04/04/2022 MMSD Board of Education Instruction Work Group

001maya um the recording process is in place i'm still admitting some people if you could give me about 30 seconds please maya um the recording process is in much barbara savion might be in a waiting room oh i'm checking everybody who's in i don't see him just yet you might be in the other link ananda you're right as always oh yeah thank you so much uh maya if you are uh okay to go um bobby can i ask you to shut off your video please i just need the board members up and dr jenkins thank you and and of course nama thank you okay i am ready awesome i would like to call the april 4th instruction work group meeting of the madison board of education um to order um we do not have any

002written statements today um barb do we have any public appearances we do not okay we're moving along that's great um i moved to approve the minutes from the instruction work group meeting dated may 3rd 2021. second thank you ali uh number your advisory vote i thank you all those in favor sabian we're just voting on um approving the minutes okay got it so unanimous vote thank you um and then we're moving on pretty quick uh into the wellness check um dr so you want to go ahead and take that away i sure do thank you very much absolutely uh good evening everyone um let me start with um some incredibly good news um carrie stampley is uh here with us this evening but she's just listening in because she had a conflict but nonetheless i

003want to take this opportunity to introduce her as the permanent and official director of health services for mmsd um carrie uh has her leadership has been incredible and we are so grateful i am beyond grateful for her interim leadership and i i truly cannot tell you how happy i am that she's gonna continue her leadership moving forward um so carrie i know you can hear us and and we're all uh giving high fives and um hearts so thank you very much um for your leadership and for agreeing to work with us and lead moving forward it is truly some of the best news i have gotten in a very long time congratulations period all right so um we're gonna move on um i will uh give you an update on uh a few things and

004then we'll turn it over uh back to board member pearson um so as we're returning from spring break we have seen a very small uptake in uptick in cases which is consistent with what is happening in the community and frankly what we had anticipated we'll continue to monitor those conditions within our school and community as we have throughout the pandemic and tomorrow we are starting a conversation um with our metrics team and medical advisors about the shift from maths required to masks recommended as we've shared with the community you can expect a decision on that um unmasking indoors and our other mitigation measures by april 15th um so we continue to monitor that and we'll be in touch as we make those decisions um after a br i'll move on to testing um after a

005brief pause in service we do have a new covent testing vendor um it is the same vendor who many of you experienced when you went to the alliant energy center if you've gone in the last couple of months accelerated clinical laboratories is providing testing in 14 of our school sites now and as they're actively hiring staff we will continue to add testing sites um to priority sites of priority schools in our community um we also have um an update on vaccination um we held our last vaccination clinic on march 2nd and that was at memorial high school our final totals for mmsd was nineteen hundred total doses administered um one thousand two hundred one thousand two hundred and seventeen of those were four five to eleven year olds and 693 for were for those 12

006and older though we do not have school-based vaccination plans clinic plans at this point we are excited to announce a partnership between dane public health madison dane county um and we will be hosting recurring pop-up vaccination clinics associated with school food pantry hours um these will be every other tuesday starting april 19th um so that is exciting and an ongoing opportunity that we can direct our staff um and students to um that happens frequently um lastly um talking a bit more about um or shifting to mental health i just wanted to give a highlight um of a partnership that we have in mmsd that is new this year um care solace is our complementary and confidential care coordination services service um that's intended to help uh families quickly find mental health or substance abuse treatment

007options matched with needs regardless of circumstances um and we began this partnership um in december the work with this partner in december and since then there have been 1500 inbound interactions which means families staff or students um have contacted care solas either via phone or through their website they have done 148 warm hand-offs that means they're helping get uh that they they helped make the connection and handed someone off to a provider to see if they were a good fit and they have 48 confirmed appointments into care um which if you understand the sort of climate around getting appointments that is incredible and and great um great progress uh their outcomes and their uh success rate continues to increase every month and we're just eager to keep getting this resource out to our schools and

008communities um so that is some good news around the mental health and care coordination front is all i have for you this evening thank you dr esser um any questions go ahead ananda um thank you so much dr esser for the those updates and congratulations again on um this great accomplish of uh retaining an amazing staff and uh and making sure that that she gets uh elevated um i was hoping that you can talk a little bit about the new variant it's been hitting the news a little bit more over this past couple weeks um can you talk to us a little bit about what is uh prevention uh strategy what is it going to look like for those veering not catch us by surprise like omnichrome kind of did um so and then anything

009else that we should be expecting as far as communication and then what is it look-alike communication to uh families so sorry three questions in there uh variant what is our proactive approach um what should the board expect and what's the family members and community should expect as far as communication all right i am going to take this one to the very best of my ability and if my answer is unsatisfactory we will get you something in writing after we talk with our health advisors tomorrow um we are uh as we as we entered into spring break we're very cognizant of the new variant and and thoughtful about our uh mitigation measures um and not pulling back too quickly given given the unpredictability of a new variant um so we continue to monitor i'll be quite

010frank in in telling you that i don't um i can't speak totally to the community impact at this point we meet with our medical advisors tomorrow and i would be happy to provide um an update in the weekly bulletin to get into a bit more detail i can though share ananda just the thought around being proactive and truly part of our intention um in waiting to make a decision about mass being recommended or required is because of our uncertainty of what this variant can do um as we know the delta variant happened over winter break and now obviously variants don't know when spring break is held but it is you know ironically peaking around this time so as far as proactive we continue to our layered mitigation strategies and do feel confident that where we

011have pulled back was we're still safe enough in doing so um from a communications perspective as i shared we will provide something in writing just a bit of an update on the variant and public can access that information as well but then also um in the coming uh weeks april 15th uh at the latest families will get communication from us staff and families around what our updated mitigation measures are making decisions really rooted in the science and our recommendations from our health care advisors yeah thank you so much leah i'm um you know misinformation is already rampant and i you know looking forward to to continue to rely on a district for accurate factual information thank you um i will share one other thing um as carrie uh sent me a text is that the

012the variant the new variant is not the dominant strain yet here in in madison and dane county um so we will continue to monitor that as well go ahead damian thank you um thank you so much dr esther um i'm wondering if you can give us what the referral process looks like uh for students who are referred to aoda treatment and some of the ways that we are um trying to mitigate um kind of our shortage of school sites uh in that uh identification and referral process okay um i will take both of these questions separately um and uh start with aoda so um for those who are not um familiar aoda is really uh is alcohol or drugs and our approach to students who have um who are experiencing challenges with the use of

013alcohol and drugs uh like everything that we do um and i reinforce often our approach to um to everything really needs to start with universal practices and universal teaching so of course um really using health education and other opportunities to teach and reinforce um the importance of staying away from drugs and alcohol recognizing that that is not always effective i will again reinforce that our school-based student services staff are that front-line mental health provider their role is really to work with the student and the family to identify whether in-school interventions such as esper which is screening brief intervention referral to treatment um for example would be a an adequate um next step as a school-based intervention it is possible too that they determine that in fact the students needs are greater than what the school

014can offer and they work collaboratively with the families to do care coordination and and mental health navigation um so that care solace for example is one resource that we have to help build the bridge between school and mental health providers and then our school-based student services staff serve as that that bridge between um being able to take and understand what is learned in a in a community space with a provider and how to transfer those skills to school and reinforce those skills in school additionally um we do have a partnership with horizon high school horizon is um the only um wisconsin's only recovery high school we can send up to 15 students um and actually have some wiggle room for more if needed and there's in their space to horizon high school horizon serves students

015who are on the journey towards sobriety um and it's an opportunity for them to get their academic needs met their social emotional needs through life skills and therapy um social skills et cetera um so we have we have uh sort of a comprehensive approach um i will uh be very frank in sharing that uh one of our department priorities for next school year is to really take a look at that from a holistic perspective and um ensure that we have a true multi-tiered system approach and that we are not missing any opportunities um then your second question was around sykes um and i think you know to i think the connection that you made um savion is that when we have less um or we have vacancies or openings for sykes and student services staff

016how do we ensure that we're able to serve our students um adequately and um we are working incredibly hard on our recruitment efforts um for psychologists social workers counselors and nurses and are partnering with dpi on a grant um it was just announced very recently there's a new program at uw lacrosse to support um school sites and emerging schools like so there's a lot of really interesting and exciting things in the hopper um that we are working on and i will tell you that sarah kennedy is steadfast in recruiting and getting the best candidates she is like a competition to see how many early hires we can get so um we're also really just being very aggressive frankly and getting the best thank you so much that was um that that last part was really

017um and formative to hear and definitely interested in learning more about that that grant um and um have more questions but can can follow up with you at a different time thank you sabian and thank you dr esther for answering that that's helpful um chris goldman go ahead thank you chair pearson um dr esther my my question sort of follows up along the same lines as um savians and it was about the specifically the kara solis program and completely appreciate you know the work that's going into this and just noticing the number is about 1500 incoming and the the handoffs that were around 148 so about 10 um what happens to the other like 1300 are these like students that it's decided they don't need a more intensive intervention or are they given some other

018sort of resources or yeah what happens um for those students um i'm gonna give you the best answer i can and if kristin tells me dr getzel tells me tomorrow that there's more i'll provide it in writing the way that i understand it is that they will not um close a case until there is a confirmed appointment and they do that official official handoff i do not believe no i know that there's it the intention is not to connect to other resources necessarily it really is to connect to that provider um you know as you look at the data i think you're right in in that the it doesn't appear at this point that the conversion rate is super high i don't know um frankly if that is due to um family follow-up and or

019capacity i i so i think what i will tell you is i'll give you a more satisfactory answer about what happens or why those people are out in limbo when i get a chance to talk to dr gecco and we'll share that with you in writing if that's all right yeah that would be great i i just i mean i think everyone knows that there is a huge backlog in the system for students needing support and families needing support so um just appreciate the work that is being done and and making sure that students aren't disconnected um at some point while they're waiting so i appreciate that um and then i just wanted to follow up on some actual i thought was good news um ananda i thought you had a really good question about

020the the variant um the ba2 variant and i was just reading through the public health madison dane county update from march 31st and it did say that um here i'm pulling it up right here it said that we're optimistic that it hopefully any ba two surge we've been lot would be mild based on our high vaccination rates and because a large number of people in dane county were infected with omicron ba1 um and then they said you know vaccines still work against ba2 and protect against severe disease um especially for people who are up to date on their boosters so again the encouragement for people to get vaccinated because that is really important but just knowing and crossing our fingers that that's a little bit of good news that maybe we won't get a significant

