001regular meeting of the River Falls Board of Education. This meeting has been properly properly notified and we will begin with the pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The first item is the hearing of visitors or delegations. But I don't think that there's anybody who has signed up to speak. So we are going to move right intoformational items. And the first one is the spotlight on education for the Renaissance Charter Academy. And so I believe that we have uh Peggy and Jerry here. All right. Welcome. Please come up. Absolutely. Is there like a there's no longer a mic because we have these mics that will catch your sound.
002So, you just have to speak normal. You should be good. Knowing that will be cut up. Yes. Is there a laser on here? Oh, okay. Like maybe that'd be cool to do, but um Okay. Hello. I'm Jerry. I'm the school counselor at the Renaissance Charter Academy. This is the end of my third year at the Renaissance and I'm here with Miss Webb and I've been here for one year. So, thank you for having us. Uh, we're excited to share with you. Maybe maybe turn it on. I did turn it on. Okay, I pushed the wrong arrow. That's fine. So, we are going to go over the three goals that we had overarchingly throughout the school year. So, we broke it down into three categories. So, we have our academic goal, a behavioral goal, and a
003community goal that we had at the Renaissance. We did this for a couple reasons. We have an extremely small staff and in Peggy's first year, she worked with all of us, collaborated with all of us to kind of just talk about what direction we wanted to go as a staff for the Renaissance Charter Academy. So, we broke it down into these three and we'll go over each one of them in our presentation today. I'm going to get this right at some point. I know. Okay. Thanks. So, our first one is our academic goal. So, it is a modest goal. We said that each quarter 100% of students will complete one book of choice. That was important that it had to be their choice, not one assigned in the classroom. And that this was going to
004be monitored by our library use data and then also our room time. The reason that we chose this goal is because this is our second full year in our building that we have currently. I've been there three years, as I've said, and we've moved three times since I've been there. And so with that, our students have not had access to reading materials in a traditional way. There was no place for them to check out books, to go and see what they were interested in. So they were relying on some things that in other schools they may have gotten just like that. And at the Renaissance, it was just kind of moving around all the time. We also wanted to leverage our advisory time or win time because it's 45 minutes that teachers have as a
005home room for their students. So we wanted to utilize that as a way to improve our literacy with our students. Our ninth and tth graders, let me go to the next slide. And thank you for helping. Our ninth and tth graders focused on more of those basic literacy skills because a lot of our ninth and tth grade students that come to us at the Renaissance come to us in an alternative pathway. So a lot of our students who are younger are homeschooled. They may have been in treatment centers before. they may have been online in other districts or open enrolling with us. So, we don't necessarily have that like traditional data that if they came to us from Meer Middle School or straight from River Falls High School, we just have that ready to go
006and to look at. So, that's why we kind of chunked out our students 9th and 10th grade and then 11th and 12th grade we focused on that books of choice, reading of choice because they have not had access to a library when they've been our students before. So, um, yes, thank you. So, this is our beautiful library. Yay. Um, and just a cool plug for our program. Our students made all those bookshelves and cabinets. Um, and if you haven't been in our building and in our space, it's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. No, they don't take special orders, so sorry. Um, so, uh, we weren't able to get the data ready for this presentation here, but we are working with Mary Miller, our school librarian. She goes to lots of different areas, so we know she's
007busy. So, we weren't able to get that library use data for the year in total from her yet. But, we did have data of reading logs that were completed by our students 9 through 12th in our advisory period. So, those reading logs were completed two times a week with their advisory teachers. And then read theory was a supplemental program that we did for students ninth and tth grade that really honed in on those literacy skills like I already talked about. And that was done two times a week as well. The reading logs also um obtain also contain um strategies that students utilized when they were reading the books that they were um reading for for advisory. I think I did that. Or did you do that? I did that. Oh, okay. Sorry. It was just
008we were so in sync. So here's some of the data that we got back specifically from read theory. So keep in mind this is ninth and tth grade. Um, the green on there shows growth from term three to term four. The red you can see not growth. Can we go to the next slide? We're breezing through because we got three goals to get through. So, um, and then this integration of knowledge is the last section of the literacy goals that we had our students focus on in read theory. So, you can see that I'm going to start with the data that gave us pause. You can see that there was a little bit of fallback that happened in that integration of knowledge. The nice thing about having this data now is that we have our
009again first in my tenure at the Renaissance, we have a dedicated staff member who has been hired on for teaching English. So he is our English teacher. He's going to be working with 9th through 12th graders in literacy skills, English 9 through 12, American literature. So we're really excited about that. He's been taking all this data and then we'll inform his curriculum to mirror what the students need from this data. So he's been able to take what we have for him here and the reading logs that Miss Webb mentioned and he's going to be able to infuse what students need more support in. So this integration of knowledge especially that's going to be hammered in this coming school year from Mr. Colinbach. Um, and then the plan for next year, the data there that gave
010us pause is that read theory is great, but we really do need to find something like FastBridge or STAR and make sure we work with our school psychologists to implement that and make sure that we're getting those data points for all of our students, not just the ninth and tth graders. But some data to celebrate, so I want to celebrate. Sorry. Some data to celebrate though is that 100% of our ninth and tth graders, which is our biggest cohort of students as our underassmen, there's almost 20 of them total. And so they 100% participated. I don't know if they loved it, but they participated and did it and followed through with it. So that was really great to see. They rose to that ask. Um, and then there were there were there was overall growth
011in all those three main areas of literacy that we had them focus on. Okay, your turn. this you can just click. She's got it. All right. Our second goal for the our our program this year was um the cell phone policy. Uh we kind of decided uh in 2023 that that is something that we wanted to move forward um as a as a building hole after listening to staff say, "Oh my gosh, we create these wonderful lessons and engaging lessons and we have this all the time." And so collectively we sat down and we're like, "Look, let's just move it forward and we're going to implement a no cell phone policy for the 2425 academic year." and we had fantastic support. So, we um looked at what the staff were saying and we actually listened
012to what some of the students were saying and we were going to um move the when we were looking at the data, we're like, how do we determine if we're being successful? We were going to monitor our uh cell phone usage by in by infinite campus and the number of writeups that we had in 2024 2025. We didn't have any data on 2023 2024 just because we didn't have um an active cell phone policy in place. But when we looked at the qualitative data from 22 23 and 23 and 24 we all just agreed like this has got to stop because we just got bedrock in the head. Just you all know I just don't even need to go any further on that. Um and then we decided that we're going to move forward with
013the policy with administration taking the heavy on any infractions that happened to be um brought to my attention. Um and we just agreed that cell phones were super distracting in the classroom and after implementing it um we had some really great outcomes and you'll see that on the next um on the next slide. Um so we went from a put it in your locker to the first violation. And the second violation is it goes to the office. And then on the third day um the third time you get um caught with your cell phone in class is a 5-day surrender to the to the office which they had to surrender their phone to Miss D on in their little cell phone jail. Um and as the picture depicts right there, you can see our students
014um in the past have not had really good attendance. I'm sorry. Um engagement engagement when we had speakers or um staff presenting and you can see this picture. I was in there and this was Pierce County Public Health coming in and students are paying attention. They're not on their cell phones just because they're no longer allowed in the in the classrooms. I'm ready for the next one. Thank you. So, this is the data that we had in term one holy buckets. We had 30 32 violations and remember we started with about 40. So, everybody come to the table with at least one. Put that back in your locker. Um that was I'm not and I'm not going to lie. Um, after I was hired for this position, I actually lost sleep on how I was
015going to impose the um the sanctions because I didn't know what kind of buy in I was going to get from families and I didn't know what kind of push back I was going to get for from students. And overall, we had fantastic support of staff 100%. And even after we kind of got down to the the nuts and bolts of as to why the cell phone policy needed to be put into place, we got buying from our students. So, as you can see, um, term one, we had one surrender for 5 days. Term two, we went from 32 down to 11 with another another fiveday surrender. Term three, we crushed it with five. And then term four, we had a an uptick. Um, this first thing we're going to celebrate is that everybody bought
016in and we just really thought it was fantastic. And when we had guest speakers come in, they were say, "Oh, your students did a fantastic job paying attention." Um, and then it was a great learning opportunity for our new staff. Now, don't take offense to any of this, but we had not don't take take offense, but we had three new staff members. And I when I say three, we had a student teacher. We had a long-term sub that just finished his um ac uh schooling this year. And then we also hired Mitchell Colbach. So, we had three um very new staff members under our um umbrella to kind of move this policy forward. And that can be kind of a crapshoot when you're looking at young people to enforce technology because they're they've kind of
017grown up with it. But they were fantastic in moving our agenda forward. Um for term four, we saw up an uptick up to 12. Um and I attribute that I'm speculating because I when I looked at the um the person that wrote up the the violations, it was our long-term sub. And so what they our students were doing is they were pushing the envelopes on somebody who was no longer in the classroom to see if they could get him to budge. And he did a fantastic job just sticking to his and I kept saying it'll get better. It'll get better. You say it long enough. You say it long enough, it becomes the end of the year. Exactly. So um and that's I just want to say that I thought the cell phone policy went
018um was was fantastic this year. So I'll yield the floor to the the third goal. You're starting. Oh, that's right. Um for for the our third and final goal, we we continue to want to grow the program. We have realized that this River Falls community supports the program and now we just want to grow it to its fullest capacity and um so our goal is to increase our body by by 10% and to participate in at least four community events and increase collaborations with Myra Middle School and um the River Falls High School. You can click to the next one. And um was this one you Okay, perfect. So we just want to keep moving forward that the Renaissance is not the same program it was 20 years ago. is not even the same program
019it was 5 years ago. So, we got to keep moving the agenda forward that we are a school of choice for the River Falls community and that if you don't fit into um a traditional um academic setting, maybe the Renaissance Charter Academy is something that your family should could consider and maybe have some success with that. Um we know that we have um positive glowing reviews from families. they are in this together when we when we when their students don't want to come to school and it really kind of takes a a community effort to get their kids across the stage for graduation. And so they're grateful. I mean, we have a lot of fantastic emails that come through. We have a lot of tears that come through and they're just uh they're just eternally
020grateful for the program that our pro that our district has to offer. Sorry. Yeah. So, we took a look. We'll go into the data right after this, but we took a look at our student go growth that includes transfers from RFHS to RCA and then also open enrollments that came in. Um, we went into some of our community events that we attended out in the community, but then also hosted because we do have a brand new beautiful building and we want to make sure we showcase it and show off the things that our students have partnered with their teachers in making like you saw in the library space area, but also it's just a nice clean open space for people in the community to come and enjoy. And then like Peg said, partnering with Meyer
021and Riverfalls High School. You can go to the next one. So on the left side here, there's the student enrollment that you can see from term. So we crushed our well crushed we exceeded our goal moderately, modestly, 14.2% growth from term one to term four. So we're really excited about that. Um there was some steady enrollment, slower than I think Peg and I were kind of go-getters. um we wanted, you know, even more exponential growth, but we'll take what we can get. And we, you know, like Peg said, we saw the students coming in and worked with the families and we know that good growth means we have to put a lot of time and intention into it. Um we also have support from other schools. So, opening that partnership with Meyer, continuing a partnership
022with River Falls High School has been very beneficial because we can't get any new student enrollment if we're not partnering with our neighbors in the grades up, you know, above us, below us, and at the same that we need. And then there's a lot more general curiosity from the community that we've been really excited about. I think having a new building really helps with that. So again, we are super appreciative of the support of the school board and the community for that because our building is really awesome and people are like, "What is that? Is that a warehouse?" And then they come in and they're like, "Oh, it's a school. This looks amazing." Um, and you know, some pause data is that even though we do get a lot of people curious and coming in
