Board Meeting

001Really what our goal There we go. I think I just push a button. Um, our goal really tonight is to look at our uh continuous improvement. As you know, we're we're the framework of our district and the board focused goals really is under this lens of continuous improvement and build building this culture of excellence. And really this is the vehicle that we're using to build a culture of excellence. And really it's just focused on reflection, planning, doing, studying, acting um and just refining some of the strategies that we uh that we use and most um specifically is how do we align culture and strategy for leadership excellence. So tonight I'm going to walk you through the work that we're doing with uh continuous improvement. Again, as you're listening to it, it's really from this lens

002like you can say we're going to get better. We're going to get 1% better. We're just going to be get to a culture of excellence, but this is the how that we're doing it here. So, I'm really excited to share some data. I will tell you that some of the data is really compelling and some of the data is like, okay, that I didn't expect that data. Um, and that's okay. I mean, part of that is to then discuss, all right, what where do what happened? And if we feel there's a variable, then we can adjust that if we feel like it's just something that we didn't focus enough on or it was just a function of that's the day the person took the survey and it's just it's a marker in time a lot

003of these things. So as we dive in was just working a second ago. Give me one second here. There we go. All right. So um tonight really is about just the why. I'm going to uh I'll share our our in our intended outcome for you this evening. I'm going to paint a picture of what we've done the last three years. We're going to focus a little bit on organizational excellence and then really the bulk of our time is going to be on the tools that we're using and some of the uh the data that has been lifted from that. And I'm going to use my office um as an example. Um, I'm going to be vulnerable with sharing my data. So, you just see like what does a leader in our district get and then

004what's the expectation for how they receive and act on that data. So, we've shared uh multiple times. This continuous improvement is just a tool that we're using um to help us get better to improve our performance and really just uh have better outcomes um in in all of our departments, not just for our kids, but for our employees and for the departments that that they serve, too. Um Another uh focus here is just we're constantly looking on ways that we can improve. You'll hear tonight there are some barriers to us getting better that we have gone through a lengthy process and just decided it is what it is. Like we're not going to be able to get better on this because of some external barriers that exist. Um and it it's mainly that's about processes

005some processes that we have. And then as the board has ina indicated and affirmed last December, this is a core focus goal of yours. So, it's one of the reasons I wanted to bring this back to you this year. And our outcome really is just to update you on the work that we're doing related to continuous improvement. And then it's an opportunity tonight if you have questions about continuous improvement. I I did put uh deep in the slide deck some suggested like questions to and it does not mean there has to be questions, but if if you have questions for us, what that will do is inform just our next steps with continuous improvement. I'd also like to hear what you think's maybe going well with this work and maybe if there's areas that you

006just think could we get a little bit better or I want to I want to know more about X and then I'll bring that back. So I hope this video plays Dustin and Lisa. I don't know if you're able to click on it. This I don't think I can. Nope, I can't. But I think you might have to skip and then yeah enlarge. I should, pardon me, add >> King Sky. It's Great Britain's professional cycling team. Sometime in the mid 2000s, around 2010, they hired a man named Dave Brils. And at the time, Team Sky had a very middle of the road record when it came to performance on the world stage. They had won about one gold medal the last 100 years from 1908 to 2008. They had never won a tour to France

007the beer event in cycling. And when they hired Dave Railsburg they said we would like to change this. We'd like to improve our performance. We'd like to reach a higher level of performance. What's your plan to help us do that? And when they hired Brailles first he said I have this strategy called the aggregation of marginal gains. And the way that he described it was the 1% improvement in nearly everything that you do. And so they started by looking at a lot of things you would expect a cycling team to look at. They improved their uh bike tires, made them slightly lighter. They put a more ergonomic seat on the bike. They had their riders wear bio feedback sensors so they could see how each person responded to the training and practice they did each

008day. They had their outdoor riders wear indoor racing suits where they were lighter prior in. But then they did a variety of things that you wouldn't expect the cycle team to do. They split tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the best form of recovery. They taught their riders how to wash their hands, reduce the risk of infection, keep them healthy. They even figured out what kind of pillow led to the best night's sleep for each rider and then brought that on the road of the hotels. So Rford said, "If we can actually execute on this strategy, if we can aggregate all these small changes, these little 1% improvements, then I think we can win the tour to France in about five years." He ended up being wrong. They won

009the tour to France in three years, and then they repeated again the fourth year with a different rider. And then just last year, they won for the third time in four years. And breast strategy really came to fruition at the Olympics in London in 2012 when they won 70% of the gold medals event. And so what I'd like to start us off with is the idea that small improvements actually can add up to a very significant change in a relatively short period of time. And this is just basic math. All right? If you get 1% better each day or 365 days, you end up 37 times better at the end of the year. If you get 1% worse, you take yourself all the way almost all the way down to zero. Now, you might say,

010"Okay, well 1% improvements are nice, but clearly no one is going to get 1% better every single day. So, is that ever enough to accumulate anything considering that you're not going to be perfect all the time?" And I would argue yes. In fact, you can get 10 times better if you get 1% better 5 days a week, 46 weeks a year. So, it's about 230 days in total. That gives you six weeks off for holidays, illness, laziness, and just generally not getting things done. But you're still 10 times better at the end of the year. And what I would like to propose is that the way to do this is not by setting better goals for ourselves or at our organizations, but by building better systems and obtaining better habits. In fact, you could say

011that the goal never changed. They wanted to win a tour of France each year. They wanted to win Olympic. So, it wasn't the goal that made a difference. Instead, it was their system, the way that they apply those improvements in a 1% bas. >> Thanks, Dustin. I threw a curveball at you there that didn't prepare us for show the video. So, I I want to recover um go back to that video for just a second. I've watched it several times now. The first time I watched it, it was like so much math. I'm like and and I I too have um the 1% better every day is just not realistic. So we're not using that term, but I think that what we're just saying is how do we get better every day? And some some

012days that might look like a tenth of a percent. Some days it might just mean status quo like that was better today because it was a really tough day. So we're not talking to our leaders about getting 1% better every day and that just these metrics that are down like clocking them that that's not the intent. really is just how do we get better? And I what what is um striking to me is just how he talks about systems and habits. So, we're going to dive into some of the systems work that we're doing and some of the habits that we're just trying to create that once we realize we get better at something, how do we just maintain that as a habit and not let it fall off our plate like continue with the

013work that we know is moving the needle. So, we started three years ago and if you remember when we hired Stutter, it was all about we're going to do strategic. we're going to do the strategic plan and then we found ourselves and at the board thankfully um several of you on this board at that time just said hey can we talk about this uh you know it one-on-one and there was just some concern about um what was the ne what what were we going to invite into the boardroom with strategic planning at the time there was a lot of noise in the system about what schools were doing and what they weren't and so we just decided that at that point maybe this isn't the time to do strategic planning we have a we have

014a really at LCAP. We we know where we're what we're trying to do. We had good results. And so at that point, we just said we're going to push pause on strategic planning and as a leadership team, we're just going to learn more about continuous improvement at that time. Like we'd already hired this lady. We pivoted and said, well, okay, how can we use this? And it was I for us, our team, I think it was a a fortuitous series of events that led us to this because that we were going to we were going to reverse engineer. It was starting with where do we want to be and come back and we instead we said where are we at now and we it was all about learning. The second year was just about the

015work that has to go in and it was getting our getting our system set up to res to um administer two major feedback pieces with the district services survey and the employee uh experiences survey and then how do we get good at receiving feedback like let's just practice that. There was a lot of other things that we did uh that year. here is a lot of talk a lot of um work related to alignment sitting in this room and having very long conversations with our we had a we had one day everyone calls it the snow day but it was we thought there was going to be snow and we sat down and said what does that look like for us and how do we have a really great outcome for our families and our