021surge with this so just wanted to add that thanks okay thank you um and chris chrissy go ahead thank you so um i really appreciate this update and i just have one more follow-up question regarding care solace i'm the the the types of data carous might be collecting would be incredibly sensitive so i know there might be limitations as to what they might be able to share with us but i am wondering what data they are able to share like are we able to get more information from them about what some of the bottlenecks are that our families are experiencing when they try to access mental health care or if they're able to share with us like maybe some of the broad types of support that our students are looking for because that might help

022us inform our own you know internal approach to mental health care in the district great question and i'm able to give you just a little bit more information about um about those cases that don't end up there haven't ended up in a referral or an appointment um it many families and our staff actually are using the system to just explore so they're getting initial information they're looking at it themselves and then making their own connections um it is reliant on the family to um follow back up and give that that update um to uh to to share that information with us so there is there is that sort of piece to just note um we um we are able to have conversations with our representatives and the people at caresolus to really have those systems

023level conversations about what's happening in our community so for example we were able to surface that one of our insurance providers in town um had significantly less service providers um in the kersala system um than what was needed so it's one of the ghc was just not well represented and so we're able to problem solve those systems issues with them um to really to use their expertise to have an understanding of as you said chris like the bottlenecks in the system places where there might be points of advocacy or things that we could do to to better increase access or advocate for better access the other thing to just note is that this is one part of our mental health um navigation strategy but the other uh other piece is that we do have a

024mental health navigator on our team as well as a mental health bilingual resource specialist so that those individuals are able to work with families who have really complex and intensive situations perhaps related to insurance or very specialized needs so we do have a differentiated approach um there as well the last thing i will mention that i uh wanted to share is that there are um uh also dashboards that uh kersalis um provides us with that we're able to look at and desegregate the data that we are allowed to have um about the the cases that come in or the families that come in thank you dr esser did that answer your question chris okay perfect great any other questions relating this to this topic okay seeing no other questions thank you dr esther thank you

025all i appreciate you have a great evening yeah you too uh moving along academic plan updates dr jenkins is having a little bit of um technical difficulties and so we have uh miss green here to give us the updates as well as answer our questions as well take it away all right thank you so much uh maya i really appreciate it and good evening everybody i am here with the team i'll introduce the team in a minute um this is definitely not a solo act but we're excited um to provide a few updates tonight barb can you go to the next slide please as always grounding in our mmsd vision uh that we believe is critically important to all of the work that we do next slide bar and ensuring that all the work we

026do is helping us realize our three strategic goals in addition uh our focus on our core values that we all know and try to make sure we operationalize every day yep next slide bar so our outcomes for tonight is we're really excited to be back with the board tonight and have another discussion on the adoption for literacy and biliteracy materials that will be coming forth in a consent agenda later this month um and then we're going to hear from the wonderful carolyn stamford taylor and some of the work uh that she is starting to think about in her department and some of the voices she's collected to share and update in terms of where they are with their initial thinking and then we're starting um a little bit of a new routine where we're going

027to end the night with a preview for the following month as well as some celebrations around uh great work that's happening with our scholars across the district so we want to make sure we end on a really positive note about the great work in our district so that's the outcomes for tonight next slide please um all right so here with me tonight is a group of people that will be a part of the presentation as well as part of the discussion so we have all of our associate superintendents of schools for elementary mr ennis harvey carlatra stanford and chelsea tubbs we also have a few of our principles here as well that we're really excited some that have been part of the full rfp process as well as those that are implementing uh different pieces

028of our literacy so we have dr larry love from leopold we have jackie smith from gompers we have sarah from elvium here we have bobby campbell who's the instructional coach at elvium and i believe we also may be um having becky kundart from orchard ridge joining us and then we have uh kaylee jackson our executive director of curriculum and instruction and dr gabby bell our director of literacy so we have a full team here with us tonight that will be a part of this discussion so i'm going to kick us off and then i'm going to pass it on so if you could go to the next slide please barb so since we were together with you last time and through a few of our updates uh we had heard that the board was interested

029in a little more detail around the two recommendations that we're putting forth some of the cost analysis um aligned to both of these recommendations where we stand in terms of thinking about professional development and then we will end with a discussion so i'm going to turn it over to mr ennis harvey and he is going to uh get into the content for tonight next slide please thanks thank you miss green good good evening everyone uh as a quick overview as we began this process of adopting high quality instructional materials our goal was to ensure that the process was transparent and to center the voice of all that was impacted initially we had six vendors to apply to the rfp uh the proposals they were evaluated on the strengths and areas of opportunity to meet the

030needs of our district the selection committee put forth two recommendations for consideration recommendation a which consists of two vendors open up and benchmark for our monolingual as well as our dli and dbe programs the instructional applications for this recommendation it creates two curricular tracks across the district recommendation b which consists of one vendor benchmark for our monolingual as well as our dli and dbe programs and the instructional application it creates one curricular track across the district we spent a lot of time just really making sure that we did a deep dive on all these high quality instructional materials to ensure that it met the needs of our district next slide please mrs jackson i will pass it to you thank you mr harvey and so what you're seeing on this slide is our three year

031total approximate cost analysis for both recommendations so for recommendation a which is both open up and benchmark you're looking at just over 4.9 million dollars over three years and for recommendation b which is benchmark alone you're looking at just under 3.7 million dollars and so what you will be seeing at the end of this month um is two consent memos going forward one for recommendation a one for recommendation b and we will be asking and calling upon your leadership um as the board of education to help us make that decision and deciding which route we're going to go next slide here's some more detail on how we got to those approximate costs um so what you're seeing here for recommendations a and b um are the same information you're seeing the materials cost all right

032that materials cost includes core instructional resources for both students and teachers at each one of the grade levels it includes access to their online platforms it also includes classroom libraries which includes decodable texts you're also seeing our professional learning costs for both open up and benchmark one thing to note around our professional learning costs here is that benchmark as an organization provides both the resources and the professional development and so some of our professional learning costs with a benchmark are actually greatest because of the amount we would be purchasing in materials open up and el are actually two organizations that work together one provides the resources and one provi provides the professional development so you're seeing that cost in here as well and then the third thing that you're seeing is our cost for shipping

033and handling per recommendation a and recommendation b next slide miss cindy green thank you um i one thing that i want to mention i apologize before we go on is dr jen shepkey who has been intimately involved in this work also and has been our project manager uh to really help us get through this is um here as well so i did not want to forget to mention her because we couldn't have done this without her as well so i apologize dr shepkey um okay so what you have in front of you one thing we heard from the board is you are very interested in what does professional learning look like for this work and how are we thinking about that not only to gear us up for the beginning of this school year but

034also how it will look throughout the school year i want to just call out that this is intentionally a marked draft because one uh we need to know where the board is going to make a decision so we can scope out the work based on the recommendation and two we still have some vetting and decision making to do with all of our school leaders and our school staff to ensure that we get the professional learning right so this is a small group of collaborators that have put this together in draft form but one thing we do know before we can actually have the professional learning touch our teachers and our schools is we need to build the understanding and need to build the knowledge base with some of our key leaders both centrally and at

035the school level so we want to do a deep dive into the learning around the materials and how we want to think about the context and the setup for professional learning for schools uh in early summer so that's what you'll see here is how we're thinking about building our own capacity in order to support schools can you go to the next slide please barb and then what you are going to see here is how we are thinking about our priorities for next year and how we believe we will uh have literacy be uplifted as one of our essential priorities as a district as well as balancing that with our social emotional learning and our mental health professional learning that we also know is central to um the well-being of all of our stakeholder groups schools

036staff students etc and so we're thinking about during our welcome back week which is that week that kicks off our school year that we would have two full days of professional learning that are geared towards the new materials for literacy simultaneously we're going to have our support staff focused on social emotional learning mental health and re-grounding them in the essential roles and responsibilities of their work for example our counselors our school psychologists our social workers etc so that would be the beginning of the year you'll also notice that we have letters that is absolutely one of our essential components for our literacy work as well outlined here in this table letters for us is an example of how we see schools thinking about using their time and their own decision making for when and how

037they're going to meet those milestones of letters but we didn't want to miss putting that forward here um so that you could see how it could fit into a year-long calendar then we want to really leverage our early release on mondays and our full day professional developments that are spaced throughout the year for both the balance of social emotional learning and the literacy work so you'll see the um toggling back and forth between how we see that happening again this is a draft we know schools will have to have voice into how this is going to work at each individual school as well as as a district level but this is a good sample if you could go to the next slide bar please you'll see as we carry throughout the second half of the

038year that we're centering still both social emotional learning and the literacy so on some of those full professional development days we believe that our focus would be on literacy whether it's driven by the vendor itself or if it's school led based on a specific set of topics and then we also know that some of our early release time and professional development time throughout the second semester must also be focused on social emotional learning and mental health once we get to the end of the month and we know which recommendation we are going forth with we're going to build this professional learning planned out in more detail with our schools could you go to the next slide please park so now what we would love to do is open it up for any outstanding questions that

039the board members have and also allow our school staff who are here with us to be able to support in answering some of those questions dr jenkins anything that you would like to add before we open it up for discussion uh i just want to say nice job to the screen with going through this and this has totally been a collaborative effort and we want to make sure we get the best input from our board uh as we co-create something that's going to be significant for our district we want to make sure we get as much input as possible we're trying to come down to the final decision so but our professional development plan will be based upon the early decisions that we make so that we can have our staff in the best position

040to get the information and also helping us determine the pace so that we can pay close attention to the social emotional mental health well-being of everyone but it's definitely time for us to move forward lean forward in doing the work that we all really truly want to get done now thank you would you mind taking us off screen share for this part so that we could open up the dialogue okay um so i welcome any board members to ask their questions go ahead and ananda thank you so much um [Music] uh board member pierson uh cynthia do you mind i'm i'm a little bit confused of what is the main difference between recommendation a and b is it is it just the the fact that all the schools that have dli programming and then uh

041nuestro mundo and and dbe will not be part of the curriculu have the same curriculum they will have a different curriculum and then from your opinion what would be some of the pros and cons of that uh so i can start with that and then i will definitely turn it over the team so yes ananda what what the difference in the recommendation is one recommendation means all 32 schools are utilizing the exact same curriculum regardless of program right so whether you're an eli program or you're a dli dbe program all schools will be using the same curriculum and the other recommendation we're saying that if you are a dli in dbe school you would be using well one set of curriculum and if you are an eli only school you would be using a second