023and wondering about our program, whether they're a potential student and family or they're just a um community member, there still is that stereotype that we're a last resort school, that all kids that come to us do drugs and they're bad and they're just going to juvie. So that is something that we p are very persistent in making sure that we're gently pushing against but also showing and showcasing what our students do and who they are and why they're so amazing and should be supported by the community. Um other piece of data community events attended six hosted eight and then had six events between meer and RFHS that we collaborated with the staff in being a part of. So, we're really excited about that partnership as well with the community and the schools. So, the um
024the events that we attended was the drug impairment training pair professional um training for educational professionals. Um the truency summit, we did an event at the riverfalls public library for mental health. Um we had fantastic participation at the school forest for tree planting. The craft fair was a huge hit and then with um Mr. Weiss and Mr. um Stapleton working really hard to get that ACE hardware partnership and they just keep making more stuff to send down to the the hardware store and we're really excited about that. Yeah. So, the hosted events, we are going to be having a STEM camp. I believe it's been community ed in August. We had Pierce County Reproductive Health come in. The Lions Club has hosted meetings with us. The AAW has hosted meetings with us. Um we have
025a running um hosting event with Pierce County Parent Education coming in once a month that we're really excited about. So they rent out our common space and then they rent out one of our classrooms. So they get to use that. St. Croy Valley Start, if you're not familiar with them, they work with RFHS and us and their great community partners. Teen Mental Health First Aid is being hosted through there and I have a new lead for hosting youth mental health first aid at the Renaissance this coming year. And then abundant yoga in River Falls as well. So th that's just from this year and we're really excited about that. We just think the more people that we can get exposed to our building, the more it gets them talking and then it just kind of
026popcorns throughout the entire community which is why we're so excited to invite people into into our space. And as we continue to move forward towards our growth, we're just going to make sure that we're being v uh diligent and v vigilant about our technology use um in regards to cell phones, but then also, you know, prioritizing the the technology that Mr. Weiss and Mr. um Stapleton have utilized in their classrooms and through their curriculum. Um and Miss u Miss Mueller and Mr. Colomb will continue to work for the different assessments for um literacy and such. I don't know if you know this, but Miss Mueller has a background in English language arts as well. That's why she's really imperative um in moving our goals and moving forward and then continuing to just partnership and other
027events with the the high school and continuing to utilize our space in the best way that we know how. Any questions? Thanks for listening to us. What's our capacity at the building? 100 is what we were told, but I think realistically 70 when we look at the stu student to staff ratio within the charter. It's 70 with the current staffing that we have. Is that so we'd have 100 for the buildings, 70 for the staff? I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. So there's room to grow. Absolutely. What we would have liked to have said tonight was like we need a referendum to build another space for their next year. We're just going to keep we're just going to keep hammering out that we've got a great space and an opportunity for students to be successful that may
028not have found success in other in other educational settings. So, it's been it's been a pleasure working with the high school as well. So, thank you for all of that. One of the things that we know well on the board is that our financial resources tend to run out before our ideas run out. I am really glad that we are able to fund the program that the two of you are leading. This is critically important if we are going to meet the need to have appropriate learning environments for all of our students. So, thank you for the work that you do. This is critically important for these kids. We agree. So, I hope Jerry, are you able to connect with folks at the middle school so that families recognize that this really is a good
029option for some kids who need a smaller space? That's something that I started last year with um working with the counseling team. So, Sam Duc because they do grade rotation. So, Sam Duc and I partnered last year to kind of get a a list of students that might be good candidates and then this year we partnered with the big high school and Meyer. So Jordan Ciphert to actually present to all students with Kit and the counseling team about the two choices that they do have. And then Peg went with a student representative to uh conferences I believe at Meyer. So that is Mhm. slowly rolling up and I think we're just going to keep growing because we've gotten great support from Meyer for that too because I think before it was not really a a
030pathway to start at the Renaissance as a freshman, but we're finding that when students start with us, it's very successful for them and they can actually find success first um right away with us and it doesn't have to be that last resort. And again, that's just rewriting the narrative, you know. So, that's what I was going to say. That's the way the narrative is going to shift. Yeah. So, also, I think you were very courageous to take on the no cell phone policy. Good for you. It's all Peg. She's wonderful. Good for you. Sometimes we have to do the really hard things because we know it's going to make a difference for our kids. And it sounds like you did it. I would say the overall thing that we're most pleased about is that a
031year ago when we would walk into the common space there would be nobody talking and like now when we walk into the common space students are chatting and they're laughing and they're playing games and they're being 100% present and one of the my another favorite comment that I've overheard staff say is like I actually now have to tell students to be quiet stop talking. Yes. So um it's um it's been really good and the staff been fantastic. So, appreciate this. Along those lines, I was really pleased to hear that that you did find buy in from families and students. Maybe it took a little bit of time, but um I think that's some of the reluctance initially to like forge into that ground in in making a big drastic change like as you're not just
032quite sure how it's going to go out, but it sounds like through some good conversations and honest conversations about why you're doing this. We want to protect our instructional time. We want to prioritize that social interaction with kids. And we see this as a staff as something that is preventing us to deliver the highest education possible that eventually students and and families did come around and they now see the value in that that difficult decision that you all made and the fact that you were all in it together and everyone was on the same board. I suspect that had a lot to do with your success. That's critical. So well done. Yeah. you know, I um we're we're really proud of this program and I think because in part because it's so unique and um
033in in fact and and in your presentation tonight, it's it's been obvious to us all year, Peggy, that your leadership is making a real difference. So really appreciate what you've done and what you're doing taking on these things and and Jerry and the other staff for being able to connect well with her and obviously you're working well together and that's a great sign for our kids. Good cup, bad cup. We're some of our parts. I just feel good inside. She's not She is not satisfied. So, as we move ahead with this and this this is so unique. I think there are people in the community who take it for granted. Either they're unfamiliar with it and take it for granted or they're very familiar with it and take it for granted. Um, but this is
034really unique and it occurred to me when you were talking is I know when Kit's up here, we're gonna we talked to him a lot about what are our peer institutions, who are you benchmarking again, what's New Richmond doing, what's Ellsworth doing, what's whatever our our our peer um programs are. Do we have such a thing for the Renaissance Academy? Do we bench Were you able to benchmark against anything? Do we have a peer? We don't have anything like this. When I was doing my administrator um certification um deep um the instructors from WMadison said I do not know why the River Falls model is not the statewide model for alternative education. So that spoke volumes when I was sharing about the program. Um but when we look at the other alternative education programs that
035are in the area, it's school within a school or a night school. It's it it doesn't have anything like River Falls has to offer. one more reason to get the deputy uh um secretary of education, superintendent of public instruction up here sometime soon just to sort of see this. But anyway, I appreciate that. Appreciate this information tonight. Keep it up. Well, and we can see that stats in our graduation rate, the fact that we have this compared to other districts. So, it's good. Awesome. Thank you very much. All right, we are going to move on to reports. And the first reports that we have are school resource officer annual reports. So welcome. Talk about good Brian. I was going to go. Uh so yes. So I'm officer Brian Justin. I've been with the school district
036for two. I just completed my seventh year. Uh this was my first year transitioning to the middle school and elementary school. Overall all I think it worked really well. Uh I got to meet a lot of new staff and a lot of new uh students uh which was great. Um I was in involved in a lot of health classes talking about drug education, alcohol. Um the health teacher came up to me at the end of the year and said, "Hey, just to let you know, I did a survey with the students and overwhelming they said they'd like to see you more in classrooms." Uh so that's awesome. I have a good feeling. Um, but so we are kind of looking into maybe do a online safety uh scenario with with the students and stuff. U
037Adam and I just went through their school resource officer convention last week and there was some uh nice uh AI uh presentations and stuff. I'm hoping to put some into their my presentations. Um otherwise uh fifth grade uh safety patrol uh that was a big thing to do work with and deal with. Now I see what officer G dealt with which is crazy. Um but a lot of organizations uh a lot of organization I should say. Um it just it really when you work together and see that and try to uh establish the picnic in the movie, you just realize how great this community is volunteer their time and our PTO's uh also helping with the financial uh burden can be hosted picnic and things of that nature. But our community really stepped up and
038uh definitely appreciates our school district on Oh, I don't know why I keep on. There you go. Like I said, it it was great to work with, uh, you know, everybody, you know, Pax, uh, River Falls Theater, um, uh, Westwind, um, I'm going to forget some people, Best Made Cookies, uh, bunch of other great, um, businesses around here. just really a great it was a lot of fun that way. Um and I think the only movie I've heard a lot of good reports with that talked to some students around that uh picnic um was towards the end of the year so I didn't get a chance to really talk with a lot of the students there. I remember the last day where I was chasing a bear around because we had a bear around about
039like block and a half away from our sixth grade as well as some of our fourth grade. Everyone was safe though. Let's not let's not give any misinformation. everyone over by Glenn Park. Uh had some great pictures if you want to see them. Uh so but uh but uh I uh went over there spotted at the sycamore. He was sitting on the edge of a bed. Oh, really? You saw the thing on Facebook pictures of bears at all the different business. It's crazy. Uh where I saw it was it was in a fenced backyard up a tree and I got some pictures of that and uh the bears looking right at me. Uh DNR got a lot closer than I would want to. Uh, but as the deer got closer to the dip bear, he
040started growling uh at it. Um, so it was kind of crazy, but uh I I said I talked to the guy. I said, "I'm going to give you my personal cell phone number. If it goes one way, I need to know. If it goes the other way, I need to know because I have people on both sides." Okay, I'll keep thanks. I appreciate it. So, uh, did they get the Did they get the bear out? So, my understand So, my my neighbor is actually the guy that takes care of nuisance animals. uh he he's a subcontract for the DNR. Uh and so he was already on a call moving another bear to another different location. Uh but because of there's a lot of Yeah, there's because of like farmland and population and everything else like
041that. Uh we just happen to have a lot of that around here. Uh so therefore moving the bear, you have in this location, you have to really move it up way up north to drop it off. Um, so on the way back, u I talked to him, spoken with him briefly, uh, just with my neighbor. I said, "Hey, did you get a chance to look at the bear?" He goes, "Yep. I'm hoping by nighttime it's gone." Um, he said, I said, "It looks pretty young, like a year, a year or two years." He goes, "Yeah, I think it's a year and a half. I think mom just kicked him out." And he doesn't know what to do. And so, he's just wandering around trying to figure things out. And I'm like, "Okay." So, we're going
042to give him the benefit of doubt tonight. And, uh, hopefully by nightfall he'll go in the woods and won't see him again. So, I'm like, "All right." So that was my understanding. Anyway, so yeah. So any questions there? Do you know when the safety patrol program started? That's uh that's a good question. I don't know. That was before officer G's time too as well. So it's been around it's been around for a long time. Wow. Since I since you were a patrol before that since Yeah. But I remember uh we went to um up to Willow River State Park. That was the right that we we that's where we went this year too. Still is. It still is. Still is. Yes. Uh but so my understanding that Lahan was one of the officers that planned
043that actually goes back to John Dingle was the Okay. Yeah. Officer Dingle. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. My understanding that what they do is to grab a bunch of charcoal and boil water and boil the hot dogs that way. Um I've learned from Chris it's a lot easier just to have gas and that's how we cook. So, uh, we just bring the gas up there and and hot dogs are done in no time flat. So, um, which is nice. So, so yeah, get them fed. So, it's just, uh, it's a lot of work. I mean, I investigator Ryan Miller helped me out with that, too, which was great. Uh, he had a daughter there, too, as well. So, uh, involved in the safety patrol. So, it's just kind of fun that, you know, daughter gets to see
044him in a different type of light, too, as well. So, it's a it's a great program and it's really fun. I take my kids to and from school every day. So, uh, it is just another way for our fifth graders to be bolstered in their conf confidence and their leadership at the building and to recognize that they they have an an additional set of responsibilities being oldest at the school and you it's fun to see them out there, particularly like the crossing guards and those that are out there really serious jobs. You know, see them out there confidently, you know, helping kids cross the street. It's wonderful. And they take their job seriously. and they're out there when it is so cold and windy and rainy and miserable and yet they get the job done.
