001um i just wanted and then also just sort of welcome everybody into this space to mention that we're excited to as districts have permanent homes for some of our programs that were previously in this building so um lower level here in space that was specifically designed for that programming as well and so that's just an exciting uh just announcement to be in this space and also just want to give a couple of shout outs uh one to adam janine who built all the cabinetry that you see in this space as well as the table that we're sitting at and adam as you can see does fine work and and at a great price to use and not that i'm plugging adam but for our tax paying community he really did a fine job and just
002to also note some things like the divider behind you the wood on the wall behind us the stone when you came in those are all product left over from the karcher middle school project and so a great way to recycle those materials as well i also just wanted to mention that if you hadn't heard we experienced in our community a tragedy friday night affected some families with a pretty really just bad car accident it brings me great pride to let you know that watching our community specifically burlington high school as well as fox river come together in support of those kids and the families that are impacted it means a great deal so hopefully your thoughts your prayers can stay with them during this very challenging time for their their families in the road of
003recovery that they have not to leave you on on a sad note like that i just wanted to also highlight kind of a bittersweet we had a student that you may have heard of nate ryberg who's a junior at bhs that was recently diagnosed with leukemia and the school very quickly wanted to have a full display of orange on friday night and when we competed against waterford and held our wall of fame recognition but really one of the highlights is the the sort of respect and love of a neighbor uh we're very competitive with waterford of course and yet their students and their coaches all showed up in orange in support of of what was going on and so that kind of classy uh relationship with a neighboring community is always fun to recognize as
004well and then lastly i just wanted to mention that we did receive for tonight a report from ics at about 5 30. we did post that to board docs and it is going to be on our website if it's not already so if after tonight you want to dig in further or have questions following the report uh that's going to be available as well so thank you for the opportunity to share those couple announcements you're welcome thanks for sharing um steve are you going to lead the discussion with uh i will do that so much like we did back in december when dan lozen presented the findings of the discipline audit tonight we'll do a similar presentation where i'll just give a little bit of background as to how we got here and then after
005the presentation jill olschlager will share a little bit about some of the work that we've been doing since and so we are here tonight i want to highlight what you can see on the screens is our three big goals for the district we work with a focus on essential skills which is really about our clear learning goals uh best practice in instruction specifically and then univ universal access those have been our three big goals for approximately the last five years and they continue to be and of course having an audit of our work aligns to all three of them quite closely so that's that's good news relative to our work also just to remind us kind of how we ended up reaching out to have an audit done this is similar to what we saw
006back in december but just as a reminder that there was a corrective action issued from the department of public instruction and you can see that there were four items that we were attending to and really what we're talking about tonight is item number two about addressing a hostile environment that is present that dpi believes is present here in the burlington area school district and so that is what led to the audit as well so requirement number two specifically read that the district will work through a continuous improvement process of analyzing practices policies and procedures based on recommendations so the recommendations that we'll hear tonight those will be for the board's consideration for the community to hear as well and provide feedback on and then we see where that takes us in terms of next steps
007and so without any further hesitation want to pass it over to both doctors elise fertura and dr colleen capper who are from ics and just give us a moment to get that zoom live and they'll begin their presentation magic all right thanks so much all right so i'm going to go ahead and get us started and then i'll i'll turn it over to colleen i'm elise fatura i'm one of the co-founders of ics equity and we'll talk a little bit more about this but we've been doing this work for well over 30 years together and professor emeritus from uw milwaukee and was professor in educational administration prior to that i was a director of student services for 15 years and three different districts in wisconsin so colleen do you want to go ahead and introduce
008yourself before i get started it makes sense sure i'm colleen capper and again uh as lisa co-founder of ics with the lease i'm professor emeritus from the university of wisconsin-madison the department of educational leadership and policy analysis and my role there is on preparing school leaders and superintendents for systems change work and we're grateful for this opportunity so i'm going to go ahead and just share out a little bit i'm getting started in the evaluation and [Music] i will says but miami tells me i have all my bars which i can't believe we're still talking about bars but i am so at any rate let me know if it's terribly bad um colleen so or jill um at any rate so i'm going to talk just a i'll do a quick introduction and then a
009little bit about our approach and then turn it over to colleen to talk about the process and some of the selected quantitative data and then i'll pick it up again around interviews the interviews we did for the focus groups and then essential next steps and then we'll open it up to q a our understanding is we have about 30 minutes and so we'll be as timely as possible so just real quickly as i said kalina and i have been doing this work for over 30 years and we school districts and educators across the country since 1985 providing professional learning for school leadership teams district leadership team school board community members etc and as far as evaluations we've done follow 50 evaluations from major school districts like san francisco public to new holstein in wisconsin to
010um other districts across the country so um and we are just telling me that it's dragging a little bit so hopefully it's okay um but so you know every evaluation that we do um is unique to us it's really unique to us and we're honored to um and felt the responsibility i must say of being asked to do an evaluation for burlington what we bring to that evaluation is a significant amount of experience from our previous evaluations and all the work we've been doing around equity for the past 30 years we also don't do this work alone and so we have a team of facilitators ics facilitators and coaches that work with us and the steve rogers was one of the facilitators that did some of our focus groups as well so just a little
011bit about our approach i think it's really important to know that our recommendations and how we actually even initiate any conversation with the school district is that this work is about advancing the learning for all students across all identities across race disability language social class religion gender sexual gender identity and other intersections it's about that equity is about high quality teaching and learning for all kids and that's the premise that we take within this approach and within all our work um we don't see this work as a zero-sum game it's not that some kids win and other kids lose out right that the responsibility of all school districts across this country is to raise the achievement of each and every learner and so that's the lens that we use throughout this report and throughout our
