001for we'll call the meeting to order at 702 p.m on Monday November 6th the year 2023 uh we have some consent agenda items uh including the minutes of the October 23rd 2023 school board meeting and the October 23rd 2023 annual meeting and budget hearing also have some professional staffing recommendations and some co-curricular staffing recommendations uh I would look for a motion to approve the consent agenda items as presented I can do that thank you Bruce go have second I'll second thank you Tom all in favor please signify by saying i i i v opposed motion carries 5 z uh there also are some Personnel items uh unnecessary for vote so I would move to public comments Angie do we have any public comment we have not received any public comments prior to the meeting and
002no one has registered in person okay in that case we will move right along to the McFarland High School student report hey there they are today um I should be sharing my screen in a second here okay can you oh wait is there a way I can do this where it's like not okay cool that's fine okay hey everyone okay so I we were supposed to have someone else from Deca come and present today but she wasn't feeling good so I do have her presentation that she made so I will be we'll be starting off with a little Deca Spotlight um Mia wishes she could be here I think she did just genuinely get sick from our trip so it's unfortunate um what is DECA Deca is a business and marketing Club at the high
003school that does a bunch of community service activities as well these include sugar can tie blankets cards to the nursing home MDA Miracle minutes things like that as well as competition and building leadership skills that our students will use long term picture to the right is state from last year um a miracle minute and ICDC from last year some recent events we had recent like you know this last week we um we had tricker can where we went around to houses in the community to collect non- perishable food items for the McFarland food pantry we collected 1,378 items as well as raising $125 o sorry I like G with around like 28 Deca members that night the second thing we did was actually this last week we went went on our McFarland industry and college
004experience trip really hope I'm not lagging um where we Ted W Stout and u ofm we met with industry speakers went to all of America and a scavenger hunt for marketing techniques you think I'm lying are we good is the connection yeah yeah it's it's real you didn't do all this in one day did you weird the the sound and video are slightly off but it's not enough to be to be a concern okay thank you okay thank you um so we had three different industry speakers from Target Avita and smileback vintage which is a local store on campus as well as participating in an industry challenge with ew Stout and then we had a Mall of America scavenger hunt as you can see by some of our members participating in that some upcoming events
005we have we are leaving on Sunday night again to go to the Wisconsin Dells for our emerging leaders conference where there will be 900 EA members from all across the state and this is a great way to like intro to competition and getting to meet new people um future quests which is actually something I am planning for my youth apprenticeship will be on Wednesday November 29th at the line Energy Center um seventh and eighth graders all around Dan County are coming to this event where they can kind of look at different career paths um and many high school Deca members are volunteering to help that day as pictured to the right the next thing will be our Sports entertainment marketing conference on Friday December 8th in Green Bay where this is also a Statewide Deca
006thing where we get a tour of Lambo field the Packer Hall of Fame and we're going to attend a minor league hockey game as well as networking with all of our other Deca members in the state there's a lot um Ryan's Round Up in early December where um we partner with Ryan who's actually a student at the middle school and we raise money for the muscular distrophy Association which was very successful last year as well um mini districts on November 18th which is um our intro to competition where actually a lot of our Deca alumni from like even 10 years back come back and judge new members so we can get them into competition and then lastly we have districts which is our first competition of the season and that's at the Forest High School
007so yeah that is a little presentation um that Mia put together about Deca and then going back to our original slides oh cool okay yeah wait oh this is still mine so this last weekend M and memb went to the went to Simon which was hosted by St Ignatius High School in Chicago they participated in a variety of committees raining from beginner to Advanced and special shout out to Ava for being an honorable mention in her ad hoc committee as Athena and then on November 1st the McFarland Med Club took a field trip to promega's BTC Institute where they got to experience and an Immunology lab um they tested for salmonella and eoli antibodies in chicken eggs and then our MHS has started a new club to encourage encourage students to read in their own
008free time with no pressure this is led by our English teacher Mr Jenkins and then upcoming this weekend is the MHS Musical Legally Blonde and it's on Friday Saturday and Sunday um and tickets tickets will be purchased online through the um Pac website and then moving on to sports we had a really big Sports weekend asa's gonna start with um made it to State at Green Bay in a first game in a game against Edgewood at State game against Pewaukee they won in their F fifth set by a narrow two points this was an upset this was an upset win sorry it's like little on the screen this was an upset win against the number two seed mcfan also won 1,000 for selling the most fan tickets and then on Saturday they fell to Xavier
009the first seed taking home the silver ball congrats to our mcf McFarland girls volleyball team for an amazing season and thank you seniors the next thing was our cross country team this is a little bit back the McFarland boys cross country team as well as Hannah Kirch went to State on October 21st at Wisconsin rabbit Rapids congratulations to the boys team for finishing eighth overall and Hannah kir for finishing 72nd next is our girl swim team who are also heading to State they did amazing at sectionals this last Saturday the team took fifth place overall with the following state qualifiers for individual events we have sophomore Olivia tyranny in the 100 fly and Senior Caroline Green in the 100 back and then for our relay we have the 200 menley relay of Caroline green Ellie
010cozie Olivia Tyne and Izzy Tobin and the 400 free relay of Izzy Tobin Ellie Draper Caroline green and Olivia tyrany as picture to the right and then for connect Updates this next this next week on November 16th connect will be hosting the McFarland Equity picnic an event that will entail the social justice Equity groups of MHS and imms to come together and discuss their goals for this year we have a representative from Jimmy Anderson's office attending this event too as well as for connect updates we have been working that's a really big picture we've been working really hard to get student voice involved so new student surveys for nominating staff for participating and the bell announcements over the loudspeaker as well as staff shout out surveys went out on October 30th since then we had
011received 30 shout outs and a handful of nominations for the speaker we then posted to our Instagram for the final votes for the top four nominations for bells and McGrath won by a landslide winning over 50% of the vote and now he has a lovely little poem on our loud speaker every day four times a day and yeah I actually did wanna I'm gonna stop screen sharing because I want to be able to see again okay um I did have a question I know you guys can they see us okay I know you guys all got the invitations to our Equity picnic so I was wondering wondering if any of you were planning on attending so I can add that to our sheet Mr okay I I will I will be there I heard you'll
012have to be there will out of town sorry I'm out of town also okay and I need a reminder when it is I'm sorry the 16th 16th I probably would be there okay Co and then I was wondering if you guys had any questions for us at this time what's going on anybody got anything Megan well I I don't know that we have any questions but um your your the DECA organization is it's just incredible all the different events and you know programs that you go to just just kind of a out there question do you have any idea aide if our Deca enrollment is one of the larger enrollments around the state or are there you know do the big schools have much larger Deca groups um so I'm in I'm like an bador
013for district fre we're we're pretty mediumsized I would say we're like not small by any means okay um with around we have around 135 this year so we jumped a little bit I think the biggest chapter in the state has like 300 350 um but something that some of the other schools do is they mandatory enroll all of their business students in Deca and count it as a course fee which is not something we do at McFarland we don't limit to our business students but we also don't require it well you you just are doing a fantastic job and and that's from someone who was here you know when we had 15 kids in the in Deca yeah it's huge we do do a lot I know we've we have two trips this week or
014like in the last week including mice and then I'm going to ELC as well and then plus future quests and all of those different events that are coming up it's it's been a lot well I'm sure it's a lot but I'm sure in the end it's it's well worth it yeah anybody else have anything can you just just uh elaborate on what the scavenger hunt was like up at the mall America so our advisers came up with this big list of different things to like find some of them were like digital displays examples of odd and even pricing some of them were as simple as like were like as fun as like talk to a manager of a store and get a picture with them um and then the group that won was Jun were
015Juniors it was Matthew STS and foreign exchange student wisdom they killed it they completed the whole scam front no one else did that they they absolutely smashed it out of the park um we posted on our Instagram and we actually got them all of America to like it so I was pretty proud of that because I made the Instagram post okay thanks yeah thank you very much thank you so much thank you have a great week you too okay moving on I believe informational items the forward exam data and annual reading report milissa the floor is yours thank you thank you so I believe last week or earlier probably last week you received a copy of the reading report from Mr tarnutzer and you have a copy of it in front of you tonight I'm
016going to spend some time talking about our forward exam and preac and act data from last spring and then also tell you about the work that we have going on in literacy at all of our schools this year as we look at the data I'm going to share lots of celebrations about about it I also want to acknowledge that we always have room to improve and that there is more Improvement that we're hoping to see when the students take their um tests again this coming spring but as I pointed out in the report and as you can see in the table our scores are nearly back to preco levels in most of the grades students gained in their percent of students who are proficient they gained in their Gap above the state and they gained
017in their rank in Dayne County that's across the board every grade third through 8th grade um some particular highlights to point out if you look at the diagonal numbers along the row last in the spring of 22 the third graders 38% of them were proficient that same cohort of students 51% of them were proficient as fourth graders likewise kind of going backwards um the third graders in 2021 they have jumped over the last 3 years from 31% % of them being proficient to 44 to last spring 51% of them being proficient so huge gains are being made in literacy across the board there's maybe one spot um where it dipped a tiny bit but a tiny bit and then if you look before coid we're seeing the percent of third graders who are proficient last
018spring is higher than the percent of third graders who were proficient before coid close at fourth grade close at at fifth um close all the way the rest of the way down closest at eighth grade getting back to that pre-co number you feel that happened maybe a little quicker than expected it was always going to be hard to tell the impacts of Co were so long ranging it I don't know if I would have made a prediction but as we were planning during those years um while we were doing virtual learning the message we were getting was accelerating student learning we were trying to make sure that students were not just getting a Year's worth of learning in one year but getting more than a Year's worth of learning to catch up for the time
019that they missed out of the classroom we certainly knew already but relearned during that time just how important the relationship between students and teachers are in how much they can learn I think there was a lot of gloom and doom you know early on that we were never going to be able to catch up well keep up the good work I guess yeah the you know I'll say thank you on behalf of all the teachers certainly absolutely um moving on to act a quick update the n9th and 10th graders previously took ACT Aspire that changed Statewide to an assessment called prea very similar assessment but just a change in what's required as the state test for 9th and 10th grade um our students with pre-sat or sorry act if I've been saying sat I meant
020act every time I said it um preac and act we have their scores there again a lot of places we are back to pre-pandemic levels um for our 9th 10th and 11th graders something that we continue to look at is what's happening from 9th to 10th to 11th grade with those cohorts of students and why aren't we seeing gains in the percent of students proficient across the board I know that's something that our new high school principal and administration team have talked to me about trying to brainstorm how can we make sure that these assessment results accurately reflect what students know and are able to do you know we are happy to dig into the skills and we are digging into the skills but we're not yet confident that these are reflecting what students are
021actually capable of um there's motivation issues to think about um you know just a variety of things that come up with high schoolers when you're asking them to sit down on a computer at n9th and 10th grade for a half a day to take a test and then Juniors um originally when we started giving the the act as the Statewide test Juniors took it very seriously it was a free shot at getting a Great ACT score we hear now more Juniors who are saying well I know I'm going to take it again so I'm not even going to try or I've already gotten the score that I want why does this stay matter so working on some motivation pieces with them to let them know that this is you know you can always improve this
022is another great chance to do your best um and continue to show us what you know now along with all of that I want to preview what's going on in literacy classes um outside of these assessments we certainly want to take the assessment results seriously but I'm actually more excited this evening to share what we're doing in classrooms so I'll work backwards from the high school which is a little bit out of order from what you're seeing there um at the high school The English Department is continuing their work aligning their expectations and rubrics to the state standards and also have a big focus on their language standards which would be grammar and mechanics and those skills coming up the English and social studies departments at the high school are going to get together to
023align their writing expectations and make sure that they're using similar language and similar expectation for nth graders 10th graders 11th graders and that their expectations are raising each year they're also doing disciplinary literacy professional development at each of their professional development days with the full staff um that is thinking about how do you read like a mathematician how do you read like a scientist what are the skills that you need to know to read a piece of music how do you read a manual in teched and thinking about what are those skills for the experts in content for them to be able to transfer that literacy knowledge to their students finally at the high school this year um every year our teachers need to write a student learning objective and this year they wrote one
024that was focused on Literacy for each of the teachers at the high school so there's a really consistent regular focus on literacy outcome for all of our students and we're excited to combine that with test test prep strategies test motivation strategies to see what our students can do on prea and act this spring it keeps getting exciting at the middle school working our way down the grades focus on disciplinary literacy continues there at the middle school that has been ongoing work for the middle school over the last several years our ELA teachers are continuing with the units of study and increasing um their Fidelity to implementation working on getting more units in more bends of those units um and having more time to um conference with students oneon-one to make sure that they know where
