00124 we'll start with some uh consent agenda items including the minutes of the October 21st 2024 Schoolboard meeting and October 21st 2024 annual meeting in budget there are some professional staffing recommendations and co-curricular staffing recommendations and as a new little wrinkle to our uh reading of the consent agenda items is there anyone that would like to pull anything out of or separated from the body of our consent agenda item this evening I will assume that that means no uh we also have uh oh I would look for a motion to approve the consent of agenda as presented I'll make motion to approve the consented agenda as presented thanks Tom do I have second I can second that thank you Megan all those in favor please signify by saying I I I opposed motion carries 5
002uh there's also some Personnel items uh not necessary for vote and we have some public comments this evening so before we get started on that I'll do this little reading that I have in accordance with Schoolboard policy 67.3 the Farland School Board welcomes public comment during regular meetings from individuals who are present at the meeting participating virtually or have sent an email to the board president or superintendent participants are required to register to speak upon arriving at the meeting provide their name address and any group affiliation before speaking address only topics within the legitimate jurisdiction of the board recognize that the board will not respond to comments during the meeting unless the item is on the published agenda limit their comments to under 5 minutes or 600 written words and of course maintain decorum so
003we will start out we have a couple uh Samantha Zinga welcome thank you for coming hello good evening my name is Samantha Zinga and I am here representing Spartan forward approached the final hours before the election I want to take a moment to reflect on what Spartan Ford has accomplished during this campaign and to express our gratitude for your dedication to McFarland's students Educators and families over the past month Spartan Ford has been fully committed to engaging our community on this critical referendum throughout the campaign we have distributed over 400 yard signs and six large signs across town and we even put up a billboard we have sent out over 4,800 mailers and over 12,000 text messages to ensure McFarland residents have the information they need to make an informed decision the McFarland House Cafe
004graciously allowed us to spend over 30 hours campaigning in a tent at their Cafe their Hospitality has given us an important space to connect with the community and we are so appreciative for their support our team has coordinated 15 app ads developed connections locally and Statewide and spent countless hours in meetings and on social media advocating for the needs of our schools this level of community outreach has truly surpassed my initial vision for this campaign and is a testament to the passion and dedication of everyone involved in Spartan forward I would also like to express our sincere thanks to Aaron Turner and Jeff Mahoney they have been incredibly supportive throughout this process answering our questions and listening to our input which have been invaluable finally I would like to thank each of you on the
005school board for your hard work and for your commitment to McFarland students and staff your dedication makes our community stronger and we recognize the significant role you play in building a brighter future for our schools no matter the outcome of this election please know that Spartan forward remains dedicated to supporting our schools our Educators and most importantly our students We Stand ready to work alongside you in every way we can we also will hope that you will join us tomorrow evening at the bowling alley while we await results together thank you for your time your trust and your ongoing commitment to our schools thank you thank you very much Sam well done uh next is Melanie robach is that the correct pronunciation of your last name roback rback okay that's [Music] okay thank you for
006making this space for public comments my name is Melanie robach and I'm on McFarland parent of 2 um first I want to thank you all the school board and administration uh for all your efforts to inform I know that people are still watching the recorded info sessions um watch one if you if you haven't or skim the slideshow or the frequently asked questions on the website um it's Illuminating to say the least um I do think people finally understand there's a cap on school funding and the state hasn't appropriately adjusted for inflation in over a decade that's it so the referendum question and possibly every school referendum question around the state of Wisconsin this November is basically this should we Empower our schools to budget for inflation yes or no this is why and you
007know I know it's not that simple but this is why a record number of school districts in Wisconsin are going to to referendum to cover basic needs it's not about fancy new stuff or keeping up with the Joneses It Is by no stretch a matter of poor budgeting or greed these are our schools you know and no one's in it for the big bucks it's about keeping up with inflation and increased competition during a teacher shortage uh I know that your role is to inform and not advocate so I worry sometimes that the stakes of this referendum get lost and I wanted to highlight some of those Stakes now most immediately at stake are our outstanding teachers and outstanding teacher retention about 94 95% as I understand it compared to 89% in dropping around Daye
008County as someone in education this is huge and it must be a big part of how they're leveraging how you're leveraging near bottom funding to achieve above average performance often top rankings in the county our retention Craig you said this um it's a unique person who goes into education the demands relative to the money it's even more unique person who does it well you know 20 or so kids in a classroom think of how we all do it at home meeting the needs of two maybe four and it's an even more unique person who does it well and sticks with it but McFarland schools let's think about this these have been comp competitive positions at every level for a long time our staff are here because they saw that conditions are ripe for thriving and
009being effective which is an important part of loving it and because they're the ones who made the cut then they find themselves in the company of talented colleagues some of whom have been here for 10 20 even 30 plus years and this deep institutional history our retirees will get this better than anyone long-term staff have Decades of professional development under their belts and collaboration with other staff the history and expertise isn't just stored in the individuals but also in the Deep spaces between the camaraderie shared professionalism it's like a family an extremely competent family I would guess this is probably a big part of why people love working here the strong Talent early on and outstanding retention has fed itself um and it takes a long time to build this up and it's invaluable to
010everyone we even feel this in our community no doubt about it this is a lucky combination amazing staff we obviously don't want to lose a single one let alone 36 or whatever number will decide that teaching is hard enough even under the best conditions uh and know that they have other options if our retention cracks if this breaks uh we'll be forced to compete to fill those those positions the quality gap will be great and that'll be that for a long time cuts that impact class size and the number of assistants actually compromise that we parents tend to care most about day-to-day and that have the greatest impact on quality of Education our teachers are skilled and they care and there's only one per classroom but the number of kids under their guidance and the
011number of support staff can vary a lot managing classroom learning and behavior is a delicate balance students might bring mental behavioral de developmental challenges while many others are primed and ready to learn some dying for more of a challenge they don't need all the same thing at the same time and the combination of needs can conflict these conflicts take time thought and high highly skilled staff sometimes enormous time working through stories resolutions or misunderstandings um and and staff can end up with their hand side you know I'm going to just jump ahead here and say teachers staff admin thank you so much we see you um and all that you're giving of yourselves especially during this stressful time we really can't thank you enough um and and meanwhile parents there's no bad time to show
012our appreciation an impromptu note and email saying thanks something extra for the lounge even when it's not enough for everyone um goes a long way let's use the shoutouts on the contact D's page uh of the district website and let's show them the love thanks thank you very much okay uh moving on we have the McFarland High School student report should we uh just go ahead and skip to the administrator's report why don't we we certainly can lots of things going on uh in no particular order uh the first one that I want to talk about is just to highlight that we had the high school play elsewhere this weekend and I know some of you were able to attend really great play kind of sort of in the round so to speak in the
013multi-purpose room also known as the Black Box Theater was really excellent acting great production the amount of of set changes and uh you know behind the scenes work was really impressive so just a shout out to them for their great work it was very timely being her own Halloween yes yes it was very clever very well done the uh we also received a grant you'll be that's a little bit of a theme in my presentation tonight one grant that we want to highlight is uh a grant with the Wisconsin board for people with de developmental disabilities so we received a $5,000 Grant really for mrap and what that is is about making our programming more accessible to people with disabilities thanks to Stu schaer and Alicia fix and Lauren Rango and many others who are
014involved in this there'll be an Advisory board that looks at things like our website the programming especially for those under three and over 18 that we provide uh through remr M WP for people with developmental disabilities so that's something that's very exciting and we'll expand our programming make it more accessible a couple donations to recognize uh we had uh recognizing maranne Pilger Pat McCoy and members of the McFarland class of 1974 for donating towards student food service accounts so they made a donation to offset some of the balances for some student accounts so appreciate that tour that we gave must have been the tour yep usually that's what sells them do we know how much we still have outand it fluctuates by the minute so I don't really know um what it is it just
015comes and goes at this point of the year it's typically not um too bad at this point of the year but um that's something we'll keep keep an eye on and can can bring back also thank you to Joe Rundy she donated uh funds to cover The Lift rental costs for the stained glass wind window installation at the middle school so that was something that uh several of us got together to to fund that project and there was an additional cost to to rent a lift to put it in place so she generously donated it is really beautiful yes turned out really nice if you haven't seen it please give our thanks to all who did that um yes I will pass it along there were several of us that donated our coal Fellowship funds
016for that and then um another Grant the Ganon family Grant uh gave an award many awards but the one I'm going to highlight tonight is to Rachel won and Eric Massie middle school special education teachers and they received a grant to create an accessible school garden at the middle school so they're looking for staff students families people that are willing to help to plan it build it uh plant organize care for that project so they're going to be some raised beds that they have that are that are accessible and um used with students with and without disabilities and community members the uh one of the things we always do in October is we do some professional development on bullying harassment and and prevention and Britney Brazzle LED this work in October using the speakup model
017that she put together from a variety of resources last year was the first year we had used that model and this year was a revisit of that so thank thank you to her for her leadership staff practicing how to intervene uh when they hear things that students are saying thank you to everyone that was involved in bringing the Mad Hatters here to the Performing Art Center that was one of those things where we're really trying to provide opportunities for the community to to come and use the facilities for non-school related events as well and that was a great event it was also a busy night um with a football game but uh still well attended and we're looking forward to expanding those opportunities in the future another Grant the oh go ahead yes I for
018what the fee was charge it was it was nominal versus when they appear on campus in November it's like two or three times as much yes so if we can bring things here and the community knows that yeah you're providing top rated um performances right and they'll pay far greater elsewhere they you know this is a good place to be right and it's so accessible and comfortable it is just parking mostly good too good not to use yeah yeah very good another Grant the robotics team here at the high school thank you to Neil Carney and and applying for this grant through DPI was awarded a robotics Grant in fact um if you're curious they're kind of set up in the back room over there um getting ready and practicing and and that work so
019nice thing that that can provide some materials for that robotics Club that's started in the middle school and has expanded now the last couple years to the high school had the superintendent uh listening sessions last year I did those twice with staff this year expanding it to three times so it was in each of the buildings had some great conversations with people sometimes just eating lunch sometimes talking about uh issues questions concerns that they had so excited to have those those went really well Wiis family fun night occurred since we met last was a great success I don't know what the final numbers were last I knew there were over 600 people there so it was it was hopping welld designed there's a lot of volunteers involved in that um I don't remember what the
020final number of volunteers are 30 40 something like that a lot of high school students too which was neat volunteering so it's conference season so just want to thank the teachers for all their preparations it's a ton of work getting ready for conferences middle and high school and now element country so thank you to them thank you to families for taking advantage of those opportunities also had a great experience last week we had a sort of a virtual visit from two really well-known very popular I would say famous uh young adult authors we had Jason Reynolds and kwami Alexander that did a a virtual um author visit so they talked about the writing process and what they when they get stuck with the writing process and we are one of um a handful of schools
021that participated in that we held that in the Performing Art Center and it was a really special moment when an author comes on the screen and even though they're virtual our students clap they were so excited to see them it was like somebody famous cuz they are famous but I mean you know you would have thought it was a concert so that was really neat so amazing authors and good role models for our kids and we had the calendar committee met last week we'll be coming to you probably on December 2nd with a calendar so that's exciting looking at that for the calendar for next year and coming up we have the employee Relations Committee meets next week and we'll be talking about handbook changes health insurance is the hot topic for us right now
022so at that point we'll know the outcome of the referendum as well so that will I'm sure influence our conversations I do have some um photos to share as I'm doing that I'm also going to share some upcoming events uh we have the courage retreat tomorrow for the uh seventh graders so a lot of high schoolers will volunteer for that so that's a great event we also have a coming up well tonight right now is the sixth grade band choir and orchestra concert so that's that's a really fun event it was actually scheduled for tomorrow and thought maybe um not the best day to to have a concert it's all day long it is it's all day long yep that usually culminates you know my Recollections about 2:00 is when they have their closing Circle
023really powerful event uh we also have the seventh and eighth grade band solo Fest coming up this week it's the end of the first quarter which really impacts the Middle School only we have staff development on Friday no school Veterans Day next week U many events actually throughout the district the big ones are starting with breakfast here at the high school and then an assembly at whis in the afternoon next week is uh school psychologist week There's reality Zone next next week for the high school school juniors uh on the 12th we also have the school and village board joint planning committee meeting that's going to be at 5:00 instead of our usual 4:00 time what date was that I'm sorry the 12th and then um the Middle School choir orchestra solo and Ensemble is
024also the 12th the seven the week of the 17th is American Education week and we'll meet on the 18th reminder on the 18th we also have the prospective School Board member meeting just prior to our full meeting so that'll be at six o'clock and our meetings at 7 uh so so have some pictures up here for you you can see the the students here they harvesting some beans and corn and and things that they grew in the community garden so a lot of Pride there that a big squash that has a big squash it's a big sunflow yeah yeah so kind of a neat thing for our students we had um Mrs mnik I came and visited Miss Davis's class and doing some critical thinking skills with with our Young Learners so very fun there