012analysis so i'm going to go ahead turn this over to colleen do you want me to keep sharing or since i'm dragging maybe you should yeah i'll go ahead and share my screen so can you see my slides i just froze i was gonna want me i know you can hear what i'm saying yeah we can hear you okay uh let's see if i can get myself out of here yeah i'm stuck so all right i'm going to go ahead and share mine and then do you want to go ahead and talk about the process and i'll just flip the slides yeah except that i'm like really completely wait i'm coming back now i think hang on here uh now it looks like i'm back okay let's see we can do here uh okay but
013they're my slides do you want me to stop sharing yeah now i think you can see my slides yes we can okay sorry about that little zoom um so just a little bit about our process so as lisa we did conduct focus group interviews approximately 55 focus groups and 25 individual interviews so we always asked in our focus groups if anyone wanted to contact us one to one they could so it was actually around about 400 people that we talked with across the district the community the school board administrators etc from each school we did a separate focus group with general educators and student services people about and seven to eight individuals per group as i said district administration district office staff secretaries building grounds community members that were demographically representative of the district and
014students at the midland high school who are also demographically representative and then we had individual interviews with the principals some community members district administration and school board members as well and we also just want to say up front how grateful we are to jill and the other district office staff who really helped in this process is incredible um getting the focus groups together getting us the equity audit data um it was fantastic the organization of it all and so how much we appreciate that in this work we made our work a lot um a lot smoother process so for each focus group we just asked two key questions so one is what do you think is working well in the district for every student and the second question is what could be improved in the
015district for every student so that was like those are the two basic questions we asked everyone when we got into as you can see in the next slide we asked some more detailed questions when we talked to the educators so again we asked what's working well what could be improved and then we asked the educators about um the current structure for educating students with disabilities and what are the challenges of that structure the current structure for students who are labeled as ell the english learners and the challenges to that structure the current structure for educating students labeled as gifted and the challenges to that structure we wanted to know what staff collaboration looked like across the district and then we also asked the district policies support and district policies that get in the way of
016all students achieving in the district and then also with everyone we got to the end of the interview we just said is there anything else you want to add about advancing the learning of all kids in the district and so that was our structure for questions they also that was the qualitative part then for the numerical part in the data audit we looked at data across demographics or across social class race disaggregated by race by language by disability by gender and then we we looked it in programs of special ed special education gifted and honors ap response to intervention we look at achievement we looked at math and literacy achievement graduation rates ect we also looked at truancy attendance and discipline that this all is in an excel spreadsheet a district level excel spreadsheet we
017got that to the district and the district plugged in all the numbers for us brought it back to us and we did all the analysis and produced all the graphs except that you'll see in the report we also collected documents like key district policies and procedures like board policy student family handbooks discipline practices and referral practices for at-risk art response to intervention gifted in special education in our analysis we analyzed all that data you know looking at key themes in the focus groups we compared that data to the research on effective practices in education and then we identified these essential next steps for the district to take so you'll see in the um in our report this is the our table of contents we had our introduction we're going to talk a little bit about
018the pupil non-discrimination law coming up here you can see we divided it out in these different sections the first section was more the quantitative then we had the focus group for strengths and areas for growth and then the last section are the essential best practices that we suggest and then we summarize the next steps at the end of the document so i just want to start out with and this is in the report in the very first pages just what the law wisconsin state law says about um there are wisconsin people about non-discrimination law and how it applies to the burlington school district so i'm actually going to read it because i think it's important it's just it forms the context for this whole work so the wisconsin public school district the burlington area school
019district remains legally bound to be in compliance with wisconsin chapter 118-13 the pupil non-discrimination law and pi9 wisconsin administrative code under under chapter 1 18 13 no people may be excluded from a public school or from any school activities or programs or be denied any benefits or treated in a different manner because of sex race religion national origin including a student whose primary language is not english ancestry creed pregnancy parental status marital status sexual orientation physical disability mental disability emotional disability and learning disability the law requires that each school district to submit an annual compliance report to the department of public instruction periodically conduct a self-evaluation status of google non-discrimination and quality of educational opportunity the policy must apply to all areas of school operations including school-sponsored programs and activities section 903 of the code
020illustrates the scope and breadth of the required district policies by identifying many of the areas subject to the non-discrimination policy they include admission to classes or programs rules of conduct and discipline selection instructional library meeting materials and facilities among others our people manufacturing statute applies to all aspects of district operations and programs but the law requires the pupil and administration policy or policies that the district adopts apply to all areas of the district so just as a summary to form the context of the work that we did in the evaluation so we just want to start out with um they're at their fundamentally absolutely were district strengths and this is identified across the district across community members um across for all perspectives of community members is across teachers and educators these are really common one
