001well I wrote myself a little opening here yes all right okay everybody we're gonna start now I want to welcome you all to the April 4th meeting of the PSD Board of Education much of tonight's meeting will be focused on teaching and learning and academics I encourage everyone with an interest in those topics which I hope is everyone to stay for those presentations and to learn about our exciting new literacy adoption and the success of our high dosage tutoring programs I would also ask you as a courtesy to mute your cell phone if you haven't already done so so we have no interruptions and I guess I'm also supposed to save the time it's 6 32 pm and with that we'll go to the Pledge of Allegiance if you stand and join me that'll be
002terrific congratulations with liberty and justice for all terrific thank you very much would anybody sorry would any of the board members like to change make any changes to the agenda looks like not in which case we will go on to our next item which when I turn the page on what that is uh we have uh our first action item for this evening in in which is a motion and support of Arab American heritage month can I get emotion with respect to this resolution uh go ahead Kristen I move that the board approved the resolution and support of Arab American heritage month April 2023. great thank you can I get a second looks like DJ for the second there and would someone please read the resolution for us I didn't know whether Jess was setting
003up for that or not it's up to you sure we'll have Jess do it resolution in support of Arab American Heritage Month whereas in 2021 after several years of advocacy advocacy for such a designation the House of Representatives proclaimed April to be federally recognized as National Arab American heritage month and whereas 3.7 million Americans can trace their roots to 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa including Algeria Bahrain the comoros Islands sorry I'm I apologize for butchering thank you [Music] sorry [Music] all right Jess why don't you give it a try from the top thanks whereas and are we nope all right still echo okay still echo testing testing oh better thank you Matt all right go ahead I guess whereas in 2021 after several years of advocacy for such a designation the
004House of Representatives proclaimed April to be federally recognized as National Arab American heritage month and whereas 3.7 million Americans can trace their roots to 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa including Algeria Bahrain the comoros islands Djibouti Egypt Iraq Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Libya Morocco Palestine Qatar Saudi Arabia Somalia Sudan Syria Tunisia and the United uh Arab Emirates and Yemen and whereas the first arabic speaking person in the country zamori arrived from Morocco as an enslaved person in 1528 and whereas America Arab Americans have made valuable contributions to all areas of United States Society including Medicine Science business technology government the Arts and pop called popular culture and whereas despite these contributions Arab Americans including those who are members of our pooter School District Community continue to face systemic discrimination Prejudice stereotypes and hate
005crimes which have impacts on their health socioeconomic standing and well-being and there is a need for greater education and awareness of these issues and whereas the Pooter School District Board of Education Administration and staff are committed to making pooter School District an equitable and inclusive community for students families and staff who identify as Arab American and we recognize there is more work ahead of us diversity equity and inclusion are fundamental values to pooter school district and we are committed to ensuring the Arab Americans I'm sorry Arab American students families and staff are valued seen and heard now therefore be it resolved the Pooter School District board of education does hereby proclaim the month of April 2023 as Arab American Heritage Month in pooter School District we recognize the importance of Arab American heritage month as
006an opportunity to reflect and learn more about our diverse Arab American community and to ensure they are included in our curriculum and instructional programs the Board of Education encourages students staff and the communities to celebrate the Excellence and enriching contributions made from our Arab American community of the past and presidents dare I say something apparently I can with it thank you Jess for reading that sorry everyone for the technical difficulties um and with that superintendent I believe we have some folks to speak with us about this resolution and and the month we do thank you president Patterson joining us this evening to speak to Arab American month is Dunn Elementary School's principal Abby Henley welcome Abby we're grateful that you're here [Applause] what do you think is this going to work all right so good
007evening my name is Abby Henley and I am the proud principal at Dunn Elementary in IB World School I would like to thank superintendent Kingsley and our board of education for considering April as Arab American Heritage Month across our school district we serve over 200 Arab American students we are fortunate at Dunn to serve over 20 of these Arab American students two of our students have joined me tonight to share why recognizing their Arabic Heritage is integral in ensuring their sense of belonging at school I am honored to introduce these amazing humans first we will hear from Lamar Shanta [Applause] assalamu alaikum peace up on you my name is Lamar Shanta I go to dilemma Dunn Elementary in fifth grade and I am from Libya I was born in Forest Collins my Arab American Heritage
008is important to me because we shouldn't we should have the chance to share our religion and our Traditions learning about different people helps us not to bully people if they do something different than others I want other students and people in Fort Collins to know that it is okay to be different they should also explore other they should they also should explore other cultures and have a chance to be accepted LinkedIn accepted us it is important for Peter School District to recognize Arab American heritage month so maybe other schools will start doing it also thank you for listening to me I hope this has meaning to all of you thank you Lamar and now we will hear from azus Corban thank you means welcome my name is I am a second grader at Del Elementary
009in Miss Elder's class I am from Saudi Arabia and I am eight years old I was born in Jersey City it's close to the Red Sea I came to Colorado when I was four months old I am the oldest son and I have one little brother my Arab American Heritage is important because it is about me my family and my friends I love to do what Arab countries like such as playing soccer and swimming I like to practice my Arab language with my friends I love to be a part of our culture and I love Arabic foods and to celebrate our holidays lucky I would love to share and talk about my culture so my friends and teachers and Community will understand me and support also it is important for the community to learn about
010different cultures about our food and vocabulary Awards to support all Arab people and to make them more comfortable learn about our culture share our special moms and holders make the Arab kid feel one of the community so they don't feel sad don't I share about my traditions with my friends in class that made me feel happy thank you for listening to our culture show current means thank you [Applause] okay [Music] [Applause] tonight [Laughter] I'm good okay yep okay thank you so much for being here tonight all right [Music] [Applause] actually we need to have a vote on the resolution right so let's do that please we took the picture before the vote anyway Let's Do It DJ Anderson I Jim brokish I Nate Donovan aye Kristen Draper aye Rob Pederson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica
011Zamora aye motion passes 7-0 excellent thank you very much Jill uh our next item on the agenda is recognitions uh and again I believe Brian you have uh some introduction to that I do before our guests leave if it's okay if I just take a brief point of privilege I just want to thank Lamar and azuz for their beautiful comments it is very clear that Dunn Elementary schools and elementary school that celebrates learning for all students and about all cultures and you make us so proud to know that your students in our school district your leaders and for you azuz you're eight years old I learned something from you we all learned something from both of you tonight to talk about the importance of learning about each other's differences so we can respect and honor
012each other and that's what this place is about I just want to say thank you again to you and all of your family thank you very much foreign that's great thanks uh Brian and now uh recognitions you bet so this evening we're privileged to celebrate greatness in our district we are seeing some greatness and we're going to continue that here momentarily including leadership PSD in the 2023 spelling bee Champion so leading tonight's celebrations is our Chief Information officer Miss Madeline noblet Madeline welcome back thank you all right thank you superintendent Kingsley members of the board cabinet and everyone here I'll go ahead and pause for just a moment as we transition um and remind folks for our recognitions we are so incredibly fortunate to be able to celebrate our colleagues our students for the tremendous
013work that they do at local State national and even International levels as well as importantly the relationships that we have with those in our community in the non-profit sector with our businesses with our parents and Guardians and and so many so with that I would like to welcome this tremendous group at the back of the room as well as my colleague Nick Peterson who will lead this recognition so with that if you'd like to come up Nick and then if we could have the entire leadership PSD group come if you'd like to stand here in front of the screen as Nick celebrates you that would be wonderful and we appreciate you being here thanks guys thank you thank you Madeline for the introduction this is the this is part of our leadership PSD group um
014not the spelling bee group so even though we wish thank you for letting us share a little bit about what we've been up to for this year I think the best ideas and Partnerships come from a place of knowledge and understanding which is exactly what these people signed up for in leadership PSD throughout the school year this group met monthly in various PSD locations and heard presentations from 21 leaders in PSD representing cabinet directors principals coordinators counselors program leaders teachers and students topics range from PSD strategic plan our latest data and Trends operations language culture and equity and special programs like Opportunities Unlimited transition Pathways Futures lab CTE and a lot more bringing their personal and professional perspectives this group had so many insightful questions and ideas in every session we wished we could have
015more time to engage which having been a former classroom teacher myself I really appreciated to help capture the experience and energize this program after a three-year pandemic Hiatus we created a short video that I'd like to share with you now okay thank you [Music] involved with PSD in multiple ways for many years I have two boys who are at Fossil Ridge at the moment and one daughter who goes depressed I chose to join leadership PSD for personal and professional reasons through PSD leadership I'm able to understand at a higher level the goals and the missions of psds and organization as a whole and if you look at this visual that was created a few years back is still very relevant because who is at the center of this who's at the center that's why we're
016here I have learned so much more about PSD through through the leadership PSD program it's been quite quite amazing I feel you know between my involvement between uh you know career-wise and our apprenticeship program and from rotary I felt like I so I knew the school the how PSD work but this has just been very mind-blowing in terms of knowing what else is behind there which has been great because then I can be a greater resource and the community when others are perhaps running into issues or aren't sure where to go that's my job to figure out how all kids at the end of the day after 13 years of their parents like you sending them our way I want to make sure at the end of the day that they not only graduate but
017they graduate with options my passion lies around work based learning and my work gets is in line with that passion what I'm hoping that education gets overall is that better connection to the business community and to work experiences United Way of Larimer County is working with with many non-profits across the county and the school districts themselves to identify how we can best fill the gaps that were created by the recent pandemic you know I see them in emails I see them in videos I get newsletters because I'm a parent at Peter school district and um I love actually getting to meet them in person I highly encourage anyone who wants more about PSD and be much more involved in the community to definitely participate in this program I think it's been an amazing opportunity I've
018been really impressed with the new leadership at Purdue school district and I would encourage everyone in the community to get involved and learn more about what the schools are doing and how and best support the students as our next generation of workers and leaders and as this community I think it's important that we all support and give back to our school districts thank you all right yeah that video was made by a former PST student actually who's now at CSU before I read the names and organizations of this year's participants I want to welcome Gage Duncan and Gary ozello who each wanted to share a few additional remarks about their experience in leadership PSD this year hello um yes so my name is Gage I joined leadership PSD to learn more about the community and
019our school district I was a student in this school district I was one of the statistics and the healthy kids Colorado survey I was a 5041 504 plan kid I was a fifth year high school student I lived in a single parent household I was bullied and I overcame and now I'm a Community member and being able to serve that Community now in my position is the reason why I joined the program thanks Gage and I'm Gary Gary ozello and I was thrilled to be a part of this program I want to thank Nick I want I would like to thank the board uh superintendent Kingsley uh as a as a proud parent of two PSD students who are well into their professional lives and have seated succeeded in spite of the gene pool which
020is shallow at their dad's end uh okay um I I looked at this as an opportunity like Gage said to give back I've been a Community member for almost 50 years I won't ever be able to give back to PSD what PSD has given me as a community member and what PSD has given to my two kids but this is was an attempt and I went in thinking gee what could I bring I didn't bring anything but I sure learned a lot uh it was it was a phenomenal learning experience for uh in leadership PSD as you saw in the video tell your friends tell your neighbors and tell others to get involved with this I I apply led the board in superintendent Kingsley and Nick for overseeing this program because it was absolutely phenomenal
021and I learned so much in the past few months that I uh again I just want to continue to give back because we have such an a great community and are blessed by the school district thank you foreign all right thank you so while some of us couldn't join us in person tonight I would like to name and celebrate this year's leadership PSD class so those of you who are here when I name your name just step forward give us a wave all right thank you all right so um Heather Alderman Commission on sports management and accreditation Carrie Brown Larimer County Extension Zach Ducharme Larimer County Department of Health and environment Gage Duncan Fort Fun Veronica Estelle Colorado State University Jillian fresa City of Fort Collins Marty Goldberg Colorado Community College system deems hargo Road
022Bank of Colorado Candace Hartley lamp reinerson Allison Hines Boys and Girls Club of Larimer County Sandra Jacob Larimer County Economic and Workforce Development Amy kolzak UC Health Jesse Madison The Arc of Larimer County Michelle Marquis food bank for Larimer County Sarah McKean Boys and Girls Club of Larimer County Gary ozello canvas Credit Union Carol Salter Larimer County Phoebe stalker Banner Health and dulcey Willits from pooter School District I also want to recognize in the room Don fight our volunteer in Partnerships coordinator for being a great co-pilot and for helping assure everything worked out yeah thanks guys so I'm very lucky to have been a part of this journey with such a wonderful group of people we're already excited about how to make leadership PSD even better for next year and a few class members from
023this year are helping with that effort I think there's been a lot of potential for leadership PSD to be a catalyst for Meaningful Partnerships and connections going forward I invite anyone interested in learning more or getting involved to visit psd's partnership website for more information you can just search leadership PSD there or on Google and it should be the first thing that comes up thank you again for giving me the opportunity to share about this program and celebrate this year's leadership PSD class all right I uh I want to say thanks from the board but I also it's kind of weird Mike here I want to face you um but I I'll give you a little history lesson too is I actually was part of the team that started this thing about seven eight years
024ago and I am so excited to see how it has grown and matured and gotten better Nick coming on board to be able to lead it and go I'll give a shout out to Beth Higgins who ran it for many years before that too um I think it is a great opportunity to get more in depth understanding of PSD and it has been I think a fabulous tool to help our community understand about PSD and the the little niches and and all the extra things that we do offer that we unfortunately can't talk about all the time but there are so many great things that our district does and so many good teams and the opportunity you guys get to get sit down and listen and see all those is such a wonderful opportunity and
025so now that you've experienced it when you're ready to run for the board please come and talk to me because it's definitely a great training opportunity but thank you for your time your commitment to do this so thank you [Applause] thank you okay foreign [Music] thank you congratulations thank you [Applause] without you all right so our next recognition of the evening we are so excited to celebrate our 2023 PSD spelling bee champion and with that I'd like to introduce my colleague Sarah urbonic Carney from teaching and learning who will introduce Michelle Whitcomb from trout core knowledge to be able to celebrate our winner from this year's competition so if you'd like to join me up here at the lectern and take over so that we can celebrate this evening go ahead and come on up
026[Applause] all right I wanted to start off by just recognizing all our PSD spellers that participated in our district B it was evident the hard work and dedication they put in to be prepared for that spelling bee and we had a wonderful bee this year so I'm going to give them a round of applause I I am the spelling bee coordinator but I did not coordinate any of that alone there was a great team of colleagues including my teammate Rosie navejas who helped put that bee together and so I want to give them a round of applause as well and then finally I'm going to introduce Michelle Whitcomb she's the trout core knowledge spelling bee coordinator and fourth grade teacher and she's going to recognize our 2023 winner thank you Sarah good evening my name
027is Michelle Whitcomb and I am the spelling bee coordinator and a fourth grade teacher at trout core knowledge school on behalf of our principal Dr Alyssa Kendall Nichols third grade teacher Mrs korzanowski and myself thank you for inviting us this evening I would like to introduce this year's District spelling bee Champion nickel gonta and his parents Ashwin and hema gonta [Applause] Nicole gonta a third grader at trout cornellus school is an outstanding student in numerous ways and excels at all that he does while continually showing strength of character and humility he enjoys advanced work in math learning Spanish is active with skiing and basketball and has an insatiable love of learning with Reading Writing and especially spelling his strengths and spelling recently resulted in winning Trout's spelling B PSD spelling bee and a sixth place
028finish at the 2023 Colorado state spelling bee which is most remarkable as he was the youngest child competing he stayed poised throughout every part of the competition as he went all the way to round 21 at state this was not his first time winning trout Spelling Bee for he also won it in first and second grade representing pooter school district for the past three years at the Colorado State spelling bee in 2022 while in second grade Nico was one of 11 students representing PSD at the state B he then went on to be one of 16 students selected to the oral round from about 250 students across the state of Colorado he finished six just like this year and was the youngest finalist his accomplishments are extraordinary thank you so much to PSD and its
