001foreign all right thank you very much for joining the Board of Education meeting this evening please mute your cell phones as we begin the meeting today is Tuesday January 10 2023 and the meeting is now called to order at approximately 6 35 PM I'm sorry that we're we run a little late here we had a couple of things we were a couple of things we were talking to somebody about so if you will join me for the Pledge of Allegiance which is the first item in rrj and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all great thank you very much would any board members like to make any changes to the agenda it looks like not in which case we will move on to recognitions
002and reports and I believe we have one pretty exciting one today and I'll turn it over the superintendent for that we have a super exciting recognition you're absolutely right board president Patterson so this evening we're honored to recognize an incredible pooter School District student from Lincoln Middle School leading tonight's celebration is our Chief Information officer Miss Madeline noblet Madeleine welcome thank you superintendent Kingsley members of the board cabinet and everyone gathered here this evening as superintendent Kingsley alluded to we do have an exciting recognition as those who have watched meetings and participated in the past know we are typically recognizing our students and staff who go on to win State national or International awards for their outstanding academic work and work supporting our students or we are recognizing Community Partners who help amplify the efforts
003that are happening in PSD every day but this evening we're doing something that is unique in that we are recognizing a student who through their quick thinking and as we were as I learned before the meeting started by watching TV was able to save the life of one of their classmates and so with that I would like to welcome up here to the lectern alongside me is my colleague principal Ryan Thompson from Lincoln Middle School along with uh nights the student receiving our recognition Jacob Vint so that we can celebrate Jacob for his efforts and just be incredibly proud to um of everything that you did and to be able to say thank you we appreciate you [Applause] Thank you Madeline and thank you superintendent Kingsley and members of the board well I gotta raise
004this up a little bit sorry first of all I wanted to start by just saying this is a 13 year old young man and at 13 as I think back many many years ago uh I don't know and I'd like to think I could but I don't know that I could do the things that Jacob did in that moment and with that tenacity and that just quick thinking and selflessness so I'll start off by saying just a little a couple of things from a couple of teachers uh Jacob has been a selfless leader on the football team and he is an amazing young man in Mr gillis's class as well and he is always positive but on this day started off normal and he went to math class and another student was chewing on some
005ice but he wasn't chewing enough on this piece of ice as it was on his tongue and he leaned back a little bit and it went into his throat and at one quick nanosecond he was changing from smiles to you know and as much as you can display it he was choking and at Jacob's table he looked at him and he said hey are you okay are you gonna throw are you gonna puke actually are you gonna puke and he couldn't get the words out to and so as he was kind of slumping over Jacob observed in the classroom kids were observing everybody was kind of locked and you know what do we do and Jacob hustled around the table we got him up and did the Heimlich maneuver and out pops this giant piece
006of ice and at that point the glass just kind of cheered for him and they finished class just like another normal day we wouldn't have known anything about it except when Jacob and the other student and all the other students from the class came into lunchroom Jacob said I think I just saved somebody's life to officer Dane and Dane comes over tells me I'm like what we don't know anything about this and so we went and talked to Jacob and I said what tell me what happened and sure enough he tells me the story and I'm thinking what the heck is going on here that we don't have the communication that this just happened and so we talked to other students they're like yeah it was so quick he jumped around there and did it
007I was like where did you learn that did you learn it formally uh no I saw it on TV and I thought again 13 years old at 13 could I have put that into methodology and use that training that I learned on TV and would I have to save my buddy's life across from me the quick thinking and selflessness and then the first I I made a call a couple of calls like oh my God our one of our students just saved another student's life what do we do to bring recognition to this young man because he changed two students life at least for the rest of their lives one who went in we interviewed him we asked hey do you think you may have died and he said you know I would have at
008least passed out because I was feeling my breath slip away and I was starting to feel a little woozy and I said well and officer Dane was there too said well we wouldn't have made it so you probably would have if you fell on the ground with it still lodged in your throat and so again it was a quick thinking 13 year old that changed this other young man's life and and gave him a future so again I I can't say enough about Jacob and I just want to help celebrate and bring this recognition to him so please um help me yeah he wants to stuff I just want to say even though he wasn't my friend and just a random student I would have saved his life either way [Applause] thank you very much
009Jacob congratulations uh do you have any idea what you want to be when you graduate or what do you want to do post graduation but I think that's an awesome fit for you so let me say this in the microphone so Jacob the skill sets that were described by you today by your principal and by and think of the people that are here to support you they are exactly the qualities that represent the people that we want to not just hire in this District but we want to be in community with we're looking for people to serve we're looking people to be observant and Vigilant people to take care and show love and compassion and action towards others and you did all of that without being asked to because it was the right thing to
010do and somewhere along the way you have learned whether through your family through your school through your community how to take care of yourself and take care of others and I just want you to know how significant that is I've been the superintendent of this district for 18 months I've recognized people for graduation rates for being outstanding athletes for being world-class musicians and artists this is the first time that I've recognized anyone for saving another person's life and I will forever remember it I just want to say thank you that we are collectively super proud of you and we hope that you continue to be you and help serve this community you make us better and stronger I just want to say thank you [Applause] myself don't touch it one more would you like to
011be in one yeah it's okay foreign [Applause] foreign thank you so much and that concludes recognitions for this evening thank you very much our next uh item is our first action item for the evening which is a resolution in support of Dr Martin Luther King Day would somebody like to make a motion first of all uh yes Nate yes I move that the board approve and adopt the resolution and support of Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day January 16 2023. excellent thank you do I have a second DJ's got a second there would somebody like to read the motion and then we have some folks to share with share some thoughts with us I think go ahead Nate resolution of the Pooter School District Board of Education in support of Dr Martin Luther King Jr
012Day January 16 2023. whereas the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr was born on January 15 1929 and was assassinated on April 4th 1968 and whereas he would later become the leader of the American Civil Rights Movement through non-violence and Civil Disobedience from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 and whereas Dr king led the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott for 381 days to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks and the segregation of the bus system during which time Dr King was arrested and his home was bombed and whereas Dr King responded to arrests and violence with non-violence and courage in the face of hatred and fervently advocated non-violent resistance as the strategy to end segregation and racial discrimination in America and in 1964 at age 35 became the youngest man to be awarded the Nobel Peace
013Prize in recognition for his efforts and whereas through his work and Reliance on non-violent protests Dr King was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the voting Rights Act of 1965 and whereas for his work in alleviating racial inequity inequality through non-violent resistance Martin Luther King Jr day was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and whereas Dr King will be remembered for awakening the conscience and consciousness of the United States and using his message of Hope to bring people together to build the Beloved Community a community of justice and whereas the black community faces faces cultural and systemic barriers to an inclusive and Equitable education Booter School District strives to close the equity and opportunity gaps for black students and Promises to commemorate the legacy of Dr
014King by creating and upholding Equitable inclusive and rigorous educational opportunities experiences and outcomes 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 black and we recognize there is more work ahead of us diversity equity and inclusion are fundamental values in pooter school district and we are committed to ensuring that black students families and staff are valued seen and heard now therefore be it resolved the Pooter School District board of education does hereby Proclaim January 16 2023 as Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day in pooter School District we encourage students staff in the community to celebrate Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Junior and those who have followed in the reverence footsteps expanding social
