001you. kick off the work session for tonight. So this is the first uh work session for our new board members. So uh this is a much more informal setting than when we're up on the dis and so you know you can feel free to kind of jump in with questions to be a little more relaxed and don't follow Robert's rules of orders necessarily. This is more of just a place for discussion to getformational updates from staff workshop ideas. Um and this is this is one of my favorite rants to go on. So I'm going to indulge and for the community I'm going to very briefly go on a rant here which is that one of the things that you get to do right when you see your public institutions in action is you are kind
002of seeing the process and you are seeing the work. Uh and I know very well from my own time in research that the process of coming up with new ideas necessarily involves coming up with some bad ideas along the way. Um, and so one of the things that, you know, the community watching a work session and you all as new board members should be cognizant of as well is, you know, don't be afraid to ask questions. Don't be afraid to throw out ideas. Don't be afraid to throw out suggestions. This is not a place where we're voting. This is not a place where things are going to be super polished on our end necessarily. This is a place where it's okay to be curious, where it's okay to be speculative, uh, and to, you know,
003really kind of relax a little bit. So, uh, we have three two major things to get through tonight. Uh and then one brief one. Um we're starting with a conversation uh about the bond and um including kind of particulars for bond communication. Uh this is going to be relevant in particular for Parth and Leanne because at the board retreat you both mentioned being interested in kind of taking the stick on uh considering how we think through community engagement particularly in the context of a bond. Um and so I think I think this conversation in particular will be interesting to you. After that, we have our uh midyear data updates. Um, and I'll talk a little bit more about there when we get there. And then finally, the last thing we're considering tonight uh is this
004tasker for a alternative pay scale uh that Jason and I put together. And we'll talk about that at the end of the work session tonight. Um, at the retreat, uh, Michelle and Charles had also potentially agreed to kind of think through a protocol for discussion, whether that was at a regular meeting or whether that was at a work session. My understanding from talking to Charles is that you all would kind of like to see a work session in action before you bring any concrete proposals. So I don't have any real intended protocol for tonight. I think this can be conversational. I will just say that one thing that has worked for us in the past is as we're going through presentations from staff, try to hold your questions until the end. You know, if you
005have like a very quick clarifying question, you know, there's a data slide and it's another one of those D11 acronym heavy slides and you don't know what anything is referring to, that's fine. Ask the clarifying question, but questions of substance, please try to hold until the end. And then if you would be so kind as to kind of prioritize your top two questions, uh, that would be nice. And then if there's extra time and not everyone, you know, has a full set of questions and you want to come back to some lower priority ones, I think that would be a good way to do tonight. Um, but like I said, I'm okay with it being a little conversational as well. So, with that, we will start with our bond overview and I'm going to kick
006it over to Superintendent G. Uh, Dr. Kerry and to the board and to the public. It's an exciting time to show you all the work and the planning that we have done on a bond initiative for November of 26. Uh, I also got a picture today of the mezzanine steel going in at Jenkins and I was over at Palmer earlier today and I can tell you that even though both of those projects started with great consternation, the excitement in those buildings around investing in the education of our current and our future students is extremely exciting. I've not felt that in single buildings in the three years that I've been here because we've normally managed ourselves from a deficit start position. What do we not have? How do we bridge? How do we gap? We have
007for you here an update and a plan of which we'll want your um ideas and your thinking on of how do we take a grassroots initiative to the very people that we are asking to serve better. I have done some of my best work in my military career in the most austere locations. I'm very proud of that work. But I was never asked to live there permanently. And so, yes, I could deploy forward and bring together people from all over the world to put the tip of the spear wherever it needed to go. But I never asked somebody to teach world languages on the third floor of Palmer High School when it was 120 degrees as their regular job. I never asked other educators to go into buildings and staff and students that don't even
008have a plan for air conditioning. I've never asked somebody to go into a building that from every version of a fiscal facilities index or an educational adequacy puts us dead last not only in the city but dead last in the state. This is a hallmark opportunity for this board and our community to finally come together that says we actually believe more in district 11 than anything that somebody wants to tell us is wrong with district 11. With that, I pass this over to my trusty deputy who needs a clicker to be able to do those things. All right. Good evening board. As the superintendent said, very excited to bring you the presentation tonight. Um, just to orient the board to what we're going to talk about tonight. Uh, we're going to talk a little bit
009about pro how we're going to go about project selection, how we're already going about project selection, um, how we're going to engage with the community, and then we'll end with some kind of financial analysis so that we can kind of look at the numbers and and have a a good conversation about that. Uh, you'll see that my slides tonight spiral a bit, so I apologize if they feel repetitive. It is in design intentional. We'll see how that plays. Um, but we'll get started. Okay. Uh as a reminder to the board, we are partnering with um some similar companies as we get started on the bond scoping work. Uh we're partnering with Perkins Eastman, with RTA architects, um and with NES. Those are the same partners that we are working with right now at our with
010our Palmer High School rebuild. And they're also the same partners that helped with all of the data collection that we've been going through over the last three and a half years as we come to this moment. Uh, and so they always have their slides about all of the work that they do. We're going to go through that quickly. Okay, here we go. Um, again, 20,000 students, uh, over 1,800 teachers, 55 schools. Uh, as the superintendent said, this is, um, one of the most pivotal moments in the district's history. Uh, and so, uh, we want to talk about why now, right? Um, as I'm sure you all hear, and I certainly hear, uh, everybody can have a really good reason of why a bond um, isn't a good idea. I'm sure they've all had those same
011good reasons over the last two decades, but it has been two decades. You will not find a surrounding district that has gone two decades without recapitalization. As the board has also heard me say, we have the money we need to deliver on the strategy in terms of compensation, in terms of academic performance, and we just like every other district in this state cannot recapitalize ourselves. It is financially impossible. Nobody has done it. Nobody will be able to do it. So why now? Three reasons. Number one, we're going to build on success. this board um has overseen significant transformational success over the last three and a half years. We're going to build on that. Now, the buildings, no pun intended there, need to improve. Uh as the board has also heard from me say many, many
012times, when we wait, it only gets more expensive. Appreciate the it is not something in which um it is I made the joke earlier, this isn't our buildings are not fine wine. They do not get better with age. They only get worse with age. and we'll we'll show you some data on that. And then number three, uh this size of an investment is not just an investment in our district. It is an investment in our community. I can show you so many data sets that show that investing in schools improves everything about a community. Um we and we'll talk about that a little bit. All right. As I just said, no district does this itself. This is 180 successful bond campaigns over the last 15 years. That word wall you see on the right, the
013bigger the name, the more often they've passed a successful bond campaign. What I want you to notice, those are not all the same types of districts. Yes, there are the big urban Denver districts. You'll Holio's the biggest. There's nothing further away from the big urban districts than Holio. Uh you'll see our neighbors are on there largely because they've passed multiple bonds. 180 successful bond campaigns across the district in the last 15 years. Uh again, District 11 hasn't passed a bond since 2006, and our buildings demonstrate that. When we bring it in closer, the board has seen this slide before, again, this is what's happening in our local region. Uh they've all recently passed or will go for another ballot initiative in the in the near future. Uh and if you look at our data, as
014the superintendent said, the condition of our facilities is the worst. That is true. I wish that were not true, but it is. And if you've taught or spent significant time in our schools, you know that to be true. Miss Hotelling, who represents our capital programs, has done everything humanly imaginable with the money she has over the last four years to change this. And she's done incredible work that I think the board has seen, and that will only go so far. We're not the only district to face something like this. So, I want to walk you through a little bit of a case study. Uh this is a case study about DC public schools. Um, again, a district that would serve a similar population to District 11. And, uh, over about two decades, they went through
015the largest recapitalization effort um, in the nation's history. $6 billion over 20 years, right? We're not asking for $6 billion, but um, and you can see they did exactly what we're doing, major large-scale investments, some more targeted investments. In that same period of time, they also became the fastest improving educational urban system in the in the country. Now what I will say is it is not solely because of the condition of their facilities but I guarantee you it helped. Having high-quality facilities matters. In that same period of time they also saw a significant increase in enrollment. As the board knows, we are now as active as humanly possible in the school choice for families and we have done some really transformational things over the last few years and facilities matter. They do. If you drive
016by a new building and you drive by a really old building and everything else is equal, that new building is going to win 100 times. 100% of the time. Okay. Uh back to our numbers. Here's what we know to be true. Uh, our average age is, it says 58, we're just around 60 years in terms of our average age. Uh, we are a large portfolio across the city. Um, and we're really focusing on kind of three primary things. Working with school leaders and communities to help decide what projects need to happen in their schools. We are obviously prioritizing larger investments um that we know need to happen at the district level. And what the superintendent said, we're grounding that plan in local voices with a grassroots campaign. We'll talk about that in a little bit.
017I'll say this one more time. Uh I've shared this slide multiple times. Things only get more expensive. Remember when we approved the cop, we used this slide about the Adams investment, which when it occurred was $8 million. Five years later, it was going to be $15 million. 10 years from now, that same $8 million investment will cost the district $40 million. $750 million worth of projects if we were to wait five more years is over a billion dollars. It does not get more uh it does not get less expensive. The need only grows and the cost only grows. Here are the primary areas that we are working with school communities to identify projects. Uh you'll see that we're going to try to hit all parts of the school experience. What we know some projects have
018already been identified. Number one is the completion of the Palmer master plan. Number two is the paying off of the existing cop. Remember we have brought the board the concept of if we were to have this large of an investment in capital across our system. It would free up existing resource that then we can put into other district needs. What we have brought is the concept of significantly changing changing the teacher salary schedule so that we do not continue to play the $1 and $200 game with surrounding districts. But we establish that students in district 11 deserve the best teachers and best teachers deserve the highest pay. This is our opportunity to free up resource in a way that we have not had and will not have again. So, uh, also a new home's middle
019school. Every piece of data that we have evaluated, regardless of how we order it, always tells us two things need to happen. You need to rebuild Palmer High School, and you need to rebuild Holmes Middle School. Every single data set. Now, I know that might be weird because Holmes isn't the oldest. Um, but every data set that we have says that that's where we need to, it does not make sense to continue to try to fix things. Uh it's like that old car where it's like you just keep putting in money and at some point you just got to buy the new car. We're also going to once and for all address all HVAC needs. This is primarily a secondary issue. $75 million in HVAC projects. With our current capital allocation, that's four years of
020no other projects. If this board said we want to guarantee that every student has access to air conditioned space, we do no other projects for four years if we were to do that. Right? So this is Coronado. This is fixing Dohy. This is fixing all of our secondary spaces and catching a few of those elementary classrooms that remain. And then obviously some of our statutory requirements as well. After we do those big projects, it still leaves a very sizable amount of money that will be now in the hands of schools to decide. $275 million. There's going to be a baseline investment in every school. Every single school will significantly benefit from this bond. There's not going to be a school that doesn't get anything. Everybody will get an amount of money that they can change
021something significant in their school. Also, we're going to do obviously mid and high tier investments. Uh and so what this also means is when we organize the projects, we're going to make sure in every K12 metriculation there is a transformational project. If you're in the northeast, you have the transformational project at Jenkins. and we're going to put significant investment in Dohy. If you're in the central, you have the rebuild of Palmer High School. If you're on the west, you have the rebuild of homes. If you're in the southeast, you have the significant investment that we've already done at Mitchell, and we will expand that. So, regardless of your area, everybody will get to experience in their educational journey, a significant capital investment. I'm going to flip through these quickly. Let me show you just some
022examples of what this kind of looks like. Mid tier. Uh mid tier are our bathroom renovations. Those things have been incredible. Um again, it's still my daughter's favorite part of the Holmes Middle School. I don't know why. I don't think she spends a lot of time there, but uh she still loves the bathroom at Holmes Middle School. It's CTE investments. It's the types of things that we're doing at Halbert. Wouldn't it be incredible if not just the front of Halbert, but also the entire playground experience at Howbert matched what it is to be an outdoor learning school? Then you'll see again some of those more mid-tier Penrose. Look at what Penrose looks at looks like on the left. That's what it looks like on a good day. That's what green grass on the right. With
023a reasonable amount of money, we can change that front off or that front experience. Remember what the demographer said, fasttrack facelifts, change the entry experience for families. We're not making this up. This is based on data that we know to be true. And then that's a rendering. Please hear me clearly. This is not the final drawing. That's what Holmes Middle School can look like. That's not if you drive by it, that's not what it looks like today, right? That's what you could get to experience off of Mesa. Again, to remind the board, this isn't because we've mismanaged our facilities. Our facilities crew is incredible. They do incredible work. Our building teams are incredible. We are old, right? Most of our buildings were built before the 70s and it's not like in that good charming way.
024It's like in the 60s and 70s, right? We got to fix that. That's what you just saw at Penrose. That's what you also see at homes. Okay. We're not uh just letting the superintendent say put money there. This is all databased and it will all be completely accessible to the community. The first data point that we look at is facil facility condition index. This is the same data point that this district utilized in the previous bond. This is the standard industry standard across the district. This looks at the bones of a building. Here's where we are. We only have five schools in the entire portfolio or 10% that are in the good category. Zero in the great category. We only have five that are in the good category. And what I can tell you is
025every year the poor category grows uh because the fair continues to move over to poor, right? This screams that we need a large scale capital investment. We're also looking at educational adequacy. This is a more modern metric. This looks at the experience that students have in a school. So you can see all of the categories the evaluation and we've did this at every single school over the last couple of years. It's like 600 data points that they go out and they review. That's a kind of a description of that. Again, this really looks at how does a student experience a building. If you're at Sabin and you literally have no exterior lighting and you're just in an internal building all day long, I promise you that impacts you. Here's where we are with EA scores.
026Same story. Again, no great schools. Our fair category is a little larger. Uh again this data will continue to to become more challenging as time progresses. Our investment approach again there's some districtdirected investments. We showed you those. There's also going to be the school communitydriven investments. Every school is going to get a baseline dollar amount that will vary obviously by the data we just showed you. Uh and then schools and I'll show you the methodology here in a sec are going to get to with a with their leadership they're going to get to decide here's what we want to see in our school. Yes, the district is going to say if there's a bad roof, we got to fix the roof. But we're also going to say, what do you want to see happen here?