025um then we had in second grade some little pumpkin experiments doing some some testing and experimenting with with pumpkins here you'll see that as a theme coming up uh a little bit of a celebration I thought this was really fun they finished this book The Tiger Rising and you can see in the middle there the students are simulating what itd be like to um create this cinee Chaple by drawing on some some things they also did some soap carving because that was uh one of the characters in the book did some carving so cool neat all this you can see this sort of Hands-On experiential learning is a real theme with these pictures tonight similarly seventh grade did a little they're doing a minute to win it there competition I think trying to see how
026many times you can stand up in a certain amount of time for the civilization game lot of simulations got to keep those students engaged right and those are great memories the uh I don't know if you saw this on social media but in I Civics is the is the software program that has a Electoral College activity teaching kids about it through a through a simulation and a one of the things I Civics does really well is sort of gamify a lot of their learning and make it very interactive so big part of eighth grade curriculum there food truck unit tacos one of the things I miss the most about being at the middle school um my nose always found my way into the family consumer science um Wing when that was happening but nice that's
027such a neat project I think can't I do think the previous family consumer Sciences teacher started the food truck unit I think but it could have been Julie tokim as well great turnout for the fall craft fair you know really fun event so many vendors and uh all of the the funds from that go to the middle school and and to serve the clubs there so some extra sort of a fundraiser but also a great Community event and really um one of the custodians at the middle school Tamara does such a great job just organizing that just out of her kindness so a lot of amazing things there and also as part of that event something they added this year is the unified um Club at the middle school organized a activity room for kids
028so students were or kids were able to come in and do some fun activities sometimes allowing their parents to go craft explore the the space so appreciate that very creative idea so you can see Katie Miller there and co-advisor Michelle was there as well the new um class here at the high school the legislative semester where they simulate a legislative session well underway students proposing bills and and advocating for that running for office uh very competitive but a neat activity that I've seen in other communities my own kids went through a similar process in their district and so excited to have that at the high school so thanks to the teachers for organizing that of course we had the our three runners at Cross Country excited for them congratul ation to them and their amazing
029accomplishments but all of our our athletes this is the time of year where I think we're at the point now where our our teams have concluded their season uh after this weekend so but a great great job with the cross country team very proud fun to have the drum line on Friday for them Department's got a very strong history of distance running in Cross Country yeah as well me too we do lot to be proud of the GSA hosted pronoun day so you could have your own pick up a free pronoun pin so very popular at all those pins with different options for students to choose from fun activity you can see getting back to the theme of pumpkin exploration doing a little bit of Investigations with our pumpkins and Mrs lennings class here at
030the high school the uh mrap hosted the flag football recognition event at the high school football game and those students were really excited uh bit of a chilly night a little bit but they were having a good time and a lot of fun and great program very well very popular program so those are the things for that I was going to share are there any things the board members would like to share as recognitions the comment I would make Erin the things that presentative over the past 5 8 minutes it would be a great promotional video for incoming parents just taking a look at the wealth of opportunities and experiences afforded by the district variety yeah that's excellent point I think even for community members who don't have kids in in the district yeah yep
031um I have a couple um shout outs uh I am grateful for Britney Brazzle including the board in the equity Summit that she I think organized with some colleagues um and it was professional development I think for teachers right um and there were breakout sessions and I think the thing as a board member that I especially appreciated was in my small group like I could really hear how staff members and Educators were thinking about the subject matter and how their brains work and it was just very clear to me that we are we have some really bright Minds um so I'm really grateful that we were able to be included in that um and then also the work that the um um mft has done to you know get the word out about the referendum
032and everything there's teachers taking extra time out of their you know on their weekends to this last weekend yeah so that was yeah that was a good chunk of the day on Saturday I think so um just recognizing that there's a lot of people putting in a lot of effort to get our school supported the way it needs to be that's for sure that's all I have anybody have anything else if not we'll move along to our first action item and that is action on McFarland High School spring early college credit and start colge now program requests I would look for a motion to approve I can make that thank you Bruce I can second that thank you Megan discussion I just have one question there's a student that wants to take like French one
033two and three and four is as epic as we don't offer a a similar class here no we do offer those classes those are board separate classes yeah so it's different content Al together I think it's because they're taking it for CR college credit yeah I saw it was like for four credits through the start college now okay as opposed to you know the other programs where it's a course isn't offered here okay I know that was not uncommon in the past MH we don't offer I can't each year it varies I can't remember for offering French four this year anything else can't recall hearing none all those in favor please signify by saying I I opposed motion carries unanimously 5 Z next is action on first reading of policies 0164 meetings 2131 educational outcomes
034and expectations 31202 04 employment of substitutes 31208 employment of personnel for co-curricular extra extracurricular activities 3431 short-term leaves of absence 04 uh employment of substitutes 443 one short-term leaves of absence 52000 attendance 5505 academic honesty 5610 suspension and expulsion 5771 search and seizure 8510 Wellness 8540 vending machines 8550 competitive food sales 54603 uh WEA High School graduation requirements 5 46.4 uh destination Career Academy High School graduation requirements and um Insight School of Wisconsin high school graduation requirements um do I have a motion to approve I can make that motion thank you Megan second I'll second thank you Tom discussion would you like to break these out and go one one at a time right I have several okay action on first uh meeting 2 2131 educational outcomes and expectations yes okay Mr Mooney under academic
035skills and knowledge letter D the skill and aptitudes that will further lifelong intellectual activity and learning the other four items are all measurable D skills can be measurable but how we measure measure attitudes Prett and if we can't measure it should it be in there that's it's that's difficult it's like measuring effort or you know anything that's kind of intangible so the question is should it be in there well I guess my question is whether it comes from statute M which means we don't you know I don't well maybe I have to look at that up so I can look up and see if it's in statute or not but if not sometimes they list those things um did you have more time yeah okay I would say if it is statute then I think
036we have to get to the legislatur and give them a short lesson on measurable objectives or goals yeah it certainly would would not end with that one true but yes if it if it is not so it sounds like if it's not required eliminated right then under citizenship item G again they talk about an appreciation and understanding of different value systems again how do we measure appreciation understanding we can measure but not appreciation and then under H and maybe I'm just I'm not caught up in the most recent thing and understanding all great levels of human relations particularly with regards to American Indians is that politically correct or is Native Americans that does come from statute I mean that is the term that's required under act 30 31 indigenous is or indigenous is is this
037a new more commonly used I think almost interchangeable though from what I'm understanding well my question is have they've been using American Indians for years for decades if they have they sign probably for a change in terminology yeah that's true and then under personal development letter C appreciation is there again I just close the question tough to quantify if it's not measurable I don't think it should be in there and that's all I have for this policy okay um I had a couple in this policy there you go um the so in the first paragraph it talks about the district's Mission and I don't know I wonder if we want to update that to match our current Mission more I think this is more relatable to our former Mission good catch um I'm pretty sure
038so maybe maybe we want to just update that that is that's very good Megan I think you're right um thank you um and then in C under academic skills and knowledge they talk about the responsibilities and again if this is statutory you know from the statutes then there's not much we can do about it besides giving lessons um to the legislature but um in C when it says the responsibilities of the family as a consumer Cooperative marketing and consumers cooperatives I feel like of the family as a consumer like do we really need that part can it just be about consumers it feels more inclusive to leave out fan you know that's understood yeah so I don't know something to consider um again I think an e under the same section it feels like outdated
039terminology about computer science um Computer Applications and the social impact and I wondered if we wanted to change it to current technology because I think I mean I technically computer science includes a lot of different things but um are the academic skills and knowledge Faro be like that we're expecting kids to know now is Way Beyond that um so that was one question um another good catch then under personal development and again this might be statutory I most of the things that I tend to take issue with end up being statutory issues um under letter B number two they talk about in The Last Sentence maintaining a healthy weight um I don't think that that's applicable anymore I know that health and wellness is moving away from weight as a number they did move that
040out yeah and I think in later policies that we're talking about they talk about something different so it's I wonder if we want to change it to maintaining a healthy lifestyle or something there F let's find out if it's statutory and then um figure that out yeah because we don't have any date on here as far as when it was last revised or yeah April of 2019 so last Revis pretty long ago mhm so I'm not surprised that there would be outdated language in there it could be outdated year to year so just so you know I'm multitasking here I I will double check all of them but I can already see a lot of this is right out of the statute yeah okay so for example um that that D the the skill and
041attitudes one is right out of there computer science is right out of there okay so how do we ever attempt to have that corrected Aon you ever just keep saying it's statutory you year after year yeah so that would require the legislators some proposing yeah would that be something that the wasby um you know like all of those changes that they asked to bring for the convention convention yeah doesn't it fall in that category I'm not totally sure how that works it could but you know yeah it just means they're going to advocate for it but it certainly doesn't mean that it would change right yeah all in fact all of this personal development well that's what I mean you change it year to year sometimes the healthy weight is in there which I think
042is interesting cu it's definitely in a in another policy later y that was up that was um mola pushed for changes I think it was statutory changes they they make that change so I don't know maybe it's Neola that we go through with question they certainly can try I don't think they have any political influence but okay any more on if not we'll go to 3120.4 employment of substitutes anything there I had a question about the option um it's in the fourth paragraph um that talks it looks like it's an optional paragraph and we're choosing not to enact it um about background checks is it but we still do background checks for substitutes is it because we go through the third party yes okay yeah so we don't employ they do the background okay they
043do background checks they're the employer okay so we're taking it out of our policy because we are not technically the employer right and it references an administrative guideline that we don't use the AG yep okay perfect any anything else there it just shows you though I mean to me this reflects the shortage of substitutes mhm I mean it just yep shows you 31208 employment of personnel for co-curricular and extracurricular activities anything there if not 3431 shortterm leaves of absence anything there some of these we just reviewed in August just for the public who are maybe wondering 41204 employment of substitutes again 4431 shortterm leaves of absence again 5200 attendance yes I have some here okay it's more of a commentary I know children between the ages of 6 and 18 it's mandatory that they attend
044school where 4K and 5K it's optional mhm and my comment is this I think we're missing that great window of opportunity for kids to be learning because we know those are pivotal years for kids to be learning uh new things skills attitudes just getting along with kids and I just find ironic that the state says that's still optional when many of I mean we have a great turnout at 4K certain 5K uh so again it's just a comment I make I think it should be mandatory because of that window of opportunity when kids are starting or are continuing to learn at their optimal time I'd be curious to know why they didn't do that you know why they didn't include those two well 5K probably because they never did yeah it's really interesting and sometimes
045change is hard for some people okay 55 Z minute wait minute oh sry sorry under the second heading uh written excused record required excuse me um so this has to be just for clarification it has to be in writing is that correct MH okay and it could be an email text or okay thank you then under excused absences under physical and mental condition mhm uh the second sentence absence for this reason may be excused by Oral or written notification to the attendance officer so I do like the option where it can be verbal where it doesn't have to be written like sometimes you know families may never get the written piece in but they would just call in and then think the last or maybe not the last comment under uh J Election Day official
046our policy is including private schools and schools students enrolled in homebased private education those are beyond our control why are they in our policy but yeah and that is right out of state law um so that's right where that doesn't make sense because we don't have any control over that it seems like it's connected with the public school education but it's not I would my own bias is it should be a separate paragraph for home school and private education but if that's around the policy we can't do anything about it well I mean you you could separate it I suppose did we put it together or was it was it separated do we know Aaron at one time no I don't to my knowledge we haven't changed so so they just added 4K really when
0474K came into being 5K has always been optional so okay grades definition of part of day for an excused absence and they talk about 4K and five and 6 to 12 they talk about uh not in their signed area for 20 minutes or more M you know that's a 20- minute leeway for kids to come as a former teacher and administrator now as a board member I mean I think those kids should be there on time or certainly within five minutes I wonder when that changed I don't that the expectation isn't to be there on time I don't know but I think most teachers will say the first 10 or 15 minutes of the school day is just as important as the rest of the day because s sets the tone the expectations when kids
048come in late you know they can be disruptive in addition to the teacher having to repeat themselves sometime to connect with that student so what you're doing just to be very clear about this is that you're talking about the difference between a tardy and an unexcused absence so when you you move from a tardy I'm late to you missed now it's recorded as part of a day for truancy purposes so a student is considered a habitual truant if they're have unexecuted absences for part or all of a day for 5 days in a semester so what this defines is says that 0 to 20 wouldn't count for habitual treny so if I'm you know late to school for 15 minutes on five days in a semester I'm not habitual truant but if I'm 20 or
049more minutes late then it counts so it's a difference between like tardy or late to school and an unexcused what what it doesn't because you can have an unexcused tardy right but it's in no way saying that it's okay students still have consequences for them it's just not habitual treny good clarification y thank you thank you that's all I have for that that's important okay um 5505 academic honesty uh yes I do have a comment about that under academic honesty going down to e talks about so using language translation work of someone else's or using technology when the expectation is doing one's own translation I think many students use technology as part of it are we talking about what kind of Technology are we talking about Ai and if that's so I think we should