029distinguished board members for recognizing this incredible gentleman and congratulations again to Nicole gonta and his family thank you oh my goodness all right wait it comes to the mic and say that the winning word accentuate I'm not sure I can do that yeah great job Kingsley I'm the superintendent of school I was just wondering would it be okay if I got your autograph I'm serious you're famous [Laughter] hanging in my office okay [Applause] touch screen so it's a little funny thank you congratulations [Applause] all right thank you Madeline um and now we'll move on to our next item which is the superintendent report superintendent Kingsley will now make remarks to the board of education and to the community I'm still awestruck by nickel so good evening everybody it's it's great to be here traditionally um
030I'm gonna do something a little different traditionally I start off my remarks by talking about celebrations and we will get to that I promise you momentarily but I I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that in public education in our school system is no exception that the last couple of weeks especially have been really hard and I don't want to skip over that it's been difficult for staff in some instances to work in our schools for our district and in some instances it's been difficult for students to feel safe going to school so I'm here today as the superintendent asking this community whether you're here in person and I'm so grateful that all of you are here thank you so much or if you might be listening on YouTube I'm here to ask you for
031your help I'm asking you to consider in your heart to be promoters and Builders of community regardless of difference I'm here to acknowledge that democracy is messy everybody has the opportunity to have their own mindsets values and beliefs about life about their identities whether it's their gender identity their religious identity their political identities maybe their identities regarding their abilities in some instances now their identities that are professionally related just in terms of the profession of being an educator or a leader we have so much to learn whether it's from nickel Lamar azuz or PSD leadership crew that talks about the importance of shared learning experiences what I took away from all of those presentations tonight is that they illuminated differences in challenging whether oneself or each other to think differently to be their very best
032and that comes out of sacrifice because sometimes being your very best means sometimes showing up for somebody else this district is focused relentlessly on accelerating learning and cultivating a culture of belonging I'm here to remind ourselves remind even myself that in order for one person to feel like they belong it can't come at the expense of somebody having to not be who they are that's not about belonging it's privilege I really want us to think about how we can come together because the people who work for this school system are here because they are called to something bigger than themselves they're called to be an act for service and in many instances as I talk to members of our school system who are employees they spend more time serving other people's children than sometimes serving
033their own that's a sacrifice in my opinion they're Heroes whether you're a bus driver serving lunch or breakfast to teacher a paraprofessional an assistant principal a principal a Cabinet member a board member the people who are part of this community and part of this school district are not perfect but they are heroic in every sense of the word and we as a community must do better by them to remind them of their heroic efforts in some instances right now it's easy to forget that they're Heroes because as we realize and grapple with the realities of what if life is experiencing right now sometimes it can feel like we're villains or victims surrounded by inaction I share these things not to be a leader focused on gloom and doom I'm sure that sharing this with you
034because in spite of those emotions that run deep through the veins and the hearts of the people who work here who may support the school system who attend the school system people in spite of those things in spite of those realities in spite of those challenges are still showing up every single day and I'm incredibly inspired by them had an opportunity just in the last couple of weeks to attend the superintendent Art Exhibit over two nights look at these incredible pieces of art from students of all grade levels it's inspiration that led them to sharing their beliefs their thoughts their meaning of the world and themselves with us the same way nickel gets inspired at the age of six or seven years old to be the very best speller not just for his family but
035for the state of Colorado it's for students like azuz who's eight years old who can probably give this speech better than me I had an opportunity to visit Johnson Elementary School last week it's an incredible School in the Rocky theater pattern amongst many other incredible elementary schools there and one of the things that I was struck by that makes that school an outlier is not just the leadership of Georgie Dawson it's their leadership's openness to let the community be a part of the school did you know that there are over 64 000 volunteer hours cataloged annually at Johnson Elementary School I was starting to do the math but somewhere between two hundred and three hundred thousand dollars of service that is I believe annually whether it's helping children directly helping offset some of the challenges
036that our teachers and paraprofessionals and leaders are having all in service of people feeling seen and welcome regardless of who you are that's Community that's belonging you know this week is National assistance principle week being assistant principal of my 25-year career was the hardest job I've ever had maybe even harder than the one I have now I think it is I want to recognize and honor the incredible assistant principles that we have here I met with every single one of them amongst all of our Deans last week to connect with them to recognize how we can serve them and be a better district for them they are extraordinary leaders just like their principals who are working tirelessly every day to navigate the messiness of democracy where rules have seemed to have been forgotten so I'm
037asking us tonight to just be kind to recognize that we can coexist regardless of whether you don't share the beliefs of this organization or not you have a place here too we're not seeking common agreement we're just seeking respect and we're looking for something more than tolerance we're looking for honor the same way that our students showcase that tonight I am so excited to talk about throughout the evening the various presentations that we have because it highlights once again how we continue to focus as a school system on our Core Business so as you hear tonight an incredible presentation on our curriculum adoption curriculum is not about just buying new books and buying new materials it's an investment in people it's giving our teachers our paraprofessionals and parents and kids the resources that they need
038to have like not just a grade level classroom experience but the first class experience and I'm really excited to hear more about that from our team and there's been an incredible effort of being inclusive and engaging parents and families in that process and you'll hear more about that tonight and I'll say another presentation that we'll hear tonight and I know there's others I'm not gonna because I'm running out of time is we're going to continue to talk about how we're being good fiscal stewards we're about to be a 370 million dollar organization and how we spend every single Cent to make sure every single student not only feels seen But accelerates in their learning matters and we have work to do because I will tell you 370 million dollars is not enough I want to
039be clear about that but being really good fiscal stewards to take care of our people while also meeting the challenges the challenges of the needs of our students continues to be something that is very much an Adaptive challenge that we work together and tonight will be another night where we share more details with this community so I just I continue to be grateful to be surrounded like leaders from PSD leaders people who are here tonight committed to giving their voice space in our organization that's what this is about leadership is leadership matters and I want to thank you again for giving me the opportunity to be one in this community thanks thank you very much Brian um absolutely your remarks are inspiring and Food For Thought always so thank you the next part of our
040agenda is community comment and I want to remind us all of our hopes for this section of the agenda the board desires to hear the viewpoints of all stakeholders including students employees parents and Guardians and community members input that is most helpful to the board of education and District staff is that which celebrates successes that support the educational and social emotional experiences of our students or which identifies a problem and proposes a solution for us to consider that ultimately improves the educational and social emotional experiences of the students public comment is designed to address issues not personalities or Personnel matters please keep your concerns and comments focused on the district it is important to note that the board does not generally respond to remarks made during Community comment or a lack of response should not
041be construed to mean that we agree or disagree with what is said or with a description or interpretation of events as presented by any speaker although we may disagree on some things I know that we all want the best educational experience for the students and as we participate together in this community comment session we should model for our students how to listen how to interact respectfully even with those with whom we disagree and generally how to show up each day with that I will remind everybody that this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who have registered to speak by the designated deadline those people will be called on to make remarks in the order that they signed up and each speaker will be allowed three minutes to address the board our
042first Speaker this evening is Jim weinbrenner welcome Mr Kingsley Mr this is Mike on yeah good Mr Kingsley at the last board meeting you recognize the diversity of faiths in our district you acknowledge our Muslim Community who will be starting Ramadan with fasting and reflecting in our Christian Community engaged in Lent and our Jewish Community who will celebrate Passover Mr King so you claimed Muslims Christians and Jews as part of your communities you continued we represent so many cultures beliefs traditions and identities that's really important that every single person is seen as human and Affirmed every single person really choose Muslims and Christians worship the god of Abraham and the god of Abraham teaches us in Genesis that we are created in God's image male and female yes binary yet in pooter schools you teach
043that gender is fluid that you can identify as a boy a girl or anyplace in between your curriculum directly contradicts the teaching of our major faiths you are driving wedges between parents their children and pooter schools you spoke in support of Transit the transgender day of visibility that same evening rewriting the pledge of allegiance to eliminate God I suspect you know God does not belong in the same sentence with transgender day of visibility here's your talk once a month in this room we passionately look the flag behind me and say the Pledge of Allegiance which talks about all of us collectively standing under one nation with Justice for All Mr Kingsley it's one nation under God that would be the god of Abraham indivisible Mr Kingsley don't divide us eliminate the sexualized curriculum that drives
044a wedge between parents of faith and pooter schools with liberty and justice for all even Muslims Jews and Christians how do you think parents of faith will react as more of them discover that 8 000 of our students now identify as queer or non-binary and 5 000 of those are considering hurting themselves or contemplating suicide is there a safe space in your diversity inclusion and Equity plans for Muslims Jews and Christians thank you for listening thank you our next speaker is Reverend Sean Neal Barron welcome good evening my name is Reverend Sean Neil Baron I'm one of those Faith parents you were just talking about and I use he him pronouns and I have the pleasure of serving as one of the ministers at Foothills Unitarian Church here in Fort Collins and with my husband
045attempting to parent an 8th grader who goes to Preston I'm here this evening because I want to convey on behalf of our church our deepest appreciation for the policies practices that you and PSD are striving to make our schools a safer place for lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer intersex and asexual people even if that makes certain parents uncomfortable our congregation joins With Many religious communities and religious people in Fort Collins to affirm the belovedness of trans queer and non-binary people we don't believe that you can be too young to know your gender We Trust children who feel the gender they were assigned at Birth fits what makes non-binary and trans kids any different you are not grooming children when you acknowledge the existence of queer and trans people in the classroom you are not sexualizing
046children when you teach them about sex sexuality and gender what you are doing is empowering them to not feel ashamed of themselves to learn to have agency about their lives and their bodies and that there's a beautiful diversity of humanity that they will be enriched to come to know if only they step out of their preconceptions you are not harming children when you refer families to Medical providers who practice gender affirming care as gender affirming care is well researched safe and effective in supporting a child to identify the roots of gender dysphoria and address it you are not undermining parents when you use the pronouns and names of student requests you are modeling how we treat one another with respect that conveys both dignity and belonging which does not depend on understanding now I dream
047of a time when no child would fear telling their parent about their gender or sexuality but we are not there yet fewer than one and three transgender and non-binary youth find their homes to be gender affirming so for now PSD can be a home for them where they can feel affirmed and accepted an affirmation and acceptance that reduces by 40 percent the chance that they will attempt suicide the work that you do all staff all teachers parents everyone involved in PSD is literally saving lives when we affirm queer and trans people thank you thank you [Applause] our next speaker is Alex Harris welcome thank you all so much for having me uh appreciated the words Mr Kingsley earlier about inclusivity we heard it from kids as well because kids know what it means to be
048seen and accepted my name is Alex Harris tonight I'm here as a PSD parent and a mental health professional I'm a licensed clinical social worker as well as a licensed addictions counselor and as you said gender inclusive policies save lives this is not hyperbole lgbtq plus youth that are excluded from their communities die by Suicide at a much higher rate than the national average however lgbtq plus youth that are supported and allowed to be their genuine selves in fact die by Suicide at a rate lower below that national average so not only do gender inclusive policies literally save lives but I ask you what community do you want to live in I want to live in a community that is inclusive diverse and founded in love and equity especially as other states Target the lgbtq
049plus population for eradication it is critical that communities like ours are more than just tolerant of vulnerable populations but are in fact embracing and accepting I know that Fort Collins is a community founded on the ideals of love inclusion and supporting each other please continue to advance gender inclusive policies so that all PSD kids can know that they are seen and embraced just as they are for example I would love to see holding gender trainings at the beginning of each year where teachers can learn to use gender inclusion language when addressing the class such as or friends rather than boys and girls let's be a community of inclusion thank you thank you our next speaker is Jeff after Heidi no it is okay apparently Jeff is not here this evening in which case our next
050speaker is Andy Brunson Williams is that how I Bronson okay good welcome loudly hi thank you for welcoming Community comment tonight my name is Andy Brunson Williams my pronouns are she her I live here in Fort Collins with my husband and our three children my eldest started her preschool Journey here in pooter school district and graduated this last spring from Polaris high school they're now off at College studying paleontology the passion they've had since they were three and we also have a 16 and 8 year old they are currently enrolled in pooter School District I'm a passionate supporter of public education and I have always appreciated pooter School District's forward thinking about how committed they are to student well-being as parents in the community we all hope to instill in our own kids lessons and
051our own moral values things such as being kind being Community minded and maybe occasionally eating a vegetable now many of us parents are fighting a different battle for our children we're fighting one we never imagined we'd have to fight for their basic human right to just exist today I Want To Praise this board and the district itself for all of your gender inclusive policies you have followed the research the data and the needs of your community students and we thank you everyone in education understands the most powerful tool for any teacher is connection children who are seen and validated are able to learn and be encouraged to be the the best version of themselves these policies that you've created help children to focus on their education our district has become a beacon of safety and
052hope to many families and neighboring states and they are moving here to ensure that their children can safely learn and grow into adults lgbtqia plus students are disproportionately at risk for poor academic and health outcomes Research indicates that having these gender inclusive policies in schools enhances belonging and engagement for all students transgender non-binary and intersex students exist in our district and they are a valued part of our schools and our community we know there is more work to be done to ensure that they are safe and given equal opportunity to education please continue supporting our lgbtqia plus students so that they can keep being valued members of our community whether or not they eat their vegetables thank you for the work you do and thank you for your time thank you our next speaker is
053Christopher sorry our next speaker is Christopher Humphrey welcome I'm spoken [Music] I haven't spoken in front of a group of people on the wall since the United States Army ladies and gentlemen of the board thank you for having us here today and um thank you law enforcement for also being here um thank you for giving us this platform that we can come together and speak and agree and disagree why am I here today I'm here because there are many they're afraid to speak now I'm not I come here today with love for each and every one of you both great and small I'm here today for the voiceless for the 13 14 15 16 17 year old young women that deserve to have safe place just like others deserve to have safe places they deserve
054to have safe places as well that deserve to be able to use the restroom the changing rooms and peace without the threat of physical or sexual assault the child that is afraid the daughters the sisters that deserve a safe place not only in school but also School athletics as well these young women need us they need us to fight for them and their rights many too shy too timid to speak let us put aside our differences and remember these sweet children in our solemn charge to protect them men I call upon you to do the right thing to call out perversity and stand up for what's true and right there was a time that we would come running to the aid of those in need let this time be today and let us show love
055to even those that we disagree with even those that send no love to us we show this love by speaking the truth I'm a Christian and uh my son actually goes to PSD and with light of the current events that have happened um and also with news um I actually live in Loveland and it came to to my attention that a young lady was actually attacked sexually assaulted in one of the restrooms at the Loveland recreational center also in the birth it might be a different School District but a young lady was also attacked and sexually assaulted in one of the restrooms there the school board actually tried to cover it up and um we actually had to go to the Sheriff's Department to get to to get the um to get the the truth