015justice and civil rights throughout the United States of America and here in Fort Collins thank you for reading that I appreciate it and now superintendent Kingsley I believe you have someone from staff to share with us some insights on this yes thank you so as tonight as we listen and celebrate this resolution in support of Dr Martin Luther King Jr day I just want to invite and remind our Collective community that we will be celebrating this very important holiday and the work of Dr King with a march to Old Town Square next Monday if you would like to join many members of our district I invite you to come to Washington Park at 11 A.M where I believe will March to the Lori Student Center where there'll be incredible activities and celebration of his life
016and Legacy and as we can acknowledge that there have been some strides over time there are tremendous inequities that still exist and must be dismantled particularly for those who are most marginalized I'm really grateful that we're here tonight joined by both staff and students to begin talking about the importance of this day joining us this evening to speak in support of not only this resolution but the day Dr Martin Luther King Junior Day is PST diversity equity and inclusion coordinator Ms Delia mahaney who was also joined by Hooter high school student treyshawna Stevens and Rocky Mountain High School student Owen Wentz welcome to all of you we're really excited that you're here superintendent Kingsley and Board of Education what I value most about uplifting the legacy of Dr Martin Luther King Jr is that our
017community comes together no matter our identities and lived experiences to actualize our potential to build and live in a Beloved Community a community of justice and Equity the quote on my shirt from Dr King states in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the Silence of our friends I chose this because the theme of this year's Dr Martin Luther King Day parade and celebration is voice violence oppression isolation cannot endure tonight our two speakers to the resolution in recognition of Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day are using their voices to talk about their thoughts and feelings as students in our system trishana Stevens a freshman at Peter High School will speak to the resolutions importance as a black student in our district and Owen Wentz a student a senior at
018Rocky Mountain High School equal will address what it means to him as an ally an individual who recognizes the importance of showing up alongside and in support of Social and racial and racial Justice it's also trishana's birthday today [Applause] you're fine hi my name is Roshana Stevens I'm a freshman at Peter High School I believe that honoring Dr Dr King's birthday with anesh with a national holiday and this resolution is important because he fought for what he believed in and worked to make the world a better place for everyone Dr King used his voice and poetic words to inspire others to do the right thing while showing that the work to make the world a better place needs to be done not just by a black person but by all people Dr King also showed
019that people can change the world resolutions like this are also important because when you don't recognize something a black person has done to change the world you are also hurt you are hurting and disrespecting members of the black community even if you don't mean to foreign ly it is important to recognize this holiday and participate in the acts of servant acts of service on and around January 16th to honor his legacy thank you [Applause] hello uh I'm Owen Wentz uh I'm humbled to speak in front of you tonight and uh while I'm sure there's more eloquent speakers than myself I'm grateful for the opportunity to share some of my thoughts I'm a senior at Rocky Mountain High School I'm a peer counselor and I'm a student athlete as well also on top of that I
020am an ally um I'm here to listen and listening is important so we can address the issue and then ultimately fix the issue but with honoring uh Dr Martin Luther King it's not just about honoring him for his uh many great contribution contributions but it's also honoring his ideas that are still relevant and important today equality being judged for who you are and not what you are and and hope for a better future for the all of us are just some of his ideas that are important today Dr King once said Injustice everywhere is a threat to Justice everywhere I believe PSD should listen to all representatives of the community to make sure this quote Rings true in our district thank you foreign thank you very much for sharing those eloquent thoughts um are there
021comments by members of the board go ahead DJ one of the things that I think is important and I appreciate you bringing it up too is that uh his thoughts and ideas are something that we need to think about more often and I think the beauty of January 16th and honoring him is that we get an opportunity to bring them back up and talk about them and so I thank you for uh being here and sharing your guys's thoughts so much uh and I also encourage everyone to take a moment to think about uh the steps that we have made which we have made some but how much farther we still need to go and we need everyone to listen and to get involved so thank you well spoken other thoughts go ahead Brian so
022a couple of thoughts that trishana and Owen uh you make us proud I just want to say thank you for your student advocacy I want to thank you for using your voice here tonight to talk about the importance of us inspiring ourselves into action into service trishan is something that I've heard and the responsibility reminding us the responsibility of not just for some people for all people to take part in changing the world for better Owen your humility and your gratitude for the opportunity to speak tonight shine through and I'm really grateful for you elevating the importance of allyship as we continue to do this work the work that we have to do as a community to come alongside as Miss mahaney eloquently said is Mission critical you know what some of my favorite words
023that Dr Martin Luther King shared is about compassion he talked about true compassion not being simply flinging a coin to a beggar but it's realizing that an edifice that produces that beggar exists and it needs to be restructured the gestures that we take part in as a society as a community cannot simply be symbolic in nature whether it's a March or an act of service it's doing the mirror work and the Deep reflection to realize that we need to identify ways to dismantle institutional racism to dismantle other opportunities that don't exist for all people to thrive and to succeed and this is an opportunity to take one step forward and trishana and Owen from a student perspective not only did you use your voice today for the better men of our community but you reminded
024all of us the responsibility that we have as adults to follow you into a place of action so I could not be more proud to be your superintendent so thank you for being here foreign thank you very much for sharing those remarks Brian it's uh as usual impossible to say more so thank you so much um Jill if you would call a vote on this uh resolution I'd appreciate it DJ Anderson aye Nate Donovan hi person aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes five zero thank you very much really appreciate it and thank you again for for sharing your thoughts and for speaking in support of the resolution tonight and in in uh and in remembrance really of Dr King and his legacy and the work we still need to do thank you
025so much um next item on the agenda is the superintendent report and we'll look to superintendent Kingsley to make remarks to the board in the community we can if you want sure Shawna and Owen would it be okay with your if it's okay I know you're about to leave in Miss mahini I apologize but I think it would be appropriate for the board and myself to have a great opportunity to take a picture with all of you to celebrate this really important moment is that okay yeah thank you okay we'll take a quick pause for that you know Capricorns rule the world right [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] now all right let's get you all front and center yeah thank you what's your name thank you all right the floor is yours superintendent Kingsley all right thank
026you for that point of privilege to honor those young students and staff for that incredibly momentous occasion I really appreciate it I want to wish the community and our governance team and extended staff a happy New Year and and welcome back to our school system for an exciting 2023. I had an opportunity to start this school year the same way that we closed out by getting into our schools and I want to highlight one school in particular which is bacon Elementary School who I had an incredible visit with uh just yesterday if you're not aware one of our center-based autism programs is housed at bacon Elementary School and while I've had an opportunity to walk the halls with principal Joe horkey not just our program our autism program but our other classrooms I was just
027really impressed with the high level of literacy engagement that came back just from day one coming back into the school year but as I had an opportunity Unity to you know meet many of the students who were in that highly specialized program and the various paraprofessionals and licensed staff and leaders who support it now I will say I do believe that every member of the school district Community is a superhero but the people who are serving those highly specialized areas their Cape may be a little longer a little brighter but the work that they were doing in supporting some of our most marginalized students was highly compassionate empathetic it was centered on belonging and patience using state-of-the-art Technologies to help provide students opportunities to communicate in new and meaningful ways all in the spirit of