025their students are at and what their next steps for growth are teachers have noticed for several years that our current curriculum needed more help in the language the grammar mechanics pieces that I talked about at the high school as well and they wanted that to be a new um report card standard for them this year and really big be a big Focus what we decided over the summer was instead of having teachers develop all of that from scratch which takes a ton of time we've adopted a program to use as a start we're going to evaluate how it's going and decide is that a program we want to continue with is it seeing the gains that we're hoping to see but the program is called ISL it is an Adaptive online program teachers can select
026which lessons they want to assign teachers it is aligned with the units of study or with the Wisconsin State Standards teachers can have students do it independently they can have them do it as a whole group and when students are working on it when they have a question they can pause the students in their class do a quick mini lesson on subject verb agreement for example and then have them keep going with their lessons so far we're um beginning to survey students on their opinion of you know do you feel like you're learning something from this um we don't take exactly everything that middle school students take and make our decisions based on that but we do use it as one piece of the puzzle along with feedback from our teachers and we'll look at
027our El data in the winter and spring to see if we're seeing the gains that we hope to see in grammar and mechanics a theme continues as we go backwards to Waba they also are continuing with units of study and to connect that back to the data that we had I was talking about the gains that we've seen for cohorts of students from third to Fourth to fifth grade in ela those gains are happening with us using our tier one instruction of units of study so I know the units of study have received a lot of press recently and nationally and people talking about that not serving our students well currently in McFarland our data is showing that what we are doing with that curriculum the way that we're using it and implementing it it
028is working for our students now I monitor that very carefully every summer when that data comes out if we start to see something different then we might need to do something different in our classrooms but currently we're growing from third to Fourth to fifth grade so I don't see a reason to move away now that said just like at the middle school the units of study is lacking in word study and phonics and things like that so this summer a group of Waba teachers got together and evaluated different options including again creating our own curriculum and what they decided was again to adopt a program so they've adopted 95% group core phonics it is designed to be given for about 30 minutes every day and we just don't have that much time in our schedule
029to also attend to the reading and writing standards so we're doing s splitting lessons over two days about 15 minutes one day 15 minutes the next to complete a lesson we're going to figure out how that goes this year learn more about the specifics of what's in each unit and then next year figure out can we combine these two together can we skip that one how do we want to make sure we're fitting 30 minutes a day into 15 minutes a day the most effectively what's really great about that is it is developmentally appropriate third grade it's a lot of phonics Focus so continuing reviewing those skills that they learned in K2 and making sure they have letter sounds and vowel Pairs and all of those things figured out for their spelling and their reading
030as it goes up by the time they get to fifth grade they're focusing on passages that build content knowledge while reviewing vocabulary morphology which was a new word for me it's the study of words and their parts like prefixes suffixes Greek and Latin roots all of that's included close reading strategy IES and knowledge building they recently read a passage about World War I in fifth grade and then looked at the vocabulary word of isolation and provocation related to that they read one um a fifth grade teacher told me they didn't know about it I'd never heard but the Kentucky mobile horse libraries I got all of the words wrong but basically in Kentucky in rural areas the books weren't available to all of the people so they put books on Horseback and then traveled around
031with mobile libraries like that sort of reading passages about that content studying the words that are in it doing close reading and learning the strategies along with again the morphology of the words finally at waisa I'm not even at CS yet finally at Waba we have a group of about a dozen teachers who just started tonight a teacher study group related to a new book that was published this fall called Shifting the balance um our board members who have been here for a while may remember that and K2 we did a shifting the balance tsg before coid the Publishers or the authors came out with a new copy that's designed for third through fifth grade teachers so it's meant to take a balanced literacy classroom or a balanced literacy mindset bring in the science of
032reading and shift the practices to be more aligned with what we're learning with science of reading so they're reading that book together making commitments um celebrating what they already have in place that's aligned with the science of reading and making commitments for what they can continue to improve fun with all of that work at Waba I am sure that we're going to continue to see the positive direction with scores for our students in the spring and they're going to have the benefit of having students coming from CS with the most comprehensive systematic and explicit curriculum that we've ever had at CS we've adopted wonders at grades kindergarten first and second this year um it is intense the teachers will tell you they are busy their students are busy they are spending every minute trying to
033get through the lessons that are dense particularly our second grade students had something different at kindergarten in first grade and now are adjusting to this as second graders but they're really taking it in stride um I happen to have a second grader who lives at my house and she's using words like antonyms and finding text evidence which are words that she has never brought home and her sister when she was in second grade never brought home either so they're really learning learning those deep skills of literacy that are going to set them up for Success going into Waba teachers at CS are also continuing their letters training letters is deep science of reading learning um that is one of the trainings that is recommended in the new act 20 which is an early literacy Act
034passed by the state legislature I was just talking to a colleague at a conference this morning and he said what have you decided to do for your act 20 training that you have to do and I said we already started wonders last year and he said oh you're so lucky so appreciations to Greg for his leadership to Lori and to Brooke for bringing that to us and we're even ahead of the game as far as the requirements of the new law come um finally at CS they're continuing with Hagerty which is a curriculum for pheic awareness pheic awareness is what you can do with your eyes closed you can think about all of the sounds the letters make without ever ever having to look at the printed letters to start reading and it's really one
035of those foundational skills that we decided to stick with what was working for us with femic awareness even though it's also in wonders we're going to have to figure out over the next year or so which parts of femic awareness will we keep with Hagerty and which will we do in wonders and how do we blend the two together all of that is to say yes the data looks much better but we are hoping that it is going to continue going up because of the dedication of all of our Educators and the leadership of our teacher leaders and administrative team any questions for me about literacy I just have a couple questions Melissa you talked about um where is it now 95% Core Group core phonics at weisa and it's build as daily work but
036because of the schedule you know you only do it twice a week yep how does that impact the Fidelity and how do we know if it works or does not work if we don't have that type of fidelity since Fidelity is a huge thing here certainly so we're doing it every day for half the amount of time so it's designed at 30 minutes a day and we're doing 15 minutes a day so it's going to be split over two days to do one lesson um the research is based it has um I think gold level sr3 Sr um backing which is the government rates curriculum to know what quality they are we won't know you know the Fidelity there was teachers who were doing it who had the time to do 30 minutes every single
037day so we are going to have to see how it goes and how students are able to transfer that knowledge um unfortunately with the schedule that we have and the number of reading and writing standards we also have to attend to in addition to that vocabulary morphology all of that background knowledge we just don't have the minutes in the day to do 30 minutes a day on that and I completely understand that but again yeah within a day the curriculum is what I consider overloaded because we know we can't squeeze it all in uh you mentioned act 20 yes and we're ahead of the game what about the universal screening that they're talking about can you just elaborate a little more on that yeah we have Universal screeners in place already we use fastbridge which
038is an assessment students in kindergarten through 8th grade take three times a year in reading and in math now act 20 is saying that there is going to be a mandated reading assessment in grades K through three that students will have to take and DPI hasn't told us what assessment that is yet or if we'll have flexibility um previously the early reading screener was called Pals that company doesn't exist anymore it disbanded just this last summer um and so there isn't yet um notification from DPI if it will be one assessment that's mandated for every District across the state or if we'll get to pick from a selection and whether or not fastbridge would count or be included in that or not and the most recent information and it does change by the minute yes
039that we have heard was that it will be a new screener developed by DPI that's the last I heard and there won't be flexibility but that is very ambitious and that's what I heard on Saturday also why were they why are they trying to do that I mean is there something broken that they're trying to fix well part of the the law is requiring a common Universal screener so we we're hoping that the state would say and and they still May that here's three you can pick from and one of them would be fast Bridge that's what we're hoping for yeah it it's interesting the speaker on Saturday was talking about that and the universal Universal assessment and he was talking about it's potential potentially strong that a whole class may fail because that whole
040criteria is based on the whole state yes you know the parl out there the Milwaukee out there so it'll be interesting it and the assessment ments um like Fast bridge for example when they talk about letter sounds it's how many letter sounds or how many letter names they can recognize in a set amount of time and so previously when we assessed letter names for example we'd let the kids have as long as they need to to say you know that's an a that's a b that's a c but the fastbridge protocol is how many of them can they say quickly because they know that automaticity of letters really helps with their uh fluency of reading so they both need to be a B to do it fluently and to do it eventually so we actually
041started assessing the kids both ways we'd give the fast Bridge assessment see how many they knew in a minute but then also give them as long as they could take so that we know well how many of them do they know eventually and are we really working on continuing to have them learn more letter sounds or have them get more fluent with the sounds they already know what was the outcome of that data they it improved when the kindergarten that's a kindergarten assessment mostly we give it to some first or second graders who are lagging with skills but but at kindergarten when the teachers started practicing and teaching with fluency the scores in that went up they were able to see Improvement by just practicing the skill the way it's assessed yeah anything else I
042can help with I I'll mention my bias also certainly whenever they're talking about Statewide assessments I wish we could spend as much time in Social play fre time to build up the kids social interactions life skills um would improve their mental health BS developmentally that's where they are and I know we don't have any control over it but the state should be ashamed of themselves try and put everyone in that same funnel at the same time because I do believe if we could take each child where they're at some of them probably wouldn't even receive interventions because they aren't at that point yet we wouldn't have as many kids at risk maybe even potential referrals down the road but that's my bias so thank you and I'm glad to see that we're trending in the
043right direction I think we probably all agree that we'd like to see what's going to happen in the next two or three years yeah uh what as we compare with other Dan County Schools yep but we certainly are training in the right way and a reminder the results we'll see a year from now it'll reflect the work that third grade's doing for those third graders but it won't yet reflect anything about wonders because those students it'll take them another year before they had wonders as second graders and they get through third grade and then they take the third grade assessment so it's slow to show up on the tests but since we have work going across K12 in literacy we're still confident that we're going to see gains as long as we have faith I
044think you know you just go at whatever speed you need to go and and what happens at the end of the day I I think we're all confident it's going to be you know what we've been looking for great job so far thank you and I'm excited for you to hear more it'll be a lot of repeated information when the principles come up to share their school Improvement plans so I apologize for taking some of your talking points um but it is really an aligned effort to work on literacy across the district yeah for sure thank you very much Melissa thanks thank you okay one com oh thank sorry Megan you still go back to you see but I just wanted to say that um this report is always really fascinating to me and the
045thing that impresses me most is that we saw the dip in the numbers and you know it's not all about numbers and and you all recognized that and we pivoted quickly and um and we're already seeing improvement from that and just hearing you speak about the reading and the the um the different skills and how they're taught is and the curriculum is just as a parent and also as a Schoolboard member um it is so good to hear that there's such expertise in the district following this because it's such a foundational skill so thank you thank you thank you Megan and I'd be glad to share that the first day that I came to the District a few years ago I told the reading specialist for me literacy is the number one curriculum that kids
046must succeed in yeah so we continue to strive towards that absolutely okay moving on we have school Improvement plan presentations and I guess we can go if you unless you have a particular order we'll start with Greg well that we have a kind of a process process we're going to have them all at once so okay that will work better yes so I'm going to hand this out to you thank you [Applause] [Music] thanks today okay so here we are for our annual School Improvement presentations what I just handed out Megan just so you know was what was in the minutes about the school Improvement presentations so nothing new there um I'm just going to orient you to this document uh talk to you about the format of our presentation tonight and then we'll get
047started so the document starts with some uh acronyms that are included there just so you know we talk and Edge of speak we try not to uh but if there's something that you're like what is that look there first and hopefully it will be there on the back side of that is um a new document to you and it's called we call them our kpis our key performance indicators and these are based on the Strategic plan they're metrics uh that we are going to track over time to demonstrate the impact of our strategic plan we don't have specific goals identified for each of those that would be many many goals but we do um plan to to track that throughout time so what you see is our baseline from last year I'll reference each of
048those as we go through our time today and then included in the rest of your packet is each building's School Improvement plan the the presentations are really going to focus on our mission which is wild ly displayed behind me meeting the needs of every learner every day in pursuit of our vision which is creating an equitable and inclusive community committed to student belonging achievement and growth so what I'm going to do is similar to The Format uh from last year I will introduce one of the pillars so the four pillars and then each building will spend a few minutes talking about uh one some of the things that they're doing with the pillars our goal is really that you are going to to have a sense of the continuity across the district our collaborative efforts
