001It is 506. I am calling to order the special board meeting of January 29th, 2026. Mrs. Sch, may we get a roll call? >> Yes. Carol Fox >> here. Megan Miller, >> present. >> Brian Nichols >> here. >> Tom Henkins and Amy Levy are unable to be here this evening. Joanne Rue >> here. And Tia Johnson >> here. All members are present then except Tom and Amy. >> Thank you. May I get an approval of the agenda? >> So moved. [laughter] >> Second. >> Motion by Brian Nichols, seconded by Carol Fox. Any discussion? >> Hearing none. All in favor? >> I. >> Any oppose? Motion carries unanimously. Our first and only agenda item tonight is the open lit literacy and skyrocket information sess session. The purpose of this is this will be an opportunity for
002board members to discuss with representatives from open literacy and skyrocket the services and programs they have to offer. Board members will have an opportunity to ask questions and gather additional information. Tonight we have uh Dr. Anderson, Le and Lisa Fers, and the representatives. Dr. Anderson, do you want to introduce the group? >> Well, I'm going to let Lisa do most of the introductions, but I will tell you that uh we were able to meet Mike and Sarah this afternoon, the principles and directors. Uh so, we were already able to get a little bit of a foretaste of what you're going to hear tonight to learn about Skyrocket and to learn about open literacy. I think the uh presentation we had earlier was um you know very wellreceived and we're interesting in interested in learning more.
003So I'll turn it over to Lisa. >> Great. Thank you. Um first off, we really do appreciate the time with the principles this afternoon. It was really a helpful discussion. Um we did make copies of the decks that we used today and Michelle has those if anyone wants to take one with them when they leave. Um, so good evening and thanks again for all the time. Um, I've asked each of our guests to introduce themselves as a part of their presentation. So I'm going to yield the evening to our discussion with them. But before I do, I'm going to make three requests for tonight. The first to ground the dialogue in our offer of a pilot one school. Our intent in making this offer was to provide a tool to support staff, elevate outcomes for
004students, and offer a learning tool that can assist your board in developing a district-wide vision for the future. This is a tool to support that work. This is not that work. At Monday's meeting, board member Miller respectfully asked for the opportunity to be transparent and to have feedback accepted in the spirit given. Today, I'm going to ask for the same. I'm going to name that I believe for some the core question isn't about these interventions, but is about the question of whether or not the district should partner with our foundation. And because that hasn't been explicitly named, I sense that it bleeds in other parts of the discussion. So my second request is we put that issue in the parking lot and we find a time down the road to actually discuss that and not
005let that question shadow the exploration work with these organizations. And finally, one of the greatest gifts I've received in engaging in the hard work of education is the privilege to get to know some amazing and gifted people, including the two who are our guests tonight. Both Michael and Sarah have devoted their professional work to challenging us and then supporting us in doing the very best we can for kids. My final request is that we offer them our full attention tonight. They both dug themselves out of East Coast snow to be here with us. And I ask for your openness and curiosity centered on this question. Do these organizations offer something that can benefit your staff and the children of this city? We had discussions Monday about strategic plans, other tutor models, decisionmaking, all important, but
006I'm asking you to set those aside for tonight and focus on the work that these organizations do. With that, I think you have heard more than enough from me, and I am incredibly pleased um to give the stage to Michael. >> Great. Thanks, Lisa. Hey, everybody. Let me just start my timer. Um it's great to see you and it's great to be here. Uh I appreciate your time and attention and uh I was saying earlier that I've spent quite a bit of time in Bloit over the years but have not gotten the opportunity uh to connect with the people in this room. So really honored to be with you today. I am the CEO and founder of Skyrocket Education. Uh we are a uh on-site we are an on-site onetoone sometimes one to two sometimes
007one to five sometimes 1 to 15 technical service provider specializing in the areas of school leader development and effectiveness instructional uh instructional effectiveness instructional coaching effectiveness and school culture and before I talk about our model in more depth and we get to some Q Q&A. I want to just talk about our agenda here and I'll spend a little bit of time on like why I started Skyrocket, what it actually looks like in practice, and then we'll do some uh I I make a distinction between coaching as we describe it versus the way most people in our work describe it. And then we'll do some Q&A at the end, which I'm really excited for. So, I want to go back to go forward. Uh, back in 2012, I was the director of strategic partnerships for a
008school district in Philadelphia. I had the good fortune to work with schools all over the country. We had global partnerships as well. Most of that work was me training those folks on our school culture, instructional, school leadership, and teacher coaching models. But a lot of it was me learning from those folks as well. And I say we worked from east to west and north to south all over this great country. And in that time, three real trends emerged as it pertained to uh what folks prioritized in their schools, their school culture, their instruction, their development of teachers, their development of other leaders. And I'll go through these relatively quickly, but in that first picture on the top left, uh many many schools, many districts hadn't defined o almost at all what good looks like. Everything
009from what does a good leadership team meeting look like to what does it look like to have a really effective coaching meeting with teachers to what are we actually looking for when we go into classrooms? What rubrics or frameworks are we using to determine if if what we're seeing is actually effective uh effective in those cases? As you can imagine, without any sort of anchoring documents, without any sort of agreement as to what good is, really smart, really talented, really passionate, and sometimes really experienced school leaders were talking very hesitantly about the things that were happening in their schools. In the second bucket off to the right, you see that person kind of drowning in papers. And in those schools, folks had so much. They had walkthrough tools. They had rubrics. They had frameworks. They
010had all these different things that from my experience, but almost nobody was an expert on. They had a sense of those things versus a really clear I can walk into any space or place in in my building, excuse me, and say, "Yep, this is exactly what it's supposed to look like or no, this is not, and let's then determine what steps we need to take to coach people up to get to that really great place." And so these folks, you know, not unlike when I was a first year teacher and they gave me a 25page handbook as to what good teaching looked like and I threw it in the bottom drawer of my desk and never looked at it again until it was evaluation time and then I took it out. I blew the dust
011off of it and that happened about twice a year. So we were just giving people too many too many things in these cases. And then in the last bucket, whether folks found themselves in the first box or the second, uh folks were cherry-picking specific skills, uh things that their schools didn't necessarily need. Sometimes that came from the district level. Sometimes it came from school leadership. The uh story I shared with the principles earlier, which I'll reiterate now, was on my very first trip to Detroit public schools back in 2014. They had just run a training around a questioning strategy called cold call, which I imagine many people here know what that is. They were so excited about cold call. They were thrilled that they'd run this training on cold call. And I was at my
012very first school that day right from the airport. The first bell rings and there are 70 students in the hallway pushing and shoving. And I start talking to the teacher. I say, "How was the training on cold call?" and they said it was fine, but I need to know how to get my kids to sit down. And so in so many places, we were coaching or so many people were getting coached around and trained around things that not only weren't driven by data, but were just like kind of the topic of the moment. Um the cherrypicked skill that people didn't really need. And so I said, how do we actually change that? And so I created the skyrocket frameworks. Now, all of our board members have these up there. I it's I'm not going to
013ask you with the the 10 minutes or so that I have left to go through them. Now, though, I know some of you have gone online and some of you have taken a look at these. But really what I wanted to do was uh using research, using be best practices, using all of the things that I learned from amazing educators around the country is to create the simplest, most direct frameworks for school culture, school leadership, and teacher development uh in the country. I was adamant, one of our values at Skyrocket is keep it simple. I was adamant that it fit on one page front and back. I was adamant that it'd be an actual usable document and not the thing that's thrown in the drawer uh that uh never to be seen again. And so
014uh things to notice about our framework, our frameworks, they're the only ones anywhere that are hierarchical, meaning we are not we're coaching people where they are. We're we're coaching them where they are to get them to where we want them to be, but we're not asking a struggling teacher to get students into groups of five and to have collaborative uh collaborative working groups when they're having trouble getting kids to stop talking. uh we're not asking leaders to do some of the more uh robust and deeper uh strand two and strand three uh actions like deeply coaching teachers before they've gotten some of the classroom or school culture stuff figured out. And so really our model is let's go slow to go fast. I've seen zero evidence anywhere that people can get really good at five
015or six things at one time. And probably more importantly, it's almost impossible for us as leaders to follow up on those things. And so what happens in a lot of schools, we give way too much feedback on way too many things. We can't follow up on it and then the thing goes away and the teacher or the assistant principal or the coach says, "Wow, I endured that time with Michael, but I didn't get even a lick better." And you know, guess what? I'm not going to do any of the stuff he asked me to do. Not because they're jerks, but because it's really hard to get really good at a lot of things at once. So, our model's hierarchical. All of the actions are provided. They're in there. The language is in there. It's precise.