042a different set of curriculum so that it is um a option between holistic singular um curriculum for all 32 schools versus two curriculums across 32 schools is the main difference um i am going to turn it over to the team so that they could share with you what they believe those that were heavily involved in the rfp process what they believe are the main differences between that so i think i'll start with uh dr gabby bell and then any of our school staff larry i think would be a great person also to share some thoughts hi and i'm dying um ananda that is a lovely question so yes like as cindy said it is um having one curricular resource for all the schools or having two different ones there are always risks and opportunities within

043every single decision that we make the vendor that we have in the race right now to make sense of both spanish literacy and english literacy progress by literacy is benchmark and having benchmark for both sides of the house and the li and db programs would allow us to be able to craft drawers by literacy while at the same time would create an opportunity for colleagues in english-only programs to have an entry point and being able to collaborate so for example in a building like leopold where we have dual language immersion programs and monolingual english programs if all of the second graders are using benchmark there is an opportunity for partnering um for ensuring that the scope and the sequences are matched our professional development is aligned the units that we will be working on and

044the standards that we'll be working on will be the same ones with the different dual language immersion programs we'll be attending to it in two languages so there is a great opportunity in that um having two different curricular resources will take away some of those opportunities but will also open other opportunities um if merlin what programs have um open up nel and the development of bilingual programs and dual language measure programs have benchmarked then the collaboration will happen per program not at the building level um did i answer your question and some risks and opportunities i would add after larry talks that maybe one of our principals that's implementing el could also share their perspective because i think that just provides a little more uh context for you but larry i don't know if you

045would like to add from being on the rfp team uh your perspective no i think um gabi must have known what i was going to say and decided to say it so same exact sentiments thank you and um jackie smith or sarah if either of you would like to share your perspective in terms of uh from implementing el already what you see as benefits and risks of the two options hey everybody unfortunately i have an appointment in about a minute so i'm unable to turn my camera on but it's wonderful to join y'all again this evening and i can just speak through um i agree with my colleagues with some of the benefits and risks of the two different curriculums as a possibility i have noticed that in our english language only instruction building at

046gompers a lot of success around implementing the el curriculum which open up is the vendor especially when we think of our population of students who have been historically marginalized especially our black students in our district we've really seen students build their confidence and their stamina and kind of their love of literacy around it aligned with different skills with reading writing speaking and listening so the integration of those skills around the standards has been really impressive for us with the implementation of the el education curriculum and open up vendor i can turn it over to sarah briefly as well oh sarah you're a mute thank you um hi everybody i would agree with jackie and what she is seeing at rappers with her eli students um we see our students engaging in high level reading and

047writing activity and skills and building that love for a variety of texts um i see the importance of what gabby was talking about with our dli programs of having a common curriculum there so that when they're learning in spanish and english they're getting that um same scope and sequence and everything and so that's where i think the two options come down to the importance of really looking at both advantages of eli and dli but we are having success as well like jackie said with our eli kids yeah thank you always this is a little bit more than what i asked so i appreciate that uh a couple follow-up questions one is i know at some point i uh it was part of a conversation where we were trying to phase out dbe is that still

048something that we would be interested in doing is dbes to an effective program and then the second one is uh what is the staff impact on option a when you have a you know not the streamlined curriculum so i'll first let gobby answer uh the dbe question and i um just want to make sure i clarify another you mean specifically for spanish only versus we also have a hmong dbe program in the district yeah we don't have a dli hmong right at this point right so i was speaking the the sp specifically to the spanish tv okay thank you for that um another question about the db program is a really really good question i don't know that um this is what i can tell you historically when the el plan was proposed in 2015

049part of the proposal was to uh do away with development of bilingual pro and the dba programs and transfer them all to dli and the board of education that existed at that point in 2015 say no we'll keep them so that is what we have kept them yeah but i think that there is a larger conversation that can be had i just don't know that today is the day but i will put it here in my notes yeah thank you for that gabi and i think that's uh something that is definitely a further discussion as a system in terms of where we stand in terms of the staffing question i think that and i'll have kaylee add to this but i think regardless of which recommendation we go with there's going to be a lift

050for staff it's new curriculum and we know with new curriculum it takes time to learn that curriculum you need the time to dig into it you need the time to practice you need the time to reflect you need the time to adjust so so i think that the the um question around that uh would be the same answer regardless of which recommendation but i'll turn it over to kaylee and mr harvey if they want to add anything to that yeah thanks cindy i i agree with what cindy is saying whatever curriculum we get right there's going to have to be new learning um regardless i think the additional pull for recommendation a is going to be on um building leaders right building leaders who have both programs within their schools as well as instructional coaches

051who have both um programs within their schools because they now are going to have to become experts of both sets of materials um to be able to ensure that it is being implemented well um and to be able to know the look for us for benchmark as well as the look fors for el um so i think on the individual teacher basis right the teachers are are largely going to only have to encounter one material but when it comes to building leadership their need they're going to need to know um both materials inside and out thank you everyone i'll pass it um oh i don't know if there's anybody but i'll pass it to um to you um uh board member pearson and i might have some questions after absolutely um just a reminder like

052you can always you can always like have the senate email or something like that too if we think of something later um chris i know you put your hand down um and then you put your hand back up so i'm gonna go ahead with you because you were next on my list um one reason i did that was because my ques some of my questions are about pd and i don't want to disrupt the flow of talking about curriculum so i'm happy to wait okay perfect okay saving go ahead all right thank you so much um i guess my question is somewhat related to to pd um you mentioned that um that that that open up will provide the the pd for us and i'm wondering what our options are for benchmark sure so both

053vendors will provide professional development for us i think our decision that we have to make as a system is how much of the professional development do we want to be vendor-led versus how much of the professional development do we want to take on centrally and uh leverage between us and our school leaders and our instructional coaches um to lead so that's where once we have a decision and we know which direction we're going that's where our kind of collaboration needs to happen to figure out uh how much vendor led versus how much uh district control we decide to take so hopefully that answers your question yeah absolutely um and then both vendors will be available for us on the road in terms of um uh like um adaptability that we want to to make to

054the uh to the materials i'm seeing that's thank you so much and then the last question is you know at what point in time do you think we will start looking at secondary or supportive materials to the core materials let me just clarify so one yes customizable for sure from the vendors that is a requirement of ours because we've got to make it you know to our context when you say secondary do you mean supplemental materials for k5 or do you mean secondary like middle school high school no i'm sorry i'm at s supplementary yes absolutely so uh we definitely have already started to think about and identify where we stand with supplementary materials right there is no one package that's going to give us everything that we need but i'll turn it over to

055kaylee to kind of add to that to see if there's any more she wants to chime in on yes thank you miss green um great question savion we actually are going to have an update for you within the next couple of days about our first request for supplemental materials and those will be in the form of classroom libraries as was discussed at a couple board meetings ago we are going to continue to add to our classroom libraries as we believe in early literacy and beyond um and through our evaluation and selection process our our our group was able to identify some areas in which we're going to need to continue to um supplement so we're already having those conversations we're already going to be able to put a recommendation forth um to you all at

056the end of of the month um and we will continue obviously to um to get feedback throughout the years in which we're utilizing the materials whether we go recommendation a or b um and we will supplement as necessary thank you so much those are my questions and i see your uh your shirt dr green go tar heels okay we'll have that conversation later all right keeping it to literacy yes not in badger nation um okay moving along um go ahead chris go my schmidt thank you chairperson um and thanks for um the information um i wanted to say thank you for sending the executive summaries that we requested from the last meeting those were really helpful to review to better understand how the selection committee was weighing the different options in making the two recommendations

057and another thing that i found really helpful i want to say thank you to the schools that reached out and gave invitations for board members to come out and take a look at the different curricular options in action one of the questions that i had around that is i had sort of forgotten that we had approved the use of the benchmark curriculum for very specific um spanish language in in virtual mode back in december of 2020. so essentially our dli dbe schools as i understand it have been implementing the phonics part of the benchmark curriculum is there any way you can explain a little bit about the experience of that how it's worked how the schools have and students have experienced that um and to what degree that has i don't think it's been the

058whole curriculum but i was i was surprised to to learn from a school that they had been using it for that long yeah i'm going to start with uh our principal dr larry love who is at a school that has that from his perspective and then dr gabby bell can also um provide a big picture on that but larry do you want to respond sure um so great question um as you mentioned the use of benchmark is being used in a very um limited way within the schools um particularly as you mentioned was a response to us going virtual um and a response to uh the fact that we didn't at the time have a spanish program um to cater to the foundational skills within our dli um side of the house um i will

059also just mention for the sake of mentioning we are currently using the 2017 version of benchmark just so that information is out there as well um in terms of the experience with it um teachers and instructional coaches particularly at my site um do speak to the way in which it does align well to the letters framework um and and how letters instructs us to think about the teaching of literacy particularly foundational skills um i will say also some of the feedback that i've heard is that some of the implementation has been a struggle just in thinking about the time aspect of it um and so uh what benchmark calls for often um is more than what our uh foundational skills blocks allow for within um the elementary setting um what else uh i think um

060let me see again yeah i think there it has had its benefits um but i think it's really hard to think about the use of benchmark holistically knowing that we've only used it in such a limited way in comparison to the use of any other curricular resource that we might think about copy is there anything you would want to add to that or did larry capture though i think that larry did beautifully but i will just paraphrase because i'm a language learner and this action is for real that we are using a tiny tiny fraction that is um a 2017 edition so it's a very different thing than what we're looking at right now holistically and it was absolutely in response to having to go to school virtually and not having a way or a

061resource to be able to deliver um or execute foundational skills in spanish in english in bilingual programs so it has the same name it's benjamin but it's something different yeah okay that's that's helpful to know because um going you know just having schools contact us and say we have been using benchmark i was a little surprised by that so i guess you know i i just think it's really helpful again when we when we're implementing something or piloting something to really understand the experience of of the schools especially you know we have four schools implementing the el curriculum and evidently other schools who have gotten excited about it just hearing about the success of students and so um i just think that's really important for us to know and to take into context as we're

062making this really important decision um for how we're moving forward with literacy um one of the other things i noted from the executive summaries is that for the the benchmark curriculum um we are going to need to supplement the foundational reading skills and to me i don't think that's something we can wait on and it seems like that should be part of the analysis of the cost difference between the two recommendations and so i guess i'm curious ballpark figure if we use you know el and benchmark where we won't have to get as many supplementary materials for the foundational skills how will that compare to the overall price or what does that do to the price if we were to use all benchmark and i guess that's a question for kaylee yeah yeah and i'm