049so notice um throughout the presentations one principal may say one thing and another person says in addition to what they say because a lot of things are do being done in each in each building uh which is important for that collaborative efficacy so we'll start um I will introduce our first pillar I ask that we allow the all four principles to present and then save our questions for after each at the end of each pillar so we'll have time for questions you know four times throughout the presentation but you may have a question that's answered by another administrator so our first one is educational excellence and the objective there is to improve academic achievement with a focus on literacy and closing gaps for traditionally underserved groups that's right of our out of our strategic plan
050you'll notice that all of the school learn school learning objectives focus on uh literacy in this specific area our um kpis or key performance indicators focus on reducing that Gap just as the objective says um using our Wisconsin Statewide Ela assessments related to race disability and gender we're also going to be administering a student Sur survey in grades 4 through 12 and one of the indicators we're going to collect Baseline data on for this year is called the connection index which is another way to think of belonging and that's about students reporting that they feel they belong at school because they have healthy relationships and they're actively involved in school related activities so that's an assessment uh a survey that will be administered this um January so now I'm going to turn it over to
051Greg who's going to kick us off and then we'll go through each building in order thank you good evening everyone good to see you all so as Aaron mentioned under educational Excellence Melissa has already wonderfully shared all of the action steps that Cs and the other schools are taking when it comes to literacy specifically and so I'm I'm going to give you a little context for what you see with cs under the action steps uh as a k through2 school not taking the forward exam we operate under what's called alternate account ability with the DPI and with the DPI we're required to set a goal in literacy in math and in on track to graduation and our level that's attendance um and so since we are already obligated to write those goals Monitor and then
052report out at the end of the year that's what you'll see listed under cps's action steps so more of a goal format instead of action steps um but really what we're looking at is um we're looking for students to improve overall in literacy um and in math uh you'll see I put last year's data on the leftand column um we you know we set lofty goals we increased the goals this year from last year is it where we want to be no but are we working hard to continually improve as you've already heard as a theme yes um math isn't necessarily a focus for us because without being more intentional than we already are we're doing well every single year same for attendance um we have systems curriculum processes in place um that are working
053in those areas which is why um a lot of our eggs are going towards the literacy basket uh so we're going to continue with our commitment to staff learning around Equity University through our partnership with uh the center for culturally and linguistically responsive teaching or CLR as you might have heard and then finally we're going to we are working as a district on coordinating efforts at the building and District level to organize academic social emotional and behavior systems uh into a comprehensive service model that all students access and that is uh em LSS or Equitable multi-level systems of supports maybe if you're if you've been in education for a while formally mtss formerly RTI all right great so over at weisa uh last year 2223 Melissa talked earlier about um all of the literacy pieces
054so um our staff was highly engaged in that process um it was very inclusive um we did have representative groups um and then at times there was the entire um literacy um Department involved and as Melissa said um implementing 95% core as our word study group and of course um that's there's ongoing learning throughout the school year actually every week through um the PLC process that our teachers engage in on Thursdays um so that's ongoing learning also PD time as well um last year we U began examining our Spotlight time Spotlight is um a time that we have in our day it's a 30 minute time I think um CPS has a Spartan time kids getting what they need extending learning um supporting um learning gaps where where they exist so we started um looking
055at that last year and really kind of narrowed our focus on okay what is it that we want um to have that time be used for um because it's 30 minutes as we you heard earlier tonight like 30 minutes is 30 minutes in a day and so we wanted to maximize that so we got Clarity on that continuing this year Greg mentioned um building our emls team um so we're really um developing that both at the at the building level taking representative groups at the district level um and Spotlight certainly fits within that framework as as well as supporting um students so we're going to continue to grow um that as well and then um lastly um in 223 we began examining our behavioral structures and our response plans we know that as part of
056e educational Excellence um we need uh supportive safe um classroom environments so learning can happen um so we began that last year and then this year as Greg mentioned um the um across K K12 um we are implementing the progress Progressive response behavior model and like I said earlier too that's ongoing learning that we're having throughout um the school year we're now in um three different versions of behavior norming is what we're calling it so like as a staff taking a look at certain behaviors and how are we how are we interpreting that behavior how are we responding to that so we as consistent as possible and that will continue throughout the year as well that's weisa all right hello everybody um I'm going to speak with you all about Indian M so um again
057a lot of the things that you're going to hear me say are similar to what you've already heard so I will try not to be super repetitive uh but looking at last year we really started digging into our Equitable multi-level systems of support which we're calling em LSS um and we really at imms dug in this summer and had some um a lot of summer hours with this team really digging into our process and so really what it is is we have you know everybody has this tier one of our our literacy um or any kind of curriculum um and then where all students have that access and then tier two and tier three are really about students that need a little bit more so we are um working on our process using data to
058guide our decision making um and looking at specific um research-based interventions for students both in math and reading um and additionally back to that tier one that's where the ISL um program that Melissa talked about comes into play which is really um new for us and it really meets some of those um the needs that we have around the foundational lagging skills so that's um the mlss is a big uh a big project both at imms and all the other schools in the district is working um on that as well um another area uh that we are focusing in on is really looking at our student voice and um our Equity work work and we started doing some very intentional work last year around um teaching and learning around hate speech inclusion identity through our
059clubs and groups uh this year we are doing the same but we're enhancing that again our our Equity team our Equity action team um is working closely with um Britney brazzil to develop um lessons um to share with our students and we are also trying to align them all um K12 as well right now at Indian Mound we um are working specifically on lessons around identity and lessons on hate speech um so we're kind of using that in combination with that Progressive response to to behavior that that Corey spoke about and the CLR practices that we're all learning we're also um this is down a little ways but we're also continuing to grow in our professional development in that area and then finally um another area to kind of bring in that we're super excited
060excited about for educational Excellence this year is our implementation implementation of the web program which is where everyone belongs so um as you all know the first day of school this year was for sixth grade only and um we have about 50ish eighth grade students who were chosen and then applied um for to be leaders for the web program and so on the first day of school we invited our sixth graders in and our web leaders our eighth graders um were the ones who were to um guide their way there was a big assembly lots of fun music games um Community Building there are small groups and they're getting together throughout the year um to continue to uh support our sixth graders during our time and other lessons um as the sixth graders go throughout
061their years so we're going to continue with this program um on keeping going and our student services and some of our teachers are the leads of this program then that's all from indon all right on to the high school uh some of the things that were identified from last year you'll see there were um some of the work that they did to identify standards based grading needs and then working to align those efforts starting from the middle school and vertically align those up through 12th grade at the high school level and then they also engaged in the CLR binder study which is one half of the CLR work and this year you're going to learn that we're we're moving on doing the other the other half of that PD um so some of our action
062steps planned for this year as you heard from Melissa that each of our departments has developed student learning objectives that are focused on disciplinary literacy so each department has their own PLC professional Learning Community they're able to meet and they created their own uh student learning objective for their Department each department is slightly different but they are all focused around our disciplinary literacy goals as a school uh next up there you'll see that we are doing some literacy and CLR PD our literacy PD is uh heavily led by Aaron Fischer our literacy coordinator and our CLR professional development is led by a few of our teacher leaders uh we offer are going to be offering these throughout the entire year at each of our PD days that we have each month so we've had two
063of them we've got another one coming up here at the end of this at the end of this week so we'll be continuing that work throughout this year and really ring on those leaders to to lead us through those professional developments and then lastly there you'll see that we likewise at all the other three buildings our Universal implementation of the progressive response to behavior plan that's been huge at the high school level for us to be able to use that as a pillar to keep coming back to as we deal with student behaviors and our response to them to make sure that we're calibrating um we're the one building that works with two associate principles so they've been able to calibrate a lot with each other and be able to compare notes as they deal
064with student and respond to student behaviors and work with our staff it's really helped us be able to be transparent with some of our decision- making not only to staff members and student but also uh also home as we contact home as we work with those students to be able to give a sort of why and be able to point to this this resource and this tool to that uh you know helps us navigate some of those sometimes pretty tricky situations and obviously you know being able to set up a a supportive structure like that allows our students to and staff to be able to strive for that educational Excellence which is why it falls under that that first pillar there excellent so now you've heard from each of the buildings on educational Excellence so
065if you have any questions about what you've heard so far now would be the great time to ask them I have a couple questions uh Greg under your um updates on progress in 2023 I see that but then your action steps uh the second bullet additional goals for math 80% that'll be be an increase of 1% but attendance is like 4% less than what it was this year is there a rational why we would have a goal of less than what we were able to achieve the year before yeah that's that is a great question um kind of and I'm not saying this is right you know if that makes sense but we kind of have used 80% as the standard for math 90% as the standard for attendance at the beginning of the year
066then with the alternate accountability though we do have the opportunity in the middle of the year in the winter to look at the midyear data and revise the goals so we do plan to do that in the middle of the year are we on track to 80 if so we need to increase it if we're not then we need to do something about it same for attendance so the literacy goal um had a little more intention behind the numbers we ended up percentage wise the math and the attendance since you know they do well on their own without focus on them we kind of use those as a standard but very likely um which is probably your hunch they're going to increase when we look at middle of the Year data well I certainly appreciate
067the uh flexibility yeah definitely you know where you and the staff will take a look at that to see if that might or or could be changed absolutely and then the only other question I have is for High School uh I was excited to hear that you include home and families making connections with them communicating back and forth because that's really vital agreed across across the whole board but I'm glad to hear you say that yeah you bet go ahead I have a couple questions well you you asked the same one as me for Conrad Elum so Greg you're you're good I don't have any questions for you um Corey uh just wondering your action step of building capacity and shared leadership of your EML em LSS team with increased staff participation what's the percent
068of staff participation right now sure well we'll take a step back and say that um EML SS traditionally has been viewed as an intervention only um now that doesn't mean philosophically that we weren't always pushing it but we are now increasing it so we have um I would say probably double that so we have instructional our instructional coach is part of that um uh coordinators so percentage of our whole staff probably I'd say about fiveish to 8% okay which in the past again it was a very very small number of people okay and then Jamie um well two questions ISL is that a resource for both teachers and students yes so it is a program that students participate in it's a um web- based program um that students take kind of a um like an
069overall um assessment what is the word they use uh diagnostic thank you diagnostic um at the beginning and then it kind of shows which skills students are need a little bit more in and then the teacher can assign those skills to the student based on the area that they're lacking in um and so then the teachers can see all of the results and then they can use that to either we we can use it for intervention for our tier two tier three mostly tier two but we also are using it at a universal level like if um you know the eighth grade ELA teacher is looking at word work and these eighth grade students because many of them due to co didn't get the word work they needed they can say okay we're going to
070pause for a second we're struggling with this area and so we're going to give a lesson on this area so the students participate in it um and then the staff use it for um a resource okay that makes sense and then um with your your clubs and groups um as kind of an update on your progress I'm just wondering how much you guys are trying to get like the middle school and the high school groups maybe to meet and kind of work together so that some of the younger students feel like they have older students that they can go to yeah so the equity picnic is just coming up we're doing so our PCU GSA and AOA are all going up to the high school for um the equity um picnic um I know there
071are a few times of a few times a year where the other Affinity groups get together as well last year um they had a couple events that they did together um I'm trying to think of a lot of times when there's bigger events or events happening at the high school they'll include us and invite invite us in we also have times where we have um we just had a bunch of high schoolers come to our AOA as Alliance of allies um come into our a AOA group um and talk about high school and what it's like in high school so we're it's a lot of kind of inviting both ways okay all right so this is my last question that's for you Brett um you don't really know me yet but I'm very passionate about