016It's succinct. Uh the whole doc, all the language in the doc itself, it's byite-sized. one of my like you know somewhat um you know one of my pride points I know pride's a sin but when I I am feeling prideful it's when I go to classrooms and teachers have our framework taped up on the wall behind their desk and I've never seen anybody do that with other frameworks because it's too much and there's too many pages and so it's a really cool thing when folks say yeah this matters and this is digestible and this makes sense to me [snorts] the actions progress in each of our strands from planning to execution and in our last so they so they move so move from like the the design the intellectual prep to the actual execution in
017the school or in the classroom and then it's all grounded in the outcomes I see a lot of frameworks and a lot of rubrics that are focused solely on teachers uh I know I think we have some teachers in the room and I remember as a teacher that was very frustrating to be coached on you're not doing this you need to do that you need to do that I tell our partners I I don't care if you're juggling flaming chainsaws on top of your desk. If you're getting results, that's what we're focused on. So, we're looking at the outcomes. I do actually care about that because it's dangerous. But my point, I think, is uh you understand my point. Uh we're really looking at what are the outcomes, what are we producing here and we're
018moving backward from there. How does what the school leaders doing directly affect staff engagement? How does what every teacher is doing directly affect deep rigorous thinking from our students? And so when I think about our our model, I break it down into eight separate facets. And uh the frameworks we already spoke about, those are our grounding documents. Everything we do stems from our frameworks. They are curriculum and programming agnostic. whatever they are. We're not trying to change anybody's code of conduct or anything like that. We're not changing uh the programming that folks are using. We are supporting schools in executing those things uh in the most effective ways possible. We are our our work is totally unbiased. It is grounded in data. There's not what I think or what I feel. And with our rubrics
019as the starting point, in some cases the end point, that's actually really easy to do because I'm able to say to a leader, okay, great. So the bell rang. How many scholars were in the hallway after the bell rang? Okay, 14. Great. What's the cause of that? Cool. Let's directly address those things. How long did that entry routine take? It took six minutes and 11 seconds. How long should it take? Under 90. Okay, we're losing two weeks of school at the end of the year because that teacher needs more coaching around uh around effective transitions. So we are rooted in data but that's doesn't mean the human side's not there. We focus heavily on communication. Our model is called the dash model. Uh it's data driven, authentic, straight. So we don't sugarcoat anything and of
020course helpful. So it's not Megan do this. When I come back I better see. It's no I'm going to support you around this. I'm going to be an advocate for you. How can I support you most effectively in making this happen? Our work is grounded in practice. So we don't tell folks, we show folks, we practice with them. This is a shift for a lot of people in our work who are very used to sending an email and crossing their fingers. The educators in this room will know that that rarely leads to change. Uh and what it does, it almost uh it creates potentially a dynamic where our teachers and our other leaders become really good at ignoring our feedback because they sent us an email, we didn't do anything about it, they didn't say
021anything, and then we moved on. Uh we have really high expectations for our partners. We do what we say we're going to do. We have sky-high integrity. We say high expectations, high support. Uh and then everything's rooted in goals. I talked to Megan about this beforehand. We start any partnership with an audit of the school. We then provide a report for the school. We then collectively set goals based on our findings. Of course, leaders are free to say, "Hey, that was that was wasn't accurate. That was a random day." If that's the case, it rarely happens, but if that's the case, we'll revisit. But mostly what we're doing is we're we're using that grounding document to set our goals for the rest of the year or for the rest or for the immediate future rather.
022Um, we are high on accountability. I use the example with the leaders. If you say you're going to if Wayne says he's going to send me something by 400 p.m. on on Thursday and it's not in my inbox by 4 p.m. at 4:01, he gets an email. He's not in trouble. I'm not mad at him. It's just me looking at why the where the breakdown was. What did I not do effectively enough to make that thing happen? Uh, and then real-time coaching, which is the process of providing feedback for teachers, leaders in the moment, not sending an email three days later. We use the example of if I had food on my face right now and Tia sent me an email three days from now about it. Uh, that wouldn't be very helpful, but that's
023what we're doing in schools at all time. And so honoring our professionals, honoring their expertise, never undermining them, framing it in a way that asks permission. Excuse me, Miss Johnson. Can I interject for one moment? Can you reset the expectations for scholars right now? Is are they at a level one or at a level zero? I'm just not sure all the kids here. That is something that we are our model is very big on. And then of course, it's all grounded in relationships. Somebody once joked that our strand zero should be relationships because we are big on connectedness. I pride myself and our team on really getting to know our partners and knowing quite a bit about them and their community and what makes them and what makes them tick. With these last couple moments
024I have here, friends, I just want to make a distinction between what we call coaching and what most people call coaching. And if you look at that box on the left, we think of coaching very much the way for those athletes in the room or former athletes or or athletic coaches, we think of it very much like that. Um, you know, high rep, really clear, really clear steps for what good looks like and then high repetition practice, not until they get it right, but until they can't get it wrong. Part of the reason why so many schools are having the same conversations in May that they were in September is because they're sending emails and like I said, crossing fingers versus saying, "Hey, um, you know, uh, Joanne, let's work on this thing. Let's script
025it out. Let's practice it. Okay, I know you have to have an essential conversation. Let's have that conversation. Let's practice it. Say it to me." Great. Say it again. I think this part could shift. What do you think about that? Uh, and then we go uh from there. And we have those questions on the side uh right there which is um after every meeting. I'm not talking about a transactional meeting to talk about the next field trip. I'm talking about an actual development meeting. We ask our coaches to ask themselves and if one of your schools winds up being a partner school, I would be asking this question of principles, assistant principles, instructional coaches, whomever, did the person you met with just get significantly better at something? Do they know their next steps? And have
026you put systems in place to hold them accountable? We don't think of accountability as a bad word. It's skyrocket. We think it's actually the kindest thing you can do for someone. We look at it as a handshake. We agree on this thing. And once we agree on it, uh, we both have to keep up our end of the bargain. And if one of us misses, we're not in trouble. We're not mad at anybody. We want to find out why. We want to make sure that we, uh, we don't we don't do it again. Friends, thank you so much. I am interested and eager to hear any questions that you have on the skyrocket model. >> Thank you, Michael. Any board members have any questions or comments? Carol, >> go ahead. Um, how do you get
027started? Um, how much time uh what kind of time commitment [clears throat] is expected? Um, and where were you 25 years ago? [laughter] >> Uh, I'll start with that. 25 years ago, I was uh bartending in New York City. So, I don't know that I would have been much help for you uh to you back then, but um yeah, we start with the we start with the audit. Uh that's the uh that's the the foundational piece. What's actually happening in here? Making sure that we're aligned. I've never we've done dozens and dozens and dozens of these. There's never been an instance where we've presented a report to a school leader where they've said, "I disagree with this." So, uh, maybe this would be the first, but I can't imagine that that would be the case.
