through that so that that is definitely right where right where the conversation is is going right now with a lot of lot of Staff you know very simplistically for me um I I agree with harland's point that parents I can only imagine if I had children in school right now I'd like to know is there any way that the system is trying to measure the impact of this remote learning and frankly um I'd like to know because what I
403suspect and I could be wrong I'm just raw suspicion here is that students aren't making the same kinds of gains and for me that's more of a rational for why we need to continue to work to try to get students in person I'm just I'll just put it out there that's what I believe I have no no evidence to to prove that I would love it if we could get some evidence and I'd love to be proven wrong by the way i' love to know that if kids were making the same academic gains in this um ISD virtual learning as they were previously I just have a strong suspicion that they're not we did a we did modify the the scope and sequence and learning expectations to try to really focus on what's most essential
404because I I don't think it's as efficient as live instruction in-person instruction right any other questions or comments around the Sip data that we're using um we're GNA have I think it's either in the parking lot or trying to look at my thing um or we'll be talking more about the sip from our standpoint as a board what do we what is it that we're looking for um and and really around student achievement and moving the bar closing the achievement Gap um the opportunity Gap so how can we really make those changes um and um what do we see in the Sip with regards to our our district as a whole and then piecing it so we're going to have more conversation around this um but I thought it's going to be important for us
405to know what are we doing for this year to really catch that information Harland I see your hand up again so to answer your question Marney as I would love for us to have some prary conversations because I guess what I don't want to hear is like from every single building it's like well you know this year is very challenging for the data can we just skip academic data this year and it can just be sent out to US based on like what you're talking about but the conversation could be about how are we serving kids and Families how is each I mean that's what I really want to know is in the era of this pandemic how are we serving and supporting kids and families at each building yeah that's a good point how
406much time because they have nine minutes so how can they use that more productively what is it we want to hear in those nine minutes because this data is going to be all something what I worry about is it's just G be a conversation of each person stumbling on the data that's all going to be new to them and so for them to try and translate that into meaning in those N9 minutes seems like something be best served for you and us as a cabinet and board to dialogue about which also I think SS a message on hey we understand that we want learning to be our Focus but we ultimately we want healthy and pring kids and families so I'm a big data guy you know that and I care deeply about student achievement
407but in this instance it just seems like it's it's just we were put into this unfair conundrum that I just feel like we shouldn't just try and put it in a box just because it belongs in a box so I'm just throwing it out there for the rest of or to think about that maybe we use this time just to hear from each building on how they're serving and supporting our kids in this pandemic and recovery but that's it what are others other people's thoughts on that I had to run and find a power cord for my dying machine um so here's like so I'm not a fan of the whole SBA thing I think the data in this space is a little wonky I like this version better I agree with Harlem with what
408you're saying but what I've been sitting here thinking is if we were to do it that way then we'd have to have at least for me I'd have to have some way of actually having the family feedback in that I don't know how I would be I wouldn't be as excited about hearing the like the school leadership tell me what a great job they're doing reaching out to kids like that wouldn't that wouldn't work for me and it wouldn't Jive in my head so I think your your ask is the right one which is how are we serving kids in this time but the but the actual voice of the kids and the families for me would be what would make that work actually can come back another time would we want to develop some
409type of survey to go out towards the end of December like over break or when they WR as they get back from B break or How would how do you think we might be able to cap capture that data because I'd want it by school for elementary you could do after first try and for secondary you could do at the end of the first semester I'd be really close to when we get the sips but if they could process it that fast and and you know what I was going to add in I mean I I get I don't want to get mired in the in the data because it is new but I also want to know what are they specifically doing in their building to help fill the gaps that the kids have