072standards based grading um so my question is I know that you're working to align the efforts between grades 6 through 12 what are you doing in the high school to align between departments so how is that measured are you looking halfway through the semester and saying okay why are the majority of students getting this grade in this class versus this grade in this class yeah I will say that uh we know that our standards based grading practices is a growth area for us and that's something that we're learning within our administrative team this year um you know I do know also that inside of our departments we do a lot of kind of calibrated grading so I'll use biology for example because I walked in on some of this today of we've got multiple teachers
073that teach biology they'll give a common assessment at the end of whatever unit it might be and they'll get together and do some of their grading together to make sure that similar responses no matter what teach they have are getting a similar grade now between departments from the maybe the science department to The English Department those that's definitely an area where we don't have quite as much alignment that we definitely are trying to work um to be able to get that similar across the board we also realize that from Department to department and discipline to discipline you've got different types of assignments that are going to be graded slightly differently and there's just going to be different type of work that students are producing so that's a that's a tough ask but one that we're
074going to continue to work on um so I I wouldn't uh I wouldn't tell you that we're we're where we want to be right now with standards based grading we know that we've got growth to be had but that's going to be continued effort for us as we get going so is there somebody or who's I guess who is checking in within the department to make sure that you know in biology it seems like the various teachers have students performing kind of at the same levels in their class so that not everyone's getting you know A's versus C's and if more people in one classroom are getting C's versus the other why is that sure sure and our department chairs line up a lot of those kind of department meeting or those PLC meetings so
075similar biology teachers so they'll be the ones that line up a lot of those and are able to answer some of those initial questions and then we've got administrators that oversee one of the three of us kind of oversees each department so is able to kind of be that go between between the department and then Administration as well so I it would be tough to give you an exact person because it is kind of a team effort um but it is definitely something that we we work together with those different departments on to try to make sure that we have that grading calibration um because we know that's an important piece and we want everyone regardless of what teacher they have to have similar experiences not only in the class but in the the grade
076they receive okay I'm done I I have one more question Jamie you talked about uh we based programming but this question is for all of you do any of you use or have students use AI I'm sure they do yeah yeah I mean we're they we're just diving in right with with AI and trying to teach students how to use it in a helpful way um you know with English language arts it definitely could be a helpful tool and a tool that could maybe not be so helpful in some ways and so I think yeah yeah too helpful um high school maybe even more so but the Middle School we're we're trying to and as staff we're trying to um trying to use it in different ways that are helpful for our own our own
077use and our jobs too so as we're getting to know it we're able to share with our students even more yeah I me there's a lot of professional development out there right now for teachers as well to be able to learn how to use it for good within your classroom as well as to monitor student work to make sure that it's not lending too good of a hand towards a final product and so yeah I mean it's a it'll be here for the years to come so we got to embrace it and figure out a way to use it to our benefit yeah I just haven't heard that much about it so thanks Corey yeah I would say at our level I we haven't intentionally taught it but I think there's elements of it that
078are play for our kids and for us for a long time I our kids do a lot of speech to text the text comes out it starts identifying um you know where there are errors or continued on sentence I mean that's AI right it's it's it's word prediction um so you know things like that but we haven't actually done any sort of like intentional teaching of it or any programs Greg anything to the extent that we're talking about AI for you know those purposes right now I'm not aware of CPS students using it okay that that is that is not an acronym that is included in your hand stands for artificial intelligence artificial intelligence Megan have anything any questions comments um I don't have any questions specifically um I can I can tell you that
079a lot of this is um a lot of the goals and improvements um I can definitely see districtwide these efforts and these specific you know efforts for each school I can definitely see that um you know showing up in what's coming to parents and in the emails or not the emails but the the newsletters that we see and that you share with the board so that's really I mean sometimes I think in probably other districts these Improvement plans may or may not be as robust as they are for ours um and so it's just really great to be able to see it both on paper and in action so thank you for that I have an opinion about what you just said I would say that your plans are more comprehensive and sophisticated than a
080lot of other school districts from some of the ones that I've seen so I think that's a good thing I've got just a couple real quick um you all came from another District did those districts use standard-based grading all of them not your place not at the not at my level the elementary they did okay all right and secondly uh I guess this for Brett uh Progressive response to behavior plan who was involved in the development of that I mean was it a combination of different disciplines throughout the the district yes so I can speak to that but it really was a district level work it was all the associate principles as well as Mr tarnet Sir and Lauren Rango um that was that pretty much comprised the team they worked together I think before
081I was here last spring they had kind of started to get together maybe it was even last winter and then I know that they got together a few or a handful of times over the summer to work on that plan and then it rolled out kind of officially in the fall we've kind of held it behind the scenes we haven't necessarily shared it out publicly mainly for a very calculated purpose of knowing that we were going to have to live it kind of in real life for a while and you know put it into practice and kind of calibrate amongst the buildings and see what age appropriateness there was and make sure that it was serving the purpose we wanted it to and I I think I mean I guess I speak for myself in
082saying that I think it's done a very good job of that so far for us this year everybody satisfied to this point yeah I would say we're learning we're learning through it I'm assuming it's kind of a yeah can I jump that was the question that I wanted to ask you guys and I guess before I say uh just compliment you I want to compliment you because I remember you talking about this last year and so has it been embraced by the staff pretty much I guess each of you I would say it's not um it's more the um Administration and the associate principles right now the staff have had a little bit of exposure to it but I think the the part of it being embraced by the staff is that it helps to
083um ensure Equitable decision making and a guide for um both restorative practices and disciplinary actions and so um I I think people are happy about that because no matter how hard you try as an administrator you there are different biases and there are different um things that happened with different experiences and this this project and this plan helps to keep people aligned and celebrated with one another yeah the word that comes to my mind you know after teaching that many years is the consistency which um you know you're right it's going to take a while be before it becomes kind of automatic um the other next question was has it been embraced At All by the parents are you hearing good things from them pretty much or again it's it's all new but it's a
084wonder I think it's a wonderful idea so I'm just really excited about it but yeah I mean I think just to have that speaking point when you're talking to parents about why you made the decision that you made and what our kind of beliefs are and what our expectations are and it gives that that talking point that I think people really benefit from not only parents but you know staff members and students as well so it's uh yeah and I can imagine as kids go through and they start it counted over in primary school they just they just kind of follow it through I mean I just think it's a again I I look at it that consistency and I think it's it's a wonderful model to have so anyway thank you I I would
085say one of the you know from a teacher perspective we were trying to minimize the changes at the start of a school year but one of the things that has been emphasized at all the buildings is the importance of partnering with parents and and calling home when you have concerns and doing so consistently and so that has been a real Focus we haven't really shared the plan widely because pretty much almost daily but at least every week there are changes being made to it we're encountering behaviors that aren't included on the plan or we're wanting more flexibility in certain areas so we wanted to kind of play with it a little bit before and I would think way keep that way forever I mean it just you start putting things set in stone you're going
086to you're going to box yourself in the corners but I just like the idea that we're we're trying to be consistent I I just compliment all of you excellent All Right Moving On mov on all right to family and Community engagement uh so our objective here is about bridging meaningful and constructive communication and Partnerships to ensure Equitable access representation and voice so our key performance indicators here are really focusing on that parent Guardian satisfaction which we did for the first time last year so you see those the Baseline numbers for our informed index and our included index in uh included there we're also uh creating we're in the process of creating a community engagement self assessment that looks at the number and the strengths of our Partnerships with Community Partnerships we spent a good chunk
087of last spring just recognizing the Partnerships that we have because that is something we often don't know and and as we kept talking more and more Partnerships coming up so you know are there different Partnerships we could develop or strength and that's going to be the next focus with that um plan so that's kind of the overview of that element but then we will start this time we're going to start with Corey and work our way through and then Greg gets to be last all right um so looking back at 2223 um we used to at weisa we used to do a monthly newsletter and last year we shifted to a week weekly and we were doing both so we were kind of this is our opportunity so we were doing a monthly newsletter we
088were doing a weekly and then um we realized if we go over to 2324 um here's another example of us working together as a um K12 system we are all now shifted to a weekly communication s'more um which hopefully by now you've seen that both maybe um externally on the outside and then we use it internally with with our staff as well as well um so yeah so that's been a really nice tool to to provide a consistent experience um for families um as they go throughout the system um also looking back at last year we took the spring data the uh stutter family perception uh survey data that um that was given I believe is in April our building leadership team analyzed that through spring early summer um and continue to make some action
089plans uh with that including um um we talked about seesaw so that's now being implemented um so we had a staff representative committee group um go through some decision-making process last spring uh the decision was made to go with seesaw primarily because um K2 had been using seaw since the start of the pandemic I believe it was um and at that time we were using canvas weren't just wasn't age appropriate for our students so to you know again think about the um child and parental experience K12 um there's really kind of like two shifts for thinking about learning management seaw K5 and uh canvas uh 612 and this tool really allows to enhance the the um communication um between student um and teachers home um actually students and and their parents they can uh students
090can seesaw items that they're working on it could be a writing piece it could be an art piece and teachers can say seesaw that to their parents so really kind of gives parents a a more like in the- moment um glimpse of what's happening in the classroom I will say though that uh we are in our first year and um you heard about us implementing um some new literacy um curriculum and so forth so we are nudging our way forward with that and just kind of going step by step um with that and then lastly uh our Equity action team uh we began to talk a little bit about the um the new student experience and what does that look like when they first come to us um when they enroll throughout the summer but
091then also throughout the school year so we're putting some processes in place which we already started in August so prior to the the traditional welcome back supply drop off event we had all of our new families we reached out and we got um about 85% of those new families come in for an inperson um talked a little bit about what does it mean to to be a w Spartan um did a little tour and then now we're taking that extending that Equity action team to developing a um a family night um that we're looking to combine um out of our EC through PTO uh joining forces and developing a family night sometime second semester so that is what be all right right Indie Mound um so one big thing that we get a lot of
092feedback on in the middle school is communication because in elementary school there you know families and parents seem to be pretty connected with their child's teacher because they have less of them um and so once students get to Middle School especially you know sixth grade right when that transition happens it sometimes feels like a little bit scary for parents because they don't have quite as as much like understanding of what's happening and so we're working on making sure that families feel supportive feel like they know what what's happening in the classroom for their students um and so a couple things that we're doing for that is we are going to be offering some sessions for families um on Infinite Campus canvas um and that's going to be in November um and then eventually um after
093we do a little bit more work on some things with standards based grading we'll have a session for standards based grad as well um I'm thinking we're going to do it as a Google meet uh so that families can just join from wherever um and have a couple teachers and staff members and myself um present to answer questions and kind of walk through how do you look up your child's grades on Infinite Campus what do you do when it says missing work those kinds of things um also um there is a just this week tomorrow night I believe our student services is doing kind of a parenting Middle School kind of night giving some tips and and tricks about parenting middle schoolers and talking about different mental health concerns and the Social Media stuff um
094and then we're also do planning in the spring a family fun night like Corey talked about um again the new platform for communication um all the principles have gotten together and as you've heard decided how that we're all going to be doing using the Sam more newsletter on Fridays and so that has been great um at the PTO meetings they have shared just like you did Megan that they've noticed um that it's it's we're hopefully sending less one off Communications home um because we got lots of feedback on the survey from families about getting too many emails um and so we're really trying hard so if families are listening just know that's where you're going to find almost all of your information so that's the thing to read so I think sometimes you know that's
095because people are used to us sending lots of reminders and lots of one-off emails that that kind of we're we're switching that to try to have um more streamline communication um and also trying to put pictures and different things in there so people can see kind of get inside the school by looking at the newsletter and then finally we are um doing grade level hubs um for family and school communication and this is in the newsletter but basically what what it is is U related arts 6th seventh and eth grade each have a separate one um but parents and families and students and staff all can use it um you click on a link and it will say like for my eighth grader it will show all of his um core academic classes and then