028accelerating learning and I know those types of things are happening across the district but I just wanted to take a moment to celebrate the work that's happening at bacon Elementary School I'm just really grateful for all the staff and the family trusts that exist in that Collective School community uh we have a lot of exciting topics on tonight's agenda one that I have been passionate about my entire career is the work around literacy and the importance of supporting literacy work by providing high quality instructional materials not just to our children but to our staff members to our community members to make sure that we're using the best materials available and we're providing robust professional development services to ensure that our families our students our teachers are all set up for Success on a day-to-day basis
029I've had an opportunity as you all know to get a bird's eye view of the presentation that you're going to see tonight it is both highly informative and highly educational and I just I'm really really proud of the collective team's efforts to take us to where we are we're very close to making a decision but we are still in the process of soliciting feedback from our broader community and I want to invite all members of the community I want to thank the Coloradan for publishing an article today on this very important process to help us get the word out that we have engagement sessions on January 17th 18th and 19th to engage the community so we can get their feedback on our selection process to make sure that we all see ourselves in this highly
030important district-wide investment we'll also have another update later tonight on the importance and the impact of our summer programming while I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the impact of covid as an educator I think we can all believe that maximizing time on task and making sure that we continue to engage students in high enrichment opportunities both during the school day after school before school and throughout the course of the summer continues to be a system-wide priority this system continues to do great work in this area I remember a year ago celebrating the significant impact on reducing summer slide for those of you that may not know what that means is the regression of academics and knowledge that sometimes takes place as a result of students not being engaged in a
031highly contextualized educational environment over the course of the summer these types of summer programs that are done in partnership with our employees and outside entities whether they're philanthropies and non-profits are super significant and continue to show a robust impact and we continue to expand these offerings to ensure most more students can participate so I'm looking forward both to that presentation but also taking a moment to celebrate the hard work of people knowing that people are quite exhausted people have been working around the clock to try to figure out ways to continue to provide children and young adults with what they need to get them across the Finish Line to keep them plugged in and engaged in school knowing that they're a part of something bigger than themselves and I just want to continue to honor
032that celebration and honor this investment in our young people tonight lastly I want to share something and this is not to bring down the room but I think it's important in my position that we address and Tackle challenges head on and for those of you that may be paying attention to either our newspaper or local media are aware that we have been dealing with some issues with water at a subset of our schools water testing has been taking place at some of our schools after elevated levels of copper were found in some fixtures and locations at Wellington Middle High School just before winter break elevated levels were also found in two locations within Rice Elementary School as well I want to remind the community and our staff that our staff took and continue to take
033immediate steps to address this issue throughout the holidays knowing the importance of making sure that we're providing the most safe environment for both staff and students on a day-to-day basis these were all done all of the action steps that our district has taken we're done with the investment from our County and our state health departments as you know and I don't need to read this to you that we care deeply about the people in this community We are family members we are friends we are colleagues we care about each other and it goes beyond the work that we do between Educators and children on a day-to-day basis people matter most in this District we know that students can't learn staff can't work when they're not focused when they're focused on their well-being more than the
034things that are in front of them such as water now I will tell you that Although our district does not yet know the cause for the elevated levels the district has taken a number of steps in response including working with an external water engineer to assess and test multiple locations and fixtures we've also determined whether filters were reducing these levels of high copper in our water lines we're making and continuing to make bottled water available we did that initially followed by installing water coolers with filtered water throughout all of the impacted schools we're restricting the use of Hydration Stations drinking fountains and sinks for drinking and we're continuing to collaborate and prioritize meeting with State and County Health departments and the town of Wellington on a sampling and testing plan our district believes in transparency
035and we're going to continue to communicate with staff and families as more information becomes available we'll also continue to partner with the health department to ensure that what we communicate is vetted by medical and public health professionals again I want to remind all of us that nothing is more important to us than our staff our students and their safety we will continue to provide information as we know it and we appreciate our local media sources helping us continue to get this information out and for all people that are impacted by this particular scenario to make sure that they're funneling their questions and Curiosities through the appropriate channels and we look forward to continue to providing more information on how best to do that in the very near future so thank you again for the opportunity
036to share my comments this evening appreciate that thank you the next item on our agenda is community comment the board desires to hear viewpoints of all stakeholders including students employees parents Guardians and community members and the Board needs to conduct this business of the district in an orderly timely and respectful manner input that is most helpful to the board of education and District staff is that which identifies a problem and proposes a solution for us to consider that ultimately improves the educational and social social emotional experiences of our students public comment is designed to address issues and not personalities or Personnel matters please keep your concerns and comments focused on the district we ask that you not directly call out an individual whether a student parent Guardian staff member or Community member it is important
037to note that the board does not generally respond to remarks made during Community comment our lack of response should not be construed to mean that we agree or disagree with what is said or with the 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 our 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 everyone that this opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline the three people tonight will be called on to
038make remarks in the order that they signed up and will be allowed three minutes each to address the board at the end of each speaker's time if that person is not finished I will respectfully ask that person to conclude the remarks immediately thank you with that our first Speaker this evening is Jim weinbrenner welcome there we are after November 29th board meeting because of the unusual nature of that meeting I estimate about 20 seats were available for public seating I tried to watch the meeting on Comcast channel 10 but I was frustrated to find no audio I then joined about 11 people viewing the meeting Live on YouTube to keep this in perspective with roughly 30 000 students in PSD maybe 30 people watched the meeting board member Draper summarized the November 29th meeting by
039saying eight thousand of our students identify as queer or non-non-binary with five thousand of those thinking about hurting themselves or considering considering suicide that's out of 30 000 students nothing about this on your website nothing in The Coloradoan nothing on local news parents are in the dark back on November 7th I sent a positive constructive proposal to board members I suggested a public on the record meeting with board members and support staff in a high school auditorium parents in the auditorium would be able to ask questions with follow-ups directly to PSD Administration regarding District lgbtq policies I know my proposal was delivered but I never received any formal response from the district my proposal matched what was promised eight months ago in this boardroom Mr Peterson you assured back and forth dialogue with parents about
040difficult issues and how the district is addressing them I wanted to re-emphasize what I heard from superintendent Kingsley and what I believe and I know the board believes and that is we are going to go forward with Community engagement activities I don't know the schedule yet but you can be assured that they will exist and they will be opportunities for us to have the kind of dialogue that folks were talking about here back and forth dialogue about difficult issues and how we're approaching them so we look forward to those uh engagement sessions uh in certainly in the new school year and maybe before that question does PSD have a specific strategy for our 5 000 queer and non-binary students who are thinking about hurting themselves or considering suicide Mr Peterson do you think parents and