028We present the report to them. We interview everybody on staff or as many people as we can. We observe everything from arrival to dismissal to transitions. We get into every single classroom. We want to see everyone uh, any sort of leadership team meetings. We create uh, and on and on and on. We create the plan from there. then this program is a very high touch. We're looking at three days a week on site at whatever the whichever the partner school is. But like I said to one of the principles earlier, this is not uh I'm at your school three days a week and your life stops and you're not doing anything. No. Uh we might go on walkthroughs together. You might have an IEP meeting to step into while I'm actually meeting with one of
029your instructional coaches. I then may be in your office typing up some of my findings. We I then sit in on your leadership team meeting to support you around that. So it's a very hightouch partnership. That's what that's what real like true like like to get execution to the level we want to uh get it to in any of our partnerships. It's got to be that level of uh of that that level of frequency. But I want to make sure that folks are clear that it's not like time stops when when we're there and principles and school leaders don't do anything but spend time with us. It's not the case. >> How many staff do you have and how many schools are you doing? I know you're doing TLA. How many other schools are you
030doing this for? Yeah, I mean it's always hard for us to to to to share that because we work with Philadelphia public schools and that's 216 schools. So is that one partner or is it 216? Right. And we work with the arch dascese of Chicago which I think is like 156 schools. So is that one or is it 156? And we don't necessarily work with every single one of those schools, but um yeah, I mean we have dozens and dozens of partners around the US and um you know, some very big, some standalone st standalone. Uh we have some folks, we have three schools in in a right about 45 minutes outside of Debuke, Iowa. Um you know, relatively small schools. So, um I don't I don't know if I can give you an accurate
031answer there, but we do have a a pretty fair mix of faith-based traditional public and charter schools. It's almost like a it's like a 353530 type thing. And in terms of staff, I have uh we shrunk the team quite a bit. I have five full-time staff and then we have consultants all over the all over the place, including in down the road in Milwaukee where we have quite a few folks. So you could do several school. I mean obviously you do bigger districts, you do smaller districts. So you could do more than one school if we wanted to do something like that. [laughter] >> Yeah, we would have the capacity to do that. I think I'll defer to the the the powers that be on on my side to see if that's of interest, but
032you know, we certainly have the capacity to do that. necessarily expected. [laughter] >> Any other questions? >> Go ahead, Megan. >> Thank you so much. Um that was a really wonderful presentation and you know also thank you for the the opportunity to have kind of the meet and greet thing. It was really great speaking with you. Um couple of questions. Um you had talked about uh defining which I I fully support you know what good looks like. Um to what extent are you aware of the work that has already occurred here in the school district of Bo? >> Um I have a preliminary understanding of that but I do not have a deep knowledge of the work that you all have done behind the scenes or maybe out out in the open. >> Okay. The
033reason that I ask is that um back in 2019 we began an initiative with like it was a it's a public private partnership called Ford NGL which you know is its own conversation but one of the outcomes of that was um to establish a portrait of a graduate which is work that um was districtled but very much in collaboration with you know the business community and in other stakeholders and so that is something that um that we have it's embedded into kind of our practice as a district. um how does that impact what you believe your I don't know itinerary is the wrong word but kind of like your uh priorities might be with working with one of our schools. >> So as I mentioned it's a great question Megan um we are mostly uh
034agnostic to what the school is doing assuming it's not harming kids which is very very rare. Um, but even, you know, if you think about some of the tutoring stuff that, uh, Sarah's going to talk about momentarily, um, we worked with schools that have in New York City who have 70 to 100 tutors on site in their buildings. Um, we we work around we we we look at how effectively that's being done, if that's something that the leader wants us to focus on. Sometimes we don't touch that stuff at all and we say that exists in its own universe. But what we say to our partners is it's not about the thing, it's about how well you do the thing. And so if you say or if we got to a school and said, "Wow,
035this program is being done at an exemplar level." Great. Um, we don't touch it. We don't we don't even talk about it. I mean, I want to talk about it to learn about it, but we're not going to give feedback around something that's going great. Now, if it's not going terribly well, that's certainly a place where we can add value. Um, but any sort of existing programming, anything that's already in place, I'm not suggesting we would never tweak anything, a culture, code of conduct or something like that. Um even things like um you know you know [snorts] a lunch protocol like you know you're in a lunchroom and there are five adults there to support students but they're on their phones and there's never been an expectation around that and the school leader says yeah
036that's actually not effective. Great. We'll we'll tweak a code of conduct to include stuff like that or actually that would be a a handbook. But in terms of changing things, um, we don't we don't do any of that. >> Thank you so much. Um, we touched on this a little bit like just in our own conversation, um, about just like data and things like that. So, you know, I I just I'll bring that up at a later discussion with my colleagues on the board, but I guess um, in your experience, you know, you've you certainly have very broad reach um, with a lot of different districts and I think that's an asset that you have to provide. Um, typically in a situation outside of, you know, this one in a district our size, would you
037typically begin with a school? Would you typically begin with district level? Like how has that worked with larger districts? >> Yes, it's a great question. Um, this partnership for us is unique. uh we don't have any partnerships where it's just one school of many um and if it if there are some partnerships where we have a handful of schools for instance Milwaukee public schools we have you know half a dozen to a dozen schools those are less pilots and more the philanthropist who funds us said we want you to work with these eight schools and so we said sure uh This program at this point's a little bit unique because it is a like let's pressure test this in one place. Let's see what the appetite is. Let's see if we can support folks in
038the way that um in the way that we know how, but let's see if folks are are are willing and able to do it. to your point, um, we always try to start as high up, for lack of a better term, on the food chain as possible. Talking to superintendence, supporting folks at the district and network level when the partnership is larger. Alignment across schools is key. Um, anytime we're working with multiple schools, the first thing I want to know is are there aligned systems and protocols, uh, so that the school over here is not doing something radically different than the school over here because, you know, autonomy is a weird word in education. It's the least autonomous job on the planet. We tell everybody what time to be there, where to go, where to
039go, when they can eat, what, who their students are, and then we talk about autonomy. For us, it's like, well, if this school's knocking it out of the park on this thing, let's all do it. Uh, or if they're doing actually a really poor job, but this school is doing a great job, you do what they're doing. So, um, if it's a larger partnership, even just multiple schools will always start at the district level to see how much alignment we can uh we can get on the front end. >> That makes so much sense. Yeah, very same page. And I really appreciate you speaking to that point. Um, last question just in terms of practicality. um what has been your experience with the range of buyin from instructional coaches? And the reason that I ask
040is that our district has uh strategically prioritized working with coaches as part of our um school improvement like we have an AGR obligation. There are certain uh funding that we get from DPI to invest in increasing our academic outcomes and the coaching model has been one that's has been invested in heavily. That is not in any way to say that we're not I'm not like trying to shut down any I just want to be clear because I know Miss Fth made some comments about that which are not accurate but I just do want I'm very open to hearing what you have to say. The reason I asked that is that you talked a lot about like buyin and autonomy and I think you know anybody knows you can have the absolute best thing in the
041world and if people don't buy into it it's it's it's good it's good as it's buying right. So, I would love to know if you could please speak to some, I guess, your range of experiences with how you've been able to to enter into productive, you know, um, gainful relationships with existing cultures of instructional coaching. >> Yeah, it's a great point. And I mean, our model is different than really anything out there because of the level of um not just detail, but of prescription that we provide, which doesn't mean there's not room for coaches to um freelance at times. But when we've gotten uh push back from coaches, it has every single time been from I don't want to tell another adult what to do. And this model requires that that happens. Now, it happens
042politely with empathy. It happens in a supportive way, but there's just there are just things that are true in schools that too many people act like are unfigureoutable and our models are the opposite of that. There are things that are just true. Uh teachers need to do X, Y, and Z things to be effective. leaders need to do A, B, and C things to be effective and lots more as well. So, what we found is that coaches really like our model because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. And in too many places, coaches really have devolved. This is not on them, but they've almost devolved into what we refer to as friendly helpers. They knock on the door, hey, do you need anything? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I can grab your copies.