096click on the other one it says related arts classes it'll say this is the we're working on this in class today uh for ELA science whatever we have assessments the assessments on this day um and so you you have pretty much everything that you need to know um you don't necessarily have all of the assignments themselves but then it shows you how to click into canvas to get to those those assignments and things so um it's I I want even more people to use it because it is a really really really cool tool for everybody to be able to use and also it helps our um our uh case managers for students with IEPs to communicate really well with um the core teachers to help prepare the students with IEPs for things that are foreshadowing
097what's to come all right all right gonna hear a lot of the same from me um but biggest Focus for at the high school level was also the creation of those uh s'mores both internally for our staff and then obviously externally for students and families and then kind of lastly our our new uh Spartan spotlight video announcements have been um we've released those weekly on Mondays as well and those have really started to gain some traction with some different student groups as well I don't know if anyone here has seen them but we're starting to get some more submissions from different student groups that are either celebrating some past accomplishment or recruiting members to something that's going on or just foreshadowing events that are coming up in the future to try try to drum up
098some more student participation so relying on uh those different ways to communicate both internally with students and staff and then externally with with our families and you can see some of the work from last year they were really uh trying to identify some opportunities for families to get engaged in academic and career planning um and we do have that kind of academic and career planning night in the winter I don't know I know they had a very big successful event last year um with that I don't remember if last year was the first year of that but that will be something that will continue into this year and for years to come there was a lot of great great feedback from that evening all right at CPS one thing I'd like to highlight when it
099comes to family and Community engagement uh at our school is that in as we reflected on the feedback we got from families several things arose as themes one of them being families wanting to just continue to stay informed of what their child is working on learning in class with their teachers and so that's something we continue to promote as much as we can with teachers but also then when there are those opport opportunities highlight them for families so I mean formally that's the parent teacher conferences that's the report cards uh but uh what I what I'll speak to a little more is family involvement in general families want to be involved and that means a lot of things so we are actually working with our Equity action team this year to Define family involvement and
100we're asking ourselves why involve families what is the purpose of it so that we can um we can go into a brainstorming session with that mindset and our brainstorming is going to be around rather than create something new to involve families let's take the things we already do that are opportunities for family involvement and examine them with that lens so there's a lot field trips classroom volunteers uh so on so forth tutors even coming into the school um bringing things in sending things home for families to work on there's lots of opportunities but again we're going to be intentional with re-examining the great things we already do with the eye for looking towards promoting increasing family involvement at the school level excellent so that is the presentations on family and Community engagement what questions comments
101do we have from the board I just like to thank all of you because I just know these newsletters must take a lot of time and I just I I think it's it's wonderful I enjoy reading them myself but I'm just going like wow on top of everything you do it's it's wonderful uh Jamie you were mentioning and I'm not going to get this right but is there any way we can tell and this isn't directed just to you but to all of them is there a way for us to kind of identify the people who are not able or not using um this information that you know the stuff that is out there I remember as a teacher as well but it's only gotten more exact what you what's out there for assignments whatnot
102is there a way to identify the parents who are just not using it and then trying to figure out why are they not too busy did you just not understand it I I'm not sure I mean with this with the small platform it gives you some analytics which is yeah which is really helpful um and I haven't dug super far into it but I can tell you how many views it has I can tell you um like which link on your Sor newsletter is used the most and how many clicks it's had um so we can see more you know usage than you know which obviously if you look at it the other way lack of usage um but I I feel like one of the questions in the in the family um survey is
103about access I believe Aon to like to you know internet and devices and so you know many and most of our families have that access so it's it's just a matter of um continuing to get the word out there for people and and knowing that's where like we're trying to have the this family um session to try and show families um you know write there show them what what it looks like and maybe that will help as well well so I think in just continuing to talk with parents about it when people call or when we're having parent teacher conferences or when anything we just continue to talk and once you show them what the resources are I think that's when they become used more often I I was just going to add to that
104that's part of the reason we moved to the s'mores was the user experience some of the things that we've been sending out Google do like they were really hard most of our parents they told like they're viewing things on their phone so when you're trying to scroll on a Google doc it's very hard to read but with the s'more not perfect but it's a lot easier to read so Jamie you answered one of the questions I I was thinking of parents telling the school that we're we're communicating with them too much and you talk about email so you you switch that mode um is that an issue in the district because I know there's a lot of information going out and I know parents are busy it was and I think that was kind of
105part of the decision to go to that s'more is that if everyone can kind of streamline theirs at that building level especially for families that have students at multiple buildings if they're getting multiple emails a day from the from each building it's just becoming overload and they do a delete all instead of taking time to to read that and understandably so I mean so I think that was part of the decision to really try to streamline that across all buildings I would say you know part of the and we're still early in our adaption of sore but part of the training was about how to communicate messages using more visuals fewer words the idea is to make it mobile friendly and that most people are going to just scroll through and see what they want
106to see and that they're more likely to do that than they are to read an email but I'm looking at you know I just pulled up some of the data so when you look at the family ones 400 500 views for a Weekly Newsletter that's pretty good um and I can't imagine that was that way with our our monthly to be honest so people are using them and certainly referencing them and of course the staff ones are in the hundreds which you would hope um or use as well so I think that that the format is also part of it it's not just having it in one place but also Al having a format that's mobile friendly I I just think you know you're you're to be commended for recognizing how important this is to
107families and and community members to be kept in the loop so I I can only imagine it gets to be somewhat frustrating when you start to get a a message messaging from the opposite way saying whoa whoa this is just you know it's overwhelming um you know and I think we've always kind of been of the thought that you can't communicate too much but I guess maybe you can so you know you just have to make sure that you're you're not creating fatigue you know and and maybe they stop if there's too much they stop so I I commend you for for going to a system that's going to help fix that problem I mean speaking as a parent who definitely was one of the ones that probably said I got too many emails um
108because I have kids in multiple schools it was a lot and I think this format is great and it's easy to read and I can read what I want and Skip what I don't want to read um I would encourage you because I'm a skimmer with my emails for the most part um and you've probably said this in emails before but like encouraging families to utilize like Infinite Campus or c saw or canvas like I I'm embarrassed to admit this but I didn't actually get access to infinite canus until this year and I have a senior and a sophomore and an eighth grader that's ridiculous I know that but the the thing that made me do it was that I could do my attendance on that so like the little things where it's just so
109much easier than having to call the school to you know excuse my child or I don't there's just so many things that I think parents don't realize they have access to to in addition to grades and missing assignments like sell that you know because for some parents I just made my husband look at the grades I didn't want to deal with it until I found out that I didn't have to sit on the phone and call you know to Excuse excuse a student so I know those seems silly but I think that's the thing sometimes parents don't understand thanks great thank you anybody have anything else I another a question can you make accommodations for parents who do not want to come to school for a parent conference for a parent training of some kind
110yeah we offer a lot of them in anybody can do a zoom and if a family wanted to we would go to them we would go wherever they needed us to go but always um or I guess it's not zoom anymore it's Google meet yeah virtual we offered that as part of the conference experience now that was one one of the things we learned out of the pandemic I don't think we did a really good yeah I don't think we did a really good job of that beforehand I don't even know if it was an option to be honest with you now it's kind of like he IEP meetings but surprisingly I we're still finishing collecting our data but it's overwhelming at least at our level that parents want face to face Elementary I mean
111there was a small handful just lot of scheduling but I mean if that means that we got a a conference then great yeah anything else if not yeah I will I will um I'll just reiterate what I said before I think this is the part of the Strategic plan that feels the most visible as you know as a parent and um kid multiple kids in the district and um I think that this has been a huge turnaround in such a short amount of time and the the even just the mental space that it frees up for parents and families to be able to engage in those other events um you know like Greg you were talking about like now they're going to have one place to look at to go see the events that have
112always been going on but now they have more space to be act you know to engage in that um so I think is amazing what you all have done with this plan and what you've implemented um and then what you also have planned in the future um and I also appreciate that it what it feels like as a parent is that um the people at the schools are more accessible like there's it's easier to figure out who to reach out to when you have a question um it's all it's it it feels a lot more accessible and the piece of it I know that it's in the high school newsletter I don't know if it's in every newsletter but I suspect that it is um having that information about the school board meetings I think
113it's also really important that's going to help our families and Community really engage in the ways that um that maybe they weren't able to before because they couldn't find the information so overall this communication plan with the district has really really I think um helped to increase people's ability to engage with us and to just have a better school experience and so I'm and it has happened in such a short amount of time so that's amazing thank you all right moving on to exceptional staff of course we have that um but our objectives here are to provide an inclusive work environment that Fosters open communication collaboration growth and support to promote high levels of well-being and there's another objective it's a TW for here actively recruit and retain a diverse staff representative of a global
114Society so a couple things we're looking at with our key performance indicators of course now we're looking at our staff check-in survey which we have the Baseline data from our first um goar around last year and we'll do annually this is the first thing is the engagement index so I like working here I'm valued I heard I can contribute also the staff experience index which is about feeling accepted respected and supported at school and then also looking at our our staff retention rate that is something that you know I think we um have talked about a lot but we haven't really looked at a number so now we're starting to maintain that 94.5% last year certainly that's wonderful we want to keep that up there in a high number so now uh we're going to
115turn over to Jamie in the Middle School to get us started all right um just to note um and I know we've talked about this a lot but the the people you see in front of you we've been um we've been meeting a lot and talking a lot and trying to really use the survey results and just each other's experiences to um provide a kind of systematic aligned approach and so hopefully you're hearing that and seeing that through all um we're trying to get together as a principal team outside of our a council meetings outside of of other meetings that we have so that we can have that time to do that so that's something that's really important um and you're going to obviously are hearing it throughout the time tonight so um for exceptional
116staff I think um We are continuing and I know Brett talked about this a little bit up in educational Excellence some of these categories overlap just a little bit but um we're really working on continuing to grow our distributive leadership among our staff when you when you develop leaders they they want to stay they feel Val valued um and so um actually the first and the third bullet point really we're we're having um our building leadership team and others Beyond um doing more um professional development facilitation the experts in their area whether it be literacy or Equity um or we're doing uh a deep dive in our standards based grading practices at at Indian Mound and kind of you know making sure that everybody is on the same page because it it has been you
117know a a roll out year by year by year and now everybody is there and so we're trying to align each other um with that the disciplinary literacy the CLR all of that so example on Friday this week um at Indian Mound we're kind of taking all of those things and creating one experience for our staff that includes all of those so it doesn't feel like it is you know okay over here is the binder study over here is standards based grading we're working to to model um that professional development with the teachers who are who are in the classrooms doing that work and in our professional development it isn't just adults up there talking at other adults it's really modeling what they do in the classroom for their students and so we're using protocols
118we're using critical reading strategies with our staff so that they can then use it in the classroom so that's something that we've been working a lot on at any amound um and just another thing to touch on is um our staff we're really proud of our staff acknowledgement systems and I will say I mean I inherited an amazing staff the Middle School staff is some of the happiest staff that I've ever seen I I really think it's it's incredible there's a lot of amazing things happening people have each other's back they support each other um you know there's hard times too but one thing we are really working on is our acknowledgement systems um and really um trying to acknowledge staff the way they want to be acknowledged because it isn't the same for everybody
119so we do um we do a VIP uh every week and we're now putting that in the newsletter as hopefully you've seen and then we have this like sign that goes across their door that students made and we're announcing it to students as well um we're doing um positive postcards for students but also for staff so when you know we see each other doing things that are exciting or um um you know if you if we see somebody who's having a difficult time we you know recently I've had some people whose family members have passed away and we're providing like just that little extra touch for people to be like I see you I see that you're working hard I know you're going through something or even if it's just a really rough day um
120so that's something that's been really important to us and then that also pairs with the culture of warmth that's been happening um at the district level um I think that's it for exceptional staff from us great at the high school level I'm going to really ditto what Jamie said about the shared leadership opportunities literally everything that she touched on is uh is a big focus at the high school level as well with being able to get some of our staff to really buy into leading different professional development opportunities whether it's just tier one General best practices for all classrooms or CLR or literacy or or anything really um really leaning into that with a lot of our different staff members um and then the other one my other bullet point here is the intentional staff