041parents should know about this difficult issue and how the district is addressing it or is this strictly a rhetorical question a question to which no answer is expected and to which no answer will be given does the district plan to double down and hire a second full-time lgbtq core Advocate because of 5 000 of those students thinking about hurting themselves or contemplating suicide Mr Peterson is this a difficult issue should parents know how the district is addressing it I think now is the time for PSD to schedule an open meeting on the record in a high school auditorium to inform parents of how the district is handling these difficult issues and by the way tonight this is being heard only by the spokesness room about 21 people on the YouTube live because the Comcast 10
042Channel 10 is mute there is no audio thank you our next speaker is Jeff afterheide welcome my name is Jeff afterhuddy from Wellington Colorado the board of directors signaled their intention to be more transparent with their associations they recently complied with their conflicts of interest policy and doing so represents a significant Milestone as the board has not done so in almost 10 years and I want to say thank you for doing that I do appreciate that tonight I have two requests of the board and District leadership my first request is now that the process has been completed where can the average citizen view the completed form signed by the individual board members my recommendation is that it's placed on the board of board of directors section on the PSD website my second request is now
043that secondly that now that the conflict of interest statements are signed where can the average citizen view what organizations provide grant money to the district where can the average citizen view what programs they support if the grant information is not available on puta School District's website already when will this information be available on the district's website for public inspection it is important to understand what local state and National organizations provide money to the district and I believe it is imperative to understand what programs studies or initiatives are being supported by the money thank you thank you I have been informed that our third person who is going to come tonight is not here right so that concludes Community comment for this evening next up on our agenda is board topics or committee reports is anybody
044from the board would like to speak DJ I just want to point out that the legislative session has just gotten started down in Denver and uh we will be monitoring that closely for any issues that might pertain to school board and to our students absolutely we meet regularly there's a subset of us sorry that meet regularly in public meeting by the way as the legislative subcommittee to talk about uh legislation that is either pending or maybe pending before the before the legislature and we uh try to influence that for the best interests of our students and our district other comments looks like not okay then we're on to the consent agenda can I have a motion to approve oh first of all would anybody like to remove anything from the consent agenda looks like not
045can I have a motion to approve it go ahead Nate I move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items on the consent agenda second anybody looks like Jess did that one sorry every Everybody sort of did but I'll give it to Jess uh and then Jill if you call a vote on this I'd appreciate it DJ Anderson aye Nate Donovan aye Rob Pederson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes five zero thanks very much Joe I appreciate it now we're on to our second set of action items which is really one I believe and that is a resolution in support of revised director districts for the Board of Education uh may I get a motion on this uh resolution and then I'll speak to it a little bit
046go ahead Nate or Chris uh Carolyn sorry Kristoff yeah I got it how's that I move that the board approve and adopt the resolution in support of the revision of Board of Education director districts which will enact the new director District configuration as of the date the resolution is approved excellent so thank you so much can I have a second and DJ got that one all right so for those who are uh didn't look at the packet and whatnot uh every uh regularly we are required to try to align our districts that is the districts from which each of us is elected based on population changes so that the population in each of the um each of the districts director districts is what we call them is roughly equivalent uh there's no way to make
047it exactly equivalent without dividing streets and Neighbors from each other and whatever so we try to make those dividing lines uh based on major roads for example and other other clear Geographic boundaries and if you wish to see the new director districts which are slightly different from the current ones because population has shifted between them you are welcome to look at the packet and I believe they will probably be posted on the on the board of education website to once they're approved um that's the background is there any comment that folks would like to make on this Nate and then DJ yes I've looked at the reconfigured director districts and I think they make good sense um I'd like to welcome the additional constituents to uh director District B that I represent but I want
048to make it clear that uh the director districts are districts in which a person has to reside but everyone in the pooter School District elects all seven seats on the board of education and I appreciate staff's work on this and I think it's it's interesting to me to see how now that they're reconfigured the uh narrowness in deviation from the mean number of uh people it's very it's very small now it was a little larger before so I think it makes good sense that we adopt this resolution thanks yeah and so I was just wanting to clarify too for people that might want to run here uh we will have an election here in November uh that these areas uh my district is taking over some of B so again we knocked you out Nate
049um but uh that you need to live in these areas so I just wanted to stress that also and uh thanks this thank the staff for uh the time that it takes to try to get this to balance out and make sure that it works so thank you okay I think that's it for our comments here uh Jill if you'd call a vote on this I'd appreciate it DJ Anderson aye Nate Donovan all right Rob Pederson aye Carolyn Reed aye Jessica Zamora aye motion passes five zero thank you again Jill uh our next segment of the agenda is informational reports and discussion items and as uh superintendent Kingsley alluded to earlier we have two areas tonight one of them is an update on our elementary literacy adoption thank you presenting the elementary literacy adoption update
050this evening is our District's director of curriculum Mr John pasentino and I want to also thank Miss K canine our director of learning and teaching being here for support this evening uh John welcome we're excited to hear your presentation oh there's we go all right thank you mm-hmm okay good evening superintendent Kingsley board directors uh thank you for having me here this evening to provide this update we are in the process of doing an elementary literacy adoption and one of the things I'd like to emphasize we look at a district priority in the area of literacy and we like to talk about literacy as a gateway to learning it's extremely important in the elementary literacy adoption therefore is very important for our Student Success going forward when we talk about literacy we are talking about
051reading writing and communicating in all spaces and and being able to read write and communicate provides access to curriculum for students that is how they build knowledge and engage with the world and we really like to be expansive in how we talk about literacy because students read write and communicate in all spaces so we see all of our Educators as literacy instructors um as part of this work and we came off the tntp review last year and one of the recommendations is that we developed a literacy Vision in the district we still consider this Vision to be a work in progress but it's very important to us emphasizing that all students have Equitable access to high quality literacy instruction and that is applying those literacy skills across disciplines from Early Childhood through graduation and as
052we look at literacy we like to create a bigger picture of how literacy skills progress as students move through our system first thing we're looking at here is foundational literacy this is what often is what is happening for students from Early Childhood through second grade about and this is where students basically learn to read we call this a structured literacy piece I'm going to talk about this a little bit more later but there are five components of structured literacy along with oral language this is the area that the Colorado read Act is really emphasizing as we look to make sure students are developing their reading skills in the early years as students move up through the system and they acquire those skills we we see how they apply those skills in content areas across the
053curriculum this is where they take their basic Reading Writing communicating skills and use them in instruction in learning other content and one of the things we want to emphasize for our teachers is as students are working with those literacy skills and content areas we are looking at those as literacy experiences and helping students to apply them in meaningful ways moving forward this is a slightly different area but an extremely important one right now and our team has begun to do some work on this is media literacy students have access to information from all different places and of all different levels of quality so we want to make sure that our students are able to discern good information from Bad be thoughtful in how they engage with the world use good evidence to inform their thinking