016staff at the end like how do we communicate that it's not going to snow here but 40 40% of our workforce live at the snow level and what does that look like? And so we had this very long conversation that it um where we produced a really great document, some really great thinking and we never had to use it, but we still have it in the event that it's going to happen. But it was just like this work like how do we look at a problem and say how do we get better at it and and get out in front of it. And then this year was um really uh that that things blocking the share things blocking up there. But it's this year is just about impact. So we did some learning, we did

017some work. Now let's start talking about what's the impact of our work and where where do we need to continue leaning in and where do we need to pull back on. >> So if you want to achieve organizational excellence, there's really you do that really through your leadership group and then this emphasis on culture and strategy. And this guy, you're gonna have to click for me again. I think click it. Yeah. Thank you. Um, Zor here in 2009, he came up with this this this premise that if you're going to be really great, you got to be you have to be really good in culture and strategy. You can't just be you just can't be a culture person and and have people say that's a great leader and you can't be just strategic and have

018people say that's a great leader. I want to follow him or her. So what he says is after um after rating leader skills, employees identified if their leader was great or not. And if you're really good on culture, like everyone loves you, you're nice, you're thoughtful, you're approachable, all those really wonderful humanistic qual qualities. Only 12% of your employees are going to call you a great leader because they're going to say, "These are really nice because we don't I don't know what we're doing. I don't have any clarity on what the person's about. They're just really nice." And I like that. On the flip side, if you're really strategic, like I don't care about the culture piece. We're going to have our processes in place. We're going to be organized. We're, you know, that the

019train trains start and stop at the same time every single day. You're going to have almost the same outcome where people about 14% of people are say he he or she is a really great leader. I wish they had some empathy. I wish they said thank you. They never say hi when they come in the office. Like that that that blend is there. And so if you have if you're strong in both and if we can develop our leaders to have a strong cultural lens with some really good strategic systems and processes, odds are that 72% of our employees are and our parents are going to say that's a really great leader. Not only are they thoughtful, empathetic and strong on the structure or on the cultural part, but also they have this strategic lens.

020And so that's our our work has been on how do we get strong in the culture? And we're going to I'm going to share what that looks like here in a minute. And then how do we get um how do we continue to be strong or get better in the strategy section. So this is this is a just because there's a couple dots underneath each one of them. I don't want you to think like we only did three things related to culture over the last three years and we only did five things related to this is just a very high overview. But so on our leadership what we've we've dedicated time for our leaders to learn about stutter um through professional development. We have like as you know our DTL time in our leadership meetings.

021We met in here this morning. We meet in here every single Tuesday and it ranges from oh two to three hours I would say probably on average um an hour and a half to three hours depending on what the meeting's about. And it's all about for the most part the strategy piece. um the bulk of the meeting, but we lead off with the culture piece. So, if you see the culture piece, we started a couple years ago this idea of thank you notes. We've sent last year we sent 800 thank you notes out of this office. This year, we're going to do it again. One of the things that we've done with the thank you notes just about talking about getting a little bit better. Our first year was just we sent a thank you

022note. Thank you. You're a pleasure to work with or thank you for being thank you for being you. You know, we sent out at that year we started mid year. So, we sent about 400 of those thank you cards and we didn't really move the needle on I feel valued at work or you know people hear me. And so this last year we started doing what we're calling intentional uh thank you cards. So I'm just giving you an example of what strategic improvement looks like even at when we reduce it down to a thank you card. It's we're going to send a thank you card and you're going to tell the person the impact of of their work. So you can still say thank you. You're such a pleasure to work with. When I come

023to when I come to work every day and and you greet me with a smile, I'm I'm happy to be at this I'm happy to be at work and it makes my day so much more enjoyable. Or thank you for always being you're always at the crosswalk. The fact that you're there day, you know, day in day out, rain or shine, our kids are safer because of you. Thank you. Like just being really intentional with what the thank you is about. That didn't move the needle either with the I mean we're I'm expecting these massive Oh my gosh, I love working and and people are reporting that, but we're not moving it by anything statistically significant. So this year we're trying another because we're not going to get rid of the culture piece. We're just

024continue thanking our employees and and um coming from a lens of gratitude. But this year now it it feels more robotic. And I Dustin and I went up to Oregon and they were doing this in Oregon and I told I think I don't know if you remember I'm like I am not doing that or they track thank you cards. Here we are three years later we're tracking thank you cards. And what we've got is we have a list of every single employee. it gets put up on there and everyone is just expected to go in and um what was happening was you walk around and you've got people that have 14 thank you cards posted on there cuz they're top of mind for our group. You know, Christina is an example of that. Like when

025I come down here, there's so many things I could be thankful for for her because I work with her every single day. But there's a lot of other people that I that I have interactions with like the lady at the cross crossing guard that I see there at Marina. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that lady, what a saint." So, like, how do we get more strategic about, "Okay, I'm going to pause and I'm look down this list. Oh my gosh, that's someone that I see all the time. I'm going to write them a thank you card because I know something specifically they did." So, we're trying that out this year. It doesn't mean that uh employees like Christina aren't going to get 14 cards again or whatever, but they we are going to be thoughtful

026um and try to spread the wealth as much as we can. at the the concern is that you start getting a little robotic with it. The whole idea is not to give everyone a thank you card. It's just like are there other people in the system that need to be um thanked? And then the on the strategic part uh and that thank you card kind of plays into the strategic part. But um we've started these uh last I guess a year and a half ago some protocols with our one-on-one meetings. And so I modeled them for a year and these are the questions that I just ask when I meet with folks is what's what are you what are you crushing it at because I want to celebrate that. What's keeping you awake at night?

027Because I want to problem solve with you. Who in the systems been I should probably read over there. Oh yeah. Do you have the resources? Who's been most helpful to you since the last time that we uh that we connected? Because I want to be able when I see that person I want to tell them. I just had a meeting with Jamie and she was so complimentary of XYZ just so that everyone sees they have a role in creating this uh environment and then there's a continuous improvement check-in about what what is your area where you're trying to get a little bit better in this year. So this is the bulk of what goes on in this room and with our leaders on a day-to-day basis is just getting better with their leadership and then

028having a lens towards culture and strategy. The other piece is just how do we get instead of everyone on the left hand side you can see everyone's improving and moving but just not in the same direction and we're just trying to get a little bit better about alignment. That is not easy to do. We had a discussion this morning about when is the best time for volleyball at the elementary level. We had a really thoughtful conversation and it was like, well, if we do it in the if we do it in the fall, it overlaps with cross country. So, you have kids that are in cross country that can't do volleyball. In the spring, it's it's more open, but it's hotter um in the gym. Our co we talked about how do our coaches feel?

029So even just down to trying to get alignment on no we do rescue does volleyball because we've toggled back and forth like let's get tight on this when do we do volleyball and why so even at that granular level and I know our team sits and like can we get out you know like seriously but like the more tight we can get on some of these nuance things we're not going to have this conversation next year or the year after or the year after because we're just going to have a thoughtful process and it it doesn't take up any more of our head space so to speak. So, we're trying to work on uh this alignment piece at the same time. And you could stop me at any point. So, the the two tools that

030we've really used uh explicitly in the last two years has been our district services survey and our employee experience survey. This is layered on top of the student data surveys that Dustin brings um every year to us uh and also on top of the LCAP parent surveys uh that we do every spring. So, we really have four really big survey tools that we use. I'm going to focus on the two tonight that are really about continuous improvement from our employee lens. Um, so the district services survey is taken every November, December, and basically all we're trying to find out is how can we improve our district services. So if you've interacted, you you get a survey sent to you and you get to check every department that you've interacted with within the last year. So