121community community building uh opportunities that was developed off of feedback from the staff survey last year um at the high school level we feel like it it's pretty easy to get just sucked into your own department and feel like that's your own little community and that you never go talk to the world languages Department if you're on the first floor in the social studies department or whatever it might be so we've really been trying to look at some different opportunities to be able to get people out of those uh departments and interacting with others throughout the building we do have a fairly large staff here um so really trying to figure out how to uh make that feel like a little bit more of a community so we've done a few things at the beginning
122of the year have some things planned throughout the course of the remainder of the year as well to hopefully offer some opportunity for that so it's been well received so far so looking forward to continuing that out throughout the rest of the year at CPS when I think of exceptional staff in the same vein that you've already heard it really does start with um staff culture and um I I love how Aaron kicked off the beginning of the year for everybody with that culture of warmth peace and again thinking about culture specific to CS several years ago um 8 10 years ago um we just went through quite a few Growing Pains as a staff um we were in two buildings we went through five principles in six years we moved into one building and
123through all of that our culture improved each year because we We examined it and we set goals around it and people were committed to improving that culture to the extent where when our BLT looked at our climate and culture survey data this summer they were blown away we have some of the best scores climate and culture-wise that we've ever seen and really that's a kudos to the staff at CPS they wanted to improve and they did improve and it's all because of their work you've heard me talk about letters and wonders that's a lot and with it being a lot we don't have a lot of time to intentionally work on a climate and culture this year so instead we need to think creatively we need to keep in the back of our minds as
124staff that we as individuals as teams will look for opportunities where we can keep um where we can maintain and continue to improve our solid climate and culture one thing we did decide to do though that will help with that in addition to staff culture but also student culture even is we decided to adopt what we're calling monthly themes this year it's nothing groundbreaking it's pretty simple but BAS basically each month has a themee and along with that theme there's going to be resources shared with staff there will be student lessons for some of the themes when it makes sense but also kind of more importantly I'll even say um we're going to embed moments of student joy that connect with the theme and moments of Staff joy that that connect with the theme of
125each month as well so for example October is identity this month is uh safety and self-control so depending on the time of the year the theme matches that um and it also fits in with our PBIS system too it gives us a way to intentionally think about again the staff Joy piece when I'm thinking about the exceptional staff um just doing our part to keep it going because this is the year we're not going to be as intentional as we have been in building that strong climate and culture but um I think I can speak for everybody at CPS we're also not going to let it go either all right at uh Waba um we too uh examine that uh data are C staff survey data and really what motivates we talk a lot about
126increasing student voice you've heard that but of course staff having a sense of voice and what's what's happening so they really kind kind of drove our goals here uh first one being um authentic staff and student celebrations so we um took our building leadership team to the PLC conference this past summer and out of that um process there was a some intentional um examination at how we're celebrating staff and students uh so just for example um some adding on to some layers that we've already done but um we have together as better just handwritten notes you'd be surprised at how much staff appreciate those and it seems like every time one of those goes into a mailbox or so forth you walk into somebody's room they got them posted up right um other things like
127getting finding out what's someone's favorite song and playing that at the start of a a staff meeting and it builds connection and identity um similarly to what Greg had talked about for students we kind of redid our the way that we're recognizing students we're having character Focus um um kind of themes each month and like we just celebrated student wellness um this past month um teachers are acknowledging those students they get an award they get their picture taken those are posted up in the hallway way um students are seeing themselves and really um celebrating the the great work that they're doing um next one um talked a little bit about this earlier with the behavior um plan that we are implementing um but this was really a priority that our building leadership was wanting to
128have those crossgrade level discussions so not just within grade levels but across the grade levels we talked about that calibration earlier um across schools but um you know all the buildings which has been helpful um but our teachers have said they they want to be able to do that because you know it's super important um that you know us among teams and through it as a as a school building that we're trying to as best as possible um acknowledge student behavior and responding to it in an appropriate manner that's consistent and then lastly you've heard this from several buildings the shared leadership um it which has been just amazing the amount of efficacy and response from our staff when uh their colleagues are leading um whether it's our Equity work with our um our cbts
129that we're doing with our CLR work um through building leadership team through our committee work uh staff are really stepping up and engaging in in leadership action so excited about all that excellent so that's the presentation in that pillar what question and comments do we have from the board I have a comment I just got first of all I have a couple things um I just kudos to all of you I mean I I've been going around seeing schools and I just I'll be honest with you I I think your staff in each one of those buildings are they're they're showing they're reflecting what you're talking about I'm just really impressed I I really I feel like the climate of the staff I mean it's just really it's really good and that makes me really
130very proud um Jamie you were mentioned about what is it how do you call it you call it the Cal calibration and alignment and I think it's really and it kind of is this whole thing again we're kind of making it more uniform throughout the whole system but you know when I first started here we were a 712 building so obviously there was a great deal of you know uniformity between what was going on seventh grade and e8th grade now you got kids who are taking eighth grade it could be language it could be math and they're getting high school credit and the fact that you guys are doing that cuz I think for a long time we were kind of into this a little bit in this Silo type thing attitude and I really
131like the idea that we're we're starting to reach out I think that's so important because it has to be again that consistency throughout so anyway just thank you all because I think you got very happy staff working at four different buildings car you mentioned about uh crossgrade level communication with behavior for example do you do crossb building collaboration where a second grade team meets with a third grade team fifth grade with a sixth grade team we haven't yet but I know that that has been conversations have come that have come up over the years um where our staff have have wanted to have Cross grade level conversations with CPS we did that maybe I think it was my first year um but that's definitely something we could consider yeah for sure because I think it's
132important MH um you know one thing I was working here one thing that I disliked hearing from like say a second grade teacher where the parents talking about third grade a second grade teacher say I have no idea what they do over there it's a killer but we can minimize that if we do a little more cross-building communication thank you anything else no again I just want to compliment all your staff yeah I think we have exceptional staff 4K through 12 take it away all right moving on to our last pillar last but not least the resource allocation so our objectives here are to create a f fiscally and environmentally responsible operational plan that is Equitable sustainable and adaptable to evolving needs and priorities and also to deepen our investment in District diversity equity and
133inclusion efforts through Community Partnerships and District actions in terms of our key performance indicators we've talked about this at length and really felt like where we're going to see indicators of improvement in this pillar is by seeing them in the other three essentially we're allocating resources to support the other three elements so more than uh a number associated with it it's really about looking at the progress in those other indicators and you know what are some of the actions that we've taken with our resources to allocate them so for example the creation of five student services positions and a deib coordinator last year is a clear indication of how we're choosing to allocate our resources to support those other pillars so this time last but not least we're going to start with Brett great um
134so you can see some updates on progress from the 2223 school year and I know Aaron just touched on adding some new staff members for this coming school year so kind of talking about the you know money resource one of the things at the high school specifically that we attributed some funds to is some new Atrium furniture on the first second and third floor we have atriums that are kind of common learning spaces for all students and we have some new flexible seating options in those areas we used to have essentially lunch tables in those areas so we allocated some funds to get some more functional seating in in those areas um action steps planned for this year um it got a little creative here by saying that we're using the Strategic use of time
135as a resource to focus on our school culture um so one of the things that we're we're really working on and our first one is coming up here in a couple of weeks is a Spartan Pride assembly we're going to have three of those on predetermined dates throughout out the school year so November 21st is our first one and we will be using that as a way to celebrate accomplishments of students or accomplishments of Staff or as well of just uh different groups or clubs or individual students so by predetermining those dates we make sure that we have them spaced out throughout the year and can really highlight some of the neat things we've got going on in the building and then Aon already kind of touched on our staffing additions and Alterations by adding
136a school psych a school counselor uh deib coordinator and a math interventionist all four of those positions are new at the high school this year so figuring out where those fit in and how to use them appropriately within our building to be able to really maximize the amount of effect they're able to have for our students and for our staff that they work with has been um a fun thing to really work through at the start of this year all right at the EPS resource allocation so uh picture having a full-time job and then on top of that um um going through one of the most intense trainings for your job you can that's letters for our teaching staff and then um learning a new way to do one of the largest portions of your
137day that's wonders for English language arts for our teaching staff and then also with our vision focusing on equity and inclusion um that's a big commitment as well and that's our CLR work for our teaching staff um you would you would not walk into CPS and ask anybody if this is the right work and get the answer no it it is the right work work working on early literacy working on equity and diversity at CPS this year it is a lot for our staff so I'm thinking of resource allocation as time right now this year we are focusing on letters training wonders learning wonders planning and our CLR work and as the big rocks that's it I've committed to staff that we're going to avoid as much as we can um adding in any surprise
138asks of teachers throughout the year um we are not going to be you know providing oneoff staff meetings or PD where hey here's a really fun topic we're going to learn about today because sometimes even having to mentally just know more things and think like should I be using this teachers have guilt that they put on themselves that's a real things so um we are committed again to our rocks for the year but we're not adding in anything else um and that being said we are also providing time that we don't in a typical year because we are asking so much of our CPS teaching staff so we've cancelled some things like committee meetings some staff meetings so that we can provide the additional work time needed for our staff they've got to do reading
139online modules live trainings for Zoom they've got to read their new wonders manuals and collaborate with each other and so we're also in addition to committing to those we're also committing to giving time when we can as well um and that's that's really our focus when it comes to Resource allocation this year at weisa um our three main priorities um that we're listing here around resource allocation um thinking it's sort of a time but also um financially as well is really making sure that we're using some good decision making um around how we're supporting the learning and the ongoing support of both literacy and our CLR um throughout the year um and then moving into the second one um T the time 20 minute deer time you may have heard of that term before it's
140drop everything and read so every week on Thursday while our classroom teachers are doing their PLC time we have um um other staff who support the classrooms and so it's really um yes a focus back to the educational Excellence it's also an uh Equity um decision too because it guarantees that every student gets that additional 20 minutes of reading time every single day so students are really have gotten a lot better um at even the the day before Wednesday afternoon teacher saying hey remember you're going to have your deer time in the morning get your book ready because kids can be pretty um sly at you know wandering around the room and make it look like they're looking for a book for 10 minutes um so it's it's really coming along nicely and giving us
141a good focus of um making sure that all students and that's every student no student gets pulled for any other services during that time and then the last one one is you may have noticed if you've been to Waba lately we have these large televisions um no we're not showing movies um during lunchtime um the intention and it actually really came out of our Equity action team uh to increase that sense of belonging and identity um we kind of toyed around with some idea of getting pictures around but then the cost of getting printed and so forth um so we can do um there are some announcement type things like lunch and and so forth and birthdays on there as well um but it's like things are just happening authentic things that are happening during
142this school day playground field trips in the classroom and you know we can just send that quickly to the person who's who's um um sort of operating that and I mean we'll sit down at the lunchroom table and say hey you want to take a selfie and and yep it'll be on the screen it's up on the screen the next day so really it's it's changed our our lunchtime experience too cuz you know sitting down with 170 kids you've been in there right you can get a little bit you know ancy and a little bit loud at times so give kid kids are really excited we also use it to um do our acknowledgements that you see in our newsletter um so you know it's Native American Heritage Month you know there's some learning that
143happens in that way too so all right Indian Mound uh resource allocation so um um you know everybody already spoke about um some of the new hires that we had and so that's also something that's been great at Indian Mound um for school social worker um we I talked a little bit about this before but spent a decent amount of resources um on contributing to Summer work um between the building um my building budget and the Melissa's budget from the teaching and learning Department um to really really dig into um the work around standards based grading and Alignment um and we are continuing with that work and spending a decent amount of time during our PD um to ensure that we're you know all aligned and and and connected on that work we are also