063actually going to ask gaby to come um on screen for this um as well um it's it's an answer connected to phonemic awareness and this is some of the work and the conversations she's really been involved in so i'd like her to put voice to it yes and i want everybody to know that i did not plan the question because i love the question and i love the answer so we when we ask um for vendors to put forth uh proposals for the rfp we ask them to provide for us a walk through for the wisconsin state standards and for common core state standards and if you look at the standards especially in the beginning in kindergarten the standards make an assumption that kiddos come with um phonemic awareness mastery and then we're getting them

064into phonics what the learning that we're doing with science of reading and letters is telling us you cannot make that assumption all the time you need to check and you need to see it overwhelmingly a lot of our kiddos need additional practice for phonemic awareness if you think about that statement under the presumption that everybody speaks the same language now try to multiply by two if you're in a bilingual program and you need to engage in phonemic awareness for a language that is new to you so we already started doing some of that analysis and some of the thinking so these are the highlights common core state standards presume that kiddos come with phonemic awareness they touch based on phonemic awareness but really little or really start on phonics looking at something like benchmark especially

065thinking dli and db programs will require for us to explicitly attend to the phonemic awareness that is the prerequisite for phonics to be able to get into the phonics and just hit the ground running so that is specifically you know i would say like the largest piece of that did i answer your question guys you do oh nice go ahead chris i think i think sort of and i understand but from from my understanding if you're talking phenomenal awareness the el curriculum is stronger in that but if we choose the benchmark we're going to have to honestly buy some supplementary curriculum or curriculum resource that supplements what benchmark provides and so i guess what i'm asking is the the price of that isn't included in the overall price that you're giving us so i'm asking

066if if we choose you know benchmark you know for everyone that's a hundred percent of our schools 100 of our students if we choose el that already has that built in and we have to do it for 15 to 20 percent of our students that are dli dbe like there's a cost difference there and and that's not included in the calculation right now so i guess you know there's there's school districts like oakland california that has done exactly the same thing where they've implemented the two and they have also supplemented with i don't remember the name of it i i think there's a number of different resources that it's on the phoenix awareness part um but i guess i'm looking for a ballpark what's that they do yes so we looked um first commencement we

067we looked at hegerty as a resource to supplement exactly what you are saying um we've requested quotes and it would cost about a hundred and forty thousand dollars um for all schools in order to um supplement that um that portion of benchmark and that cost includes both languages because everybody comes in spanish okay so is the 140 000 for only the dli dbe part okay and is there professional development that goes i'm just trying to get a an estimate on if you could like that and send us an update with that included in it and and what's selected and how much you know the whole package cost is that would be great that'd be absolutely we have a cost analysis and i would say just a quick answer is uh hegerty requires very little professional

068learning it is the most explicit teaching that you uh could ever do um so there's very little professional learning but we can definitely provide uh the quotes that we have that would encompass all 32 schools so you could see the what that percentage would be for a portion of our schools okay that that would be helpful and just from the context of it's adding one more thing that schools are going to have to be trained in and how to integrate that with the the benchmark if if that's the route we go to choose so i think that would have to be considered also from a professional development um standpoint and then um my last question is just clear clarifying again so the 10 schools that have dli dbe programs they would have two different curriculum

069implemented at the same time did we ever consider implementing just the the benchmark that works for the dli dbe in those schools in those 10 schools and using the el open up for english language instruction in the in the other schools the other 22 i guess yeah let me just make sure i can restate what you're asking so currently for dli dbe schools we uh if we go with the one recommendation we have two curricula that would have to be implemented what you are asking is did we consider to have uh schools that are english only have one curriculum and schools that are dli dbe have a different curriculum so depending on what school you go to would be which curriculum you have um i will i don't know if that uh that uh scenario

070was considered uh but i'll i'll let uh kaylee or someone from the rfp team answer that kaylee do you want me to answer go for it mr love so we did consider that one of the biggest things that came out of our um evaluation committee was the reality that a lot of our students are highly mobile in our district and so with the high mobility rate um if a student transfers from one school that say is using curricular curriculum a to a school that's using curriculum b then we run into this issue of like how do we uh where's the entry point for that student as they come into the new school and how do we ensure that they're still getting a high quality education um with the resources that we have at the the

071new school okay and that that makes total sense i i get it and i really appreciate you explaining that that consideration um that's all the questions i i get i guess i do have one more process question like what are you looking for from the board members and how can we best also in addition to just asking you questions about these things like like a way in as you guys are making this really important decision i mean i just keep looking at this and you know the the this is you know an essential foundational decision for our district um to connect between our staff training and letters and the science of reading to the literacy instruction that students are going to receive on a daily basis in our k-5 schools so i guess what would

072you like to see from us process-wise or what is this going to look like coming back to us and could we actually have it as an action item on the regular board meeting instead of being in the consent agenda so i'm going to first see if dr jenkins wants to answer that and then if not i'll also chime in uh yes most definitely first of all that's a great question to uh board member gomez smith and what we had intended to do is what we said we wanted to bring it back as many times as possible to give board opportunity to do this we need to have this discussion in public this is the biggest decision i think we're going to make for the next 15 years uh 20 years in our district and we

073have to get it right one of the things i said about the questions you were asking and i've called superintendents in minnesota in utah i've talked to individuals here at the conference from california i've talked to people from texas both correctly will have some supplemental work that needs to be done be it either for the foundational skills that you heard and one when we talk about benchmarks uh then also for el when you're looking at an a community with a strong ell community when you adopt el when they did the assessment in terms of how well el has done it wasn't necessarily with similar demographics that we also have but they said it did well both have done well but both would need to be supplemented i would definitely want us to come back with

074uh as you had asked all of you to have two recommendations board of giving input but if you're here tonight the staff is really giving input the people who are closest to the work have to help us define this and i would just hope that we can respect at the end of the day the professionals as they come back and how we lay this out we want the board to have input raise the tough questions we try to answer here publicly so that the community can know the depth of uh of work that's going into this and we've had some really tough conversations but true collaboration is what we're about having it to be co-created so that's what i have to say miss green you have anything to add to that no i i think

075you said it well and i think uh we're just hoping that um with this discussion the board uh feels like they have everything they need to make an informed uh decision and uh uh which direction we're going so that we can hit the ground running and plan forward so we are going to see it come back as an action item out of the instruction work group then i guess that was my are you are you looking for a direct answer to an action item or a consent agenda item he be just more clear on what you're asking yeah i just it was referenced a couple times that it would come to us at the april meeting as a consent agenda item and i i guess i'm i'm looking it to to come to us as

076an action item if possible if that makes sense and i said that's the board's pleasure uh definitely it's no issue for us to bring you back the recommendations you're hearing it now and after we continue with our work we could come back as an action item with that saturday i see you jumped on can you can you go ahead and go ahead sure i just wanted to remind everyone about the board policy around procurement and it specifically calls out that all curricular um items would come in the normal course of voting on um consent agenda items and so if the board were to make a change to that i believe that you know to adhere to the policy you'd have to somehow make an exception to that thank you for that answer sir i'll take

077a look at the procurement policy um this week i appreciate that thank you chairperson yeah absolutely and just a reminder you know as as we are building this um i tried really hard to meet with cindy to kind of preemptively think of the questions that my colleagues would be asking so that we could have as much information up front to make this process a lot easier so if there are more specific things that you feel um really need to be answered um i would i would ask that you please send it send an email just like cc and mia or something like that just so that we can make sure we're being as concise um and not having um long drawn-out conversations i know that there is a um when working with cindy we did

078make sure that we had the appropriate cost details for recommendations i mean that was a part that she heard us say in the last meeting about just like what it might how much it might cost so that we can make that decision effectively i also think part of our our role is not to dictate exactly what the administration is doing but to come alongside them um and our things are policy budgets and um you know making sure that we are ha we have a superintendent for our jobs i just i just want to just remind us of like those three buckets um yeah so okay moving on go ahead chris thank you so um first of all larry i want to give you just like huge gratitude for um calling out the needs of our

079highly mobile students i don't think we do that often enough and they're real so thank you so much for doing that um i completely agree with your analysis um i have a number of questions and i think i'll start with questions about the costs um so you provided us with two figures for three year costs of these two curricula if you divide those by the three years the difference is really about 422 000 a year which is you know it's it's not insignificant but it's also not like earth shattering i don't feel like that difference is enough to drive the decision by itself i'm also curious um you know it's a three-year cost horizon i assume we're going to use this curriculum for much longer than three years i'm wondering how much of that cost

080is one-time permanent materials and how much of that cost is disposable materials that we have to purchase again every year and if there's a significant difference between the two in terms of annual cost of replenishing the materials yeah so i will i'll say a few things so one when we purchase uh kind of in a three-year bulk obviously there is some savings that we are able to give what you will also see when the consent come forward is how we're breaking that down into three years and that the heaviest amount or the largest amount is going to be this first year because we are getting the full package for this first year we have to get everything that is essential for our students and for our staff for the recurring costs each year it'll be

081a much more reduced cost i don't know what that number is off hand and i'll see if gabi and kaylee know that number but otherwise you will see that on the consent that we're showing you the overall three-year cost as well as what it looks like for fy23 and then the two years following that are a much more reduced cost knowing it's mostly uh replacement materials yeah cindy gaby and i had that exact same conversation today um so the consumables uh cindy's absolutely right the consumables will be um a much uh a much smaller cost um that we're seeing throughout the years the bulk of the cost is the stuff is the books or the teacher materials um and the consumables or the workbooks are a much smaller cost we don't have those numbers um

082offhand uh but we as cindy said we'll put those in the consent so that you're able to see that um detailed breakdown thank you so much for doing that and um ross i'm wondering if you could just remind us for the one-time expenses associated this how much do we have set aside and fund balance at this point to cover reading curriculum purchase so the planning we're doing right now is to include the majority of this curriculum purchase on essar funding which is part of the discussion we're going to be having later this month and uh because as a three-year agreement we'd want to get this out in front of the vendor as soon as possible we are looking at a prepay arrangement with that group such that the cash would get to the vendor in

083time for the the price advantage that we received but that the amounts would hit their subs the respective years in which those purchases would need to be relevant so thankfully because the three year is would be out the door um no later than july 1st of 2024 we would still be able to include all three years in the planning on using esser that's super helpful thank you um so that means we won't need to use fund balance to cover this that's correct okay and um that i think makes it even more important to understand the cost of consumables because eventually that's going to shift onto our permanent budget so um for long-term budget thinking that would be great information um let's see chris asked my questions about dli so those are covered um i just