056in the matter and um still to this day the young man um no charges against them nothing so I'm here actually for for young ladies I'm I'm going to conclude your remarks time's up okay yeah I'm here for the young ladies I just think that they deserve to have protection just like anyone else and I do appreciate the time to be here today and um there's a lot of hate going around I love everyone thanks guys thank you our next speaker is Salem Clement welcome okay hi um my name is Salem and I'm a sophomore at pooter High School I've come here today to talk about the treatment of transgender non-binary and lgbtq students within schools at PSD as a trans non-binary student I have seen and heard my fair share of violence and hatred
057towards kids like myself schools are supposed to be a place where we can feel safe to be ourselves while getting an education unfortunately many kids a part of this community always feel conflicted about going to school because we don't know what sort of harassment we will face that day personally I have been called homophobic and transphobic slurs barked at and yelled at for being open about my gender identity and sexuality at pooter High School I have had friends who have been cornered and asked to prove their gender by being asked what's in their pants in the middle of a hallway and nothing was done there have been instances where the staff members struggle to get my correct name and pronouns down and I understand it can be a New Concept to some calling a singular
058person they instead of he or she but there were times where it seemed their own personal beliefs got in the way of respecting how I choose to present myself a big part of how I am treated in the hallways and classrooms have to do with how I look kids stereotype the lgbtq community to have bright hair and dark clothes and pick on anyone who matches the description they also make insensitive remarks and jokes referring to self-harm my school has taken measures to be more inclusive when it comes to the lgbtqia plus Community but there is only so much they can do this harassment of lgbtq students is not solely in my school it is all throughout PSD I have friends in Rocky and Fort Collins High that have gone through the exact same treatment something
059has to change in order for students to feel safe in their schools we have complained to staff members and given examples of how we are treated with no results so it's time I brought to the attention of higher authority I have no Solutions but I'm happy to be a part of brainstorming to come up with one to stop this Behavior thank you thank you our next speaker is John Meyer welcome wow it is uh it's been a privilege to be here tonight my name is John Meyer I've been connected with the Fort Collins Community since 1989 four kids have graduated from Fort Collins uh Public Schools and it's really clear that whenever issues touch the lives of children a lot of people have strong convictions about them and there are changes happening about how gender
060and sexuality are are addressed in schools and I'm aware that these changes are bringing questions and concerns to a growing number of people I guess probably we all are you know 13 days ago there was a vote on the resolution for the transgender day of of visibility and um one of the the board members just commented to the trans student that had spoken eloquently in favor of that resolution these words I want you to know you have our support you are seen heard loved valued we need you here in PSD we need you holding us accountable now that's an appropriate and a laudable affirmation of that student's contribution and superintendent Kingsley has so much appreciate what you shared and and I guess what I need to know is I need to know that that you
061have that same perspective toward me that you you need my voice uh that you um you would thank me for trying to hold this board accountable I am not here to criticize I'm not here to accuse I'm not here to dictate anything I would hope that in your incredibly challenging job I could help build Bridges and Mr Kingsley I sense that desire in you as well and I really appreciate that can I please or just communicate this perspective I know you genuinely care for these children but they are not your children so it's not possible for you to be the real stakeholders in their lives you said the policies and programs for the 12 years in pooter but the outcome of that affects a very complex set of relationships for a lifetime if they're my
062children or my grandchildren what happens during those 12 years affects every Christmas for them and for me for the rest of my life this is the stakeholder perspective from which people are going to come to you and so I just want to ask please Grant a place for dialogue more than three minutes I'm already done um as people come to you give us something that gives us more than a one-sided three-minute opportunity to share our heart and bring this community together right I need you to conclude now thank you thank you our next speaker is William Rutledge welcome hi my name is Bill Rutledge I have raised six children in this school district I came here first in 1960 and at Moore Elementary School and we bobbled around and just about every school you can
063think of with six children and moving in eight different houses I didn't come here tonight with the idea that I'd have to speak something for perhaps 95 percent of the parents and children because it seems that almost everyone is commenting about a special minority as opposed to traditional people and traditional roles in schools I was a teacher I was an administrator and I love teaching but I I'm a Fundamentalist I believe in Christianity and Judaism and all these others that should be recognized but I I believe in the old school where you go to learn Reading Writing arithmetic when you're a teacher you're there to teach the discipline that you are qualified to teach you're not psychologist you're not sociologist you're not nurses so stick with your subject and as a past teacher I can
064tell you one thing and that is it my greatest accomplishments are not what I do my greatest satisfaction is what my students do when they go on in life and I assure you that I've had a number of students that I'm extremely proud of who have excelled in so many disciplines but one thing I believe in sticking to stick to what you're taught to do what you're qualified to do and you're not qualified to intervene between parents and children period thank you aren't sorry our next speaker is Aaron green welcome good evening members of the board I unfortunately remain discouraged status of pooter School District in relation to accessibility and integrated services obviously the presentation on leadership didn't include picture descriptions teaching the Future Leaders of this community how to discriminate against my son these
065particular handouts in particular as an accommodation for my request for picture descriptions in this meeting school district and the administration is 100 aware of the fact that for the past two years my son's IEP has specifically prohibited them because they sat a member of the IEP team from my son on the committee that decided to produce them efforts of respect was what you said Mr Kingsley efforts of respect tonight one of your board actions will be to approve a new director of integrated services somebody who superintendent Kingsley described as not what we were looking for to the parent committee that sat on the hiring committee less than last year to be clear I'm not specifically opposed to this individual but I support the idea of competition from the outside and empowering the position to a
066cabinet level similar to those of other higher performing districts so they can make the changes necessary to improve the situation here in pooter School District at the graduation with options public meeting on February 1st of this year Mr Kingsley committed to checking with the Colorado Department of Education on making Educational Services for American Sign Language Braille and assistive technology count towards graduation credits this is critically important to give is students equal access to some of the programs identified at the graduation with options meeting he specifically aside Mr Nielsen follow up with CDE two months later no follow-up from me either Mr Kingsley or Mr Nielsen on that topic so I'm here to ask you the school board specifically two of you were at that meeting to use your Authority Under Colorado revised Statute title 22
067specifically titled 22 32 133 3A you as a school board have the ability to Grant academic credit for completion of an American sign language course or demonstrated Proficiency in American Sign Language on the same basis as successful completion of a foreign language you as your board can take this action and at least give the students doing American Sign Language the credits they need to have access to some of the graduation with options programs now unfortunately it will not make or it would still maintain a disparate discriminatory policy of the 4x4 class schedule in relation to graduation with options programming for the visually impaired and other students receiving services but I can work with the legislature to get that changed hello my name is Sawyer green I am a student at Rocky Mountain High School I'm
068also part of the speech and debate team at Rocky Mountain High School and today I am coming before you all today to show two reasons why neat that change needs to happen as my father before me said I am a visually impaired student in in PSD to get into the first point in this how Rocky Mountain High School is non-inclusive as the video of inclusivity that Rock Mountain High School would produce was just a performance and two how even this home board meeting meeting isn't accessible to visually impaired people nor people with disabilities to get into the first point why should a kid be forced out of a class because a teacher said they aren't going to teach how that kid's IEP is supposed to accommodate them that happened to me this year I'm in
069ninth grade I took algebra one at Rocky Mountain High School and yet a math teacher told me that he will not teach the way my IEP accommodates me tell me is it fair that we let other students in the exact same classroom but we do not let a disabled student who is a visually impaired student be able to learn inside the classroom without a teacher telling them that they are not allowed that they cannot sit in the class because they will not teach how their accommodations show how they are given the accommodations in their IEP it is unfair to get into the second point of this also to go back yesterday Rocky Mountain High School doing a second period in our home room showed a video about inclusivity yet that video only paints a picture
070of what looks good at Rocky Mountain High School does not even show the actual effect of it as explained before to get into the second point well this meeting isn't inclusive to people with disabilities one this meeting is held late at night so kids with extracurricular activities cannot actually go and speak their mind to the board and two this morning does not have a sign language interpreter nor has picture displays I know my parents have said this many many many times before that this boy needs to have that but yet nothing has been done so to view action needs to be done I don't know exactly what action money needs to be done and secondly to the board of education for PSD you've lost the ability to call your meetings inclusive thank you thank you
071that concludes Community comment for this evening our next topic on the agenda is uh board topics and Community reports does anybody from the board have something they'd like to share Jim anything nope all right then we will conclude that agenda item and move on to our next one which is the consent agenda would anybody like to pull anything from the consent agenda it looks like not in which case can I get a motion with respect to the consent agenda Nate I move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items on the consent agenda can I get a second looks like Kristen this time Jill would you please call a vote on the consent agenda DJ Anderson I Jim brokish hi Nate Donovan aye Christian Draper aye Rob Pederson aye Carolyn Reed
072aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes 7-0 thank you very much Chad uh thank you very much Jill um all right now we're going to move on to our second set of action items and in this case it's a uh an executive limitation report 2.6 on asset protection can I get a motion with respect to this Nate I move that the board determined that the superintendent has reasonably interpreted Board of Education policy El 2.6 in the internal monitoring report dated April 4th 2023 and that the evidence presented supports the superintendent's conclusions stated in the internal monitoring report can I get a second uh Jess seconded it uh is there a discussion we have some folks here in support of this if we have any questions or discussion we'd like to have go ahead Nate I just
073want to point out that these internal monitoring reports are riveting so I appreciate them well thank you for that Nate uh for the for those who are in the audience who haven't read these I think uh they may not be the uh page Turners that uh that uh one would hope uh or one might look for in your own uh enjoyment reading but they do provide interesting insights into how the district uh is run and how the administration follows the limitations that the board has set down so uh you can you can read them uh if you like um at uh by looking at the board packet which is which you can get to from the uh from the website is there any other discussion all right then Jill would you please call a vote
074on this DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish Nate Donovan aye Kristen Draper aye Rob Pederson aye Carolyn Reed hi Jessica Zamora hi motion passes 7-0 thank you again Jill and now uh as uh promised we're going to get into a couple of the uh uh pieces related to teaching and learning and academics and tonight the first part of that is K-5 literacy instructional materials adoption can I get a motion with respect to this yes yes Kristen can give us a motion approve the agreement with Imagine Learning El education with amplify ckla skills for core knowledge schools K-2 as described in the board meeting agenda packet for a total obligation of five million 709 700. thank you very much can I get a second looks like Jess would give us a second on that and now this
075evening we'll have a presentation on this for our benefit before we vote and also for the benefit of the community Mr Kingsley would you like to introduce that yes Excuse me yes thank you president Patterson joining us this evening to speak about our K-5 literacy adoption is our District's director of curriculum John pasentino John welcome we're glad you're here um can I follow up with a meeting I attended back in early January where we share the early parts of our process and we're down to three finalists and tonight with after A Brief Review of where we were we're going to share where we've been since that time uh going to start by uh re uh calling that our district priority and literacy is foundational to our Student Success literacy is the key to building knowledge
076and engaging with the world and uh the last bullet there has been updated with both bolded part that foundational reading skills and background knowledge are essential for future success and that is what we're really trying to Target here with this K5 literacy adoption recommendation as part of our work this year we have been developing A literacy Vision that will guide all our work going forward all students having Equitable access to high quality literacy instruction and engaging in opportunities to develop and apply their literacy skills across disciplines from Early Childhood through graduation and pretty simply this adoption goal at the highest level is to begin to fulfill that promise provide our teachers with these high quality materials to support them in ensuring that all students can find success in literacy as outlined in our vision uh
077as a quick review here when we reviewed our materials we had four non-negotiables as we called them we used a tool called the imet instructional materials evaluation tool and the four places we were looking uh complex texts these are shifts in the common core standards evidence-based tasks and building knowledge but all that is built on a foundation of beginning reading skills and students being solid readers the visual off to the right which is what we call our structured literacy visual which has five components phonics phonological awareness phonics fluency vocabulary and comprehension all with a basis in oral language development before students become readers they are comprehenders listening and speaking helps them build knowledge and begin to access the curriculum from the earliest ages so those were the areas we were looking about our review team
078we had 31 members of Educators across grade levels we had two Elementary administrators and one is in the room room here Laura Sutton assistant principal at shepherdson participate in this process and was provided great contributions we had seven central office staff and four parents and then we had representation for English language development mtss information technology and integrated services and it was important that we made sure all students were represented in the curriculum and we'd be able to build a universal instruction that really meets the needs of all students right in what we call that tier one and while I'm mentioning it Sarah Urban at Carney and Rosie navejas are here they were here earlier for the spelling bee I will say I could not have been blessed with two better leaders for this work they
079have they have you can't even describe how much they put into this and and how essential they are to the work we have done so it's been fantastic I really do thank you um as our team and this is everything we covered from before we started with two days of preparation we wanted to remove bias from our thinking we wanted to learn about our tools and how we're going to evaluate curriculum and then we spent three days reviewing and analyzing the six programs that were submitted using that imet review tool we also looked through a culturally responsive scorecard to look for materials that were inclusive and representative of our population when we last spoke we had three program finalists amplify ckla hmh into reading and imagine learning El education since we last met we had
080three staff and Community engagement sessions at the end of January we did them regionally we had about 125 people attend these meetings where they got they heard presentations from Publishers after a brief overview from me and had an opportunity to take a look at the materials and we did gather their feedback and synthesize it for our team to look at as they continued their review process we also had one day of review for cultural responsiveness and representation with a separate team got some good feedback on these programs recognizing they all have areas we can work on and we can continue to do that work across our curriculum as we go forward to make sure we have a curriculum where our students can see themselves reflected and then we came back for two more days of
081review team analysis and consensus building at the end of this process we had a lot of information a lot of data some of it objectively scored a lot of subjective and our team came back and and reviewed and considered everything as we came toward consensus building it was a challenge when you have that many people and that kind of diverse curriculum out there so what we did is we reviewed that evidence and we asked our review team members to think about the entire District every school has circumstances where certain things may seem like they can be successful and and certain things may seem to be blockers so I asked our team for for the moment knowing that we would take care of each individual school as we go forward step outside of that look at
082the entire district and what see what program would be best fit for the district as a whole and we started going through it with a standard consensus model first thing would be yes I'm all in on this program I'm there for it block would be no I'm I'm not with this one and I really don't even want to talk about it anymore we're done and then two other areas where maybe is I'm not there yet I can consider it if we could address some issues I might have and then the final category being standby I'm not really choosing this one but I'm not going to block it I understand why we're accepting it and and I'll be able to support that um so we went ahead and ran a round on these three programs and
083came up with something that was a little surprising for our team but it was pretty solid um we can see right here amplify ckla had two in the S category 21 in the block no as a district-wide adoption hmh into reading four and the yes and 12 in the block no and imagine learning El education we had 15 yes so a little short of half of our representatives there and two in the block so when we looked at that realized that El education was the one we should investigate further because that was the one that was looking like it was building toward consensus so on that evening we spent about 45 minutes getting feedback on those issues that the members of our team wanted to address how would the district address their concerns going forward