144um looking at our budget um and looking at how we're spending our money and making sure that it's connected to to our strategic plan so that um we know that we are you know putting putting our funds and resources towards the things that we're committed to as a school and as a district um and we also are working to um look at the building budget to see how we can ensure to keep our fees low for students um it's just it really important to us that um we keep our fees as low as possible because um we want the learning experiences just to be learning experiences for our students without having to to pay extra um so that's something we're going to continue to work on and really try and be creative with as everything
145is continuing to be more expensive and then another thing with the resource allocation and kind of Partnerships it's kind of both but we have a continued partnership with W for our Sabers it's second through 12th grade uh but Sabers is kind of an assessment that students take as a social emotional assessment and uh student services that have access to it but at our school we're doing a partnership where staff are also scoring students twice a year um on the Sabers and so we can compare what the students score themselves to to what the staff is scoring students to so teachers are taking time um and we're connecting with w and the teachers are getting a very small amount of money to do it from the U and the ww's um than helping pay for um
146our um fast break um part of it at least no not fast Bridge yeah fast Bridge Melissa yeah they're paying I'm like it's been a kind of a process um to get it paid for but they're paying for our membership or our licens to fast bridge for one year while we're doing this partnership so um and then also um our student services along with that Sabers and we're taking that information to um there were a group of teachers who did a tsg around anxiety and so something really cool that we're doing is every it started out as every week but I think we're going to do it every other week that we have a full week of school is we're sending a survey out to students that ask them um how their weekend was and
147if there's anything they want to share with us about their weekend and it's been really interesting and so if there's anything that students want to share with us um that we feel like we need to follow up with them on then we're able to do that um but that kind of goes a with the Sabers between that and the Sabers I feel like we're be able to spend spend that time and resources in partnership with mental health excellent questions comments from the board I was going to make a comment the last time and and and the way it goes with its resource allocation um as a former teacher um reach out to the former staff I I I just think what you did Greg with your tree that is so awesome and I know you
148you brought in some people and they were so proud of it and it just connects them to the the current staff and their kids and and they reach out it just it kind of broadens I think everyone's appreciation for this community um that's one thing I I'd love to see and I don't know if this is appropriate but I'm going to I'm going to say it anyway so here we go um I keep on saying some point I would like to see a high school class where kids who might be interested in going to education would take a class and then they would be this Cadre of people who could go around to the various schools see classes but also then become people who could also be helping kind of like your eighth grade Jamie
149working with the sixth graders you have a high school kid coming in there and I know they're doing things like that already with like reading and stuff like that and that is such an eye opener for these little kids um and same you know at the we be C media school but someday day I I dream that that will be something it we'll do because I just think it offers so much and then the last one be is related again Greg to what you have the idea of a museum I think every school has famous people and various fields and we need to recognize them and we need to kind of they can from Sports to music to business to politics um we've had some amazing people in this community and I don't know if
150that has to do with resource allocation but I want to include that I would say this in response to what you're saying Bruce um sometimes because I'm a retired staff member here out of sight out of buying we have a rich resource of retired staff here yeah we only have to reach out to them and when I get together with my group every month I mean some of them really feel bad it's like they had never been employed here because they were never asked to come back for anything so when we talk about resources that's an untapped resource and again you know the longer they're out the more difficult and less eer they are to return but I can name some staff that retired last year they want to take a year off but then
151they want to come back in some type of volunteer capacity we just have to ask them and set up the situation that's right for them so let's see secondly I forget what you were talking about Bruce oh we have a young lady that the optimists are recognizing tomorrow and uh she was in Maria markings class last semester uh helping Maria with her kindergarten classroom part- time this year I think she's the first one in the youth apprenticeship program who is in a third grade classroom it's Ser of an educational assistant uh so that gets to what you're talking about Bruce but I think we can do even much more than than what we're doing right now so well sort of like a club for future Educators and we have talked about you know kind of
152a grow your own model and doing that and there's some models out there that are gaining popularity around the state and the nation um it hasn't been you know on the top of our priority list but it's on a list it's on a list I do believe that the act the formalized youth apprenticeship program continues to add Pathways and the education pathway is one that they are so it doesn't have to be this kind of fly by the seat of your pants this person is interested let's put them in a TA position and figure it out I think there will be a formalized the true youth apprenticeship program is looking to go that rout anybody got anything else if not um I just want to commend you on the work that you're doing um I
153think we all understand how difficult it is and how complex it is um but I think even more to the core of what I'm seeing this year in my conversations across the district in all the different buildings uh and Melissa and I had a conversation about this just before the meeting across the board there is something about this districts that's different this year than even last year the year before in terms of Staff morale and just the general overall feeling of how the year is going so far and it's just incredibly encouraging and that's doing no small part you know to you folks and obviously we know you all have teams but if you would take at least my commodation back to the people people that are responsible for how great it feels to be
154around here again this year thanks for Shar that I think that's partially due to the staff surveys that have gone out the past couple years and the response by Administration and the board to make sure that just doesn't get put on the shelf that we want to turn that into some type of action so we can get to the culture and environment that we're experiencing well well done well thank you thank you thank you thank you okay moving on we will go to Mr Mooney cesa 2 Board of control update yes I can give that to you uh the board of control meets used to meet every month up until this year then the members decided let's just meet every other month and we meet in white water at the ca building so we're meeting
155every other month and this is uh my last meeting just uh a week ago uh Ted n the special education I have I have to write down my time so I don't go over you go over and just let me know to no the special education director of the regional Services Network presented uh just some basic information 74 school districts are in cesa 2 and any of them can reach out to support to the RSN resources available include their professional development uh programs idea compliance best practices assessment technical assistance Staffing data collection analysis onboarding of new staff just to name a few um some new information that I didn't realize is that there are 450 compliant points required in each IEP imagine how many IEPs that are written in this District in 450 compliant points
156also what's available is a 150 page guide to IEP forms and it's result of chapter 15 15 which we may be aware of 150 150 page guide to IEP forms that's you're a new staff member or you've moved into the special ed realm out from regular Ed where do you start with all this and that's where Administration comes in yeah they they help serve as check checkpoints with that and since Ling more in depth information about that I have a renewed appreciation for what our special staff is required to do and what they do cesa 2 is starting a pilot program it's the new teacher induction program probably similar to what we experience uh cisa 2 is directly involved to some of the Head Start programs in cisa 2 um and they provide comprehensive mental
157health programs for 3 to four year olds uh 98% of the referrals to spe to Public Schools meet qualification criteria to receive services from public schools which tells me that prior to any referral of a student three or four year-old to a public school the preschool teachers have done their job and everything they've done they've exhausted all the resources that they have their expertise and you know to have that type of response rate 98% uh Head Start teachers recently received a 25% pay increase resulting in Greater retention of more teachers and there's an increase in pay for support staff in Head Start that will be addressed shortly so that pay is really a big deal and and it should be so I'm glad that we're we're CE at Le starting to uh address that Scott
158Carr uh he is the career and college read consultant for cisa 2 uh there's four excuse me there's eight Focus areas that he talked about academic and career planning redefining what Readiness means student outcomes and they've created a portrait of a graduate the readiness approach leading to achievement the work career based learning uh the Wisconsin Career Pathways equity and access graduation Pathways and Readiness leadership so as you can tell cisa 2 is very involved with uh the districts and they have lot to offer Us in the second report it's the Weaver report again we meet monthly it's all by Zoom uh once a month uh this is just some of the information that was shared enrollment is fluctuating but Turing in a positive manner and there's always seems to be a dip in the fall
159but then by second semester they've they probably have um underestimated what their enrollment will be disenrollment needs Improvement particularly in the Insight program uh that's what the data shows the board approved to switch Banks from Lake Ridge in manona to one Community Bank in McFarland $70,000 was approved by the board for tutoring contract for K12 students uh with WEA uh the board approved seven policies included including the audio taping of IEP meetings uh I don't think they've done that in the past I'm not sure if we do it here we don't do it here uh and and the reason why they do that is to uh make sure that there's any uh misinterpretations or what said you know that they have recording of it Joan Gast uh she's uh in their office was recognized for
160her 10year anniversary of service at weeva uh each each principal report out sharing for each of the five schools there 100% of the students were contacted by school by School staff member prior and at the start of the 2324 school year that's quite remarkable because they have 2,000 some kids right now close to 3,000 actually closer to 35 00 I think 98% of the students logged in on third Friday count which is really good I'm not sure what our percentage is when they have to be in the seat here 20 students are enrolled in the DCA connect program in Green Bay I talked about that last spring uh with expectation there'll be 100 students enrolled at the beginning of the second semester so when I talk about they only have 20 this fall that's what
161they anticipated M and that program will certainly grow and there's uh our next meeting excuse me our December meeting will be up in Green Bay at the DCA connect facility 15 sites conducted inperson family picnics uh after school started plus one virtual picnic and then again as mentioned last time WEA uh will maintain data on interventions for re-engagement of students uh so we have an idea of what they've tried to keep those students engaged at WEA so they don't have have to come before us like tonight uh several students will be sent back to their home home District okay that's that stride fall Summit yes let's see where I do have that I don't have that with me right now okay so if I can hold that off till next time table that till the
162next meeting yep we will move along to the district administrator's report Mr Teter the floor is yours thank you it is a pleasure to share with you um this evening I want to do some you know start off with some recognitions of course um something that is important for us to recognize uh is we hosted look at me uh we I'm gonna turn off my camera um we we hosted the yeah I don't know I switch it up I switch it up you never want people to think that you're in one place me up every time I know sorry one of these days I might get myself in some trouble um so I want to recognize the work that went in in the wonderful execution we hosted the U Badger small conference swim meet here
163in our pool what a great event way to showcase our facilities so a special thanks to to Stu schaer and and Kayla and Jessica who did just a great job I heard wonderful things about it and um you know of course we acknowledge many of our athletic accomplishments and so much goes in to the success of these student athletes so I appreciate all the coach as our seasons are starting to to wind up here also wanted to recognize the amount of effort that goes in to take four busloads of students to Green Bay that is a quite an undertaking you know it's interesting I think uh when we started this with girls basketball last year and we had actually actually had four middle school buses and I think two buses from the high school we
164started this new trend um which seems to be having our middle schoolers go and they did a phenomenal job on on Friday just did a great job and and so it's just a neat it's a it's a lot of Community Pride and our many other athletic um accomplishments and recognitions as well a special shout out to Carrie Roberts who organizes our uh staff flu and coid vaccination clinics uh the numbers are in we had 190 staff reive the flu shot and 161 staff received the coid vaccination so that is a a very large group and how convenient is it to just you know walk down the hall and end up with a couple of shots um some of us had a couple had a bit of a a struggle the next day um but we
165did okay we scheduled it well um it was a professional development day the next day so thank you Carrie um wanted to acknowledge I know Jamie mentioned this but I just think it's really unique this they're calling it minding the middle this the middle school student services staff you know having a a parent tip uh event for families I just think that's very Innovative and very creative and they're extremely busy um but I think it's a good example of when we start when we actually start getting closer to being right sized with our student services staff they're able to do some more of those type of things um that are more preventative and in community engagement Focus so um that's great I'm going to share some photos which will include some recognitions with you uh
166as well all right so we have um here I I really just think this is great making musical instruments in Steam right and I can imagine this seemed like a great creative project for our students and then they went home and found whatever they could in their house and made musical instruments at home uh which I always you know think is really fun but a very creative idea um making musical instruments there at at CS um yes we had a superhero assembly and these were your three superheroes um I haven't seen these three since actually um pretty pretty disguised well that in the middle yeah it's hard to tell yeah that in the mle that can't be revealed um but two of the three are should be um um very present in your thinking um
167yes so that was that some are happy some are angry some are very serious so um Waba had a had some fun at the assembly doing the chicken dance so thought that was really clever and that gets to that Community um building that that that Corey referenced a little bit earlier uh the author share event I every the past two years I've been inviting couldn't uh attend but the literacy classes share their their writing and invite other people to attend and I've heard wonderful things about that but that is one of the important things is to share your writing as authors and so exciting event there I thought this was just really clever getting your Boeing license so as a fifth grader um you know getting sort of that passing the test and getting a