043That's okay. they are rarely rarely the people who are uh in a very intentional way driving the instructional program and pushing folks toward instructional gains. So our model for the folks who are hungry for it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it and they're actually excited about it. But but like I you know like we I'll be transparent here. We had a partnership with uh a district in North Texas. They had 12 instructional coaches at the end of the year one with skyrocket. Seven of the 12 uh left. Uh now some of them wanted to go into different leadership roles, but some folks were like, "Yeah, I liked it better when a teacher was teaching main idea. I shared a resource from when I taught main idea and that was our relationship versus,
044hey, I was in your classroom. You have 27 students, forehead, heads down. Um this, you know, you gave directions at 9:31. you said X at 9:34. 50% of the class had not begun writing yet. And of course, a lot of our feedback is rooted in glows and positivity. I'm sh I'm sharing the opposite here, but um there's an equal part of um and maybe even more so of the things that the teacher and the leaders are doing well. >> No, that is that helpful. >> Oh, no. Totally. That makes a ton. There's always room for growth and assets based feedback. No, it makes total sense to me. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. >> Thanks. Thanks, Megan. Can I ask a followup to Megan's other quit? You know, when you have
045multiple schools, do you uh does it help to have multiple so that people can do like do you train principles together and then they can support one another and talk to each other about how how things are working? Um is that you find that to be a benefit when you work with schools? Yeah, it's one of the weird things about our field that like you're uh you might not know what the school 200 yards away is doing, right? And it's we're so busy and there's so much to do. So, the answer is yes. Uh I don't know if that's on the table for this work, but the more we can get more leaders together getting the speaking the same language, that's one of the things about Skyrocket and I hope this doesn't sound immodest. It's
046not me, it's the model, but like it gives people a shared language that's often times missing in schools, a shared way of talking, a shared way of seeing things. So, the more folks we can get in on that, the better. The problem is is that training folks without on the on-site support, I say it's like an appetizer. Like you go out to dinner, the appetizer is good, but like if you left after that, you'd be like, "Wow, that feels like I feel ripped off." And so the problem is is we want to make sure that if we're actually coaching people or training them rather in some sort of cohort model that they're also getting the on-site support to uh reinforce those skills on site. >> Do you use a lot of staff development days, uh
047pre-ervice days to to set those things up? Um how does that work? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean I have to look at um Yeah. I mean the answer is yes. I would if this winds up happening, we'd have to look at calendars and see what makes the most sense. But yes, summer training, PD days, any sort the Wednesday PD or Thursday PD or Friday, whatever day you all have, but making sure that we're using those days really strategically to build uh staff skill. >> Brian, do you have any questions? >> All right. >> Thank you, Michael. >> Thanks, friends. Appreciate it. Did you have any questions? [laughter] >> Additional knowledge this time around. >> Okay. Thank you. >> I will. >> Michael, I let me I will say thank you. Um I think you've I
048think you've opened you've opened more of my eyes and I think hopefully for the rest of the board, I can't speak for the other board members. But um you you said you know what you're doing and that's what we need uh at the school district of Hawaii. So thank you. Thank you for being here. >> I appreciate. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Bye. >> Hi there. Um I'm Sarah Scottfrank, the founder and CEO of Open Literacy. And thank you as I want to echo the um the thanks for coming to yet another meeting this week. Uh I did live stream the t the meeting was it Monday, Tuesday? The days are bleeding together. Um, and so what you're going to hear tonight is not necessarily an overview of open literacy. I'm
049assuming you understand how our high impact onetoone virtual tutoring program works, but more a response to the questions that seem to be surfacing and that I've heard across repeated sessions, both the original presentation and then um in this week's meeting. I also just want to sort of mark that one thing that I'm really excited about in this proposal is the symmetry that we see between Skyrocket and open literacy and the shared values that span both of our organizations. Thinking deeply about the eight facets that Michael talked about in communication, accountability, data, goal setting um is not one of the eight facets of relationships really undergurs a lot of our work. So there's just a lot of symmetry between the two organizations that I think will allow us to think at a systems level that is
050often not present in proposals like this. So it's just a really exciting facet that I want to to name. So tonight I'll tell you a little bit about the origin story of open literacy and then I'll take you inside a pilot that we've been part of because you're being asked to participate in a pilot and I think there's some really important lessons learned in the pilot that open literacy has been part of. I also want to respond to the idea of how this might fit into a strategic plan. There was an email from a community member as well as questions from the board around that. Uh I want to address the importance of parents as partners. I see that Andrea is back. Um and obviously they are a critical critical part of the conversation. Uh
051the number of seats that are allocated and thinking about how open literacy uh works and could work in bo um relative to other models and what the research says around those models and we'll end with talking about sustainability and success. So a little bit about open literacy um gives you a chance to learn a little bit about me as a leader uh and why I started open literacy. So I came to this work uh from having a really nice job as a research one professor at the University of Pittsburgh and I got to do research on reading comprehension and understanding teacher education. Um, and it felt really far from the work of teachers and classrooms and kids and families. And so I quit and I started open literacy so that I could get back in
052the trenches. I wanted to be sort of close to the bone of the work of teaching and the messiness of schools and districts. Um, since 2020, Open Literacy has focused exclusively on onetoone tutoring, but that hasn't been what we've done since that's hasn't been our only work since 2013. So, we've brought all of those lessons learned over the past decade to our work in high impact tutoring. So, let's go inside this OSU OSD um pilot. OD stands for Oakland Unified School District in California. It's a rather large district. There's 53 elementary schools for example. So it doesn't match boit in scale. It does match bo in terms of need around reading. So 80% of kids in Oakland aren't reading at grade level. There's a good percentage of English learners in Oakland. And I want you
053to think about this pilot in terms of your thinking about why are we only doing one school? Because I hear that thread in your questions. And I think it's an important thread because there's a lot of need um in Oakland a foundation called EatL, Learn, Play, which is led by Steph and Aisha Curry Curry. If you're not a basketball fan, Steph Curry's a very good basketball player. Um and they've made this big investment in tutoring in Oakland. And this multi-year commitment has been transformative for the district in a couple of ways. Um, having a multi-year commitment has given the district some breathing room to think about what do our systems look like. So, I think we see a multi-year commitment in the proposal on the table here. Um, that's very similar. They're also it's a
054very place-based investment. They're committed to Oakland, California, much like this proposal is committed to Bo, Wisconsin. Uh, they've made a very strong commitment to learning from the pilot. So you'll see it every step of the way. We started small, we grew a little more, and this year we're at full implementation. Um, and by sort of going slow to go fast, we've gotten a lot better. Um, and we've built buyin along the way. the um the foundation came to the district with very clear non-negotiables and that has been a gift to us as an organization because it's brokered the relationship with the district but it's also um you know people and press come to me and say what's it like to work with Oakland and they expect me to spill some tea that's quite negative and