050be more specific then to that the only reason I I'm not sure I agree with that because I'm tell you it's always a catch-up game and what is not now the current you know AI concern you you you've got to give teachers because when I was doing term papers it was just like you know what was within the legal or what was within the ethical and what was not and it's just constantly changing so I think in a way you need to little leeway I think with this with translation specifically you having a more open definition because it could be like du lingo is an app that does translation learn you know you can learn right um and they might not be using it in the class but a student might be using it but
051that I don't think that would be considered AI um or online translation services Google translate but I don't think it would be AI either and and I understand those uh ideas but what about someone who's using technology to look up definitions of words I mean I always use technology to identify but it does say in here with with the teachers permission there is there is that worked into here and I I think you need to have it somewhat vague but you're always going back to the teacher that's all I have okay that one I think it's just general I I like seeing that there's some that the addition here yes is really because the last time we reviewed this was in March of 24 and so really we're just reviewing the the AI yeah um
052and I'm grateful that we're starting to see this Incorporated cuz it's get I mean it is the new thing you have to learn to recognize it for one thing yep okay 561 5610 suspension and expulsion uh 5771 search and seizure 8510 well yes okay under a that's where you get it ta about promoting uh nutrition education with the objective of improving students health I don't think we can improve students Health but we certainly can promote students health and that would be in more consistent language with C where they talk about promoting student health down what's the objective of improving students health I is this statutory also I wonder there's definitely statute on this I'd have to look it up there's federal law this is the one we were referring to but I can I can
053look that up and see I'm not I um I appreciate your attention to detail cuz you're right it's not um they are similar so I feel like they should match I me that's likely based off a dpi's model wellness policy but that doesn't mean you're required to use that typically it's just a model policy that they develop I was more familiar with the language of promoting something versus improving something MH CU we're not doing much measuring no look that up yeah okay okay okay 8854 vending machines I remember the hubub when they took the soda out oh yes few years back uh 8550 competitive food sales 54603 we a high school graduation requirements oh wait oh we have to vote on the uh I think they're all no that's right they're all're all together sorry
054for the for the weeva one for the graduation requirements um I think just to clarify this changing the um the credits this is really just to align what they've been practicing for um the last year it's it's to align to the statute that requires financial literacy okay yeah okay so they're clarifying that in their policy okay 54 60.4 destination Career Academy High School graduation requirements okay oh this was actually sorry that comment was actually for this one about the on the first page um earning a minimum of 18 and changing it to 15 credits we already had changed that to 15 so that's what I thought okay yes really that change was made at our last review yeah okay back in March I think yeah that's what I wanted to clarify 5 46.5 Insight School
055of Wisconsin high school graduation requirements all right any further discussion before we vote I've got a motion from Megan and a second from Tom all those in favor please signify by saying I I oppose motion carries 5 next is action on recommended uh weeva uh destination Career Academy and insight School of Wisconsin statute 11848 G student transfers to resident districts do I have a motion to approve I so moveed second I'll second thank you Megan discussion now just please note there of these 11 one is a second grader one is a fifth grader y so we're sending them they're going back to their school districts probably with little to no support but I certainly understand the rationale yeah any other discussion hearing none all those in favor please signify by saying I I oppos motion
056carries 5 Z and that is it for our action items uh informational items the first one is the school safety written drill evaluation notification and review per Wisconsin State Statute CP okay so you can see that in there just an evacuation um exercise at Waba that was interesting uh at the conclusion of that situation where the fire chief requested that Brook report to him directly to make sure that you know her confirmation that all the students were CED for he wanted a face T face short conversation yeah and we are meeting with the fire department at our next a council meeting just to discuss how to handle when we do have false alarms MH and so they don't have to send out as many people it was amazing too that they were saying you know
057this isn't something you practice you would never have a practice in the middle of lunch but they said it worked out and kind of kudos to the administration for being able to make just a little bit of adjustment in the scheduled and everything went right back to normal that's pretty awesome this um I don't really expect anyone to know the real answer but I mean do we get very many false alarms we've had two so far this year oh which is the most in the last three years oh okay so generally last year I think we had one the one I remember okay that was here and I'm trying to think are they all covered with that plastic cover mhm I think so it was a like a first grader that pulled the alarm years
058ago in con Delia mhm that resulted in the fire department cover in all those fire alarms and it used to have a fairly significant cost attached to it as well and it's not not something you want to make a habit out of no we don't encourage it wise okay uh the annual K12 stride Summit Mr Mooney the floor is yours sure thanks Greg uh that was conducted last week for a couple days the model uh this year was delivering tomorrow's education today a strong model uh they talked about the last 25 years this is the 25th year of uh k12 and they're talking about the next 25 years already uh they talk about uh virtual learning is Affordable and accessible to anyone anywhere anytime um their goal is to personalize uh the education to everyone
059every student's needs there have been three million learners and 3 million learning coaches each parent is considered a learning coach and they receive trading with that also they have 20 they've had 22,000 teachers in 35 States and 100,000 high school graduates in those 25 years uh they talk about uh TI which is teaching intelligence combining that with AI and you have the best combination for kids uh that only makes sense yes it does uh they talk about Strider squads it's forming small communities uh with geographically located families uh parent squads the same way parent advisory councils facilitating the communities with play dates pizza parties clubs book clubs Etc making connections to build communities and it's really fascinating how they virtually how they transform a simulated playground and different groups different students can form different um
060friend groups and actually engage in some things in playground they have passing time in the hallway where friends can connect it's just phenomenal how things have changed with virtual learning over the past few years there are four sectionals the first was marketing and Public Relation Synergy which I'll byy pass unlocking potential Evol uh evolving the science of reading that was heavy duty I think I will hear more about what we're doing here in the district here uh after 25 years years of research the science reading has surfaced they talk about the big five um the phic awareness phonics vocabulary comprehension fluency and I shared with you last year and they reiterated this year that's d has a guarantee that if a student isn't reading at grade level by grade three they will tutor those students
061until they reach grade level reading that's right phenomenal in our district you provide a lot of interventions which is yeah just as good I think this is all virtual it's all virtual and then they have the K12 Zone it's where they have Innovative engagement for teachers and students um and talking about uh unlocking the the the barricades to promote establishing more social relationships between students and teachers and among those groups also and it's just amazing what they're doing using that type of Technology all the safety things are in place uh security is in place so it's not like people can break into those walls and start doing things I talked about this last year also uh online counseling services for both students and and families and then finally just surrounding uh the virtual students with
062that sense of community just like a regular school you you have your home room groups you have your read groups and that and that's one of their uh big goals and then they talked about special programs educational support and engagement with students who are visually and hear and impaired it's just phenomenal and it's interesting because you know they have I pce so that means you know some students are required to be one-on-one mhm that's a quite an expensive Venture and also uh puzzle trying to figure out the timing for all that to take place so and we've also won our award um Sarah Cutler was presented with a an award with for destinations Career Academy and fin work that they they've done with that school and that concludes that report thank you Tom any question
063questions or comments before we move on uh next uh forward exam data annual reading report and act 20 update Melissa F joins us this evening the floor is yours thank you very much ni here [Music] walking e e e so the forward exam before I dive into that information the forward exam scores were rored this year which means a group of Educators from around the state got together and looked at the forward exam items and responses and decided what proficient looks like or what meeting standards looks like and that changed the bar which means we can't really compare the scores from this spring this most recent spring to the springs before that it's kind of a fresh slate starting over however we can look at how we compared to the state because last year compared
064to the state that Gap and this year compared to the state that Gap it's the same Benchmark both times so this graph I've shared many times before I like to call it the rainbow chart um it has cohorts highlighted as you go across so for example the students who were in third grade in the spring of 20123 and blue will become the fifth uh the fourth graders in the spring of 2024 can follow diagonally down so you'll notice the far right the spring of 2024 many more students are meeting or exceeding the standard but again that's that cut score change so yes we think our students grew significantly yes we think we're doing great things in our literacy classes but that doesn't completely account for the fact that last year the scores were kind of
065in the high 40s low 50s and this year we're up into the 60s and high 60s that's that cut score change however if you look at again those blue students who were third graders and then fourth graders they were 88.9% above the state and now they're 10.3% above the state so in addition to the growth we saw from the cut scores we also saw some nice growth for students compared to the state as you look down pretty much every cohort grew in their margin compared to the state that group that was fifth and sixth graders in yellow went down just a little bit basically the same a little bit lower um that group from sixth to seventh grade is one that we're going to dive into a little bit more why did it go from
06612 points above the state to six points above the state we're kind of looking at what are some things we can work on there but a really great highlight is the group that is their currently freshman in high school when they were seventh graders they were 5% above the state and as eighth graders they were 177% above the straight of of the state and that growth for eighth graders um yes it certainly reflects the amazing things that are happening in eighth grade but it's a culmination of everything that's happened K through 8 leading up to that point and getting them to be in a great place heading into high school you can also notice our ranks in day County and again even though the cut scores changed that's something that we can take a look
067at and our ranks in Dan County were either steady pretty much or there was a nice jump for the students who were third graders to fourth grade they went from eth in the county to Fourth and again that group that was seventh grade to e8th grade went from Seventh in the county to third so that was some excellent progress there for those two groups the other groups you know a couple slipped one spot but pretty steady performance overall on the forward exam Megan C asked for this chart and so it's here now um this is a new way of looking at our forward exam um information that we just haven't used previously so I can Orient you to that McFarland is there on the left and that graph is showing McFarland without weeva separated and
068the lighter blue is our percent of students proficient and advanced in ela the darker blue is in math and then you can see how that compares to every other District in the county and those other districts are sorted kind of highest to lowest um and this is all of third through e8th grade combined so the rainbow graph that I shared with you was each cohort separately this is all of those students from all of third fourth fifth sixth 7th and eighth grade combined um and so you can see we're doing quite well um one thing of note that I thought was pretty interesting is if we had uh currently on that graph our Ela were 7th in the county and in math we're fifth in the county but it is very very close the number
069turned out to be 21 students if we had 21 more students be proficient in ela we would have gone from 7th to 3D and if we had 21 it just turned out to be 21 again 21 more students in math be proficient we would have gone from fifth to 2nd so our scores there are just right in line right up there with the top of the county um for all of the schools and it's something obviously we want to grow but we're we're doing very well and um we're headed in a great Direction with Ela thank you so much for putting together um I'm a very visual person and so if you could have seen me at home digging through the cohorts and like drawing lines and whatnot um but during this whole referendum passing
070progress or process I should say we did get a lot of questions of well where do we stand in terms of other schools within our district or within our County I should say and so seeing this uh in all the colors is extremely helpful so thank you you're welcome um and it's book ended there on the far right side with the Statewide so we're well above the state in both Ela and math not to just focus on our third through e8th grade students act and prea results are also there for ELA um some nice growth again um for our high school students in ela it is an interesting thing that the high school has noticed over time that when students when those cohorts go from 9th grade to 10th grade to 11th grade we don't
071see the growth in the percent of students being proficient that we really would like to see we have a lot of wonderings about that um are our Juniors doing their very best effort on the ACT some of them are saying I take the ACT another time I'm already happy with my score am I giving my best effort um but in terms of rank in the county that's probably not unique to McFarland probably all of the Juniors across the county and across the state are also wrestling with those same motivational issues and we end up typically about sixth in the county which is okay but something we want to see improve um very pleased with last year's Juniors our current senior class um that was the highest amount above the state that we've been in sometime
072for the ELA 12.8% above the state in terms of number of students proficient and advanced and the cut scores didn't change there so you can compare the ACT scores going backwards all right some updates from each building I'm going to share just a bit of information about each of the buildings the principles will follow up and fill in some of the gaps but at Conrad Elum they are working to apply what they learned about the science of learning through their letters training over the last two years to our wonders curriculum wonders is a fantastic curriculum we're very happy with it but there are pieces that we think don't align with what we learned in letters that we want to modify and we want to make sure that it is really doing everything that we possibly
073can to get students off to a great strong start with their literacy knowledge wonders or letters wonders this is only the second year of implementation the teach are now they year anding oh I you know this is what well last year this is how I can make that go better this year um these are pieces we need to change last year it's kind of like drinking from a fire hose the first year you implement a comprehensive curriculum and it's just getting through it um this year they're really refining that process act 20 that I'll talk about quite a bit in a little bit is is pretty comprehensive it takes quite a bit of a attention and focus particularly for our interventionists but also our home room teachers our home room teachers are providing intervention to