027And having been a principal that got I remember this vividly, $333,000 in a bond. And I knew that that could recarpet and repaint my school was a gamecher. I didn't get I didn't build walls. I didn't knock anything down. I didn't build additions, but just updating the facility to be respectful of what the type of teaching and learning that I expected in my school was wonderful. How are we going to do this? Again, this is a grassroots campaign. We're establishing bond liaison, community bond liaison, parents, PTA members, SAC members in every single school. The training for that is tomorrow. We have two sessions tomorrow if the board has any interest in showing up at 10:00 and at 4. Um, and we're going to go through an entire process with them about how they can engage
028with their community, how they're going to be able to help select projects, how they can help communicate uh what we're doing. Why we're doing that is because we know that what people are saying at schools matters and they're going to so much more trust what they're hearing from another parent, another community member than anything that the superintendent or say obviously principles are going to be heavily involved in this. It is going to be a a team between the bond liaison and the principal. They're going to be we've already gone through a training with them and they'll continue to get information on how they message and how they select projects. More about that liaison role. Their role is about connecting with the community, advocating for their school, partnering with principles, making sure that they're getting the
029word out about the benefits and why this matters for their local community. We're going to provide communication toolkits for both principles and bond leaison. They're not going to be out there just trying to draft these things by themselves. Template emails, snapshots, pictures. We're going to give them all of that information so that then they can engage with their community um in a way that makes sense for them. There's an example of some of those uh templates and tools. What I love about the uh prepackaged approach, we learned a lot during the Palmer uh renovation plan and we spent a lot of time talking to our Palmer community as soon as we engaged our north and our steel and I think we also went to Colombia, right? The momentum for that project accelerated exponentially because now
030we started to get more people who see Palmer as their future and not just talk about Palmer as their present or their past. And I can't tell you the incredible feedback that we got from our PTA leaders at Steel that literally were just saying like and I'm be facicious here but are you going to do a brick campaign because we want to buy a brick. like they want their second grader to be a part of that school instead of the constant game of choice of every metriculation point deciding what is the least worst option which you see by the age that's in there. And so this idea of engaging at the lowest level gets this out of you like the rendering for homes or you don't like the rendering for homes. The Palmer plan was
031not what I originally pitched. The Palmer plan was fed back to us by our community that says here's a great way to reinvent Palmer and we couldn't be more excited about that. So giving this actually to the people who are going to benefit from it is what we believe is the thing that's been missing for many of the ways that districts do talk about investments in the future because it's if you don't like that idea or your kids's not going to go to homes, you feel disconnected. Every school gets a piece and we give the schools the tools to figure out which piece they need and how to project that forward. All right, we tentatively have some community engagement meetings set up uh for a couple weeks from now. Obviously, I'll take feedback from the
032board on that. Uh but we know we need to engage the community. We want to start having some of these regional conversations. Obviously, the bond leaison will be there. This is largely going to be a school-based campaign, but we know that people like to come together to talk about it on a regional way. especially as we talk about in each region you will experience a transformational housing. Uh okay, this is an example of a planning tool. I'm going to let it kind of walk through. Um there's two pieces here and and I'll definitely show the board more when when we have more time. Number one is going to be accessible to the entire community. And so the entire community is going to be able to go in, click on a school, and they're going to
033start to see information, not just general building information, but they're going to see how did this school score on educational adequacy. How did they score on facility condition uh assessments? And so this is going to really help because the way we've presented this in the past is the same way we present financial information, which is in a giant spreadsheet, right? Here's a spreadsheet of all of the facility scores across all of the things on a on a 70page document. Now, it's going to be a tool. Secondly, you're seeing what the bond liaison and kind of leadership team will have access to, which is they're going to see an allocation of money and then they're going to be able to go down and start clicking. Well, yeah, I want to see what it would cost if
034I put new flooring in this school. I want to see I want to prioritize or I want to do new furniture, but maybe I only want to do that in 50% of the building. What does that cost? Um, so they're not just going to be looking through a pamphlet of of information. they're going to have a tool that they can go through um that's going to have renderings for them, pictures for them, and it's going to allow them to allocate the resources that they think make sense. This is what we think is going to be really critical. Again, we are not influencing this. We will have non-negotiables about projects, but once we give a school their allocation and we've set what what meaningful projects can be, they're going to get to decide that and say
035that. And we think that that's really going to help with the um with the buying. Okay. some upcoming engagements again bond leaison training tomorrow at Tesla we have a couple of sessions those tenative regional um engagement meetings uh we're going to get in front of the DAC with this uh we will uh Miss Hotelling is already starting to work with charter schools in terms of their needs assessment and those types of things and then um Dr. Wise is already out engaging with the superintendent with the business community and then obviously we will bring an update back to the board in February if uh if the board requests And then it's just more about the next steps. Okay. Uh let's get into the financials. Remember, as a school district, the way we're funded is through what
036we call a mill. And a mill is basically just every one of our citizens their investment through their taxes. Right? Um, now this is a comparison of that investment, community investment across all surrounding districts as well as districts outside of our region. And here's what you'll see. We are the absolute lowest. So here's what that means. By percentage, our community's taxpayer invests the least in terms of in their district contributions. And this is real. As of today, you can find this. You can go on the El Paso County Assessor site and you can type in your address and then somebody else in another district and you're going to see those middle differences. We are dead last. Now, why are we dead last? We're dead last because we haven't passed a bond. What you'll see there
037is when we pass a bond, we're only going to go to the middle of the pack. So again, I know it's a sizable amount of money, but it's because we are a large system. We're not trying to leaprog and all of a sudden we're the most costly, most tax heavy system in the entire region. We're just trying to get in the ball game and get in the middle of the pack, right? We're the absolute lowest right now. I don't think most of our community knows that or understands that. That's our job to communicate that. What what I think is uh telling on that slide is particularly in our neighborhood uh we don't have rivers and canyons in between the districts in El Paso County. We have roads. Some of those roads are county plowed. Like
038there's a part of Woodman that the county owns and there's a part of Woodman that the city owns and then part of them are stateowned. But literally to the north you go over Woodman. to the south to district 2, you go across circle and over to 49, you go across uh powers and then just south and west of Ivy Wild, magically you're in district 12. But really, the difference in our community doesn't significantly change. And so when we talk about we know we're a no growth city, we know we're a no new taxes city. Well, right now the only people that are that are south of Woodman, west of Powers, north of Circle, and east of Ivy Wild. Just the center core of District 11 has convinced themselves that we should not invest in an
039infrastructure requirement which is the obligation to educate our children. Everybody else around us has figured that out and they figure out regularly. I won't go back all those slides but regularly they have gone back to their taxpayers to say do you or do you not want to continue to invest in the system. So we are not exclusive in where we sit within this community. We are actually homogeneous within the community because the average person doesn't understand those boundaries and in a system of choice people have the ability to cross those boundaries. our newest school as CSST in the back of the cyber security building at UCCCs. 40% of those children come from out of boundary on the investment that this board made. A whopping $2.5 million to retrofit the space on a 30-year lease with
040UCCCs. And you could do the math, which is an incredible deal. We do not have the ability to recapitalize that on our own. those $2.5 million deals. I saw the last campaigns. People said that the CSST took away from Jenkins. People don't know their math. It's $2.5 million to open CSST on a 30-year lease. Again, do that math. And it's $40 million to make basic repairs to Jenkins. That's not stealing from Peter to pay for Paul. The recapitalization of facilities requires a significant campaign with our initiatives fed back to us from the community on how they want to see that happen. This chart tells everybody you don't have the right to say I'm a no new taxes person because I guarantee you you're going up and you're eating dinner in D20 or you're going out
041for a special event at the Broadmore and taking pictures at the lake at Christmas time and you're loving the development at the airport out in 49. So, we're living off the benefit of what everybody else is going to do except what we've committed to do over the last 20 years. And remember, we lost that last vote by 11 votes. That's because people were actively against the initiative. And to Brandon's point, the last it was called a facilities uh master plan. It wasn't called an academic master plan. It didn't have a live tool for somebody to come in and say, "I want a new playground." Did you see what the cost of a new playground is? I don't think the average person knows that to put in a brand new playground is threequarters of a million
042dollars. Okay, now we have Okay, how much money do I have? What can we do? Right, we have the tools now to better educate the very people that were asking for their confidence to say put Colorado Springs District 11 right in the middle of that chart because we're right in the middle of the city and we can continue to redefine what it means to have access to high quality public education. For a bit of levity, I got an email from a student at Coronado a while ago and he said, "Uh, if the district wasn't spending all of that money on yonder pouches, I would have air conditioning." And I was like, "Who's your math teacher? We got to talk to them. I wish that I could air condition uh Coronado based on yonder pouches." Um,
043should we jump in with questions until you're done with this? I'm almost done. I mean, I'm happy to take a break. Okay. Uh, so let's talk about how we finance this, right? Here's what I'll tell you. We can structure this any way the board wants to. It depends on what's the variable you want to control for. If you want to control for time or term, we can do that. If you want to control for tax impact, we can do that. Uh there's a million ways we can structure this. Um I'm going to show you three today, okay? And they all have a few things in common. Number one, three tranches. Three tanches for a few reasons. We can't spend $750 million in three years. We can't. It's going to take us time to do some
044of those projects. So, we're going to split that out over time. Um, this first one, $750 million, a 25-year term, which is standard. Standard bonds are 25 years. The state allows 40 years, right? State statute allows for a 40-year term. Standard is 25. Some districts do 30. We'll show you an example of that in a bit. Uh, this option assumes a level of assessed value growth. We've had much more than 5% as the board knows uh over the last five years. But if we assume 5% and we manage everything else, the tax impact per 100 or uh per $100,000 is $4.50. And you see there a point of reference. The bond that Manitu just passed just a couple of months ago was $7 per month. So we're not again we're not out of the ballpark
045here. In fact, we're significantly lower. Now, is our overall bond much larger? Yes, because we're Yeah. 30 times the size. So, of course, the investment is larger, but in terms of the impact on the individual homeowner, we would be significantly less. Second one is very standard. We do it all up front. We still trunch it, but we lock everything in early over 25 years. You can see that would put us at six uh $6. still below what we just saw happen in the region a couple of months ago. Um, but this is the most predictable, the most standard. There's no there's no funny business in any of that, right? This is just the the normal bond. As another metric, like I said, if we wanted to really control for um the term that should say
046$5, my apologies. Uh, this is if we went to a 30-year term, we kept everything else the same. Uh, we would be at $5 a month. And as you can see, if we had large assessed value increases be above that 5%, it could be as low as $3. So there's a lot of ways we can structure the the ballot and the initiative based on what the board wants to control for. And with that question, so so real quick before I turn it over to the board for um for discussion, I I want to real quick just try to clarify the next steps in the timeline because this is a little You can please correct me if I say anything wrong because again D11 hasn't done this in a bit. Um eventually the bond initiative would
047be formally approved by the board in a vote which we have not done yet. Nonetheless there is a significant amount of pre-work that has to be done in terms of planning communication with the community laying the groundwork for kind of the messaging because there is a certain point at which we have to stop talking about it. Right. So can you just real quick for the board just clarify the timeline both in terms of our role to play in this and then also at which point we kind of send it off to the ballot initiative process and we're done. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that um request for clarification. So uh when the what the board requested last semester was bring us a comprehensive package. So that's what we're in the process of doing
048right. Um ultimately we will bring to the board uh with their decision we will bring you uh a ballot initiative to approve. Um now before that between now and then we're going to go through this entire project selection community engagement process. We'll do additional polls. The board will be very well informed on is this an initiative that that we think the community is going to support. that timing of when the board would approve ballot language is probably right before the board goes on recess for summer or directly after. Right now, we're kind of mapping it out for after. Um so that we would have this entire runway of the next five months, six months to continue to be as verbal and out there and building community support. Then to your point, um President Kerry, the
049moment the board approves the ballot language, the district goes uh silent. we can only present facts uh pro and against and then it is up to the community to continue that engagement ultimately until the the vote in November. Thank you. Uh and with that I open it up to the board for conversation. Do you mind if I because I have to leave here and go ahead. Um okay I I I'll just I'll just jump in. Um yes, teachers deserve excellent pay. All staff works hard for kids in this district and they deserve excellent pay. I don't know if I'm on that camera or not, but I'm looking right at you when I say that. Yes, our buildings have been left behind in terms of keeping up with maintenance or even preventative maintenance and now we're
050at a place where things must be taken care of. Jenkins is a perfect example of that. Yes, our buildings need air conditioning. I can tell you that from personal experience. No learning takes place in environments where classrooms are anywhere from 85 to 95 degrees. That's not an embellishment. Those are actual numbers. I've been in classrooms like my classroom was like that. I would encourage anyone to sit in a full classroom in the middle of August, September, much of October, April, May, more that's more than half the school year. And then even in the winter months, the HVAC is so screwy. The classrooms are either so hot from the heat or they're freezing. The need for consistent HVAC is absolutely necessary if you want to access highquality instruction. Instruction, it's not all about instruction per se.
051You need to have classroom environments that are comfortable for kids to learn as well. And yes, buildings that are well-maintained, pretty, and have curb appeal get more attention from people, and perhaps they would bring their kids to those schools. If a building is wellmaintained on the front, then the inside will most likely be cared for as well. Yes, our kids deserve to have modern facilities, but we also have to have a return on investment. We're not asking kids to do more than they are capable of. Behave, do your work, and do your best in school. That's not out of the realm of what we can expect from our students. But we need investment from kids for their own education and their parents, too. We keep providing more and more for our students, which is great,
052and they deserve it. But we need parents getting more involved with their own children's education for the return on investment, even if it's just an hour after dinner. And we need kids to take their education seriously. I understand that not every parent is able to do that. Some parents work two and three jobs and their time is limited. I totally get that. But any amount of time that parents can give their kids would be serious ROI in their kid, their own kids' education. I I will go on record saying I I am opposed to raising taxes, but I also have the experience of being in D11 and having to work through not always having what we need for our students. I saw how not approving multiple bonds over the years affects students in our buildings,
053not to mention hiring freezes and pay freezes. So then what's the message we're sending to our students if a bond doesn't pass and their schools don't get what they need? On the other hand, how much will this affect the average homeowner? Let's say a home is worth around $500,000. What does that translate to in terms of impact for the taxpayer who owns that home from the numbers that you just showed? um 450 per 100,000 would equal 2250 a month, which means the average taxpayers raised to their property taxes annually for a $500,000 home is an additional $270 a year. Again, I I'm opposed to raising taxes. $750 million is a lot of money, but I also know that this district has been left behind by previous administrations. And I'm not slamming them. I'm just calling
054blue blue. Okay? But I am for letting the people speak through voting for or against this proposed bond. As I understand it, my involvement is whether or not to put the vote to put the bond on the ballot. And since we are a nation that is by, of the people, let the people speak. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Michelle, do you want to jump in? Yes. I'm actually going to take sort of the opposite approach, but out of curiosity. So, I have taught all over the world, Nepal, Ghana, Afghanistan, with no supplies, no air conditioning. And we live in Colorado, which is very dry. My house doesn't have air conditioning. And I'm just wondering that's a lot of money. I'm running some numbers over 30 years. Some families could pay $15,000. And
055I'm I'm just sort of curious and I don't have an opinion on this yet. I'm helping help me build this. That's a lot of money to ask the community for for buildings, but all the places I have taught, we we've sat on dirt and used pieces of cardboard, and the children have a higher reading and math proficiency than our district. How is all of this building going to improve our academics other than just the answer of they won't be hot. A lot of kids are hot all around the world and can read better and do math better. So when I talk to my neighbors, help me find research and language that bridges that gap. Reminds me of the times that I attended school in uh all the things. But I'll defer to I've got some
056comments. Well, I'd love to hear the board talk to the board. I mean, I think I've I I I have the same answer as I always have, but I'd love to hear a board comment to that, especially in a system of choice where we lose 8,000 student residents a day who choose to go to surrounding districts who don't have unairconditioned buildings, who don't, and I'm certainly respect the places that you've taught, but there wasn't another option in Nepal for them to attend another place. So again, if I go to our common dialect, I did the best work I've ever done in Iraq and in Kyrgyzstan, but I could not sustain that over time. I don't know if I could have recruited against that over time. I don't know if I could have promoted against that
057over time. Mhm. Um, we do understand that we are asking our community to make a massive investment and I also know that we don't have anything to hang our hat on other than every year we have been here and you'll see it again here at the midyear data. Our data has improved. It is still not where it needs to be, but it is better than it was and it is trending in every variable in the right direction. I can't create the magic of if you do this then that will happen. What I have to create is a belief statement that you believe in downtown city schools. Okay? That you believe your children do not attend our schools. You have that as an access point for you to be able to do that. Many of our
058residents have no choice to be able to send their children. But that's my point. One of the options on there was $700,000 for paint and then you're saying a quarter of a million or more for a playground. Why would we let them have that choice for paint and a playground? We we we are ultimately responsible for the projects that were happen. The idea is well I'll I'll let Dr. Comfort talk about it since his doctorate is in choice. Families who choose schools are more likely to stay in those schools. Mhm. The gift of public education in America, particularly in Colorado, is the right to choose. The underbelly to that is the only people who do choose are people who can exercise choice. We have 1,200 children who are boundaried to Mitchell High School who do
059not go to Mitchell High School. Yes, it is 5 years since the reconstitution at Mitchell High School. The results for children at Mitchell, particularly kids that are further behind, are better than they are for children who are further behind as a control group in the other comprehensive high schools. But that's not how Mitchell High School is talked about because Mitchell High School doesn't have the drag of the higher SCES family that's invested. Do we believe, and I don't want to make it about Mitchell, we have a sack meeting uh with our community in early March for this conversation. Do we believe that children who live near the Citadel Mall deserve the ability to have a high quality facility and instruction on the inside? I'm ultimately accountable to the academic strategy of this district and happy
060would be more than happy for the board to actually say we're going to move in a different direction because you're not delivering. So, it sounds like we we're trying to incentivize nice places so the families don't leave. But I just wonder if we could take that$10,000$15,000 and do something different with it as a taxpayer. I'm neutral right now, but I'm telling you people are going to stop us in King Supers and ask the question and I guess I'm looking for research. I've heard you guys, but more research into how a nice building is then going to translate into higher academic proficiency. I'm sure there's something out there. Can I can I jump in here with some with some points? First of all, Brandon, can you just refresh my memory as to kind of the way
061different pools of money here work? bond money is spent on recapitalization. Period. Dot. Period. And right now we have funds in MLOs's and other places where we're kind of having to spend that money on repairs and infrastructure because we have no other we have no other place to draw the money from. That's correct. Where if we had a bond, we could take that money and we could repurpose it. Right. So I think this is just from where I'm sitting. I think one half of the answer to your question is that idea of right now we are having to spend a lot of our resources that we might have some operational slack for on repairs because we have no other way to do it. A bond would free some of that money up. And then, you
062know, kind of to echo what Superintendent Gaul said, I don't want to take away from your own work, but I I have the luxury of teaching for the military-industrial complex at USAFA, right? It's very difficult for me to not draw a line between the very high quality teaching I'm able to do to things like I have a hilarious salary relative to the teachers in district 11. I have hilarious amounts of planning time relative to the teachers in district 11. I have a lot of flexibility. Like all of those things are made possible. Not to be like super go about it because the Air Force has, you know, functionally infinite amount of money, right? So like I understand your background and the work that you were able to do in those classrooms and those settings, but
063from where I'm sitting, some of the resourcing that the Air Force has is part of what lets me do a really good job in the classroom. And I think you know you mentioned at the beginning of it maybe this was in the board orientation conversation beforehand I'm getting mixed up that one of the ideas staff have is okay if we can free up some of this money we can spend money on salaries we can spend money on academic projects we can attract a higher quality you know any highquality teacher in the region we can say come to district 11 do your magic we will pay you the most of everybody um I think those you know it's it is not really the case that in any district in this country you can draw a direct
064line between spending and academic outcomes. uh in general it's you know actually the correlation is not really there as far as I understand the research but I think if number one you believe that this board is capable of using money in a sane way and number two you believe that there are things that public institutions can in principle spend money on that will improve academics then I think again kind of to echo something that Jill said you toss it to the community and see what they think cuz We're we're not voting on whether to kick off 750 million in spending. We're voting on community here is the proposal. This is what staff and community have put together as far as their own ideas. Do you like it or not? And if the community says we're
065not interested in that, you know, we don't need we don't need a new playground. We don't need a new facade. We're not interested in any of that, then fine. That's that's their call to make. That's how public institutions and voting work. This is putting the option in front of the community to say, "Look, D11 hasn't done this in 20 years. your tax burden is the least of everybody in the region. Would you like to reinvest in your schools? And if they say no, then they say no. But but this gives them the option to at least weigh in on the question. I think what I'm looking for is not I feel like you all are trying to teach me what it is. I get that. But what I'm advocating for is the people in our
066community that are already starting to ask the questions. And I taught at the same school you did, the military-industrial complex. And the buildings are old and the building isn't what made the teaching. It was the teacher and the instruction. and and I just want to be able to answer our community. So, start building this text. What you're saying, it frees up the middle of the override and being able to consistently use that messaging because right now there's a lot of different perspectives and they're all over the place. Part of the goal of the campaign is to not have messages that are all over the place, which is we're extremely proud of the team that we've put together to reverse the trends that this district has suffered from for decades. Enrollment, achievement, engagement. They have turned.