055I say it's a dream it's been amazing it's been some of the most meaningful work I've done in my entire career and that I think is in part because of the very intentional design that has rolled out over the past three years. [snorts] So here's what it looked like. Well, let me give you this framing first. Um, so while you're thinking like why are we doing just one school, I actually think the framework that operated well in Oakland was to pilot obsessively learn from the pilot align across the district and scale appropriately. It is really tempting. I think it, you know, tutoring is is a very sexy intervention. It's very effective. So it would have been tempting to say let's do all 53 but they started with a coalition of the willing and that momentum
056made this a successful program. In our first year we had 500 kids across three providers. Uh that means we had like 175 kids. I think that year we served about 224 students total. uh what they called the year-long pilot served 1,200 students across three providers. So, we spent a year, we each had about 11 schools. And then this uh current school year there's 1,500 students across two providers. So, they use the data to actually reduce the number of providers and they split the district in half across providers. Um and this is just a slightly more detailed view of that. So six schools and 200 students um 93% of students saw meaningful growth in a tier three intervention. So sort of your hard the students identified as hardest to move. Um in the fullear pilot we
057had 500 students across 11 schools and on the SERI evaluation we had the highest growth compared to the other two providers. And then this year we have this district-wide evaluation with 27 schools and we're part of a randomized control trial with John's Hopkins. Our goal is to get the ESSA tier one evidence from that. Um and that study is not designed to sort of put the two providers in a horse race against each other. It's actually designed, the question that they're asking this year is how are all the MTSS systems in Oakland supporting students to become proficient readers. So they have this multi-tiered intervention, what's happening in the classroom, what's happening in small group instruction, and what's happening in onetoone instruction. And they're trying to understand that implementation. I think the big lessons learned over
058the past three years is to smart start small and really build a true partnership to be intentional about learning from the pilots and iterating. So treating the pilot as a pilot. What did we learn from this? What can we do better? The intentional supports that open literacy now has across our entire curriculum came out of our data for English learners who were not moving at the same rate as the other students. And so if you look deep into our curriculum, you will see now there are a range of amazing intentional supports for our English learners so that those students are receiving the support they need to make the same pace of growth as other students. Um [snorts] we've done a better job over the years to become a true ally to teachers. So how do
059you build teacher buyin? How do you make this resource something that teachers view as making their job more doable and sustainable? If you have to teach students and you have to move them two grade levels, three grade grade levels to get to grade level, you need an ally to do that job. The work is just too hard. So, how can something like high impact tutoring make the job more doable and sustainable? Um, and then thinking about the system. So, how do you develop systems that allow for coherence between what's happening in the classroom and what's happening in tutoring? That I don't know what word that's supposed to be, but I think at one point it said supporting and now it says opportunity. Um, we're going to move on. So, let's think about what it looks
060like to support a coherent literacy plan. So, we're not designing your MTSS system. That's not open literacy's job. But I'd like you to imagine how something like a well-designed high impact tutoring program in tier three could spark the design and support the design of a tier 2 and a tier one that has some coherence that makes sense across a system. How can it fit into a system? How can it become part of the fabric of what happens in a boid school? And I think the systems level work that skyrocket brings that open literacy loves to think about and be part of is a really exciting part of this proposal. Now, let's talk about parents. My favorite topic. I have an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old at home. And parents, as Andrea noted earlier this week, are
061students first teachers. They're also really important partners in this conversation. So, Open Literacy has a number of ways in which we engage parents by hosting an introduction to tutoring program, sending progress reports, sending engagement initiatives for school breaks, and having resources on our website like decodables and phonics games that parents can play. If asked, we'll provide resources for a a school literacy night or any sort of literacy events just to encourage that connection. We also have individualized learning plans for every student. And when parents ask, we can provide access to those learning plans. So parents can see with a lot of transparency the exact lessons that their students are getting. They could review them with students. They could look at the stories that they read. So there's an opportunity for transparency. um that's really easy
062to access through just a Google link. And then parents, we can talk about how parents are partners in this work for getting kids to school, for supporting strong school attendance, for um accessing the materials on our website. So this dialogic conversation between open literacy and parents is an important one and one that we hope to to be part of the conversation. um just 60 students. Uh this is a popular question. You want more. Um and I it's important that you think of these as seats and not students. So the seats um you know they're not it the seat is not tied to a particular student and students can graduate um out of the program and so other students can come in. Um and it goes back I want you to think about this systems level
063work that they're doing. So, how does how do these 60 seats give you an opportunity to think about the system and to think about what role these seats play in a broader system and I will note that every district that has scaled successfully has started small. So, they haven't gone for the whole enchilada from the start. They've started small like you saw with Oakland and then they've carefully grown. So, um, MCP in Milwaukee is a nice example. They actually also work with Skyrocket. Um, they had 80 seats last year across two schools and this year they have 200 seats across four schools. Um, and they're knocking it out of the park. So, it's been a really nice evolution where they started small uh to go fast. And then this last point here is thinking about
064the key features of the open literacy model and why aren't we using another model. So there is a little bit of magic to the virtual model that a decade ago I probably wouldn't have said was a good idea. But um as we've developed better technologies for online learning, as we've thought a lot about virtual conferencing and that's become more accessible, um there there's a huge advantage to doing onetoone virtual tutoring from a scheduling perspective from the regularity of having the tutor and from the regularity of having the tutoring. So we have a detailed subsystem. If a tutor is going to be absent, there's always a sub there. So, tutoring is going to happen. It's, you know, if it if the tutor can't get there because of snow, uh for in-person tutoring, you know, tutoring doesn't
065happen. And so, there's a lot of advantages to really maximizing the minutes in the virtual model. Um, open literacy is aligned with the youth scope and sequence, uh, which I know that you already are using intervention init. Um, importantly, we've we we don't use the UFly curriculum. We use their same scope and sequence and we address some of the sticky points. So, UFI is designed as a tier one intervention, but we see in the data kids get stuck at some key points like blends. As they move from reading words with three letters to reading words with four, they get a little bit stuck. [snorts] Um, and working on fluency and working on comprehension. So, we have some um other materials that we've developed that sort of supplement and make sure that students are making progress.