084and and just pretty much process that whole piece and then we went ahead and did another round and what we found was the 10 who were in that maybe category in the beginning that wanted to address some concerns none of them stayed in that maybe category and none of them moved down to block so what we ended up with was one additional yes and then 15 standby which is 31 who are yes or stand by and ready to go with this one and the two blocks were remained the same to people um so why Imagine Learning El education why did that stand out for our team uh they they pointed out the systematic foundational skills that includes differentiated small group instruction informed by assessment having that differentiated small group built into the system was appealing
085to our teachers also El education is based on a trade book Library so if we think of traditional curriculum we have the basil readers you know we probably had them when we were in elementary school where you got that thick book it had excerpts and chapters and pieces of things put together Millennial education we're looking at trade books which means actual books that you could buy in the bookstore and that is those are the foundational texts for the program teachers really were impressed to see those teachers get excited by books and they're excited to make that the foundation of their curriculum there's also Hands-On multi-sensory activities and this is not a worksheet heavy piece there is a lab component to this as well that gives students opportunities for Hands-On learning in K2 um there is
086explicit embedded support for English Learners English learner instruction the support we give to students is not what we consider an intervention that is tier one universal instruction and we want to make sure our universe our English Learners are supported and and we scaffold things and and work with them to develop their language skills in The Core Curriculum our previous materials didn't do this this is outlined very well and it is explicit in the program and we are working with our language culture and Equity department and our ELD program Specialists to see how we can support English Learners in that Universal tier it also aligns with the Next Generation life science standards and I say the Next Generation science standards the life science ones and that is alignment with our Colorado academic standards so give teachers
087an opportunity to get more science into the curriculum as they're building background knowledge they're also addressing some of those science standards not replacing a science curriculum but certainly giving us something more there our teachers also love the idea that it was designed by teachers when you look at it and you see the the decisions teachers can make in the program it doesn't look like the typical publisher put this together and our teachers definitely appreciated that too as they evaluated the program it is also the only program that has fewer than 180 lessons it has far fewer so all lessons can be fit within the school year with some Flex time so although it asks for a lot of time in the day for instruction it is doable and if you're a teacher and you get
088a program that has 188 lessons you're starting knowing I'm not going to get to all this what am I going to miss this program doesn't have that problem it can be covered reasonably within a school year the quality of student work that is demanded and the level of writing that is in this curriculum is exceptional and it's certainly going to raise the bar of rigor for our students and expectation it also has what I will not call an SEL curriculum but it has a whole strand of habits of character to help our students become effective Learners ethical people and see how they can contribute to a better world and that is a component in each unit that is outlined so we can help students learn those habits and practice those right in the classroom although
089none of our programs were phenomenal for cultural responsiveness this was the one that rated the highest when our teams did the review both the cultural responsive team we had and our review team itself it also has a digital platform with an online classroom it integrates with with Google classroom and that is something that is valuable and we've been using obviously since covid we've been using quite a bit Even in our elementary schools foreign the best fit so this is one of the things that seemed to become very important as we were going forward not all of our schools were the same and we honor those differences in our schools and we want to make sure that our curriculum is going to do what it can to support those differences so our recommendation is broken up
090into three parts actually haven't addressed one of them I haven't addressed them yet I will in the next couple slides one for all non-core knowledge and non-dual language schools we are recommending Imagine Learning El education K5 for our core knowledge schools which would be Bethke oday trout and Zach we are recommending amplify ckla skills that is a K2 piece that addresses the foundational skills in a systematic way we have not supported schools for that systematic foundational instruction prior to this and we want to make sure all of our schools have a tight program starting next fall in that area and then finally we have two dual language schools and dual language schools obviously are teaching in two languages two languages and need companion programs that match each other that allow them to deliver that wonders
091in maravillas were part of our last adoption when we adopted cengage rate for reading they are on cdc's approved programming list they are highly rated by Ed reports so they meet our basic criteria I'll talk a little bit about what we plan to do with them but for now we're going to go forward with what we have with a bit of a reset core knowledge schools just to to give a little background on why El education wouldn't be the best fit and and is mainly because the core knowledge curriculum has a sequence of its own a sequence of learning um in science geography um world history U.S History Literature and we didn't want to disrupt that we didn't want to give them something that was going to push that sequence off the table and make
092it hard for them really to honor the core knowledge um so we wanted to make sure that they would be able to continue we have recently purchased materials for the core knowledge schools to support their literacy and we are going to continue to work with them to look at their entire program to see that they have what they need to really have a comprehensive literacy program that meets their needs and so we're going to begin that work in this implementation phase actually we're going to start that work this month with those schools and really kind of provide alignment and professional learning where it is needed our site-based nature and then you have these the core knowledge schools even what's happening at those four schools may be a bit different so we're going to work with
093them to see how we can create a solid program in the in the core knowledge next um I already mentioned why the Dual language schools have a different materials we do want to evaluate the current adoption and just for background we have two dual language schools and they have different models of approaching that instruction so there will be differentiated in that way as well but we do want to know how well these materials have been meeting their needs what is missing what they might need to help support that and any additional training they mean they may need and we are open as we work with the others with the Dual language schools it turns out these aren't actually the right materials and we need to dig in and see what's out there to support them
094we will look at that in the next couple years um on our cost side and this is a 10-year cost for Imagine Learning El education 5 million four hundred seven thousand eighty four dollars it includes all required trade books which we mentioned those books and they're also a list of recommended books that align with the themes that are being taught and we're purchasing all those for each classroom so our classrooms will have a good classroom library to support the knowledge building that will be going on in that curriculum amplify ckla skills is 302 616 and you see that's for five years and that's for five years made that decision as a call to say this is a good fix right now to get the sequential program in the K2 but we also want to evaluate
095the whole thing and it may turn out through core knowledge Foundation materials or maybe updates to things that there might be within five years there could be something new to look at so we wanted to go that a little shorter so we'd have flexibility if something more comprehensive came available and then no cost to the McGraw-Hill wonders maravillas right now we do have some ongoing training that's built into our original contract want to make sure we're taking advantage of that and if it turns out we need to update some materials for schools we would do that as an addition to the previous contract that we had with them implementation and this is a big one for us and the statement there are programs Effectiveness depends on it being used as intended our district hasn't always
096had that expectation really we buy standards aligned materials we select them and ask teachers to meet the standards by using them as a primary resource that is not the message we have right here this is high quality instructional materials high quality system we need to have it delivered the way it was designed to see how effective it can be that's the message up front obviously we will um do what we need to do to adapt going forward but we're starting with a strong Fidelity message I know this slide has a lot of boxes on it I'm just trying to show organizing some thinking and I will step through these pieces so you can at least and this is early thinking of trying to design a high quality implementation plan we are going to start with
097an implementation timeline which I'll share a little here in some of the educator learning we're going to do up front and you'll notice slogan on the bottom adopt before adapt we're going to keep saying that to folks because often the first response when people see materials is how can I make this better what's missing from what I'm used to we really want to hammer that message home that we want to give this its best shot as designed and then we can grow and learn from there um so El education itself comes in blocks you can see the K2 there's a skills block there's a module block and there's a lab now each one of those is 60 Minutes the K2 skills block is the primary one that we're going to make sure is trained well
098and ready to go on day one because that is where students are getting their foundational skills and that is where the sequential systematic piece of the program is essential you notice The Orange Box around there we're launching with those two blocks with the explorations into the labs we're going to feel our way into that we're going to have all the materials this is a lot for teachers to learn and we don't want to overwhelm we want to make sure we can learn well sequentially so that we can bring these pieces to students with success right off the bat and then in three five there's a shift where there are two blocks the the skills block drops off drops off and we have the module block where the the basic literature is introduced in the learning
099and then the additional language and literacy block where they continue to build literacy skills well developing that depth of knowledge and applying it across different texts as we go forward so just to reiterate Focus heavily on the primary block for for for K2 that will be skills four three five that will be module and we will be implementing those second box as at the start of the year and then the labs we will look at just depending on how how things are going in the system we're going to monitor that very closely educator learning will start on April 21st with what we're calling a bridge to structured literacy this journey started a number of years ago with our training we were moving from what we called balanced literacy to structured literacy and our teachers have
100done tremendous amount of learning we've had letters training we've offered what we call 95 group is another piece of support for student for teachers a number of our schools have have gotten what Orton Gillingham OG training on their own and they learned a lot but what they didn't have was the high quality set of materials to support all that learning so we're asking you know the point of this is kind of let's seal the deal on this we've done the learning now we have the materials let's make sure we can deliver that well um we're focused on curriculum-based professional learning what we've done in the past is often a half day overview here's what the materials look like here's where you find this we're looking at a program that is going to teach teachers how
101to use these materials well and develop that capacity so a much focus on how to be successful with these materials we are looking to partner with an outside um a provider for professional learning we want to make sure this is essential that we get this right and we want to make sure the PD we offer is the best that's available we're in a fortunate situation in the resources have been set aside for this we want to use them well so we will be going for the separate RFP for PD we are working with a company called rivet education to advise us on that and there are at least six providers out there that are certified to teach El education we'll put forth what we're looking for review those and then we will come back with
102the the result of that in a more fleshed out implementation plan at a later date after the uh April 21st obviously we'll have that kickoff our formal training will begin on August 10th where we have a full day of PD and we may also have another additional half day before school starts we're working on that with principals and then September 22nd we have another full day training and then after that we're going to be looking in our RFP for different ways to phase in the trading different opportunities for teachers some asynchronous learning opportunities I don't have detail other than these are the things we're going to be looking for at this time and then summer Institute sessions to develop our teachers a lot of our teachers were on our review team we're very interested in
103being part of the implementation and we want to invite them and maybe some others who want to become leaders and champions for the program to get some training with our team coming back here uh we're already working on materials delivery and support our warehouse managers working on the plan when and we're discussing what needs to be barcoded how we're going to distribute things to schools to get materials in the hands of teachers as soon as possible we also part of the materials management is going to be a d implementation there'll be materials we're collecting back because we want to there are things we want to stop doing as we start doing these pieces we're working with Bud's team on technology integration we had two members on our committee to help us with that and we
104will as we get into the platform recognizing Imagine Learning Yale education El education itself our open source literature materials literacy materials Imagine Learning is our digital platform and our vendor so the the digital component is is a separate piece of this that we will be working on hey John yes you just use the term called open source can you share with the board in the community what you mean by that please thanks I do open source Yale education was developed by teachers and published as for free and available on the web so I've had a few teachers ask me when can I get materials well you can get materials right now if you want to go you can go to the El Education website this is not imagine learning and you can find how all
105these blocks are are set up assessments how to group kids into groups and run these uh the whole program basically so that does provide some flexibility and opportunity as we go forward because we don't have to be stuck with one single vendor there's there's others who have used this they're actually other Publishers two of our six submissions to the RFP were different versions of el education so it's it's really a great benefit that everything is available now and there's a lot of good resources to help teachers ease their way into the program okay thank you for pointing that out then fidelity definition I know that's something we want to know right now um we definitely want to use these programs as intended and we want to start with those first blocks teachers being expert in
106that as we launch and confident in doing that well we will be working with our schools to develop some of those uh commitments with each other and make sure we understand what we're trying to accomplish now I've highlighted some things on the school side because we really wanted to create a link from what we're doing at the origin of the purchase with our schools and make sure that information is coming back again so we're tightly connected as a system so we're going to talk about site Readiness leadership roles educator training and the implementation team model um first of all sight Readiness and Leadership we're going to start meeting with our principals on this Thursday to discuss uh so we want to collaborate on this we're going to be in agreement what are the roles and
107responsibilities for principals and assistant principals um how does this how does a program how does a site commit to a program we want to think about site Readiness make sure we're enabling context for success for this that does include Master scheduling that supports the implementation um we've talked about 60-minute blocks we also want to really look at our entire schedule we prioritize certain things over the years things are as they are we're bringing in a high quality literacy program we want to make sure I won't even say we we make sure we maintain science and social studies but we consider them more deliberately than we have in the past often those two subjects do get pushed out because of all the other demands on the schedule so we're not only going to be trying to
108design schedules that fit this program but also address a meaningful way science and social studies going forward in addition to mathematics so we're really going to talk about priorities and and how we can do that as successfully as possible we want to make sure sites have materials available and have a way to address it if they don't that we can support them and teachers have what they need and then site-based educator collaboration and learning our teacher teams meet regularly we would like them to become you know a professional learning teams right at their sites on El education and support them with that and then Define a connection communication and workflow with an implementation team we are going to have members of our Central team identified as an implementation team members and they will be leading
109that charge and keeping that connection between schools and the central office so they'd be assigned to certain schools they would be the primary contact for El education support and making sure things are rolling the way they should be so yes the team which will Implement implementation planning and support for sites we want to be timely in our response we want to be timely in our information so we know what schools need I can be honest with you I was here for a math adoption we did and within two months it had been deconstructed out there we really are going to be on top of that we're looking at 30 minute 30 day not 30 minutes 30 day cycles of feedback to make sure that we don't like let things drift in a certain direction and
110we're there to support schools Fidelity assessment will come out of that what are we trying to do and how will we measure that we're doing it and then our team will gather feedback and information and we'd like to set up learning loops and honestly we talked about this with our whole team today in literacy and the secondary said can we have learning loops for our secondary folks as well even without an adoption so we can know what our schools need and we can provide the support that they need can you clarify what a learning Loop is I'm going to have a little graphic here that will and I will explain that yes thanks first we have to define the Fidelity what are we trying to do if you don't know what you're trying to do
111and it's not clearly defined you won't really know how well you're doing it so once we have that though then we will move toward um what what does implementation Fidelity look like in communicating that with schools and then making sure schools have that they learn what that process looks like they Implement that we get feedback on that implementation as I said I'd like to have a 30-day cycle uh at least at the beginning the implementation routine receives that feedback we we learn about it we let it gestate for a while because we're not going to be jumping and shifting things right away but we really want to know how's the implementation going where do we need more support um what part of the schedule isn't working the way we wanted to or what part of