031I interacted with tech services, food services, I didn't do anything with facilities, I saw the superintendent, I interacted with them. you know they can go down and then they answer uh questions related to that department demonstrating a culture of excellence and on the employee experience sur that's in the spring every employee gets to just say how do I feel about working in rescue union school district and they get asked 20 questions that are very specific and really what we're trying to just be is this are we a best place to work employer that's what we're striving towards so I'm going to go over our department services survey and I'm going to give you some data so these are the five areas is I if someone clicks on Yep. I met with the superintendent's office, they

032can click and they can rank me on these five areas. Is he accessible? Is the information I get from Jim's office accurate? Does he have a good attitude? And and Christina gets lumped into the this. So we have a very small department. Are our operations do they run efficiently and effectively? And are we are we timely? Really five simple questions easy easy for folks. And then they also have an opportunity to provide us uh some input. So they just say they get presented a statement like I just read you and they they can click a one if they're like nope or they can click a five. We're like oh my gosh home run. And our goal is to have all five of the topics scoring four or better. So that's what we're reached for. I

033mean a five 5.0 I know would be fantastic, but our goal is all excuse me, fives and everything is the highest you can get, but our goal is just can we get a four or better on every single metric that's being asked and then employees have an opportunity there to also provide uh a commentary. I'm the only employee um well actually Lisa and Dustin get to see um them as well, but let's see all of the commentary that come in on these. after that it gets filtered out by themes so that no one's no one's getting crushed underneath a bus because people are saying scathing thing and that doesn't happen but I don't we don't want to create we want to have an environment that's safe so if someone if there's an area that one

034of our leaders there there are let me back up there are areas that all of our leaders myself included have to work on and so we want that to be presented to them in a way that's constructive and not hurtful and so we go through and really just provide themes and don't provide some of the comments except for the commentary I shared at the meeting about me being a used car salesman. I thought that was too good to pass up. But um and this year we had 56% of our employees take it which to me says people value the uh t taking this. We only have 56% of the country voting for the president. So I feel like I wish that number was higher it and it will will grow. So these are our goals.

035Remember, um, our intent is to have every single department score a four or better in all five of the areas. So, if you took the aggregate score, I'll I think I've got mine on the next slide, but this is all of our departments. These are very high scores. And I say that I should probably finish with this because some of the other scores later on are not as high as this, but you can see on average we are well above the 4.0 that we're expecting. And you look at our overall by every single metric um are doing very well. You can see we had some dips and I did some quick math which sometimes is maybe not the best idea. Um a 3% is the margin of error on this. So when you see a

036um the 4.41 that accessibility drops to a 4.37 like my first my thought is what we went down 4%. It's actually 9 1000 of a percentage point when you break it down into the change. So that is statistically irrelevant these small there. There are a few that went up 3% or down 3% or more and I'll call those out. The highest one here was this attitude. Did you receive service with a smile? That's a two that's that's a 2% gain on that one. So none of these scores deviated by any anything statistically significant. And quite frankly, I'd like to see some of them deviate by something that was statistically significant. Um, but um overall these were really good scores and if we can maintain this and make slight improvements on it, I think we're on

037a very good trajectory. Um, and then for the superintendent's office, um, I'll just give you some examples. When I got my scores back and let me see if I put my score, I didn't put my score on there. Our scores were I Oh, wait. Did I put mine? I didn't. I I think I think this was one of our lowest scores. It was like a 4.5 or something like that. It wasn't a low score at all, but it was on the It was this the feedback that Christine and I got was in 2024 was on accuracy. And we're like, like when are we inaccurate with any of our information? And so we uh Christine, part of the role that you're going to see later on that our leaders do is when they're diving into the

038data is just trying to tease out through meetings and conversations like what does that really look like and what and then we look at the feedback that people gave. And what I was hearing was that I was inserting myself into conversations and situations that I was making a mess out of. And I'll I'll give you an example. So, I I'm at um I'm not going to relive this completely accurately, but I'm down at Marina Village Middle School and the track co Oh, no. I was mountain bike right here at the school and the track coach tells me the sand we don't have enough sand in the in the uh for the sand pit. So, instead of me working with Brandon at the time or telling her, hey, I will I'll get this message to Brandon,

039sand is not my specialty. I instead send Brandon a note saying the track meets in two days. We need sand down here. Thinking I'm like, well, Brandon's going to be thrilled that I've told him we need sand down here. Then we won't be embarrassed. Well, so Brandon instead of having some time and some thoughtfulness just tells some guys, "Go get sand and put it in the sand pit." And got they go and put sand in the sand pit and it turn it ends up being the wrong sand. And so we got to redo the whole process again. That was that was 100% I think my fault because it wasn't hey Brandon um you know there's an issue. Can you work with the school and the track coach to to determine what type of sand they

040need down there was just like they need sand. And so I don't know if that's a great example but what was happening was I just or another one was someone tells me a problem. They grab me the the bell's not working in my room. I'm like, "Oh, we got we're going to get that fixed." And then they leave going, "Well, Jim said the bell's going to be fixed, so I would imagine maybe in the next six, seven minutes this thing's going to get fixed." And I go to, you know, uh, tech services or facilities and they go, "Yeah, we know the bell hasn't been fixed." That person's been told 17 times that it's that we don't have that. We're waiting for a part and it's in a port somewhere. So that person now for the

041next three months is saying Jim doesn't give accurate information because he told me this was going to get fixed and it's not and there's a reason it wasn't. So what I what I do now what I try I still my I'm a a servant leader and I want to help and I don't like pushing stuff off but it's just better if I let the expert give the response rather than me making up a hey oh yeah we can do better we're going to fix that. So, I really tried to stop doing that and I still get caught doing it. And our team has been great about stop when I do it like reminding me, hey, remember don't would you please stop or would you include me in that meeting when you have a meeting? Um,

042and then Christina and just vetting and talking with people. It was just it was well, hey, I called and I didn't get the information I needed. Well, Christina's like, well, I didn't know that. I gave them what I thought they needed. So, she simply uh has just started asking at the end of every conversation, hey, do you need anything else from me or do you have everything you need? Just a simple question. And um the intent there again is not to have this work that's going to we're going to be working on the weekends extra hard. It's just how do we be more thoughtful about our responses? And you'll see that our our scores did improve in these areas. The other the other one is the employee experience survey. And this is where our employees

043get to rank uh every leader on a on 20 different uh topics. So 10 of them are related to kind of team, department, school 10 of the questions. Eight of them are kind of your organizational experience or larger level and then two are the personal fulfillment. The last two are really high for our so like I've got pro I might have a problem with a team or a department or with an experience I had but my personal fulfillment is still very high. Um and then they're also allowed to provide comments and we had over 400 comments that got left in this category and so those get divvied out to every leader. So, in my case, um, when you see my scores here, it's everyone here at the district office and all site leaders, um, and

044and and department leads have an opportunity to weigh in on my score. If you're at um, Rescue Elementary, then it's everyone on Rescue Elementary site has an opportunity to give feedback to Todd on his on their uh, employee experience. So again, they're asked to to rank us. And our intent here is not to have 100, not not to have all 20 questions be at a four or better. Our our goal here is just 75% of the questions uh to be at a four or better. And that's agree or strongly agree. And here we had um 265 of 441 employees, which was a 5% increase from last year. So we are getting um better there. And I'm not tracking along with you. So if if you look at our ex these are our overall district results.