045So, it's it's we're very fortunate to have that that program and it's it serves our kids very well. It Yeah, I I agree agree totally. Um and it's fun because after during the safety patrol um I'll I'll try to go hit all the schools up, you know, like throughout the week I try to hit one school uh like one day and another school and try to get all the elementarymentaries throughout that week. Uh, but one of the things I do is the safety patrol will come in. I'm like, "Hey, how's it going today? How did it go?" "Oh, good, good. You any trouble? Any issues?" "No, no." I'm like, "We'll keep up the good work, you know, and just try to connect with them a little bit as as because I was I wanted to
046mention something about safe control, too, because it's so critical and it's such a responsibility. I mean, when you're driving around town during those hours and you see those kids out there helping kids across the street and you realize kind of how dangerous that is generally, I mean, it really is good that it goes so far. But as you're saying this, it occurs to me that this might be something as the year starts. You know how we're always conscious about trying to put out information about school buses and the stop signs and don't pass a school bus. We ought to do something. You guys should do a video about the safety patrol. Who are they? What are they doing for people in town? Pay attention to them. Watch that kind of thing. I think the people
047in the community would be real receptive to seeing what those kids are doing and appreciate what they're doing. But also just a reminder to everybody that these kids take their job seriously. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think that'll be a good reminder for sure. 100%. Well, Brian, thank you. As I read through your report also, it seems to me that the theme that pro that goes through everything is relationships. Oh, for sure. And that's really important. That's what our vision is. And so, thank you for upholding that. And we've had a lot of school resource officer reports and we've never heard about bears before. This is very unique. You have Yes. So all right. Thanks. Thank you. Appreciate it. Adam, you are next. I'm going to apologize now. I have no advance story. So So I'm
048Officer Maro. I was with a false police department. Uh this was my first year in the high school. So I took over for Brian. Uh so I got to spend a little bit of last year. I think I started in what April at the high school and we was just able to see what he did and all that stuff. And then uh last year we also too attended at the SRO conference. So even though school ends on Friday of June 6, we spent last week at the SRO conference. Um so it's just a good networking because it's a Wisconsin based one. So there's two SRO conferences you can attend. So there's a national one which is I think this year was in Phoenix, Arizona and then there's also a Wisconsin one. So, it's good just
049to get with the Wisconsin guys just to see how well the SRO's in different parts of the state do things. Um, it's a good networking. We go while we attend uh little things here and there throughout the day. Um, and then so now we fast forward to when school started. So, first off, before I say anything, I just wanted to say thank you to uh this staff right here, Kit, Lisa, uh Heidi, Peg. they kind of uh we laid the foundation at the beginning of year what the expectations were when it came to the students and I think we did a a pretty good job of what the expectations were. I think just because of having a new SRO at the high school, everyone was kind of wondering, well, what's this guy going to do
050type deal, right? So, I I truly believe in everyone's an adult or they training to be an adult in high school. So, that's what we're going to do. We're going to treat kids like adults. So, um throughout the year, um we did football games, basketball games, wrestling matches. Um, also want to say special thank you to my counterpart Brian Jensen because even though I couldn't be at some because I'm still in the National Guard back home. Uh, he stepped up and was still able to attend those those uh, activities that way a police officer could be present there for the students and they were probably happy to see him face too. So, why not? Um, and then after that, uh, yeah, it was mainly working with staff being in the classrooms. Um, also too, I
051also did uh some alcohol and vaping things. Um, I think it's an eye-opening experience when kids start to realize how much money vaping and all that stuff or even being caught with alcohol is. Um, I know we teach that from a young age all the way up to high school. But now that they can be held accountable when they get into high school, it's and they see that that $70 citation how much it goes up and up and up in price. I think that kind of is a hindrance of getting kids to stop it. Um, and then my big event this year was the M car crash this year. So, the M car crash happens over at the hockey rink. So, we invite uh gosh, Alina, the fire department, the police department helps with it.
052Um, we tried to get a helicopter this year. I know they have been successful in the past of doing it, but unfortunately we weren't able to because they had a real world emergency. So they had to go do that literally like 10 minutes before it started. So, uh, they weren't able to come. Um, but once again, it's just a it's a good eye opening experience to have just how much work goes into it and all the resources that take the time to come and actually help with it. Um, we also have a Yeah, I'm going to get a new one. There we go. Uh we also have a mother of a a child who was killed by drunk driving that usually comes in and talks. So it's a very eye opening experience for the students
053to actually get the firsthand account of a parent who has actually been affected by that. Um prom was amazing this year. Uh senior night was also another big thing. Um, CNA is kind of like the the last night where we can I guess like really have a good time and interact with the kids. Um, cuz on graduation day I none of them want to see me. They want to get out of there as quickly as they possibly can. So, uh, you say congratulations in the beginning and then let them go about their business afterwards. And then, uh, yeah, that's it. Uh, it was a very good year. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the uh relationships that I built with uh not only the students but definitely the staff and uh parents. Um and I'm definitely
054looking forward to to next year. So any questions for me? I don't have a question, but I do have a comment and that's to say that I noticed in in your written report that you were talking about being proactive and I think of how important that is with our students, particularly at the high school level to prevent things. Um, so it also seems as if you were able to I mean it's a lot to take on in your first year to come into a school and to understand the culture and to to match that. So thank you. I I'm convinced that if all school districts had the kind of experience that we have with our school resource officers, everybody would want them. Yeah. and being proactive. It's what I do. Even back home when I
055was a cop in Massachusetts, I came from a city of over 100,000 people. So, I I love being proactive. I told myself I was never going to be the cop that just sat in the corner of a parking lot and did nothing. Like, that wasn't the thing that I wanted to do. I wanted to be out in the public and wanted to go ahead and show face to everyone. That way, people know that I'm here. I think that's the one thing I love from staff is hearing from staff is, man, I rarely ever see you in your office. And that's because I don't want to be in my office unless I have to be in my office. If I have to write a citation, do a report or whatever it is, that's really the only
056time you're ever going to really see me in my office. Other than that, I think I I can probably clock 10,000 steps a day walking around the school just being a face that the kids can see knowing that, okay, officer Mars in the hallways, then then we're good. We got nothing to worry about. So, I hope that's the uh that's the perception that I give to to the students and to the staff. So, that's great. Fantastic. Thank you. Um, this is a really good program for us and I I often marvel at the state level there's constant it seems to be constantly talk about legislation requiring school districts to have SRO these kinds of things for us it just seems so natural and works so well that that's that's a testament to the work you
057guys and your predecessors have done and to um this community and to the police department and the city um here that we partner with and we're so appreciative of the city and um their leadership in helping partner with these. It it it's it always strikes me that your your work is interesting and this is not that much difference I guess in terms of what you're supposed to do than um police officers generally, but your work is both prevention as well as intervention, right? And you need to be prepared for you need to be doing both at the same time. I just um I was really struck this last weekend um with the assassination and the events that happened in the Twin Cities over the weekend of the positive interventions that happened from local police forces
058that that didn't make that a large much larger tragedy than it was. And I just think these are the kinds of things in a community even like our school. It's the what are the positive interventions? What are the kinds of things that happen? And um I think we as a board have a lot of trust in you. The district has a lot of trust in you too and the work that you do because we know that first and foremost you're you're involved in prevention, but when the time comes for intervention, um we trust that you'll be there. You'll be the people running into the building. You'll be the people looking out for our students and those kinds of things. And it's an awesome responsibility. Um and we're glad you've taken it on. So thank you
059both very much for being here. All right. Works. Okay, we'll see. Um, we are going to move on to administrative reports and the first thing is we're going to be looking at wigs um at the secondary level and we will start with Meer Middle School and Mark and Cat, I believe you're up. All right. Well, good evening. Uh, I guess for people at home, my name is Mark Chapman. I'm the principal of Meer Middle School and with me is Cat Swanson. And I just want to do a quick shout out for Cat. She's been an invaluable addition to our staff. She took the time to to build connections and relationships with our staff to build that trust up and she built that trust up very very quickly because of those relationships and because of her
060expertise. And so I just can't thank her enough. All right, you go to the next slide. Does it work? Just try. Yeah. So our our goal that we strive for this year is that 90% of our uh students would be proficient on 80% of the standards measured by the end of the year assessment. So all of our core teachers created an assessment aligned to our priority standards. We had a midyear and an end of year assessment. And so this particular uh goal ties really nicely and is really relevant to our strategic plan which is holding high expectations for student learning. It also is really relevant to the work we're doing around standardsbased screening and we have been also tracking forward data for going on nine years now and one of the things we noticed and
061recognized was this disconnect between the results on our forward exam and our traditional grading system. So, we rolled it out this year and uh it was challenging to say the least, but we're really proud of the work that our staff is doing around standard based grading. Uh some of the the data too I mentioned the forward trend data. I'm not going to open this up just for to keep this moving along. If you have time and you want to look, we have been tracking this data for a very long time. Uh slides five and six in particular. Slide five tracks our our cohort data over the last you know the classes that have come through looking at that growth. Uh slide six when you open it up compares to art. Alan mentioned the the benchmarks
062to other districts Hudson Richmond o every fifth sixth seventh and eighth grade tracking ELA and math that 30,000 foot view. Slide 25 has got a breakdown of all the of our broken down by standard from the Ford exam. So we can identify which which standards we need to work on, which ones we're doing well on. That helped us with our u curriculum review cycle as well looking at that information. And then same thing with our math on slides 26, 27, and 28. It has all that information that we've been tracking this data for a very long time. You guys want to take out a piece of paper? No, I'm just kidding. Not if you want to click on the link. I thought it'd be interesting. We didn't do this the first time around. This is
063an eighth grade eighth grade assessment at the end of the year. You can scroll down. So, it's broken down by house, student name, section that they're in, and then in the parentheses, those are the different standards. I don't have the answer key, so I can't help you. I think one of the challenging things that you cat was really instrumental in in helping teachers with collecting this data and analyzing the data and I think some of the tricky part to this maybe you want to talk talk about it but I'll just go ahead. Sure. Uh the data collection part is very time consuming. you have, for example, this eighth grade group, the science teachers have 18 priority standards, which is a lot and some revisions do need to happen. Uh, but when you have 140 students
064and 18 priority standards, you're looking at every student to 18 standards and that takes a long time to collect that data. Uh, you can use spreadsheets and formulas and try to find programs online, but there's all these roadblocks that get in the way. maybe you have to pay for the program that's going to do the collection for you or the formulas aren't working or it's an extension you have to add all these things kept happening so it was very timeconuming and uh I wanted to take that off the teacher's plate so I offered to do the data collecting for them just because it may have taken me an hour but that would have been a whole week of prep for a teacher so I wanted to do that uh to support them but even looking