112the curriculum we weren't deep enough on our uh anything we need to do to understand what's happening and so we have data in review and then we cycle that back to the schools so we're looking at having means to collect information easily and then using our implementation team and our site leadership to disseminate that information so that we can eventually iterate if we need to and the biggest piece I want to get from that is that direct line from the classroom to central office leadership connecting the learning to what we're looking for and then providing the support needed for any adjustments or extras that are needed at the site so consider that a continuous loop that would be you know an improvement cycle basically but with the patience to adopt and see that the program's
113implemented and see what kind of results we're getting does that clarify all right thank you so again program evaluation Effectiveness depends on it being used as attended you can't evaluate what you're not doing so we want to make sure we're doing it well before we begin to evaluate it we will have that learning Loop we will be working with assessment research evaluation and accountability Dwayne's department on evaluation of that Fidelity and of student outcomes this is new for us so it will work tightly together and I look forward to working with Dwayne we've worked together for many years and and I think we'll have something really special coming out of that and then as far as the student outcome peace I never I know we have to a lot of folks like say implementation dip
114I don't even like to talk about that we do the best we can we expect good outcomes we haven't always had dips um where were we looking though especially with that K2 skills block is we do read act assessments three times a year for all students in K3 and what we assess there is exactly what we're teaching meaning it's very sensitive to instruction if we teach it and students learn it it will show up in the data to some extent so we'll be monitoring that right off the bat just just to see how things are going longer term we'll be looking at our map cmass and any other literacy assessments transferability is really important it's one thing to pass a dibble's test or an acadiance it's another thing to take that reading and background knowledge
115and apply it in new spaces so we're going to be looking at eventually affecting student achievement in all areas across all subjects at all levels I mean that's that should I really do believe we do this well this will drive that change it will take years in some cases to see those effects but it will set a solid foundation for kids for future success and then finally I just want to call back to about a year ago we had our tntp review of our schools and out of that work in their report we came up some next steps in literacy and the first one we came up with was to establish a coherent detail District vision for excellent literacy instruction that has system alignment and ownership I put a check mark there we are just
116in the first steps of that but we're really addressing that head-on and I think we've made a lot of progress this year the next one another check because that's ensuring high quality literacy instructional materials this is K5 at this moment we're going to be looking at 9 10. this this spring here to see what criteria we'd need there but in pretty short order we're going to address the whole sequence from pre-k through 12th grade and then the next piece is you're going to see in the Strategic plan when we get that we're still in the development stages of that but we are directly addressing the next steps that we are looking for in literacy in the Strategic plan so I think the work is aligned and we're excited to get going on it and that
117is what I have for this evening thank you very much John um do you want to add anything come in okay good so what does anybody from the board have questions or comments go ahead Carolyn so I know in one of the slides who called out D implementation can you tell me why that's so important and you know I wanted to talk about that more so thank you thank you for bringing that back up okay um T well okay for one thing we always add to the system and we rarely remove explicitly um and we have some practices that are rooted in some of previous like so I mentioned going from balance literacy to structured literacy I would argue 15 years ago we're even in the whole language Camp a bit so we had some
118practices that were ingrained and so it's hard to let go of some of those practices and then some of it's just jumping up the rooms we got stuff everywhere and so we are going to be de-implementing or removing the cengage reach for reading materials that are there and for those listening at home um there are readers with those there are trade books and if teachers find those of quality and they're going to line up into their classroom libraries we're not taking those back from them but the actual materials themselves we have units of study writing from Teachers College we're going to pull that back because and and the reason and we also have some old Treasures things in open court things honestly still out there this does take 120 to 180 minutes a day we
119need that and there's no time for bringing these other these old Legacy things back in and also many of those Legacy things aren't evidence-based we know they aren't the highest leverage way to increase student learning so de-implementation means taking it out and taking it away and just but completely wiping it out of the system um we're asking teachers to take a leap and commit to the program we really want them to be able to focus on that and not have this um I don't know the word's not coming to attraction to just pull back those things that they always did so and I do think this is a model we need to have because you layer things on and teachers have things in their classroom they don't want to give up and they may be
120distracting from developing that new system and evolving in the way we need to evolve so we will be explicit one other thing we still have in our schools is what we call the dra2 assessments which is a long uh Legacy assessment we used for the read act which does level students and is based on the leveled reading piece and there's a few teachers out there I know of that still like to give them every year so we're going to be collecting those back too because they lead us toward the wrong direction of where we want to go other questions or comments Jess so you were talking about looping back I'm kind of curious if we'll get a loop back sometime like a year from now on how implementation and professional development is going I don't
121know if that's a you question or you guys question but I'm hoping that's what happened or happier how about it I don't Define the timeline but yeah we'll we'll work on the timeline but but I think everybody on the board is going to be interested to have regular for some definition of regular updates on how the implementation of this is going given the centrality of it to our to our educational efforts going forward and given the amount of money that we're talking about spending on this so uh I assume yeah I assume you've heard that from I look forward to seeing you more oh you know what and I look forward I'm excited about this and I do think it's more than just words right so we need to do that and honestly that accountability
122will keep us moving forward make sure not only we're tracking the right information we can communicate about it clearly so I consider that part of our Loop honestly that'd be great great John thank you other comments from the board uh DJ speaking of the money um I was uh through the contract can you give me better Insight on what the 10-year contract gets us I see that it locks in prices for it so we we get all the material and then and then what what's digital licenses for each of the years for students and teachers and consumable materials so every year we would get more and it's already in that price yes or it just locked into that price no it's at that price okay yeah yes that's at that price and then the my
123second question is about the student data um I love the the detail that we had you know clarifying A lot of that but I still was not clear on um what data that um that company will have uh on their servers it doesn't seem to be real clear if is it just a sign-on that we're going to have with their with their servers basically or will that be sitting on our system we're gonna have a sign I don't bud can you address that at all your knowledge I can the answer is that uh Imagine Learning is a it's an online platform so there will be data uh that lives in their platform there will be data available to us and then we still need to do the implementation on the detail side of that but
124we've been working with them on the Contracting side to make sure we know what each of the elements are it's part of our standard student data contract did I answer your question yeah I think so it's it let me say a different way if I'm understanding correctly we'll have identifiers that we will give to them but not the personal identifiers that'll come back to us to put back together I would need to confirm the contract and get you that specific answer all right thank you other comments or questions Kristen yeah I just want to take the time to thank you and your whole team for taking on this massive effort um you know so quickly um and doing a great and thorough job and when you saw that the things maybe weren't you know going
125in in maybe a direction you wanted to be we looked at things and said okay well what what about if we did it slightly differently for core knowledge schools versus for second language dual language schools versus so I know I know how hard that was and just thank you for that one of the things that does excite me about this truly is the trade book libraries that the the students will have in their classrooms um and for parents yeah I might the librarian and me comes out because for parents what that means is that not only will they have the school books in their school library or in their school in their child's classroom but these are books that you can access to purchase you can come to the library and get them out for
126free so you can work as a parent with your child on the books that they are reading in school so it it really does send it kind of round everything out and allows the parents and the um Guardians and caregivers to say you know what we were reading this book let's let's go to the library and check that out bring it home and we can practice at home and I can see where you're getting stuck and I can help with that and so we become um you know together Partners on the reading so I'm very excited about that great thank you thank you Jim did you have anything you wanted to ask just just briefly I appreciate the Monumental effort that's gone into the selection process and John I also appreciate your comments about you
127know maybe that was even the easy part as huge as that was uh just getting everyone on board getting all the teachers lined up using your feedback process I'm really excited for the next steps on this thanks John thank you yeah so I have a I have a couple of uh comments and questions I guess um uh first I'm I'm excited about obviously this provides a foundation for science of reading uh the the writing element of it uh been a lot longer advocate of that long before I was on the board for for uh strengthening our writing uh approach so that's great to hear uh I like I like obviously the idea that the science is uh dovetailed in let's call it that I do feel strongly as you know and I'll just say it
128for the record that that uh we do need to maintain science and social studies as integral parts of our uh learning in elementary school and so I appreciate your statement that you're going to be working with the uh with the elementary schools to ensure that the schedules respect that need so thank you I know that professional development on this is going to be a huge challenge right I mean you're gonna we're looking forward to seeing the professional development plan and approving whatever contract needs to be approved to get that going so hopefully that'll be soon and that brings me to my other piece which is I understand the challenge of the timing on this this is not not only have you done a tremendous amount of work to get us to this point we've got
129to get all of we I say we you have to get all of the teachers in the system to a point in August where they can begin to start using this material and that's going to be in some ways a bigger challenge just because of the large numbers of people and the and the the need to reach out to all of them and and work through work through all of the implementation and the implementation details so uh thank you for taking that on really appreciate it as noted obviously we'll be looking for regular updates I'd I'd like uh when we get the I guess we're calling it area results uh to have those available to the board as they as they come in as well uh I will just uh say a couple other things
130um you mentioned that the materials are available online uh now um is there I I'm hopeful is there going to be a communication to the to the elementary teachers that points them in that direction if they want to get to it because I'll just say that I you know an anecdote of one but you know I had an elementary teacher at the church where I go to talk to me about this and she's anxious to get going and was wondering what you know what's the hold up and let's get going on this you know she's really excited about about moving forward so so hopefully you'll uh there'll be a communication that allows people who are that enthusiastic to move forward uh at as soon as possible yes and I would just want to add I've
131been working with Madeline on a communication to go out after this evening not sure exactly the timing of that but we've been working on that and Rosie and Sarah have been working on a landing site for teachers excellent that will bring in those links links to some videos of some components of the program so they can dig on on that so yes and in that we'll also have right there a feedback for and for teachers to ask us questions and and uh get going and and that is that is so exciting well you have that also for the the uh core knowledge folks as well as the imagine learning folks we will and and the interesting thing the core knowledge is not open source but a lot of it is mirrored on the core knowledge
132foundation's materials that are there um it's a little less clear on that because it's not open source we have to actually get the access and and work that in but we are we are addressing these with the same seriousness across all three recommendation pieces now we have a different number of resources we're gonna have to put into each one of them but we don't want this to be a lesser experience for certain schools because we went in a certain direction it's all going to get us set on a solid system with solid support and and iterations to help improve that as we go I'm glad to hear that and then one final thing I wanted to just uh throw into the room particularly as we Implement a new let me back up we have a
133bunch of schools who have implemented things like impact teams plcs other high quality teaming initiatives for their groups has there been any uh thought or will there be thought as to how to use those those vehicles in those schools to help with this adoption and implementation yes I would not not specifically but we've talked about the curriculum-based assessments that are within the curriculum how they can inform those practices there's a lot to learn here in the curriculum itself and that's where on the right side of my box sheet that educator learning on site we want to support that encourage that and and use our structures we have in place a lot of what we're looking to do is a lot of things we do that attempt to improve things continue to do them but use
134this material as the materials for that instead of trying to piecemeal things out so when we look at standards to deconstruct in our impact teamwork look at how they're addressed within this curriculum and the assessments within this curriculum we want to keep driving people back into these materials because we believe done systematically done well they're going to deliver us some results so yes excellent and if you can I mean my interest in this obviously is that we've we've have some data and some experience that these high quality teaming activities are make a significant difference in some of our schools and I wouldn't want to lose that into the in in the in the adoption in the flurry of having to learn and unlearn things for the teachers so to the extent that you can be
135explicit about the idea of uh using those teams as vehicles to dive into the curriculums and and whatnot we will and I don't want to not mention my partner here Kate canine who's phenomenal in this work and has had a big influence in our teaming work at schools and uh we are we are working very closely as a whole teaching and learning team on on how to get these things going in schools excellent thanks very much and I know Kate's Been instrumental in this and we're going to hear from her next so is there anything now that I've run through my scribble list here is there anything else from the board that we'd like to go ahead DJ I just uh would love for you to share a little bit when we've talked before in
136the past uh about how this is a Better Mix to meet the needs of our students that might be dyslexic in there with the the phonic awareness and that that Circle you had basically yeah I was going to come back to that you you can visualize it when we look at the science of reading structured literacy these five plus components that are somewhere in here um that is what we need to do well one for all kids um two for a subset of kids that need a little extra instruction and then sustained and deeply for students who are dyslexic who struggle and that requires sustaining the practice this is the foundation that is necessary often we still need those layered supports for kids but but it's always sad when we have to go to the
137layered supports before we give them that high quality foundational level and so part of my messaging I know we jumped to the intervention level so quickly in our thinking we've got to get that tier one universal instruction right those components are designed to address dyslexia and students who struggle to develop their basic reading skills um that was a that was a a non-negotiable at the very start it is what cde's list is based on it is what Ed reports reports on and it is honestly it is what is lacking in in our current materials and uh we've tried to hodgepodge things together and do a lot of work hard work good work but not necessarily have something that's coherent for our kids so that is where it lives and that's why I want thank you
138for pointing that out why I emphasize that K2 skills block so seriously because it has assessments that are diagnostic prescribed where students need to be with their learning it gives us structures for that learning and materials to support it in a complete system and thank you because I get to refine that message thank you for sharing that out anything else from the board Brian you had something you wanted to say yes just briefly I I just I want to thank the team uh for all of their hard work and and getting us to where we are right now this moment is significant in a lot of different ways because we're raising the floor of Excellence we're not dictating a ceiling but we are significantly raising the floor of Excellence for literacy instruction across all of
139our elementary schools and I really believe that the team that is here presenting that's here in Partnership uh talking about this it's you know my observation is it's your benevolence it's your credibility and your reliability over time in partnership with our teachers and school leaders that allows this to be met with enthusiasm and excitement and it's also a result of you taking a stance not just for our children but taking a compassionate stance with our Educators that this is something we need to take a stance of learning on this is not a one-year we're we're we've achieved this is a multi-year effort that's going to take a lot of empathy and compassion and take a committed stance to to ensure that we're all learning together including the adults you have our commitment as a team
140members of our board to come back in short order as you heard from John that we have another RFP out there around a professional development plan for our leaders I want to make sure that you and the community and all systems stakeholders have a deeper awareness around our implementation plan beyond the theory of action that John eloquently articulated here tonight I think it's important Mission critical in my opinion that our principals assistant principals teachers paraprofessionals can forecast into the year ahead before the end of this school year around what to anticipate and when we're going to be engaging and what's optional and where are we going to have points of really making sure that we must engage all of that needs to be answered before people go under various paths over the course of the
141summer so you have a commitment from us to come back to you with that level of detail in short order okay thank you again yes sir I was remiss Tracy guile has been working with us very closely as well making that connection with principals and is is going to be key so I don't want to go without acknowledging that as well thank you thank you and I I want to just re re-echo I don't know the thanks that uh that I think the entire board has for the work that's gone to this point to the work of this team going forward as I said I think that's you all know that's going to be a lot of hard work and we want to thank also the principals assistant principals teachers and parents who are going