067They are not where they need to be. I can show the data points that I'll show you. The highest performing school in all of El Paso County is in district 11 at Chapida. Not just 50% of the fifth graders don't go to homes, which is in itself a concern that our highest performing school, half of the metriculation point does not go to homes. It's the upper half of the performance of that fifth grade band that does not go to homes. So we lose every of the examples that you all are giving, whether they be deployed or whether they be within military. You have a locked set of constituents. We have to play both a marketing game of how do we keep families. Right now we are an inch in front of D20 on on Palmer
068and they're suffering losses of how the government's taking money away from Air Academy. If we don't have a Coronado plan, folks and Air Academy opens, you're have a different ask of us, which is how do we collapse to a two or three high school system? Families are choosing safety, comfort, security, access to new programs. That demographer study and especially for those who know me, what was the the gentleman's name? Shannon. Shannon. Shannon and I could not be two further people from how we see any one problem. We have executed his recommendations and they have been spot on. Our our community wants our children to have access to buildings where people want to be. I walk into PD sessions in August and I'm embarrassed that we're asking our professionals to sweat it out. And I remember
069the comment I made last year. It was actually at Coronado Jill. I said to the staff members, "Thank God it was hot today and it's not going to be hot tomorrow because tomorrow was the first day of school." Shame on me. Shame on me that I said good for the adults to have to sweat it out in this space. This ultimately will be a board decision if you want to take it to the community. You won't be getting better by asking us to continue to do more with less. We have we have um squeezed that lemon to the point of we're talking about projections for next year's teacher raises while one of our neighboring districts on the other side of one of those roads is declared a fiscal emergency. Can Yeah. Can you give me
070an idea how you got to this point like timeline? So we know 2021 lost by 11 votes and this is a completely different plan. So can you give me an idea of the history as well as your ideas for community engagement specifically reaching out through Facebook emails? Yeah. Um, so I think uh post 2021, I think the district went through a time of reeling from a bond loss as any district does. And then we got to work um collecting all of the data to not try to bring the same plan back again. And actually that's what most districts do. Most districts if they fail, they go the next year, right? Same plan, just we're going to ask again. And and in all honesty, it it works a lot of times. It worked for this district
071multiple times. failed once, went the next year, passed, right? Uh I think we thought that yes, we lost by 11 votes, but if you want the will of your community, they're telling you, they're communicating we need something better and we need a time to start to improve metrics. I don't I don't think um well, my core belief is that uh kids deserve quality buildings regardless of their their learning level. Um, I don't think anybody doesn't understand that the community wants to see better outcomes to to think that that we're an investment that's worth it. And so that's what we've been doing, right? That's what we've been doing by expanding the portfolio, by improving academic outcomes, by changing how we compensate teachers. Uh, we've been trying to transform the system to come back to the community
072and say we're not what that was. We're different now. We're worth the investment now. Uh so I think that's what we've been doing over the last couple of years, right? In in addition to collecting tons more data so that it's not just about the broken boiler. Uh in terms of community engagement, again, it's it's kind of it's kind of three tiers. So you're going to see some regional things. You saw some dates up there of when we'll engage with the regional campaigns or the the regional uh teams. This is really again a school-based campaign. That's what that bond liaison is largely going to be about is how are they attending all PTA meetings and music programs and have a little table that says can I talk to you about uh what this school can benefit
073from. Um additionally we're going to have a campaign that comes in that starts to work on all of this communication. Right? That's what this is. We're trans we're going to transition in the next six weeks from project selection to community engagement and communication. That's where polling will come in. That's where a lot of those things will come in because we're going to need to know yes, our schools are really going to love the concept of picking their projects, but for all of the people who are not parents in schools, um we need a whole campaign for how we're going to engage with them. That's why we're actually extending the time between uh when we're selecting projects and when we're going to bring the ballot to the board for its consideration. We had historic or we
074had we would typically do that like later this spring and then we would go quiet for a really long period of time. We're extending that so that we have even more time to engage with the community and communicate with the broader community about what we're trying to do. Uh a different way to look at that is after the failure there was certainly a reset of how did we engage with our community. We found that we were um uh too educationally lingoed. You know, we had facility masters plan and we were talking about closure of buildings for some economies. There are economies that can come from collapsing smaller buildings into bigger ones. But what was happening is we were we were alienating the very people that we needed to serve. If I need to close schools
075A, B, and C to build a new school D, I've now angered three different school communities for a hypothetical of a new community that I haven't defined yet. What we um took advantage of was we I my assessment of how we lost by 11 votes was there was not confidence in director rule's question is there a return on investment by continuing to invest in district 11. It is clear that we haven't communicated that consistently that we are doing that. So, what we decided to do was let's use our own money on the Palmer project to show people that we can be good stewards of the dollars that come to us and we can engage thoughtfully with our community and now have a hallmark opportunity in our downtown and we're literally now just weeks away from
076steel superructure coming up. If you're a construction person and you get on the second floor, you can see the great work that's happened. but starting to show people that the investment is the opportunity not the risk. Now tearing down now the the portion of the building that was de demolished at Palmer is the newest portion. So we protected the original core of the original building but that in itself you know that was that was very painful for a lot of people that their history in that building was now changing. But now people are starting to come around. What is that opportunity look like? Can I see what the floors are going to look like? Is the thirdf flooror art studio going to be able to paint a sunrise in the morning and a sunset in
077the afternoon in the same open space? Like those are exciting things for people. And so we used the cop as a catalyst to try to get us to where we are today. Now those superructures aren't quite up yet. And we'll get a tour for the board, for both Jenkins and for Palmer in the next couple of weeks so you can see what construction feels like when it's happening. But our belief is that our community is now no longer going to be upset driving down Weber or Nevada. They're going to be excited. And the same thing when they're going on Austin Bluffs uh uh when they're up there by Jenkins. They're going to be excited about the things that are happening. Is that excitement contagious enough for people to believe in the future of the system
078or will we have to regroup again like we did, you know, four years ago? I I don't know that the original polling for the new board members had upper 50% of people that were for the bond. The average that you want to enter in is you'd like to be over 60%. Because people drift the closer they get to actually pulling ballots. You're not obligated to anything right now other than us continuing this timeline and we are obligated to another poll in the spring to make sure that we understand how language resonates and what are the fiscal conditions. We do know that, you know, it's a challenge for a lot of people to make ends meet. We also know that making decisions about next November in January, boy, if anybody could figure out what the market
079was going to do in November and January, we would all be a lot richer than we are today. Jason K. Jason can Jason, do you want to jump in here? Yeah, Magnific. Yeah, I I to add other work that we've done. We've moved to schoolbased budgeting. We've been fiscally accountable to our budgets now based on per building. We haven't cut any teaching positions. We've let that stay protected while cutting $6.5 million in central admin and other areas that haven't impacted schools. So we've built this base of responsibility in and saying as Mike said we've squeezed all the lemon out all the juice we can out of this lemon and so just as that the other thing I would say is uh m director com Dr. comfort on this. You have per 100k household. I would
080change the language there to per 100k of assessed household. Got because your home might sell for 400,000 but your assessed value is 270. Yeah. Understood. You're not paying off the 400,000. You're paying off the 270. Yep. So just for clarifying people's mind of saying my house can sold for 500 grand. You're not paying five times 5. Yeah. You're paying five times Oh, it's only worth 380 uh in the assessor's license. So, just a point of clarification. Yep. One thing that I don't think you dove enough into tonight is that tool, and I know you had somebody piloting it there briefly, but um I think that's very neat. Y because people can't come to little community houses and organizations and and you know, uh things like that. I can barely get out to uh Nancy Henum's
081neighborhood meetings for our our council district. Um, but if you had a tool like that where you said, "Yeah, my kid goes to Edison. I want to see what I could do with their 300 grand in Edison. They already have a brand new school." But I'll let you know when I drive by Edison and the grass is mowed. It's great. But you look at that faded blue paint and my kids go and their kids are going to be truthful, but they go they look behind the school and they go, "Can we go to that playground?" Because it's real brand new, you know? And so we ride our bikes down to that playground because the playground's awesome back there. So, um, you know, it it is what you look at is naturally appeasing to the eye.
082And so, you have to have that that little bit of curve appeal just like when you're trying to sell your house. So, um, I get that. I think that tool should be bragged about and maybe a link shown to us to see what that we can play with because I think that would be for somebody who can't go to a visit to be able to go in there and go okay my kids um you know Edison North and then Coronado or whatever your boundary works out um to to be able to go in there and say okay what can my kid my kids you know three years away from North what could be done in the next three years to have my kid have a cool stuff at North and they can plan it out
083and see, okay, for 14 bucks a month, you know, I guess that's, you know, a Chipotle burrito bowl these days or it's, you know, two lattes, it's worth it, I think. And I, too, I just was speaking in the background about hitting paying all the taxes I owe to the IRS this year for being successful last year. It sucks, but if it's I know at least this money is going to my property, to my D11 community. It's not going into whatever the things are you see on the news these days. We have actual turnkey. You can see the steel superructures. you can see the um you know new outdoor playingground at at Halbert and you get to see what you're putting your tax dollars into. There was also a very hidden point on one of
084the slides which was the zero for our bond obligations right now. a board previous to you all, actually two boards previous voted to close that uh that it was it was it was the bond or the the MLO that we closed out. It was the bond. We close that out. And many financial adviserss would say, "No, you don't close that out because you still have borrowing capacity in that open bond." But our obligation to the taxpayer because again this is a big ask is that we don't want to ask you to put money into something that isn't worth your while. We believe so much in that that we went against the sound fiscal advice and close that line of credit because it's not right to just keep open a line of credit so you can
085go spend money without the return on investment for it. And so now we're at a place where we're coming back and saying now we'd like to establish that again. But that I think that's an important point that I remember having those conversations that said this this has been a conservatively centered board since my time in district 11. We take our debts incredibly seriously. We do not take the community for granted. So do you want to weigh in? So I've got a lot of thoughts and uh I may ramble on it a little bit but uh hopefully I can make sense. Well time so be thoughtful but this is a discussion that we need to engage in as a community. So I I want to um first I the needs of our school district is well
086established and all the slides that you talked about the age of our school districts and the need for air conditioning. I don't have any qualms about that. Having comfortable learning environments uh is going to improve student academic achievement. Uh I'm um supportive of that. Uh but at the same time as a elected board member, I want to make sure that uh we are fiscal stewards of taxpayers dollars. Um so now um just turning the clock back a little bit in 2021 u superintendent G referenced the um bond that failed and at that time we had several engagements with the business community out there and the business community feedback was what has district 11 shown as far as academic achievement goes because in 2017 we passed an MLO for about $42 million a year which has
087now grown with the inflation period to a little over $50 million a year. So if you go back and look even at that data from 2017 to where we are at 2026, the increase in academic achievement is marginal, which means that our community has supported us with over $500 million in that time frame for which I know that in between we had the COVID time frame where we showed a significant dip and now we are still growing out of it and the trend is in the right direction but it is really important that we do when we go and ask our community for money. The last one of the analysis that uh I saw that 70% of our uh residents that live within our D1 community do not have students at this time. Some of
088them are elderly people that are living in fixed income. So we are asking a significant amount of burden financial burden putting on them and asking them to come into our schools. But we got to be able to respond back by making academic excellence the center and deliver on our promise that every third grade student is going to be able to read and write at that level. And um that even you know we you talked about the August timeline. So that's why when we are taking this in front of our community in August, September, October, November time frame, the results that we demonstrate at the end of the year is really important uh to that discussion. So um uh and then I know that there is going to be several layers of community engagement as we
089go about over the next several months including you talked about pooling and I'm sure that that has got something to do with RTA and the other bond management team that uh through the RFP process we have identified and then there is going to be the uh projects that have been identified. uh some of it are non-negotiable the district identified projects that uh was shown in some of the slides out there. Um as we go about this process uh even looking at that polling information that goes out uh what the current economic climate is going to be around that time in November, competing tax initiatives that could be on the ballot at the same time from other entities. um in this community. Um I think board engagement is really critical in the next three, four, five
090months. Uh this is going to be a persistent conversation updates. You mentioned that if the board is interested a February update I think there has got to be a monthly update on this conversation going forward and more so some of this discussions are taking place behind the scenes. What I would propose at this time for the board's consideration is uh as we have done in other initiatives that one or two board members are assigned specifically to engage with the district on this matter um and then bring periodic feedback to the board itself on this subject matter. So that's one thing that I would really like what you're talking about uh we have community layers on bond leazison and all those kind of things. I think there should be a board leazison that is working with
091the so the board's interest are also being represented in this topic and we want to I also want to say that we may get one shot at this in November. So looking at the various options that are in front of us, uh would I we want a $750 million bond which probably translates into close to a billion dollar with interest. But if the polling suggests that we are going to be more successful with a $500 million bond, I would like the to be open to that. I would rather see a bond initiative succeed rather than go for a bigger bond initiative that doesn't have chance of success because we are there is going to be at some point in time a saturation is going to be reached even if it is going to be for
092the safety and the security of our overall community and students our community may respond with a no answer. So that's my and and our initial um to you all here is reflective of the original polling which was there was no difference between the size of the the 500 or the $750 million. And so the we feel that the best way to engage our community is is that every school's a winner instead of now um I think everybody loves that rendering of homes until you reduce the size of the bond that's there that says you can't do a major a major school build. Yeah. We don't need to make that decision now. It's all contingent on the and we'll continue to poll against the range of the things. That's the goal here is that the process
093contin propose that throw it out to the board that we have one and uh if the board is you know has I'll raise my hand and yes I was I was going to close with that exact suggestion. I want to be mindful of the clock but also um Charles you haven't had the opportunity to say anything yet. Would you like to weigh in with your thoughts otherwise I'll Yeah. Uh, I think similar to Parth and Michelle's reaction, I think 750 is a lot when you first glance at it asking community members to pay into a bond. And I'm curious to know what this referendum is going to sound like to folks when we've already invested into the phase 2 for Palmer uh the capital cop debt um payoff. What what will that look like to
094the folks knowing that we've already started kind of ground work on that before now asking for $750 million? You want to be specific on what this isn't about Palmer? I think that's kind of the question. Well, not it's not about Palmer, but I'm just saying like when you look at when you're asking for $750 and you see that you've already started $150 million down on Palmer, uh you have the COP debt payoff. You also have the deferred HVAC and you're already putting in millions of dollars into this fund. What does that send a message to the community about saying, "Hey, let's add another $750 to cover this but also add on to other schools." And Dr. Comfort, I this is a common I remember this being a common point of confusion with the COP. How
095much did we go to the taxpayer and ask for for the COP? Zero. So, the taxpayer isn't funding any of the the Palmer project right now. We are self-funding that again to the superintendent's point earlier because we wanted it to serve as a catalyst for what reinvestment in the district could look like. Um so what you see on that list is the remaining thing the the the um the existing cop is all self-funded from from the district. Parts of this bond will pay off the it can. Yes. Yes. And then I know we showed the toolkit for each school to kind of move around and see like what best interests them. Yep. And I know for the example the school was like 2.4 million. Is that going to be the same for all schools or
096how is that going to look like when No. Yeah. So there's going to be a baseline investment meaning there's a it won't go lower than that. But then the data of facility conditions, educational adequacy, those types of things will then adjust above that if that makes sense. So there will be a certain number in which nobody everybody will get at least I'm just going to I don't know the number. Everybody's going to get a million dollars at least, but definitely some schools are going to get more than that if the condition of their building requires more. Go back to the good fair poor slide. Either one of those. If if you're in the good category, you're going to get a chance at saying, "Wouldn't it be great if we had the a blue whale mur
097mural down the hallway here because we're the marine biology school?" Right? because you can do that. That's a very lowcost initiative. We don't need to spend a lot of money on the very few number of schools that are of we made an investment in the 2006 bond. We did Adams, we did uh McCulliff, we did freedom, right? Those schools are well positioned for the next set of generations to be served by. But as you know, in many of our other schools, that's not the case. Um and those would be the places where we would see a difference of the amount of impact that we believe should be happening uh across the system and getting that feedback from a community on what they want to have happen within a set of guide rails and guard rails
098to make sure that we're not just throwing good money after bad. Um we have studies and we will share them. Uh, of course they come from our partners as well, but on what what does access to daylight or to open spaces or to educational adequacy as we would define it or even the safety vestibules that we open, how much more does it increase the likelihood of a student and a staff member to be engaged in learning when they're not worried about those early conditional setting items that have been a challenge for us for some time. We have that. We'll share that as um a data point for the board to digest and we also commit to um the idea of uh liazes and uh more regular feedback. We can do them a variety of different
099ways. And one other quick question that branch release that you talked about in the last two slides, what's the gap between each one of those branches? Uh it's the way it's designed now is it would be 27 29 31. Okay. Every two years. Yes. Are there was some initial discussion at some point in time that the second and the third branches would have some type of academic uh metrics attached with their release. Is that even possible? It it is possible. So I have I have consulted with uh with bond council on that. It is possible. It's never been done before. Uh obviously it was highly encouraged not to to happen. But I again I think we acknowledge and understand that we have to like this is not separate of academic achievement right um if you
100look at choice research it's very clear in the fact that there is no single driver do buildings matter yes just like academic achievement matters just like proximity matters just like all of those things matter right so um we we will I mean I don't want to speak for the board I we we have found out that it's legal to do I'm happy to figure out what draft language might look uh and then we can you know take it from there. We introduced this idea over a year and a half ago of accountability tranches which is how do we create a relationship with the community that says if you invest in us it is our obligation to deliver um as Brandon pointed out we would be the first district in America to commit to that level