045So our first uh our first year we had nine questions that exceeded the goal and and 11 that did not and we were at a 3.9 or higher. Um this year we had eight questions that exceeded the 4.0 or better and 12 questions of which two were a 9 3.9 or better. So we have some work to tease out what what what's why is it trending that direction and so prior within the next month every leader is going to be working with their data and their team to say to tease out hey you're going to see some uh more data that I'm going to share with you but they're going to be looking at their team and saying I want to know more about these three areas maybe where we went down. So, I just

046did that work with our all of our site leaders in our departments and at the end of July and then we just had our meeting with our district office people last Wednesday where they could start providing some feedback on um areas where we crushed it because we want to be able to say what did you what why did we crush it there and we want to keep continuing that and then where did we not do very well or where we went down and what led to those results. So, this was our overall score in uh 2023. Our overall district results were a 4.04 and our overall score right now is a 3.94. So we did go down and again that's part of our work. That's a 2.5% reduction. So it's still statistically not significant, but

047it's it's on the cusp of being a significant downward. So we've got some our work now is to figure out okay what resulted in that? And it could be a variety. I've had people say that, well, when you when we had when you had us take that, you had just announced that it was a 0% raise this year. Like, I don't know. Did that impact it? It may have. Um, also, it's during a time where we're uh assigning people new classrooms and new and new um where they're teaching. So, we've even talked about is this the best time to give the survey. we've decided to keep it at that time because we want to have we don't want to move the date to try to uh generate a different outcome like let's do it the

048day before Christmas when everyone's while they're on vacation. So, we're going to keep it there. But those are variables we can't control. So, I don't while we can acknowledge that this is when it happened. Our work is just ask our people why why did why do the results happen the way they did? This these were our district office results. We had a little bit different outcome here. And again, this is everyone that works on this campus and all of our site and department leaders. So, uh, last year we had seven questions that exceeded the goal. This year we had 10 questions that exceeded the goal. And remember, we're trying to get to 15 questions. So, we did not meet our mark, but we showed some significant improvement here at the district office. Um, and then,

049uh, if you look below, we went from 13 questions that were below to 10, and we had six that were at 3.9 or higher. So, we're really close to moving the needle and getting to the goal of 15. I'm just happy that we saw some progress and we had the same conversation in here as we would have if our scores went down. It was like, all right, we still have some areas where you're telling us we need to get better. How do we do that? And then our overall score creeped up just a scooch. That's 5 1000 of a percentage point. So, it might it looks really cool. 3.97. It's not that big of a move statistically. So these are the these are the this is the work that um I dug into with our

050team in with our leaders in July and with everyone that works here. These are were our strengths that they believe that their work positively impacts those that we serve that they feel a sense of pride when they tell people where they work and that they believe that leaders in their immediate work environment are generally concerned about their welfare. And you can see the um that's the one that went up over 3% that question number five that was a 3.1% increase in that score. So that was the only one that was statistically significant and just barely. Um but again overall we moved in two of the areas uh they're already strengths very high strengths already but we were able to get a little bit better on those. And then this is we share as a group.

051Hey, collectively we all think that as a team that we have a supportive invisible leadership, we've got a positive work culture, that we're student centered. Um, so that's part of the part of the work on this continuous improvement is is to acknowledge that we're doing some things really well and celebrate that and then dig into areas where we feel like we need to improve upon. And so this was the district office. These were our growth areas. You could see we had that's a 14% that number 11. These are the exact same uh excuse me number 11 and number six are the exact same uh lowcoring two years in a row and it's really about resources and so the question the way it's if you read it there I feel that organizational level resources are allocated

052to maximize effectiveness and then I feel that and number six I feel that resources in my immediate work environment were allocated to maximize effectiveness. So the question is what does that mean for resources and we're not allowed to change the question because we want to be able to compare ourselves nationally because everyone gets tripped up on this question. So our goal is to my goal with our team is say what do you mean when you answer that question? Was it time? Was it money? Was it your technology? Do do you not have paper to print? Like do you not have a pen that works? Like what what is when you talk about resources? What do you mean? And I'll I'll I'm going to share with you what that meant. Looked like you wanted to maybe

053ask. >> I was just curious, Jim, you had mentioned that there was some commentary that um you and Lisa and Dustin see. Um but for the most part, you things out afterwards. Was there any com Well, this is two parts actually. Was there any commentary connected to 11 and six that shed some light on really what these um what they're about? And I was curious if you thought that if we have ongoing running underperforming in our eyes of the number we're seeking year after year adding anything to it to actually try to um work that out to get an answer. >> Yeah. So, um I'll skip ahead a couple slides because you're you're you're must be in the AP class. So, actually, can I get when I can I I'll No, no, no. That's a

054great question and I'm going to I will answer that for you. Um, and the other the other low performing one that popped up this year for us was that I believe organizational information is communicated in a timely manner across the organization. And so as a the lead communicator for the district, I'm like, well, that that I don't like that that people feel that way. So, we really wanted to tease that out and I'll I'll I'll walk you through the protocol. So, this was the growth areas. Basically, it was staffing, workload, and compensation were common themes that came up throughout um the commentary that systems and communications. This inconsistent protocols is really what you're going to hear about. Uh and then communication gaps across departments and then employee employee support and development. Um just need for

055better training. And I'll share with you some of the really good work we did related to this. So when we ask people, so our my job and all of our leaders jobs in the next month is to sit down with the people that took the survey and say, "Hey, let's celebrate. Give me some this." You said that you feel a sense of pride when you tell people where you work. That was a 4.31 score. Why is that? What? Give me some examples of what we're doing that you like. What What are things that promote this outcome? What should we continue to do? We don't want that stuff. We don't want this score to we want to celebrate this and honor it and keep it elevated. And so this is this is what came from our

056group. They love Dustin's Monday memo because it connects them. They like they can see like all the wonderful things that are going on in the district that you might not ever see if you're a payroll technician up there at the district office. They have appreciated the thank you cards. We do birthday cards. they get a lot of thoughtful email and text when specifically when someone compliments them and we hear it. Our intent is to make sure we pay that forward like, "Hey, I heard this or just a quick text. I was just meeting with Lissa. She said the nicest thing about you and send that off to them." Um, and then we try we try to do these they like we enjoy the district office events that we do here. It's hard to do sometimes

057because there's just work that's always going on. So finding the right time where we can all gather, they find value in that. We do meet every month for um it's monthly, right? Yeah. Yeah. Uh for coffee and conversations where we sit down here, every department has a chance to update. We do a couple celebrations, try to create that team. And then they said they appreciate the personal check-ins, the good when our team when we walk in the building, there's an attempt to say hi to most people. Um and then the I should move this up to the top. This is the most commented one is that we focus on hiring good people. So if we have a someone that's real strategy strategic or cultural based, we're going to heir on the side of the culture

058based because I got to work with that person and we can we can coach the strategy piece. I cannot coach 52 years of learn behavior. If you're if you're just negative, we don't want you in our in our sphere. We have a very positive for the most part. Um, I mean just some days are more stressful than others, but uh they want to keep that by hiring good people. And then to Michael's point, we dive into all right, you also said that you you gave us a 3.59. Collectively, we scored this. It's not like you. It's like we all said this is an area. Let's call it out. It was a 3.59 on that first question and a 3.31 on the next question. And so we do preface it with given that we don't have

059unlimited resources, what what within what's within our sphere of influence or our control to be able to fix this. And so what we talk about what what can be streamlined, refined, do we do things that aren't needed and are there examples of resources that you need? And I just I'm still working because I've collected this data. So my I'm responsible for connecting with our team before September 17th and sharing here was the themes of the data that you gave back the deeper dive that you gave back and here's what we're going to celebrate and keep and here's what we're going to work on based on what you told us and every principal and uh department lead has to do this as well. So ours ours was these time-intensive uh protocols and could we automate some

060things some more and we have explored we've got a principle at Marina Village um Levi is is experimenting with docuign for short-term independent study contracts um like how do we could we start using some of that for some of our processes where it just automatically jumps to the next person. We don't have that. We're very paper. We love paper in education. And so, um, like that was a a theme that came up. People said, I I would like some time management training because I don't think I even know how I could get more efficient with my time. And then, um, it was really about, how do I improve processes if I'm constantly putting out fires? like this. Every day we show up, there's an issue that gets presented to us and you're you're dealing with