084some questions about the pd schedule just it's a pretty intense schedule of professional development that you guys presented and i'm wondering how many um early release mondays our elementary teachers will have that they can use for collaborative planning once all is said and done with that plan yeah so i'll start here and i'd love for any of our principals that are still on the call for them to chime in from their perspective when we focused on the mondays we only focused on some of the mondays knowing kind of what our handbook languages and where uh schools uh have uh decision making that they have to do at the local level with their splt and where um individual and or collaborative planning time fall in as well so we did not take up the four or

085five mondays every month that we were thinking about it we were trying to think about one or two mondays across each month um and again i i want to reiterate that what we shared with you is draft and what most importantly that we wanted to show is the balance of what we believe will be critically important next year of social emotional learning and mental health and that balance with the literacy work we also believe a lot of that literacy work is going to be um facilitated and led at the local level so that because of that schools are going to be making decisions about is some of that just collaborative planning time where we're digging into our units ourselves and we're thinking about our plans versus is it whole school professional development but i will

086see i don't know if i know larry is still here but i don't know if sarah or kelly wanna also chime in on that but i see larry is off his camera so larry maybe i'll start with you but i definitely would love uh some of our other principals to also share their perspective on that yeah i i think at this juncture it's kind of early to really think about like what exactly the professional learning plan will look like um i would venture to say at any school as we think about all of these priorities um i i do want to just reiterate what i heard said earlier by cindy was the fact that it would be a collaborative process between building leadership and our district leadership to think about what makes the most sense

087for um respective buildings and so on um i know that doesn't necessarily answer the question of like exactly what the professional learning plan will look like but i do think um what i'm hearing and what i'm hoping everyone else is hearing is that there will be a level of intentionality and collaboration to make sure that it it does help us actualize our goals while also being cognizant of the many demands that our teachers already carry hi everyone i'll just chime in as well um i i would say i appreciate the questions and the thoughtfulness around the professional development i think larry and i and all the principals would both agree that that is something that is really on our minds even as we're thinking about the options right now because that's really where the rubber

088hits the road um and professional development is both those like sessions where we picture all of our teachers coming together and getting really a formal presentation either from vendor or from school leadership but then it's also a lot of that follow-up reflection and adjustment in teacher team meetings and that really is based off of the work that our invaluable instructional coaches do every day so i know that the pd plan is something that we are all hoping to get right so thank you all for those comments that's really helpful this is something that's weighing heavily on my mind because on one hand we need to do the literacy pd that we need to do to get this right and to make a difference for our students particularly those who have been historically excluded from opportunities

089in this district and at the same time there's a lot of research out there about job stress and what causes job stress and one thing that causes an immense amount of job stress and often you know harmful health outcomes for people is having a demanding job like teaching and also not having much choice about how you spend your time um whether that's like when you get to take a break which we know teachers don't get much choice about or what you do with your time or how you do your job and um increasingly in the world and this is not pre-coveted as well like there's been less trust of teachers and more of a desire to like tell teachers how to do their jobs um and on top of that now when you start taking

090collaborative planning time away from teachers and give them less agency over how they use that free time again that adds stress so i want to make sure that we're approaching this pd plan with the fact that staff retention is an enormous goal for this district and right now a huge issue in this district we know that staff stress and staff mental health are something we have to keep at the forefront and our pd plan needs to reflect that we need to ensure that while we're moving forward with on our literacy goals which we have to do we're still giving our staff lots of agency in terms of how they do their jobs and what they do with their time as much as we possibly can so chris can i i just want to chat yeah

091i want to chime in on there real quick to add two uh thoughts one i think it's important that we know that this is a multi-year plan that we uh know it's going to be a few years of professional learning and constant reflecting and adjusting and we want to be very intentional about that we're not going to try and do everything at once right we've got to pace it out and i also want to be clear that we are not taking away teachers collaborative planning time we're being very thoughtful about the balance of what we know teachers need to have where school decision is and where we as a system want to try and balance some of those priorities so i just wanted to make sure that that was stated so thank you i appreciate

092that and i also know that like as we make these investments in our staff we want to keep them so that needs to be foremost on our minds that we're making this plan in partnership with our staff and it's a plan where they that they feel good about so super important um let's see what else i have in my list oh finally i wanted to um build on some of the questions chris had about process um what i'm the process of adopting this curriculum so i'm a little bit like to me there's a difference between adopting the curriculum and voting to choose a curriculum and then the procurement decision which i agree based on our policy the procurement decision has to happen in consent but does the decision about which curriculum we select need to

093happen in the consent agenda would that make more sense to do as a a voting item that came out of instructional work group i i don't see that in fact i think it could be very awkward in consent to have two curricula in there and try to you know have one that we're not going to accept and one that we are going to accept but we're not talking about them at the same time it just doesn't seem like a good process it feels to be more like we should pick a curriculum as an outcome of this instructional workgroup discussion and then we vote on whichever consent item funds that curriculum in consent in alignment with our policy i wonder if you could speak to the process a little bit more so i'm going to lean

094on sherry and dr jenkins for this one i could tell you uh time war timing in terms of what we're hoping for but i definitely want to lean on sherry and dr jenkins uh first for their responses go ahead sherry my answer is the timing issue um because then if we take it outside of normal process and put it as an action item in order to get it on consent we'd have to know what you voted on so it wouldn't be able to go on consent until the next meeting and i don't know that that works with the timing that we're talking about because i don't believe that we will have the materials and time if we wait another month which is why we are at the place where we are where we have to

095vote on it this month um because you you won't take it up again until the regular board meeting and you won't be able to give us a decision until that meeting which means we can't vote on either one until we can prepare consent to match what your vote was for the action item out of this work group thank you so much for that general counsel and i would just say to this we put a significant amount of energy into making this large decision and what we heard earlier that we wanted two to come forth i agree with everything what member cruz has said in terms of coming through our instruction i think we've done that uh we've gone out and had people be a part of the committee this is the place where process gets

096in the way of impact and when i think about the impact on our students on an impact on our staff if we don't go ahead and make our decision we most definitely we could bring one there but i want to stay within the process which the general council laid out for us one these two curricular uh items are very close uh it's just a matter of how we're going to supplement which one with what but the timing is so important to get our staff on board to be a part of the process so we can develop the professional development plan and that we can meet the needs of all of our students so i i would just say in terms of how we're moving forward if there's one um that the board has a pleasure

097with already uh let us know that's why we're here to get your feedback but as far as myself the superintendent i just want to go on record and say we can go either way and we're going to have to do some supplementing and if you need me to tell you um to provide you a recommendation that's that's no issue we can do that but i do respect the process that we have set up and we want to still remain true to it throughout the whole way and we don't want to set a precedent something that we haven't been doing based on this by rushing through it in a different way or changing it in the middle of the process so i want to clarify what will come to us in consent are we going to

098get two separate consent items for the two step for curricula and vote in the curricula that we want or are we just going to get one consent item for a recommended curriculum from administration so dr jenkin do you want me to answer that yeah please so as of right now our plan is our understanding is the board wanted us to put forth two recommendations and continue to provide that information what we as of today are planning on submitting for the end of the month are two consent agendas one with recommendation a and one with recommendation b and that through consent and through the voting process that the board engages in the decision for which recommendation would be voted on through that process um and so that would be the way that we understand the decision

099so i fully appreciate the urgency of this like i i get that we need to get this decision made soon so we can get the spending going and use esser dollars and be on top of this so we're ready to start in the fall um if you are already bringing us an option a and an option b in the consent agenda it's not clear to me why we can't vote for this with those two options in the consent agenda as an action item like choose the curriculum as an action item and then once we get to the consent agenda it's kind of a no-brainer that we approve the consent item that supports whatever we just voted for and we don't approve the consent item that doesn't support whatever we just voted for so i i

100just think it's going to be a very difficult discussion to try to like have one of them be on the agenda first and we talk about it first and we're trying to figure out if we voted up or voted down without talking about the other one it seems like it would make much more sense to have both curricula on the table at the same time and have a discussion and a vote for which one we want as an action item and then move into consent and approve whichever consent item aligns with whatever decision we just made it seems like that would be possible if you're already bringing us both consent items in one consent agenda and we're picking one i'm just going to just jump in really quick i think that part of that is

101us having an opportunity to discuss this in the last instruction meeting and an opportunity to discuss it in this instruction meeting we've spent two instruments and i'm not i'm not trying to downplay at all the amount of conversation we need to have about this when things come to a consent agenda they are meant to for us to pay what we need to ask the questions if there's something that we need to ask um to get clarification but really these are the opportunities for us to really have an extensive conversation and so uh personally i don't think it's an issue of a process if that is how the process is set up and that is how the policy is set up for us to do that i do think this is the opportunity for us if

102you have more in-depth conversation questions to ask those now um on what recommendation we would like to have i mean i think that they've laid it out very well i'm here and in the previous presentation last month i don't want to keep waiting for it but i don't know sherry can you answer chris's question certainly the board could do it that way i just to me that causes confusion um because you're gonna talk about two items outside of consent and then have them in consent and discuss them essentially again but if that's the pleasure of the board i'm fine with it um as i've said repeatedly you know i just like a clean record and to me that's not very clean but if that's what the board desires certainly the board can put it on

103the agenda twice um and not and vote on one outside of consent and then vote on it again in consent which is kind of strange but that's again the pleasure of the board so i'll just wrap up my comments by saying that like you know a couple years ago the board was told that we shouldn't be trying to make major decisions in the consent agenda we should be coming to the consent agenda with those decisions already made and now we're making a major decision in the consent agenda so i would advocate to make that major decision as an action item coming out of instruction work group and then have the consent agenda set up so we can act immediately and keep stay on time because i fully fully appreciate the urgency of this and i

104don't want to drag the process out and that's all my comments thank you thank you um sherry what would be needed if that was the if that was the way to go it would just go on the agenda twice you'd have a dec possibly a discussion as an action item coming out of instructional work group and then you would vote again on it in consent just to keep the process clean but again you know it's at the pleasure of the board the board can pull stuff out with regard to this being a major decision i do believe that is why we've had two um subsequent conversations about it but if there's more conversation after this meeting that needs to be had again that's at the pleasure of the board and do you think it's fair