101of relationship with our community. We are certainly not against this at the table. I'm not sure if polling says that that works for more people or less. I know it works for certain people and those might be critical people to get there. I know again my belief statement is is that the the last bond failed because the local business community was not on board. Yes. Right. Jess has set engagements up for myself. I'm happy to invite either of the board liazes to those meetings of how do we address because the other unhidden thing in here is it's not just a homeowner who's paying. If you're a business owner and we pass a bond, you're writing a much bigger check than us talking about fixed incomes and individual households. So, it's a critical component for us
102to engage in that community and we've started that conversation already. So, we have those meetings uh upcoming. happy to extend that to either of the board leases as well to keep this going and definitely interested in how do you find the right language of accountability that you don't lose $200 million because your top principal went on FMLA and that school had a slight dip in their data for one year, right? So, it's got to be macro enough that you can assure yourself that the things you're investing in will have a better return on investment. So I I do want to keep things moving and move on to the midyear data conversation, but I want to close with two quick points. So first, the the suggestion of kind of having dedicated board leaison on this project
103is something I was going to make as well. Um are there you've already expressed interest in it, Jason, Leanne? I I don't have a strong preference between the three of you. Um I guess I don't know. Do you want to just kind of have the conversation and see who has the most capability and the most interest in contributing? My own gut would say that since the two of you kind of at the retreat had said, you know, we're interested in kind of tackling some of the town hall community engagement pieces. I think you know the two of you are natural choices, Jason has interest in Well, do you want to just kind of have those conversations and then let me know how it goes down and we'll I'll kind of clarify for the whole board
104at that point. Sure, sounds good. Okay. And then the the last point that I just want to make again is um you know public institutions belong to the public through the mechanism of voting. That is the way that this is set up. We are the elected leadership through the mechanism of community voting. Right last November this is exactly the same dynamic. We will be asking the dis the community whether they would like to recapitalize in the district in this way. They can weigh in through the same mechanism of voting that they did last November. And I think the only question like the qu the main question that we as a board have to answer is do we believe we can spend this money wisely and just speaking for myself if you look back at some
105of the decisions we have made over the last two years I think the answer to that is a definitive yes but again you know it's a question of whether the community is going to believe us. So okay uh I do want to move on to midyear data conversations. So this is right. We do this uh at the midyear every year. I do want to make two points for the board though before we kind of move on to here. Maybe three points depending on how I break it down. So number one um we ran a little over with the bomb conversation. I'm okay with that. It was a conversation we absolutely needed to have. Uh I would suggest that we try to keep this one tight. I had made the suggestion earlier of you know hold
106questions to the end. If you have clarifying data questions because you don't understand a slide, knock yourself out. If you want to prioritize your top two questions, I think that would be nice. Um because we do have that uh pay scale tasker to kind of discuss at the end of this. There are two other points that I would make here though. Number one is right the cadence of operations during a school year is such that at this point Mike and the team are pivoting towards prepping for state testing. So this is a good right this is a key accountability piece. This is a key place to see, you know, if our strategies are paying off in the way that they we think they are and hope they are. It's not really practical to ask Mike
107and the team to completely abandon course in the middle of the year, right? We can talk about kind of ways in which we think staff can kind of update and learn lessons from this. But, but I I don't think it's going to be productive to ask Mike, hey, based on this data, we need you to totally change the game plan. It's just not realistic for this time of the year. Um, the other thing I would just point out to you is from a timeline standpoint, you may remember that we voted on this kind of injection of money into the system for places that we had identified as being significantly, you know, in need, places where we wanted to deploy additional tutoring or additional resources. Those actions are not reflected in this based on just because
108of the timing. We voted to spend that money two weeks ago. It takes time for those things to actually have impact into the system. So if you're looking at this data and you say, "Well, what did we get for that money we spent, you know, two weeks ago, it's not in this data set. We have no results. We don't have the results from that quite yet." And that is one of the things that Mike has committed to bringing back and saying, "Here is how we spent that money and here was the return on investment." Um, so with that, I turn it over to Superintendent G. Hi again, everybody. Uh I think it's really timely that these two conversations are happening at the same night because they're they're interlocked. They are connected. How it is that
109we perform as a district is the way that we in uh engage and endear trust with the community that we serve. Um again don't hate the play or hate the game, but more people uh choose by percentage to not come to schools in district 11 than any other district that they are boundary to in in El Paso County. that says that we haven't delivered on the quality of the salad that we offer. Uh and this is a brief that shows you what that we've been doing and the uh feedback that we're getting on what work, what's not working. If you read your Mars last night, um we are going to be continuing to communicate with the board uh on those items that way. But you'll see we're giving anecdotes of some of the ways that
110we did program that million dollars that you gave us at midyear uh for where we think it will make a change. I will always set for everyone if we have a classroom and we have this data now all the way down a classroom that has a below 30 student growth percentile. There is no amount of money or time that is going to significantly change that other than turning that 18 to a 25 and then the next feedback into a 34 and then maybe the year after that to the 40 where now as an aggregate it doesn't drag the entirety of the school down. And we will continue to invest in our adults as long as they continue to progress in the same way that we commit the same way to invest in our students. We
111use this slide to center all the time when we talk about data because it's very easy to allow one data point to become the entirety of a conversation because sometimes in a small school one data point does become the entirety of the conversation because by percentage alone if there's a third grade teacher, a fourth grade teacher, and a fifth grade teacher, one of those three teachers not performing in math or ELA will put that school on the watch list. So, but we have the ability to measure down to each one of those classes and we will show you today most of the data you've already seen. What we wanted to build this for are the actions that we have taken not just at the beginning of the year but at midyear to make sure that
112every one of those green dots all 23,000 of them is getting access to highquality instruction through a variety of different ways. And so I also want to dispel the rumor that we are telling people what to do. We do not tell people what to do. We give people the tools for them to be as successful as possible. The idea of pedagogy should be different every day in every classroom when measured against the highest of ideals. What we are doing is codifying what we believe those ideals represent so we can put measures against them and understand where we can put the limited resources we have against the number of green dots that are still woefully below grade level. We're going to do a lot of uh passing here. We brought the whole team to the table.
113So, a toss to David. All right. Well, thank you for your time and thanks for the chance to do this. So, I just wanted to talk through a little bit about the three primary measures that we you utilize uh so it makes sense and so that we don't get caught up in acronym soup and and lose lose track of where we're at. So, the three that we really look at the most important is the number change in percent of meets or exceeds. We use this in different way different ways. How many students do we move into passing? How many students are at grade level? How many students are meets or exceeds? All those are synonymous. The next one that we look at, so we talk about this is growing the top, growing the green, like
114getting more students up into those higher bands. We also want to be cognizant of the lowest bands. How many what is our change in percent well below? Uh so how many students do we move out of the lowest performance band? And then finally, we'll spend a lot of time with growth. And I'll spend just a little bit of time explaining that a little bit more. But growth from fall to winter and then the next time we come back fall to spring uh CAMASS and state testing utilizes a yeartoear we utilize a within year. Uh so how did a student perform compared to their like performing peers? That's a that is a uh a big big caveat there. So within growth it gets broken down into two major major metrics. The first one is a student
115growth percentile. This just shows how much an individual student improved compared to other students who started at the same level in the fall test. So within Renaissance, which is our vendor, our star program, our star profile, there's millions of data points across the nation, our students get grouped into buckets, if you will, of like performing students that gives them an individual student growth percentile and SGP. Now we can group those SGPS in any form or fashion that we want. We can group them by classroom. We can group them by school. We can group them by district, by by region, any of these pieces. Whenever we group those students, we take the median which is the middle value of that grouping and that gives us the MGP which is the more common metric that we talk
116about. So it's the middle score when you line up all the students growth percentiles in any particular group that you want to take. And that just gives us an idea. This is our norm. This is our norm reference measure. This is the one that measures us against a broader group of students where the percent passing and and percent well below measure us against a skill. It's a criterion reference. So how much what skills are being picked up. So when we talk about gap closing growth, we want that right-hand picture. an MGP of 65 and above means that our students are gaining ground based um compared to a national sample and that we are closing those those uh performance measures, closing the gaps between those performance measures. 50 we're holding steady right right in the middle,
117not losing ground, not really gaining ground until the entire population starts shifting right to the right. That's what we saw with state testing last year. the state grew faster than we did and we got lower growth growth percentiles. So, we don't want to really stay at 50. That's just holding ground. We want to really have that 55 and above. Uh below 50 means we're losing ground. The rest of the population, the rest of that sample is moving, growing skill acquisition faster than we are. So, we definitely want to avoid that. So, that's how we talk about growth. That's kind of the big thing. Right hand picture. Good. That's where we want to be. So then when we look at our particular you can see and I think we've briefed these in a couple different ways
118so I won't spend too much time but 45% passing in ELA 33% at math we are kind of holding steady in ELA this is fall to winter comparison okay fall to winter within the year are so we're holding holding steady compared to the national sample in math we're falling falling behind but really the 52 again depending on how the overall sample goes That's that's a that's a tenuous one. So then when we look at year-over-year, this is midyear. This is winter year-over-year. You can see that we have an upward trend. We have a positive slope. The takeaway here is that that positive slope just needs to be steeper, right? We gain kind of basically one to two percentage points one year over the next compared to compared to winter to winter to winter. We want
119that to be three to five five to 7%. Getting excited over here. So that is an ELA. And I want to also note that this is grades 2 through 11. So all of our schools tested our younger kids this year, which is a new which is a new strategy. Um and so we've added those those grades in there. Remember state testing only goes 3 to 11. When we look at math, we have another positive trend year to year from midyear to midyear. And again, we just want to make that slope inlect more and more up to the 5% gains. And we also want to from fall from winter to to spring to our next testing window, not lose any ground. Sometimes we take a we take a hit, we take a peak and then a
120little bit of a drop. We want to stay level or keep keep that trajectory upwards. When we look at our subopuls, so these are subopuls that are on that we get scores for on the school performance framework. and then ultimately gets wrapped up into the district performance framework. So we always monitor these because we don't want to leave points on the table when it comes to our school performance framework. So uh those are um ELLL English language learners, minority students uh uh special ed and then free reduced lunch. Um we gain individualized points by um by having those students grow and perform at grade level. So all subgroups in math met the district goal of reducing the number of well below students. So remember that is those bottom students in the red. We shrunk that
121red across all these groups. That's good news. In ELA um um ELLL and sped did that. We did not see that with minority and FRL. the the thing that we just have to keep pushing on with our with our subpopuls and serving those students well and serving those families well is that we see those small improvements but again we need to inflect that slope and get that steeper. So all um when we look at the top then the green the percent passing all special populations except ELLL stayed flat or dropped. So, we're pushing we're pulling students our sub ops out of the red decently. Could be better, but we're not moving moving our approaching in into the green the way we want to. What are we comparing there? Is it from fall to winter? Fall
122to winter. We're only within year within year comparisons. So, this is a slightly terrifying number here. 42 instructional days remaining between now and spring testing. So, we are on a clock here, right? We need we want to get this and see uh you know continue to push on these strategies that are going to be spoken about in just a moment. But again, it's a it's a tight window. Um just for your reference, we did give f we did give principles to great applause, which was fun, uh a a an option to be able to test before or after uh the uh state testing. And so those are coming in. And so we will have some flexibility there. So um when we look at then how many how many how many schools are outpacing, maintaining or
123falling back. Can can you about go back and state that point again? Before and after what? Oh, I'm sorry. Before and after the state window. So in the past we had testing running right our our star testing running right up and slightly into the state window. We got feedback from principles that that was causing a lot of anxiety, a lot of it was compressing everything. And so we're giving principles the option you can choose that early window if if that makes sense to your strategy or you can choose a later star window after state testing. All schools are still doing uh benchmarking for spring, but it gives them a little bit more flexibility based on their strategies and based on their improvement their improvement goals. Yeah. So some schools had specific feedback that their children
124performed very well over the beginning of year, midyear and end of year star assessment which shows about a point8 correlation to CAMASS. It is not the same but then that kids were dumping and diving on CAMASS because they're like I just took a test last week I don't want to take another test this week. So we gave schools the choice this year that says if you feel that that's a cultural challenge in your building. Other buildings kids are like I killed that test last week. I can't wait to kill the one next week. But we gave the school the choice now such that what we hope to see and David and team will be able to to correlate this is does that show a higher correlation because what we see is that our higher performing
125schools have the highest correlation to their star data to CASASS. Our lowest performing schools have the lowest correlation. So can we tighten up what we know about happening in our underperforming schools to really know what are the strategies that work and don't work because we are unfortunately and fortunately we are held hostage by our own assessment cycle to see if strategies work or they don't work. So what is the balance of how many times do you test a child to see if they've learned a learning objective before you've lost a chance to actually teach a learning objective because you're only testing it. So getting that correlation tighter I think is going to be great and I appreciate the push back that the schools gave that said they wanted the ability to be accountable for that
126decision in their building and we'll be able to report that at end of year if there was any market difference by uh any effect in that um decision on either correlation or outcomes. Yeah. Yeah. It was fun that was also a great partnership with DAC accreditation. So, just as you guys interface with DAC, that was a great conversation that we had. Um, and so then the big takeaway here besides the 42 days is that what we saw with our winter a little bit more than last year is that was bit of a bifurcation where we had a few more schools in the falling behind, a few more schools in the outpacing, then the maintaining kind of kind of decreased. So, we want to stop that bifurcation and get them over into the high end of
127maintaining and then ultimately outpacing. Right now, more than half of our schools are falling behind in math. That is less than the number of schools that were falling behind before. Go back. So, yes, still more than half of the portfolio. No, it was just the last slide. So, sorry. One more. No, no. The the the one you were just on. Go forward. Seven. Go eight. Go nine. That one. So we still have more than half of the schools at 27 schools that did not achieve a keeping pace or closing on MGP as the entirety of the school. Yeah. Now again, that's counting by schools. And so it's really important to remember that when Doherty and Coronado beat the average, they are pulling Doherty at 1,600 kids above the average and Coronado is pulling,200 kids above
128the average. And I won't name schools because I don't want to put people in the bad uh column here, but when 110 kids school is falling behind, they get the same marker as a Dory or a Coronado is pulling forward. And so 100 kids to,600 kids. The aggregate that I would point to is again that the midyear data is still showing that we're moving in the right direction. And then the total MGPS for the district are not quite over 50, which is what our goal is to make sure we're not losing pace. What we like about the school level data m uh uh director rule is it allows us to engage specifically with that leader on what the challenges are in that building instead of sometimes when you go in mass all kids 4 foot
129or taller are doing well and three and a half feet or shorter are not doing well. So this gives us some specificity but it doesn't quite really say that half our student more than half our kids are falling behind because the school isn't quite an equivalent. Okay. Um you're familiar with this list but it really just want to point out some of the amazing in percent of increase passing of 17 16% 18 uh down into the 12elves. This these this is the ideal state for us. We want to continue this. We want to systematize it. So one thing about this slide is that the there there's some common factors you know the the Martinez's the chapas we want obviously to keep them on there and then keep the Carvers the Ottabon Audabon has been on
130this slide for the last few times. So that's a really great example we'll speak to. You can see we have a few more high schools which is great on both sides of this both percent increasing. And then this is the median growth percentile of 54 and above. So we have again uh Carver with their growth scores um 71 in the 60s is exactly where we want to be. That is significantly gap closing and that's going to have a lot of payoff in seeing them bump into uh pulling them out of the red and seeing more and more bump students bump into the green. Um, and I want to keep the word Carver on everyone's mind because if you'll remember in August, Carver was added to the state watch list. And so when things happen now,
131could we have been more preventive? Yeah, I can look back at that and I could say that I saw some of that coming and we weren't as decisive enough. But we also didn't have and as we pass to Carol here in a minute the specificity of how we're addressing the gaps that we see in our schools. But that you'll see that Carver now go back a slide um showing up there uh at an increase in percentage and then if you go forward again now and as well as MGP and so getting that double whammy and again just as I said earlier Carver is a super tiny school. So, but if we can do it at Carver and if we could do it for the 235 kids that are at Carver, we can do it for
132every kid everywhere else. Um, within uh so we we also look at a critical 50% threshold. We really see that as a tipping point for the culture and climate within a school to have more than half of the students passing in particular areas of math and ELA. So, these are that list in math is low. It needs to grow. And then in ELA, it's continuing to grow. So again, just want to point out how Dohy has been on most of these lists. Uh we have Coronado's Mitchell popped in on several of these metrics. So again, we're looking at these factors to just see how is the climate climate and culture shifting into an area of performance and mastery. When we look at um this is a new slide, I I'll introduce it. I have I've
133asked the team for several years now. Um, how do we know what's happening upstream? Uh, third grade CASS, there could be probably no more stressful thing for either a student or an educator, which is I'm not really so sure you're reading at grade level yet. Why don't I leave you in front of this computer for an hour or two and see how you pass the test or don't pass the test that requires you to be able to read. So uh we have really robust measures that come from the early education environment but they don't translate with any really direct correlation to how the state evaluates at third grade. Dibbles is a really it's almost the conversation between teacher and a student teacher and student on how kids are gaining literacy and fluency. And then again