021was the first is district willingness to examine high quality teaching learning for all students work to improve that they're excited about this evaluation they were really excited the district was engaged in it excited about the opportunities that could come from this evaluation and that was true again across nearly everyone that we talked with a second one is this the district strength is just caring and supportive teachers who work really really hard to meet individual student needs and again parents community members all said that that was a strength and they felt really proud of teachers and a really hard work in the district are really trying to meet student needs in all the ways that they could a third really strong logistic strength was lots of options at the high school for different career paths as
022well as extracurricular programs what we really were impressed with was just like how all those paths were valued so that um all the different career pathways it wasn't like some sort of hierarchy and that some people were going to college some kids to tech school trade school et cetera but they were all valued in this and the high school that has done a great job at supporting that the district has and supporting those options for students um also common was a district process of the school boundaries with the district did engage in i think over the last year and this is the first year the district boundary changes were um were made better represents students across schools and there's again positive support for that there's also positive support for the process of how those decisions
023are made um loses strength another strength that came up was um the middle school work on discipline practices there were some really strong new ideas there about how to dress up because remember these interviews were done at the start of the school year we thought really provided a strong model for the rest of the district so those are just five there you know those are really five strong ones that really stood out so we want to keep that in mind these are the district strengths we want to be building on we talk about the next steps for the district to engage in [Music] so the next piece i'm just going to talk about is just to select a quantitative data so we've probably produced i'm i can't remember now probably about 35 at least different
024graphs um that are all in the report we're just we're just going over a few of those just being mindful of our time so i just started basically in this in the district some basic demographics so um in the district we have about 16.6 percent of students living with a disability 4.2 percent of students are receiving english language services thirty six point three percent of students receiving freedo's price lunch and twenty point seven percent of students of color remember these are the day the district got to us i probably over the late summer um so again some of these data may have changed over this school year but that's the date at that point in time that's what these data represent so we look at students receiving freedom's price lunch over then in the left
025bar you see that 36.3 percent of students are receiving freedo's price lunch in the district and so what we're going to be talking a little bit two two key points in this data one is what we call representation and we call proportional representation to what extent the demographics of a student group in the district is represented across the district in different areas and then the second key data area we're going to share is achievement data and so i'll talk about both those but those are the sort of when you're looking through these slides i'll be talking about representation and then achievement so if students receive freedom's price lunch again 36.3 percent we can see that students receiving fruits priced lunch are over identified for special education because if it was proportionately represented we would suspect
026about 36.3 percent of students receiving special ed um uh to be receiving freedo's price lunch vacancies they're over identified for special education over identified for tier two and tier three interventions at 55.4 under identified to being labeled as gifted at twenty point six percent under identified advanced courses at the middle of a middle and high school at twenty four point three percent and the students who are attending our alternative school setting seventy eight point seven percent of students receiving produce price lunch so i'm going to share i'm sharing some data on free reduced lunches so you can sort of follow where we're going to go here then i'm going to share some data specific to race and then i'll send data a few data points specific to kids receiving english language services and then a
027few data points of students identify disabilities so just so you know where we're going and within each of those a few on representation and a few on academics so we look at district reading achievement and kids on friday's price lunch what you're looking at here are in the in the green bar are students who are middle to upper class meaning that they're actually not receiving produce price lunch like that that's what that means and the students here in the gold bar the orange bar are students receiving fruits priced lunch so this is reading achievement so if you look on the left side these are students who are scoring basic or below basic so they are not at grade level and reading and this is for grades this data set is for grades of students grades
028three through eight just so you know where it comes from so students who are middle and upper class 36.5 are basic or below basic in reading um and then we see that students who are free to use price lunch 63.2 percent are basic or below basic and reading um and then you see that sort of the inverse on the other side for students are advanced or proficient in reading 60.2 percent are kids who are not receiving freeze price lunch and then we see a little more than a third of kids who are assuming for reduced price lunch are proficient or advanced i'm going to focus on that left side i think what's important about this and it goes with how we started this out tonight is that in this school district right now even kids
029who are middle to affluent in your school district they are not on produce price lunch more than a third are basic or below basic in reading so that's what we're talking about like this is what so there is a gap we see a gap between kids on friday's lunch much higher just two-thirds are not reading at grade level and then we have a third that are um middle and affluent who are not reading at grade level yes there's a gap for sure but i think what's important what we think is important is that even with all the really good work going even kids who are not our fruit is lunch more than a third are are basic or below basic so that's what we want to come back to um you know this work it
030actually is about our kids it's not about one certain group of kids we're going to do this for these kids over here and sort of everyone else is doing fine this is about sort of rethinking how can we continue to improve our district across literally all kids in the district and this is one example of that we see the same in district math achievement so i'm just going to focus on this left side students from middle to upper class 27.6 percent are below basic and math again this is grades three through eight and then you have um more than a third of kids who are receiving freedom's price lunch are both below basic and now um so now we're gonna that was a little bit on friday's lunch i'm gonna shift now to raise so
031when you look at students and demographic and district student and staff racial demographics you can see at this point in time we've collected data 20.7 percent our students of color our students of color in the district but you can see staff of color in the district are 2.6 um certified staff of color 1.2 and then we sort of made a note over here what we thought was important of your students of color 14.3 of students in your district are hispanic so we have a fairly large hispanic population as you probably know at the time we got the data from the district in the summer at that point in time the district report they didn't have any uh hispanic staff they when we met with the district last week they said that they had they do