410I think one of the one of the things about using fall data is fall data's primary purpose is to identify the students who need supports and and so the the question then is is exactly what you were saying an which is okay so identified students that need support what then and more importantly is it effective like just because we're like oh here you have an added Zoom meeting with this classified staff member but is it actually moving the needle both from how they're feeling to how they're doing right because that would be key because if we're really not filling in the Gap then we're just making a in the end a bigger Gap right and I just I'll share my personal example right I I feel like my fifth graders teacher is doing an amazing
411job I've also spent the last 24 hours trying to find um either a pod or a supportive center-based um situation for him because it's not working he he's not um he's not making progress in fact I think he's he's losing ground because of he's not doing he's not able to connect in this way he's a social kid he thinks of school as a social activity the learning is part of that structure for him it's not working and so I I would so that's why for me while I think teachers are doing an amazing job and his is I've watched the class I've done it multiple times it still doesn't change that he's not able to retrieve I think how how Howen say it you said the the teaching versus The Learning he's not able to
412um internalize the learning and so I think that's the piece we have to to hear in this and hopefully we found a pod he can join today so will he be doing both so our goal was to find a PO of kids that are ISD kids and in his grade so we think we've found one that have like his grades he'll be accessing the same basic schedule Etc and then he'll get extra support throughout it um that's that's been our goal but yeah it's It's Tricky and we've got all the resour like that's the thing that kills me is we've got all the resources in the world we're both here we're both Highly Educated we're doing it you know we're doing work in the evening but it's just not how he internalize the school yeah
413y wow Sydney that to me you know people keep some people keep saying Ron why do you keep pushing on this why do you keep pushing on this you just answered the question for me in a big way yeah this is not about um ethnicities it's not about resources I mean because I can guarantee you there are probably some families with you know lowincome families and for whatever reason their child's doing okay that's right and so that this one so I just wanted to clarify if I heard what I thought I heard so thank you Rich you've you brought a data set that we are regardless of whether we use this for the Sip process this is a data set we need to continue to follow to see how we're doing as a system absent
414the normal datas that we have but what I what I heard was the idea of maybe we want to use our our precious time with our buildings differently this year we'll do all the data stuff we can share that but do we want to have a different kind of conversation and does the board have two or three questions that they would like us to pose to our buildings that they would come prepared to address those questions and then what we can have the data we don't even have to have the buildings there to have the data conversation necessarily well I think the problem is and I don't remember if it was Marne or Sydney who said it that it's one thing for the buildings to say oh yes this is all the way we're all
415the ways we're engaging kids but are the kids engaged in the same way and and I'm not Sydney gonna put you on the spot because this is personal but you know kid is not engaged in in the right way does his teacher recognize that I mean you know because the teacher as you say the teacher's doing a great job but does the teacher know that hey for at least this kid it's not really working or or online isn't really working and maybe it has nothing to do with the teacher but is there that connection is there that realization on both ends because otherwise we've got a bunch of people who think this is really working I've got all these smiling Zoom faces and you've got a chunk of parents and kids saying yeah not so
416much and if they recognize it well first the step would be to recognize it but then do something about it makes a difference that makes the connection so the kid is learning so I'm not sure how we get at it right and I'll just share from our situation it's a it's it's a Continuum of understanding I think that the attendance would say that he logs in on time he's in every session he's supposed to be in he's submitting things right I think the next level down is what we see is like at random I I don't think I was talking to an but the other day I walked in the room and he's like cooking he's cooking a full meal for himself and he's like well but I'm on break I was like no your
417teacher's talking bud and he's like oh my teacher's talking like he's doing all the things to physically connect and then I think so the teacher is sending the data okay so now we can see he's turning stuff in but he's not finishing it when you ask him about that he said well the teacher just says to turn it in at the end of the session so we have to be like okay well what does complete mean like we we have to step through that all those things would naturally I think happen in an in-person session the cues of completeness the cues of um what good looks like that those would happen if someone was there with him we fly in and out like we try to do touch points throughout the day and he's at