074students who are not quite there yet with their reading proficiency and they're using a program from the University of Florida that's ufly so the UF there is University of Florida um It's A literacy Intervention Program that focuses on Phonics and it gives explicit systematic instruction and we have a great program for identifying where students gaps are and then starting them exactly on that lesson and having teachers Implement that for small groups or one-on-one with students in their classroom and that's an excellent change that we've made this year to make that um much easier for teachers to implement we're giving them the curriculum um Greg purchased all of that and provided professional development time for teachers to be able to do that in their classrooms Waba similar um the Waba teachers act 20 goes up to
075third grade so our third grade teachers also participated in letters training our fourth and fifth grade teachers um unfortunately letters is quite expensive and so for fourth and fifth grade teachers we provided them access to a different science of reading training over the summer and what they're going to work on this year is taking what they learned over the summer and applying that to their curriculum their big focus and change this year is increasing the amount of time they use on our supplemental phonics Core Curriculum that was something we started last year we had noticed our word study spelling vocabulary as a weakness in our current curriculum and so so we added on this 95% phonics core program and last year when we implemented we didn't allot we knew we weren't allowing the right amount
076of time for them to be able to do the entire curriculum and this year we've doubled the amount of time which it's not doubling the amount of time that they have to teach literacy it's just doubling how we're splitting up that portion of time so if you increase the amount of time on vocabulary and spelling you have to decrease the amount of time on reading and writing but it's a need that we have and it's a temporary change in how we're splitting up the time we'll see how that goes and then move forward we're hoping we can close some gaps we're also knowing that the students will'll get from CS are going to be that much stronger in their phonic knowledge so we feel this is just a short-term change while we're waiting for all
077of the great things that we're getting from CS to kind of trickle their way up similarly the Middle School um started using an online program called ISL last year and they've really redoubled and focused their efforts with ISL this year when it was new last year it was teachers experimenting pulling bits and pieces and trying to figure out what would fit best for their students this year we have a comprehensive scope and sequence really focused on grammar and language and again that's an area where our current curriculum is lacking and so they've uh really focused on that they students can do grammar lessons independently and it's adaptive based on which questions they get correct and which standards they need to learn but also teachers do something called I love the name a group Jam where
078all of them are doing the same lesson together and again it's very explicit instruction and the teachers didn't have to develop that we just bought the ISL program so that they didn't spend their time doing that but they could really focus on spending their time implementing it the middle school I didn't write up there but similar to the high school where I'll highlight it the middle school and high school are working on disciplinary literacy across the building um the high school is focusing on a universal summarizing strategy that started with the teachers of nth grade students and those teachers said we should just be doing this across the entire building so they spent time uh professional development learning a common strategy and uh when Aaron fiser presented that information she's our literacy coordinator she said
079now I'm teaching you a new strategy so I'm going to do this with a familiar text so that you can really be focusing on the strategy and learn that well if the entire staff is going to use the same strategy with students whether they're in math or science or social studies if they don't have to keep learning another strategy another strategy if they' use the same one every time they're going to be able to really focus on the content as they're learning it and focus on how can they summarize what they've learned and how can they then retain it and apply it to other contexts the other piece that the high school will continue this year that started last year was the English and social studies departments got together to talk about how they teach
080writing um they both do a similar process where they're talking about really what I would call a claim evidence and reasoning how they structure their paragraphs and structure their arguments but in social studies they use an acronym called happy and in English they use an acronym called soapstone when they got together and those things I cannot tell you off the top of my head what either of them stand for but I know it has to do with author's um perspective and what the author is trying to accomplish and um your evidence pieces that go along the way when they met they decided it's okay that we're using different acronyms but we need to make a graphic organizer so that students know how they fit together so in all of the English and social studies classrooms
081they have the same posters pardon me that connect those two acronyms together excuse me so they'll continue that work this year and it's just making those intentional connections for students so that they're not trying to figure out what the teacher means they can see okay it's a different acronym because it has a different purpose it's different when you're writing like a historian compared to when you're writing for a literary purpose that is so much more than one slide worth of content for the teachers um it is meant to be a general overview of the great work that's going on but we are really laser focused on literacy across all of k12 and we're seeing that payoff for students both inside the classroom and then eventually on our standardized test results so to close updates about
082act 20 I did not change the date on that which I'm going to say was intentional um this was a a recycled presentation that we gave to teachers back in December and then we gave them another version of this same presentation in August and now here it is for you in November excuse [Music] me in the report that I gave you there were several pages about act 20 and a table that had what does it say what's the requirement for ACT 20 and then what is McFarland's plan all of that information is available on our website so I am not going to read all of that or go into much detail about every part but if there's anyone in the community who wonders how is McFarland implementing act 20 if you go to the teaching
083and learning web page you can find this early literacy Wisconsin Act 20 page that has all of the information that I gave to the board in the report act 20 contains a lot of information that includes how DPI is organized how funding is provided for literacy teacher preparation and Licensing professional development for teachers and pre-service teachers as as well as curriculum instruction and assessment I'm going to focus on really three parts the professional development curriculum and assessment pieces and then just kind of Nod at the everything else portion of act 20 act 20 asks that all K3 teachers including special education teachers interventionists reading Specialists and administrators receive professional development on science-based reading instruction through DPI approved curriculum methods the great thing is we had started that before act 20 was passed letters is one
084of the approved trainings for ACT 20 and at this point 99% of our K3 staff have completed letters our CS staff were working on that over the last two years and our third grade staff did that this summer um just a couple teachers that we need to catch their schedules didn't work out and so we'll have a new cohort next summer to catch up either any new hires or the teachers who weren't able to make the sessions this summer our original plan was to open up letters for fourth and fifth grade teachers as well because we know it's really valuable and it will help them Reach the students who are falling behind um due to the referendum not passing we weren't able to afford to have fourth and fifth grade teachers participate in letters but
085there is a free online program that has similar content at a much less intense depth I would say so similar information just less intensity and we had 14 staff complete believe yes for fourth and fifth grade teachers because it really talks about like letter names and sounds and by fourth grade that's information most of our fourth and fifth grade teachers have um what our teachers have said is it does help me though for the students who are below grade level it gives me some more strategies about going backwards and filling in the holes um but I would say our fourth and up teachers don't need quite the same intensity that our kindergarten teachers do who are really living and breathing the early literacy skills every today curriculum act 20 says that K3 reading curriculum must
086be science-based in both the universal and intervention settings and it defines science-based instruction to be systematic and explicit for phonological awareness pheic awareness building background knowledge oral language development vocabulary building instruction and writing and comprehension as well as reading fluency act 20 also specifies that instruction cannot include three queing or msv um that is a way of teaching reading where you're not necessarily decoding and looking all the letter parts and sounds but you're looking at other hints that you have like context in the whole sentence and looking at a picture on the page for example the state is saying we want people to decode the words as they're written without using those other meaning Clues so our current status wonders um is a science-based uh comprehensive reading program we also supplement that with Hagerty for
087some more pheic awareness at K2 we've also looked through the units of study for third grade and said yes there are some pieces of units of study that we wish were more systematic and explicit so let's add on that 95% cor phonics word study program and increase the time this year to um make sure that we're aligned with the ACT 20 requirements our interventions you fly I mentioned previously we're really ramping up our use of that at K2 the 95% group and snde intervention systems are again pieces that we had in place all prior to act 20 so all of this work that McFarland has done to comply with act 20 was started prior to because we know the importance of the science of reading and um talking to colleagues in other districts who are
088a year behind us or a year different from us in their implementation it is so nice that we were um on top of things and proactive because the reactive side doesn't feel quite as good now assessment we didn't have any choice and we were a little reactive in assessment um DPI this was back from December it said we'll select an assessment that we'll give two times a year for 4K and three times a year for K3 and then based on the results of those assessments some students will also take diagnostic assessments to dig in deeper DPI selected that assessment on July 15th this summer um and originally the implementation was supposed to be for this fall they passed a supplemental um bill I guess that said you don't actually need to begin that assessment until
089winter however for people who work in schools it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to use one assessment in the fall and then switch things over mid year so we just did the new assessment starting in the fall um that is as web plus and really kudos to our school Sykes Becca Hulse and Kayla gtz as well as our literacy coordinator Lori Lovel for all of the organization that they put into figuring out what the assessment is figuring out training for teachers um managing the results process looking at which students needed more um diagnostic assessments to follow up organizing all of that data it was an enormous amount of work that we couldn't even begin working on until after July 15th when the assessment was chosen and they got it done um we've
090assessed all of our students um 4K through three this fall even though it wasn't required and as we look at it I'm going to skip a slide and then come back um so we tested students at K through3 and the students who score below the 25th percentile by act 20 need to receive a diagnostic assessment which is just a more detailed assessment that goes into a specific area so that we can figure out where is the students understanding of literacy breaking down so we start with with a oral fluency uh test where it's uh listening to them read and seeing how many words per minute but then we break that down and go backwards well is it letter sounds that they're having trouble with no they get the letter sounds well okay is it letter
091names that they're having trouble is it nonsense words which part of the literacy process are they are they struggling with so that we can Target our intervention to where they're struggling in a healthy system we would really love to have 80% or more of our students scoring above the 25th percentile and as you can see there we weren't quite there this fall however when we have those number of students who needed that diagnostic assessment when we gave the first diagnostic assessment about half of the students scored much better on the diagnostic than on the screener and so our wondering is were they just not familiar with that type of assessment and so when they got another chance at a very similar assessment measuring a very similar thing and they did better it's not that they
092have trouble reading it's that they have trouble taking that assessment so when we get to the winter we're hoping and expecting to see a higher percentage of our students above the 25th percentile um we're also going to give them a practice test right before they have the actual test in the winter um that was a reason we wanted to start earlier than the state requirement so that we could learn things like that and just have a smoother experience in the winter um starting in the winter then all of the students that are in that below 25th percentile and get the diagnostic will have a personal reading plan that is shared with families and monit is monitored weekly for the rest of the year that plan will have this is the program we're going to use
093and this is what we're going to be looking for to say that your student is back on track and is ready to just have their regular classroom instruction again and be caught up with their peers and ready to go I think the only thing I skipped a little bit on this is just an FYI we're still using fastbridge um I did have a parent reach out to me asking why are you using as web and fastbridge why are you assessing our kids so much we're using the state required program for literacy at K through three we're using what we always used to use for math at K through 8 and then fourth grade we're using what we like the state requires us to do one thing so we're doing what the state requires us to
094do but we left everything else alone at the other grades because changing everything all that onceth on very little notice would have been logistically complicated so we just changed the bare minimum we'll evaluate this year we may change over to something else next year we may not but we didn't want to make that decision on one month's notice and with no teacher input because they weren't working over the summer I believe oh everything else so everything else about act 20 um act 20 also gets into what resources we use for intervention who gets it um how it's communicated by families one piece that'll be of interest to the board is there is a promotion um component of act 20 that talks about how students move from third to I think fourth to fifth grade I
095believe DPI will release a model policy change and then the board will decide if they want to update our current promotion policy and use um the model policy or if how we want to approach that act 20 I I labeled it DPI stuff it created a new office and in DPI and some committees currently because of funding that office at DPI is one person Barb Novak and she is in charge Statewide of helping support districts and uh figure out the implementation there are supposed to be some literacy coaches Statewide but again due to funding there aren't any at this point so it is just a one person Department who is doing really a phenomenal job given the constraints she has to provide information to districts are there a lot of statut requirements that you know
096are intermixed that need to be addressed yes um like that assessment piece is all a statutory requirement how we communicate with families is a statutory requirement okay um the last piece that felt pertinent was reporting currently at K2 when we get our school report cards out they use an alternate reporting because they don't take the forward exam at K2 uh going forward all of these required assessments that I was talking about that information the percent of students who are proficient by third grade will end up on the school report card in a public and visible place so that families know how we're doing in literacy and again that's something we've been sharing with families right along so we didn't wait for the state to tell us that these are all good ideas um and it
097has been still a difficult road to go through all of the the technical details of getting up to speed with act 20 but philosophically we were already on that path that has made the process much easier for us that concludes my reading report for today um what questions can I help address related to literacy and reading in McFarland it C go ahead it certainly appears as though we're trending in a good direction you know from the time I don't even know how many years ago it was now but literacy was a was a very difficult thing for us to get our hands around and it it certainly seems like everything's headed in the right direction kudos to those that are probably doing two three jobs at once our but our our staff does that so