142to be working with you on this to make this successful for our students I know that's going to be a lot of work and a challenge for all of you as well and we appreciate very much your willingness to engage in that work so thank you very much thank you all right we have two more items I just want to check with Brian about how long they could you please call the vote on this DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish hey Donovan right Kristen Draper aye Rob Patterson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes 7-0 excellent and uh why I was trying to check on timing is I think we'll take a uh we'll take a recess now and we'll come back at 10 minutes to 9. thank you all right welcome back to
143the uh April 4th uh pooter School District Board of Education meeting it is now approximately 9 50 and uh sorry 8 50 and 30 seconds and we will resume the meeting uh I believe our next item is an item telling us about how our high dosage tutoring activities are going Brian that is correct we're going to stay focused on our Core Business and talk about how we're moving the needle for kids and I'm excited that we uh now have an update coming up for all of you on the status of high dosage tutoring in our district I want to thank our District's director of teaching and learning Ms Kate Canon for being here welcome thank you thank you good evening thank you Mr Kingsley good evening board of directors cabinet those still in attendance and
144those watching um I do have to say happy school librarians day today add to the Celebration the mix of everything um and I just since I have the mic a shout out to all of our staff that lead from our libraries and our media centers ensuring students have that love of books love of reading and they're equipped for this information-rich world so yeah National School librarian day so and thank you for that last vote to also support that so thank you not our topic though um high dosage tutoring about let's say a little over a year ago if not two years ago as federal and state funding started to become available to school districts to help address the impacts of pandemic era learning we asked our community what would you like to see as part
145of those strategies and one of those items in that input and that feedback from the community was high dosage tutoring so thank you to the community for that so tonight we wanted to update on high dosage tutoring there are four areas that we're going to review tonight the first one is we did feel it might be a good time to back up a little bit and review what is high dosage tutoring and how is PSD implementing it we will share some data about implementation thus far the third thing is and in partnership with Dr Schnitz we will be sharing some of the impact that we're seeing from implementation um little sneak preview we are seeing positive impacts from this intense level of support for students so we'll dig into that a little bit and then
146lastly we'll try to wrap it up a little bit quicker with what are some next steps knowing that a large piece of next steps is a deeper analysis once this school year concludes and we have a full year of implementation more data that would include this spring as well as that full year of outcome data that we can look at and have those end-of-year measures so how do High tutoring is the dedication of grant funding both again federal and state to address the impacts impacts of pandemic era learning we know is a system we continue to invest in strategies multiple strategies to accelerate the learning for all students so I wanted to pause and really start by saying that high dosage tutoring has been an example of this entire system very quickly shifting and iterating
147to deploy a very intense support to students that need it the most while all of the adults in the system and all the humans in the system were also dealing with the pandemic it was a big lift and I cannot say how proud I am of everyone involved and just want to celebrate them our students that are involved in tutoring though they're they're working with tutors they're building those relationships a huge thank you to our families our families continue to partner with our schools to talk about their students success their strengths their progress what other needs may exist so thank you to our families and especially again those who have been involved in tutoring because that may have involved making some changes or shifts in their schedules to allow for that a thank you to
148all the people that have stepped up to tutor we have had community members come in and be hired to be tutors current staff are also doing their normal job and they've stepped up and they are tutoring substitute teachers student teachers retired teachers we also have built Partnerships with external service providers who are able to deploy tutors in our schools so to everyone who's tutoring and taking that extra time thank you all of our schools have identified a high dosage tutoring site facilitator they're the liaison to helping coordinate and implement this those site facilitators some of them are administrators Academic Deans mtss coordinators lead teachers classroom teachers that are maybe doing this out of a leadership opportunity or they just saw the power in this support for students so all those individuals vary full plates already
149dealing with the pandemic said I want to step up and help make this happen so thank you to our site facilitators and there's a lot here in this implementation of high dosage tutoring that's behind the scenes that is not known so central office thank you also HR payroll Diane Dickerson I.T Betsy Westbury and her team procurement and finance especially Chrissy Easton and Mariah Ortiz those departments helped us figure out all the processes and they were supportive that we got the tutoring to students as quickly as possible and we didn't wait for every single process to be perfect they've been very flexible they've made adjustments and we've been figuring it out so thank you to all of them thank you again to our teaching and learning team especially the mtss facilitators those folks from other departments
150that have had the awareness of tutoring to help problem solve for individual situations and make it happen and and kervin on our team are from a budget perspective and Bianca Katz on our team they've frankly saved us because saved me I'll be honest they saved me they became our liaison to those external service providers they made those connections that I flat out just couldn't didn't have the capacity to do so to everyone that has stepped up during a difficult time and a tough time man we have stepped up to get this support to students so thank you for that so back to this slide and the intent of exploring tutoring we know that pandemic era learning had different effects on our students so as we continue to work with schools to address that we continue
151to maintain the priority of start with our students on the academic side are showing that they're performing below the 35th percentile and reading a math and they're not showing the expected growth in addition to that any of our students at the high school level that may be off track to accrue their graduation credits so when we work with our schools this is this is often the starting point when we look at re what resources we have and what what additional supports we might provide start here with these students what's in place already and my high dosage tutoring be another layer to add we know that our schools May then start to move Beyond this group because there may be other types of needs where the resources are important to to deploy we might have students
152that are right on the bubble or the edge might be at risk of this but with high dosage tutoring there also might be students that were noticing oh I'm seeing a gap and I think if we hit that intensely and quickly we could probably fill that and we'd be okay we wouldn't be here but this is always where we we start with our schools um zooming out high dosage tutoring is only one of multiple strategies and we said we didn't want to lose sight of that tonight so this is and this is certainly not an exhaustive list of of strategies but we know as we just heard that high quality evidence-based Universal instruction and materials how important that is for our students Shoring that up always striving to make that better is really important that
153in addition to mtss layers of support whether that be that differentiation at the universal level targeted small group intervention or intensive intervention that high dosage tutoring is a piece of that we also have really put a lot of effort and attention and resources to that summer continuity of learning and engagement we rely on our Community Partners and really I would say at the base of all of that not last on the list but the base of that is the engagement and the partnership with our families so in addition to high dosage tutoring being just one of these strategies again many elements of the work that we're putting into our strategic plan are focused on those top two bullets and ensuring that those we continue to improve those and we also look for those common best
154practices across all of our schools um so we're going to when we step into what are the features of high dosage tutoring um it might be good to just kind of pause for a moment high dosage tutoring what what is it you know there's features of it but what it what is it um tutoring whether it's high dosage or not tutoring is not teaching um tutoring is intended to reinforce that teaching it's intended to have a trusted adult right there while I'm practicing those skills that I've learned in teaching it might also be looking at what's ahead what are the new Concepts and what are the pre-work prerequisite skills we might want to shore up before we so we are able to access that New Concept and dig we're able to dig into that um
155I think I'm gonna pop around a little bit on that piece so the team last year and thank you to that team that set the context for this implementation looked at the research that was out there and the features of high dosage tutoring that had the most impact for students during and as we've pulled out of the pandemic and those features and this is something that we have shared before but just to review this the features here are what we would want out of high dosage tutoring so a highly trained tutor or a licensed educator embedded in the school day serving four or for your students per session the the tutoring would occur three or more times a week 45 to 60 Minutes for about six to eight week Cycles before we reevaluate and determine
156if we have foreseen the progress and the response to that that we wanted so maybe we drop off and we don't need the tutoring anymore or perhaps we need to increase the intensity focus on literacy and math and of course the importance of the tutor collaborating with the teacher on the needs of the students because we do frankly run the risk at times of the strategies at Universal level classroom instruction perhaps layering on Intervention perhaps layering on a tutor if all those individuals have different strategies and it's not aligned we run a risk of confusing the students even more so that alignment there and that collaboration is is critical I find myself often you know over the past I guess it's been about a year now with this refer to this as the research bar
157but as we start to implement this we recognize the need to customize high dosage tutoring for those student groups of students the school the situation so we didn't want this list of or these features to become you can't do or try to start high dosage tutoring if you can't check mark every single one of these because what we noticed and we we know of students if I have areas of need I tend to not want to do those things as much if I've got more time in my day that I'm spending with that my day is extended for these those things that actually might be a d motivator for me however flip side of that for some of our students that dedicated time with a trusting adult or having a safe space to expend extend
158my school day it's absolutely critical we know that we we need that so that customization was important for us thinking about these features we also started to see a difference age of students so our younger students we started to see you know what it might be four or five times a week but only for 20 to 30 minutes our older students who have a very busy schedule it may only be two times a week but we're pushing 75 to 90 minutes for those so again we we wanted this to be here's the what we're striving for but don't let that don't not do anything because you feel like you're not reaching this perfectly now I will say I've had very few but I have had a couple times where a question has come to me
159of you know might we those resources and those funds be available to us if we had a tutor pop in twice a semester for an hour that's a little too far away from the research research bar so we have also communicated with us with our schools that some of what high dosage tutoring is not so high dosage tutoring is certainly not meant oops sorry my slides got messed up down here um I just the tutoring is not remedial work it's also not a punishment it's not something where we want to sentence students to having tutoring all year long it should be fluid we should evaluate it we should decide um how we're adjusting it as we go along continue to stress that tutoring is not a replacement for Universal instruction in that content area classroom
160it doesn't replace elective classes there it certainly doesn't replace something like recess it's not a substitute for the other interventions that are already in place in the school or services with the support of an IEP tutoring isn't it also isn't totally solely for struggling students again it may be that short dose that we want to put in to tighten things up so that students can be successful that next one I'd like to touch on a little bit more treated as an optional offering for PSD schools because there's really two parts of this the first part of that is that the resources available to us were available to all of our schools so we did we didn't treat this as a pilot we didn't you know identify that there's more need here so you get a
161certain portion it was available to all of our schools and all of our schools have worked on how would they implement it but the other side of this one is that it wasn't optional from um perhaps it's like a a tutoring open lab that a student at any time could pop in for helping we really want to dedicate These funds and identify the students that would benefit the most from it so it really it is the school partnering with the student and the family to say we think this is a support that would be beneficial so we're going to schedule it on a set at a set time and follow through with with that um and then the last four bullets here really are just the flip the exact opposite of what the what high
162dosage tutoring is in that research bar so we don't it's not high dosage tutoring if we are we have one tutor with 20 to 25 students so um so as we I think as we implemented and it really was about this time last year I think it was right before spring break when we really started to push and communicate with all of our schools there we started with five models and schools again depending on the student and situation could choose any hybrid of these they didn't have to just pick one and stick with that for all situations model one in person embedded during the school day model two still in person but outside so before after school both models three and four are virtual tutoring model 3 is intended that it was on a very
163set schedule this week I will meet with my virtual tutor on these days at this time model 4 was intended the on-demand was more that it might be a more complex or dynamic schedule this week I'm meeting these three days at this time in the morning but next week I've got to switch to these two days and it's in the evening so it was so what we found is that was a little confusing because we I think we think of on demand differently that's more like I can pop in whenever I want and that can become more like homework help and that was not that again doesn't meet the criteria for high dosage tutoring so it was more model four is more virtual on a dynamic schedule and then Model 5 was calling out that
164it could be any of the other four but it was focused on credit recovery and that credit accrual for graduation a learning that we've had from this that we are going to streamline a little bit for next year next school year is that we we are going to go down to just the first three models because again model four we have we track which students are involved in this high dosage tutoring what that schedule is what their participation is in our student information system in Synergy and so this and that can handle any sort of schedule so model four we don't really need to call out separately anymore and model five when that information is tracked in Synergy there is a field where our site facilitators can list the course ID number that we're working
165towards those that credit for so they can do that separately in Synergy and they can just choose model one two and three or three and we'd still have that information about credit recovery so you'll start to see that next year we may we'll be referencing just model one two or three because we are interested in learning from what is the difference between in-person or virtual what is the difference between embedded during the day or done outside of the day so we can learn learn from that um as schools started to see how this could look for them we saw very concrete decision points and action steps first one being student criteria which students do we think will benefit from high dosage tutoring the second action point or decision point was again which delivery model in
166person or virtual what do we know about our this small group students or the student which one do we think would be best the third decision point was is about which tutors do we want to hire our own PSD tutor or do we want to partner with that external service provider and have them help to deploy one of their tutors to our school or connect virtually this year we did enter into agreement with six external service providers this was a first for me that that agreement was more of a our schools may work with you they may reach out to you and see if this would work of the six about half of those we did work with and Axiom learning was one of a strong partnership that we've built the Axiom learning a thank
167you to them they really were able to respond to what our schools were trying to do and the way that they were they were doing it um the fourth decision point then became are we going to do this during the day or outside of the school day um outside of the school day I I want to say a thank you a pretty thank you to to Jeff and the transfer you may or may not know this actually yet at this point but the transportation team has been wonderful to work with because we know anytime we start to talk about support outside of the school day what if Transportation becomes the barrier tutoring by Nature makes the routing puzzle quite a puzzle because we are talking only not every single day very small group of students
168short time and after six to eight weeks it may be different students so I'm I am I know transportation is going to be there to help when we have that situation so far we've asked our schools if that becomes what might be the reason a student can't be tutored we we will problem solve that we will figure that out so far that we have not needed to step into that our schools are creative leveraging other resources getting creative about scheduling but I know our team would be there um probably when that happens not if so um okay so that was a lot of context setting um thank you for that next I'd like to step into some of the data that we're seeing from the implementation that started in quarter four of last year last
169summer and then what we've seen so far this fall okay so the first thing I'd like to share are just counts so School involvement as well as students and this was pulled from Synergy it is looking at unique student ID numbers and you'll see and I have a little I have a little more information here of the breakdown of this but we did when we started last last year at this time we had 11 Schools starting the tutoring and tracking that at in synergy that was about 10 L well not about it was 10 elementary schools and one Secondary School 135 students 118 of which were Elementary a little difference there in the summer that increase to 16 schools 11 of which were Elementary 333 students 245 which were Elementary this fall and this the
170the count here for the fall was really I we limited it to the actual cycle happened during the fall semester so we kind of cut it off if you will or we only looked at the fall increased to 36 of our schools and um 864 students so the the split there was 24 elementaries to 12 secondary and 527 elementary students which of our elementary students that's about five percent and 337 secondary students which is about two percent of our secondary students and then you can see here on the slide combined the 864 is about three percent of our students I think for me interesting to pause at this point and say three percent is that appropriate is that too few is that too many what where where are we how could we gauge this and