066And then we have the intensive EL supports that I referenced. Open literacy also uses certified teachers who have deep literacy expertise. Uh we give the joy of hiring just one in 20 applicants. Um there they have an average of 15 15.4 years experience right now. And we also participate in a lot of coaching with them. We can jump into a tutoring session and do some live coaching, especially if they're wondering about a student who's not making the progress that's expected. Um, and so the question that's on the table from the board is why not do in-person tutoring? Why not use pair of professionals? And I want to name two things here. The first is that Oakland does a ton of in-person tutoring. in-person small groupoup tutoring using early lit tutors. And that's a successful model.
067And yet they still have high dosage onetoone tutoring. Why? Because the need is so enormous in Oakland. So they have a multi-pronged solution. And that multi-prong solution includes both small groupoup instruction for tier 2 intervention using early lit tutors and onetoone high impact tutoring. They also will name that there are a bunch of staffing challenges with getting the same number of minutes for small groupoup instruction as high impact tutoring because it's really hard to staff those pair of professionals. Um, as we look at the research on the tutoring models, there's sort of three buckets we can move through. The first bucket of research for tutoring is tutoring at large. And tutoring at large is a banger intervention. It gets great results almost. It's kind of like pizza. Pizza in any form is kind of good
068and tutoring in any form is kind of good. The second bucket is tutoring during the school day with teachers and pair professionals. Most of that research is K12. It's any subject area and it's um agnostic with regard to is it a teacher or is it a paras. So they don't tease it out. It's like you have this instructional person. They are trained and they do a good job and there's great effect sizes there. And then there's this last bucket that really digs down into reading tutoring and [clears throat] specifically reading tutoring with struggling readers. And that's where you see that having a certified teacher makes a big difference. And if we want to move fast, which we don't have time, if you're two grade levels behind and you're going to go to fourth grade, fifth
069grade being too like we got to move. So the most high impact intervention for working with struggling readers is going to be your certified teachers and that's what open literacy brings to the table. [snorts] Finally, as we think about sustainability, as you think about these three years that are on the table for the proposal, I invite you to think about year one as systems building, year two as an opportunity for refinement. How do we get really good? and year three as a positioning for the broader system. So um how are we going to fund this for the long term? What are our braided sources of funding? Uh what do we want how do we want to change and expand? Um so I think this three-year runway gives you a nice space to think about that.
070I keep saying finally uh [laughter] this is really the final one. Um so what does success look like? Uh we expect strong literacy growth. We don't have any schools where where kids aren't making growth. Um but the real success metric is poloid at a systems level and thinking about is this reducing the number of students who need tier three support is tutoring a successful intervention for for bloit and I remind you that like the this is not a proprietary solution. So you'll learn things through this pilot and those will stay here. So this is an amazing opportunity for bloit to learn and grow and at the end of three years whether that includes open literacy or not you will be in a different place than you were when you started uh at the beginning of
071the pilot. Questions? >> Thank you Sarah. Any board members have questions for Sarah? Megan. >> Oh, yeah. No, sure. Okay. Is that all right? Okay. All right. No. Well, thank you Sarah so much. This was a wonderful presentation and thank you so much for taking the time to physically be here with us. It's wonderful to meet you. Um, so a couple things. Um, kind of similar question that I had for Michael. Um, to what extent are you aware of, I guess, like our our MTSS or EMLSS that it currently exists within our elementary schools? I'm aware of the curriculum tools that you're using such as ARC and uh you fly in and tier three. Um and so like Michael, I have a preliminary understanding of of your programs. >> So sorry, not not the resources
072like to what extent are you aware of like our our systems that exist? >> I am not aware of your systems. >> Okay. So that would be one thing that I think would be good for us to kind of get on the same page about, right? because I think um open literacy is as you mentioned it's it's high impact right um tier could you know tier three right because it's one-on-one high dosage you know intense intervention um I think like one thing that like from a board perspective that I think would be important is like if we embark on a relationship like we want to make sure it's effective and that it fits within an existing system. Um, I think I heard you say earlier too, um, with your Oakland experience, which makes a ton
073of sense, and I mean, celebrate you for for having the wisdom to start that way, you start small, right, where there's buy in and where it'll work. So, I just um, one thing that as a board member, I just want to bring up to my colleagues here, like I think we need to really be mindful about like, bless you, where where that starting point would best be and making sure that it fits within the systems that do already exist. So that's just one thing I wanted to ask about um and just more just to bring up to >> Can I comment [clears throat] on that >> please? Yeah. Um, so that was actually a nice an important part of the conversation with principles like when does this happen? Where does this happen? Like and so
074we had a really nice conversation about the conditions for success and we have lessons learned like will be more successful because because of the lessons learned over the past several years in districts like uh Oakland. How do you schedule? How do you get it? What does a bell schedule look like that accommodates tutoring in a really efficient way? Um, how do you communicate with teachers about the role of tutoring in the bigger ecosystem? How do you fit it in with existing tier three and tier 2 supports? 60 seats isn't going to serve all the students who are receiving intervention in the school. So, what do those conversations look like? And so, that conversation about conditions for success was part of my presentation and also raised by principles. And I think that's a critical critical conversation
075um for thinking about how you bring a program in that becomes part of an existing system. I referenced in the principles meeting that my very favorite reform uh book is called tinkering towards utopia and in that book Taek and Cuban talk about incremental change and what does that look like and so you can't just come in guns ablazing and say here we are you have to think about how you accommodate those existing systems and that's an important part of skyrocket's work as well >> thank you so much another question that I have is when we talk about growth. Um, and I'm aware of like how like dibbles and orar are integrated within the program and that's like wonderful stuff. Um, one thing that we have to consider because of you know title AGR and just
076like the way that Wisconsin I mean you know and and like Michael and I were saying earlier a lot of it's very similar right between states but you know Wisconsin has its own unique you know state report card pieces and all kinds of you know the nuances of that. So what is the externally validated kind of data like in terms of transferability and sustainability? Um for example um growing on dibbles is is wonderful like maze like all the good things like I see a lot of growth in my students. I've been a reading interventionist for this is my seventh year, you know, reading intervention in general where that's like my only thing. But, um, those those gains don't always transfer, right, to sort of the higher stake standardized test pieces that often districts in schools,
077right, are judged on. And so, I'm just sort of wondering, um, part one of my question is in in your tenure with open literacy, what has been your experience with transferability? And are there specific districts or types of districts that you know have have worked better or or whatever? My second question, actually I'm going to pause. Sure. >> I was going to say, can you can I answer that? >> I just didn't want to but yeah, you're good. I got you. So as you think about benchmark testing like I Ready uh and you think about a child a student who is a a third grader reading at a kindergarten level or third grader reading at a fifth grader reading at a third all these students exist in those tests are not going to be sensitive
078the fifth grader who's making huge gains on first grade level work and second grade level work and third grade level work and are dancing in the streets because of this child's growth is not going to look different on that fifth grade test because the fifth grade test is measuring fifth grade work and the same is true with dibbles. So the fifth grade dibbles is a fifth grade level test measuring fifth grade reading. So the fifth grader reading at even a second or third grade level if that child makes any growth on fifth grade in the first half of the year for example between if we look at the midyear data we should be absolutely thrilled that is awesome. Um but it it raises this bigger question. The other big thing is that constructs like vocabulary
079are incredibly hard to move. So much of a vocabulary knowledge is eaten up by a child's background knowledge, right? And so you have these huge big bucket like math everything you need to know for math is can be taught in school. What a gift. And that is not true for reading because for comprehension and vocabulary so much of it is tied into uh into a student's background knowledge and 70% of the variance is eaten up by their zip code. But that can't be our answer. Our answer has to be to stick with a program and play have a plan so that that fifth grader can read at a third grade level by the end of year one. And that child who moves a sixth grade can read at a fifth grade level by the end
080of year two. And then in that third year, we will see that child reading. That that's the long game that we have to play. When you have such when you have students who are reading so far behind, you have to think about those tests slightly differently. You're not you're not going to see a huge jump in year one, but you might in year three. And that that's that's just the nature of the game. >> Yeah. No, I mean, same page. You don't have to convince me that standardized [snorts] tests are garbage and like we shouldn't even do them. So, like we're good. Um I Yeah. I mean, that's obviously like our I'm sure yours as well, like lived experience with students. The reason that I ask is because like our district is often judged and
081I think often um mischaracterized and sometimes just flat out lied about based on arbitrary scores that like in many ways are meaningless or tell a very partial out of context picture about like the growth that does happen like for our students. you know, my my now um second grade daughter's first grade teacher is right here and like last year she was like on a reading plan and this year she's reading to me before she goes to bed. I mean, growth happens, right, in plateaus and and then then spikes, right? Because like kids are are different. There's asynchronous development, all the things. So, yeah, 100% same page and I really appreciate the context you provided around that. I just know that that's going to be a metric that we are held accountable to as a board
082and I just wanted to like kind of feel out and get your perspective and you know get get some of your uh sorry experience uh with that from open literacy. You actually segueed into my second question really beautifully. Um I'm concerned also about our sustainability over time. Um, and I'm not sure um if you how familiar you are with like research on like Wharton Gillingham, for example, where they see like huge gains and then we flatline and then we decline. So that's >> Oh, Megan, this is my very very favorite question of all time. >> I know. And I was so I was going to say like we should probably you should probably like stay in town. WSR conference is next week. We could probably talk for hours and I would I would love that.