098I certainly I certainly applaud the uh the leadership and the teaching to get to help get the students where they are but I think I would be remiss to say that based on the ly approaches we used previously I mean that late 80s early 90s we were not performing well at all but then we went up significantly so I think we want to acknowledge that also um but couple things I know you had talked about some of the PD wasn't uh done this summer because of funding yeah I believe curriculum instruction is one of the most important things that we should provide to our teachers uh regardless of the funding we should find the money to do it uh secondly the materials also I should I don't think we should let the lack of funding
099uh result in not purchasing the needed materials um I think yeah we just take a look at the our overall budget and see where we can find that funding because otherwise it just delays us further in helping students yeah some of them fall either further behind so I think if that happens again yeah I think you come to the board and say you know this is the plan can we move forward with it somehow we shouldn't use the lack of funny as an excuse not to move forward with that at a good good accelerated rate thank you um and the alternate PD that we provided for fourth and up teachers was recommended by cisa and for that second point that you mentioned they said we recommend districts use their money for the materials over the
100professional development and VI this free professional development that literacy professionals at cisa 6 which is a leader in literacy in the state they said this is adequate spend your money on getting the materials in the hands of teachers so that the kids can have that high quality instructional material and I appreciate you collaborating with cesa 6 because they provide some wonderful resources the only other comment I would make is that when 4K was initiated a few years ago the fear was that the kindergarten curriculum would come down to the 4K curriculum first grade first grade curriculum would come down to 5K curriculum some of that has occurred it reinforces my belief when I hear act2 is saying we must test 4K students to me that's totally inappropriate is not developmentally appropriate the original intent of
1014K was to get kids ready for their 5K experience yeah it just tears my heart out when kids come into 4K or 5K and we classify them as already behind and we do interventions with them they're developing right where they should be we have to give them time and as as an institution and it's it's Nationwide we don't provide that time for some of the kids they all learn at different rates and and we all know that so let's give them some of that time but I'll get off my no it is nice that the intervention components of act 20 don't go down to 4K so that we have to assess them and it's really um letter sounds at 4K so what sound does this letter make which is you know information that 4K is
102working on it is developmental um but that Shar in to family you know we have to share that to families and in some cases it does alarm families you know what what are you saying my child's already behind and our 4K teachers do a nice job of saying that's exact that's why they're here you know if they already knew it they'd be in kindergarten already they're in 4k to learn that information and we're going to keep working at it and by the end of 4K they're going to be ready anybody have anything else the only other question I have is you talked about spelling and that historically speaking has been sort of a Thor on our side have you found anything that can improve the spelling competency and proficiency of kids I think I mean
103yes and no um there's still an aspect of we want them to develop those writing skills and those broader thinking skills and it's difficult for students who are just learning to focus on spelling every word accurately and doing that broader thinking and organizing their thought skills however the information we learned in letters and the s in letters is spelling and so it's talking about how do we learn those letter names and sounds how do we figure out and as they're learning to read They're splitting the words into their component sounds and so then that's the decoding so then when you go to encode the information you know how that works you know how these sounds fit together these sounds match with letters and you can put the words back together again so I think more
104intentional focus on the letter sounds and how words work will help their spelling down the line the program we're using at third through fifth grade does a nice job of then at that point they're talking about um roots and Greek and Latin roots and how does this part of the word work together and taking longer multi-lab words and breaking them apart and putting them back together so are we improving our spelling yes s an it'll still be a part to go you know when we had last year we just started in third grade with that new program they didn't have at K2 they didn't have wonders yet coming up to them and so we're throwing them into R controlled vowels and they're like what's an art control vowel um what's an open syllable what's a
105closed syllable and now the third grade teachers are like oh open syllable closed like they have the hand signals they have a sense of what it means um I was blown away when my daughter I think she was in first grade or second grade and she said um she was trying to spell something maybe foil and she said oi like what says oi I was like I don't know what do you think and she said um o y and O I can both say oi which one is it and I was like oh they do and she oh wait o y is usually at the end of a word and o i is usually in the middle of the word so I bet it's oi and I was like it is oi in the middle
106of the word and just for her to you know say all of those know how it goes know what the letters are he like oh this is working you know what we're doing is definitely starting to pay off for kids the only reason I bring it up is that I continuously hear that from employers sometimes yeah but one thing I don't hear from employers is that the kids who are in the youth apprenticeship program I don't hear any of that M from those kids that are um engaged in a specific company or business biggest part of that's the whole mentoring Thing by the employer yeah so yes thank you very much thank you thanks for everything you do always thorough thank you I could understand it what do we do from here we have the
107school so we've just got about another hour and a half left um so we're going to have our principles um come on up and I'm going to orient you to our our next part our final part of our agenda here so I know you received information in advance but we're going to walk through this for you uh we sent you a document that includes acronyms that we may be referencing for your purposes ultimately what you're going to hear is our the school Improvement plans um both that that are connected across the district and things that are unique to each individual building because we're driven by our strategic plan and our mission and vision our mission Accord is is meeting the needs of every learner every day and our vision of creating an equitable and inclusive
108community committed to student belonging achievement and growth you will hear that embedded in all of the work that we discuss with you tonight the way that we will present this to show that align ment with the school improve or with the Strategic plan is each School Improvement plan is divided into those four pillars of our strategic plan so we'll take each each area each pillar one at a time I will um share with you some of the the practices that cut across the district that we're all doing to show you that connection and districtwide work and then each building will highlight a practice in more detail it detail and what we're trying to do so that it's not redundant and repetitive for you is the principles will be sharing some different things but many of
109those are being done in all the buildings so instead of each building say yeah we do that to yeah we do that too yeah we do that too um you'll hear it highlighted so make the assumption that they're also doing that in their um unique ways I ask that you hold your questions until after each building has shared about that pillar and then we'll have questions before moving on to the next pillar I will also in addition to sharing the the practices I will also be sharing our performance related to our key performance indicators or our kpis to throw out an acronym for you love a good kpi yeah love a good kpi and we've we've got them so I will share our progress on those because that that's what we've defined for our strategic
110plan so with that one of the things that you will see that I have for you is we do have a slideshow which is a unique slideshow in the sense that it really doesn't have any words so uh outside of our first slide which is our our mission each of the pillars will have a different slide that highlights some things just a foreshadow some things about some visual ual to exemplify that pillar but there aren't words for you to stare at because you're going to stare at these fine people that have words of wisdom and insight to share with you related to their school Improvement plan with that I'm going to start with educational Excellence that is our first uh pillar to share with you the objective in this area is improving academic achievement with
111a focus on literacy think you know a little bit about that and closing gaps for traditionally underserved groups again this was an objective developed through the Strategic plan process not something we came up with on our own um and you'll see that in our school learning objectives are really focused on this area and literacy being our main priority in terms of our key performance indicators it's really about reducing those gaps uh between groups uh related to race disability and gender and you'll see that um in general when you when you include act and forward exam um where we saw pretty much a stable um The Gap pretty much stayed stable across areas the one area that we're really focusing on in our work is the gap between students and with and without disabilities because that
112one um increased by three percentage points so that's a real focus of our work this year we also in this area we also use the school perceptions student survey uh the connection IND index and what that measures is students sense of belonging at school because they have healthy relationships with other students and adults and they're actively involved in school related activities so that school perception survey takes several questions on that survey and combines it into one student uh one connection index on that survey we don't have a last year was our Baseline so in January of this year we'll have a comparable so we don't have a comparable to share in terms of our district aligned work just getting getting to that working on those those gaps it's really about addressing uh a focus on
113high quality instruction and services you often hear about that referred to as part of our Equitable multi-level systems of support or em LSS and a a big part of that kind of one of the new things that we're doing this year is initiating um collaborative classroom visits the high school took the lead on this last year piloted this and this is really about teachers just spending time in one another's classrooms observing and learning from the expertise of their colleagues and then sharing those insights out uh that they learn also you heard a lot about act 20 and what that means in the literacy work we also added the curriculum councils back in reminder about that so those have have met a couple times already this year we continue to implement some of the plans that
114we developed last year so the progressive response to behavior the bullying harassment plan plan attendance plan uh we're not going to focus on those tonight cuz that was really a focus of last year we continue to refine those I just didn't want you to forget those we're hoping they will become standard operating procedure moving forward so that's just lays out a little bit of it and we are going to hear a little bit from the the buildings then we'll have time for your questions we're going to start with Conrad lvm primary school and Mr Greg Nelson good evening nice to see everybody all right when it comes to educational Excellence at CS this year one thing I'd like to highlight um is the fact that after going through letters training then and adopting the Wonders
115curriculum we can you know we can give teachers the tool of a great curriculum which is wonders but the real magic and the real teaching happens when you know we have good teachers who have the skills teaching um you know the curriculum that's that's that's important work but how do you connect it that was what was on our mind um starting this year how do we connect the learning to the tool we have um we actually came across the perfect opportunity to do that learning and have that conversation we have a group of teachers we're calling them the literacy committee this year that is going through a training with one of the cesas on early literacy in an emls um with the focus on high quality instruction so it's it really was perfect timing it
116came our way and it's doing that connecting for us the outcome is we're going to have a group of teachers who are kind of trained on um several highquality instructional practices that we can then talk about bringing back to our school and so those high quality instructional practices that we're going to be trained on are um teacher modeling which is perfect that's exactly what a structured comprehensive curriculum entails and student-led discussion and so we are kind of in the midst of the teacher modeling training right now we've defined teacher modeling as a group that we're going to then um share with the staff and we're going to think about how we can both affirm the good teacher modeling that's already happening help everybody get on the same page with a definition as we work towards
117consistency and what that high quality instructional practice means looks like in the classroom so that we can again continue the learning and supporting each other with it um so it was kind of exciting again that that opportunity came our way because it's doing what we were hoping to do ourselves but um providing the people who are experts in the field already to help guide us through it um as Aon mentioned we um have begun our ccvs the collaborative classroom visits and very excited to report that our teachers are are finding um you know they've talked about wanting to do that and so we we're hoping to you know build a system thank you to the high school for you know beginning that work um and just getting some positive feedback from their colleagues is always
118very affirming um Melissa had mentioned before um talked about our phonics um instruction and so this year it's really neat to see um those systems that were developed um I think anytime you start something in year one you're just kind of working out the the the and tweaking things um so to have kids now know like oh these are the routines of a lesson so yes we're adding more time but we're just being much more efficient with it and we have some foundational um systems and practices and routines that kids are are used to um the other thing we're looking at and you hear um about emls and we have of course the academic side we've heard a lot about literacy tonight um but there's the social emotional learning side of that and so we're
119really trying to be strategic this year about um looking at some of our foundational umcl practices our tier one practices um and throughout the year doing some teaching reteaching um with our staff so just recently at a PD day um we went over some of our um regulation calming Corners within the classroom to really help students you know be self-aware how can they um advocate for themselves and take care of those regulation needs in the classroom instead of having to leave the classroom for that um so they're not missing out on instruction and um we're going to continue with further um uh other opportunities as well and um yeah I think that about hits it for weisa over to Middle School hello everybody I'm going to talk a little bit from the Indian Mound perspective
120lots of things as Aon said are very similar so I'm not going to repeat everything but we do also have um an em LSS team in place that not only is there the building wide one that everybody has there's also going to be the districtwide one that Melissa has been talking talking about um but we're working on those ccvs as well um we are also uh digging into our process to determine students who are eligible for intervention and looking at progress monitoring and kind of fine-tuning that that process we are also really working to utilize our data to guide our practice so we get data from lots of different places you've heard about a lot of them tonight um we do have a program called NEX path which is a districtwide program that replace Ed
121climber if you've heard of that it's basically a hub that has all sorts of things all sorts of data in it and we're using it to um help us guide um our interventions we are using our grades from standards based grading ISL which Melissa talked about our fast bridge and our formative and summative assessments the good thing right now I think at Indian Mound is we don't have any brand new curriculum therefore we have the opportunity to spend some more time really looking at how we're assessing students how it relates to their learning outcomes and the standards so we have some time to kind of roll up our sleeves and dig into that by using the data that we're collecting and then finally the last thing is around student engagement we two things I want
122to high highlight there one is the web program which you've heard about before but it's where everyone belongs it's where the sixth graders come on the first day of school and the eighth graders are their mentors and there's times they meet throughout the year which has been really outstanding for not only our sixth graders but also for our eighth graders to be leaders and then for positive behavior interventions and supports PBIS at Indian Mound we kind of have a reset this year where we're kind of going back to basics we know that in elementary school students get taught behaviors all the time and when you get to Middle School sometimes it's assumed that they should know or remember the things that they're taught about walking on the hallway and going through the lunch line and