134Cass is a very binary experience. If you can't read the question you got a one in4 chance of getting it right because it's multiple choice. Um and so I asked the team to to introduce to mid-year data what are we doing differently at the early years for us to understand are we getting in front of this or are we constantly just waiting for another bad third year uh third grade report to come in or or a good good third grade year. Carol so I will just build on what was already shared both by the superintendent and by Dr. coli that this is our first year of pushing down the star assessment districtwide into first and second grade. You saw the student data aggregated into the other charts that will now dig down to second grade
135to 11th grade, but we wanted to pull out specifically first and second grade data. Just one point of caution here if you're not super familiar with these assessments or you're watching this at home. A Dibbles assessment is an early literacy assessment that we give to all students that really measures their basic reading fluency. STAR is much more in-depth and measures those comprehension skills that students are going to see when they take the third grade CAMASS assessment. So, in order to be eligible to take STAR, you do have to have a reading proficiency. So, this includes some of our first graders, not all, but then the bulk of our second graders. And in math, it's both first and second grade. So, when we look at this, what we're continuing to see is that growth score above
136a 50. This is really exciting for us to see nationally when we compare our students in our lower grades to how they're performing across the country. We're seeing our kids above that 50th growth percentage in first and second grade in both ELA and in math. The other kind of highlight here is just really this point about preschool. We, you know, we walk a lot of preschool classrooms and sometimes I get questions about how different those look than our fourth and fifth grade classrooms. But what we know, what we're seeing show up in our data thanks to Dr. Kicki and his team is that we see a direct connection to kids coming into our preschool programs that they were on average scoring 12 12 points higher on their dibble scores as second graders this year when
137compared to students that did not get access to those early education opportunities. So the investments that we're making on assessment but also on instruction in our lower grades is going to contribute to us being able to close this gap much sooner as kids come into third grade. I promise if you're wondering when we're going to get to what we're doing about all the data, we have just a few more slides uh that showcase the data that we've had up to this point. Um but I wanted to do a specific slide here to look at our watch list schools. We came to you in the fall and said these were the schools that we should all be the most concerned about and we want to come back with a quick update here. I won't read every
138line, but I just want to point out a couple of highlights. So obviously we've spoken to Carver already. What we are seeing at Carver and we will get into Carver a little a little later is both those MGPs so that growth score of kids compared to other kids again at that same level are really outpacing and outperforming national averages even our own internal average and we're seeing that go to achievement. So you can see here the shifts on achievement as well. So those are really our positive stories and there's several others in here. We're going to highlight Adams here in a moment. Um, but I also want to speak to these spaces where this data does tell us where it's not working, right? And where we need to move faster. And so I want to
139highlight there's actually a community member here from Colombia. So I'm going to share on Colombia first, which is just this idea that when we got data back at Colombia that said we have not made ch we have not had meaningful change. And in fact, if you look at ELA, we were actually slightly down. What are we going to do about that? That leader didn't waste any time between the midyear data coming back right before the winter break and taking action. They've extended the school day for third, fourth, and fifth graders by two hours each week to make sure that kids are getting access to two additional lessons as part of an extended day tutoring opportunity for the kids most at risk of being in this bubble category of not being able to be proficient on
140the state assessment. They've expanded an intervention program that Chief Rasmmanson's going to speak to that looks at fact fluency, right? And ensuring I was I was speaking to the principal this morning and she shared with me that in those third, fourth, and fifth grade math classrooms, they never start the day without a procedural fact fluency like sprint for students to have the opportunity to engage in those basic skills that open the door to them being able to have more advanced concepts during their lesson. That's really similar action to what's being taken at Wilson and Swagger and Galileo or Mitchell portfolio. They're looking at extended tutoring opportunities, really thinking outside of the box. And I'm going to speak to that on the million-doll investment on a later slide. But really this idea of we are now
141three weeks out from when we came back. We've had a lot of meaningful shift in the system just based on the data that you see here and we're going to continue to move at that clip. So, if you got the email last night with the Mars report that had the updates on individual schools, we continue to have I had two while I was here at the board meeting tonight, schools reach out to say, "Look what we did today. Look what we did yesterday. Do you want to see this opportunity to dig into our data?" I had a teacher send me an exit ticket data to show me how much students had increased um in their math scores. And so, I I want to just put into the system. There is deep urgency not just on
142our watch list schools but on so many of the schools across our portfolio who are saying we're taking the money that we're getting but we're also considering things that don't cost money right changes we can make with our own staff with our own resources to ensure that we see different outcomes when we look at spring testing Darren Smith area superintendent I'm here to review the uh a review of the district improvement plan immediate action steps for our targeted schools we have regular principal meetings uh with our superintendent team. There are regular action steps, adjustments, and refinements of the USIP at our schools. Uh there are tighter cycles of data reviews for our curricular assessments, on-time instructional adjustments, micro adjustments in the classroom, and in time additional resources to meet the teaching and learning needs of
143our schools are in process. The last one, number six, it's it's additional mid-year resource allocation leading to filling skill gaps for our students. Dr. Dr. Fry is going to speak more on this here in a minute, but I want to I I want to also remind you of one big move that encompasses all six of these actions and it's in motion in uh in the recent work we've done at Swigert and two simple moves putting in uh an uh all of the instruction in the main building and a structured passing period are just two examples that uh were adjusted to hold the integrity of the in of instructional time leading to fidelity of delivering on the plan. And with that goes back this way. No, that one. So, as we talk about growth and I
144know the superintendent spoke to this when we think about schools in big picture, right? What we know across our portfolio is we have really different makeups of how we get a median growth percentage based on the number of teachers that we have in that building based on the number at each grade level the size of the school. I think this answers some earlier questions about how many schools are below that 50th percentile that we want to be. So what we thought would be helpful is really to pull out some examples. So these are just three case studies of schools across our system that look at as the different ways that you can get that standardized score across the school. So the first one and this is obviously a great example here. You can look at
145that data and it is consistent in those third, fourth and fifth grade classrooms that they are significantly outperforming and outpacing growth expectations that we see nationally. What's interesting about this first school is that this is a building that didn't have a single teacher in a single classroom a year ago above the 50th growth percentage. And so we're seeing that really significant shift in what's happening as a result of again some of the work we're going to speak to later. But just to highlight here, this is a building that's heavily invested in coaching. Today I was pulling some coaching touchpoint data for these teachers. Some of these teachers have had more than 40 coaching visits since the start of the school year. That on average is a coaching visit every three days. Right? These are teachers
146that engaged very early in our model classroom initiative. They were some of the first teachers in the district to go see excellent instruction in other buildings. They've taken that back to their planning and in fact this is actually the principal that was reaching out today to say look at already the student movement that we've had as a result of our afterchool tutoring program. And so what we're seeing is just that level of urgency at scale across all of those classrooms. This is also a space where immediately layered support from the district came in. They had an instructional coach, but we had assigned an additional district instructional coach. And we actually housed some of our district staff out of this building to provide that day in dayout wraparound support to really be the service that the
147school needs from district staff, which is we are always here and always available to do what's necessary. The middle school, I actually brought the principal here. I thought it's helpful when you get to hear from from the field what's happening and hear beyond my voice, but really some of our team members. And so I'm going to kick it over to Carolyn Graham just to speak a little bit to what's happening in her portfolio there at Adams. If you can remember off the previous slides, you'll see that Adams is a school that we are celebrating both for achievement in ELA and math, but also for growth in ELA and math. And I won't take away her thunder, but that's a really significant picture than where we were sitting a year ago. Caroline, that's great. Thank you.
148and thank you for investing in us in the district and giving us that extra funding because um as you know the resources allow us to focus on our vision at the school, but the systems we create are forcing us to focus on that vision and hold up to that. And so um as you can see here and and back on the slides before, we are outperforming the district. I'm just going to to Adam's horn a little bit, but on on the math and ELA mgps districtwide, we did um uphold above both of those. And so that's amazing for us. Um even though you do see some MGPS below that 50 mark, we do need to be in the 60s or higher atom to close our gaps um on our USIP, we do have a goal
149to get to 25% of students performing at grade level because we were in the 14 15% last year in both ELA and math. So that we want incremental growth that is sustainable by creating systems that allow us to do that. And so I know that u Mr. G did speak to that. It's not going to happen overnight, especially when you have last year we had MGPS in the 25 range, 30 range. Um, our overall in math was 25 and it was in the high 30s in ELA. So, um, we are all well aware of the work we have to do and, um, they're all committed. We are one team, one vision. We say all the time and so there's not one teacher at our school that is not invested in this program of our model
150of agency collaboration and standards driven instruction. That's our vision at our school. And so, 100% of our teachers are engaged in coaching. And so, um, we did had added a coach this year which has helped us tremendously in our model of just making sure that 100% of our teachers are engaging in every single cycle that the district has set forth and put on their calendar. And so, we are entering closing up uh coaching cycle 5. And even teachers that may not need coaching, when you look at their numbers, they're also still receiving it and they are wanting it um because we do feel that we can still, no matter what, grow and get those kids to grade level expectations, our students. So this portfolio right here for this year um 50% um as you can
151see are not uh 50% here excuse me but 100% of our teachers do not have two MGPs below um 50. So 50% have an MGP of 50 or higher at least in one category content of ELA or math. That's amazing. And then four out of those um in math have a 60 or higher. So when we look at this portfolio of ELA, um just know that if they are below in ELA, on the opposite side in math, they are above. And so that is a huge celebration for us. We're very excited about that. Um and in our classrooms, we have 13 classrooms in the core um our our core classrooms. And so six of those teachers are within three years or less of being a teacher. And so that's 46% of our teachers are rookies,
152right? like we are they are coaching, they're in the trenches, they're learning how to have the art of teaching and navigate that world. And so this year we also have two teachers that are year one. And so it's just it's really it's really just profound and significant to see this these results. And though I know it's not where we need to be yet, we are definitely on the right track. And so I appreciate everybody's support district. Thank you. Thank you board because it's working and we believe in our staff. We believe in our students and we're just going to continue to see this growth. Awesome. Thank you. What I what I appreciate out of the work that Carolyn's brought to Adams is the we're all in this together. Um Carolyn is one of my very
153early hires moving you from West over to Adams uh to take on and to develop a model of instruction that she would not alone be responsible for. And so it I mean Carol Carol Carol Dr. Fry is giving you just the tip of the amount of support that comes in. But what Carolyn's created in the Wolfpack is everybody needs support. So there's never a closed door and there's always an open attitude between adults and students and how is it that we can improve our experience. And Carol and I were there for a couple hours yesterday. And literally as I was getting ready to leave one of our model classrooms out of Adams, that teacher actually came out into the hallway and said, "Superintendent Gall, please come into my room and see how it is that
154we're actually changing an experience that I've spent a lot of hours in Adams over the last couple years was not um something I would have expected to see happen that strongly and effectively as I saw it happen in Fatima's classroom just uh just yesterday. The days get so long. Can I ask you a question? Sure. Two slides back where it has the 13% passing. Can you help us understand? I see the MGP is 57, but the percent passing is 13%. What does that mean? So that means that's the number of kids that are at or above grade level. So the MGP 13%. Yes. Correct. Yeah. Go down the column. 11 at Swigert, 11 at Galileo, 12 at Man. I know. I'm just This is just shocking. Yeah. So it is. And I know when you
155see those numbers, it's easy to maybe beginning of the year it was closer to 10% based on your MGP. I mean I I can speak to something here just to to draw this down. I was looking at a school this morning. We have a school that on our star assessment at the beginning of the year had 0% proficient kids. And so really this is that space where growth matters. And I really appreciate the question because as we look at these growth scores, that's the space where her kids are gaining at a faster rate than other kids at that same level. And the last column shows how much they've gone up by since the beginning of the year. So it's up 5%. So at the beginning of the year, they were 8%. And when you break
156that down on our numbers, in order for us to get to that 25% at grade level, that's about 12 kids per class. And so that's our magic number to get to that next increment. But that's not where we want to stop. But we are targeting kids by name and need and their number is 12 and you've got to label identify target micro intervene. Like they have to attach themselves very closely. Caroline, retell the story of the runner that I asked you about and and the conditions that you shared with me about that individual's past. Uh yes, and we've had children that are just just living in cars. McKenna Vento um just coming from some very unstable situations. And so sometimes at Adams the success doesn't always look and equate to an academic number on an
157assessment or a test, but their growth at that time is to become stable in a classroom, not run down the hall anymore, sit in the seat. And I know on the grand scheme of things, um, we need them to be at grade level to be successful in their life. Um, and so we are trying to do that. But sometimes those the feeling of belonging and just being able to sit and function and be in their seat and own that learning and engage in their data folder and understand how to get themselves to the next step in their journey is moving mountains for them just so this is a first grader at the beginning of the year whose first school experience was Adams that week in first grade from living in a car for as long
158as that child can remember. And so a gasast as well at schools with 10% our ability to influence how people show up to us is what we're doing once we get them. The challenges that exist in America. We've made this conversation go back to the uh to Darren Smith's slide. just somebody lay down the socioeconomical um or average income or any of the free and reduced lunch markers against those six schools. Right? The number one predictor of performance in America is the absence of poverty. So I'll try and make that positive of that we can actually succeed. But if you're a poor family, you're coming in years behind. I love the prek slide. What was the points that you gave? 12. 12 points. And remember, it's universal prek. So now it's not I mean that's
159that's a space that the state's probably losing money on each one of those seats, but they're gaining money because if we can get 12 points of a difference in a control group of a child over two years, that saves us having schools where 11 or 13% of the children are at a at or above grade level. And right now we have 15 students that have gone from kindergarten through fifth grade in our institution at at Adams. And so last year it was 30. So we are seeing that the longevity of staying in that one spot in our population just diminishes a little bit each year. And so having us being able to have that consistent impact is harder to measure over time due to that transient. If I may jump in real quick, I think
160it's worth stomping that this is not a D11 problem. This is a public education in America problem. There are years where Chicago public schools across the entire system has not a single student on grade level. You can look that up. That is a true fact. The University of California system just pass published a report basically saying we have record numbers of kids taking remedial math in college. This is not a D11 thing. This is a public schools across the country, if not the whole world thing. So don't don't look at these numbers and think, "Oh my gosh, D11 is just dropping the ball everywhere." Th this is this is the reality of public education in America right now. Um, and that's probably a good segue to kick it back to you to say, "What are
161we doing?" A great segue for the sake of time to the last example. And all I want to showcase here when you look at school one versus school three, those are different subjects if you look at the top math versus ELA, but is the difference between school one. We took a schoolwide approach. We did a lot of things. We flooded in support. We made sure that every teacher was receiving these high levels of touch points. In school three, what you see is we actually have three classrooms that are significantly above where we where we expect to see classrooms, but we have one that really needs that intensive amount of support. And so, we'll talk about this at the million-doll investment, but the other thing that we're doing is not just intervening in that classroom to
162support the teacher. We're actually providing additional instructional opportunities to those students as well to ensure that we close that gap quickly. Okay. So, I know I've shared this before, but I also know that we have some new board members here, but as a academics team, we are organized by region. And so, each of our regions has an academic director that really speaks life to our strategy at our teacher level. So, this is someone who works with a team of individuals to really take the strategies from concept to action. And so, Charlie Ryder is our Southeast academic director, and he's here tonight to speak to our three largest instructional strategies. and then I'll wrap that up as we think about the new investment of funds that we've made on the million dollars. Yes. Thank you. And
163I'm gonna break a presentation rule by reading the quote because we have a few quotes on these slides and I love it because it's actually a way to give voice to actual teachers in the system and things they've said. So I'm going to break that rule and go ahead and read this. Agency allows students to hear from each other which provides a powerful experience in which students share their knowledge. It also gives the opportunity to lead and problem solve as a team, which increases confidence. Through this, I've seen students attempt new challenges more frequently and with confidence. And this resonates so deeply with the classroom I was in yesterday, an elementary classroom, where I would argue that agency brought to life what would otherwise just be a simple and potentially maybe even students would say
164boring question. and their reading class suddenly became not just a boring question on a piece of paper but a live debate where third graders were talking about the author's opinion and whether they agree with the author's opinion which was about who is the bravest man in ancient Romeorous and do you agree with the author and third graders standing up and articulating to each other how they respectfully disagree they think that Julius Caesar was the bravest man in Rome and they had a discussion chain which is an agency structure where the students own the conversation and they literally call in the next person and they use those habits of discussion to engage deeply. And I think kind of the most speaking of quotes, the the quote that I think captures agency for me and what gave
165me uh goosebumps in that moment was when a student who was sharing was looking around to call on the next person and she literally said, "I'm looking for someone who disagrees with me." And I thought that was incredibly powerful and something that we maybe won't be able to capture in an MGP. But speaking of society, isn't that the type of society that you hope to live in with students with people who are saying, I'm looking around and I want to hear from the person who disagrees with me and I'm excited to engage in that. So just wanted to share that agency is a major initiative and we have teachers who are learning from each other and sharing these strategies and I think it's just at the core of everything that we're doing. And I guarantee
166in classrooms where you hear students saying things like I'm looking for the person who disagrees with me, you actually do see that reflected in those numbers. And that classroom was at a school that I'm looking at right now on that chart. And it's no surprise to me that they're sitting there um on this slide showing the power of this approach. Dr. Kiki, do you want to speak a little? What we wanted to do here is give some narrative anecdotes from the classroom, but then also echo that against the data that we're pulling from these classrooms and across these schools. Yeah. So, we took a look at our agency our agency focused schools at the at the furthest level of implementation. So the highest level of treatment. So that was identified as Ottabon Rudy and freedom.