061that issue and the this idea of how do I get better? You just got I'm gonna I'm going to move that to tomorrow because I need to respond to this person. It's probably why we score so high in the culture side and people feeling like we're responsive and and then and they want the processes to get better and just finding the time to do that. It comes down to a workload sometimes too. One of the things that we have done is um even without um fully baking the response back yet is we've internally we had you know it's DTL meeting where's that how do I find that Google where's that Google doc located in a I don't know how many Google docs we have thousands uh oh tomorrow's leadership where's that agenda where do I

062got to click click click click to get to um we have our cabinet meetings. We have our sec our thank you um spreadsheet this all these things that are located. So we've created this Google one-stop doc for our leaders that says every meeting that you have is on this one doc bookmark it you go there click DTL for DTL click leadership for leadership. So it just makes it a just little things like that like it's it's been really nice. No one asks that question about where do I where is that again? We've also put it in the calendar invite for our meetings. you can go right into the calendar invite if you haven't bookmarked it and click it and and find your things. I know I have greatly appreciated just that small little um attention

063to that. So, like I said, these are I just wrote down a couple from the sticky notes that are in my office so I could give you an example of what that's going to look like and I'm going to share with you what it has looked like. Um on the communication side, again, we got a 3.59 here. So we just asked people what like this this the resources one I could understand. This was one I was like what do they mean like that we're not communicating and it wasn't what I thought it was. If I had just taken this given them the survey and then gone and sat in my office and I go oh they don't think I communicate well enough. Well I'm going to send out an email every day and that's going

064to show them how much I communicate. Um it wasn't that. It was about department to department. So like how do I make sure that when a a decision is made in HR that payroll knows about it or when a decision is made at the in in cabinet how does that get communicated to um you know the front desk or to Christina like just how do how do we get better about communicating and connecting dots between our departments when decisions are made. um this idea of can you give me a heads up? Like one of the things I think we've gotten a lot better on my first couple years here when there was a crisis at a school or a situation I did not give the secretaries at the schools or Sharon or Christina at the

065time like a heads up like you're going to get some calls and then inevitably they would say can you tell me what's going on because I'm getting a lot of phone calls about an email you just sent out. Can you forward it to like just little things like that? So when when we do have a what we think is going to be something bubbling, our team, I think, does a really good job of going, "Hey, who's going to notify Amanda at the front desk? She's going to be there this morning. She's probably going to get a phone call. Who's going to let Christina know?" Just these heads up, who's going to let the secretaries at some of the sites know that this is might be headed their way. Um, this communication tree. So they've asked

066for a communication tree like when a decision is made in cabinet who from cabinet is pushing this pushing this information out to departments that aren't represented in cabinet. Um and I think what that's an easy fix I think for sure. And then just really this interest in just being on the same page like if if you're going to make a change fine tell me the why and I'm I'm fine with that. So that was really what got vetted from talking with people which was very different than what I thought was going to be the answer. So that's the value of going back and asking and I know I'm talking a lot. I told the team today this the longest PowerPoint I've ever put together I think. But so I did want to share this is

067what we did la I want to go back a year so you could see some tangible because I'm just hinting at what we're going to do this year. This is some work that we did last year that I wanted to just highlight as an example. So the monthly attendant sheet came up as an area when we were talking about processes and resources like are there a form are there forms we could tackle and so we looked at the monthly attendance sheet and really at the end of the day we explored it and I could put there's another form called the PAF that no one likes in the district office. We we solicited samples from all over the county about does anyone have a PAF form? Send it to us. we want to look at your

068form and compare it to ours. It just that and the monthly attendance, we just looked at it and said there's really nothing to improve. It's just an ugly form and but every every line on there is necessary and we're we're not going to make a change there. And that's okay. Now everyone knows I I could dislike that form, but I know it's not any better anywhere else on the credit card supporting materials. Well, this actually came to me through Christina was just how time and paper uh intensive the process was to reconcile my credit card, Lisa's credit card. And so Christina, Amanda, and Lorraine sat down and Lisa was instrumental in this and just saying, "What is there a better way to do this just with Excel and not be something that you would think

069is very just like a simple thing?" But we hadn't taken the time to stop and say, "Let's stop doing that and get back to and look at a process." And that one has reduced the time spent monthly significantly. I don't hear it. I mean, I think this was a monthly conversation with Christina about look at how much paper this is requiring and now it's still time inensive, but we've improved that process. And then on the meetings, I I already shared the Google doc, the Google tool that we've created um to uh hopefully make our meetings a little more fluid and and easier for people to prepare for. I want to make sure I captured. Um, so the next steps here is these results rollouts. Um, every every one of our department leaders and our principles

070has until uh it's basically Septemberish um to review the results. And so we've all we've did that collectively as a group in August. And I'm doing that in my one-on- ones now. by October 15th, they are to have had a meeting like I just shared with you we had here with their team. It's a little bit delayed time frame because they don't get weekly time with their team. I mean, sometimes it's teacher time, sometimes it's district collaboration time. So, at one of their faculty meetings, they're going to run through those questions that that like I just did with you. What's what's lending to this result? and then and tease that out and then ideally come up with what are what are some of their action plans going to be for the year. And you can

071see some of them can be really significant, some can be just like minor um uh minor attempts to get better almost to that that bike racing like the gel, you know, like sometimes it could be just as small of a thing as that as an example. And then October through March, they're just going to work on making sure that they're that that's top of mind, that they're working on whatever it is they say they're going to commit to getting better. And then in May, everyone in the district has an opportunity to evaluate whether or not or everyone in your downline has an attempt to evaluate and say, "You didn't do anything what you said you were going to do or hey, thank you for uh working on that and improving upon it." So, um, that's

072a really long way of kind of painting a picture for you, but I I wanted you to be able to see when we talk about the continuous improvement like like what's layered underneath. I was going to bring down the the papers that are associated with this, but the documentation that we collect and the data that we collect is really uh significant and the ideas this year is for it to be impactful. So, I think that's the I lost my voice on I obviously don't have a teacher voice anymore because that was not all that long. But, um, so I I I put some questions on here as as potentially to guide conversation, but they're in no means intended for you to ask those. I didn't sit down and like prepare an answer for any of

073these questions. I just was trying to think like what are some questions that might be ruminating. So, I'm I'm curious, our team's curious about what perhaps a simple question is where are we crushing it at? What's keeping you awake at night with continuous improvement or where do you think we could get better? And then I guess what more information would you like or need from us? >> Well, I'll first start by saying thank you for um the presentation on your findings. I have to imagine that there's a fair amount of commentary. Um I'll open up to trustees to start that. Good. Miss Bibo, go ahead. >> I said Michelle over she was there. >> I just had a question. >> Okay. >> Um I just wanted to just to emphasize this is the work that

074we're doing with stutter. This is their gu through their guidance that we have been able to kind of really intentionally implement this. >> Yes. So the >> continuous improvement >> what they've specifically to the the um well the professional development was led by Amy or uh during our first year and and our and our second year. This year, Amy is no longer with us, but we have a new coach. And um we feel like we're in a good spot as a collective group, but we have two leaders that are leading some significant initiatives. And so, the time has been released for our coach to support those two leaders and moving some very important work that needs someone that's like going to be right by their side helping them. So, that's what that person is doing.