123just very simple things and we're learning that we do need to continue to teach our middle schoolers those things even when we think they might already know them so we're really going back to basics we have signage around we have common language we're reteaching expectations and it has been extremely successful and helping just the flow and the systems of our school from day to day all right from the high school side of things uh again I know everyone's brought up the ccvs that is something that the high school is now doing building wide so we've got all of our staff getting into each other's classrooms not only within their own department but then inter Department as well we've got a lot of really solid feedback from that so excited to kind of wrap up our
124first round of that here in the first semester and then dive into a second round of those uh in our spring semester one kind of unique thing um that we've put some effort into at the high school is some unifying of our PLC and Department Department collaboration time a lot of different teams that gathered throughout the day through either common planning time or just because they teach common grade levels a lot of K8 ends up being grade level specific once we get to the high school it ends up being kind of course specific teams as well as grade levels specific so really unifying the work that those different teams are doing and being able to have some common protocols that they come back to routinely to analyze data or to provide intervention to specific groups
125of students has been a really good use of our time to uh increase our efficiency of those teams and make sure that everyone is feeling like that work is Unified across the building as opposed to just different pockets of different things happening throughout the building so those are a few things that uh We've really spent some time at the high school level focusing on for our educational Excellence pillar so there's the time for you to ask questions make comments related to educational excellence you guys agree thank you for all the information you bet is there a a a process that you follow once you have the collaborated classroom visits and you know obviously they're Gathering their input and such when or how do you disseminate you know what they learn to other folks yes can
126speak to that a little bit just because we've got the our whole staff doing that and we've got different subsets at the other buildings doing it as well but um so when teachers go into a classroom they're always going in with at least one other teacher so then afterwards they get together after being in the classroom those two or three teachers get together and kind of share their notes so they were able to say well I picked up on this that I thought was really great and I picked up on this thing usually there's a lot of overlapping feedback from that they fill out a Google form that we we've created that they're able to then share that feedback a little bit more globally that comes to the administrative team and we have a running
127spreadsheet of all these different positive things that we've seen then in our classrooms and the end goal is for us to be able to take a look at those things collaborative with the entire staff and be able to identify some common understandings of just solid tier one instructional practices that should be happening across the board because hey we saw these great things happening we should all be able to level with each other this is what great teaching looks like let's really Hammer home some of these great tier one practices that we've seen happening and want to continue to kind of lift up building wide so I think that's the goal K12 by the end of all of it we're all slightly different spots right now but by the time it's all said and done I
128think that's that's where we plan to be so the feedback happens virtually immediately yeah yep super thank you anything j i excuse me Jamie I just like your Your Back to Basics that's good and and you think it it's working well that's that's excellent I think it's really good and Aon I want to just compliment you because I think this is something that you've really it's been a real um emphasis on on your part which is try to make the whole District working together and you know make it kind of a standardized the whole whole bit I think it's really something that's changed dramatically since I was teaching I know that well I can't take credit for that I you you know if if we weren't all um believing that was the right way to
129go it wouldn't happen I mean I know I'm very powerful but but they are it's what we all want and can see is is the best you know I I think the Strategic plan was something that we've been hoping for and wanting for a long time and I agree with that but at the same time I mean I think it's something that we always wanted and it it just seems like it's a real there been real push on your part good is there a vision um because I applaud your efforts for the CCV within the building but years ago we did across the district and the benefit of that is that high school teacher was actually able to observe what a fourth grade teacher or second grade teacher how they interacted with kids and the
130reality of what the different age levels are all about is there any vision of doing that sometime in the future because otherwise we're still operating in our silos you know within a building even though it's through different departments yeah it's certainly something that we'd look at eventually to be honest I think part of what we're doing is building people's comfort with having a colleague yeah in their classroom and so that would be certainly a future step I could see that really evolving out of the curriculum Council that's what I was going to say curriculum things right at the same time so then as people become more familiar with they know well and Trust coming in could see that as being a nice next step right is okay now as curriculum councils we're going to yeah
131observe each other just something to consider for the future idea okay we're going to move on to family and Community engagement our second um pillar our objective here is bridging meaningful and constructive communication and partner ships to ensure Equitable access representation and voice so our key performance indicators really focus on that school perceptions survey results the informed index the included index and the um and another tool that we also use that I'll tell you about in a second so that informed index is really about parents feeling that they're kept up to date on their child's progress and what's happening in school and and so from the first year we did this to last spring when we did that that survey we saw a a small increase from a 3.98 to a 4.1 what I will
132point out to you is yes that's an increase but I would also say that a 4.1 on a fivepoint scale is pretty good and we're going to continue to to grow that in the areas I'm going to share the included index focuses on uh parents reporting that they feel welcomed respected and a part of the school community also saw an increase 3.9 to 4.05 we also developed an annual uh Community engagement self- assessment which it's not a quantifiable so much of a a resource it's more of us looking at a rubric of things that we want to improve on based on what research has shown as best practice and identifying areas we use that to guide our action planning which I will talk about now so some of our district aligned work is focused on
133making sure that our system of communication and the tool that we're using aligns with the purpose in the audience so an example I'll give you familywise is when do we use email versus putting something in the newsletter so we want to make sure we get people with the right form of communication when they need it how do we use you'll hear about seesaw in in canvas to get information about their child's progress to them another part of it that really came out of that Community self assessment was increasing opportunities for for families and community members to volunteer both promoting what we do have and increasing those and I know um that's something that we're worked working on as as a group as well I would say when you talk about both of these issues volunteering
134and communication generally what you'll see is the buildings focusing a lot on parent Guardians and where I see our Communications office in the district office me what I see uh me working on is the community engagement how do we so I'm I'm developing a a community newsletter that I've reached out to my colleagues uh around the the area to see what they're doing and I've got some nice models to develop from that lastly is uh focus on developing really authentic opportunities for our families and communic community members to get involved in providing us feedback and advice on um different projects different things we're struggling with giving their input on a specific problem so I mentioned about newsletters versus emails that's something that that um our our Equity Group focused on and provided feedback to us
135we shared some ideas and they provided feedback so kind of that really more targeted feedback on a specific issue and that's something that you'll hear about as well so we're going to start with with Corey and Waba thank you um so one of the first um areas I'd like to highlight is that uh communication piece and so for us um we have the Seesaw that it's our learning platform management system um and we um got together K5 um at the K2 level they had been using seesaw for a few years and so really with this feedback we really wanted to think Elevate um the idea that like how can we help families get sort of a glimpse into what their students are learning um just the way it works at the elementary level um you
136know teachers are not inputting grades per se you know as much um so we got together this summer and came up with a um communication plan um that really outlined the difference between uh seesaw email s'mores and really highlighting the fact that seesaw is the connection point between parent Guardian student and teacher so that way now when a when a parent is getting a communication through seesaw they're not confused oh is this coming from the from the principals is no it's it's from the from the teacher um so that's been helpful so far and then we're going to do some um midpoint checkin and get some feedback from parents this year um the other thing is um community events um Erin talked about the opportunities for families um our Equity action team last year um
137we kicked off our family fun night in the spring and we did it again just recently um and partly we did it because of that feedback was we wanted to to really have this positive engaging opportunity in the fall um for families so just a huge shout out to so many people we had community members other District um Greg you know came over and volunteered other teachers from other buildings we had high school students our own staff I think we had close to 40 of our staff members who volunteered that night and we had um I think it was about 715 people show up that night so yeah it was amazing um you know I heard like hey we should get more parking Yeah well yeah that'd be great yep so um but just an
138awesome we're looking to um add new this year an a learning night opportunity and this is the part that Erin talked about getting some feedback is we have some ideas of what we think parents might want be interested in but we're going to ask them but things like like um learning a little bit more about seesaw may you know maybe they're struggling with that uh Bridges math curriculum if there things with literacy that you know we talked about tonight social emotional uh well-being um things like that um another change we made for engagement was um our assemblies we did some revamping in the last couple years and so now we um at our assemblies we have our students who are fifth graders who are leading the assemblies so their parents are able to come and
139actually watch their them lead the assembly and then our students who are receiving the awards are coming so we've to the newsletter so people can just put things in there if they have to the newsletter so people can just put things in there if they have questions and we can get back to them opportunities for families again we are offering more volunteer opportunities or at least making them uh more you know more people more aware of them so for example we've had lots of families obviously who go to Timberly so that's one that a lot of people know about but also we're increasing our volunteers around our musical this year so we have lots of parent volunteers helping with that we also are a big thing that we're doing at Indian Mound and we started
140last year but but continued is a virtual family night that we taught families around Infinite Campus canvas and standard space grading we had a decent turnout for that and we Rec recorded it as well and linked it into our family newsletter so families can learn the differences between all the different platforms how to use them how to make sure they know what's going on with their scholar and their grades and just things that are coming up for them also to know that if anybody misses school you can go right to Canvas and see exactly what you need to do while your child is home ill or if you're on a vacation or things like that we also changed up our conferences a little bit there's never a perfect way to do conferences that is the
141truth and we did switch up our conferences a little bit for seventh and eth grade this year we piloted last year and it's working pretty well where our families are coming to one teacher and that one teacher has um input and comments from all of the students teachers so they're sharing that so that the families don't have to sign up for conferences with every single teacher they can sign up with one teacher and that teacher has the input if they want to they can sign up with other teachers but it's not a part of kind of the system that we're trying so so far it's gone pretty well and I got lots of positive feedback from families on how that went right at the high school level um some of the things that we are
142kind of expounding on are some of our family and Community engagement sessions on different typ timely topics throughout the year um at the beginning of the year we've got our ninth grade transition meeting that is direct or I guess presentation that is directly after our um ninth grade transition day where they come in and get LED through all sorts of activities and tours and Things by upper classmen we also this year had a standards based grading presentation that same night for families um along with the introdution introduction of some of our attendance procedures I'll talk a little bit about that a little bit later we also have timely presentations about the new Wisconsin guarantee and direct admit those were a new last year so still trying to be kind of proactively communicating with families around
143those and there'll be some opportunities for families to continue to learn about those throughout the year as they pertain a little bit more to Juniors when we really start need to start getting into the nitty-gritty of what um how that rolls out now we always have advising night in February at the high school which will be another opportunity for some engagement sessions when we have a pretty captive audience in the building so we look forward to offering some of those same sessions during advising night and then hopefully being able to expound on those a little bit one additional um piece to that night is always that eth to n9th year transition meeting that happens for eighth grade families coming up as they start to go through that registration process for their ninth graders classes for
144the following year so that always ends up being pretty great timing for them to start thinking high school and get an introduction to the building and how how the schedule looks is it's a prettyy unique setup for for a firsttime high schooler um this year we also are putting a lot of effort into some proactive attendance communication with families last year we really um felt that we were reactive in a lot of our communication around attendance uh just with different flags that we had set up as we started to note attendance concerns we've started to address that we believe a little bit more proactively with families and we've seen a lot of great um success ESS so far as we compare data from last year to this year regarding our student attendance mainly in the
145in terms of tardies um and then just lastly I don't have it in my document but just to kind of go off of The Learning Management Systems we have put a lot of great use into canvas and we continue to uh really promote that with our teachers and with our families we just recently ran some data and found out that 83% of our families have an observer account set up which means there's a a parent that can essentially get a bird's eye view of the students canvas and see how they are interacting on canvas with teachers and the different info that's shared with with students on a daily basis for each of their classes so that was a pretty big number for the high school level so we were happy to see that just really
146kind of drives home the importance of us um using that consistently as as teachers in the building as well so that's the high school all right when it comes to family and Community engagement engagement at CS we have some great families some very supportive families and that's wonderful to work with and when we hear from families saying hey look for more ways to involve us keep us connected communicate with us that's just an opportunity you don't want to um Miss and skip out on so there's a couple areas that I'll speak to for that at CS one is specifically related to the opportunity for families to provide feedback and input so each year uh we host music programs for all three grades at CPS and there is a cost associated with that I mean even