054and then also be free from indoctrination and we look at developing media literacy in our students all the way from elementary school through graduation and then finally at the top we have disciplinary literacy this is similar to content area literacy this is where we focus a bit more in secondary and this is where students apply Advanced literacy skills in specific disciplines so if you're in a science class doing uh research writing a report that is going to be done differently in that discipline than it might be in social studies or another discipline and we have that graphic there of The Graduate on the side because all of these literacy skills are very important in helping students to become prepared graduates um one of the things that we're emphasizing as we go forward is that students
055engage with high quality text without throughout the curriculum to build their knowledge and we look at that high quality text in content area literacy media literacy and disciplinary literacy so basically in most situations students will be engaging with high quality techs to build knowledge and I'll discuss a little bit later on how that's a different angle maybe and how we've approached literacy instruction in the past we are moving a focus here from balanced literacy to structured literacy I've been in pooter school district for quite some time and I could say at one point I would have considered us a whole language District then we move to balanced literacy and now we're moving to structured literacy so I'm going to go over a little bit of what we might see in differences in instruction as we
056go forward um you notice at the bottom we have that blue box with foundational literacy so we're laying out that these are where we talk about structured literacy in this context it isn't about developing those reading skills um so we have a table here where we have balanced literacy on the left in structured literacy on the right we're moving towards structured literacy and I will say we've been doing a lot of that work over the last three or four years but we're looking in this adoption to find materials that really assist our teachers in having what they need to be successful with this and not have to often construct it themselves first thing is phonemic awareness and phonics and phonemic awareness is having students recognize that the sounds they hear attach have have sections and
057and segments that will attach to how they read so that is all oral it's not necessarily with those letters themselves and then phonics is how they take those sounds and then relate them to the letters and the combinations of letters that are there in a balanced literacy situation there's not necessarily A systematic sequential way of addressing phonological and phonemic awareness and phonics there is some instruction there it's often based on teacher observations little mini lessons trying to help kids to acquire skills as they notice a deficit but not necessarily as structured in a structured literacy program we will have explicit systematic sequential and cumulative phonemic awareness and phonics being built another area is high frequently word for high frequency words you may be familiar with what we'd you know call sight word lists and we
058had students memorizing sometimes like many many words there are still some what we might call sight words in a structured literacy program but we teach them according to phonics patterns and even if it's a high frequency word if it follows the phonics rules we learn it phonetically as opposed to just trying to memorize it um when we begin to read in a balanced literacy situation we engage students with text and do read but we have something uh leveled reading where students often try to read books that are at what we consider their instructional level and we do something that is called three cueing often three queuing is it doesn't make a lot of sense as it is but basically when a student comes across a word that they don't recognize we might ask them what
059word would make sense here what word would sound right here does it look right to you look at the pictures on the page and basically the problem with that is students are developing their their skills in recognizing words and those cues actually don't have them look at that word to try to figure out what that word says and so sure we all use context at times when we're reading but for the developing reader it's very important that we have them engaged in doing those decoding skills and word recognition so when we do beginning reading in a structured literacy program students work in what we call decodable texts and those texts have phonics patterns that match what students are learning at the time so what we're doing is they're giving you an opportunity to practice the
060the phonics they're working on decoding the words in embedded in the context of text and so we have students sound out those misread words as opposed to trying to rely on other Clues to figure out what they are when we look at comprehension and balanced literacy those leveled guided reading groups where we're doing the three queuing we're often asking students to work on comprehension there as well and the challenge is they're not they're struggling to actually decode the text and read and so the comprehension does it's just a difficult match and in a structured literacy setting we will teach we teach the comprehension separately early on so students are developing their word recognition skills on the page but we're also developing comprehension skills through oral development and language development so that when they become readers
061they do have that background knowledge and are able to apply it successfully and then there's beliefs and I I want to say this I I lived in a whole language world and I believed in balanced literacy for a time so we have this no better do better thing and we're learning more about the evidence and and we're trying to bring it into place so when I say these things it's not disparaging at all what we've done in the past we are just learning and moving toward the science and the evidence Stu students get better at reading by reading we used to believe that immerse them in books give them time to sit and enjoy the books and and we thought it would just come to them well we learned to listen and speak naturally we
062don't let necessarily learn to read naturally so we moved toward an idea that says students get better at reading by learning to learning to read and practice the code and the code we mean how do you take those phonemes those sounds and recognize what what letters represent them and then blend them together to get to reading so that is where we're heading with our structured literacy approach and here's just a brief overview of what the five components of structured literacy and we often say the science of reading and this is what we mean in this case with the science of reading we use the term structured literacy because it has actual components that we can Define and help us speak a Common Language about it those components are phonological awareness that's all the oral peace
063hearing the spoken word and then phonics and word recognition is taking that into decoding words on the page fluency is reading accurately with a decent rate and good porosity meaning we're speaking in a way that um how we speak we read a little bit get that inflection in there building vocabulary and text comprehension those are all those components and we have oral language in the middle of the graphic because everything we're doing here is based on a student's oral language development as well and that's something we're going to pay a lot of attention to as we go forward in very getting getting solid with our structured literacy approach you take a second here to talk about this structured literacy approach and I'd like to focus on the upper right where it says green all students
064are really advantaged by a structured literacy approach now you see the five percent on top it says learning to read seems effortless and then there's another 35 percent who learn to read relatively easily and I would say in a balanced literacy situation most of those students will look like they're doing just fine and in pooter school districts that's probably higher than 40 percent so there's a way to feel like hey this has been going well but as we get down further here in 40 to 50 percent nationally and if you look up Nancy Young's reading ladder there is research supporting this this is not just out of thin air forty to fifty percent structured literacy approach is essential and that is something we haven't necessarily had as a district-wide expectation or the materials to support
065it and so we have students that present as having a learning deficit a reading deficit and oftentimes that might even be thought to be a learning disability and it could just be that they haven't received that explosive the instruction that they have needed and then at the bottom there we have 10 to 15 percent and those are students with dyslexia and students the students do still require this code-based structured literacy they just might need more repetitions and more of it and honestly our staff has gotten a lot of training in the last few years and they're ready to do this and we've been a little reluctant to address dyslexia in our district but we're taking that head-on and in our training and how we work with students and work with parents when they have concerns
066this movement to the new materials and these instructional strategies will definitely be addressing that more for students and hopefully we'll see fewer students identified with disabilities in this area so quickly here this Scarborough's reading rope don't know if you have seen this before but the Rope itself is separated in the beginning so if we look at the left where those strands are consider that early childhood kindergarten so at the top part of that rope we have that language comprehension and that is all done orally so we're not depending on a student's ability to read to build background knowledge vocabulary structure reasoning and literacy knowledge that's something we do but we haven't done it intentionally and that's a big part of what we're moving toward the bottom piece you see the word recognition which I've been