167As we continue down this agency path, this list gets longer. Uh but these are our highest levels of of implementation. And so what we saw was within these uh agency high level agency schools. You can see those ELA MGPS and math MGPS are gap closing. um and that we are seeing a percent passing that is uh meeting or exceeding that 50% critical mass that we're really shooting for. So overall again um I would say that especially to Audabon I'll leave it to the to the experts that work in this area. Audabon has been on a really significant journey over the last last few years where they have not been on lists like this three years ago or four years ago. And so it's very exciting to see some of this work uh have uh have
168fruition. But overall agency median growth was 11 median growth points higher than the district and then in math it was seven points higher. So we are seeing some of those returns. Awesome. You want to click to the next slide? Yes. So we continue to come forth and talk about the model classroom initiative and so again we'll talk a little bit about some anecdotes from the classroom and then how that's transferring into data. Awesome. So this quote comes from a teacher who is a model classroom. And I would maybe hazard to guess one of the most visited teachers thus far in the program. And in this anecdote, she actually is sharing about how there were kindergarten teachers at another school in the district who were struggling with a particular component of CKLA and engagement during that
169time. And so these two teachers from another school visited the model classroom teacher and had a bit of an epiphany about how they can restructure their approach and plan a little bit differently with the same content but in a way that feels a lot more engaging and meaningful to the students. And I love this anecdote because I think it represents something that as we live into this model classroom program more and more, I'm realizing that it sounds like a very singular moment and experience. like it's model classroom singular and you picture maybe one teacher going to see another. But what we're actually seeing is that it's usually much more of a multiplier than that. And an anecdote that also comes to mind is we have a school where the teachers have been going to the
170principal for a while because they are an agency school and so they receive a lot of visitors and they've been saying like we would love to go see other teachers too and we want to be pushed to the next level but there wasn't necessarily the infrastructure to make that happen quickly or easily. And so at that school, the principal within two weeks of us releasing the model classroom process had scheduled and executed model classroom visits for every single teacher in the school. And every single teacher that did those visits has a targeted area that they're going to now implement in their classroom. And I could pull it up and I could read them to you and it would be a list of things like how to enact and increase agency, how to build more release
171into student responsibility for practicing content. um aggressive monitoring, which is a really important teacher practice and guided practice as you're making sure that students are following the content that you're teaching. So, what I'm trying to get out is model classrooms are not just a great support and help for teachers who are maybe struggling and need to see the exemplar. It's actually a really powerful tool to take some places where they're already doing good things and push them into great things. So that's one of my kind of latest epiphies about model classrooms is just the fact that it's really something that is going to multiply greatness into other places. Yeah, I'm going to interject on um I I can't give enough credit for the team of how in just one year we have completely restructured our
172academic um uh org structure and how we deliver supports and services to schools. What makes the model classroom such a gamecher is we will never have enough coaching to meet the need that you saw in some of those slides. There's just not enough money. There's not enough people. There's not enough time. The accelerant that we have here comes from this idea of teachers actually learning from other teachers. The peer network is the most powerful teaching tool than the d than the cascading waterfall of I told the area superintendent or I told the chiefs who told the academic directors who then the three of them all told the principles who then told the AP who told the ILT who then it gets to a classroom. When a teacher gets to visit with and see practice from
173their peer, it has an accelerant to it that skips all those layers. And it's almost uh anybody have a twin or anybody speak uh you know make well yeah I bet you and Chanty you and Chanty have a whole different way that you connect and communicate that your own family doesn't even understand. Right. This is the power of what you think we're on to here is is that when no matter how long I have someone for PD, it's limited. The work doesn't actually happen in PD. It happens after PD. When people come back to their building and say, "What is it that we're doing with this? How how are you doing that?" Well, here's what I did and here's what I worked. And so I just give great credit to the team for going out
174and not just going to the three highest performing schools and saying the three highest percentage of kids that are achieving must be the model classrooms. It's really interesting to see our higher performing schools traditionally now going into this the the center part of our city to see really strong instructional practice come to bear. And it's um it's very it's it's contagious in a very positive way that uh when we write that story, all the great things that we talk about, it's going to be the model classroom that brought it to scale and the incredible teachers who like you said put that into action in PD and in their buildings every single day. Charlie, we go to the next one. And it's no surprise that we're here as well to talk about coaching, which is continued
175to be our number one core strategy around how we support high quality instruction in every classroom. Julie Yes. So, this is like my bread and butter every day in my team is a team of coaches is what I call us to people who ask, "What do you do?" I lead a team of coaches who help teachers get better. And I think a really cool anecdote to kind of bring this to life actually connects beautifully with what we just talked about, which is model classrooms. I'm thinking of a teacher who started this year um kind of in a worrisome spot. ended last year struggling with classroom management, had really pretty low data, and we knew going into the year that this person needed a higher level of support. So, from day one, this teacher was paired
176with a district coach who intensively coached and supported at the beginning of the year to ensure a strong start. And in fact, I think we calculated it was over 33 touch points for this individual teacher. uh which I think Carol shared earlier, numbers like that means that there's someone in their room or supporting them probably about every third day. So, usually multiple times a week, which is exciting. So, this person who's in their first two years of teaching and was struggling in year one, was very recently stamped as a model classroom, if you can believe it. impeccable teaching, beautiful classroom management, a positive culture, and not only that, but at midyear posted a math MGP in the 70s and a reading MGP in the high 50s. So to see that level of transformation happen in
177less than a school year is quite honestly incredible. And sometimes people will ask, hey, to be a model classroom, how long do you have to have been a teacher? And the answer is there is no rule on that because why shouldn't someone who's getting results and putting in that effort and innovating and trying new things and opening up to coaching, why shouldn't they be a model classroom teacher? So just wanted to share that as kind of a grounding anecdote of how a lot of these things actually connect in my mind like separate slides but really the same work embedded throughout. And you'll see some numbers up there that I think are very compelling that 30% of teachers had five or more classroom walkthroughs um thus far this year and last year only 5% of teachers
178had five or more classroom walkthroughs for the entire year. So we're already exceeding that number and we're only here in January with many months to go. Um, yeah. So, I think that kind of captures the the spirit of what we're doing with coaching and the potential because again, we can take a teacher who last year had a low MGP and take them into actually one of the highest MGPS in the district. And I think Charlie, I'll just stamp one more thing on this point, which is sometimes I get asked questions around is coaching just I walk into your classroom, I write you an email and I leave. Right? And a year ago, I think we had a model of a lot of observation. Right? Even at that 5% we were observing. What I can say
179now especially in pulling our coaching touch point data is when I look at this and say 30% of classrooms have had at least five walkthroughs in their classroom. The average number of touch points is in the 20s. And so what that tells me is for every one time we're in there, we're planning, we're modeling, we're co-eing another five times off that one touch point. And so what we're trying to really get at is a comprehensive ecosystem on coaching that is beyond just I come in and I watch you. It's really that I'm standing next to you, I'm willing to teach with you. Our academic directors are taking turns teaching in classrooms. Our coaches are teaching in classrooms. One of our coaches um taught today in a fifth grade classroom and was sending Charlie video while
180I was with him. And so really this idea of whatever it takes at the individual teacher level. And so you saw all of that data before which I think tells the story that each of these strategies is comprehensive across our system depending on the needs of the individual but also gets so specific to the relationship of that teacher to those students and what is the the move that we need to make in that classroom. If you go on to the next one, I just want to highlight we're next slide. Or do I? Great. Okay. I'm gonna kick it over to Chief Rasid who's going to talk a little bit about how we really focused on some of these fundamental math supports for kids with this midyear data and coming into the spring. Um it's good
181to see you again. So just uh because I know we have some new board members. Um so we've really focused on math this year and we've done it in a lot of ways. Um, one of them is embedding math all through induction, which are teachers with one, two, or three years experience. Um, not necessarily in the profession, but with us. Um, our district PD has focused on it. And we've done Mission Math Possible, which we've talked about. If you had a growth score lower than we wanted for fourth and fifth grade teachers, we put you into kind of this um, strand to really help you. And and it focuses on a lot of things, high impact teaching strategies, the math itself, and planning um, and that was all tied in with the coaching um, that
182Dr. I was just talking about um some of the pivots we've done. So, I just wanted to share this. I thought it was exciting. Our Mission Math Possible had ended, but we wanted um we had gotten a lot of positive feedback of wanting more opportunities. And so, we opened it up for more optional sessions. Um and we had fourth and fifth grade teachers come and we even had third grade teachers. They came in and said, "Can we be here? We're not a fourth grade teacher." And we said, "Absolutely. Come on in. Bring your friends." Um, and it was really exciting because at a budget meeting the other day, the principal of Edison said, "Hey, I just wanted to tell you my third grade teachers were raving about the support they got the other day with
183planning. Can they continue to come?" And I said, "Absolutely." Um, bring their friends more the marrier. And so, we started with fourth and fifth, but naturally it's found their way into third grade as well. Um, and so looking to continue to expand and hit them as well. Um the other thing we've done which is really exciting is we have invested in EXL which is um really focuses on math facts and fluency. If you're not familiar with it, it can be used for tier one, tier two or tier three support. Um and so originally I thought I started working with um Superintendent Gaul on this in October and I thought well we'll do a pilot maybe 10 20 schools. Um schools overwhelmingly were like I love the data. I didn't originally sign up. Can I sign
184up now? And so we have over 40 schools on it. Um and they are just using it in a really a lot of different ways. Some tier one, some tier two. Um it's really interesting when you look at the dashboards because I thought, oh, students will really go at home and they'll play games. We see um when we pull up that even students are doing instructional videos and so that lets me know if they're getting it wrong. They're watching the video embedded right there or it's popping up. Um so I thought that was really interesting. As a student, I don't know that I would have focused um on instructional videos. I probably would pick games, but each to their each to their own. And and the thing that I really like is when I was
185in a budget meeting the other day, I just was like, I'm going to pop in on Carver. They're getting amazing growth, what's happening there. So, I popped into their Kinder because you can watch it live. Um, and I could see right there who was doing really well in their fluency, who was struggling, and then I was able to see there's three students struggling, and then it dropped to two because the teacher went over and supported. Um, and so that's been really neat. It's really actionable in the moment. Um, as it's live watching it. I mean, I I literally like if I pull it up right now, the students on at home, I could watch them. So, um that's been really neat, but it it builds fluency in a variety of ways. Um there's a lot
186of um focused work where you will go as fast as you can and answer questions. There's scaffolding. Um there's feedback that immediate you didn't get this. Here's a video to watch. Um and then just it adapts as well. So, we're using it to diagnostic. Students go into an arena every week for 10 minutes and it just continues to give them skills and move them. Um we know statistically that if students spend about 10 to 15 minutes um a day in there and they master two skills, we see about six points increase um for CMAS. And so it's been really interesting seeing who's using it um just for tier one, tier two, and tier three. But we're seeing a lot of really good growth. Great. Um, and so as we talk about all of these amazing
187things happen happening in the schools, what we know is that students need to be present and they need to be in a safe learning environment in order to benefit from these strategies. And so we've really been focusing on attendance and behavior. Um, positive news is that our attendance is up 4% from this time last year. Um, one of the things we were able to do this year that really um, targeted the work was that uh, Dr. Dr. Kicki was able to run reports of really what is the what is that that pivot point where a student gets to this level of daily attendance we see an impact in their academic achievement and so from that we were able to target specific groups of students through the um multi-tered systems of support process and put interventions
188in place specifically for those students so really getting to that actionable data so we're getting to the point where I can get a list and say MTSS facility facitator. These are the students that need that additional support, additional attendance, um incentive to be at school. So, we are seeing the benefit of that. Our behavior is down 24% um when you compare the the incidents from this point last year. So, when you look at semester 1 from last year to this semester 1 from this past school year, we were down 24% which is great. Again, we're seeing that the implementation of the cell phone policy, we've built a lot of consistency in the practice and students are responding very positively to that practice and are now not in that struggle of the yonder pouches that people
189are following the process and we are seeing consistent implementation. Um, in terms of our graduation rate, we have an increase again um in our four-year graduation rate. Um, we are seeing steady increases in that and also our metriculation rate. Metriculation rate is the percent of graduates who go on to a 2-year, a four-year military or a certificate program. We have had the highest rate in since um I think 10 years. We're at 47% of our graduates. Um so that is great news. We are seeing a lot again in that really focused work that we're doing at the schools. Every secondary school has a dropout prevention um workg group that meets monthly and goes through individual students and make sure that they have action plans associated with them if they are at risk of dropping out.