105to say that if there are more questions that we have more directly to that that as the board we are able to ask those questions directly to the administration um so if there is more clarified information to not have to use continuous meetings to do that we can do that right sure and it would come to be whatever questions came to us would come back to the board through the board's liaison dr mcgregory with the answers prior to the board meeting okay thank you sherry okay um ali go ahead thank you so much for this conversation i want to say that i had questions specific to retaining the staff that we're training so we often talk about training staff um but it is not not a secret to anyone here um that staff retention is

106a major issue um and so if we're training staff and we have kind of a revolving door within our district um you know what are we doing to keep the staff that we're training and we've already done a significant amount of training in letters in the science of reading and so i'm wondering of the staff who have been trained in letters in the science of reading how many of those staff are still with us and have made it through that training up to this point and will we have retention data on those staff going into next year and that question i'm going to direct at hr so at tracy carradine i can't answer that question because i do not know who went through the trainings for that i would have to give that to kaylee

107if you can help me with that so certainly so um all k5 staff went through the trainings um sixth grade staff ninth grade staff um and then there were a couple and start all of our instructional coaches and then there were a few of our middle schools where they advocated for um all of their staff to um be trained as well as capital and shahbaz correct me if i'm wrong all staff were trained in capital and shabazz um gabi who am i missing all esl and brt skateboarding esl and brts thank you kaylee thank you bobby of course so with that information tracy are you able to follow up with me and let me know about our ability to retain the staff who have been trained in the science of reading and letters absolutely and

108then is there a plan to retain staff or training in the new materials and curriculum um what is what is our plan to keep those folks with us um and to prioritize making sure that those folks are able to advocate for themselves within their role at the district um but also are are satisfied in the work that they're doing with the district and um want want to stick around and not take that training somewhere else so i can let dr j yeah dr jacobs go yeah i i think that's that's a great question it's one uh it's a very aged question but during this midst of this um coming through the pandemic as we have we want to do everything possible to try to retain our staff and there are multiple factors just like when

109you're going around in the buildings one of the things that staff screaming about the most right now pain about is not having a viable curriculum and they want these materials but also uh knowing how we make our staff feel valued in many other ways within the midst of negotiations right now how we treat our staff around mental health uh right now socially mostly how we're managing our district just all together those are critical things that you're asking but these are things as i'm here right now california talking to my colleagues everybody's talking about the fact of retaining staff and there are some other things at the local level state level federal level that's making it very difficult to be in education right now it's very painful to be frank with you so i think we

110train our staff and they do feel better when staff feel more competent confident they can feel competent and when we're giving them the right support and i think as much as we can take uh a real long view in terms of with our uh academic focus and stick to it that's going to be very supportive in trying to do the work that we're doing but we believe me you heard earlier about um miss canoe just beating the bushes at the state level and trying to get the other staff that we need it's not even just teachers it's all staff and with the increase of individuals being able to leave education now and make double their salaries it's kind of like uh we're in a very different space so we'll continue to work on it and

111as we are hopefully retaining more people will ask them why are they staying because we have a significant number of staff and i do want to bring that out too and we really do appreciate everyone staying with us as well so that's your job i appreciate that answer but i think you're talking about retention a little bit more generally than my question was meant to ask so one of the ways i think that we could retain staff trained in in letters or trained in uh you know these materials um would be to have steps and lanes informed by that training so right now steps and lanes will say things like a masters plus six or can our can our educators get academic credit towards advancing their degree in education for doing this training um so

112how does this training um it creates more work for our educators does it create greater compensation and recognition of their expertise at the same time yeah that's beautifully the way that we stated that because one of the things as i say we're in this whole discussion right now with staff we can think differently about what we currently have in our handbook versus what could be and that is a discussion that we need to have a little bit deeper to talk about that not just short term but long term and we do see other districts have stepped outside of that and recognizing showing value for those who have a specific area of certification or training so i'll be happy to have that discussion with you uh later but that that is a great one to have

113as a group thank you i do think if we're investing in this for our educators it means we want to keep folks who have this skills have gone through this professional development um i think otherwise you end up in this situation where you're doing this professional development year after year cohort after cohort um not being able to hold on to the people who have the information and the skill set my other question was specific to wear and tear and replacing materials i know that our current materials are out of print um i i'm wondering what the lifespan of these materials is what determines that and how frequently we'll be replacing them yeah so i could start there's definitely going to be a yearly cost as we mentioned before i think when uh chris carusi asked

114that question in terms of consumables in terms of other wear and tear um i do know um books all the time uh tend to get lost and we love when they get lost in homes i'm not gonna lie so uh there's definitely gonna need to be some book replacement um uh as i said before we are definitely going to provide uh for all of you what it looks like for the the yearly replacement costs that uh we will have to occur and then we also are thinking about that in terms of how that will be um embedded into our crlm budget moving forward kaylee anything more specific you want to add to that around the replacements nothing other than the fact that we're also working with our fallet library system to barcode literally everything um

115that is going to be that we're going to purchase um so that we can do a really great job of keeping track of of all of this um so you know we don't want to have to spend money um on replacing things so we're putting our measures in place to be sure that we can hold all of that accountable my second to last question is so i have one more after this we have to talk about disability and we have to talk about the fact that one size does not fit all when it comes to reading there are studies that show over and over again students of color are more likely to be judged for their character than be diagnosed with specific disabilities and some of those disabilities include things like glasses and hearing impairment

116right so if a kid is hearing impaired i'm a person who identifies and is hearing impaired and wears glasses phonics can be particularly difficult if you have a hard time hearing um if you cannot see the page you cannot read the page so for for what for our kids who need braille for our students who phonics is not gonna be um their access point for learning how to read what what are we doing to modify these curriculums how do these curriculums adjust um for the diverse population of students we serve and for students with disabilities specifically i'm going to let mr harvey start with that uh question and then uh the rest of us can chime in and i'll also see if any of our school staff that are implementing el want to add to

117that but mr harvey great question uh as a part of the rfp we embedded these these asking rfp as relates to the supplemental material and so all proposals those are embedded both for students with disabilities as well as all the other things that you mentioned so on the front end we actually on the front end i'm gonna see if bobby campbell also wants to uh chime in she is the instructional coach at elvium and is implementing uh eel oh i am also hard of hearing and i can't see so i hear you i think one of the um great things about el and i know that any curriculum is going to need supplementation of some sort but universal design for learning is embedded in el and so they think about that on the on the

118forefront of the lessons and so there's multiple opportunities for kids to access the content in multiple ways so i think that's one plus for the curriculum again i have not taught benchmarks so i cannot speak to that i have not only taught yell but i've also been the instructional coach so i'm embedded in that dual role as teacher and instructional coach so i've had the experience of of teaching it and i have to say that if we look at letters alignment to a curriculum i think you'd see a wonderful connection between the two often times we have standards that we you know standards-based curriculum but we are not always understanding maybe what the standard demands are this curriculum lays it out it is comprehensive so therefore it does have udl it does have what do

119you do after the lesson if you have kids that are beyond the lesson kids that are struggling so it has a ton of materials which can be an asset and a deficit because it's a thinking teacher's curriculum you have to think and and bring your own identity and the identity of your students in your room to that planning process and i just i have to put in one one just thought that you guys can percolate on a little bit i think what we've seen is a real struggle with el it it was complex for kids and it was a struggle for teachers to implement and get kids to access that and build their stamina and their identity build on their literate identities but i have to say out of that hard work comes pride comes

120um expanding on their literate identities especially our black and brown students and seeing them do something that they never thought they could do uh is pretty exciting and um i have to say again i'm not wed to any curriculum because any curriculum is going to need supplementation but what i see i see kids thriving yes they're struggling but it's productive struggle and i'll leave it there i think um i'm going to ask uh gabby to see if she wants to add anything to ali's question i do know that both materials have a technology platform and i know that that is where a lot of the adaptability comes in but gabi do you want to add anything to ali's question yes within the rfp we were intentional in asking and looking at the resource um primarily

121to ensure that a core instructional resource that the construction resource will provide us with core instruction for entry points for all of our students and that it would have multiple entry points for it so we had a really clear lens and a strategy connected to our phonics and word recognition because we know that the only way in which you can read an alphabetic language is by engaging in the word recognition component but that is not enough to ensure and having a strategy connected to rigorous texts and text-based questions that allow us to see and understand what is the student's uh depth of understanding related to or in connection to the rigor of the standards and then we analyze the text within the resource we also were really really thoughtful in looking at and understanding that

122over 20 percent of students in the district are english language learners and that we need to prepare engage and extend the learning using biological practices so that was also a lens that we did um look at the resources for it so the scenarios that we have put forth um for the words kind consideration both meet those requirements right and they will need some supplementation because we said absolutely nothing is perfect but they um they allow us to engage and have entry points for core instruction uh for our student populations so i think the challenging part of the way the the question was just answered is that we're actually looking at two different options and so i would imagine when we're talking about how we accommodate students there would be some differences given the two distinct

123options in terms of how we can modify those options to work with english language learners students with disabilities students who are dyslexic students who are hearing impaired visually impaired um and i didn't really hear that in your answer so i'm gonna go back and do a little bit of research on my own um to better understand those modifications um between our two different options um but i i really appreciate the expansiveness of your answers i just don't think that it necessarily spoke to um the two different options that we as a board are are trying to navigate um and i i wish that it did because it would help me to determine which one um is is you know an option that i think accommodates our our students to the greatest possible extent um the

124last question i have is about outcomes and i hope you all saw this question coming because i asked it the last time we had this conversation so what are the outcomes that these materials promote um other districts who have embraced these materials we often talk about embracing materials or making decisions because we want to change the opportunity gap that defines our district um so how are we going to go from being a district that produces some of the worst results when it comes to teaching students of color to read to a district that teaches every student how to read and gives all children access to an excellent education and how do these materials help us to get to that outcome so i can start and i will uh have the team german i mean i

125think you just stated what our outcomes are to be right we want to ensure that every student uh in our district is um reading at grade level is having access to grade level materials is thinking critically is writing critically um is continuing as they matriculate up through the grades uh meeting benchmarks at the grade levels defined by both local uh norms as well as national and state norms so so that is it i think simultaneously we are truly focused on looking at metrics uh around uh resiliency around self-efficacies or more of the qualitative metrics that we want to ensure are in place um how we do that i don't think is uh singularly with just materials right i think that it is uh mindsets and beliefs that uh every one of our adults brings into

126our buildings about who our children are and the brilliance there so i think that uh while we will have up-to-date uh materials that are aligned to the science of reading that we know have proven results we also simultaneously need to be focused on adult beliefs and mindsets to ensure that every adult while they are using these materials with fidelity also believe deeply in every one of our children and their talents and what they bring to the table so i think those two things in conjunction kind of the quantitative metrics around reading and qualitative metrics around efficacy and resiliency are things that we are going to focus and how um both of those are going to help realize our strategic framework goals but i'll turn it over to dr jenkins or anyone on the team to