171so if we do I pull up the the image of the mtss instruction and intervention pyramid and typically and I'm going to stress that word typically we would see um 95 to 97 percent of our students responding positively to Universal instruction and layered on small group targeted intervention if we add on that top layer of support keep that in place and we add on very intense intervention one-on-one high frequency duration we would expect 97 95 to 97 percent of our students to respond um I think I just got all my numbers off didn't I did I you got you got me you said you got you got me um so that is how we Define titus's tutoring so that it's kind of interesting there but again typically I don't know post when we look at
172the impacts of pandemic era learning I'm not sure we're in a typical time the other thing is we know that we had more students or excuse me more Schools starting to implement this spring and more students this spring so we are up to 48 schools that have implemented this spring and um if we are well we'll see that um there was a question about and I was able to pull today and I'm this is an estimate because I did it rather quickly um but if I looked at tutoring Cycles just this spring and looked at unique IDs I would estimate right now we're up to about 1 200 students and that's about four and a half percent of our students um switch now a little bit from Individual students to the groups that we have
173tracked in Synergy again showing on these slides from quarter four to the summer to the fall now the total groups that we had in Synergy went from 18 last quarter 58 over the summer all the way up to 530 in the fall below that you see a breakdown across the different models I do want to point out because my mathematical brain you'll see that some of those totals don't add up if you work up vertically that is because we did have some the model wasn't selected in Synergy and we'll clean that up and get that that fixed but hopefully here we're seeing a pretty clear pattern of preference towards in person may make sense when we think of pandemic error learning if students were not positively impacted by that it might have been that virtual
174component and Factor there but we don't we're not going to use this data to say we're not we're going to stop all virtual tutoring we know that there are still benefits and reasons for that one being that we had a student heard the story that partnering with our external service provider they were able to get a tutor that spoke in the student's native language of poshtel we don't have that resource readily available to us that was huge that student is seeing such growth because of being able to have that tutoring in their native language another look at this is what were the focus areas of these groups so the breakdown here of math compared to literacy compared to graduation credit that graduation credit number I think is small there because they um our site facilitators
175might have picked Math versus the graduation credit but again we'll be able to look at that through the course IDs at the end of the at the end of the school year um the adults involved in all of this the tutors some more data here last school year through our employee reports from HR 98 tutors hired as of the end of February 307. the external service providers that was not in place last school year but this school year we're estimating that we've deployed about 135 from those Partnerships and 40 of which roughly have been virtual um before last thing before we start to shift into what is the impact that we've seen so far is the budget piece of what's supporting this from a financial resource so we've had three Avenues of funding to support
176high dosage tutoring two of which are Grant based that have deadlines by which we need to expend the funds and the funds have to go towards strategies to impact to address the impact of pandemic era learning so the first one we have are Federal grant funds commonly referred to as Esser about 2.2 million there those need to be expended by September of 24. so we have a school year and a little bit the second source that we have is a competitive State grant for about 2.6 that 2.6 is a carryover from our award last year plus a new award this year These funds need to be expended by June of 24. and another school year and then to June and then lastly we do have general fund covid response reserves those are the reserves that
177we have that when we see the need can go towards this and 2.9 of that Reserve has been assigned to high dosage tutoring so where we are last fiscal year's expenses did come out of federal the Federal Grant so far this year and what we'll continue to use through June of this fiscal year is going to come from the state Grant we are anticipating because again it's still happening we're anticipating that about 1.2 million will still will be able to carry over we are we were approved for a carryover for for next year so we do the state and the federal carryover would be available through next school year June and ish up into that September of the 24-25 school year but then in 2425 we do have the covid response Reserve to support so
178um or at that point maybe seeking additional funding My Hope Is we continue to learn and iterate from this what can we embed in other ways in our existing system um and I will stop with that there so impacts that we are seeing so far again I I sneak preview we are seeing positive impacts um someone happened to just emailed me last night some celebrations from tutoring so Laura Sutton assistant principal and her colleague at shepherdson have have been working to implement high dosage tutoring and she shared that you know they've again she's multiple pages but in particular a third grader last year at the end of second grade on reading Maps was at the third percentile they were able to deploy tutoring student now has bumped up to the 36th percentile a fourth grader
179has grown from the 29th to the 37th percentile and the one that tugs at my heart strings is a fourth grader after being involved in tutoring he now calls himself a reader before he would tell people he didn't know how to read but now his confidence is is through through the roof we also have a testimonial here from a principal along with some photos about a student that after the tutoring completed a final draft of writing and they celebrated that and posted that work um actually the the one from the site facilitator here that actually was last um May that was shared with me of the how important it was for a high school student to work with our tutor before school because of their anxiety before 2 000 more students just showed up um
180testimonial from a classroom teacher about the growth that they saw from their students as well as one directly from a tutor about the excitement and the engagement of of the student during tutoring so a few testimonials there and then I'm going to turn it to Dwayne to talk a little bit more about the impacts we're seeing for on the actual outcome measures thank you Kate hello everybody okay so we're going to jump right into some other information I have to say I love working with Kate I always breathe easy when she's involved in any project in PSD because it's well organized and carried out extremely well at any rate so high dosage tutoring I want to point out as we launch into this the question is really did we and does high dosage tutoring accelerate
181learning for the kids that are participating and the way that we're going to answer that is we're going to evaluate the students that were experiencing the model implementation of model 1 in model 2. Kate just showed us some data that model three four and five if you remember those n counts were real thin so there's not enough data there to do a really robust job of talking about you know how impactful it was from a statistical perspective right so we are going to focus on model one and two and we're going to look at Acadian State and we're going to look at map data in both reading and math in order to answer the question did HDT accelerate learning what we're going to do is create a match comparison group student for student for every
182student that we had HDT tutoring that we can evaluate them because we have gain scores right so we match students on seven variables six of them are characteristics you can see there and one of them is their fall you know achievement score if you will after we match these students up we start to calculate how much growth did the match comparison group achieve versus how much did the HDT group achieve right and just to ground us a little bit real quickly we're going to talk in terms of these growth effect sizes which are in standard deviation units and the column on the left but they can be directly translated to equivalent changes in the percentile range or percentile rank of students okay so if a student gets a one-fifth or 0.2 of a percentile unit
183gain that's the same exact thing as moving from the 50th percentile to the 58th percentile like an eight percentile unit gain so that table I just put it in there to remind us there's an easy translation all those by the way if you look at on the right column the eight percentile points gain the 10 the 13 the 19 does align with what Kate was just telling on the personal stories of some individual students those are pretty outstanding gains for students in reading and or math to to we're going to jump to some quick statistical analysis because really we're asking are the gains significant just not were their gains but are they significantly different are they significantly more meaning not likely due to chance to show you visually what's going on when we take the
184upper graph that we're looking at that's a little bar graph of the prior achievement scores of students that were in the control group and the lower graph is the prior achievement scores of the students that received HDT you can see those two graphs are identical that's because we went in and specifically selected them to be identical so they in other words they have the same starting point academically as measured by in this case acadians when we Flash Forward through the fall semester to the end of the fall semester and the you know the winter test scores the top graph again are the students that did not receive HDT and this the graph on the bottom is for the students who did you can notice two things relative to one another route those two groups relative
185to each other there is less of the lower scores towards the negative end of the scale for the kids who experienced HDT and there's more of a shift to the right or scores on the higher end of the scale for the students who experienced HDT so just visually real quick that is what we're looking at like their prior scores compared to their post scores and did those distribution shift Left Right relative to one another but a way to speed ourselves up and look at that and answer the question were their gains and where those gains statistically significant we do a period samples type of a test and basically what we're looking at here is we're going to look at three slides in a row this one's for the acadians reading data so all the kids
186for whom we have that type of data are are Illustrated here there's 242 of those students so that's a lot of information and you can see that on average that group gained 0.31 of a standard deviation unit which is equivalent to 12 percentile points games that's like on average a student going from the 50th percentile up to the 62nd or if they started at the 40th percentile growing all the way to the 52nd that's a big deal and that happened on average for these students so the so did we accelerate learning through HDT the answer is clearly yes based on these data okay when we look at the data similar type data but for map Reading it's not the identical students because there's different grade ranges and going on and we don't want to go
187too deep into the weeds right now just to kind of move us along but at any rate there's 128 students that are involved in this both in the match comparison group and in the HDT group on average the the HDT group had 0.38 standard deviations of additional gain or acceleration relative to the match comparison group and that's equivalent to 15 percentile points gained so again based on the map data it's telling us the same thing that yes kids did accelerate their learning that were involved in HDT moving on to the last data pile which is the math data for maps we see the same type of thing where the two groups are different and that the gains were 0.28 of a standard deviation unit or 11 percentile units that's substantial and it's statistically significant that's
188the bottom right hand corner in each one of these it shows that little p-value is less than 0.05 that means it's not likely due to chance there's something else going on and I think Kate just did a great job of talking with that about what that something is right okay another question we'll hit real quick there's there's a lot of things we can delve into and that we do delve into behind the scenes we're just hitting a few highlights for the board tonight an obvious question is since we're focusing on Model 1 and model 2 did one of them outperform the other just as a model of delivery because if that Tad happened it'd be interesting to know right as we move forward well what this data shows you is that the two models were
189virtually the same on their outcomes 0.32 and 0.31 in essence standard deviation unit gains across those two different models so there and you can see that significance number in that bottom right hand corner now is 0.806 clearly not less than 0.05 so they those two models are not different than each other and they're not significantly different okay one model appears to do as well as the other that's the acadians data moving along quickly this is the map literacy data same exact Story look at that point eight three T significance they both had super high acceleration Rate rates 0.362 0.392 so they both worked really well it's probably a matter of fitting the student with the model that they need and then looking at the math MAP data same type of story no significant difference between
190the two type of model types both model types are evidenced of acceleration and learning there there is the last point I'm going to hit before I hand this back over to Kate is there are differences this is a short list of the tutor data I just want to point out to the board that we also can look at this tutor by tutor what were the outcomes keep in mind look at the end counts on the right and how small those are compared to those big old group analyzes I was doing a second ago but this is of interest just because different tutors do get different outcomes and yes they are working with really small groups of kids nonetheless there's some potential to study what adult practices tutor practices tend to be associated with the higher
191outcomes versus the lower outcomes even though you can see as you scan down that you can see from the aggregated data above that on balance our tutors did get really high outcomes and accelerated learning across the board and with that I will hand it back to Kate so much for the chance to share we wanted to try to give the a full full picture here so we'll we'll wrap with what have been some of the learnings and the actions and next steps that that we see so so far with our implementation we have there have been so many multiple entry points whether that be across our schools across our site facilitators across the tutors the models et cetera so we are working continuing to work on the efficiency of our processes the first area of
192that is with implementation thus far it really has been let's get this support to the kids let's do it let's make it happen figure out what you think is going to work we're going to be maybe two steps unfortunately behind you trying to help you make that happen so it has felt somewhat reactive and because of those decision points I mentioned earlier now that we know more we are going to ask our schools to submit a very short plan about what they're anticipating for high dosage tutoring for the summer as well as each quarter next school year that way we have that on the front end and we can actually backwards map okay you do want to work with an external service provider okay we need to now that we know that now we've got
193three weeks to make that happen and we know when you're going to start the tutoring so we will and we'll also have that information on the front end what resources do we need to help support that also looking again just hiring and payroll how do we make those processes efficient how do we ensure that our site facilitators who maybe have never needed to work with their office manager to post a job or get hiring approval or verify time and efforts that they know those processes we train on that we're there to support them um we also just know so much more now to communicate with our external service providers about what our model is looking like and what our needs are the agreements that we entered into for this year were just one year agreements
194so we actually do have an open RFP right now um for for those Partnerships to to start to to happen we'll use ask some of our site facilitators to help us review those and identify those Partnerships for next school year we hope to possibly narrow how many that we have we really want to Target that and build a partnership there and then our Synergy tracking again that data that is very helpful to the schools so they can track participation they know what's happening but also for us again many of our site facilitators use Synergy but in a different capacity so again supporting them in I.T has been again wonderful to to support all of us with our Synergy learning the other area of learning I think it's facing our world right now is really just
195human capacity I think we're we were so fortunate to have the resource of money to support this but the resource of people and the resource of time was unfortunately not something that someone could just hand to not just hand to us we worked hard for those grants um but we our site facilitators again already full plates adding this on the way I don't know how they've done it I really don't know how they've done what they've done um but so we're just going to continue to learn how to support them we are going to be looking at increasing that how we honor that time through a stipend for them next year we're going to increase that because we know it took more time um tutors just finding tutors we we have struggled to hire our
196own and actually those Partnerships with our external service providers we've had multiple times over the year where they've just had to say we don't have anyone to fill that request right now or maybe we we just hired a few more people we've got to get them trained so we can we start in two weeks versus tomorrow type of thing so it's just we we this you know and across the board right Universal instruction intervention um just the people talented people there and I say the same thing goes for our Central support all of our departments these are similar processes that have existed but any new program has nuances and so that the capacity to continue to support this centrally we've got to keep figuring out how we can do that so to wrap um kind
197of where we started that huge thank you to everyone for this heavy lift and quickly deploying the support to to students I'm just I'm extremely proud and really humbled by what um what everyone has done next steps with that dedication of funds to address impact impact of pandemic era learning as mentioned before and I apologize that bullet isn't exactly correct we we do have that expected funding from the federal and state Grant through June of 24 plus a little more into September plus we have the Reserves to take us through the 24-25 we think school year but we we just want to do that deeper analysis of the costs to Benefits Resources to impact to help us determine what attributes of high dosage tutoring might we continue I would anticipate that a year from now
198and definitely over a year from now it's going to look different we're going to iterate and there may be elements of this again that we can embed in our intervention systems and it's not a separate piece so that is it thank you questions other comments or questions from the board DJ um yeah first of all uh on on that last slide I really appreciate the deeper analysts of the cost benefit and impact I think that is uh especially at our level something we need to definitely understand so I really appreciate listing that um I had a question about the external uh agreements you had are those guys uh are those people uh willing to uh do more than just one-on-one are they willing to do the one to four groups and stuff like that yes
199we have that outlined in the agreement that our groups may be anywhere from one student to a group of four so yes okay yep awesome and the second question about them was I was wondering if you guys did the scoring uh the effect size for them versus the ones that we hired and if you saw anything different with that so I did but I don't want to say too much especially on camera about that okay um but no they came out with a positive effect size and we had many of our tutors who came out higher than that effect size and some that came out lower so they landed in the mix awesome thank you foreign other comments or questions from the board Nate yes since we're dealing mostly with the students who are struggling