075Now on the back end, Stutter is doing all the work um in conjunction with Christina on the department services survey, making sure that every single employee gets sent uh the not the letter and that they get direct that all the backend stuff for them to rank whatever departments they've been engaged in and likewise on the employee experience survey. >> And then in the disagregation of the data, are they also involved in that or is that what role are they taking? Yeah. So they'll they'll give us we can ask for as much detail as we want. What we get right now is we we've wanted to keep it so that it's not overwhelming to our leaders. So they used to give us this net promoter score and your top tier 2 questions. It was like there's

076a lot to process. Now it's just what what are the themes? So they help us with the they help us with the and actually Christina took on the themes this year for us with the employee engagement because we are trying to figure out like how do we how do we wean ourselves the goal we're on a three-year contract so it's like how do we wean ourselves off this and we are going to be working with stutter to say we don't need the coach anymore but we really need the backend on these two surveys what would that cost like stuff we just don't have the bandwidth or the and we want to be able to compare ourselves nationally to get an idea like are we moving the needle? So um so the they they do all

077the backend stuff and what they give us right now is they give us the uh your score the 4.5 the 4.31 they give it your comparison from last year so you can look at it very cleanly they print it for each or they provide it for each of our departments and uh on the employee experiences survey that's the part we haven't figured out how to necessarily wean ourselves from and I don't know that we will >> we did that what was the sur the uh California healthy kids survey Okay. We were able to figure out a way to do that on our own. I'm not I don't know that we could do that with the survey. They because it's proprietary. So, we could I know we could not ask those same questions because if they

078saw us send out a Google Docs or somehow found out we were using their questions, I I would imagine that's would be problematic for them. Does that make sense? >> Absolutely. And I was that was going to be my follow-up question is what does a gradual release look like with them? But so, it makes sense that >> Yeah. This this may be one of the first time I I mean I think in business or education there's always this creep like well we've always done we spent $40,000, you know, and we're going to we're just going to have to keep spending if we want to do this work. I think this is an example where we've really tried to figure out like this is really a three-year deal and I think we're going to get really

079close. I haven't got the pricing yet. I've asked them for it. They just haven't I think they're hoping that we have an amazing year with a coach this year and we say, "Well, how about the the uh survey and the coach? We'll give you that price. We'll see. >> Just curious, Jim. Um you were saying that Sudter was involved a lot at the back end, but it sounds like we've got an actual coach, and I'm wondering how um this is like a really big picture question, but um how this was rolled out. In other words, um what I'm really looking to see is like how did we introduce stutter and the continuous improvement idea with our leaders to get the buy in because anything that we you know as we all know anything you try

080to put in and push down uh was uh was there a slot? >> No no no not not at all not at all. >> I'm referring to you that's not what I was doing. Yeah. Um so um yeah so so I would I'm did we have some kind of um initial meeting where we really got buy in from all of our leaders who were like yes I want to do this or is this you know another like top down where people are like oh yeah sure we'll do that because you know the results in terms of really getting improvement like that's the initial most important piece and sometimes it's like that's the value of having someone come from the outside cuz they're like the new shiny object and we're all going to be so excited

081about this, aren't we? And it actually works rather than your own boss and you're going, "Yeah, I got a full plate. Thanks." >> Yeah. I I think and and Lisa and Dustin could chime in on this part too. They might have some different thinking, but I um I remember when we had our first couple meetings wondering like how's this going to land with everyone? And I for me it was how we're going to invest in people over programs. And our investment is in in you as we want you to where was that slide? We want you to be considered a great leader and we're going that's what we're working towards so that everyone in this room when they're evaluated is is considered great. So the first year what we did was we said there is

082there this what's that the that movie circle of trust what Dairo or isn't it Daener it's like this room is our circle of trust we're not talking about this outside of this room no one's going to go out and try any of these strategies start talk it was just like we're just going to learn about we want to get consistent with language we want to get consistent with where we're headed we're just going to learn as a team and this is a safe space to ask questions. And then really it was going to be like do we then the next thing is can we get to a spot where I I think at that point that was going to be at the end of my second year are people going to trust that this is

083not going to be you these surveys are not going to be used to harm them. Um, and I think what came in it what worked in our favor was the union at that point had a survey that they did at the end of every year of the administrators and the questions were worded differently that that the union wanted to ask their members and they weren't necessarily being received well by senior leaders, by the department leads, by the principles because they had no voice in crafting the the survey. It was very it felt like it could be very punitive and we had the same thing in when I was in San Juan. We had the teacher surveys. So that really resonated with me. So this was about we're going to do these surveys and it's going

084to be used from a lens to get you to be considered a great leader versus I'm going to harm you because of what these survey results came to say. I think Amy was a really thoughtful coach. um she came in and that new shiny object, she approached things from a a really great lens of meeting us where we were at as a team and trying to help us get um on the same page with this learning piece and then that it's been a very slow roll out. Um I mean we didn't do the first survey until the end of the second year um with our but I think everyone felt like we were in a good space to have conversations. Is there anything either of you want to add? I was I was just going

085to um clarify too with your question. Um Amy Fowler, our coach, actually um she spent our the last two actually was is two before that of our leadership retreats basically working with our leaders and really introducing us to a lot of different strategies and protocols and concepts. Gave us chances to work in pairs and in groups and just to collaborate. And then she helped coach us along. And so we were able to do that. And then for 2 years monthly she would meet with our leadership team like every month. And so it wasn't just about the survey and just about the roll out of the survey. It was literally about building a relationship and a connection. And as a coach, we were coached up on not just the survey, but on a lot of other

086leadership protocols. One example um that Jim shared today that we use as a stoplight protocol which we've used to create all kinds of different um steps in which we have if there's an emergency, if there's a specific topic like he me referenced a snow day, who are all the people we need to communicate with, what are all the things we need to do to make sure that we're excuse me not missing out on something. And so she um invested quite a bit of time into our leaders. Leaders could contact her and she would meet with them. she would talk to them individually about their specific job or their department or their school site. And so, um, if you were to to pull all of our leaders, they would say that she was a fantastic coach

087and that she really did provide that opportunity for us just to to grow, not just with the survey, but also just with a lot of other protocols. And she would even stay once her portion was done and listen to us conduct business and run our meetings and then would chime in if she had questions. Super helpful. So >> yeah, I I would just also add I think Yeah, I turned it on. Um I think that one of the things that we would remind them all is that this wasn't intended to add work. So Jim was very intentional about reminding like as we would learn different um strategies on how to handle this or the stoplight or whatever. It was not about adding work to our plate. Like how could we incorporate something that we learned

088in that meeting in that monthly meeting incorporated in a way that wasn't adding work. It was improving our work, improving our processes. So I think for me personally as a leader that was um like a a weight lifted, right? Like this wasn't creating work. It was how are we working smarter, stronger, and better. I think just your personal observation for all the leaders that that was kind of how at least most felt that there that they that they actually were going to learn skills that were going to make them more efficient, not trying to add work to their plate. >> I mean, I I I don't want to speak for other people. Um so but I would say that anytime we anytime stress was felt in this room as we were doing that that reminder

089was brought out. So um because it is really easy to see like all these things that we're learning and then you want to go back and implement it or um you know the the next meeting would be the followup. Okay, how did that work for you? um that reminder of it's okay if you didn't get to it. That that reminder of you know it it the none of this is meant to be stressful. So it was a constant reminder how each person or leader internalized that I I can't speak I can only speak for myself but it was a really good reminder regularly that this isn't about adding work. This was about how do we improve our processes? How do we become better leaders just by we're going to go from A to B, but

090how do we get to B? There's many different paths, right? So, how do we get there in a way that's going to bring our staff along with us? Something as simple as um when you're out in the schoolyard, just remembering to say hi to eachard supervisor. So it doesn't necessarily take more time, but it's just a little bit more thoughtful. So those are like the little things that I felt were um just really good reminders on how to be a good leader and bringing in that strategy and culture together. Um so that that's what I would add. I would I would add also um you know you get your evaluation report or your survey data back you you have a pretty good idea like oh yeah I that's I know that's an area I need

091to work on you know 35 people just told me something I already know. So our our the entry I always say the entry point to a conversation is the most important part for for me it was then work on that if you know that's an area that you're like I I know I got to get better there like make that your eval do this make it part of your continuous improvement work and your evaluation question mark and our our monthly check-in like it's going to be the same question for all three and then it and then you've already told your staff you're going to work on it and they're going to see you work on it. So this is I see you working on it. You know you're getting better in an area that you