083My question is is um what are I guess do you have some some metrics or some some things that you believe are unique to your programming? >> I do. I have an answer. [laughter] >> Okay. Because I and I would be curious. I want to hear your answer. So, I'm going to stop talking, but I am curious maybe a follow-up conversation that you could have with our our building leaders, our teachers, our instructional coaches and reading specialists would be to what extent are those some of those features already in place because I just want to make sure that we are like removing the correct barriers. So that's the spirit in which I'm asking the question. Just to be clear, but please. >> Oh, I love this question. I could talk about this question all night.
084I have a PhD in reading comprehension. Um there not many people uh can make that claim. So if you look at the reading first data from 2001, No Child Left Behind Part B, the [snorts] data all has the exact same shape. I was the evaluator in the state of Michigan at that time. The data goes up, that's the decoding, and then it flatlines. If you look at the UK data from 2012, the data goes up and it flatlines and that flatline is reading comprehension and the science of reading in many spaces has been interpreted to be phonics and we are going to get data that looks exactly the same. We're going to overindex on word reading. We're going to have kids taking, you know, I saw this in Detroit, kids taking home nonsense word lists
085and practicing nonsense words instead of reading real words. Um, but one huge thing built into open literacy is that we care about building that reading comprehension muscle from the very beginning. When a child is reading the word crab, I care deeply that they're imagining that little red crab dancing across the sand. Our tutors are trained around the reading comprehension model for even foundation skills. Often districts say we want to do foundational skills. We don't care about comprehension, which is uh I think shortsighted because we have to care about comprehension. It's the other side of the reading rope. I see the teachers in the room nodding, right? and your third grade teachers, your fifth grade teachers, your middle school teachers don't want a whole bunch of kids who can read a page and not understand what
086they're reading. And so we don't want a whole bunch of word callers. And so, you know, we could think about like are there building level training so that we can think about the role of comprehension in the classroom as in that tier one. uh as we build a system that cares deeply about both kids reading words and kids comprehending what they read. >> Oh, absolutely. Just a quick follow-up question, then I just have one more staffing clarification I'd like to make with you and then I'm good. Um but happy to chat anytime. It's really fun. >> I'll talk about comprehension anytime. >> Well, and actually, so the follow-up question I have and and I just to be clear just just I'm not only just nerding out right now. I just want to um I'm just
087given what I know about like what we you know models that we have had and and I'm sure still to some extent do have here in the district um a lot of it's built on like neurokcognitive theory and things like that like Andrew Johnson and like Donna Scanland's work with like set for variability. Can you speak to like how I guess like how do you feel navigating um an a landscape where we're under act 20 which has a law I mean we have a law in Wisconsin that tells us that three queuing which is a natural neurocognitive process is like somehow illegal. Um, and so like what would you say to a school district like or potentially our school district that's held to Act 20 where we're not allowed by state law to implement any
088practices that rely on the neurokcognitive model that you just touched on? >> I think the reason that three queuing has come under uh fire is because it is deeply focused on kids mistakes. Um, and it's linked very deeply to the whole language model. If you look at balance literacy and the research on balance literacy as it was intended to be implemented, um, >> it kind of gets it right. But >> totally agree. Yeah, >> it became it sort of the pendulum swung very very far to I don't we'll call it the right or the left, I don't know. um away from phonics instruction and so you lost the balance and so students were not being taught how to decode. Students were not being, you know, students were being asked to guess words based on pictures.