032have a few hispanic staff members now and we'll be talking about in that a little bit about the importance of increasing the number of students of staff members of color and especially of hispanic board and in your school district for students of color over identity for a special ed for special education you can see on this graph students of color again represent twenty point seven seven percent of students in the district with twenty five point eight percent of students labeled for special education so students are over identified and then when you've desegregated you have black students who represent 1.6 percent of students in the district with 2.8 percent of students label for special eds over identified hispanic students are also over identified for special education and your multi-racial students are also over-identified for special education
033then when you look at the other side when you look at kids label gifted if you look at the left bar actually students are white you know well represented in your gifted programs advanced programs across the district but again when you look at racially you can see that black students are under identified as gifted hispanic students under are under identified multi-racial are under identified and overall students of color are under-identified as a group as gifted in the district this relates to your advanced placement courses began to see on the left side white students are well represented in the advanced courses of the at the high school but again actually in this example black students are are equally represented in your advanced placement courses at the high school so that's a positive you can see hispanic
034students though are far underrepresented in your advanced placement courses multi-racial students are not identifying the advanced courses but overall you can see students of color are under-identified for advanced placement courses at the high school then we look at suspensions and discipline so yes over on the far left side you have students who identify students of color again 20.7 in your district um but you see the kids receiving in school suspensions are 31 students of color so students are of color are over identified for your in-school suspensions out of school suspensions actually they are not over identified so students are kind of over identified for in school but not for out of school they are not over identified but when you desegregate that data you'll see that students are identified as black or are very over
035identified for in-school suspensions and out-of-school suspensions as your next data right there for in-school and out-of-school suspensions black students are far over identified um same with students who identify as hispanic over identified and in school and out of school suspensions then we just take a quick look at some re achievement when we look at racial race again by achievement i'm just going to direct your attention to the olive bar so the olive bar again are kids who are basic or below basic by race and this is in reading so you have white students 41.5 percent are below basic or basic in reading black students 52 2.6 basic or below that again that's all of our multi-racial students 44.9 percent are basic or below basic in reading um 38.9 percent of asian students are basic or
036below basic and 70.4 percent of the spanning students are basically basic as we went through the hispanic student achievement game stood out to us um but again when you look across this i think what's important to know yes there are gaps so yes gaps between white students are basic and below basic in reading 41.5 you look at the gap and then black students even more black students by percentage are basic or below basic in reading i think what's important to note again come back to this though that again it's by the hard work good work with teachers and caring across the district more than you know more than 40 of your white students are basically basically reading so again as we think about the district reading system what you know what is it about that
037that we can that we want it to improve so we actually see growth across all students in the history and then we see the same i won't go through the details on this one but this you'll see the same gaps in mass you see if you look at the olive bar again basic and below basic and math white students again forty nearly fifty percent forty five point three percent of white students grades three to eight are basic ebola basic and now and then again you can see the gaps across when you look at just the olive are um again it causes the question what do we need to be doing differently in our math system so that all students can be doing better and then this last piece is just the math in terms of
038college readiness so the district did an incredible job of getting his achievement data i mean it was thorough so we had grades three through eight they got its data at the high school as well so this is the act 11th grade math assessment and this is based on again on math so so it assesses whether kids are college ready in math at that grade level and so um you can see 50 percent of asian students half and half 50 are ready for college 50 or not you can see for black students zero so 100 of black students who took that act 11th grade math are not college ready 90.3 of hispanic students 100 of multi-racial students are not college ready and then you have 68 percent of your white students are not college ready so
039again like okay like it's not just about one race or one group this is about you know this is really rethinking what we need to be doing again differently with our math system across the district and i have just two more slides two set one is around kids label ell and the other is special education so these these are students receiving ell services so you have 4.2 percent of your students receiving ell services that's on your left side there you can see students who are receiving yellow services are over-identified for special ed you can see they're over-identified for response to intervention under-identified as labeled gifted under-identified and advanced courses at your middle school and had zero students receiving ull services who completed the ap exam at the high school and then this last one is
040just related to kids with disabilities you see also the same differences in achievement so you have students without disabilities you have 43.7 percent are below basic or below basic and math but you also have um or actually 43.7 percent of students without disabilities are basically basically in math but 82.5 percent of students with disabilities are at basic or below basic and math so again despite some really hard work really awesome work on access you know high expectations trying to do rti in a better way you can still see some really big gaps for kids with disabilities beginning coming back even kids without an iep um 43.7 percent are basically basic in that so i'm going to turn it over to elise who will now talk about their qualitative things all right and i realize um
041we are going through this very quickly and um it's a you know it's a 100-page report if not more and so in a half an hour out of all fairness um we're we're only doing an overview right so for the focus groups and so there are two main data sections of the report one was that that quantitative part right what does what does the actual data look like the clean just did a few pointed slides but then the next part is the qualitative part of kind of what's the culture what are people thinking what's going on within system and so this falls under qualitative research and those were as colleen talked about the questions that we asked and so out of the 400 interviews so the 400 people that we interviewed and all the focus