418the computer he's in his class so now it's like okay now we're into D so we've been communicating with a teacher on what does that mean what is how do we make up some of these should we make up something so the teacher knows that piece but we you know in talking to him even over the last couple days it's like oh he really um it doesn't feel like real school to him I don't know how else to describe that he doesn't have the same contract in Virtual School the same social contract with his peers the same um accountability contract with his teacher he just doesn't see it he's like yeah I log on I send things and so we started talking about it he was like oh oh I'm supposed to still check it
419matters that I'm engaged for my peers like he it he doesn't see it it doesn't I like real school is the best way I could describe it he doesn't he's not experiencing it as real school so all those metrics and he's probably like Mom you're over writing this but we're really trying to figure it out so we just think he needs to have more that social contract put back in place of I go here this is what I do when I'm here not cook instead of doing my math um not not play with my new puppy because she's in the room we think that if we put back in the social contract which is what iners is about they'll be like Oh I'm doing school and I can walk through it that's not has nothing
420to do with whether his teacher who's who is really amazing is doing great work and is trying to connect with them it's completely a different angle so this is what we're doing in my house these last couple days so that's why I'm sharing it like it's very we would be in all of those engagement categories and I think because he is that smiling face because he always answers the questions his teacher's like this is great but he's cooking I if we do the Sip that way we're going to get a bunch of principles who are going to list off all the amazing things that they and their staff are doing to try to keep all the kids engaged and I'm sure they are doing it and I'm sure they're great things right what I'm not
421sure of is how many kids it's working for right yeah I I've heard you say that phrase before Sydney and I wrote it down again about the the social contract with school yes and it is an interesting idea yeah and and I I think I was talking to Ann but this is the other thing was like what is I've said this before about kids and I I'm raising two athletes they do school to get access to sports and they're willing to excel at school because that means they get to go to practice they get to compete on a field other kids it's different motivation I know some kids it's literally the grade my kids it's not it they're like if this is what I need to do in order to compete this is what I'm
422going to do well we've taken away the competition so I have it's I can't take away football practice I can't give them those other outlets so he's like well I don't have the social contract of my peers or or My Teacher directly and I don't have this thing I'm trying to go I'm trying to access if I do the right thing it he's just you know today he really like he doesn't want to go to a pod so today he's focused like today he's like oh hold on I can get really focused if you won't send me to this pod right that's what's it's that's the only way I can describe it is this social contract of school and this is for a kid who's highly engaged very pleasant very collabor like he wouldn't show
423up in any other statistic but he is not he's not in it and I think this is really important feedback and I would love to get this kind of feedback from a whole bunch of people and I have no idea how to do it right is that a thought exchange is that a survey I don't know I don't know I know I think we need to do a survey and I think we need after first try for elementary and maybe we just completely change sips this year maybe it's we do it into all elementary together and then all middle together and then all high together yeah that would be cool because that way you could then you have that delay so you could get you could do your secondary after a second or after the
424first semester ends because if you do high schools at the end you'd have plenty of time to process the data and if we do Elementary first um and then it'll I don't I I think that we need to explore getting some sort of I think it speaks this this weaves in our engagement part and our piece with how do we reach out to our community and how do we show them during this recovery period that we really are interested in what they're feeling and experiencing and so I think it would also show our staff that that's what we value too so again I just I think we should pivot off of data not because I don't care about data but I I think asking for buildings to try and explain something that they've never seen
425before is not setting realistic expectations and I think that the way Rich has explained it to us I mean but I mean you spent an hour setting this up for us before we've even looked at any data right so I don't and they have n minutes to do that I mean that's just not realistic so I would rather us have a separate work study where we go through the data and then come up with some sort of tool that will work there's got to be other districts or other states that are doing this sort of Engagement piece because that's that's the heart of what we care about the whole child and that social emotional element in the family engagement is sort of like this gives us an opportunity that we may take out of the