089Um and that hasn't served students well. 60% of students need explicit phonics instruction. They also need to ask themselves, you know, what is this text about? And you know uh what is happening in this paragraph? We we need them we need them to comprehend. So um you know the idea that three queuing is illegal. I think what undergurs that is the idea that asking kids to guess what a word is without looking at the code is not a great idea. >> Well no and I and I think you and I both know that that's not actually like how those [snorts] neurocognitive processes work and that we're looking at graphoponic cues and things like that when we're talking about visual queuing. And so I'm just wondering like with the open literacy's approach to comprehension. I mean
090how like are you in that like kind of the scan Johnson ballpark about just like the neurokcognitive model and like you know like you were just talking about actually like with crab and like with multiensory connections to language to build that background knowledge and vocabulary. >> We lean heavily on the landscape model that kids the idea that kids are making a mental model in their head when they're reading the word. >> Perfect. Okay. No, that's that's really helpful. I appreciate that and I think that's something that like our district is already like we have like a really good rich history and I feel like that could be a potential good fit as well. But I really think that a good next step would be to um I think we as a board and I'm saying
091this like to us not to you. You're doing a great job doing what you're doing. [laughter] Um as a board I think it's and kind of on us that we need to hear from our principles like about you know to what extent right like are are some of these systems already still in place? Like I have had some extensive conversations at like one school in particular where I know that we have all the pieces and like the main barrier is staffing and then so you know just I guess my follow-up question then too would be like in a situation where like let's say we hear like everyone's super thrilled and we're stoked to do the things but they're like ah but as you mentioned conditions for success if they're not there like what I guess
092like in in in the spirit of going slow to going fast what would be your hope from us as a word, right, to like make this sustainable in the district if we don't currently have at this right now, present moment, not to say that we can't, right? But like today, it's still January somehow, right? At this present moment, what would your hope be that we would do to build that capacity? And what would your ideal timeline be? >> Based on what I heard from principles today and the ones who were very excited about it, I'm not worried about them not having the conditions for success. >> Okay. Okay. So, like you heard from principles that we have like staffing and schedules and space. >> I did. >> Awesome. Thank you. That's great to hear, >>
093Carol. >> Yeah. I just um you you started talking a little Greek there and and um I'm an educator so that you know some of that was kind of way over my head. Um but I do know and I do remember that we've had trouble in the past with tier three interventions. is was kind of hard to to do some of those. Um and also the state of Wisconsin does sort of does support some of those things. We do have a grant that um calls that we could use the money for tutoring with licensed [snorts] teachers and we get some of that funding. So we do have some funding sources to scale up some things in a different way. And I I'd appreciate your conversation about going slow to because you know um I probably
094need that. I'm one that kind of wants to jump fast. But on the other hand, we're also a small district and we're getting smaller and we do need to really kind of um do some things to to to pull ourselves together and um you know to to have everybody working together on similar things might be a benefit to the district as a whole. Um to your point about uh testing and scaling up, yeah, we need to do a little bit better job of our own on working on on growth data and and some of those kinds of things because it is real that we have kids who, you know, they're in that bottom scoring area and um you know, they could be making tremendous size strides and still be in that bottom scoring area, but
095they do look at growth and and we need to be focusing in on some of those kinds of things. Um but you know I I think as a tier three intervention um being able to provide tutoring with licensed teachers would be a wonderful thing for a lot of our students. So thank you. >> I do want to add Carol something that your comment sparked is that uh open literacy does bring some capacity around the meeting the requirements of act 20. The individualized learning plan um meets that requirement. the communication that we can generate from that learning plan for families can meet some of that requirement. So in terms of alleviating some of the the paperwork, you know, obviously meeting the spirit of the law in serving students, but also there's some paperwork burden around that
096that our tools meet. >> Yeah. And and we didn't really talk about with skyrocket that but I'm you know I'm sure there's a a parent component with that as well. I mean, the more you talk about the culture of the building, the more you're you've you've got to have a parent component involved in that. We did have somebody here the other day that was concerned about that. I don't think that really needs to be a concern. I think obviously the parents are going to be involved and and and have opportunities for involvement in in both of these things if if and when we move forward. Um but yeah, I think to be able to say we're meeting some of those reading plans would be very helpful to to staff as well as to the parents.
097And then we can do summer summer virtual tutoring to meet the summer. You have to provide a summer program. So it can meet that. >> Quick follow-up question. Since you mentioned act 20 again with plans and that um what would you say like your best target grade level group would be because I think Miss said you said the other night like first and second. >> Um I mean we serve kids well in grades one through five as I said. Gosh, I'm forgetting where I'm talking. I think this was in the principal meeting. Um the runway is shorter in first grade and second grade and third grade and so getting kids to grade level can happen faster. you can sort of you know reduce the burden on the system and so I think the strategy from
098the foundation of saying like let's focus on one two and three so that you can transform the pipeline um is is part of the thinking there but I mean I love those fourth and fifth graders so I don't want to discount them. >> Thank you so much >> Brian. >> Thank you. Um Sarah, thanks for a great presentation. I just I have some things to share that you know um we've got we do have a lot of great teachers. There's three of them sitting here in the room tonight. We've got some great administration. We've got some great things going on with our academy. Uh just found out this morning that our uh our jazz band is going to Essential Ellington uh for the 13th time I think uh in in May, April, May. So we
099got a lot of things going on. Uh however we needed to build a base so that the graduation rate the portrait of a graduation of a a graduate is more uh um a higher rating than it is right now. So our our forward exam rates in the fall reported in the fall were you know re English was 20.9 reading was 23.1 and writing was 21.4 and I believe writing goes hand in hand with with with reading you know you if you can't read you can't write and vice versa. So, um I think this I think this is a great place to start um and start building that foundation one year at a time. And um you know I I consider this I consider this I consider this the answer to prayers uh for the city
100of Bit and the school district of Boe. Um, our city's been asking for this for a long time. I've only lived here 5 years, but I I know that. And so, uh, thank you both. U, I think this is a great idea and a great plan. And, um, I think if we don't do this, we're going to be scratching our heads and that hurts for me um, in a couple of years. So, that's my take. Thank you both. Appreciate it. And thank you, Lisa, and the foundation. And uh >> are there any other board member questions? >> I I have one, Sarah. How is it determined with just 60 slots which students receive the tutoring first? And I I know that the 85% attendance is part of the expectation. Do you look at the students
101um attendance rate this year into if if we go with this in determining okay this student was only present 60% of the time so we can't take that student um do you is there a discussion with the parent and the teacher? How how is it is that determined? >> Actually I'm going to answer that for Sarah is that the district determines who has the slots. >> Yeah, >> it's not Sarah. the district will work with the principles to determine who the 60 slots are. So that's our decision as a district >> and and the some of the criteria that you might consider attendance obviously, but um thinking about the ecosystem, who who is serving these kids, what does tier three look like? What does tier 2 look like? What are your what are your what
102is the overall need? um and how do you best want to sort of get the most bang for your buck with this these 60C seats? And so different districts take different approaches. Some put the hardest to move kids with us so that they're uh in-person folks can um serve other students in small groups. Some give us all the bubble kids because they want to transform their pipeline. Some give a mix. Um, and so it really does depend on your ecosystem and your needs and your and what's already in place as you decide those kits. Earlier you said there are 60 spaces or 60 slots and some students may graduate. Can you explain what graduating out means? >> Sure. So a second grader gets to the end of the foundation sequence. They complete our foundation's mastery.
103They're very confident. They're testing at grade level in their middle of the year benchmark assessment or above grade level. We love to see that. And so we have a conversation and say, you know, um Tia's Tia looks like, you know, she's finished. She's reading at the end of our foundation sequence, which is the end of second grade. What are you seeing in your data? And the school writes back and says, "Yeah, that's what we're seeing in our data." and we make a decision together that Tia is going to exit and a new student's going to take that slot. >> Has there ever been a case where a student graduates but then is not doing so well and needs to return? >> Um to date, no. Um but we're not super we don't want to exit
104them too soon. We're not super quick to exit uh like right when they get there. Uh because we want to give them a little runway. um especially if they're returning to a classroom that doesn't have a regular, you know, that has a permanent long-term sub. Um you know, we want to make sure that they're getting reading instruction and so we look closely at that and that's a conversation with the school. >> Thank you, Sarah. Dr. Anderson, did you have any questions or anything? >> No, I just want to express my gratitude uh for the opportunity to learn. So, I mean, we're all learners, so I learned more today. and uh looking at skyrocket. Skyrocket for me is not only a professional development, looks like a leadership development. And as I mentioned to Mike earlier, uh
105I think every one of us as leaders want to get better. So I look for forward if we uh can go through with this, which I hope we do, uh that we can all become better learners and we can use open literacy to help some children to a better extent than we're currently helping them. So thank you. >> Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Lisa. Lisa, did you have any other statements? Thank you. I would entertain a motion to adjurnn. >> So moved. >> Second. >> Motion by Brian Nichols, second by Carol Fox. Any discussion here? Hearing none. All in favor? >> I. >> Any opposed? >> Oh, sorry. I was still saying I. [laughter] >> Um, motion carries. We are adjourned at 6:31.