127uh please add to what i just said well i'll just come in and say uh nice job articulating that and it's not just great level great love of the young and that's something that we know and that was spoken about a little bit earlier in terms of as we're working with our students and also presenting something in order to change these outcomes students have to be able to see themselves within the curriculum that we have and this is why we're really emphasizing as well with the professional development with our staff because in order for our staff to make the shifts they have to feel very confident in the materials that we're going to select currently and for years we have not had that level of specificity uh the the intentionality around trying to reach her

128i shouldn't say trying to reach the black and brown we just haven't had evidence of back to uh chair mojo's question and i think right now coming together like we are uh on this whichever curriculum we choose those things are laid out and they were laid out front as mr harvey said in the rfd and it's transferring back to our staff and i think we're going to have the sense of energy uh in synergy around the science of reading which is critical in all of this in what we're doing but will it be perfect we don't know until we get going we're hoping in my conversation with superintendents around the country uh and they have talked well about benchmark and el i'm just telling you that in each district we must take what we do

129accept and what you uh eventually vote on as a board and make sure that we stay true to our commitment of doing this work with an equity lens and uh ensuring that our staff is equipped uh not just with professional development one time but ongoing to have a change of mindset and where we are and i loved it when our staff person just explained about even with el it's going to be hard work but at the end of the day the sense of pride and also of just getting this level of competency what it would do for all of our children so i'll stop right there but thank you so much mrs green and i really appreciate these questions and i appreciate uh you uh board member uh pearson for allowing us to bring this

130to instruction this is what we need to have this love of scrutiny from all of us to make it be the best i i greatly appreciate that and i appreciate the conversation and our ability to really lead into this conversation because we're spending millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on this decision and we're impacting generations of young people um and i i've said this before you know my my kids go to mmst i have a young person who is in second grade and she learned to read this year and she didn't learn to read because all the materials were ready and she didn't learn to read because her teacher had fully gone through letters training she learned to read because she felt loved and seen in her classroom and she could be successful and there's

131i mean there's nothing that means more to me as a parent than knowing that my kid um feels confident you know writing me a note about how much she's mad at me and so i think you know we have to remember that these are you know young people who are learning right now and coming back from a pandemic and learning to read is it this is high this is high stakes the other thing i want to remind board members of is that it is quite possible when we get to this vote at the end of the month that there will be three new people on this board um and that this conversation could be a very long conversation at the end of the month no matter where we place it on the agenda and i

132think we have to be prepared to have a thorough conversation as a community about a decision this big so i i greatly appreciate my board colleagues for for the intentionality of their questions and their commitment to to literacy and to our students and our teachers in our district thank you ali uh go ahead chris thank you chair pearson and and thank you um president mulder for pointing out i i was going to make that comment the same as that we are potentially you know we are going to have at least two new board members joining us um in the middle of this conversation and not having been part of this but having to vote at the end of the month and so i do think we need to make sure that um if this is

133the way we're approaching it that the board needs all the information i really appreciate you know president moldova's question about you know weighing the options between the two curricula and i think you've done a good job of bringing us the difference you know weighing the costs between the two and weighing you know the the consistency basis of having one versus two but you know i i think we need some more information as far as you know which curriculum has the stronger foundational skills if you're comparing the two which curriculum you know rates stronger in its cultural responsiveness and inclusion um which one has the best access points for scaffolding and extensions that are needed um and i i think we need to see that um again before we vote at the end of the month

134there's a lot of things that i know the selection committee was weighing that isn't showing up um and it's explained a little bit in the executive summaries that were given to us and i really appreciate that but i do think if it's coming back to the board for us to weigh we do need some additional information and i'm happy to send some of those questions by email too the last thing i just wanted to point out really quick is that we have a policy meeting the policy committee um vice president castro myself um ms terrell webb and and dr mcgregory on thursday and so we can take a look at the procurement policy and how this could fit in at the end of the month meeting um as i glanced at it really quick it

135does say that the board has to approve um expenditures over 35 000 it does not say that it has to happen in the consent agenda so i think we do have some flexibility in where we put it and how we approach it and i'm happy to discuss then and bring it back to to the board president mulder for your consideration of how that's going to look on the agenda yeah sure do you want to answer that or to give comments to that we can certainly look at it at the and talk about it at the committee meeting um and issue a a memo or something to the board okay thank you chris is there's another question you have or no just trying to to figure out what would be helpful process wise for us to

136um figure out how this is coming back to the board so just just making that suggestion thanks yep thanks i mean i i do think that there there's uh um i'm feeling a little that there is a disconnect so recommendation a is to purchase curriculum b and a so it's to have both them recommendation b is to only choose one and so we're not in in the conversation necessarily just to choose one or the other um and so i just want to just say just in case you know folks in the community are are watching this and listening um one recommendation is to have both one recommendation is to just only have one so i just want to just make that clear because some of our conversation seems to allude to maybe doing one or

137the other um i think as far as process i think sherry has already mentioned what that might look like so if you guys want to take a look on at that on thursday and maybe chris if you want to have a conversation with ali about after that meeting on thursday of like where it should be on the gender and how it's going to be done um i think it's very important as ali alluded to um that we have in this process new people coming on and we have to as a person who was new as of last year i think it's important to have a process where it's clear for them that they feel that they can come on and start the job and and be as strong as possible um so yeah if you

138can follow up after this and if you have some other questions that um you may have that come out of this then please yes in the email sabian thank you yeah thank you uh for me uh in terms of process i'm looking for the difference in material impact on our students whether we vote on it in a consent or whether we vote on it through an action item through a work group i think either way we're going to have to purchase the curricular materials um and so i'm just searching for that material difference but we can continue to talk about it more we've heard from staff members about how um you know having used one of the materials how it uh provides flexibility for students who may be transitioning between schools and things like that

139um but sure yeah i'm ready to move on yeah thank you savion i think it speaks to the fact that at the end of the day what we're doing is um the basis is our children and how we can best affect our kids and i also agree with you whether we have an action items or a consent agenda like the process and getting there is this is kind of more extensive than i think we need it to go so anyways let's um if no one else has any other questions let's move on because we still have some portions that need to be done oh sorry i think nama are you on i think you don't turn up your camera came back on because you left my screen oh my god okay you're good okay yeah

140um so yeah let's move on to um the department of engagement and diversity equity and inclusion um and i believe miss stanford taylor will be joining us and i am here okay yes i had so much thank you all for that very informative discussion that you just had there were excellent questions and i especially appreciate lifting up the human aspect of why we're doing what we're doing and who we're doing this for we're doing this for our kids and for our next generation so again thanks for the opportunity just to give you an update on department of engagement diversity equity and inclusion the last i spoke with you all was at your board retreat and so i just want to backtrack for those who might not have been there and didn't hear comments that were

141made so the previous department was named equity and engagement and that housed the feis team the family youth community engagement team that has been been renamed to department of engagement diversity equity and inclusion and what we've done is to bring some other parts into this department so joining us will be special education advanced learning and staff and student support and that will be under the leadership of associate superintendent dr nancy mulfender the engagement side of the department will have a position that will be parallel to dr mulfinders and that is yet to be filled this team will also include strategic partnerships community partnerships as well as the elementary and secondary engagement staff so those folks who are out there in the schools the parent liaisons excuse me the multicultural services coordinators and others this side

142will also manage our initiatives and our programs such as black excellence grants that we've given out and will continue to give and again i just want to give kudos to the folks who laid the foundation for this work that we're building upon so thank you to all those folks who were there previous to me so if we go to the next slide please so our strategic framework goals are what guides us and all of the work that we're doing is in alignment and working towards those three goals and as i spoke at your retreat in february i talked about coming in and not wanting to assume things but to get the lay of the land of course i had some beliefs and one of my beliefs is that we're more impactful at the early ages

143the early stages when we're doing prevention versus intervention but also recognizing that we have to do all of those things so in regard to that we did visits to schools we went to detention center and to the jails because we wanted to see the full spectrum of resources and services that were available to our students all the way from again prevention to intervention and from that we were just collecting voices of all the stakeholders who were helping to co-create you can move to the next slide please so we determined as a department then that we wanted to lift up some pieces and so we created three areas that we wanted to concentrate our efforts in one was the elevation of parent family engagement and how how do we get more input having our families be

144a part of decision making the second one was how do we push in our community and youth serving organizations so that they're basically seen as extensions of school and we've got some great partnerships we've got people out there who are just jumping that bit to come in and work with us and and there are i call them um pockets of excellence and there's excellent work being done in different segments but it's in silos and so we're looking at how we can bring some of these pieces together so that we're servicing more kids and more families and then the third piece that we want to pay particular attention to is how do we enhance the resources that are in direct service to our schools so we didn't want to build up a kingdom at central office

145[Music] when we thought about positions and creation of positions and other supports we wanted them directly in the schools supporting our students so you see on this slide we talk about student voice community voice and then staff voice and those are some examples of some of the folks that we've been in conversation with also want to include that i've been in conversation with advocacy groups met with the madtown mamas been with the state superintendent human relations advisory council and so we've kind of vetted some ideas through all of these folks to just get a feel for what they believe are the challenges and needs in our schools and that was one of the questions that we asked in every space that we were in with folks what do you see as being a barrier to

146you being able to do impactful work that will lead to students being more successful and we had great conversations with people so we've tried to capture some of that in in our thinking around the work of our department so next slide so engagement and equity investments you'll see a couple of positions that we've been kind of vetting with folks one is the village builder position and the other is the student coach and all of these are in service to our students who have experienced this disruption in education and especially when we look at our younger learners who have not had the experience of a normalized school year at all so since 2019 they've been kind of in and out and experiencing learning in different ways and so we need to look at how do we

147get them on an even keel so that they are integrated into this process of schooling so when we think about these two positions think about how do we situate our students so that they are engaged in learning and how do we remove those barriers to engagement one of the things we talked about is oftentimes when students come into schools they've got a lot of things on their mind just as the adults have is there a place for them to be able to process and just identify understand and be able to process their emotions and how do we support that social emotional and and mental health and wellness piece for our students these positions could also be seen as supporting the academic and instructional goals uh working with small groups or individuals support to our families