042groups this was the these are the themes that bubbled up from all of those interviews and so we put the themes into five different uh primary themes with secondary themes underneath them and so within the report you will see it listed this way and then within each secondary theme you will see quotes from people within the district or community members or board members but knowing that they're all anonymous and you they should not be identifiable at all but just really what people said what do they think about it so the five major areas are bullying teasing and harassment that that came up throughout all the interviews teaching and learning district culture community and then educational structures and so just a little bit on bullying teasing and harassment it came up as rampant occurrences it came
043up as students retaliated against for reporting incidents so much fear about if i say something to someone it's not going to go well lack of district school response and the feeling is even if i do say something then no one's no one's going to do anything about it lack of district school communicating the response of really thinking about what is the district doing proactively and there are some things that are happening proactively that are not communicated and so then it ends up providing mixed messages and then lack of staff training in the end people really wanted consistent systematic professional development in order for these types of bullying teaching harassment not to occur but also to interrupt inequities and to create high quality teaching and learning for all kids and that was a primary theme from
044staff teaching and learning is really looking at um is the curriculum identity relevant can all kids see themselves within the curriculum and the feedback from that was they cannot but that staff wanted more information on how to better do that on collaboration across staff in order for kids not to be marginalized or segregated within the system it means that our experts have to collaborate our experts have to so staff are asking for more ways of collaboration very consistent in order to continue to to build those support networks um forward in in order to have identity relevant instruction and how do we co-create that so we'll address all of these in the next steps and again uh professional development came up so again just what can that look like under teaching and learning and specific to
045collaboration instruction and curriculum and then discipline what does proactive discipline look like so people were concerned about discipline the inequity within the discipline you can see what colleen talked about within the discipline as far as some of those uh really tangible inequities and then looking at district culture communication came up um significantly but the other part was really follow through so you know our goal in this work is help the district get from point a to point b um and and what does what can that look like what can a systematic approach look like that is transparent and communicated that has the achievement and and proactive support around discipline for all kids front and center and um and a consistent follow-through that it's not a one-stop shop thing where i go to one professional development
046but then there's no follow-through or application for the classroom and then district policy so um staff were pretty unclear and most focused group participants were really unclear of different district policies and what they look like and how they can be applied and then community was around parent involvement and public relations what does a really cohesive community school district look like and how do we bring everyone together in that as far as structures many staff talked about different educational structures that felt marginalizing across special ed ell multi-level systems of support advanced learners social emotional learning and secondary programs and so all of that is listed and i'm just being cognizant of the time so all of that is in detail within the report of in general representation of what different focus group members talked about and
047why they became themes throughout so i want to just start with so i'm going to talk just a little bit about the next steps and as as we shared earlier that you know two-thirds of this report is really the district data right it's the quantitative data and it's the qualitative data one-third of the report is next steps where do we go from here we do think this is the most important part of the report um there was a quote that's in the report that really um really guided our way we have to say it really set the stage and one community member said this hearing everyone's feedback about how great their experience has been and how there are so many great things about this community i realize that not everyone has the same experiences that
048i do therefore i want from the report to address if there is something going on that creates obstacles or prevents people from having the same experiences my family and i have had we just need to fix it and so that's the it's important for you to know going forward that's kind of the spirit of the essential next steps going forward um i'm going to talk a little bit just about how they're aligned and set up in the framework and then i'll talk about them i'm not going to read them all so i think there are jill probably knows this i think they're about 36 so i'm not going to read them off because i think we'd all have the deer in the headlight look by the after that but i also we also want to
049make sure that you have an opportunity for questions so as far as the framework for high quality teaching and learning just a and in the framework we're leaning into a really systematic pragmatic approach for high quality teaching and learning so all kids learn more so the 32 percent of kids that function under middle and high class that still are not reading it advanced and proficient need to be right at the same time african american hispanic kids who are not reading a proficient need to be right so that so the first goal is of this framework is that it's it's systematic it's pragmatic and that it's connected to each other it's all interrelated and so it's not um so that we don't continue to perpetuate piecemeal that we know in order to have a system that
050is actually meeting the needs for all learners we have to be really systematic in our process and part of that is sharing out that focus on equity that everyone in the system community members board members staff all educators know the history of public ed how did we get to the system we have and why isn't it working for all our kids right and often we find that we're functioning in a reactionary kind of deficit based system and a deficit-based system holds all kids back that's the bottom line it holds all kids back and so we want to really leverage a proactive system for all kids in a healthy way but the first step of that is really knowing the history of public act shift from deficit to aspect acid-base thinking and language there were many
051conversations within focus groups that were really deficit-based language also known as microaggression but anything we say that lifts me up and pushes somebody else down is is really a micro question right it perpetuates that inequity so really understanding how our language defines how we think and then it defines the structures that we create within our system right of how we respond to students continue in the growth mindset around identity development that identity development across all identities across all races across think about across gender sexuality right so really going into kids that are experiencing poverty but really doing some pragmatic and systematic professional development around identity development and then what does the research say and so within the document there's a significant amount of research of what what a proactive system look what looks like that