067discussing and you'll notice how those strands are separated and as students move along the Continuum from left to right we will see them start to come together in a tight rope so if students are developing orally all that background when they learn to decode and become fluent readers it all comes together they have the background knowledge needed and they are ready to attack and work with complex texts to continue to build their knowledge and that's what we're looking for in the materials that will be adopting and that's what we've been training our teachers on for the last few years Tech centered curriculum this is a this was a new one to me as a focus and the idea here is that as we mentioned earlier we complex texts we want students engage with complex text
068a text-centered curriculum is going to engage students in high quality text second bullet there says College and Career Readiness what we've learned just this year through our work with our teachers is those benchmarks are actually higher than we had had in the past so to be on a College and Career ready track you actually have to be at a higher level than what we considered grade level before and that's why it's important that students develop those foundational skills build their background knowledge and are ready to work with complex text throughout the curriculum and we have three shifts and I know there's a lot of background creating context and it's actually going to feed in right into how we're evaluating the materials that we're looking at as we go through this process um these shifts are
069from the Common Core State Standards they actually came out in 2010 we were aware of them but we never made them a real focus of what we're doing um and it certainly is a focus and it's something we also learned about in the tntp review we got some feedback from them uh complex texts would mean students have regular practice with complex text and that is throughout all the grades evidence-based tasks is our students using that complex text to build their knowledge and using evidence from the text to help them learn and communicate about it so a little less thought about opinion and what do you think about this we'll still have some opinion in there but really having students call back to the text to provide responses and build their learning and then building knowledge
070is content Rich non-fiction in elementary looking for about a 50 50 mix there of informational text as we call it and literary text but the building knowledge we want it to be sequential so the knowledge is building on each other so as as students go through their building from a base and then extending from there as opposed to what might be a little random in a system that wasn't wasn't set up to do that and then a bit here on the tech centered piece Daniel Willingham is an educational psychologist very interesting um but he does say here the second part of this acquiring broad vocabulary and Rich base of background knowledge actually years yields more substantial and longer term benefits in Reading than just teaching reading strategies what we're saying here is we often would
071teach things like main idea and details sequencing inference as the point and then we'd use any old text to do that and we wouldn't really be thinking what's the quality of that text in the model we're moving toward the quality of the text matters we want students engaged in text where they're learning and they will be learning those skills and applying those skills but the text is centered as opposed to the skills being centered in that work now I'm going to get into our process a bit and we're going to also share some of the data that we have as we've gone through our process started um gosh I don't have the date in my head it was just this fall though and we brought together 31 of our elementary Educators across grade levels we
072do not have representation from every school I did try to get that but every school that wanted somebody to participate certainly did we have two Elementary administrators seven central office staff and parents from the schools represented there we made an open request for parents to apply to be on the committee for all Early Childhood through fourth grade parents because they were going to be most readily affected by this we had about 70 applicants we had room for four but we've also engaged the rest of those parents as best we could we have representation from English language development mtss that's multi-tiered systems of support information technology and integrated services and that is important to make sure that we're looking at all facets of the implementation and making sure it's meeting the needs of all and that
073it integrates with our systems we use some tools the instructional materials evaluation tool which is from student achievement Partners achieve the core and it actually as we get into you'll see this evaluation tool aligns with those pieces that I've been discussing up here and then we use what something that's called the cultural responsive curriculum scorecard so we could screen these materials again for cultural responsiveness and representation of our population and then we wanted to make sure we had structured literacy alignment because what has happened is for some of our Publishers they do implement this science of reading structured literacy but it's also in with all balanced literacy pieces as well and we actually found a couple programs that label themselves as science of reading but they were more definitely more in the balanced literacy camp
074um so basically these are the four major pieces in these Graphics aligned with what you've already seen the three shifts along the left and number four being those foundational skills and that is the tool we use to evaluate these programs and then we also looked at diversity and and this slide is a is a a dashboard we have up on our website basically making sure we remember we consider ourselves you know to be a fairly homogeneous population in this town but look at what we have here we have 94 countries of birth there 65 languages spoken and just make sure we stay outside of our own perspective and recognize that that we have a diverse population and we want to make sure we are meeting those needs and there's research in this area having what
075we call a cultural responsive curriculum we will increase student engagement attendance gpas grad rates Civic engagement and positive self images and self-definition it's first time we've done this work in this District when looking at a new materials coming in and it's been fascinating and it's been it's been a great experience but it also has let us know we've got a lot of work to do okay and this cultural responsive curriculum scorecard it comes out of NYU they're looking at validating student experiences disrupting power dynamics privileged dominant groups and Empower students and materials can be graded in three areas uh representation uh social justice orientation and how the teacher materials help the teacher to speak about certain topics and address certain things that are sensitive and culturally relevant so basically here's what we have just a
076little review our review tool from imet where we have non-negotiables we're looking at and I'm going to share with you how all of our materials rated in these areas and then whether or not they were really aligned with what we're looking for in structured literacy so we had eight programs submitted for review and this was a new process superintendent Kingsley brought us some some good background information that helped us to do this but our RFP um actually had a high bar in it so we wanted to make sure anybody who submitted could meet what we were looking for we did have eight programs submitted um and six of them actually were on what the CDE approved list of core instructional programs is in so the Colorado Reed act the state has evaluated programs themselves and
077listed programs as being approved our current adoption is not approved on the state list and that's one of the reasons we're moving forward with this at this time so we had six programs that were on that list and then there's another external evaluation from Ed reports and they look at it through the lens of those shifts and high quality text so we want to make sure we were looking at high quality materials we went in with six to evaluate knowing that all six met what we would consider the basic expectations they based on external evaluations we worked hard with our team and boy they have worked it's amazing what our teachers have done here I mean they have put in the time and really challenged themselves we spent two days of preparation working on removing
078bias from our thinking because a lot of teachers have experience and they have thoughts on what they might be looking for and then building familiarity with the tool we tried to create some iterated reliability with it so that as teachers looked at the tool and looked at the materials they knew that we were getting some good quality data out of that experience then we had three full days of review and now we did today so I'm a little tired here but we had a fourth day with our team today and we really got into some depth on some of these they focused on the specific dimensions of the imet so basically broke them into subgroups so they could really dig deep on each of those four areas so and then each team reviewed all six
079of those programs in their area so we had consistency in whichever area we're looking um I say six programs actually two of them were duplicates in a weird way um one of them actually was originally an open source kind of curriculum from open up resources and it was duplicated it's the eel education which I'll be discussing it was duplicated Because the actual instructional materials were the same and one rated higher than the other we kind of dropped the other one from consideration right away so as we look at the data we're going to be looking at five programs instead of six we have brought it down to three finalists and these are on the table amplify ckla hmh into reading and imagine learning El education and if you have the the power the side deck