426pandemic and still use this type of element that becomes of our standard work so I would approach it from something that may become an enduring peace that that allows us to assess engagement because we know I don't know Rich what is the Tie between family engagement and Student Success in the elementary world but this may be something in the future we would identify oh great there's not this family engaged at we see at the early levels and that we could intervene in that way and start providing support to the family to help kids be successful from the earliest start I know I'm throwing L ideas out there I don't have solution but I just think this is the year to think about it differently well I certainly certainly think we need to be knowing from
427our family's perspective how this learning is going for their students and how the engagement is working whether we're surveying them now or as we get you know the end of the first trimester I think it's really important to be hearing directly from them how this is working um and the idea of doing like all elementary you know for one and then middle and then high school has real validity for this year because normally we bring them all together because they're a feeder and we have a group of Elementary that go to middle that go to high and and that there's there's value in all of that but we're kind of in a different place now and you know hearing more from all of Elementary at once might also help all of them as well this
428time and then you know doing them separate so I could see value in that although you'd have to split Elementary into two I know eight hour Zoom meeting but remember Suzanne I hate to say this but we could still be on zoom and then we can no it just be like Skyline if you think about it Suzanne all element those it' only be like the skyline Peter pattern no there's there's 15 I do the skyline feeder pattern if you count Skyline up nine when we do the skyline feeder pattern so it's yeah in the ballp part about double I I think principles would really love to have a meaningful conversation and um I think the data conversation could be separate and I know that I do feel like like some of the data they the
429principles are looking at is to is to try to figure out how to monitor the learning but um I think being more holistic on this they might really appreciate that I don't know what uh director Mars and Mandell and Hood think but oh they're all on they're all on that's what I'm that's why that's why I mentioned them bring them in bring them in yeah was they're all here hi hi I think it's an interesting idea I think um we're already talking about tracking some engagement and how to get our tier 2 teams to um keep some standard information about barriers that we find so I'm sure that each group would each school would have some information from that process to share um it might be similar between all the schools so sitting through 15
430kind of similar presentations for the elementaries might get make you a little weary but um no I think that we could definitely highlight some of the um even if it's just a specific story about a family like yours um Sydney was really compelling about the struggles of your your child so perhaps the other um schools would have a success story to share or something like that that they were able to find some resources or some way to overcome those things and I think if we had the survey prior to the um the the elementary session that would also be um informative to what they share with you so I think it's an interesting idea yeah I would um agree with Susan I think the um the survey piece would be incredibly beneficial and realistic um
431to our principles and kind of a for lack of a better term almost like a just in time um PD piece because I think principles I think they want that information anyway so at the end of Tri one in middle school why would we not want to know what is working well for families and kids because I'm going to say this and I hope it's not our reality but what if we're in a uh online live instruction for into into second try wouldn't we want to figure out how and what we can do better and so I think the principles would be right on board with this um and then um speaking for my group I mean very colle y they they would probably have a lot of fun presenting with their own group um
432at in a middle school CT I think it would be a different flavor uh for the presentation uh for director Mullin um the struggle is real uh because uh your experience that you described um is very much like my son um and and it's it's real I mean it it it's just a hard hard environment uh for certain kids um for different reasons I don't think think it's easy to Define why it's hard for this little batch of kids I think it's hard for a million different reasons for a million different styles of Learners so okay well I want to be respectful of oh go ahead Donna I'm sorry no no go go go you're you're good it's all good no because I was about to say I want to be respectful of people's time
433but we haven't heard from you the the high school folks are are so much working together all the time anyhow um they did surveys last year because they really did want to hear from their kids they just value and and treasure that student voice so much and it's so helpful too for them to have it captured that and and to bring it back to their staffs so I I think they're super comfortable in in that World um I think for them they'll just really want to know exactly what it is we're trying to surface so they can get at that I I think as long as they have that Clarity um they'll be they'll be ready to go and and intrigued and can I suggest if we're gonna do a survey that one of the