052really dismantles practices and structure structures that become inequitable and then the other part of really leaning into your mission and statement and the work and the goal that you that the district already has are developing principles of excellence of how are we going to get there so so the aspiration of a high quality teaching learning system but the question is what are those guiding principles that really operationalize that work and so what does that look like and most districts have about seven to ten really operational principles that say exactly what are we gonna do it's tangible they can see it it's not aspirational it's what we're gonna do to make sure that we have equitable really how we see kids what our structures look like what curriculum looks like and what instruction looks like and
053then an annual just conducting the equity audit everything that colleen just went over conducting that on an annual basis to measure your growth and measure just achievement of the impact of a real systematic approach going forward and we would suggest that also happen so what we asked for was a district equity audit we would also include a school by school equity audit as well that schools can look at their own data in a way that they can look at proportional representation as well and then really looking at as the conversation around collaboration is really important and staff talked about opportunities for collaboration but that it wasn't structured and that they would really like to have more opportunities to actually collaborate and so that the more they collaborate the less kids receive pull-out instruction that often
054they learn less they learn less when they're removed from the core of teaching and learning so some of the conversation we have under transforming teaching and learning is the more kids that are are removed from the classroom the more they're removed from the classroom the further behind they get because the more we accommodate or modify curriculum the less information we're giving them and then we assess them on information that we actually haven't taught them so really looking at what does identity relevant teaching and learning look like for all kids under transform and teach online what does curriculum look like bringing into the conversation curriculum that represents all learners that they can see themselves within that curriculum and that it's asset based and proactive within the core of teaching and learning which when we define the
055core of teaching learning it's tier one um general education and we also made some recommendations for discipline and behavior and put a couple attachments in of what do proactive discipline plans look like that all staff are on the same page moving forward so that it's really consistent so kids achieve and learn more and then really looking at students with more significant disabilities pulling this all together and this is where the board comes in significantly is around policy and funding that aligning all human resource systems to your equity principles of excellence leveraging funding to those equity principles of excellence so the whole system is going forward in a really proactive manner i'm lifting the achievement of all students and so and then also doing that cross-check with policy and procedures against those principles of excellence at
056the top of this you'll see institute and sustain a comprehensive anti-bullying anti-harassment policy and practices and that's significant that has to come in right out of the gate and so i'm just going to share that slide regarding it that it's going to be really important to institute and sustain a comprehensive anti-bullying anti-harassment policy prior to any essential next step within the district so really thinking about exactly adopting it making it transparent and clear it's clean talked about really looking at wisconsin department of public excuse me of public instruction and the relevant federal law inform all students families and community members provide intensive training so that everyone knows so this is the role and responsibility of all school districts so it's not this really isn't to us it's it's actually not negotiable right this isn't negotiable
057in order to actually lift the achievement of all kids and provide equitable system this has to be front and center and first and completed first so and then develop that robust data system that tracks the details as far as complaints and resolutions but having a response system in place and so that when kids do not feel like there's going to be retaliation or no one's going to respond um and so and that it informs all parents students and community about the resolutions and so this under the communication too many people talked about the lack of communication going forward so then you'll see just the list of all the essential next steps that i just did a really brief overview so i'm not going to go through them now and given the time we're right at
058we're actually at 40 minutes we started at 709 and so it's 7 49 right now so i'm gonna go ahead and stop there and then we'll open this up for q and a i'll stop sharing my slides any board members have questions yeah i was wondering how you decided who was the upper class and regular you know average when you scored it are you talking about money are you talking what are you education backgrounds what are you talking about for the parents that's a good question it was um started out by um kids who received fruit price lunch at school and then kids who did not receive free reduced price lunch at school the kids who received free advice who applied and received free reduced price lunch at school kids who did not receive reduced
059price school we identified as pr as either middle or upper class knowing that there's some fuzziness there because we know that families there are plenty of families who would qualify for reduced price lunch but actually don't apply but that's uh that's how we that you know the district just got us the numbers on freddy's price lunch and then we did the announcements based on that and that's just so you know like that's dpi collects that that's a very common um dpi the department of public instruction calls it economically disadvantaged and that's how they measure it is my kids on freedom's price lunch so if you go to the dpi website right now you can pull up your school district and it would show similar data and it would show economically disadvantaged it would compare you
060know achievement accepted by that other board members questions i have one i mean you touched on at the end of the anti-bullying anti-harassment policies and practices and i haven't had a chance to dive into the practices yet but just curious on it was there specific feedback on our policies because we do have an anti-bullying and anti-harassment policy in our district are they deficient in some way that you you see or i mean one thing is that people didn't know about the policy they didn't understand what the policy was so like there might be a policy um but like the actual implementing that in practice is what was missing okay anyone else on the board any questions i mean i don't know what kind of questions you're expecting when you got this at 5 30 100
061pages yeah i mean i think that's a good point was 40 minutes yeah obviously i wouldn't think we would need another session to ask questions because there's a lot to go through here yet before we can digest it those are good points too you know doctors uh gapper and ferturo i think we're gonna need time to go through the report uh just taking the information we got and there's a lot to digest and then circle back to you with questions i think on the audit absolutely we certainly understand is this the report as it stands or will there be additions to this is the report as it stands it's official final report we yeah okay will we get a copy of the presentation that you gave tonight yeah we sent that to jill thank you