080those are clickable links if you want to go to Resource pages to review some of those first I'm going to share with you what we have is our imet readings of our team I did a color coding try to match the PSD colors because it really looked not great in red and green it's kind of hard to look at high is blue yellow is low I'm so you can see color coding how things did when we look across at the five programs we can see how they worked and you see the high quality text evidence-based discussion so those three shifts are right up at the top then we get into foundational skills broken out a little more specifically and then the other areas that we looked at for K2 and 3 5. these are all
081the ratings of our team and those percentages are points possible points earned out of points possible if you look across the bottom you will see into reading at 78 percent kind of stood out for our team they they warmed up to it well and it was rated well and then you see the next four 363s and a 60s so they kind of clustered together the one we dropped was actually in the 50s so that we felt okay doing that so that's where we sat um when we were done with the objective evaluation then we started to um have a conversation about the programs and what people had observed and the reason I have this these two programs boxed on this slide is because my view and wonders were really more balanced literacy programs and our
082team looked at them and thought I and honestly some of the comments where I can't really say we're moving to structured literacy and go to my colleague and say this is what we're adopting so through some a nice two-hour discussion we decided that we would remove those from the list they did score well but they did not meet what we were looking for a little too much balanced literacy and that brought us down to the three that we have um something else did happen in this conversation which is probably should have been expected they said well what about what we currently have adopted you know and so we're going to get into that too as we go down the road so the next thing we're going to look at though is CDE instructional program reviews
083so we did not share Ed reports or CDs ratings with our team prior to this they are available but we really wanted our team to be as objective as possible do this as best you can with the evaluation tool and they did so afterward though went through and now pulled that data from CDE now what we see on the bottom is how these programs did rate so you see into reading at 88 amplify ckla at 88 and imagine El at 81. my view wonders and amplify actually these are their original scores of evaluation they appeal to the state some of them multiple times to get those scores bumped up because we want to go on a fair Apples to Apples basis with these and large Publishers you know they want to be on the state
084list so they got on there these are the scores they received at initial evaluation so even the amplify score is a little higher in the end because they appealed as well and what you'll notice when we look at that is that my view and wonders were at the bottom and when I shared this with our team today they felt really good because they're saying we saw it we were right you know they didn't know that until they made the call that those shouldn't be on there so that does kind of justify the idea that they they needed to come off the list at this time and we have the three that we have and then we wanted to look at how did reach for reading do in the CDE review now reach for reading has
085had three or four appeals that is our currently adopted material I want to be clear about that we adopted about four years ago right before this list was published put us in a fairly difficult spot on that um but there was that feeling for some of our team well how would reach for reading do how would reach for reading do and we see that on this metric where we saw 75 and 77 not being adequate it scored a 56 percent then we go ahead and look at the Ed reports data the ad reports data and again these were all approved going in so we knew they were going to score well and you can see how those shake out into reading and imagine El came out on top and then the others amplify wonders in
086my view with my view being slightly low but all approved and then when we bring in reach for reading we can see Ed reports did review reach for reading but it was not approved you can see there's no usability rating and that's because when it didn't pass the first gate with two gateways for Ed reports it does not get the usability rating piece but we can see that what we're looking at here as far as those external evaluations thus far exceeds what we currently have in place and this is an important piece for our community to understand because this is a lot of work for teachers we understand that and this is very important work and we want to have a real good understanding of where we currently are and where we'd like to go
087and I think that that data helps with that so in summary we have these are just and just bringing together all those Baseline measures the ad reports averages the imet the CD average and then finally at the bottom and when we look at bringing all those pieces together the three that we still have in the running are the three that sit at the top when we combine external evaluation with our team's internal work and that's where we are right now as we are looking to move to the community engagement sessions that we'll be having next week and Gathering more feedback um took the color coding off so we could just look at them equally at this point we really have to dig deeper in thinking about how we want to look at these materials strengths
088and weaknesses so last Thursday we did convene a culturally responsive team it was the most diverse group of Educators I've seen in this District in my 26 years it was phenomenal having them sit there and we had every group representative every identity represented represented that we could find so it was interesting conversation looking through this scorecard and I mentioned earlier but what we learned is we have a lot of work to do there was certainly constructive feedback for all of these programs but I also had to remind the group because it's hard because now we say oh look at these and we're going to adopt one of these I had to remind the group that every single piece of curriculum we have out there right now hasn't even looked at through that lens so what
089we learned and what our team said and the teachers who are there we need to get the scorecard in the hands of all of our teachers and we need to have them at least understanding what the indicators are that we're looking for and once they have that awareness we can start to change our practice right away so that is some an area we're going to be doing much work and then today we got together and our team spent a good two and a half hours going over the positives for each program there are concerns about each program and then I had them get into this headspace to say we have adopted each of these at separate times how would we Implement that well and we're gonna we have a lot of chart paper to go
090through but we're going to use that information to help us make a decision but then really use it to help us build an implementation plan that can be successful for our district okay I didn't notice the slide change sorry um so we are going to have these engagement sessions I did mention that all of our vendors have very confirmed that they will be there and able to attend we will have a brief overview at these sessions we are inviting community members but also inviting staff members and we have a a plan for separating staff into separate groups so they might have a slightly different angle on how they're looking at these materials there will be rotations and the vendors will have a brief presentation overview we don't want people sitting there 25 minutes and listening
091to someone's cell we want to give an overview and they give people a chance to dig into those materials and ask questions and Converse and we'll have an opportunity for feedback right there through a form and we also have on our website a form that has been live for the last few months where anybody can submit any questions or feedback when they want in the last few months I've now gotten two feedback inputs I'm hoping to see that pick up if it's a question I will answer it right away if it's feedback I will put it into our bank once we get through and gather all this information synthesize it and make recommendation we will be coming to cabinet with all of this to talk about what is our best path forward and come to
092an agreement enter negotiations and then come for approval and that's where we are outstanding Nate you have a question yes thanks this is really great appreciate the uh briefing um maybe you covered this and I missed it what do you think your time frame is for bringing this back to the board for approval on our rough timeline we've got march on there it's going to depend on us making decision and the negotiations going forward but yeah that is because our goal is to have an initial exposure to the materials and work with our teachers on April 21st because we do have a work a day for that set aside so that that's where we are okay thanks foreign I had a question about when you talk about the complex text um the importance of getting
093that in front of the students is there is there still a range of like um differentiation with you know wherever the the student's level would be to be able to so that I guess my question is we're not putting two heart attacks in front of them that might have struggles are we is it is there still a range there that our materials are going to have so it's there's not I would say we are not having leveled students like like leveling the students and then leveling the text we're not doing that match um we will be doing as I mentioned the decodable text early on to help kids develop their reading then the complex text we will need to have scaffolds and supports to have a student access that text if they're not ready one