168certificate so lyanna Hershey as you know is always very creative and uh motivating for the students to get their license there bookmark and cover art the smiles tell it all right making those bookm marks it's really really uh clever reading the book uh the Tiger Rising and then doing some soap whittling I when I saw this wanted to make sure they were using plastic knives it does appear um no one was injured in the making of these uh but just a just a fun idea and again the smiles tell it all the eighth grade had a virtual visit with a really wellknown um young adult author quamy Alexander um crossover I think is probably his most famous book a very well- read um book and so they had all of the eighth graders in in
169these separate three separate locations were engaging in uh this Nationwide virtual event so very interesting learned about the writing process um and and I yeah I found it to be fascinating we've mentioned Timberly before but I think it's just nice to just to see them still smiling on day two uh doing doing well just a great group they always do this this group picture that I never seem to be a part of uh but it's really really neat just to see the energy in in the groups over the years just an amazing event once again our eighth seventh and eighth graders doing some food Labs culinary Labs there in the wonderful facility if you haven't had a chance to to see it's been a couple years now that it's been kind of reconfigured in there
170so if you're ever at the middle school pop in there and check it out of course we have a new family consumer Sciences teacher who's doing an amazing job Julie tokheim they're lucky to have her hope Squad making kindness rocks hope hope Squad is really an amazing thing here at the high school remember last year Governor iers came in and met with hope Squad a powerful group talking about um youth mental health and and and suicide this weekend coming up we got Legally Blonde so I'm sure you've got your tickets if not please do so get your tickets and this week is National school psychologist week and um once there were three now there are four so a new member there with Andrea quella but such amazing leaders I think it's hard to convey to
171the public and to the board the difference that they make especially behind the scenes with staff very um intelligent bright hardworking student centered um people we just so fortunate to have them not only Student Center but also teacher Center centered yes because teachers rely on them also they do a lot of consultation and and things so so that um concludes that part and in terms of uh coming up we also have some other you know events coming up the end of the quarter is coming up we have staff development we also have um the Veterans Day different buildings do different different celebrations of course it's on Saturday but they do different celebrations both at the end of this week and early next week coming up we have hunger and homelessness Awareness Week dwali World kindness
172Day American Education week's coming up we have the school and village board um joint planning committee it's been a while since we've we've met we're meeting that time was changed to 4:30 by the way and that's on the 14th educational support Professionals Day coming up on the 15th National parent involvement day coming up every day but also on November 16th substitute Educators day coming up on the 17th and then we get to see each other again on the 20th and uh followed by fall break and then we have a work session on the 30th so we get to spend extra time together this month so that concludes uh my report thank you very much in terms of action items the first is action on McFarland High School spring early college credit and start college now
173program requests 20 students have applied to take college level courses under the early college credit and or start college now programs at Madison College and W Madison last year it was 27 students a list of all the students and the courses that are requested are included in your packet you will notice our recommendation is that some of these requests are not approved this is due to the fact that the same [Applause] course will be offered at M McFarland High School next year through fuel ad or they have prerequisite courses to take first first if you are in agreement with these recommendations the following motion is in order so I would look for that motion yes I will move to approve the course approvals and denials for the early college credit and start college now program
174requests as recommended by the MHS Administration thank you Tom do I have a second I'll second oh I don't what did I don't know did something happen you you both kind of spoke at the same time so we're trying to decide if it was you Megan or Kate oh that did the second okay yeah that's the way we went uh any discussion I have a question what is fuel Ed it's just another uh virtual learning platform that McFarland uses specifically yep yep is that new I don't know how long it's been around quite a while not no it's not new but I don't know how far back it dates so if we just to clarify if if we follow this and then they don't offer the course for some reason like because there wasn't enough
175student enrollment or something like that then does it go back so that they can take the course yes if it is um if there's time certainly there's timelines for the college courses yeah but yes okay mhm and I would say when I looked at this list I didn't line it up with last year's list um but I felt like there were um fewer denials that was my I but certainly some of this can be averted with meetings in advance okay okay I C I certainly appreciate the format that is used because it's easy to read and interpret I agree well I think we can go ahead you it I'll wait for Bruce to get back no no problem we've got a motion and a second to approve the course approvals and denials for the early
176college credit and start college now program requests as recommended by the high school administration do you have any discussion hearing none all those in favor please signify by saying I I opposed motion carries unanimously 5 zero okay next is action on second reading and Adoption of policy 3112 and 4112 board staff Communications Administration recommends approval of the second reading and Adoption of policies 3112 and 4112 board staff Communications I would look for a motion to approve the second reading I'll make that motion thank you Bruce do I have a second I'll second thank you Kate discussion I think the uh the rewrite for these two policies is very um appropriate I think it's taken out the threatening language that I perceived as threatening language and uh I think you know what what has been revised
177now I think it's much clearer more in depth as far as issues with communication between board and teachers so I appreciate those that worked on this yes and I think it's appropriate yes okay thank you um hearing no more discussion all those in favor please signify by saying I I I opposed motion carries 5 Z unanimously okay next action on first review of resending policy 54603 weeva High School graduation requirements and first reading of policies 54603 WEA High School graduation requirements 5464 destinations Career Academy High School graduation requirements and 5465 Insight School of Wisconsin high school graduation requirements Administration recommends approval of the first review of resending policy I and reading of replacement policies regarding Wisconsin virtual Academy's graduation requirements I would look for a motion can I just this is the first reading right
178so we can y make comments on it we need a motion first oh do we need the motion first before okay well then I'll make that motion okay thank you Bruce sorry I'll second Tom and we do have Dr Cutler um who is available as well okay so discussion the only question I don't and I don't necessarily know enough about it I think Tom you could probably address this better than I um it just it seems that it's 20 credits is is what's the the necessary number of credits that the students have to take is that is that typical for a virtual school is that pretty it just seems low to me I don't know why oh the state um minimum is 15 so when you think about um just the range across the state
179of how many credits are needed for a high school um diploma it's really all board local control it's absolutely local control so since we are a Statewide school and it varies you know our students come from every corner of the state really at you will look at all three high schools very differently and that's the big difference is that we are trying to create identities of those three high schools separate from the original policy which was just blanketed of all of them um and for weeva it's four credits of all four core areas um which isn't isn't required by the state but that is what we really that's our bread and butter that's kind of why kids come to us um and then for destinations Career Academy there are less core but more CTE required
180and then actually for insight we are recommending going all the way down to 15 credits because most of the students have come to Insight our seniors with less than 10 um sometimes even three credits and they're we only serve 250 students throughout the state but truly those students would not graduate anywhere if they didn't come to us so it's a it's a big intervention for a small group of students so yes it is low definitely lower than McFarland but by the state um requirement it's it's that's significant thank you I I just you know I I guess I really trust in your your professional judgment on that and it just it was just interesting because again I taught in a a brick and morar school so thank you very much absolutely I mean myself as
181well I've had to do a lot of research around high school credits across the state and and what differs and why and Sir would that be correct if to make the assumption that if a student was going for GED that would even be less Mount of correct um and we're working with Sher Holly I think she might even be on McFarland um Remnant somewhere but she's at the at DPI and she has and we're working with her as follows alterative education and really all the different Pathways to graduation our goal is to offer as many options for students across the state as possible so even looking into G2 programs um within our high schools because truly we're there to personalize the experience for any kid who's who needs a different experience um so yes a
182Gad would be a very different and minimal experience you know it's a test out it's competency test out rather than seat time yes and Sher Hol was an associate principal at the high school that's what I I knew she yes that's right I knew I remembered the name years few years AG you should remember that Bruce yeah I had a couple of questions um regarding the Insight school just out of curiosity I'm not really questioning anything um but I noticed so the the credit requirements are lower by just a couple credits is there a specific reason for that we're really and again this is working with Sherry wanting to go all the way you know as minimum as possible um so that we can support students in moving to the into moving to graduation really
183we don't want High school diploma to be a barrier for students who need to move on to their next step in life most of our Insight students I mean they qualify are an atrisk school because they're already parents um they may be adjudicated they may um be emancipated so there's you know they're already just they need a path to their next step that's what we are providing and they wouldn't get that any in another way um so I hope you got the advis because the board actually changed that and um and went down to 15 credits not 18 um for the P so you would be approving a 15 credit requirement for insight school um rather than 18 and that is the state minimum um and what we what we believe again is that this
184particular High School is meeting that small Niche um it's very regulated it's an overseen it's at risk but it's offering students that diploma that will move them on to the next step of of really their adulthood that some of them are already living okay did that answer your question Megan yes it does and then I just had one other question which I think your answer pretty much um covers but the I noticed that the career Readiness education requirement also was removed from that policy is that just because they're already well I won't make any assumptions you can answer from Insight yes from um from Insight we still have the minimum career Readiness which is the Matchmaker personality style and mission complete so we went with the state statute minimum again um so we still really
185in actually we're modeling so much of what we've learned with at Insight with our more at RIS students in the other high schools um in particularly working on their personalized learning plan which is who do you want to you know what plan and um those three key lessons also the the staff at inside is kind of flipped so there's double the amount of student services staff including um mentors and support systems rather than the core classes there's only three core teachers and then a many many students USE Credit Recovery programming okay thank you that was very helpful point out point out that in your packet it appears that for insight it says 18 credits um so that should be corrected to 15 but then when it lists breaks them down that is accurate it adds
186up to 15 okay so it was just one extra little change there that was made um over the course so I would hate for us to miss the opportunity good and my apologies it might it be um I sent you the wrong link I don't know that just got changed at our board policy so and we're just now doing board docs and having it live on our website so this is exciting for us that you can go straight to our website and and um use that system I think that's great any other questions Sarah how many of those 250 students Insight have IEPs it's about the same actually it's about 30% I mean well it's still High um between 20 and 30% but our school does average around um all of our schools average around
18720% of students with IEPs and actually when we do our parent surveys um and satisfaction indicators it is the families with students with disabilities who have the highest marks um for coming to our schools because they needed something different for their students more than anything so it's slightly higher but not much anything else no again uh being on the land on between our board and your award um your staff is to be commended also the work that they put in in the time and over the years things have shifted and been revised uh to the benefit of students so really glad to see that's right I mean these policies are just really to support students in the different opportunities um and personalized plans that we can off provide and offer good thank you very much
188appreciate the input uh I've got a motion and a second uh for action on the first review of the resending policies uh hearing no other discussion all those in favor please signify by saying I I iOS motion carries 5 Z it's unanimous and lastly I've got action on recommended weeva uh destinations Career Academy and insight School Wisconsin statute 11848 G student transfers to resident districts at this time WEA destinations Career Academy and insight School of Wisconsin are requesting approval of recommended student transfers back to their resident districts due to a lack of Engagement do I have a motion I'll so move okay thank you Tom thank you Megan discussion oh Sarah's not here okay no discussion on my she's there oh Sarah Sarah uh last time I think at the board meeting uh you talked
189about you're going to try to provide uh what what we would does to re-engage students so they don't have to be on the list that we see here can you sort of elaborate on that a bit more yeah I haven't um come up with a good way to share that with you yet the the majority of this is a small number it usually is pretty small this time of year comparative to as it grows throughout the year the biggest chunk is our students right there and those are students who we actually did not ask for removal in the spring and kept them on hoping that we could re-engage them so we even gave them all summer and until now until we couldn't um re-engage with supports um there is a one Elementary student on there
190um and we have several a list of interventions that have come forward to that student and um working still on sort of the format to send that to you if it would just like how much detail you need and maybe Tom I should link with you because I have I could don't want to send your board five spreadsheets of all the pieces we've done but um if we could meet between now and the 20th and you could advise or you and Aaron could advise me on exactly the format that we might um present those levels what we basically have is a spreadsheet of the number of fail the number of times we've contacted the number of ways we've contacted we have an elevated system of um of letters that go out um and and an
191early intervention system as well that's been implemented yeah we get some of that information now Sarah it's that uh intervention piece that I'd be interested in knowing more about some typ of so more Yep anything else if not all those in favor please signify by saying I I I I opposed motion carries 5 Z that's unanimous and at that I would look for a motion to adjourn I'll make that motion green who's second I got a second second Megan gotcha uh all those in favor please signify by saying I I opposed motion carries 5 Z we are adjourned at oh my goodness 9:42 it's better than what I have expected well