200is it typical that that student would have the instructional level and then an intervention level and also high dosage tutoring on top of that so there would be all three of those things involved yeah thank you thank you Nate for that it is definitely um yes that that may happen that a student is they have their Universal instruction they may be receiving intervention small group intervention a couple times a week in that same area and the tutor an example of that actually would be that you know maybe Upper Elementary I'm a fourth grader and I'm struggling with writing so during class when we're working on writing I'm learning about writing but maybe my teacher is giving me scaffolds of sentence stems or graphic organizers to organize my thinking before I actually go to the the
201act of writing my interventionist that I may be working with multiple times a week in a small group again maybe giving that opportunity to verbalize my thinking before I go to writing and they're helping me with my practice it's a high dosage tutoring layer may actually be that through that alignment and working with the teacher we need to actually go back and think about the smallest component of writing a sentence what is sentence structure and they might be that deepest level of support there a piece of that that I would also say that we found a benefit from high dosage tutoring is if I'm struggling with writing I may also be struggling with reading and so perhaps that intervention time has been dedicated to supporting and layering on for reading and the school may have
202been struggling when are we going to add in a layer for writing high dosage tutoring has allowed another resource for that so but yes those that those layers could be there not always if we're seeing a need for a student that we feel like oh you know there's a you know the other example I think of is as a student in geometry in high school I might be struggling and the teacher might be like you know what if we could get some intense quick tutoring on the algebra skills the prerequisite skills needed let's do that for a short amount of time to help access those geometry skills so it isn't always that there's all three of those layers but oftentimes that intense level yes it may be there I think part of as John spoke
203about earlier Our Hope would be as our students are resilient as we continue to improve and enhance our Universal and those layers of support that we wouldn't need that added layer of tutoring we get back to a point where that would not be needed that was a little probably more than you were asking for but other comments or questions from board members Jim I'm good Rob okay yeah I have to I have to ask you because your face is not on the screen now so I don't I don't know anyway it looks like not so again I would thank you both and all of the folks who worked on this and implemented it in the central office and in the schools thank you very much for this work and for helping our students to be
204successful really appreciate it thank you I'd also like to add all the schools for joining in and pumping up the numbers I'm so excited to see more schools getting involved and in doing that so it's great that they're sharing that excitement throughout each other and and the benefits of it so thank you thanks for adding that DJ agreed absolutely and now we have a budget update Brian yes we sure do but before that I'd like to make a 30 second commercial break and if we have a Cabinet member in here that is not a part of this particular presentation or executive session I want to give you some Grace uh and allow you to try to get a good night's sleep some of these good people have been up since 4am monitoring weather um and
205just really appreciate their dedication you are certainly welcome to stay uh but no feelings will be hurt in the event that you uh choose to go home with to your family so joining us and Brian please don't take that as a sign of this I always do I know we all know that you're at your best at 10 o'clock at night so here to provide our budget update is our District's budget director Brian Gustafson so welcome again Brian thank you good evening everybody um it's a big ask following Kate and Dwayne and John and a lot of great things going on um briefly I'm going to provide sort of a preview into a preliminary budget that we'll we'll have in front of you shortly and I I was reflecting back and and we all probably
206can to times when we were students a long time ago maybe this time of the year that post spring break time of the year and how man that drug that was tough that was tough going from spring break to the end of the year but then you get in these roles and it's like there's just not enough time there's just not enough time there's so much to do and so much happening and I I think about that because here we are on April 4th I'm gonna give you a preview of some items and thinking going into the preliminary budget that's going to be in front of you in just two weeks thinking about fiscal year 24 and there's actually going to be some albeit a draft but some substance there in just two weeks and
207that's fast that's fast so we'll Jump Right In I know you still got a lot to do tonight and uh you've you've reviewed much of this stuff already right we talked to you in December and Dave shared a lot of information in February and just want to in some ways confirm some information that we've already shared but also uh maybe share a little bit of new but also reaffirm that gosh we're still waiting on a lot of information too so from the revenue side of things we're looking at three big assumptions still right and and we're waiting for a school Finance act but we really still believe it will be based on an inflation rate of eight percent okay so that per pupil rate is typically driven by that inflation rate and that inflation rate
208of eight percent goes back to December of 2022 and is is likely what we're going to see in our formula hey another big talking point is that budget stabilization factor I know that that gets a lot of traction it's been interesting reviewing the long bill which is making its way through its process right now the budget stabilization Factor is held constant in that long bill at 321 million dollars the talk all fall and even through the summer was that was going to be reduced well it seems like a different mechanism coming at us for next year the general fund is not slated to buy down that budget stabilization factor and instead we're likely hopefully going to see that buy down coming from the state education fund which is sort of that rainy day fund for
209State education it comes from income tax Collections and it's it's projected to get at a level of a little over a billion dollars here soon and so what we're hoping to see is still that budget stabilization Factor buy down but coming from a different source and the information that we get is that could be anywhere from half of that okay for the Statewide 160 million to maybe even all of it I'd be surprised about seeing all of it bought down but would love to see you know that half and and so that that's a big that's a big variable for us to consider with our Revenue projections and we're hoping uh we're hoping we can see and learn more of that really really quickly and we've talked with you about this before the projected per
210pupil rates that Statewide average that came through in the governor's budget request is just over ten thousand four hundred dollars kind of true to form uh pooter School District we are at about 95 96 percent of that and we look to have an almost nine hundred dollar increase in per pupil rate next year at 9957 dollars okay that is all it's review but but uh hopefully things that are still progressing through the the school Finance act process okay on the screen is a table that's been shared with you before as well that reviews are funded pupils and averaging hey at PSD as a declining enrollment District recently we're going to work on a five-year average funded pupil count and the important number here is really that 29 214.2 hey that's the number that we're we're
211building this preliminary budget off of 214.2 non-charter students and that's the same number we've been working with based on our our district enrollment projections and also what's in the governor's proposal and I'm I'm going to go pretty quickly and feel free to jump in with questions and and we'll obviously have an opportunity at the end for questions as well again another table that we've shared before where we compare the current year fund a pupil count and the per pupil Revenue versus what we expect next year we're expecting that not quite 900 increase in per pupil rate next year times that 29 214.2 students and we expect to see our total program which that's the the basis the bulk of our Revenue about 73 percent of our Revenue increase by about 24.4 million dollars a year
212over year increase 24 and not quite a half million dollars again this is off the information that came from the governor's revised budget proposal in January still the same data that we saw kind of progressing in the long Bill and hopefully we see in the school financing okay so that's the big pot of Revenue the the total program funding hey we have obviously Revenue beyond that and above that and we've got categorical increases and in that long bill that that's the legislation that essentially sets the state budget there are also some identifiers on increases in categorical funding and so this is some new information since the last time we we shared with you we do expect to see about a 13.4 percent increase in special education categorical funding for us that would be about 1.1
213million dollars and it's really it's it's great to note that that as recurring Revenue added on to the category categorical funding that was implemented this year of just over two million dollars now we're looking at three million dollars of additional special education funding to help with you know implementing a new model and and new allocations for Staffing in our integrated services department so we're excited about that transportation we expect to see just shy of a nine percent increase about 190 thousand dollars and vocational education about an eight percent increase to the tune of one hundred and forty five thousand dollars English language proficiency a pretty large increase 23.9 percent uh and for us that's 110 000 of additional categorical Revenue and gifted and talented 2.9 percent increase which would come to about forty thousand dollars
214so those are the categoricals on top of the program funding and we're keeping a really high level here so that's sort of the big Revenue picture and let's talk big expenditure uh picture right now [Music] the the biggest driver in expenditures we know is compensation about 86 percent of what we spend is on people's investment in our staff and that process is ongoing through the negotiation process a lot of people are working hard on dialing in what that's going to look like for 23.24 and we've got a little bit of I guess numerical multiplier data to share as far as what are some costs that the compensation committee and negotiations are going to be considering as they go through this process and these multipliers apply to all of our employee groups classified administrative certified okay
215as we project in the next year we look at what would a one percent or what would one percent of a cost of living cost increase look like that'd be about two and a half million dollars so it's important to note that for each one percent of cost of living increase we're adding on another 2.5 million dollars so if we got you know a three percent got in that three percent cost of living range we're looking at seven and a half million dollars of increased compensation costs right and this information Dave did a great job putting this all together sharing it with the compensation committee and and they're cranking right they're able to run scenarios and and talk through things and and it's it's really cool to see that collaboration and if we can picture
216in our minds that sort of traditional compensation structure in a school the steps moving down with years of experience each step throughout our our employee groups would cost about 5.1 million dollars to move a step going to cost just over five million dollars okay so those are those variables that now start to get factored into that available additional Revenue how are we going to match that with with expenditures and compensation Etc other things that we're analyzing as far as cost increases okay as enrollment changes as Revenue changes our allocations to our Charter Schools also change those are on a pro rat a share and Charter population this year made about made up about nine percent of the district funded pupil count so about nine percent of that would be an additional 2.4 million dollars of
217funds allocated to the charters okay that would take that number into the just shy of probably 34 million dollars total going to to Charter allocations and then we've got some TBD still you know we still have some unknowns that we're working through and they're going to be estimates for a while probably some of these what are utilities going to look like we're all feeling that at home right how are those cost increases going to impact the district we're working through some of that difference um in our insurance premiums okay what the the district pays to to do business okay all these costs of doing business things are going up as we all can relate the cost of fuel Etc so we still have some question marks that we've got to work through in some of
218those other categories so when we take that information and combine it into a table that's on your screen right now we compare basically those big Revenue categories with those big expenditure categories that school Finance Act generating about 24.4 million dollars of new Revenue that special education categorical increase of 1.1 million one item that I haven't touched on yet is that we do have one of our middle Levee overrides that grows with the rate of inflation so our 2019 Mill Levy override will grow by that eight percent that's an additional 1.5 million dollars of Revenue there as well so we factor that in and we've got about 27 million dollars of Charter shared Revenue then we start to take items out that allocation to the charters of 2 million 2.4 million and then we can add
219it back in some of those other categoricals we've got question marks which usually isn't very good for an equation right you got a question mark for other revenue and utilities and insurance we'll have some numbers in there and there'll be estimates but the Hope really is that additional revenue generated in our specific ownership tax and in our investments will help offset some of those utilities increases insurance premiums increases as well fingers crossed there bottom line in this projection that is is driving our preliminary budget we're looking at 24.1 million dollars available to work with for compensation benefits increases that are potentially on the horizon and other District priorities before you go off this slide could you tell us what that integrated Services line means increase in ratio allocations yeah right down there at the bottom
220the Integrated Service increase in ratio allocations of a negative one point or one million dollars okay this year the is department and worked really hard especially in the spring semester to adjust and Implement a new Staffing allocation formula basically that to work with all of our schools and to get there it costs about a million dollars this year but also that 2.1 million dollars of the categorical funding I touched on a little bit ago all right so it's costing a little bit more to redistribute that but we knew that we had that additional categorical Revenue this year and we're banking a little bit on what we see coming in and new funding for special ed next year so that one million there probably goes against this the uh the special ed categorical at the top
221yep great thank you that clarifies it thank you so what are some items we're still watching besides the whole school Finance act okay well that's right there uh we hear that hopefully that's to be introduced next week and Dave's pretty he's pretty tight with the lobbyists and folks that have information I think you all are too so as as we hear stuff we'll get that recorded initially last fall there was a lot of talk about a potential formula overhaul maybe even coming from different directions and that's gotten really quiet we just don't think we're going to see a big school Finance formula overhaul that's an incredible incredible task and so probably not happening although there may still be modifications when it comes to cost of living and at-risk shifts big question mark still surround the
222universal Pre-K and healthy meals for all we do know that the long Bill allocated 322 million dollars Statewide for the universal Pre-K implementation as for preschoolers to re receive that minimum of 15 hours of no out-of-pocket cost preschool hey what our portion is still awaiting what what that looks like well then we'll get that figured out and and estimate it as well and same with the healthy meals we a whole lot whole lot of hurry up and wait as far as some numbers some of those and then we're also curious to to monitor the rapidly changing world of assessed valuation it's a assessment year I expect that that AV rate is really going to gonna climb and what will that do to the the formula right if if more local property taxes are funding the
223formula it means less State Equalization that's pretty much the design of the 1994 School Finance formula but there may be opportunities or um initiatives to offer some property tax relief to taxpayers and mitigate some of those increases so we'll keep our eyes on those things as well The District budget priorities this is a review I won't spend really time on these a lot of great information especially tonight on the literacy and and obviously significant resources being allocated there and and you are seeing the the great things that are starting to happen there the timeline that lies ahead ahead of us uh this Friday our budget design team will convene again that group is really instrumental in evaluating the district priorities we're open as I mentioned for the school Finance to act act to drop next
224year or next year next week next year as well negotiations next Wednesday the 12th along with another cop compensation committee meeting that day and then back to you on the 18th with a preliminary budget that's a draft that'll be our jumping off point for our budget for fiscal year 24. our budget advisory committee that weighs in on some of those priorities as well provides us some feedback we're getting together with them on April 24th another budget design team group meeting on the 28th negotiations in May with the goal of having a proposed budget to you on May 23rd and then budget adoption hopefully on June 13th so it'll become fast and a lot of information will really start flowing here soon and this on the screen is the budget process timeline that we've been following
225throughout the year it's hard to believe we're already trending toward the right end of that and the years is moving quite quickly with that what questions do you have do we have questions from the board not seeing any Jam the thing here Robin did you have any questions I said nothing here Rob Oh I thought I what what it sounded like you said is I'm here Rob so sorry got it yeah I have uh I have one question and that is the cost of a cola is that on top of this step I mean presumably the cola is yes yeah okay so it's so it's if you apply a step and then you do a cola to it it costs 2.5 million dollars okay great thank you it looks like that's it as far as
226questions are concerned thank you very much for keeping us up to date and we look forward to the budget the preliminary budget next time speaking of which I'll just quickly we're going to have an executive session here in a second but if anybody's still watching um I would just uh remind you that we are still on the first and third uh Tuesdays of the month for April here but then going in may we go back to our regular schedule of the second and fourth Tuesdays and that means in May on the 9th and 23rd of May for our regular meetings with that uh can I get a motion with respect to our executive session Nate I move that the board enter executive session for the purpose of developing the strategy of the school district for
227negotiations related to the 2023 to 2024 collective bargaining agreement or employment contracts as authorized by CRS 24-6-402 4e3 individuals invited to join the board an executive session or superintendent Brian Kingsley Chief officers Lauren Hooten Dave Montoya Madeleine noblet Eric Bon Savage and general counsel Autumn Aspen do I have a second looks like a second from Kristen can I have a vote on that motion please Jill DJ Anderson aye Jim brokish Nate Donovan aye Christian Draper aye Rob Peterson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes 7-0 excellent thank you very much Jillian for again for anybody who's still watching uh we will now convene in closed session the only thing that will happen after that in public is I will come out here and pound this gavel to adjourn the meeting I'll hopefully still
228on April 4th and it is now 1005 on said April 4th thank you for joining us thank you