065back and looking at the time I spent on that was probably not the best use of even my time thinking of how much that was. So, we do need to put a system in place to try to streamline that that collection of the data and I have ideas for it. So, we'll that's one of my goals this summer is to think of ways that we can do that a little bit more efficiently because it is it's a lot. So, it's a you have I mean for the end of the year assessment we had 111 standards with to to analyze. You go back to the beginning our commitments to our lead measures. uh include our weekly PLC meetings. Cat was again really uh I don't know how many you attended each every Thursday were our meetings
066and we had them spread throughout the day and we probably got as many as you could on on Thursday. So being a big big support there. Um one of the things I think we could do a better job on next year is being a little bit more consistent with the data common data protocols and I think we have some ideas in place for that for next year. One thing we were really proud of is our assessment calendar. It was really really fun for me to go into a sore language arts teachers classroom and see the learning target up in gold house and then go into blue house it's the same learning target or if I walk in and they're given the same assessment within a day or two that that takes a lot of communication
067a lot of collaboration so that's something that we're really proud of and that's really helpful for special ed teachers as well so they can look at the assessment calendar and see what assessments are happening that week for their students in what classes. is we're going to give him these we're going to highlight some of these but these are just for your reference if you want to look at these. So the the top link was from the midyear data the second link was all the data from the growth that we see from midyear to end of the year. Uh and then the data tracking template we'll talk about cat will actually talk about that. This is new to I didn't do this the first time around but I was really curious. So I took all of
068the u percentages of students scoring proficient on each of the standards for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade for each subject area. And you can see that the averages where our students were proficient. So with ELA uh so that's just mostly the the writing standards 56% of our students were proficient literature 73% and you can just go on on down the line. I did combine ELA and lit because they are combined on the four exam. I just want to do a comparable there as well. So, this is the data that's connected to our WIG goal, which is 90% of students will be proficient on 80% of the standards. And I always have to stop and think about that. Um, so what you're looking at in the column that is green, that is showing that 90% of
069our students were proficient by the end of the year on 26% of the standards. And that's 111 standards. When we gave the midyear assessments, 90% of our students were proficient on 14.5% of the standards, roughly about half of that, so 62. That did not that's not our we did not reach our target, but we expected that because this year we had no baseline data. We were developing the assessments which on its own took quite a bit of time. You can use all the tools, you can use AI, but even using AI effectively is a skill within itself and teachers have not been trained on how to do that. So, uh, building the assessments on their own was a really heavy lift. But now we have that baseline data and we have data protocols and we're
070going to talk about that this summer and try to start next year um, looking at all of that. But even though we didn't meet that target, we do have data to celebrate. We have 70% of our students were proficient on 71% of the standards, which is still really great. And then social studies and science, our students did really well, which is pretty standard and secondary. Uh so 80% of the standards were proficient on 26 out of 27 standards in social studies. And those are very skill-based. The standards are not very content heavy. Um and then 70% of the students were proficient on 28 out of 40 standards in science. Those are very dense. Those standards are a lot. We also had a lot of growth. So if you're looking at yes, we're looking at proficiency,
071but we should also look at the growth and that's important too. So language arts for example in those classes that those teachers are focusing on the writing standards and the language standards. Um they did not have the greatest proficiency, but they had by far the greatest growth and that is incredibly valuable and something worth celebrating. So 87.5% growth is amazing. Uh so we should definitely give them credit for that. This is how we collected the data. So we um have been keeping track on spreadsheets. We have all of their priority standards for every teacher on the spreadsheet. We collect it uh at the midyear time. We did it by class. How many students were proficient? And then we have the standard again looking at the end ofear assessment. How many were proficient that time? and
072we're able to do that direct comparison and then we'll keep doing this the next two years and we'll do it on the same spreadsheet so we have that data over time. Talk about labor intensive. I was going to take a picture of my desk right now because I must have I don't know how many purple post-it notes and every purple post-it note has a grade level for content with a ton of numbers on it and then so we got to figure out system my eyes were kind of bugging out after for sure. So with that data we now have a really good starting place for the next school year. Um so we need to respond to it and the best way to do that is with uh the data protocols that we had mentioned which
073is essentially agreed upon steps that our PLC members will go through to make decisions on what to do instructionally with that data. So you will um come together as a team look at your data uh talk through it and then start making decisions on well what worked and what didn't work and now what do we do tomorrow? what do we do the next week with that data? Sometimes that can feel like one more thing to do as a teacher. And that's important for us to make sure that we approach that carefully and thoughtfully and just remind teachers that you're doing this anyways. You're looking at data anyways. That's natural for teachers. Um, a lot of times though, we make decisions just off of our gut because we know, we just know and we do it
074and we're probably not wrong. But you want to keep track of that and document that so that you can better support your students down the road. Because once you document it, you can look at those patterns over time. And then when you're advocating for student needs, you can say, "Well, look, I we've talked about this and this isn't working and this or this is working." So we need to put value in the data protocols and hopefully have buyin from the staff. All right. So next steps for us, uh, one is just review the rigor of our midyear and end of year assessments. Again, writing those assessments are tricky. Getting them aligned to the standards uh is challenging. Uh so that's the first thing. Our uh grade level colleagues, department colleagues will be reviewing the end
075of the year assessment data to identify strengths and areas for growth. And that includes having discussions about what's working, what's not working. That's happening already in our collaboration time. Um but we find out that there's some standards the teacher did really well on and maybe the other teacher didn't. So let's have a conversation about what's working, what's not working. Um the other thing we want to do is take a look now at how our kids did by standard on the Ford exam compared to how they did on the mid and endear assessment. So trying to connect those dots as well. And then finally designing one of our goals for next year is designing a common form of assessment with the response day built in as well. Lastly, uh things we're most proud of this year
076is the hard work of our staff. This has been a three year, like I've said, it's been three years in the making and it's been a lot of work. um and just our our keen focus on student learning. Uh one thing that's was really really fun to see and I know this is a lot of work for our teachers, but the individual feedback when I see Leah Fletcher or Jenny Licky passing back uh an assessment that has six questions on it align each standard with a score for each standard with feedback that takes an incredible amount of time and kids are it's dialed in. It's it's by student by standard and and that's uniquely challenging. Uh but it's a great way for our kids and our staff to know exactly where our kids are at
077in their learning. So um and high levels of collaboration happening at PLC. It's just what we do now. It's just part of our culture and I think it's a really cool thing and having the support of CAT there has been great. Um and then I mentioned alignment of our scope and sequence but I can come into a classroom and know that within a day or two I can see the same learning target and they're getting the same assessments. So proud of our staff. questions. So tell us about the data because getting the data and being able to put it in a way that is useful that is not going to take sticky notes and all of your time because all of the I mean the wigs are based on being able to report data to
078be able to show growth. So we have to be able to do that. Now I thought that we bought I mean don't we have educ that doesn't help you? Educr isn't what you need is I guess the question to get this done. Um there are a couple programs Amy and I are investigating. Uh but Educ does not collect um by student bystandard data and there I mean there's things that I've been looking at and learning more about and practicing and making some sample assessments and I'll keep doing that. I'll then have to convert all of those assessments to that. But I'm willing to spend time to do that if it makes the data collection smoother because counting is just tedious and not something we want to be doing. Um the other idea we've thought about
079is having students be involved in it as well. So if we can create a student reflective component to it. So they are looking at their score and they're analyzing it and then maybe doing like error analysis or um responding to their own data. they essentially can kind of do part of it with us. So I have I'm thinking even thinking on it using Google forms is great but when you have three questions based on the same standard and trying to get that you still have there's still a human factor that that has to do some of that scoring well the it took me a day to do it like to me I'll do that for a day it's just it is labor intensive but if I I need to take a day to do it
080I'll do it if there's not a resource out there it sounds like it was a lot but it but it wasn't like I spent she spent way more time on the looking at the assessment part I was doing the overall ties in total. So the challenge for both the middle school and the high school with their data collection is the repeated opportunities students get to prove their learning. So we're looking for evidence of their learning multiple times. It's not a one time and done. They're doing it at the middle school, you know, m beginning of the year, middle of the year, end of the year. So it's not each one of us have one test. each one of us have three tests and then multiply that by 250 and then multiply that by three and
081that's how many times it's showing up that you have to look for evidence of their learning and all of that is done through our infinite campus program but we can't pull that data specifically out of infinite campus because it would be looking for example Mark's uh science test he showed you it would be like question one is this standard question two is this other standard so you need an assessment education an educational platform that breaks it down by question. So we can look how did kids score on this science question number one the beginning mid and six seven and eight because there's different standards then also for each one of those grades. So I think cat said 121 111 111 total that we would be tracking at the middle school. I think the other talk
082about maybe I mentioned this but I didn't is the retention our kids retaining and this came up last year their math our math teachers were doing interim assessments three or four times a year I think it was every quarter wasn't it last year actually here um there's quarterly but but the point was kids that took it in the first quarter weren't necessarily retaining it at the end and so this is one of the reasons why we're focusing on that like we're teaching it but are we coming back to it if it's that important that it's a priority standard are they retaining that information or skills That's a lot to be thinking. I I I love we've got all this data collection. I I think my concern is always is that the data collection doesn't get
083in the way of the learning. It's meant to enhance the learning, but I mean, you hear me say it every once in a while, you know, we ran weigh and the pig don't make it any fatter. um we spend too much time assessing and not enough time reacting to it. Um just assessing them doesn't necessarily get us and if it's too much time then you got to tell us that because we're expecting data but if that's if that's not getting us where we need to be then um we need to do something about it. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. You guys are already up here. All right. I'm Lisa Go, assistant principal um with Heidi Link, assistant principal. Kit Lake, principal for anybody watching at home. Um so we were here
084in March and we explained a lot of the basis of what we are doing and how we're doing it. So today we're going to lightly touch on where we've been, show you some data on where we are right now, and talk about also where we're going. So, as you maybe recall, our Wig at the high school is by 2027, all students at the high school will achieve and sustain mastery of reading comprehension or will achieve at least 10% growth each year as they progress toward reading mastery. What we did this year was um first semester we had a pilot group of teachers who um created and implemented reading and response activities and um track their data for that and then help roll it out for all all teachers in the second semester where teachers were