148and our parents with engagement strategies or just providing that soft landing kind of spot to them the other piece that came out very clearly to us when we were doing our visits and having conversations i was after an absence from mmsd greatly thrilled to see so many people of color working in our schools the downside to that was that while we have a number of staff of color they're in entry level positions so this kind of goes back to what ali talked a little bit about earlier is how do we retain these folks we've got some committed staff they're dedicated to our kids and families they love the work that they do but how are we showing them that we value them how can we create a grow your own kind of model for them

149so that they can see that there's upward mobility for them and so we've been having conversations with folks about can we create a certification for certain positions or how do we go about as ali was saying if you took this professional development how does that count towards something so we're still having those kinds of conversations um i think more than anything we wanted to affirm some of the beliefs that we had around what we were hearing and we did we we heard a theme that started to develop and one was when we went to our principals meeting if you'll go to the next slide i believe that's the one that's talking about our comments from our principals in ap so i made a similar kind of uh pitch to them and asked what they thought

150about certain things and we just captured a couple of the comments because we put out a survey and asked them to respond to the survey and you see that they're talking about acceleration of students academically socially emotionally recruitment of families and students and people who are community members so again how do we bring our community in how do we get our families more involved how can we be a provider of jobs for our families and so next slide the key takeaways are again those things that we continue to hear prioritizing belonging and social emotional needs of our kids and re-engaging and engaging in building strong relationships and having dedicated staff when you walked into many of when i walked in into many of those buildings i immediately got a first impression i walked into one

151building that just felt so welcoming there were people there who greeted our kids when they first got there but not just greeted them they knew individual things about so there were comments made to those kids that made them feel like yeah this is the place to be people see me they know me and and i belong here and then there was a building where it was heavy and we know that it's not just our kids and families who've experienced this social isolation but our educators have also and and they've been working in and out and shifting on a dime and doing all of the great work that they continue to do but it showed that there's a need for some additional supports for them and so that's what we're trying to envision as we move

152forward with creating engagement opportunities that will assist our students our staff our families and all of msd so i will stop there and thank you for allowing me a few minutes just to update you on the work that we're doing yes thank you uh miss stanford taylor um i'm glad to have you on the team and um i'm so happy um about us doing this work and connecting with the community and that kind of in that level um so any questions wow okay that just speaks to the great job that you're doing or or that people had uh enough discussion on the last issue right they didn't want to give people anywhere i thank you so much and we'll continue to update you as we move along oh we got one question from president ali

153we have waited too long no i just want to thank you for this work it's so incredibly thrilling to have this work come to the board and to continue to have your leadership um shape this work that i think we as a board are so incredibly um passionate about and i think you know having a person of your caliber do this work um inspires a lot of confidence in us and a lot of trust in our community um and so i think that it is you know it's really good to to hear where we're moving in the direction that we're moving in and i guess my only question is um when can we look forward to the next update i heard something about possibly june all right well just just let me know when you

154need me yes and thank you so much for your comments that means a lot to me that's the spirit just let you know when we need you we need you all the time every day we're so glad you're here and thank you and i look forward to the update in june thank you amanda hi ananda i want to cry i think because this is i'm about to this is the second to last meeting and i'm like super honored to have you uh kind of you know bookmark this time for me uh to honor uh as you know as you know we uh we keep making the news um uh conservatives uh attacking uh critical race theory uh we are showing you know dissent on an electoral uh slate um your work and your title is

155under continue scrutiny and i don't think that is gonna go away uh what supports you need uh from this board moving forward as you're establishing laying the foundation of your work and launching your work um and what do you need from the community so i think right now we're speaking to the choir right this group understands critical race theory and ananda you and i have gone through it at the state level where everything was under a microscope and everyone was critical of terms and phrases that were used so i think having a supportive board allows me to move without having to sidestep to explain those kinds of things because you all understand that so i haven't reached that point yet where um i've had any pushback but i certainly will be in touch if that

156does happen so that you can advise me around direction that you think we should be moving oh my sincere uh wishing you good luck as you propel this work i'm looking forward to carolyn stanford taylor 2022 uh and a hundred percent in support of your work always and uh yes and i i hope this board will continue to support the important equity work and not be sidetracked by uh you know political politics right it's the politics of it yeah misguided political church yes thank you so much carolyn thank you thank you both for um that love and also call to action from for board members um so yes let us know how we can always assist in this work um since they're go ahead i just wanted to thank you oh well thank you okay

157we're trucking along um cindy i know you just came off of um on screen so go ahead and we are moving into previewing our um may times uh this is one part that we decided was super important to kind of preview what may come down the line yeah so just a quick foreshadow of what we're thinking about for the instructional work group in may um and this is kind of boring after listening to carolyn stanford taylor so bear with me because right after this is something uh what i'm excited to share as well uh but we are in the process of rethinking what um we currently call our at-risk plan which is kind of a state required plan that many of us do not appreciate that language and also want to think about a better

158way to make that part of just the way we do school as a embedded into our academic plan and not this thing on the side so um we're going to come to you with a little bit of an update on that in may we'll share with some of you uh share with you some of the data we have to date and how we're thinking about making shifts to that moving forward and getting your input i know many board members have lifted up wanting to kind of provide some input before you have to approve that plan every year so that will be may and then we're excited that we'll bring back um where we are to date on our academic plan um some of the work we're thinking about in terms of a recalibrated climate survey

159to uh really get our student input uh where we're our stakeholder input and within that you'll also get an update on where we are with our arts plan specifically uh the summer arts academy we started to provide those in weekly updates but we'll also leave space for that in may so those are just a few things that uh we will be sharing in may or can you go to the next line and so i thought we could end with some highlights and some celebrations a couple times in the last few board meetings people have asked about internships and where we are with internships and i don't think that we do enough to share some of the amazing internship opportunities we have so i have two to celebrate today one is jp hair design barber prep

160internship uh that we just started this second semester with um jp who is a barber and a teaching barber on the west side of chicago it is an area of interest that many of our students highlight every year in our senior survey and an area that isn't recognized from the state level and k-12 curriculum yet we're hoping we'd get there but we do know that we want to provide these opportunities for students where they're earning credit and they're doing a hands-on experience so we have a few students that took advantage of this this second semester and you can see it in action here of our students really learning uh components of barbering a few of our students first took uh harry's barbershop class which was part of our big ideas over at east high school

161and then second semester kind of um added here so i wanted to highlight that we're excited about continuing this in the future we're working with jp right now to think about what this might look like next year uh pending uh working through a few barriers but uh a couple uh highlights of our students if you could go to the next slide please in the quick quick correction jp is in madison but did i did i say chicago yes but that's for us that's all right that's all right i see that you're like wearing uh you know another state structure where am i i am hey where's my brain it's the end of the night i'm so sorry i live in madison jp is on the west side of madison i must be thinking west side

162chicago oh my god thank you so much ananda jp i'm so sorry if you're watching yes okay and so then another really exciting opportunity that we just started this second semester and we're hoping to expand this to other schools as well is our student tech team internship so if you know anything about tech ninjas those are the individuals that do a lot of troubleshooting on the technical side of laptops and chromebooks so if a student is having an issue with their chromebook if a staff person is having an issue with their laptop they bring these devices to our amazing young people who have an interest in the i.t field that have really learned more about the infrastructure of technology and they are the ones troubleshooting for the staff and the students at memorial high school

163they are getting credit for it we are also having them partner with a variety of community-based organizations and partnerships in order to kind of expand not only their learning and their knowledge but also their experiences so we've been talking with madem who is a community-based organization that really focuses on students of color specifically females in the in the stem and stem related fields they're doing a partnership with uw health right now and you can read a few other things as well mark can you just go to the next slide for me real quick here are some of our amazing young people that are taking advantage of this internship again where they're uh building their knowledge and skills as well as earning credit and i just threw in here a couple of the quotes specifically from

164our students and one of our teachers uh that are doing this work this semester again we are hoping to learn from memorial so we can scale this to our other high schools for next year but we're definitely using memorial as kind of our test space to figure things out and help us learn the best way to scale so next slide please barb um and so that is that is it barbra if you could take us off screen share um i'll just pause to see if anyone has any questions but i did want to just end with some celebrations of our wonderful young people is there any questions go ahead chris um i just wanted to give some feedback that i really appreciated the preview of next month and i like that so yay thank you

165yeah absolutely it was something that um cindy and i talked extensively about possibly doing and it was a great idea that she had um go ahead chris thanks and thanks for doing the highlight at the end of these internships they sound like amazing opportunities for students and and i love to hear about the different pieces that are going on in in different schools so i really appreciate hearing that um thank you also for bringing the at-risk plan to us um in advance of it being required by the state i i think that's really important that we take a different look at this and and how to redefine it not just in terms of pi 25 is what we're required to do but um more in terms of of how we want to define it and

166more expansive so i really appreciate you bringing that back um i'd also like to to mention that as we're building an academic plan trying to figure out how pi25 fits in the academic career planning that's required by the state too i've heard that dpi is doing a lot of support for school districts around this and how to integrate it so whatever we can do to include that in our academic plan i would love to have that be part of the conversation and then how pathways fits in with all of that too sort of wrapping it back to those internships that that students are doing and the academic and career planning that we're required to do with our secondary students so thank you for all of that and i look forward to continuing the discussion yes

167thank you chris um with that dr jenkins is there some words that you would like to give i know you were like sitting in the hearts and clapping and sending the the joy for our students but i wanted to give you that chance are you having technical difficulties i'm sorry i missed your question i didn't hear anything can you hear me oh yeah i just wanted to give you the opportunity to say something if you want to up around the internships and the joy that we had at the end because i saw your hearts and everything yeah i mean that was just just the ending of the meeting about our students and i wanted to thank uh cindy and yourself because you've been talking about this since day one in curriculum how we want to

168bring some of these things out but i just want to tell you your intentionality you and miss green on this it's just beautiful uh to see our students with the tech what we're getting ready to do with the within the community connecting the community to the schools and just seeing our students at memorial do what they were doing seeing the students at the barber uh in the barber shop and i talked to a community person brian britt too who's also interested in getting involved with that uh it was just really a nice way to uh end our meeting talking about students in the fabulous work our staff that they're doing with our students that's all thank you okay thank you well i will um i think that is all that is on the agenda for

169today so i would totally take a motion to return so moved a second thank you um nama your advisory vote hi all in favor for a journey uh barb can you uh record an unanimous vote thank you thank you have a good night everyone thanks so much maya good night thank you thanks to the wonderful staff that presented tonight to everybody thank you thanks board members for the questions