190So we're really getting to again to that really targeted data decision- making um with the MTSS process. We are piloting this year a um through powers school analytics and insight uh which is a data tracking system for MTSS. So we can see on a dashboard how many interventions are in place, who is responding, and we're getting to that place where we can really target where we need to um for students. Future, can you give uh an example of the review we have to do at an elementary school without naming the school or the kid of how the data and feedback that we got from classrooms is forcing this to a different level? because I know that board members will get anecdotal things that might counter some of the data that we share, but how we
191respond to those. Yeah, I think when we when we get a concern from a um in a particular elementary school about a student who maybe um is struggling with behavior in the school is not seeing impact um quick enough. What we're doing is we're looking at their body of evidence and looking at um what are the historical evaluations? What are their test scores looking like? Do we need to look at a special education evaluation? Um for example, do we need to look at providing supports quicker rather than waiting um for that student to fail? So we're really getting to that that um outcome much quicker in the process. Y All right. So, we'll end this portion of the week with just an update on the million dollars. I know that you had an opportunity to
192read some of this in the Mars report, so I won't belabor all of the individual examples, but what I want to speak to is just how quickly this has taken action. I was checking with um the budget office a little bit ago, and at this point, we have already allocated out to schools over half a million dollars of that million dollars. Every school has a targeted action plan that's belonging to this program. That's more than 30 schools in our portfolio where they have identified down to the individual kid what is the intervention that we need to have in place. And so across the portfolio some of the common trends are around extended day. So you heard me speak to Colombia um Adams is an early adopter of the extended day for third graders who needed
193targeted tutoring right but really that idea of more atbats more opportunities for kids to get access to instruction. And so we're seeing that as pretty ubiquitous across the system. We have some unique um scheduling opportunities at our middle schools. They're looking at lunch groups or before school based on kids individual schedules, but they're just turning over every rock to say what is it that we can do outside of the box to get kids more at bats. Part of what Chief Rasmusen spoke to in I and I promise this is just a happy coincidence, but I pulled the data right before the presentation and in three weeks we've had over a million questions answered by our kids on the program. And so what we see is a million more at bats for kids than we had
194three weeks ago, right? Whether they're doing that at home, before and after school, during lunch blocks, but that was more opportunities for kids to have access to that type of programming than we we would have had without this investment. And so as we think about those investments in the classroom, um I just also want to echo that we are just as in in in support of our teachers. We've expanded teachers coaching teachers. We had seven teachers coaching teachers teachers um in buildings today out in classrooms. We're continuing to expand. We have a wait list going right now for even more need for that support. We are doubling down on curricular training. We had principles as soon as they heard that this was going to be a possibility scheduling professional development for staff to really and
195you'll see some of these acronyms and the updates around win groups. What I need now these are kids getting intensive tutoring during the day. What we have done is restructure those to ensure that the mid-year data is driving the instruction that kids are getting during those times to ensure that it's gap filling instruction. So I highlighted Penrose here um because two weeks ago they were one of our very first, but as you've seen in the Mars report, there are so many others now. But what I can just speak to is all day long we are hearing from principles, from academic directors, from area superintendent of the action that's happening in our classrooms. And so you'll continue to get those updates, but I just I wanted to highlight for the community and for the board that
196we are moving as quickly as we possibly can to get that straight from the funds into strategy into action and into outcomes for kids. And I am passing it superintendent back to the superintendent. Great. Middle school. So, you heard all the great things. Uh, you know, we have a middle school accountability system that we've rolled out to start the year. The challenges in middle school are much deeper. If I can go I won't go all the way back, but to the slide uh director Rule brought us back to to point out the Adams um uh proficiency. Uh there are three middle schools that are at the bottom of that list at 10 and 11% of performance. Um the challenges in middle school are real. I share this slide to let you see that the difference
197uh of what you're seeing here and the correlation between grades that we give in middle school and scores that kids receive. Uh I think we all know that a grade should never be completely generated by the score itself because the score is never completely representative of a child's learning and their engagement in the space. But I think any of us would expect to have seen correlation, particularly knowing the spread of our middle schools, that some of them would have been in the 0 6 or 7 that if you're getting an A at school A or school B, that that means that there's a really good chance that you're at or above grade level. What you can see here, and I know we're going to have one task or conversation tonight on some of the pay
198scale work here, but this idea of standardsbased grading needs to be addressed at the policy level because there's there's a there's a missing theme in tonight's information, at least how we've presented it, but it came and I really appreciate I know she's not here anymore, but director Hayley's plea in the bond conversation that said, "One students, you have a responsibility to show up and be prepared and do what it is that you're asked to do." And parents, you have a responsibility to make sure your student is that. And when we send a message home that says Johnny or Sally isn't prepared or isn't at school or isn't uh uh behaving in class, that you are a part of that solution. So we have to engage our community and our family particularly as we start on
199this middle school accountability space here. these schools uh you know just randomized school A through school I you can see the highest correlation is at point4 and point 41 and the lowest correlation uh is significantly lower than that at both of those in school F being below.3 it says we are telling children that in the thing that matters to a child most of us are report card driven particularly at this age group that you are not losing you might not think that you're I'll use the bear analogy. You don't have to be faster than a bear if you go camping with more than one person. You just have to be faster than the other person. So in school F, it's saying to you that we're giving out ABS and C's to kids that are nowhere
200near where they need to be as we are assessed by the state. And in the most basic expectation, the state is only asking that you are ready to metriculate into the local economy. They're not asking the the 12th grade standard is not a 1600 on the SAT and every kid's on their way to be a road scholar or a white house uh a fullbrite fullbrite uh fellow at the White House. They're asking you to be able to metriculate into the economy and the society that we are part of. So this is still a challenge for us. I can say that on the middle school accountability system. I give a lot of credit to the middle school leaders. Um, I think we all hear this when we talk about middle school educators, like it's a special
201breed, right? Kids go through enormous amounts of change from sixth grade to eighth grade. Uh, one of our mottos at most of the middle schools this year was, "Can't we just keep them sweet from sixth through 8th grade?" Because they all come in in sixth grade and they all look, okay, what do you want me to do? This is just a great time of change for children. Uh, but our leaders tackled this. The size of this is large. I want you to see those numbers on there. We are roughly about 1,200 kids per grade across the district. That's about a sweet sweet spot number. In some of the places we have bubbles, it goes up to more like 1400. But you can see that if in a three grade uh uh middle school 948 kids
202are identified by math and 600 kids are identified by ELA, it's saying that nearly an entire grade level of our middle school cohort is identified. And if you remember those triggers, they were pretty low bar. You're failing classes, not I'm worried that you didn't do your homework last night. You literally have an F on your inter report card going there. I think the good news that I can share on this is in the short amount of time that we've gone with these level of supports, we have stopped the bleeding. the data that we got back on the cohort of kids that we grabbed, we didn't get to gap closure, but we stopped losing ground. So, these are kids, this is the slipperiest of slope, and this is the time in your life where you either
203double down and recommmit to your uh value proposition of education or you just kind of peace out. So, I'm happy that we've stopped the bleeding. We haven't quite figured out how to turn the corner yet, but we're in the early stages of that. I've asked the team today. I was with them today and I said to them, I said, "We all know because we talk about it all the time and you heard it particularly in how we're spending that million dollars on the larger initiatives. It's about time and it's about quality. We're a little caught up in how do we name it and where do we put it and and and is it different than seventh grade or is it eighth grade again?" And I said, "No, no, let's first of all let's go school
204by school." And so Darren Joiner is leading the initiative. if he had a conflict tonight, so he couldn't be here to tell the story himself. Walking everyone in the schools to get the right educators in those schools to commit to the extra time it's going to take to make sure that these kids can get back on track as we have done and we will always do in district 11. If you give us more of your time, we will pay you for that. We cannot match children just to the person who wants to make extra hours of pay. It has to be the highest quality educators within the middle school system or we will just continue to grease the rope that we throw to the kid that's on the slippery slope. So, we're excited about that.
205We're looking forward to reporting that back to the board in a separate brief, but I wanted to give you an update that we've stopped the loss and we're hoping to be able to turn that here as we come into the end ofear data for middle schools. I'll be really brief on this section, but in current anal analytics in this section, I just want you to know we're studying multiple strategies and inputs into the system to see where are we seeing things make a difference. One of those that the board is well aware of is we are below board formula in most of our classrooms across the district. That's what this slide shows. In being that we wanted to look at a data study, look at our analytics and see do we see outcomes from that?
206because we have smaller class size, can we say those classrooms with less kids, are they producing better outcomes? This stud is done across K12 often to look at class sizes and their impacts. And when we localize the data, what we found is there's no statistical significance related to the lower class sizes that we're seeing across the system. That's important for us to note because as we take those next steps in to say what else can we invest in to change also looking at what the board's tasked within our budget move from a 60 to 70% spend on academics. It matters where that money goes as well. Where is that investment going in that spend from 60 to 70 to make a difference to change the outcomes. Right now the data is showing in the system
207that smaller class sizes are not having a significant impact on student performance. And David, what was the number one indicator on student performance? We don't have it on the slide, but do you remember the number one what was the number one indicator? Well, we said it earlier of lack of student performance in that study on class size when we said what did have a statistical difference is what Mike's saying. Yeah, it was in in math. It was whe it was gender, it was male, and what else to remember? FRL, which we talked about earlier today as well. So in the appendix you had slides that go into depth on um the populations the special populations as well. With that we will stop talking and take questions. Slide 24 for us is slide 25 but it
208doesn't have the middle school accountability system. Yeah. Um it had extra data that was really good. Yeah. Yeah. We are going to reshare these. We made some changes to them yesterday. Um try to write it all down though. No, we will repost. You don't have to do that. I'm I'm gonna I'm going to take the uh the board president privilege here and I I want to grab the mic a little bit before I turn it over for discussion. Um because I you know this is what is this now for us? It's like the kind of just start of our second year or third year on the board and I I kind of went back to around this time my very first year because I was kind of curious. I was looking back in my emails
209and my notes and one of the points I really want to underscore especially for our new board members. It is the nature of systems this size to change very very slowly. Right? That is just the nature of any system that has to deal with this much staff, this many students, this many dollars to spend. And yet when I was looking back at these conversations 2 years ago, staff were presenting the board ideas like backwards planning, which is the idea that your, you know, teaching should be aligned to your assessment, or we should all be really, really good at understanding, you know, state level standards and content standards, or we found out that our practice is not nearly as rigorous as the assessment. And I remember two years ago being horrified because I was thinking these
210are the absolute basic things a school system should be doing. If you are presenting these to us as ideas for innovation my friends you have grossly missed the mark. So that was that was 2 years ago and I think it's worth really underscoring that the quality of ideas and the quality of strategy that you are seeing tonight is a far cry from where it was 2 years ago. So if you think about model classrooms, right, pushing in support with coaches, the academic reorganization where we have people specializing in curriculum versus specializing in pedagogy, uh the data that we saw on slide 16 with kind of the student agency, school embedded professional development, which that was something we asked for as a board. We're saying, please make professional development practical and useful to teachers. And in
211the Mars report, I know we we sent it out last night. I think strictly speaking it was sent out early so that you could see some of it just you know if you happen to see your email before this meeting the midyear investment of money that we voted on um two weeks ago the middle school accountability project that again that was a board initiative um I think it's really important to notice like I said the nature of systems of this of this size is to change slowly but I think the progress that Mike and his team have made over the last two years just with respect to the quality of strategy and the quality of ideas that we're throwing at the problem. Um, I think that's really worth paying attention to and celebrating because like
212I was saying earlier, the the problems that you're seeing on the data with respect to student achievement are not something that is unique to district 11. If you can look at, you know, national level data sets, you can look at, you know, federal collection of statistics for education. This this is everywhere, folks. This is the work of public education. And I think the ideas that you kind of saw on display tonight and the strategies that we're deploying are at least from my vantage point kind of surveying what I see in public education. This is this is really something unique. So and with that I will turn it over to the board for questions and discussion. Please can can you say something more about your curriculum versus pedagogy? That's part of the academic reorganization. I can
213certainly try to summarize it, but would you, this is your work, would you like to? Yeah. Um, uh, a couple years ago, we were built, uh, in the same way most school systems were built. We had somebody that ran operations and we had a single chief academic officer. Uh, we were having a constant pull and push in our own system of how do we both increase the quality of the teaching at the same time the knowledge the content knowledge of the curriculum. not I shouldn't say the curriculum of the standard because the curriculum can be interchanged. I don't want to make it about the curriculum. Um and then when we decided last year to redesign our academic office, instead of having a single person who believes very strongly in one or the other, we created
214the uh the three-headed butterfly, can I call you? Instead of three-headed monster, we created a three-headed chieftdom where we have a chief of uh instruction, which is Carol. And so you see her talking about coaching. We have a chief of curriculum which is Crystal who you see talking about the content. How do I get people who don't understand the math standard to understand it more deeply so they can keep it teach it better? And then a chief of our student supports and student success which is deer which is where our special populations and our studentf facing work lands. Um I've not been in a system where we've divided it into three. I happen to have come from DC where we divided it into two which was content and uh coaching and what was great is
215we had this constant internal desire for one to constantly improve the other early and I don't want to go all the way back we had early gains in my first year here because we went very heavy after content we did a really good job of saying we were uh moving away from wonders and so we were in the CKLA exploration at the time so we had some pilot programs and we had doubled down on our math at that time at Eureka. And what we saw was we got a bump from the content, but what we hadn't standardized as a model of instruction. And and I I always have to be careful when I say standardized. Um we're never expecting any two classrooms to be exactly the same. We are not trying to franchise perpendicular lines
216on Tuesdays, parallel lines on Thursdays. Every one of our educators, we want to be so good at what they do that they have the autonomy and the authority to take their pedigogy and bring it to task based upon the need. What I would say to you is that my SWAT analysis, not District 11 alone, but across the country is is the idea for autonomy has been hijacked by I'm certified. Nobody goes to get a root canal for somebody to say, "Well, the last time I did a root canal was 30 years ago." There are professions that commit to quality improvements in training over time. So this three-headed model gives everybody in their profession of teaching the space where they can get better at the thing that they have struggled with for a long time. Most
217of us, and this is where I think the culture for the district has really started to shift. People are raising their hand and saying, "Can I get some more support?" That's not a common adult thing. Most adults are pretty sure that we're sure about ourselves. And now that we have adults that are doing that, we know that the next phase is our children are going to be raising their hands to those same adults that says, "I'm struggling with that concept. Can you help me get there?" So, what we did is we divided that up. So, instead of everybody waiting in line for one person, man, if you're struggling with the content, you go to Crystal. If you're struggling with actually how to teach, you go to Carol. And if you're struggling with how to engage
218with your students and how you can identify with what their needs are, particularly for our special and our sub populations, you go to Deerra and all of them are well equipped. And so, um, Brandon showed a slide, uh, two weeks ago that said, yeah, we've added 14 to 17 staff to the academics team, but we've cut over a hundred from the operations team. When I got here, I'm gonna I won't name the operations team because I don't want to put anybody on the mark, but we had an operations team that had significantly more staff members than all of the curriculum and instruction office. And we're a teaching and learning organization. Our expertise needs to be in their balance. And so now we have and also when I arrived, we had five chiefs on the operational
219side and one chief on the academic side. And now you have three, four-ish chiefs on the academic side and you have a deputy that runs all the operations. So we put the balance of our money, our resources, our intention in making sure that every classroom can deliver on what the needs of those kids are in any given day. And I think we're seeing early feedback that at least says uh our adults are buying in and now the question is is does it does it result? Maybe it's time to review a curriculum. We are totally up for the data to decide what needs to happen next. But I think what we really have now is a strong limit or control on that data because there's an infinite number of things that go into student learning. We've
220made some serious investments that you heard some of those coaching touch points. If you're getting 30 coaching touch points from the best educators in the system and it's not getting better, we need to have a different conversation. Okay, I'll just with a couple of things. Uh first, um thank you for this presentation and also seeing some of the results how these outcomes are there. Um I'm reminded um especially the example of Audaban. Somebody pointed that out here. The first year that superintendent Gaul was here, Audabban was on the state watch list at this time and we had a a presentation around this table and the principal at Audabban came and presented and uh I talked to superintendent call after it uh and he was uh uh really disappointed with that presentation but seeing how uh