092already like yeah I know I need to get better in that area and your staff is seeing you get work. So it's really like um and just pick one. Like our first first year we were going through some of this and I you know I meet with some and they said well I you know uh you know eight of my scores were lower than I wanted so I've got to I'm going to work on all eight of them. And I'm like, "No, you're pick one this year and just do that one really really well and then we'll work." And it's like that um he he just talked about the the the 1% a day and just this the what do you call it? The I forget the term he uses the aggregate of the something

093like that was kind of the philosophy that we had was just pick the one just pick the one and let's get really good at that. You you're going to do management regardless all day every day. But so the the idea to Lisa's point was not to add work, but just like make this your singular work and it you can check the box off for all the all the little things you need to be working on. >> This is this a survey process that we will continue going forward or does this end at the end of the studio contract? >> Right. Right now it's scheduled to end. So >> the last year, >> we're in the last year. So the coaching part is now is just been pushed off to just two singular leaders that that

094are going to that are that are like I said moving some important work that just needs a a thought partner and someone to really that's really strategic with them and then we're getting we're going to be getting a quote for well I that's going to be some of our work is just going to be part of today was just listing like do you feel like this is impactful work and we something we want to continue with um is just to get a quote for what does it cost for them to do the survey. If it's exorbitant, then it might be something where we just say we're not going to be able to do compare the last two years of data, but we feel like we know the questions we want to ask and we're going

095to use it through a like a Google survey. Um, so that's kind of the next step, but I we are going to be soliciting feedback for sure. how is what still remains to be seen. And >> I think secondly, I'm not surprised, but we as a district should be very very proud of the results and all the hard work everybody put into it because it's super valued data. Um the one the one takeaway that kind of surprised me was just I would have expected the participation to be higher. You said 56% it was I think I saw one place it was a 1% increase and one place was a 5% increase. >> Yeah. You know, you you made the roing an analogy, >> but I for some reason I expected it to be higher, especially

096with all with everything you put into it. Yeah. >> What was Stutter's thoughts on the participation that >> Yeah. They thought there were it was a very high Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Every time I we have a data point and we ask Stutter like, "Is that good?" She's like, "Are you kidding me?" Like I mean like the the our the 4.31, you know, I think in in our heads like what? like how why isn't that like a 4.8 ate one like you and she's like no the goal is affordable you already met the goal you're past the goal like stop I'm like it's okay to so um she said that with the survey deck to and I'm trying to remember do any of you what's our LC cap is it is it 40% of the parents

097that do that 35% do you I want to say every spring it's like 30 to 40% it's not over 50 I know that >> yeah right so When we do our parent survey, our student survey had really good data that that's probably because we give them time to in class to Yeah, you don't have to do a test or you could do this survey. Yeah, I mean this Yeah, the this survey does require some some time for people to say, "Okay, I'm going to do it." Um and and I know the union has has done a great job. That's another thing that we've done is uh part of the slow roll with this too is making sure the union realized that what the intent was and the fact that um Raft has aband not abandoned

098but they've they've paused their survey of our leaders the last two years because I think um because they see that we're actually that we are gathering similar survey and then we're working on improving on it versus receiving a survey that all right you've surveyed us but it it it I how's that being used after it gets out we've been able to tell Ruff this is how we use the D you're going to see your principal receive the data then they're going to go in front of the staff and say here's where I want some feedback on how you rate and I'm and then develop how we're going to get better in that like isn't that what our teachers want too and so I I I honestly believe it's just a very transparent process that allows

099them to go yeah No one wants no one wants to use a survey as a baton. Um, so >> do you know the you mentioned the union participation different survey probably some commonality. Do you know that their participation? >> I don't I could probably ask I would imagine it's similarly but I you know that would be a wild guess. I probably shouldn't put myself anyone you >> I don't know but what I would comment on with that is is that um the rough survey is for certificated members and this survey um accounts for classified and so more employees from other departments get a chance to participate and weigh in which I think is better. >> Yeah, that's a good point. >> I have two questions. Um, the first one, can you can you go back

100to Amy's not with us anymore, but now we have two coaches. I thought I heard you say those two coaches are working alongside two people, or did I not hear that correctly? >> Just a little bit off. So, Amy ended up take Amy got recruited uh by a school district to do exactly what she was doing with a bunch of districts. They said, "We want to hire you just for our school district." So, and she can walk to work versus driving up here. So, it was a no-brainer for her. Um, and and welld deserved. So, I worked with Stutter, their VP of coaching, and sat down and she met with uh me in the spring and we just talked through what where are we at with our journey? What are we what are we looking

101for? And at that point, it there was there's two initiatives that are going on that I said, I really would like someone to assist with this initiative and with this initiative. So they look through their pool of folks. I said, I want someone that's had sight leadership that's been a principle that that is able to not just say, "Oh, I read a book on what you should do. Like I live this." Um that has some experience with systems work, which is what one of our leaders is trying to drive some really important system work. And then another leader that really is just trying to tighten up processes at a school site >> and with with additional staffing that's been provided, like just how do we get alignment at a school site? And so they we

102they've identified one person that's going to support both of our leaders. So instead of that one person coming and meeting with all 24 of us monthly, they're taking that time and giving really more um attention >> to uh the two leaders that um we've identified that could really use a thought partner because they've got some really important work that they've got to do. Does that does that make sense? >> It does. Thank you. >> Okay. Yeah. Um my next question is do we see any theme of um this amazing work differently impacting sites versus departments. >> Um well at least it works with most of the departments. >> Did that question even make sense? >> No. Yeah. Yeah. Um, how is the work landing with a with a Um, I my sense is is I

103I don't know that all of our departments have Oh, Kim, take care. I don't know that all of our departments have the the structured time like we do with sites like at a site, you know, every Wednesday there's a meeting, the principal has time every single Wednesday versus some of our departments and feel free to chime in here. Some of our departments have some structured time, but it's not it's not on a weekly basis. So, I think it's a little the sense I get it's a little more difficult for them to um find the time just to dig into this. I will say our food when Kim was here, she I remember meeting with her the first time she had to go over her data with and she was a nervous wreck out in the

104park. I think I may have shared this story once before. She was like, I don't know how this is going to work. This is not how we do things in food services. like you educators, this is a more of a natural conversation. This is not typically how it works. And she ca she one of the nice things that stutter did for us was they gave us all a template PowerPoint. You just had to fill your own data in. And she worked through it with us, coached us through it so we were all comfortable, nervous, but comfortable like with what we were going to say. And Kim came in, gave the presentation, and then her team gave her some just incredible feedback on was it about it was about how they receive kids in line, right?

105And they all said, "Oh yeah, I know I need to get better at that." Yep. I get frustrated when a kid doesn't remember. They all knew the data and they came up with a really and they moved the needle more than I think any department or school in the in the district. I don't know if you want to layer on that or is that >> No, I think you captured it. Um what I would just add is the department survey is different in that it speaks to just the services they provide and processes and um you know timeliness of getting there of of providing the service. And so the questions are a little different because they're uh they are focused more on the services that that department provides. Um, and it's the one of the

106questions is a clarifier that says, "Please only answer if you've um had interactions with this department within the last year because the goal isn't to, you know, back in 1992, uh, food service really dropped the ball on XYZ. So, we really want some recent relevant interactions with the departments and our departments have really done a nice job of looking at systems that um can be improved based on that feedback. And so, I do think that while it's more difficult because it is tough uh when you're talking about um food service being able to meet regularly, they're all at sites. Some of them only work two or three hours. They're not the same shifts because if they're working at the middle school versus the elementary, their time is off. And we don't have we only have

107um one day at the beginning of the year where they're all together. So there isn't that time for them to be a team. But when they've had these opportunities, it's really has brought them together to say, you know, here are some things. The other thing that Kim implemented was having some of the site yard supervisors learn and understand what the nutrition guidelines are and the the USDA restrictions and the federal um school lunch program what some of those restrictions are because some of the food service workers were coming across as mean because they wouldn't let them go get a second milk. Well, our our food service guidelines don't allow that. So, you know, understanding that this isn't about um being mean, but it's really about processes and helping others understand what the processes are. So