085doing reading response activities beginning in um the end of the term each term and also supplementing and supporting that with reading um instruction at the high school that we focused on in our um professional development. ment um teaching high school teachers, reminding them how do we teach reading at the high school. So that was this year. Next year we're moving into um including more reading response activities and also looking at what went well, what did not go well this year so we can refine what we do, maybe make our collections a little bit more um targeted so that they're giving us the data that we want. And hopefully by the end of the three years being able to have not only um showing growth and and having really good data for that to support um
086what we hope is going to happen, but also have some intervention and support systems set up so that we can continue the work with that. Um, I kind of touched on a little bit of this already. Um, the data we were pulling from our reading response activities twice a term. Um, and also our long-term measures our ACT and Heidi will talk about that shortly. Um, every student and every class the reading response activities basically a passage with about nine questions that reflect three different levels of the ACT levels of questioning. And then our our hope was to show growth over time in these activities and find out where are they lacking or where can we support them even more in the curriculum. I'm going turn it over to Heidi for data. Okay. So as Cat
087said, sometimes looking at the data can be um a lot. So I have I have some pieces highlighted just in terms of our growth this year. Um but we looked at both qualitative and quantitative data from the teachers coming in because this year is year one of implementation, right? So the qualitative data that we got from them was really telling us like what professional development needs that they're going to need for next year um and how they felt like it went versus the quantitative data that we'll kind of talk through for some of the pieces here. Um so in the last time that we were with you guys um back in March we talked about some of that immediate um implementation of the reading strategies that we had piloted and like shared with teachers for
088those tier one. um during quarter 4 we saw an increase in the number of strategies that were being used and the number um of teachers using more than one of them. So that was really exciting to see. The key ones being in activating prior knowledge and key vocabulary in that qualitative data from teachers that was one of the main areas that they said they're still noticing like skill deficits for students is in academic vocabulary and just vocabulary in general. Um a number of teachers on the math team said like we need to quit using baby terms for some of the things and really make sure that we're bolstering students academic vocabulary. Um so we saw that being implemented more and more in classes which was a really exciting shift for us most definitely. Um the
089other one in our social studies and a lot of the other areas science worked on annotation. Um, but teachers overwhelmingly just said if we're actually establishing the purpose and teaching kids that as that tier one strategy, it makes them perform much better or they do better because they know what they're reading for, right? And so for a number of our teachers, just giving them those reminders and foundational strategies they said was like imperative or very very helpful this year. Um, as Lisa said, from quarter two or first semester to quarter three, quarter three was their first try at it, right? And so from quarter 3 to quarter four, one celebration we had as an admin team is that we had a 5% growth in the number of students that were actually tested um because for
090that data I took the number of enrolled seat counts, right, and the number of data submitted for each teacher um and made sure that we looked at that. And so we had 5% growth just in the one quarter in terms of implementation despite having long-term subs in the building for certain people um and shifts in staff. And then we also when we looked at currently right now our baseline for the assessments that were created this year it said that on average 84% of our students were scoring at proficiency on our wig assessments. Now that looks really good on there but that is a moment of pause for us administratively because when we compare that to our ACT performance um or the preACT performance they're scoring way too high. Um there were a number of staff
091that reported that students were using chat GPT or some other things as they were taking it um to cheat on some of the assessments. So trying to figure out how we can bypass that even yeah even with that. Um, so there are a number of things that we want to try to refine and have um that our teachers are being really reflective and saying we need to bolster the rigor that's going with that and have the match because when we look at our incoming ninth graders like English for example, incoming ninth graders in English right now in the below 13 score right so the lowest score for the ACT we're averaging between 30 to 45% of our students starting in that range for the practice act um for below 13. So that is like not
092um representative in that area. Down at the bottom when you look at um like the cohort. So each of those colors shows a particular graduating cohort for class of 2025. So our outgoing kiddos um and then going up to our current freshman who just had their first assessment on the right hand side there. And so the scores that are at their bottom at the on the bottom are their composits for each of those cohorts on that particular assessment. Now what you'll notice is the class of 2025 had the sophomore slump as a lot of like surrounding district um administrators will talk about a celebration that we have for ourselves is that starting with our class of 2026, we have not had a sophomore slump since. We haven't had a dip in the scores since then.
093Um we also are trying to look at the longitudinal data and say what is our growth factor right and what are we um providing for our students in growth compared to what their predictive score is on the ACT and what we actually have them scoring on. So like class of 2025 when they came in their predicative score for the ACT was right at about a 20 20.5 um between their freshman and sophomore year and then it was very close on par for where that was. But with our class of 2026 and class of 2027, you'll notice that we've been having a higher jump um between their 10th and 11th grade scores. And on average, we're usually averaging about a 0.5 um to a onepoint growth like as a a typical. This year, we have a
094huge celebration for our class of 2026 though, and that's the part that's highlighted there in yellow because their a score actually went up by 2.5 points um from their 10th grade year at an 18.5 to a 21, which was a huge celebration um for our staff. Now, we want to be able to dig into the actual like subs skills, right, in each of those areas and be able to have more targeted um time in each of those areas, but looking at as a whole picture for our staff to be able to say where are we at? How are we growing? Um and then this year was really about our baseline. So, trying to create what is that foundation and knowing where we need to start and kind of launch from. So higher implementation um and
095fidelity with number of students being tested and bolstering the rigor um are definite ones. And that kind of leads us to some of our next steps when it goes into some of the content literacy pieces. I do want to go back just because we see the the orange. I want to just talk about the orange cohorts and the far right just a little bit. You can see again where current sophomores uh with the start of a 16.9 in last year's assessment, they're making growth, but we're starting at a lower if we're looking at things on a ladder, we're starting at a lower ladder run. And that's a worry for us. One of the things that you'll hear we'll talk about in the lake side of things and what we're working on this summer is the
096worry of we're now very good right behind Nate. I'm pointing at you. Sorry. Um we the ACT will predict that we'll be roughly at an 18.5. So if you see that in 25 26 right that they'll predict that that court roughly will be that we typically beat the predictor score by about6 to 1.0 or more. So we can consistently think and believe that if we don't do anything at all between now and next March our students potentially will score between a 19.1 and a 19.6. That for us is unsettling. As a as a leadership team, as an administrative team, uh in the 17 plus years as an administrator, we've never been below a 20. And so I don't I hope we're back here a year from now that that is not what our predictor score
097is. But we do need to do something more. Um the the struggle I think when we look at it is again staying really core to our wig. We know that literacy again is going to make a difference not only in students in all of our academic areas, but also now kind of again honestly feeling that bit of pressure, right? That little bit of test pressure that we're going to have to do more than the wig itself in our opinion. So, as we're meeting and looking at our data here after the school year has ended, as we meet and talk with 25 plus of our leadership team members in July, we're going to try to solve that problem, which is that lagging this this lag number here that we know might show up that we want
098to essentially beat beyond that curve, similar to what we beat beyond the curve for our class of 2026. That's a steep uh road to climb in the nine months that we have uh between now and March. And so we're going to look for your uh input and feedback along with that. We'll talk with our central office team about that. One of the things that again we have been I don't want to say reluctant to do, but we talk about whether it's test prep working with ACT suites beyond just the March exams. Is it something we need to practice more with our kids or not? Are we at that spot where most districts are in that realm already? Um, and really talking honestly about that as a district. Talking about is that what we want for
099you and us and our board and everyone to to prepare our kids for that exam. Besides the wig, we know that the wig inherently is extremely important in practicing literacy, practicing ACT like questions and reading those, but are we going to go beyond that and start talking openly about potentially some ACT prep types of materials that we're going to be exposing our students to coming up potentially into the fall? Because again, looking at where our data is headed, okay, with that particular cohort, and it's not blaming the cohort by any means. You can see again our current ninth graders at about a 17.6. You can go back and look at other predictors. We could go back even in the early precoid and see kind of the same structure of this that these these these um
100gaps that we're increasing or that we're actually decreasing and improving our scores are pretty consistent. So I'm again pretty confident that we will get back above a 20 with that current freshman class. hopefully well above that like well above that if the work we're doing is great but again there's this temporary group that we want to make sure we serve better so that they perform at their highest levels coming up in March does that make sense so we've got looking at the data thanks to Heidi thanks to Mary Beth we now can really get into not only composits but to subcores to where students are showing patterns of behavior amongst cohorts and subcores in math in and English and our other areas in science that we can really drill down to it a little bit
101further. So, responding again to our leg data, again, I want to thank uh both our two assistant principles. They've been great leaders in both interventions and strategies with what Lisa has been doing in helping our teachers understand what tier one interventions look like, what reading strategies look like. They've been doing an excellent job. Heidi has been doing just a phenomenal job leading the data protocols, looking at our data, compiling again um two tests for one kid in four classes times a thousand students in that takes a lot just to get that 84.32%. It's a lot to look at. There's no easy way to do that. Similar to the challenges at Meer Middle School and we want to get better at that. And again, thanks to the hard work both of Mary Beth and and Lisa,
102Mary Beth and Heidi in all of those data protocols. So again, I think what we need to continue to do is focus and stay focused on the wig. We don't want to deviate because we have a worry of where our ACT score may go or may not go. We're going to stick to what we're doing with the wig and in the literacy and looking at our u elmss uh protocol and and interventions related to that. We're going to again provide greater clarity. Remember, our teachers have only implemented this for one semester of our three-year goal. So, we want to stay the course on that and get better at it. One of the things that we're considering when we look at uh this particular long-term measurement, when you see the reading activity level, we have teachers
103coming in and saying, "Our kids are are doing too well on this end. Maybe we do need to raise the bar up, move everything up even more of a notch in terms of rigor on the assessment." So, that's one of the things we'll talk about at our data retreat is is these first three questions that we have quote unquote too easy for our kids that they're kind of throwaways and do we need to move this up? That'll be a debate when we actually look deeper into our individual student data amongst our cohorts with that. So, again, we're trying again to look at how we will raise the bar and and how we will continue to do that. Um, next year again, we're continuing to work with our PLC teams. We will continue to work on
104those tier one reading uh strategies. We'll continue to look at tier two and tier three interventions with our teams and our student services. And again, I think the successes that we have is that we've learned a lot about how we work together in our PLC notebooks, how we work together in our PLC protocols with staff. Our staff are understanding what data looks like in sharing it and looking at assessments. I can walk. I walked into uh a classroom, a FIAD classroom 3 weeks before school got out and I was asking what kids were doing, but we're working on our wig. Mr. Lkey, her kids are even using that language, which may or may not be good, but we they know what a wig is, or at least they know it's an assessment of some kind.