434things we ask is whether or not kids are in pods private tutoring some kind of supportive thing outside of the ISD just so we have a sense of it because I really don't I mean I see it on Facebook all the time but I have no sense if it's 5% or 50% well and it's not just that but if what we find when you break down the data is the kids that are engaging in being successful in their learning are in something like you said a pod a tutor it whatever that's really important exactly to know and then I hope we also send it to the Thousand students who left our system because it'd be really nice to know what their data is those thousand elementary kids to see how they're probably harder to do
435oh why we have we have their contact information know who they are I guess that's true I guess have would be the K students that never came never enrolled but they're not in school anywhere well presumably so private school is a little harder to follow up on the Homebase students we keep we kept we created a database of contact for um the students who chose Homebase learning so we could easily reach out to that group you know 600 thank you Rich I and I know we're running getting a little here Marne but I did just want to say a few things that um I love this discussion I I will tell you um one of the things I'm a little nervous about as we talked about it I thought okay we've got a grading period
436coming up we've got midt try coming up and we've been getting you know by and large people have been saying yeah your your ISD live remote learning such an an improvement it's going great I'm wondering if that attitude will stay the same if they get a bunch of bad grades coming in if they see oh well I thought it was going great because my kid was happy well apparently he was happy because he was cooking and petting the dock and everything but maybe not learning and and I I I love that thank you for sharing that Sydney and Jason as well because I think that really does help us so I'm just curious in my mind do do our teachers and parents views and beliefs align and will they align with the grade day because
437we're going to get gr data and so I think that'll be interesting too to to see if you have teachers out there going yeah I think he I think uh Jason Morris's son is doing great right until I figure out the the grade and I see that he's got a a d in my class or something you know I I so I think there's a lot to unpack with that and um and I'm also intrigued by the idea that maybe Co offers an opportunity to do something a little different with SIP that we can can always go back to the traditional way of doing it when we have traditional data sets and everything so anyway that's all I had to say Marne thank you for letting me run long so I know um tomorrow the
438first item on our agenda is to continue this conversation so um so you can think on it tonight think about other things you want to talk about um and try to dig somewhere in your emails uh those sip reports that we got this past year because I really want to be able to do you know and highlight what you're thinking especially when it comes to some of the schools that uh I think we want to talk frankly about where do we have our largest concerns um where are we seeing Trend data that is um kind of pequs our attention and have those conversations and we know the public is watching during these so we do know this is a public meeting but um if we're not you know during our board assessment earlier today thank
439you for all the reflection that you did if you know monsters live in the dark I think it was Dr Phil that would always say monsters live in the dark and it's not until we start highlighting and talking about um these challenging topics that we move forward so um we're going to finish the continue this conversation in the morning so if there's no objections Mar just a reminder um staff will be in an all admin tomorrow that starts at 8 o'clock I'll be kicking it off and then I'm joining so um I'm not sure about availability so this may be more of a conversation with just the board and myself um tomorrow but they they know they're welcome to join us it just it they're going to be double we're kind of double booked up
440tomorrow a lot of folks we'll be we'll be done Ron tomorrow uh 11:15 is when that agenda finishes up it could be done a little bit earlier but probably see a lot of us around 11 30 or so yeah so we're starting our day with uh the Finish finishing this conversation and and it will be good to just have us as a board really talk about what do we glean from the sips what is it that you know um we have our biggest kind of ahas and concerns and then we're also tomorrow morning we're going to be discussing the role of the sro's and I think I had Diane forward you um an article that was in the nsba and I saw it and I'm like uh this is timely this is exactly what we're
441going to be talking about so um I expect that will be an interesting and I have no idea where that conversation is going to lead but I figure it is one that is um right for us to have a discussion about so with that if there's no objections I will let you go and um we'll well we don't adjourn the meeting we're just going to hold it over until tomorrow and I forget what the phrasing of that's called see you tomorrow we're recessing we're going Teresa okay sounds good okay thanks everybody see you in the morning see you in the morning