108that was a lot of what um these surveys open our eyes to is that how can we better instruct or teach other team members about some of the restrictions or the processes that we have in place and the why because the why is just so critical. And Laura this year I got to go um to the food service kickoff where she had everyone there and part of her presentation was their survey data and she was an employee last year and sat on the one side to provide it and I said I said and we didn't really have a chance I'm sure Lisa did but just to coach around what this looks like but she was very conf she was like no I know what this is about like I I want to get the feedback

109I want to get I want to know where we can improve upon and so I I do think that the departments have it's it's a little different for them. Um but I think they've embraced it for sure. >> It is very difficult for them to not take it too personally because you know they're all like we all are. We're all very proud of the work that we do >> and the work that their team does. And so to um be able to take a step back and so I do sit with each of them beforehand and just kind of talk through like, okay, let's let's kind of tease out what could this look like? What kind of questions are you going to ask? Because you're soliciting input that's just going to improve services or how

110are we going to communicate better as to why our processes are the way they are? and and it's been working really well. I think I think each department made some really good improvements. >> I would probably start with um the value of the value of what we've done um what you've brought here and what we've committed to. Um when I say we, I don't necessarily mean me, but um because I haven't done anything. It's been cabinet and everyone else involved through leadership. But um Jim, when you entered this district, you brought with you a mantra of a culture of excellence that we were striving for. >> And I think um the work that is being done is is um has tremendous value. And and I think it's I mean one of the characteristics um Jim

111about you that I truly appreciate is your humility, how humble you are. Um always deflecting responsibility, meaning never never taking any of it in regards to what we accomplish in this district. And that's a sign of a good leader. >> But I think there are so many signs over the past couple years since we have been doing this that have pointed to rescue becoming better and better. Um, we see it in articles. We see it um in recognitions throughout the county. There there's just a number of things. And I've been around this district for for five years. Some transitional time. Um I think um we did things good. I feel um we are doing things better now. and um and I feel as if it's rooted in the ability to be reflective in our professional

112practices, which I think um what we're talking about tonight has done. Um and that's a collective practice among the employees inside of our district. I think anytime that you can um reflect on your professional practice and be willing to examine imperfections and are open to being better. Um it only lends to the opportunity to do greater things. There's a there's a statement that was always on um the classroom wall of one of my colleagues, Jay Lawson, and it says, "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard." >> And I think um everyone is aware of really talented people that they are around that don't necessarily work hard. Um, and then those that are willing to put the energy and time in to become better and the outcomes typically um, yield greater success. >> And

113I think to kitty back um, what Jamie was saying is I in fact um, can see great value in this model um, trickling down into um, our classrooms. um not to put more work on teachers because I'm a teacher. I know what that feels like and it's no fun. However, if we know that um our classrooms are about learning and connections and if we could be reflective on how to help learning become better and make greater connections, um our students win, our families win. And I don't know if it's through PLC time, through professional development time, um but if we are seeing the outcomes that we are that are um because of the work our district is doing, can we not also see the value that can happen among our kids and our district with

114our teachers doing the same? And and they're already doing incredible things. I'm not questioning that. But if it's about systems, I'm just curious. >> As a teacher myself, I could I could be reflective knowing that I could improve on my systems in my classroom to induce connections with my students that I think can lead to greater learning. Um, and if there was time carved out, um, either through PLC or professional development as an educator, um, and I was held accountable, which I think is the biggest proponent about improving systems in my room for those purposes, connections and learning, my students um, would would reap the reward and benefits from that. Do you want to come kick off our uh professional development October because you're you're you uh you've teed up a lot of what I

115think is what our what our intent here in October is and this is part of what our that one of the coaches is working with Jen on our MTSS work. One of the things we're hearing loud and clear in this survey from our employees and just our our regular meetings, our interactions with our employees is that just the the tension points with some of our uh most difficult students or most challenging students is just creating is creating a lot of tension points in our classrooms. And we don't have great we we're a very well-run and organized district. I think we have amazing people, but this is an area where we have to get better in. If we're going to recruit and retain, we have to be able to tell people need to be able to

116go out and tell people, you need to come work for rescue because here's the support systems that they have in place when this when a child behaves this way or exhibits the these uh learning difficulties or is experiencing this trauma, whatever is going on with that child, here's how we respond. and that we are all over the map right now and we've gotten a lot better in the last two to three years on the alignment piece. This year is really our focus is how do we get better in alignment and how do we provide some um opportunities for staff to have conversations, professional development conversations about what that looks like in their classroom. We're um Dustin and Jen are working very hard on our professional development day that's coming up and it's really going to

117be centered on you've told us this is an area we need to get better on. We've garved out time for you today to try to work on that. Uh we'll see. We're we always say anytime you put on professional development for 200 people, there's a there's a percentage that um it's just not going to resonate with because it it doesn't speak to them. That's not our intent, but it's going to happen. But like we think we've identified an area though that res is going to resonate with a lot of people based on the data that we've got. So I'm excited about having this trickle down to the classroom um and with what what our plan is. We've got some work to do for for the uh for that. When when Dustin and I visited that

118school in Oregon, they were they went in like two years they took it all the way down to the classroom and it was just too fat. I mean, they're nationally renowned because of how quickly they did it. But when you walk through the classes, you can tell it just probably now it has, but we were there on I think year three and they just had there was still a lot of um work that needed to be done for it to get down into the classroom level. So, our first big stab as a with a districtwide PD is uh is was that October 13th coming up. >> That's our plan. >> Yeah. Thank you for the work you're doing. I think it's really good. I think it's really challenging to be vulnerable and to open yourself

119up to um imperfections, but >> yeah, I don't like sharing some of my my data with you, but I feel I'm not going to share anyone else's but mine. And so I think it's good and I I I will go back I I really appreciate the the nice words. I do, but I want to go back to what our team said in here. Like we hire really good people and we've exited a lot of people out of the system and and they've been very uncomfortable conversations the last four years. people have been here a long time that are no longer with us. And with and our goal there is just is not to get rid of people. It's just like we really want really good people in our system. And I think that our hiring

120has reflected that over the last couple years. It's really fun to work with our leaders right now because just you look around the room and our and our teaching staff, but you look around the room and you're just like I like every single person in this room which is makes it a healthy and I think our board reflects that as well. >> I think Bill Bich did that with Tom Brady. You saw that worked out. >> Yeah. >> There any comments or questions from our trustees on this great study session? >> I think we got one more. >> I do just want to actually say one thing because I I would like to compliment the team because I do think that culture is very very very difficult to um improve upon to grow to make

121something that's you know, um, group organizationwide, right? Sometimes you have pockets of good culture, sometimes you have pockets where there's problems. And what I keep hearing, I think, in the in the conversation we've had today is that the culture of excellence is there. We have some minor tweaks with systems, >> but I I I've only heard positive things about the interactions between people and the and like the the dignity is there and the empathy is there and the you know um basic humanness of working together is there. It's just a simple tweak when it comes to processes. Everything that I've heard tonight has been this system needs to be tweaked or this process can be streamlined. I haven't heard anything negative that, you know, like you said, like we really need to get better at,

122you know, being nice to each other. >> So, I think that I I'm really um I I really want to compliment the idea of culture of excellence because that's not easy. And and as a teacher, you know, the old mantra about culture eats structure. And so I think that that's that makes it so much easier for us to make those minor tweaks because the culture already is so strong. So I appreciate that and want to thank you for continuing that. >> So if there is nothing else from our superintendent or cabinet or um leadership, I will then request for um an adjournment >> that we adjourn. >> I'll second that. That's great.