147behind the scenes busing kids to rehearsal getting a sub for the for the teacher um and you know there's several factors that we wanted to consider just with the current budget status status and so um we were thinking you know are there changes we want to make is this the opportunity to make those changes but then kind of had a realization and this came from the music teacher herself Olivia um why don't we ask families for that feedbook feedback and that input in you know to help get the best decision because this is for the families and so we decided you know we have a really good setup we're going to run the music programs as we're used to this year and then after the music program so it's while it's still fresh on family's
148mind um we're going to survey families we're going to get their feedback view like the structure the location the time of day um you you know what are the pros cons what feedback do you have for us and then we're going to use the family feedback Forum so kind of the you know method across the district that we're using to get um you know a group of interested families together we're going to have you know a group of families at CPS go through that survey data and provide some thoughts for us as we use to plan from the music program moving forward there's just lots of opportunities and options when it comes to that but we want to make a great decision and why not involve families again because that's what the music program is
149for in addition to increasing um volunteers at the school this year as you heard other schools are doing another area that was perfect for considering family involvement is our open house um you're probably used to us holding our open house at CS each fall we didn't host our open house this year for several reasons um in the fall at least a big reason we didn't hold it in the fall is that last year our Equity action team spent the year um brainstorming ways that we can use open house to involve families more and better than we currently have um so spent the year brainstorming ways we can you know from start to finish involve families more how we invite them into the building what we have them do when they're in the building you know
150the increasing the ownership of kids because they take such pride in their space how can we get families to connect with each other while they're in the building and then how after after the event do we get feedback about the event to plan for for next year so we're going to hold an open house this year it's going to be you know later winter or spring I've communicated that with families too because they're wondering are you holding it um and then and so we're really excited to be able to incorporate that thinking and again with the eye on increasing family involvement those are just two of the areas that we are doing that at CPS this year Bo I'm just curious have have we ever done I just this crazy idea but have we ever
151had like a grandparents um I don't know welcoming or something like that not not specifically not at least not in my time yeah I'm just wondering I mean I it might be an interesting way again to get people to come in and and work as uh mentors or whatever and often times it seems those people come up with ideas or will talk to the teacher I know kids would be probably interested to to have their their grandparents there too I I don't know it's kind of interesting we always invited all family members yes I know not specifically yeah Greg does kindergarten still have a grandparent day no oh they don't have that we okay because that would have been another opportunity to have them get in the building also to see if they're interested in
152going beyond that also some talking about being a grandparent sounds like we have some anti-g grandparent going on I don't I don't want to hear about it um specifically Jamie and and Brett you have conversations with with parents about standards based grading what are those conversations like nowadays I mean this it's been you know kind of a bear since we first decided that we need to go that way is most of your communication with parents POS I think for for Middle School it's it's a little bit different than the high school right because high school has GPA but for the middle school I don't have I really don't have very many conversations questioning it when you take the opportunity to share just two or three sentences on on what it is and and why we
153do it and it's to give students and families more information on where they're at and where they need to go then then the the questions end because it just makes sense to most people great yeah so at the middle school I think people are just like that's just how we do how we do business yeah I'd say at the high school because it started to I I wasn't around for all this but trickle its way down and now every most of the high schoolers have those families have experienced standards based grading a lot of our conversations at the high school end up being you know what makes standards based grading at the high school unique to our experience from the our time in K8 so it is isn't so much the you know standards based
154grading topic it's the how does standards based grading now apply at the high school when you have those additional pieces that you need to have for GPA and a final grade for each class and a transcript and a college applicate you know just how does this fit into that next piece um that's where most of our conversations end up being around I think yeah and part and part of that is because of you know a reminder students have EXP experienced standards based grading K5 mhm forever like we all probably experienced that when we were kids it was secondary that it was the change and you know part of the the way we rolled it out as a district was we had K5 and then parts of the high school and then most of the high
155school and then all of the high school and then the middle school so now we're experiencing that and the middle school started with sixth grade then as they moved up to seventh then up to so now we're at that point what you're hearing is the culmination of kids having and families having experienced it all the way through in kids coming from other districts that are also familiar with it so it's not as abstract there's always going to be questions and concerns about grading no matter what model that you use particularly as the stakes get higher in some people's minds uh at the at the high school level but you know I think it it's a a definitely a tribute to the staff and to the administrators for how they explain things to families and help
156them understand so along with that same line um I know yall were talking about like the utilization of canvas and seesaw and whatnot and how you're sending out your virtual sessions via newsletters do you guys have any of that hyperlink on each school's website is that on there all of our family newsletters are linked to the website okay perfect cuz I could probably use a refresher on canvas myself yes so will there are actually I would just direct you to the canvas site they have every time that there's a canvas question I've yet to find a question that isn't answered by a three minute long canvas explanation that is better than I can ever do so I yeah we started to make our own videos until we found their help page and I would highly
157recommend I will neither confirm nor deny that there might be some of my other parental friends that are a little confused by canvas as well so and I'm happy to direct them there and help them find that video but that's every time that we've started to create our own we've found one that's better and shorter and more condensed by people find people at canvas so that yeah I could see people using that you know that form you know that question sort of form was like I don't know who to ask this but how do I find this on campas yeah and I could see then we respond with here's a link to a three minute video yeah on how to how to do that yeah people are busy as a parent this particular pillar feels
158a lot more tangible and it's I just and now having been on the board for two and a half years I love seeing the transition of how what it where it was and now where it's going and where we've come to and it's vastly improved like the communication and Community engagement um and even what we learned from the referendum and how you guys are all incorporating that into the community engagement is really um impressive and appreciative anything else moving on all right exceptional staff there's two objectives in this area providing an inclusive work environment that Fosters open communication collaboration growth and support to promote high levels of well-being among our staff the second objective is to actively recruit and retain a diverse staff representative of a global Society so we measure our progress in these
159areas through first of all two indicators on the um staff check-in survey that we do each spring the engagement index which is Staff reporting that they like working at the school because they're valued heard and can contribute a great wonderful indicator and we saw nice progress on that in in the from our Baseline of 3.66 to last year of 3.91 in the in the spring and then the staff experience index which measures staff's feelings of being accepted respected and supported at school and that went from a 3.7 to 3.92 so again making gains in those areas is the third indicator we look at is our staff retention rate and um that's remained relatively stable we went from a 94.5% staff retention rate to a 93.9% staff retention rate both are remarkable numbers they really are
160and that that includes um retirements so that's really a wonderful indicator of our of our culture here so in terms of our work how do we what are some of our district practices first of all you'll hear a little bit about this but the district is focusing on a sort of a social emotional learning or a well-being for all that includes our staff right so thinking about student staff family well-being but also you know recognizing what our staff need to feel that sense of well-being that's in that first objective so that is beyond sort of an absence of pro uh problems but it's about feeling fulfilled in your work valued in year work and we'll have that professional development throughout the year for our staff from now and forever it's kind of just an ongoing
161thing that we'll keep doing instead of being an initiative that we do once the other thing that you'll you hear about is um that having hiring practices of processes that really remove barriers for people to apply uh to positions so if you recall a couple years ago we had uh some experts come in and provide uh uh training for the administrative team about Equitable hiring practices so we've taken those components that we learned through that and we're integrating them into a really redesigned hiring process that we're piloting this year first with professional um staffs or teaching staff student services staff others and then we'll expand to support staff and administrative staff if necessary but we're hoping not to have to hire any administrators so um those are some of the the processes that you'll hear
162talked about among our team and and now we're going to start with the middle school after Jamie takes it okay so for exceptional staff at Indian Mound we're going to focus on pretty much on leadership and collaboration so for leadership and much of this is true at all the schools if not all of it to be honest with you we are focusing on what is the role of a leader on our building leadership team we're defining who are the staff who have who has the characteristics that our leaders who are going to play these really important roles that we have on our leadership teams and who are the champions of the work and making sure that people are are bought in and and ready to go and roll rolling up their sleeves and and doing
163some of that hard work in the process of doing that we are really using distributive leadership at all of the schools uh around PD facilitation you heard Aaron talk about the social emotional learning from all for all we have staff members from each of our schools who went through a training for to present and learn about this professional development and so at each of our schools it is coming from it's working with with Britney Brazil and other staff but we have staff at each of our buildings who are presenting this professional development we also are combining the middle school and the high school are combining and both the elementary schools are combining for some of the PD because we're doing the same things so instead of having to do something four different times we're combining
164our staff to do the professional development together so we for example um have come over to the high school and we're doing our PD here with with the high school staff and we're doing that as well with the curriculum Council so there's that collaboration going on there let's see oh another another area of collaboration through the middle school and high school in particular is really we talked about standards based grading but also that High School transition so we're having more conversations with administrators with with staff on how to bridge that jump from middle school to high school we just met last week and we talked about how we're going to be offering a few more resources to families and just what is that difference between the grading systems and how does that look differently I
165know we just talked about that a little bit but our eighth grade teachers really are invested in making sure that they're doing everything they can to prepare the students for high school and our ninth grade teachers want to make sure that you know the students coming in are are ready for for what's going to what's to come the last thing I'm going to talk about is just utilizing um survey results this is all of us as well and Aaron talked about this as well so we we have these great perception Sur surveys and our staff fill them out our students fill them out our families fill them out and we're we're looking at them we're using them and we're helping uh they're helping us to guide the decisions that we're making to present these schoolwide
166goals to you all um and also daytoday in our work and our more detailed School Improvement or continuous Improvement plans that we have at each of us have at our buildings that are this only more in depth uh we take all of those results in order to set those goals for for ourself and our staff yeah I mean I think you heard from Jamie a lot of it talked about 612 collaboration especially when it comes to exceptional staff there was just a lot of overlap there that we tried to capitalize on and and hand them work with but um you know the shared leadership piece is just something I wanted to lift up again you know every time we have a professional development we send a survey out to our staff to get feedback about
167kind of the different portions of our day and every time the most highly rated portions of pref of the professional development day are the days that are led by their peers I think they just see them as people that are doing the same thing on a daily basis they can you know cut to the Chase and get to the pieces that they know everyone is going to benefit from and know that you know what lies on the other side and so they they really appreciate that that shared leadership and coming from peers um you know the continued work on transition in the 612 collaboration on you know all things e8th grade to nth grade is something that everyone is going to continue to work on we want to be as perfect in that as possible
168and we realize that there just is a is a difference in just being able to prepare students and families for what that that looks like and get them as prepared as possible is something we're going to continue try to find tune and I think we do a pretty good job of it as as is and I think there's always a few tweaks here and there that we can continue to get feedback from families on and from staff on um and and try to perfect that even even more moving forward so I think that really highlights it best for for the high school all right when it comes to exceptional staff um I'm going to speak to staff retention and there's a lot that goes into staff retention it's are you do you feel fulfilled in
169your role do you feel like you're making a positive impact but another big piece of that is um do you feel supported in your work and a lot a big portion of that support comes from the people that you're working directly with the people that are in the trenches with you and I'm going to share an example of that from CS this year that really stands out to me um I'm going to start at our F first staff meeting of the year when all of the staff are together in August but then I'm going to work a little bit backwards I'm just going to speak briefly about the first staff meeting I one statement that I made stands out to me and that that was in some way everyone's role was changing this year and
170when I say changing I mean increased responsibilities why did I say that well it stems from a conversation and planning that our leaders had at CS in August when we were planning for this year there were several positions a handful that just were not able to be filled due to April's referendum status and that meant that we had to plan for what that was going to mean and what that was going to look like in our school um and so we started talking about things like supervision all of the behind the scenes work that has to go into the planning and preparing for teaching and learning and um I I admit I was a little nervous going into that conversation because it's stressful for people to think I already have a very hard job I'm
171working non-stop all day and now I have to think about adding responsibilities so I was a little nervous because I I wanted it to go well but we also had to get through it too even if it was hard but it went completely opposite of how I anticipated but in a good way all of a sudden I had this realization that everyone around the table without even needing me to Prime the conversation was saying I can pick up you know our team can pick up this supervision we can pick up this you know copy work that needs to be done I'm using easy examples but then it started to not turn evolve even into hold on make sure you're watching out for your team like you're volunteering a lot well cuz we want to you