105Um, so we're we're really proud of the hard work that our staff have done. Really proud of the teaming and the leadership teams that we have. Shout out to our PLC leadership team, our BLT leadership team, and our intervention teams. They're just doing a great job. And again, without these two alongside, uh, none of this would be possible. They do just excellent work dayto day. Any questions? Okay. Um, couple of questions. So, one is, um, the ACT scores we're seeing the pre-ACT um, those things that's aggregated data. So, that's average, right? It's we're showing you the composits, correct? show composite. So sometimes these are are significantly influenced because at at some point um a high school's uh test average test scores might be higher because they've got this core group of students who are really
106high flyers. They score very high and they pull everybody else's score up. Another high school might have students at the other end um score very poorly and they pull everybody's down. Is this distributed somewhat evenly or do we have groups like that? we have like the latter that you mentioned is that we have a a group of uh individuals again one of the things we have to think about too is one we were talking even today is like how different is the forward exam compared to a preacct right because when Mark's sharing his 2016 to 2024 data I'm like we got to look at 8th and 9th grade let's go back even further on these cohorts to see where forward data is and what we can even see from that um because I'm curious as
107how often are kids exposed to something like that timed form of a test that as an ACT and I know they're similar in nature but for your answering your question we have a a larger bottom third the third than we would care to see at this particular point in time that we have to really have that's why we're focused again on some of the intervention strategies that we have to bring that bottom tier up out of the 13 and lower uh cohorts right and it it could be in English it can be in science it depends on the specific areas of subject okay because that's good to know because um and it is dangerous because if you've got two um competing extremes that that's not doing anything for your kids in the middle and it's
108it's throwing off the data. So I I'm I was assuming and I I get this that you're identifying pockets within that that you're addressing. One of my fears and I would um suggest that this is it. But one of my concerns is that um our overall curriculum maybe isn't rigorous enough or that excuse or maybe not not that it's not rigorous enough but our students may not be as pursuing as rigorous a curriculum as they used to given factors like for example the W system schools with the exception of Madison are admitting 80 90% plus of the students who apply. There's no longer the pressure that was there 15 years ago, 20 years ago to take more rigorous courses, take college prep courses, which we no longer kind of differentiate and and and and because
109it's a a curriculum based test that that typically influences the test scores. So, is the pressure off for students to take a more rigorous curriculum and and do we have some of that going on? Again, not having it in front of me, but my hunch in working with the master schedule for over a decade plus would be that we still have the same number, if not more students taking AP level courses. Remember when a decade ago, we only had three AP or four AP classes. Now we're offering six or seven AP classes plus DACP classes plus tech college credit. So, I do think our kids are getting levels of rigor. The question I think also still is the one test, the one day, are they honestly taking it seriously enough now knowing that it isn't
110as influential or critical as it used to be? Yeah, that's good. H how to convince a ninth grader to treat that seriously so they have a projected goal to be at their junior year and creating academic plans around that or intervention plans or being pointed of where we need to work on deficiencies is something I think we have to still get better at. I I would assume that an AP course would have a significant impact on our ACT scores. I would not make that automatic assumption on college courses. Okay? They may or they may not because they're and and not that they're not taught with rigor, it's that they're taught the different standards and those kinds of things. So if they're taking college calculus as opposed to high school calculus, it may or may not
111affect their score in the same way. So that may it's an advantage to the kid to cumulate college credits, but it may or may not be impacting their their test scores and mathematics. Just that example, more of it is way less on calculus than it is on geometry and algebra 2 and algebra 1 skills too. Right. Sure. So, and we have algebra um one uh rates similar to what we used to as or is there increase in pre-alggebra, lower math, those kinds of things? I have I still only have one cohort of it. We now co-e that. We're very clear on who we have in there and why. And it is datab based. It's not any gut decisions anymore or even recommendations. We really are putting placing kids where they should be in mathematics. So,
112there are little things that we want to dig into more. Remember that what we just presented is fresh with us in the last 10 days and what we've compiled. We're excited to meet with the 20 plus staff that we are having in July again thanks to your support to have that data retreat and really boil down some of the great things that we're doing and then also taking a look at where where do we need some really quick heavy lifting and and quick work. Sure. And and and handoffs from the other grades to where you're coming. So that because I mean the obvious question this year is so how did we get here? Um and you can't point fingers because big problems about co COVID and a whole variety of other kinds of things. But
113it's going to have to be because you're where all of our students end up. It's it's I always say that at graduation, you know, this is this is the funnel where they're all coming from four elementary schools to one middle school to high school here. And um so it it's it it all aligns. But I anyway I I I was curious about that and then how what's going on at our ask us rhetorically. You don't need to necessarily respond as but what's going on at our our peer institutions or benchmark institutions. Are they seeing a similar trend or is it just unique to us? That's we discussed that as well today is that we need to dig into that. So everybody at our levels are looking at that data now as it's coming out. We're
114going to get AP scores in June as well too that we tap a lot of those same cohorts or comparable schools that I have we have enough networking between the three of us that we can call and say like are you seeing some of the same things we are or are we way off and we want to look at some of that as well too. We haven't had a chance to do that. Great questions. K. It seems like um this year you were primarily focused on that tier one level. I'm curious to know if you can share a little bit about plans or even current practices tier 2 and tier three development of those types of interventions where we're at there and serving some of those kids that would that really need some support. That
115was really development this year. So, um there's a literacy intervention class that one of our teachers is doing and so really working on refining that and determining criteria. So, that was like a big um task this year because there isn't a universal screener at the high school level similar to what Jerry was talking about earlier. We don't have the forward or anything like that. So, it was um digging into, you know, where they had been with their forward scores coming in um what percentile they were scoring on with some of the different tasks and then looking at F reports and things like that for academic struggles. Um but I know that Lisa's working hard with Becky on that. So it it still comes down to some staffing and resource issues too to prioritize, right? Um
116so again, we have a language arts teacher that we pull for two blocks instead of working in regular curriculum, working as an interventionist with identified students. We pull back on the math intervention and they've now placed it in a co-eing model at our pre-alggebra level, looking at it from a proactive response meth. If we know who those kids are, let's put another person in to co-e and work with those students and really build the foundational skills in mathematics early and often instead of waiting until we see it, right? Uh in science and social studies, we don't have anything yet. And when we look at literacy as a full goal, there's not a tier 2 or three other than the pulling a language arts teacher out who's a reading as a licensed reading specialist to do
117added work with roughly 8 to 10 kids in nine weeks. It's the the system doesn't allow us to deliver it as well as we would like yet. Both the block schedule kind of plays a role in that because you can't do an intervention for 80 minutes a day, 5 days a week. That's going to kill that student and the teacher in that. So, we have to find better vehicles to create tier 2 and tier three interventions. But speaking to that more, like one of our hopes for next year that we talked about is being really intentional with that win time and if each of our content areas is able to identify content literacy focuses, right, and be able to say at this class we're focusing on these skills and then during that win time, hopefully
118the tier 2, right, would be more during that time where they could pull and support students. And then if that's not working, then to be able to look at some of those additional support. A lot of the tier one too that we went through were are practices that tend to be tier 2 and pulling them into create tier one when they're recognizing that several students might have you know deficit in one area to bring that tier 2 practice in in as a tier one so it can help benefit everyone. So that was kind of the approach we took. So some of the things that we talk about as tier one can be used as tier two but that's as far as we've gotten with that. Thank you. Two very brief things. The first thing is
119to say thank you for all of this. It's going to be exciting to see where we go next next year with all of this because this feels like we've started the foundation. Second thing is more of a rhetorical statement which is to say when we're dealing with data and we're dealing with students, how do we know that the data is telling us what we think it's telling us? We don't do I'll try and tell you that. I'll try to answer that next. June, I'll write that down. Just like what was the you can't what is the pig wig thing that you said the pig Oh no. All right. Thank you. Yes. Mark, you get to come up next to talk about your wig for student services, please. All right. Well, I brought Oh, no. I
120didn't bring any. I promise I have friends. I really do. Um, I just spoke to you guys in April, so I I'll go maybe a little briefer than Kit. Um, but thank you. Okay, come on. Is it turned off? He might have turned it off. Oh, he did that to me on purpose. Jeez, I can see it. Did I sabotage it for you? I think you must have because you cut me deep. I can do it. I got Okay, so just a just a reminder. Um, special education's wildly important goal was that 80% of our students would show above average growth on the uh, bas basically measured by the student growth percentile of over 65. That essentially means um that a student starting at a particular score um data they calculate data and they say
121this is about the average expected growth that a student starting at this point in time would get and we want to be above that growth. So that was overall our our goal. So student growth percentile above 85 or above a 65 which essentially is called high growth. Skip the next one and the next one. Okay. So this is essentially our endofear data when it comes to looking at our wig. And I've got a couple of different columns there. Um the first column is the average student growth percentile when you took um all the students um in special ed that were tested. And then columns three, four, and five really are the breakdown between high growth, average growth, and low growth. Um, this is based on a couple of different measures. Um, you'll see we used
122Ames Web for kindergarten through third grade. Um, Fastbridgeidge was for four and five. Um, and then STAR was middle school and high school. So that first column, the average SGP um again if you think of um the exact average expected growth being a 50th percentile, you can kind of see where those numbers lie right there. So obviously one of the things that stands out is our kindergarten numbers. Um those are below 50, which kind of is kind of a question mark for us. That's something that we want to to look at a little further. Um our other numbers in one three middle school and high school were all above 50 as far as that average growth. The next column over you can see is kind of our percent of of high growth. Again, our goal
123here was 80% and you can see that we we didn't quite meet that or didn't meet that by a lot. Um so essentially, you know, our high growth numbers um looking at that um you know 43.8% in in first through third grade. Um 36 in middle school, 32.4 in high school. Um, one I guess positive, again, not necessarily related to our goal, but if you combine our average growth and our high growth together, um, we were kind of in that 75% range in first through third grade, um, 64 in middle and about 70% um, in high school. So, again, didn't meet our goal, but we are showing, you know, some promise as far as kind of our percentage of students um, that are high growth um, or average growth. Obviously, the low growth column is
124a column that, you know, is a concern for us. Um, and I think one of the things that we want to spend some time on is looking at, you know, characteristics of those students. Um, seeing if there's any commonalities, you know, why are those students not growing at a rate that we want to see them growing at. Um, so that will be some important conversations um, going forward. But that's just kind of a review of kind of where we ended up um, as far as endear. Um, as I mentioned in prior presentations, this is kind of our baseline. So this is what we're kind of using to say this is kind of what we have um, at this point in time. Um, and now kind of using this data to look really carefully at, you
125know, what are some of the things that we do, some of the resources we use, um, some of the, you know, special education delivery strategies, whether it be co-eing or, you know, making sure that they're in core and pulling them out for supplemental instruction, you know, providing pair professional support and things like that. Um, and seeing, you know, are there any certain models that make gives us more bang for our buck um, than the others. Um, so again, that's just kind of um, some of our our endofear data. Um I think one thing that would be important you can skip ahead a couple more slides is really our keep going and one more really our 202526 planning and I've covered some of this before in kind of a brief measure. One thing that I think
126will be really important now that we have some baseline data we know kind of where we were this year as far as you know even fall to winter and then fall to spring as far as those numbers go. um is really kind of establishing kind of a a schedule of many data review meetings. Um I think when we do it like in one big chunk at the end of the year or at one point in time in the year um there's a tendency to not be quite as invested if we have a series of little mini meetings where we kind of keep after this data and after every screening period we sit down and we look at okay this is what our data tells us have some guiding questions and we build that into the
127schedule. I think that will be really important for our staff as far as looking at that on a regular basis and not just at certain points in time. Um having an established protocol for kind of pulling those reports. I think someone mentioned just kind of the whole efficiency in doing that. Um one thing that was really cool is I spent a lot of time pulling a big report in the winter and then summer bowers at the middle school took that report and just did it in the spring. Um and so just the ability to just kind of take some stuff that we create, use that to kind of funnel data in. um so that some of those conversations can have happen will be really important. Um again just identification of what's working um and what's