221bought into the strategy that has been put into place and where they are in at this point in time in terms of growth and academic achievement that they are one of the top schools that is a model school at this time. So that is really encouraging to see the impact of that. So and same principle. Yeah, it's the same principle. Exactly. Uh that was not a pleasant conversation four years back but it's turned around. So um so from what I'm understanding and the feedback that uh I'm receiving from you also superintendent call that these uh strategies that have been put into place the model classrooms the coaching all of those things they have been uh well received by the staff there is not a resistance or push back that I'm going to do the things
222the way I did before. Um I'll let the the people that spend most of the time talk about the feedback that they get. So, we looked into that exact question in about October and every single time that someone engages with an instructional coach, we ask them what their experience was like. And at present in our K8 instructional coaching relationships, 95% of those teachers have said not only did they appreciate the coaching, but they believe it directly contributed to their practice getting better. And as of I looked yesterday, a 100% of our high school coaches who our high school teachers who work with an embedded teacher coach, so that's a 50% classroom teacher and a 50% coach. 100% of our high school teachers said that yes to the same two questions, right? I mean, we can
223have the best strategy in place, but if the culture is not to take that strategy and implement it with rigor in the classrooms, then everything is going to fall apart. So, um, you mentioned Dr. Kali and I'm you know uh that earlier window or later window for the start testing uh do you have like any initial feedback as to which way schools are yeah the majority are going choosing the later window okay so they're those are still coming in but okay which is good then students can focus on the semester testing I'd like to see half in the early window have something to compare enforcing it a little bit but you Um the midyear data and this is to you to you mentioned about uh how looking back that you wish you had caught things
224earlier. Is there anything in the midyear data other than the watch list schools that are there that raises concerns to you that this school needs additional support at this point? Uh I think we've made those adjustments uh with the money that you've given. I think we're taking a a slightly larger look at um I use Carver, you know, as an example. Um I would have hoped that our results at Carver would have shown last year uh they showed this year. So sometimes uh my own appetite for change is much faster than the system itself can actually deliver on the change. But we are taking back uh some of the things that we have seen because again, you know, there are more schools on the watch list than there were a year ago. We do acknowledge
225that. But the schools that were on the watch list were the ones that we put some intentional strategies that we're now going to expand. I'm talking structural ideas, which is you make more money if you work at Adams, Galileo, or Mitchell. So, hear us now. If you want to prove your craft, we will pay you more money to go work at another one or two schools that we will add to that list. I I will die believing that the number one way to student achievement is access to highquality instruction. And I know there are highquality educators out there who are dying for a chance to have a greater impact. We're also going to take that back into and I I can't quite name it just um performance task for hiring or centralized hiring, but we
226are no longer going to let a principal all on their own, particularly one that is in a school that isn't achieving, make all the hiring decisions all on their own. We have to be part of that conversation. The culture of the system has been because we've seen it that over 90% of the people that took the bonus to join our teams at Adams, Galileo, and Mitchell came from external to the system, which means that internally we're still struggling with changing the complete culture, but externally people are like, "Yeah, I'm eager in that." And so I think that we can create a model that says, "Do you want to teach in district 11? You applied to this school. Would you also consider that school? Oh, and by the way, I do understand it's a title one
227school or it's a turnaround school. If I give you a little more of incentive, will you then consider going there and you're going to have to do a performance task for the principal in the area superintendent or one of the instructional leads to make sure that what we don't do is think we had a great hiring season and then get to mid year and go, guess we didn't have a great hiring season. The quality control of what happens in every classroom is the difference maker that allows us to really get to the specificity of tier 2 and tier three investments. Otherwise, you'll just run an all two tier two and tier three system. And we've seen what happens there. It actually connects to the first part of the conversation. Our metriculation loss from elementary to
228middle and middle to high school is always at or above grade level instead of at or below grade level. Families believe that they can get a more excellent experience in neighboring school systems as the demands get higher. They love their neighborhood elementary school. They weren't sure about the middle school and then they certainly shop on specific programs that happen in high school. We're changing that culture because now our schools believe more in themselves than we believe in them individually. Carolyn is the first time principal in a turnaround elementary school and you saw the numbers on there. It took a couple of years, but man, I put Carolyn in front of anybody right now that says she knows how to lead a building. She knows how to ask for help and she knows how to insist
229where spaces in her building cannot go without help. It's a it's a tough place to be as a leader because this is a relationship game. And I, you know, and I know most of you have either been through the system or have kids in in a system. Um, our relationships are near and dear to how a school succeeds every day. And if you can have an 85 or a 90% retention and be increasing the quality of what's happening in the classroom every day, you've got it. You've got it figured out. Some people overvalue the retention and don't pay attention to the child moves on. Like I would say that, you know, I know we're I'm exhausting everyone's time, but I appreciate the the monologue here. What's happened different in district 11 is we will not
230stop until the child gets what they need. Should be right. But I know and you've been here for six years as well and you're losing as much hair as I've lost in this process of to Director K's point. It's not just District 11. Those examples happen in our highest performing districts in the county. They're just masked by the other families that aren't at the 11%. The concentration of failure is the greatest challenge in any one building. It's nearly I always say the hardest profession in America is teaching. The second hardest to profession in America is teaching the kids that are behind. The third hardest profession in America is teaching kids that are far behind when you're not fully staffed. And this is the first year that we had full staffing and are at that time
231our three lowest performing schools. And you see all three of them on the positive end of what's happening. Nope. They haven't won an award from the governor yet, but they're on their way. I wanted Oh, sorry. No, I just want to u thanks for pointing that out uh and for the work that you are doing at Adams as well. I was at Adams at the beginning of the school year and I saw u the incredible challenge that you were facing in the classroom with some of the uh soio economic challenges that you face on a daily level. Um but it's good that we are making data informed decisions at this point in time so we don't end up with surprises at the end of the year. So, thank you for investing that $1 million that
232the board allocated in an accountable manner. And then I'll end with uh giving kudos to some of the regular schools that are on this list uh uh MGB or what uh higher levels like the schools like Chapita Scott, Freedom, Martinez, all these schools have already high achieving uh students out there and in spite of that they are able to get growth out of that school time and and time again. Bristol um at Steel some of those schools. So usually the you know the uh connecting point out there is there are strong building leaders in each one of those schools and I've shared that and we are rethinking our executive principal model because half of the success for Carver has been the relationship between those two principles. Um and they're really right down the street from
233each other. So the demographic doesn't have to be different, but because we have choice in the system, the demographic defaults to a very clear line that families choose excellence. It's as simple as that. Um, one last question. Yep. Go for it. So I'm I'm just looking at CAMASS scores because I'm trying to figure out what's different between districts and I don't know the answer to this. So if we look at ours in D11, the average ELA is 38.9 and math is 31.1. You look at D20, they're 23% higher. They're 23 points higher at 61 and 51. What is the biggest difference with D20 and D11? Why are they 23 and 20 points higher? Parent engagement. Well, I think the simplest one is we're 40% of our student population is free and reduced lunch. I don't
234know the D20 number. Um, but it is nowhere near that. Um, I would say that, you know, Rampart is certainly falling into a uh a more uh D11 type neighborhood, but um you can't get in Pine Creek or to TCA or to DCC um on the average income of a family member in D11. It's now it's choice. So, you can get there, but again, the upside down of choice is if you can exercise choice, you do. Um, and if you can't, again, the Mitchell numbers always are the first uh uh pointer out to that. Now, if you make a comparison to D2, you'll see that we are lagging behind D2. Um, and D2 is identified as 100% title one system. And so, we remind ourselves of that all the time. I will say that the
235district made a significant shift in its relationship with its uh instructional um educators uh over the last year that will give us the ability to make a lot of the changes that D2 has already done decade a decade ago. Okay, which is how do we give specific PD and or differentiation that is going to come up on the pay scale conversation for people who are contributing in a different way instead of I've been here longer so therefore then that makes me just singularly more important. Thank you. Uh but that's a a much better data point for us as a whole is D2. We predict that within two years we will surpass D2 on the district performance framework. I'd love to be able to do it this year, but my statistical data scientist would say that
236might be a leap greater than we have the capacity to get to. It's about five and a half points, six points in the DPF. Get halfway there, then we'll be headed in the right direction. And real quick, just for the in for the interest of the community, um this idea of can we be more rigorous about catching early warning signs, this was one of the ideas to come out of the board retreat. We're still working on kind of developing the specific task or language for staff, but that's one of the things that the board is considering kind of taking a stance on strategically. Yeah. Do we have any last questions or thoughts before we move on to our final item of the evening? All right, good work team. Okay, so um we need a moment
237to just I'll just keep talking. I'll just talk over over what you guys are doing. So the last item on the work session tonight, uh this is something that came out of the retreat. There was agreement at the retreat for several different ideas that we kind of spun off for different board directors to uh polish up. The one we're dealing with tonight is uh this proposal for a alternative pay scale. So this was language that uh Jason and I put together together. And um just to kind of be be clear here, right, what we're doing tonight at the work session, this is we are not making the decision that this is an idea that we're going to go with. What we are going to be doing is just getting consensus that staff go and explore
238this option and then bring us back a proposal. At that point, it would still go through the normal procedure of non-action to action, you know, public comment, discussion, etc. What what this is about is taking the idea from the retreat and saying do we like this phrasing of it such that then administration can go and start to explore this. They would then come back to us with a more concrete proposal. So um this is a the the uh um sorry my brain just shorted out for a second. What the hell am I trying to say? The the framing of this is something that we've used before. So I have a little bit of just contextual language and then I have the task for administration. The goal here is kind of just the top level summary
239of what we want administration to be thinking about. A modernized salary and professional development structure that rewards leadership and responsibility ensuring that the district attracts and retains highquality educators who drive student outcomes. The task then is what we want them to do for us. So in this case, a proposal for a voluntary responsibility based salary schedule option that can exist in addition to not as a full replacement for the current salary schedule. There are some other suggestions there, you know, clearly defined roles and responsibilities. That's for roles that support principles and improve student outcomes. Uh, and then there are a few there are a few guard rails, right, that came out of our discussion at the retreat as well that Jason and I refined. The proposal, whatever specific form it ends up taking, should hold
240harmless current employee compensation. We don't want anyone to be made worse off by this change. Um, the proposal should include things like what are the what is the fiscal impact going to be? Are there any legal considerations? What are the risks to implementation? And then finally, just because I'm sure you know community members will be interested in this, I have uh worked together with Jason, we crafted a very specific guard rail here. This does not eliminate step increases for tenure. This does not move the district towards a pay for performance model that is based on test scores. This is something we talked about at the retreat. I know other school districts do it. The incentives for pay for performance on test scores continue to freak me out. That's not what this is about. This is
241a task for a voluntary salary schedule that says if you are contributing to the system in ways beyond your classroom you should be rewarded for that. And again for me at least the context is the school that you know my kids attend Thomas McLaren they do things like this. The place where I teach the USAFA prep school and USA in general they do things like this. This is not reinventing the wheel. This is standard for you know multiple different types of school systems. So I present to you this language for consideration. I'm happy to edit anything we want to edit and then the end goal is either we'll give thumbs for administration to chase this down or we'll say you know now that I see this in black and white I don't like this idea.
242So I open it up for for suggestions. I want to understand the timing on this because as I'm remembering the hiring process is starting very soon and so is this something to be what what would the timing we give this to to staff to your staff and uh I'll I'll field that to you Brandon if suppos supposeding we give you consensus on this tonight what's a reasonable time frame for you to turn around a proposal we can turn around a proposal within a couple of weeks without without problem. Our goal is for this to be in place for next year. So part of the budget development cycle. Yeah. Uh I do think because the at least as it's written now that the task is that we would not be removing options in the current salary
243schedule even if we brought it back it after hiring and started it would only be a value add additional option. It wouldn't remove anything that anybody came to the district for if if that makes sense. So I think I think uh because again yeah we're going to start posting some jobs in a week. Yes, that's what I was trying to understand. Uh but I I think there's a way that we can we can make that transition pretty smoothly. So some of these uh leadership opportunities right now we compensate them based on a stipen system. Yep. So this would be in lie of that stipen system. instead of that it it can be I I I I would I would I don't want to speak to the superintendent department head or something like that. I think
244I would say we're going to bring you a more comprehensive uh option than um just how would we treat department heads. Yeah. Uh because if if if we're going to do this, we want to make sure that it's as connected to strategy as possible. So yes, we will have options for those things, but I think it will be um more robust. I think part of their work is going to be answering questions like that. Yeah. So just curious on the same line we talk about all these model classrooms. Do do these model classroom teachers get any addition right now? Right now they get right now they get a stipent um and for some uh teachers who have um become early adopters into some of our strategy uh we have some evaluation um options for them
245because they're they're kind of taking a risk. But no, we don't have obviously we do not have a more robust salary opportunity for anybody who stepped into those spaces. But we do think that that's one of the areas that requires a different way that we think about this. First of all, it's always an honor when people are looking at your work, but it's extra work to have people looking at your work all day long. And generally, the stipen system that was adopted into the employee engagement uh handbook is antiquated and not reflective um outside of instruction. And I'll shift this a different way. We pay our sports coaches half what every other district in El Paso County. We end up losing good coaches. And we end up losing good coaches for that. Right. So this
246is a way that we think differently about you don't have to coach. You don't have to be a model classroom. We're not asking. We're not forcing people into that space. And we would never take away their guarantees in the system. But we have to find a way that it's attractive to step forward and say I want my work to be modeled. I want to be a part of changing and getting us to a place where D20 is looking us up in a board meeting. That's my goal. Now that was my new goal. Thank you for that one. Going to send them all the CMAS link in three years. You'll be looking at us. Other thoughts or language suggestion? And again, they'll they will bring us a full proposal. It'll go through the normal cycle. This
247is just to authorize them to start doing the work. Yes. Not that we have that. I'm glad that that got rail is added. Whenever we venture into this conversation, somebody out there is going to start a rumor out there that hey, this is replacing uh steps and lanes that we have out there. So, um so it's clearly out there the guardrail. It's not. Would it be worth adding any sort of emphasis to and not that it's a big problem for us with most of our staff being effective or highly effective, but it would having some sort of baseline criteria of effectiveness be something that you'd like to see as part of the task? or do is that kind of an assumed given that if you're going to be driving improved student outcomes, you probably are
248already an effective or highly effective teacher. Is it worth putting in there? Um what I would say is is we see these things happening in sequence. Um our three-year vision is that we are developing our own evaluation system and giving it to the state. Yeah, I'm I'm all done with because right now it's a conflict. If I'm a teacher or I'm an administrator, I am obligated by law to the things that Randa is there. And Randa is there for all the right reasons. So I'm not I'm not questioning Randa. But if we believe so much in the quality of the training for the quality of the instruction, then that has to tie into the evaluation. So we don't have the anecdote of less than 10 teachers in a system of 1,800 are qualified as less
249than effective and yet 11% of the kids in a school are at grade level. So um we believe that those come in sequence. So I would prefer that we not put it into this tasker and allow this to then be next year that says now that you have this how come your professional development isn't reflective completely of how it is that you get people to this space and then that third uh shoe to fall is the evaluation system. Okay. And then again much like we heard about cell phones earlier that kids in just a year like kids aren't zapping beep beep beep on the honor pouches because kids just don't bring their cell phones to school anymore. And now our state has kind of abandoned that because they went with a local decision, but New
250Jersey just said no cell phones in any any middle or high schools. 500 districts in the state of New Jersey and they outlawed it at the state level. So we're on to something here and our goal is for us to continue to lead change um that will be beneficial for not just District 11, but for kids locally and and more broadly. Any other thoughts? Can we get some thumbs for authorizing staff to consider this? Bring us a proposal. All right, staff, you have your marching orders. Um, I'll in agenda setting, I'll kind of figure out what a reasonable timeline to bring this back. And then again, just to emphasize this, we'll go through the normal protocol of non-action action, etc. So, we haven't agreed to this yet. We have simply authorized staff to bring us
251some proposals that match this intent. Uh, that is the last item of the night. Um, so we will call it there. Uh we have a regular meeting next week. Um and I will be sending out an email uh by the end of the week as I have been doing just with a high level summary of what I want you to be thinking about and prepping for. And if you haven't seen the Mars email from last night again that that strictly I know it kind of feels like this was sent in advance of the board meeting. It was sent early in the hopes that people would be able to look at it before the board meeting. If you didn't that's fine. I do encourage you to look at moving forward. We'll call it there for the
252night everyone. We'll adjourn the work session. I don't know that I have to say the time. Do I have to say the time? Sure. 757. 757. Get out of here. What? Watching dec. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, hey, hey. Heat.