062okay well thanks for presenting tonight i appreciate it thank you thank you we really appreciate the opportunity and again we're happy to set up a follow-up meeting if you have questions as you go through the report we know it's long so thank you for your time tonight thank you that being our only other or only item on the agenda tonight i'd entertain a motion to adjourn just yeah really quick so um the question was asked about the presentation we did get that i don't know 15 20 minutes before so we'll post that on our website as well so that you have this and you don't have to worry about screenshots or what have you um and and to taylor's earlier point certainly if the board schedules another meeting where they're you know discussing this further
063after having some time to digest because it is a lot certainly that will be you know advertised as well and just a couple of slides to finish kind of the the book end uh really quick with jill and then should be ready yeah just like we did with the discipline audit i think what's also sometimes nice to know is the data that was used for the equity audit was from the years the 17 18 18 19 19 20 school year so they didn't want the years that really related to the colbit time frame um because so it was it was getting all that data prior to uh so we also wanted to be able to talk about like what have we been doing um since the since the data has been collected so a few
064changes which one of them that was that was big and part of the why for the elementary attendance country was to ensure that our schools were better proportionally represented across the district waller had 60 percent of students were free and reduced lunch students in in one building and really making sure that we're being more equitable across the whole system especially k5 to ensure that there is more equity when it comes to yell services specialized services and and just ensuring that we really are are making it as heterogeneous as possible um across all february elementary schools the second piece that um really just kind of got underway here uh in january of like this month january is the data and systems analyst so as a district we haven't formally had a data and system analyst within
065the district so we haven't had a formal way to analyze our data in a really systemic way so we have also spent time working to find a platform that would work best for us in order to track our data so that is something that uh we're working on kennedy smith has been hired as our data and system analyst and has been doing a great job so far she is um really really into it she really likes it she's very um very very he's really close attention to every minute detail uh we were going through our discipline data together and she was like no joe let's students right so uh what the data she was looking at versus the data so really important to pay attention to the details so we really appreciate that and it
066will be great to start to be able to utilize those systems in order for us to track what's going on our assistant principals in the district work on our student handbooks they align that with the viola handbooks sunyola does supply student handbooks that are made through neola and then we have the ability to kind of embed our own uh spin on them and or practices that we utilize within the district so our assistant principals have been working on those and have updated them we showed last time that we really worked to refine our discipline codes we had over 99 different codes that were being used and shrunk those down to 14. 99 can be really difficult to track especially when some of them really overlapped and were very similar to each other so that will
067make it a lot easier for us to track as well referral entry was something we talked about too more so from the lens of and the student note tracking those two components of ensuring that we're not just tracking what happens to the perpetrator but also ensuring that we're keeping notes with with the victims so that we do have a better ability to you know if roseanne continuously is being harassed or picked on by the same student we have that in roseanne's file and within the system and not just the perpetrator so that is helping us in that regard and then when it comes to teaching and learning uh one component that we brought forward to the board was in relation to the extra funds and trying to align some of that work with uh ensuring
068that we have more equitable structures a lot of that comes to the instructional coaches that we would like to implement and utilize within the district so there's a as you've heard there's there's work to do when it comes to teaching and learning and one way to go about really ensuring that our structure and our system is aligned that we're supporting our teachers with the right strategies and skills to be used in the classroom is to provide coaching so right now our principles are only instructional coaches in the building so being able to really branch out and utilize more staff for that to really bring up our instruction across the district as a desire we also have one of the positions there too is the ability to use an interpreter that is a district interpreter for
069the district uh also an el position um support within library services and then also our student services which is wrap around services that relate to counseling school sites and also social workers so really trying to elevate all of those programs and try to take care of a lot of our systems and structure components in these next two years so that once the ester funds are no longer available that we have really revamped and been able to fix a lot of the structures within the district another component that is used with teaching and learning is what we call community circle time and advisory lessons so community circle time is our program that is used more so at the elementary level so okay through five classrooms so they have about 20 minutes of time for them to
070be able to sit with their class of students and be able to talk through issues that might be arising within the school day that would relate to bullying harassment ensuring that we honor each other's differences see each other's differences and accept goals so that's what community circle is about advisory lessons are at the secondary level so middle school and high school same kind of uh idea there as well uh and also infusing the character traits with that as well when it comes to grading practices we've been really working on uh one of our big three as steve had mentioned is our essential skill work so that's really working to ensure that we are moving in the direction where it's all about ensuring all students reach proficiency which is meeting grade level standards and if they
071aren't like what do we do about that like what kind of strategy groups or interventions are we gonna put in place um and really working to ensure grading our grading system is not being looked at in a punitive way but more so as an informative way to really help students grow and learn and progress forward with their achievement skills groups is something that had originated and found to be really beneficial at the middle school where we used a time of day that was called i-time and we used our i-ready data to really be able to inform our student instructional groupings in order to support around standards so really saw the benefit of that at the middle school level and how much that assisted us with our growth and achievement so really put into practice that
072we will use skill groups k-8 so this is the first year the elementary schools also have infused the use of a scope of time and that is focusing around reading and math that is a tier one component so tier one when they use the terms tier one two and three tier one is talking about all students so this is uh skill group time is for all all students to ensure that we are meeting them for where they're at and ensuring that we're helping all students grow and achieve the last one here that relates to teaching and learning is called the expanding uh is to expand our listening library so last year i don't know if you recall or not but connie zinning had presented in relation to a pilot where each counselor was paired with