172know we want to help each other and we like stopped the conversation we're like this is amazing we are having a conversation that you know is very different from how this could have gone and it's everyone's volunteering volunteering volunteering so we've had to have a lot of changes this year is what I'm getting at but people are so supportive of each other and the work that they're having to do and have such a positive outlook on on on it um that again I that word exceptional staff that really stands out to me as an example of that um I'm going to do a quick connection back to the family and Community engagement um when we think of the increased responsibilities there's some easy stuff that we can just say you know what that was nice
173to do we're letting that go we can let that go and be fine with it but there's some other things that we planned for it's like we need people to help and that's another example linking back to that family and Community engagement we have lots of volunteers this year that are doing a lot of the stuff um that staff might have done in the past so ni connections there between the pillars too all right at willisa for exceptional staff um we'll kind of start with a highlight around staff retention as well and using that feedback that Aon had talked about uh we really wanted to build around our asset to what keeps people there and that's the connectedness to each other so we did some revisions with our Sunshine committee which is which was a
174very reaction AR um Committee in the past like people have life events and so forth and we felt like oh we can still support people in another way within their teams and so it was all about providing um our staff was saying like we want to find Opportunities where we're hearing more from others um you know yes we talk to the same people in our same pod and so forth so our Sunshine committee is doing some um cool things like just um providing you know some coffee and cider just little things things like that little music um the kids always want some of it and we say yep go be a teacher in in 10 years you can you can get some of this um and then you know also playing some games different activities
175like on Friday um they put put together this Emoji um and sort of a phrase and so it just kind of promotes staff to connect with those that maybe they're just not on a normal uh basis the other thing we just a real simple thing in our Weekly Newsletter is we're um and we're nudging this forward and we're seeing more people step forward with us but sharing C uh celebratory life events um which is really cool so you know somebody announcing that they're a grandparent um for the first time those types of things that you know when they see each other in the in the hallway then um they just have a quick talking point other than you know like hey you know it's you know great weather this you know things like that um
176it was talked about the wellness for all that's been really great um we took some of the feedback um from our staff and and you know you've we've all probably heard about the work life balance you know that's a thing that um I don't know if anyone really strives or gets to the end point um but we did some additional feedback and um you know instead of finding o some research best practice person is like what are you you know what are some strategies you use and we're res sharing those out just in little nuggets like two or three of them in in this newsletter two or three in that one um because as we know there is no perfect answer for for everybody um so really kind of just using the the collective wisdom
177of our staff to to share um and then the last thing is that came out from our staff you've heard about the progressive Behavior response plan um that we launched last year um that's still a need and it fits within exceptional staff because as we know uh supporting students through their behaviors and their social emotional needs it's heavy right um so we're continuing to try to be more consistent as a teacher at Administration uh student support uh student service staff and just um really you know making sure that teachers are feeling supported um they're getting the the kids are getting what they need and and uh we're consistent with that so we're continuing to make sure that's the focus because one year as we know um implementing something is is not there so just I
178want to thank all four of you plus your associate principles and you and then there's other people as well um it's one of the things that led me to want to get on the school board um and I I just think we're very we're very lucky I mean I think it's one of the things that makes McFarland special but you know this was a hard year in some ways we we we lost a referendum and it's like it I feel like in some ways we never skip the beat you know we St stuck together we've worked together you know we talked about you know the mft going out there and canvasing we've done those things and uh you know I I think you guys have all done a great job of making your staff feel
179supported and it's never perfect but it's about as good as I've ever seen and I was a teacher for 40 years I think you guys have been just exceptional so thank you um to my one question kind of piggyback on that um is that with this important vote happening tomorrow do you anticipate any of these action steps changing depending on the outcome I mean it's kind of a loaded qu I don't know but it I mean all of the items seem like they could go forward still to me regardless of the outcome I just don't know if it's I think the change for yeah okay yeah I mean I think and again others can speak up but you know I think we just like students we're going to support we're going to be adaptive and
180pivot and support staff where needed so if depending on what's needed I I mean I think if the pass it's going to be difficult to impossible to maintain the current level of morale among our staff and people will be wondering am I going to be cut is my colleagues going to be cut should I put in my notice now should I start looking for other jobs now those are going to be the kind of things and so to be honest I think you know the work will continue because people will always put those kids in in front of them but they're going to be preoccupied with what's my future and where am I going to be working uh you know and that's just the reality so to to be honest I I think if the
181referendum fails I think this work will go go backwards years and it may be difficult to recover from not not to be negative but just a real almost my my point was that it could have done that even in April right and that's what I'm most impressed with yep yeah true well that's why it's so important people go out and vote you got it cuz tomorrow's going to be if you haven't already turn over for the ballot that's right yes anybody needs a ride I'll give you a ride I think for my observation you know with uh what didn't happen in the spring it took us away from our mission did Absol time 100% because no longer was were staff talking about curriculum instruction and all that they had this big rock on their mind
182but I applaud the district for overcoming that also acknowledging it but not letting it interfere with their true Mission and that was to be uh instructors right in the classrooms um but my question is this I don't know if this is the pillar we talk about exceptional staff have we seen any change in procuring staff of ethnicity in the district since we started all this we haven't done much hiring pardon me at least it's CPS we haven't done much hiring that that's actually a fair point um is that we've hired fewer staff partly because of our retention rate and partly because like at CS if someone left we just didn't fill the position the large part but I don't I don't think we've seen a significant Improvement there's been you know we have hired a
183a few staff of color um you know there's a couple that that come to mind in the process but I would say when you look at our district we you know haven't implemented this new hiring process that we're hoping will remove barriers to people applying uh the other part I would say is when you find the district that is effectively recruiting large pools of candidates for any position regardless of R race andness that's a district I'd like to learn from because we're all um struggling to get two three four or five people apply for any position um regardless of of race and ethnicity are we still are we still working with the Homegrown the idea because I think that that idea is there yeah yeah the idea I mean that's going to take as the
184seed has been planted it's going to take a while to bear fruit but I do think it's one way to to do that by the way really good like play on the whole grow your own the seed has been planted it take some time to occasionally that was good I think grow your own addresses the teacher shortage yeah I understand but doesn't do much to talk about the race and ethnicity of future staff I will say though that we are there are pieces of the hiring practices that we haven't implemented yet the the whole kind of new rehaul of it but there are pieces for example we're all in having a question in interviews around equity and what are your beliefs and values around Equity right so we're looking for candidates who have you know
185the same kind of beliefs and values that our district holds around inclusion and um diversity and equity and all the things that we talk about and our part of our district so those are questions that we ask and we look for people who have those values whether or not they're people of color or what uh race or ethnicity they are are we want people who hold those values that's good I would and I would say there is an opportunity for grow your own to to impact um when you have students of color right that that may be exposed to teaching as a profession and and think of that as an idea we certainly you know we need have the 15 seconds of Fame and just every time there's a somebody going into teaching we all
186just cheer MH right and there there's quite a few and there's quite a few uh students studying right now that's where I see the grow your own having an advantage where a person may never have thought of themselves as possibly being a teacher someone sees that in them and we invest in them while they're in high school I actually was talking to a teacher just this past weekend second grade teacher two of her kids are now going to become teachers nice future punzel wonderful I I just have a comment uh Greg brought up that it it was a bit of a surprise to see how readily uh teachers will volunteer to do things to back each other up and and in the decades that I've been around here that's what they that's what our teachers
187do I bet all of you could say the same thing and that's you know that's just one of the things that makes this District so special and so unique because sitting at tables at a National Convention where you've got folks from all over the country that's that's not usual that's that is typically the exception of the rule in their districts but that's one of the things that's always made McFarland very special on top of a 95% retention rate other districts would kill for that so Kudos yeah and I think what leads to that is the whole teaming aspect I mean our district was established on different types of teams and over the 50 years now we have we've expanded the different types of teams but the core team is still there teaching teams yeah and
188they do support each other they back each other up indicated you know they start volunteer their teams and you have to you know sort sort of you hold them back so now be careful you know and I think um that would be the number one thing I would hear from teachers is that we operate as a team you be a teaching team building team District team and I think that's what's different about McFarland versus many other school districts I'm just going to add the support support from from your Administration it's so important for classroom teacher because otherwise it can just be hanging out there the dry sure so is really important thank you all right one more pillar to go this one I'm going to do um all by myself so unfortunately you're not going
189to get to hear from these wonderful colleagues but the there's two objectives and resource allocation and the first is to create a fiscally and environmentally responsible operational plan that is Equitable sustainable and adaptable to evolving needs and priorities and the second one is deepening our investment in District diversity equity and inclusion efforts through Community Partnerships and District actions and so um our our key performance indicator is not as much a quantifiable thing as is a commitment to making sure that we uh align the portion of our budget to the three pill pillars I think Tom's example earlier about literacy professional development is a good example uh we' We've prioritized Financial Resources a significant amount to that it's in our strategic plan uh in terms of our districtwide work you know it probably goes without saying
190but I'll say it just to make sure that everybody knows we acknowledge it this starts with the referendum and having a balanced budget first time we have not had a balanced budget in many many years that we can remember um and that really is the the largest issue because we can't accomplish any of the things in the Strategic plan without adequate Financial Resources so that in and of itself creating a sustainable and adaptable um operational plan is is key to that along with the referendum is obviously advocating for State funding changes uh some other things we are doing though is we are having a third party evaluation of our sustainability the functionality and safety of all of our facilities so that's a way both to look for how we can be environmentally responsible but also
191fiscally responsible you know are there ways to accomplish both of those things at the same time for example when we run our heating and cooling systems are there ways to maximize resources there so there are experts in that area that we are we are working with and then we'll Implement long range uh plans to address those needs and sometimes you need to invest in in some technology or updated systems to save money and U be environmentally responsible in the long run we're also looking at continuing to evolve our safety systems we've really come a long way in our safety practices in the district uh looking you know we've we develop a a solid reunification process that we practice and also looking at evacuation sites um cyber security these are things that are happening they're not
192often dis disuss or glamorous necessarily but they're very important one of the things you'll see um in terms of diversity equity and inclusion is that the Strategic plan committee talked about this at length about integrating this work into all of our pillars so we're going to talk about it separately um we have deepened our investment from all of the uh things you heard about an educational ex excellence and exceptional staff and family and community engagement if you go back and hear what we talked about it all talked about inclusion engagement involvement feeling welcomed valued and respected and that's for all of our students all of our families and so it's really integrated in all we do throughout as a uh as opposed to some performative thing that we do on the side in addition to
193all of those things so I'm proud of that work and of course you know tangibly there are things that we're doing and you you've heard from Britney Brazzle talk about about some of those things but it's really much broader than any one person or any one role or or commitment so those are just some things to highlight in that area any other questions comments from the boards on this pillar or any other pillar great job I like format yeah yeah today great thank you for all your efforts yeah and I want I just adding on this thing the whole idea of sustainability because I got involved with that I mean I was on that committee and I just you know in some ways economics is when we're talking about sustainability we think of it time
194typically environmentally but involving the community and again kudos to you because it's a process it's a work in progress or Pro progress but the truth is we we have made tremendous strides of working with the community we have 70% of the people in this District don't have kids and hopefully tomorrow we're going to get support from those people because we're starting to recognize even your little walking program that's a it's a great idea to the public and uh I mean there's so many things that we can do a grandparent whatever I mean it just it's ways to try to make the school really belong to the community and I I just think the more we can do that the better so thanks for all you do said Thank you anything else thanks thanks have a
195good weekend Oh weekend get Friday go get some sleep a little bit it's Monday we didn't go that long but sorry now that's a big tease okay bye see you guys bye uh thank you I I I just want to want to say one thing before we adjourn and that's um I hope everyone understands how important this election is and makes their way to their polling place if they haven't already voted couldn't be couldn't be a more important election ever and with that I would look for a motion I have a comment I knowon was here Friday night at the forance greeting guests I was here Saturday night and Bruce was here Sunday wasn't but that's oh okay I spoke to probably 20 22 different parents or whatever and I would say 20 of them
196couples had already voted voice 78 million people have voted already I know nationally nationally I mean what's our population 300 million 330 something like that that's that's incredible so be a momentous day absolutely I would look for a motion to adjourn I will make that motion thank you do I have a second I will do that all those in favor please signify by saying I I oppose motion carries 5- Z thank you very much one and all and thank you Melanie for joining us this evening always a pleasure forward very close very close yeah moment well we didn't have we didn't have this the high school report