128not working at both the student and the system level. So for case managers to look at their case their case load and say wow you know at the case load level man 70% of my students are doing really well. This 30% isn't. Why? Um, and then when we take that and we combine that across like say the entire middle school to have those same conversations about, you know, what is it about your reading intervention that's working as opposed to maybe mine that's not working, you know, quite as well. Um, so I think that'll be really important to kind of really formalize that uh that data review cycle. So I'm working with Mary Beth and Amy along with building principles to kind of figure out where we can slot those over the course of the of
129the um school year so we have those regular points in time. So that's one thing. Um as again as part of that you know ongoing review and evaluation of our current interventions and resources. Um this was the first year that we did kind of a different reading intervention at the middle school. Um and I think we it rolled out really well but I think all of our special ed teachers did it slightly differently. So having some different conversations about like hey what did you do that was working really well? What was what can I steal from Julie Johnson? Um and then you know having those different conversations I think will be important. We've had a lot of conversations at the high school about, you know, the special education skills class, how we can continue to
130use that model to kind of, you know, use uh or create, you know, academic interventions. And then how can we shift that so we're pushing more students into core instruction and giving them more elective opportunities and maybe using win as an opportunity to getting some of those interventions and skills um in place as well. So that's another piece of of the pie also. Um and then uh we talked a little bit about uh just some ongoing and systematic professional developments as far as kind of reading instruction intervention. Uh we have a lot of new teachers every year and just having a a set protocol for these are kind of the trainings that we want to make sure you get within the first year, the first two years. Uh we have student our staff coming from
131alternative backgrounds and so I think having a set protocol for what that looks like will be really really important. Um and then continued uh structured collaboration for Java al-ike staff. Um uh buildings like the high school and the middle school are great because you have a lot of people doing the same thing. Um at the elementary schools we might have four special ed teachers but one's kind of focusing a little bit more in on behavior. One may be focusing a little more on academics and bringing those folks together across our elementaryaries to have conversations about what's working academic wise or behaviorally in each of our buildings will be important. So those are just some of uh the goals that uh we have kind of looking ahead to to next year and along with this continued
132work on the building level goals as well. So like the special ed team at the high school is doing a lot of work. They're doing weekly um wig you know readings as well and so they're doing the same thing with some of those other things which will hopefully also impact our our special education wig questions. Sorry kid. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate the work and look forward to the next step. All right. Superintendent report. This is his final entry plan update. Want to highlight something that wasn't in the report that we we got some exciting news this week. We had one of our elementary schools be recognized as a um high progress school. So that's a school of rec uh of recognition and it highlights uh a school's dedication to student growth.
133So that's the Riverfalls public monastery. Uh received the high progress award for uh the distinction is based on measurable progress in student academic growth and reducing achievement gaps on the most recent recent uh forward exam. Um particularly among students uh from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. So, we're super excited for the public monastery staff with the support of principal Kai Rogers. They've done a really great job of creating environment that aligns to monastery values um and that and and demonstrates that academic growth and that's an indicator of their ability to continue to connect with each student and create systems of support for each learner. So, we're we're proud of that. We're excited. um um some of the data points there uh maybe were a cause for concern uh and now we're seeing that awesome growth and we're
134excited to see that. So wanted to make sure we recognize that we'll do some more. The word just got out but Jenny Ames and I will share that more publicly as it came. Okay, so entry plan. So, this is the last update that I'll provide um as far as the year goes. And again, the vision was really just to to have a a smooth transition um in my first year as a superintendent. Goals were related to governance, student success, organizational alignment, and communication and engagement. And so, we're at the last one. There it is. Um so um just to highlight the the things under each of those goal areas uh within governance I'm going talk a little bit about um how we did for policy uh review and then highlight the the Neola approval which
135is kind of now the the ongoing way that we'll continue that policy work. I'm not going to spend too much time on student success because we just we just saw um the dedication of the represented by the administrators, but I know there's there's a ton of people uh that have done a lot of work around making sure that a big portion of our our meetings is focused on student success. It's focused on the implementation of our strategic plan and specifically the implementation of our strategic plan around some of our our student learning goals. um organizational alignment. Just talked a little bit about uh administrator evaluations and and how we approach that. And then finally, communication and engagement, highlight some some um successes around listening uh the listening sessions this year. And then some community and
136newsletters and e-newsletters. So 86 uh policies we updated this year. So hear that 86. Great job. Um nice was here for all. Yeah, that's right. and then moving forward and away for half. So yeah, there you go. That's a good percent. There's some people that can collect data on that. In baseball, that's a good percent. Uh and and we're excited about the adoption of Neiola um which will provide uh drafting support. Uh allow us to be more compliant and more transparent and and basically create an environment in which how we do policy development will be be more efficient for our administrative team. um more efficient for people who need to access policies whether it's employees or whether it's uh the community um and and that is something that uh most school districts had already jumped
137to but um we are now excited to move forward with the only thing I'll highlight with student success morning bright and early uh we'll have an admin retreat and we we will review a lot of the elements that were talked about today uh involving our wildly important goals but also elements of our overall district scorecard. If you recall, we created that scorecard to to be as closely aligned possible as our strategic plan and maybe tell a more broader story of the growth that we're working on um beyond just the forward exam or the school report card which is which are narrower views. Um so stay tuned for that. We'll discuss that refinement and then when we have our our schoolboard retreat at the end of July, we'll see those updates. And then organizational alignment. Just
138uh wanted to touch on the fact that um all of the eval and supervisors are really tied closely to to a process in which they're setting personal professional goals. So their own personal development each administrator and director as well as uh goals, organizational goals that they make essentially about how students are doing. Sometimes those are you you'll see those referred to as SLOs's. Um and now our principles when we evaluate them there's a very specific DPI framework that's followed um and it focuses on the areas of human resources leadership instructional leadership collaboration and school management. Uh for our directors and supervisors there's no framework. So what we really tried to do this year is align the the way we evaluate our directors and supervisors as closely to our the way we evaluate our principles. So
139they set personal professional goals, they set wig goals uh aligned to their work. Instead of a a statewide framework, we relied on their job description and and provided an opportunity for them to go through that. So the next couple of slides just outline that work. Um um it's obviously um it takes a little time to to transition. Um but I've really appreciated the dialogue and growth uh focus that we've had. And then the last piece is uh communication and engagement. Uh over the last couple of months we completed staff listening sessions. I think chairman did a good job organizing that and we saw improved attendance. Uh and I would say the big thing is in addition to the quantitative data data that we collect through staff, student and family feedback surveys. These listening sessions really
140allow for maybe a deeper analysis of feedback from our staff which we really appreciate. And then the last piece that I wanted to highlight around community engagement that we're really proud of is that um each month we we sent out an e newswsletter. Um and the amount of people who received the e newswsletter either by choice because they asked for it or not choice because we've got their email address uh has been increasing which we're excited about. Um and then a and then a stakeholder group that is really tricky to have communication with is our broader public. Right? if you have no connection to the school district as a parent or a student or an employee, um we want to make sure that those stakeholders have some understanding of the work that's being done. And
141we're proud that we had two communitywide newsletters that were sent out, one in the fall and then one in the spring. Um and we're happy with the reach that that provided and and hopefully connections for those in staff, whether it's through community ed highlights, uh or other highlights so they understand the work of the district. So um we were going to have one more slide was like that's it no more. I appreciate the first year and then uh the greatest thing about it is that now we move forward and and we start this process over. Thank you. All right. Uh now we are going to move into action items before the board this evening. We have meeting minutes from the May 19th regular school board meeting. We have bills that have been submitted for payment.
142We also have recommendations regarding employment. Is there a motion to approve minutes, bills, and employment as presented? So moved. Thank you, Mike. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Bo. Any discussion? All those in favor? I opposed. The motion is carried. All right, Alan, I'll turn to you for a summary about ED program. Um, the ED program committee met on June 2nd and um We covered several things. One is we had an update from um Luke Chaffy who teaches who's a high school social studies teacher took a group of students to Europe over spring break and um they gave us a presentation on it and it was just a delightful presentation to see how our students were engaged and how um he had some students helping him with a presentation and it was very informative
143um as well as enjoyable just to hear one of our teachers talk about a program they were doing and the students who were involved in it. So, um, we did that and then, um, we also reviewed the co-curricular salary schedule. These are the activities, um, that our staff are involved in in addition to their classroom teaching. Um, these are activities that they may um, coach or lead or support or be advisor to or those kinds of things. And several years ago, we decided to index those every year or periodically so that they would go up regularly. Um so that we weren't constantly playing catch-up every four or five years that all of a sudden these have to be brought up. So um David Kra, our activities director, u gave us a presentation on what those
144would be and um we approve that. Um in fact, we have that in front of us. I think we'll take these we have three things to to act on tonight. So that's one of them. Um I think about half of us were there. I don't know how many of us were there that night, but anyway. Um so I would move that we adopt the salary schedule as presented at the ed programs committee meeting for approval. Thank you. You said that you did, Lindsay. Okay. For anybody who wasn't there, any questions or any anybody questions or clarification on that? really appreciate the work that Dave Cra put into that um it seems fairly straightforward but there's a lot of new ones in regards to that. We're going being more systematic in terms of doing it on
145a regular basis. Yes. All those in favor I and so we have five in favor. We have no people who are voting no and we have one abstension. So you've got that. All right. And then um we've been doing in addition to policy review, handbook review, and that's that's a lot of language uh issues in there. So we spent and again David Krill spent um a good amount of time with us walking through what those individual changes are. I won't off the top of my head I can't think of some significant ones. The big one was the bus. How far the coach bus was? 150 miles. I might know right off the top of his head. 149.9 miles from Wasaw West. Right. So, it's it's it's at what point do we DC lease a a
146coach bus rather than one of our school buses? And that that was a change 150 miles. I know there are some larger school districts especially out there that get a coach bus lots of times for their students, but they are more expensive. And now we have a a a policy that relates to that. Um and variety of other languages. this is a constant need sort of keep this updated and watch the language on it and those kinds of things. So anyway, I would move the um handbook revisions as presented at the committee meeting that we approved for approval. Is there a second? Thank you, Monica. Questions or comments? Any any questions about that for anybody who wasn't here or whatever? All right. All those in favor? I opposed. The motion is carried. And then um
147Mark Inoway um gave us a presentation on some changed wording to um schoolboard policy 342.11 which is the independent education evaluation which correct me if I'm wrong Mark but this is an evaluation which is if a student goes through an evaluation by the district and a parent disagrees with it it's their options for getting an independent evaluation of their student in terms of what services they may or may not need. Is that a correct summary? Yep, that is correct. Okay. All right. And again, it's just clarifying that so that um parents know, staff members know, and we have something to um react to. So, um is there a motion to approve that policy 342.11 independent education? Thank you, Monica. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Bo. Questions or comments? All those in favor? I
148opposed. The motion is carried. And then we had uh our annual title three review that um Amy led us through and just updates on that. No action required on that and and a summer up uh summer school update and things are summer school are chugging right along. We also heard an update on that name, image and likeness. Oh yes, right. Yep. And we're all right. Thank you. So the personnel committee met on June 9th and the two information items were to um hear a certified staffing update. We were doing well. We added one more retire uh resignation at the time. Um could be that we get some more over the course of the next weeks. We also um received a report about advanced learning grant awards and the history on that. So those were good
149conversations. And then the action items before the board this evening would be to approve the seasonal school bus driver detailer job description and then set an hourly rate for that position that we are hopeful that we would be able to find somebody who would be um willing to do that work for us. We also um as a committee recommend that the board approve the employee handbook updates. Nate did a very nice job going through and did some rearranging, some clarification, all things to match what the practices are that we want in the district. And then we approved the teacher substitute pay incentives, hoping that we're able to increase our fill rate for the substitutes. So, is there a motion to approve the seasonal school bus driver job or driver detailer job description? Thank you, Ryland.
150Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Lindsay. Questions or comments? All those in favor? The motion is carried. Is there a motion to approve the 202526 employee handbook updates? So, move second. Thank you, Mike Ellen. Questions or comments? All those in favor I post. The motion is carried and then to approve the substitute teacher pay incentives. Is there a motion please? Some moved. Thank you. Second. Thanks Bo. Any discussion? All those in favor? I opposed. The motion is carried and I will turn to you Mike about financing facilities. Okay. We met on uh June 9th. Uh we had a good meeting. We talked about the first item on our agenda was the facility project update. Uh first of all, the tennis courts are getting close to completion with the anticipation they'll be ready for our
151fall season, right? Our girls playing fall and uh we're hoping that they'll be ready to go for them at that time. So that's exciting stuff. Um our project, if you've been over to the high school campus in the last few weeks, there's a lot of activity and there's a lot of work going on. So, uh, we have, um, all a lot of different things going on with our mechanical. We're getting our electricals roughed in. Our our plumbing is getting roughed in. Um, we're having all our concrete work is is being done. Um, so that's kind of this that's where we are in the project at both the high school and at the uh at the bus garage. So, a lot of kind of things inside the building, getting those u buildings uh buttoned up and
152the windows are in and the roofs are on and and so there a lot of the inside work that needs to go on is happening. Um at the high school, we have a pretty major project happening with the the gymnasium. We're removing the existing bleachers in the main gym. We're replacing those and so they're I was there last week and they were starting to take those out. Uh we are looking at the fire alarm replacement throughout the building and beginning to actually repair. We're going to do a pretty major repair on the gym floor at the high school as well. So, things upcoming at the high school, we're uh working on the sprinkler layout and the rough ends uh for that. Uh we're going to finish installing some of the um CMU the walls and
153continue with the uh mechanical um things happening, the rough ends and and electrical stuff being done. Uh we're going to be putting in our new door frames. Uh we're going to we've cut walls and the existing exterior wall. We cut uh the the the um holes in it that we will be using to access the new part of the the the gym and the um multi-purpose space. So, um that was the first item on our agenda. Uh the second item was talking about our bu our uh budget. Budget is um at the end of the year, our budget year ends on June 30th. And so there's always this process at this time of year. uh we're just kind of getting finalized some of the numbers that we have with our special item funding and and
154our state support uh for that and some of the other things in our budget. Things like an example would be things that were in this year's budget that are going to be actually delivered after the 1st of uh July. And so we have to kind of move some funds around within the budgets and within our accounts to make sure that we have the money there while it's in this year's budget is actually being paid for uh next in next year's bud or next year's um fiscal year. So um just some of that maneuvering that happens every year um is happening now. We had a good discussion on the special ed uh reimbursement funding. Uh the focus uh from the from the the the state legislature uh was on the high cost aid uh not necessarily
155on the general aid in which we are um currently getting 30% or 30.6% on. I think there was just an update on that this week. Right. Right. Uh it doesn't it doesn't appear as though there's going to be a lot of movement on the the special ed return rate. Uh there's a small adjustment, but but essentially the the indicators are they're they're looking at more funding of the high cost rate claimments, which doesn't really have a lot of impact on our district. Correct. Was it 50,000 over nothing? Virtually nothing. Right. Right. Right. Y specialized uh need as opposed to a broad need of increased special education costs. Right. And so we're at 30.6%. Um it kind of gave us a breakdown as the ask was really 60%. And what the what the what the what
156the impact is on us is for every dollar we don't get in aid uh for special ed, it comes out of our general fund. So that's money we then cannot spend on other uh educational programs for our our students. So, uh, special ed funding is a is a challenge across the state and it's the way they fund it is, uh, um, difficult for districts, but because they're asking us or telling us we have to do certain things with our special ed population, but they're not funding us, uh, to help support those. So, that was the next item. Mike, one one additional thing on that, it this is the budget hasn't been approved yet. We still don't know when we're going to have a state budget, but this was the um joint committee on finance resolution,
157which probably will not be changed, but it's not totally a done deal. So, if anybody still wants to contact our local legislators, there's still some chance, but it looks like maybe just a couple percent increase on that um on that special ed special ed aid, and that's going to help us. And we don't want to complain that we're not getting anything because we're getting something. But the larger issue out there is our our um our our general a um we're supposed to get an automatic how much um per student? 325 325, right? But the state but the committee has voted no um state support for that. So all of that will come as a property tax increase. So, so yeah, the 325 is the increase in our revenue limit which is split and shared and
158it's a unique scenario depending on what district you're in. However, all we're allowed to do is increase the revenue limit by 325, but the pot of equalization aid or state aid that that funds that side of that uh is remaining essentially the same. So, that means any increases will be um on the levy side. So, what I what I picked up at a webinar I attended on Wednesday and then I've been picking up in other media accounts is there will be an increase in state aid for education, but um if if this goes through, but because of that, over 70% of the aid will simply be property tax increases, not um state aid in terms of what we would think about it as. So, what that means is because this this initial bill also contains
159over a billion dollar income tax cut increasingly, and this is not the first time we've seen this, income tax cuts in the state simply mean property tax increases at the local level. And it's it's the point where it's concerned, and I'm hearing that phrase more and more um from people who it's just dawning on them, wait a minute, I'm getting a prop income tax cut at the state level. Isn't that cool? but your property taxes um you know are being eaten up uh that's eating up that that that that you're getting. So I think it's important to for people to think in those terms and when they're talking to their legislators think in those terms. It's great we're getting an an income tax cut but by doing that it's increasing our property taxes and there's
160a big difference and in my mind property taxes are much less equitable way to tax our our our our um residents in the district. So, it's not a totally done deal and we are going to get more state aid. So, we don't want to be um looking to get horse in the mouth, but it's the way in which it's coming in, how long it's taken that's kind of been driving us crazy. Um but it is what it is and um we're getting better than nothing, I guess. So, do you want to add anything else about the budget revisions? Yeah, Lynette, anything that anything specifically you want to highlight on that? So, it's something that happens every year. we need to um make revisions that doesn't change the bottom line numbers and and so on. So
161budget it's a balanced budget and and nothing has changed there. So and we went through it carefully and we did and we reviewed it. So I'll make a motion to approve the 2425 budget revisions. Thank you both. Thank you. Any discussion? All those in favor? I opposed. Motion is carried. The last the last thing on the item was just the property and liability insurance renewal. uh discussion that we table to a future date. So other than that uh we just weren't ready for the conversation. Yep. All right. Before the board today is a motion to approve the 202526 support staff supervisor salaries and the 202527 administrator contracts. If you remember our administrator contracts are two years. Um the increases will be a 3.57% increase for uh supervisors and 3.23% for administrator. Just as an aside,
162that is a lower total salary increase than our teachers and support staff are receiving and it's an average increase. So and this would be our last group and then all of our contracts are settled. So is there a motion please? So moved. Thank you, Lindsay. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Monica. Questions or comments? All those in favor? I opposed. The motion is carried. We talked about this extensively at during the close session of our last meeting. All right. And now we have a series of second readings before the board. And unless anybody has anything they would like to pull out, my intention is to take numbers two through six together in one motion. and to take um number one separately because I'm suggesting that we add one more sentence that is still in
163keeping with the spirit of this. So I don't think that it changes that this would be the second reading but currently the only places that we reference being respectful and so forth would be in the negative in terms of that the presiding officer would be able to stop comments that are not respectful. So my proposal is that at the end of the first paragraph we add one sentence that says speaker comments must be respectful and observe the decorum of the meeting so that we're saying very specifically that that's what our expectation is in terms of public participation. Need a motion. Yep. I move that we approve it with that revis. Thank you. Is there a second? Okay. Any discussion? All those in favor? I opposed. The motion is carried. And now before the board, we
164have the second reading of revised schoolboard policy 341, early literacy program. Revised schoolboard policy 345.46. Uh third grade to fourth grade promotion and retention. The second reading of revised schoolboard policy 1.1 selection of instructional materials. Second reading of revised schoolboard policy 361.2, selection of library media center materials. And the second reading of new policy 361.2. This would be the rule. Procedures for selection of library media center materials. Is there a motion, please? Yes. I would like to move to Thank you, Monica. A second. Thank you, Bo. Any discussion? All those in favor? I I opposed. The motion is carried. Do we have any um items for future board meeting agendas other than the things we already know that will be coming up? All right. Then we're going to schedule meeting. The educational program will meet
165Monday, July 14th at 6. Finance and facilities will meet Monday, July 14th at 7 or immediately following educational program. And because this is our triple header, personnel is going to meet Monday, July 14th at 8 or immediately following finance and facilities, the next regular board meeting will be Monday, July 21st at 6. The school board retreat, everyone remember, will be Monday, July 28th at 5. And in conjunction with that is our tour starting at 4. Is that right, Lynette? Four o'clock is our tour of the our referendum buildings. And at this point, I would like to have a motion to adjourn into close session pursuant to Wisconsin statute section 19851C, which permits convening into close session for the purpose of considering the employment, promotion, compensation, or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which
166the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility to discuss the superintendent's evaluation. There a motion, please. So moved. Thank you, Lindsay. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Monica. I need a roll call. Monica, yes. Lindsay, yes. Mike, yes. I'm saying yes. And we're in close session.