073a elementary teacher and they were using books through the jewish federation it was a free program for them to be able to incorporate books that talked about differences and accepting each other and they're all children books and lessons went along with those so we've been working on expanding that to ensure it's not just a pilot within a few classrooms in the district which ensure that something that we can start to infuse in all k5 classrooms and that's that's been slowly taking place this year a few other things that we've been working on is in relation to student and parent and community involvement and with the students we have shared that we do have shareholding at the middle school in high school and that is really to ensure that we're providing voice to our students who
074are of color and to ensure that they have a place to voice any concerns and or feel empowered also to use their voice we also utilized a microaggression survey last year which was for grades five through twelve we've used that with students and we've also used it for some professional development with our staff um pre-k through twelve and then this is the last one is something that spurred out of the fall and some concerns and issues that were arising within our sports teams so eric clicks away and our coaches have been working together across the conference in order to hold a sportsmanship conference with the athletic directors coaches and some athletes in order to really start to have conversation on how do we conduct ourselves in a um in a manner where we are we
075are treating each other with more dignity and respect and really holding ourselves to that and if we have teammates that are not um how do we stand up to that and not just be a bystander and really work together to raise up the entire conference when it comes to our sportsmanship so that's going to happen on february 9th and then within our staff some trainings that have been taking place when they talked about professional development these are all things that have taken place since the audit data would have been collected so we did have 50 different staff members in the district participated in a diversity equity and inclusion training with keenan fraser it was a series of trainings um over the course of last year we also uh administratively all administrators participated in the culturally
076responsive practices training we had the unconscious bias reggie jackson came in to talk with all of our staff we also offered a evening time frame for him to talk with community members as well dr thompson has come in to talk about aces which is in relation to informed care and understanding the trauma side of what students may be experiencing and how that impacts them at school the national equity project is one that we've been working with in collaboration for the last two years um and that one is heavily involved here with our team and they we have a group of teachers students administrators that are all working with the national equity project on a fairly regular basis they also have coaches that are meeting with steve and i out every other week and then also
077doing some coaching with some of our principals as well within the special ed realm of things we've been really working on mtss multiple tier system of support and the state now changed it to equitable multiple levels of systems and support try to stay that like a lot of times so um that is just the same thing they just brought in that equity piece so really focusing on ensuring that we are are really starting to work towards changing our practices when it comes to special ed you really notice within our data that it is an area where our special ed students are not growing at the rate that we would like to see so another area that that relates to is especially design instruction so on an iep what are the goals that we're studying and
078how are we ensuring that we're teaching into those goals in a very specific way with our specialized teachers and ensuring that we're we we were a model of co-teaching and we are really wanting to evolve into more of that co-planning culture people teach which colleen and police were referring to and the last one with professional development that we've been working on is with restorative practices that is really thinking differently about discipline and ensuring that we really work to literally do what it says is to restore the relationship within students and be able to ensure that if harm was this caused that we really repair that harm we help kids learn how to to do that within within a group and be able to understand that maybe things that i have said how that has impacted
079um others right that in impact versus intent and really helping students work through that so these are some of the things that we're working on in relation to activity within the district the last thing that uh felt it would be important to bring up do you want me to or you know i'm happy to okay sure they'll hand this one over to steve um in relation to how we're also working to really involve the community at the same time yeah i appreciate the the comments from jill kind of summarizing some of the work that we've been doing you know in the last you know year to 18 months for sure i think additionally you know it's hard to try to gather you know a list of things that are going on uh because as you
080listen to the report from ics it first kind of just doesn't feel good feels like it hits you um and you have to kind of be able to take that moment to step away um but nevertheless um we did want to mention that while we've got some student clubs at the secondary level in particular that are having conversations about kids and their experience in schools we are also inviting parents at each school building to begin to engage more in terms of the dialogue back and forth that families are having regarding their experience in schools and then the next sort of layer of that to build upon that will be to have a larger community type of conversation and so we don't we're we're learning as we go don't exactly know what that's going to look
081like but met with a very dedicated group of community family students that held an initial planning meeting and feel like we are anxious and ready to hold a community type event and you know on february 2nd we're not exactly sure what to call it maybe it's kind of town hall ish maybe it's a coming together but we're feeling like the purpose is really to be able to be collaborative in community for healing and progress and so you can define that however you want but there's probably no no doubt in people's minds that it's been a rough run in terms of people disagreeing about things and you know having various different points of view about how we should go about our business and hopefully this is the beginning of an opportunity to say well the thing
082that does unite us is kids and the work that we do on behalf of our community and so hopefully you're able to come on out on february 2nd at 6 30 in the karcher commons we expect a pretty sizable group and hopefully if you're able to join us on that night you'll be ready and willing to engage in some some conversations some dialogue we intend to try to have that be in some small group conversations so that we can manage having a a large group of folks with us that night and based on how that goes we'll see what comes next as we go through that journey so appreciate your opportunity to not only be here tonight to follow sort of in this journey with us but potentially engage come february 2nd excellent anything else
083jill i apologize for not following the slide show before and uh trying to adjourn the meeting early but i think we're at that point though i'll entertain a motion to adjourn second okay motions made in second any discussion hearing none all in favor you