094of the things we know is students who struggle to read tend to get the lower text at a time when they're trying to catch up and their peers are continuing to accelerate and they are now living in this lower level this is not to say that simple but our orientation is going to be toward complex text for all scaffolds and supports where needed and there are different instructional strategies to do that sometimes there's technology to do that but we want to focus that because our natural tendencies go right down to the leveled side so yes that complex text for all building knowledge for all as we continue to develop those word recognition skills I think two more uh the second one is where does money come into this um is in the fact of when
095you're evaluating when we get down to these three are we also looking at all what I know there's negotiations that happen but to have an idea of is one going to be way overpriced more overpriced than the other or not does that come into it I'm not putting that into it right now um they're all within our budget that we have set aside I'm not going to talk specifically about that but we have set aside some money for this work because it's so important right now they're all in a ballpark the thing is when you really get down to it many of them you don't have to purchase everything and there's just different levels of what we need some have more ongoing costs than others so we will consider that but we are so focused
096on trying to find the right instructional materials we do not want to be like differentiating on other factors right now completely understand and then the third thing I had is I just want to take a moment to thank the teachers for the time and effort to dive into this um this is not easy work and I really appreciate you and your team and and the teachers taking all that time to dive in and and do what's right for our students so please make sure you're passing that on thank you certainly will and we asked them to watch tonight so either tonight or tomorrow maybe they'll take a look other questions or comments Jess so I got kind of stuck on the three queuing piece because it does sound a lot like context clues and I
097know for my own kids that becomes a really important skill set as well and so I'm just kind of curious I I get the impression it's with like the oral piece you start to support that context clues when does that also become part of their reading skills the context clues or the queuing it was actually uh when we look at the whole language approach I don't want to name programs or anything but this was a recommended way to go about having students immerse themselves in the language and then use all of that information to try to figure out what the word is um it is actually explicitly in some programs to do that the the evidence here the research that we're looking at those years especially kindergarten and first grade but for any student who's
098developing these skills they are essential and the opportunity for gain is tremendous so we don't want them finding ways to not do that sometimes hard work but I'll I can tell you as a teacher when you're sitting there with a struggling reader there are times you're like anything you can do to get them to get that happens I mean that's a natural tendency but when it was explicitly taught to do it that way you really are having kids not develop those skills that are essential to it right now so does that so that is where we're talking about it and I'm not saying we're they're never going to use other Clues they're never going to look at their back you know their background knowledge and and assume a certain word that's but instructionally we want
099students to coding we're going to encourage them we're going to teach them and we're going to practice that I guess I'm I'm partially curious where are those I'm looking back at like the ribbon or the strings and like when do they actually overlap and how does that instruction change does that happen in this case or adoption or is that more like later well no the the it's all a piece I mean it's all whole everything we have here is a system of thought from kindergarten through first grade and much of second a lot of that is the oral side of this we have done we have not specifically tended to knowledge building and literacy in the communicating realm from that oral site that's where the balanced literacy and the whole language we just kept putting
100kids in texts and that's where they lived and if they could comprehend or not so in the ideal world everything on that top strand as it is be pre-reading basically that's happening orally and you'll notice those strands begin to come together and hopes I mean the perfect world they come together perfectly and then when it's tight it becomes much more text based so it's really a lot more Tech centered and a lot of reading second third grade and on and we have to talk about things like read alouds and how we're using time in class and all that not not making blanket statement but how that should look because and one of the I gotta when we debrief for tntp I was at Warner last year's assistant principal and one of the things they said
101that stuck with me when students are not working on those foundational skills or narrative writing they should be engaged with high quality text and we expand the idea of text of any media and things that we're using for instruction and that was a different way of looking at it that if students can read they need to be reading something good they may be relying on that evidence and building their knowledge as they go but that is mostly on the tech side after those strands have come together or if students are still lagging we would provide those supports so they can still access perfect thank you you're welcome Carolyn you know something I would I hope we have a lot of parents who will show up for our literacy adoption I think reading is one of
102those things you don't worry about Until you realize your child can't read and then you start to get really concerned and you start to wonder what's going on and and I had a similar experience with my oldest son when he was in in first grade and they wanted to hold him back because he couldn't read and then we were in Ohio at that time and and I learned that they were trying to use the whole whole word methods and I spent the summer teaching him how to read and getting them caught up so that at the beginning of the next year he could read and we spent time that summer reading out of the newspaper after he went through his uh after we got the phenomes down and we did the phonics type flash cards
103and everything so it was amazing to me how quickly he picked up reading after that it was just like a light bulb went on for him and he just became a voracious reader after that so I I appreciate your presentation um I I'm excited for our students and I hope that our parents will show up and and help us pick out the curriculum form I think it's really important because like I said it's you don't realize how important it is until your kid can't read thanks other comments from the board well I I just uh I think what you said Carolyn is is uh speaks volumes frankly and so I would uh I would Echo that and I would again thank uh you John and the staff the teachers and the parents who were involved
104in this all this work and who are going to be involved in some more of the work going forward here until we get the recommendation hopefully uh in March as you said so thank you again if there's anything else you want to add or you'd like to add something sure go ahead Brian very very brief commentary to the all of the people that have been involved in this process you know John and when we first set out to kind of think about this the charge that you and the collective team Kate Marlena and everybody else that's involved both at the school and district office level was to reclaim and build confidence as a system that these Investments are going to make a difference for both students and teachers I also think that another charge was
105that you know as we go through this process you have to continue to set us up collectively to make an educationally Sound Decision for students and staff and realize that this investment is not just an investment in our students it's an investment in helping our teachers become stronger teachers without indicting them on past practice and I can't tell you how I'm energized by this work in a really significant way I just want to say to everybody involved job well done let's continue to move forward with the process that you've outlined and just know that it's this is National level first class work I will share that with you and I just really really proud of the team's efforts of taking the district on this journey so thank you and I appreciate that and I will
106say our leadership has given us the direction and the the ability and support to do this so it is from you and Marlena that's given us this opportunity and and Tracy um in the elementary realm so thank you okay thank you again appreciate it and with that we'll move on to our second informational and discussion item which is about the summer 22 sorry summer 2022 program and an evaluation of how that went in terms of uh in terms of results for our students and I believe I'll turn it over to you to introduce that Mr kinkley thank you so much presenting our district summer programming report this evening is psd's Chief institutional Effectiveness officer Dr Dwayne Schmitz joy and welcome we're excited to hear your presentation it's always fun working with John pasentino following him
107in a presentation is tough to do um but we really got the right guy for director of curriculum didn't we the celebration all right so I was asked to keep this fairly quick I just mentioned that because there's a lot of depth that we could go into around summer programming there's a lot to celebrate but we're going to move kind of fast leave it at kind of high level but I want to mention up front a couple of things there's a 39 page evaluation report that's available on the PSD website under community research evaluation and then monitoring reports and evaluation reports so that's available to the community the board has seen this report ahead of time so tonight we're just going to hit some high level points I also want to mention up front that
108our staff that carried off this work were tired you know the end of the school year comes and we ask them to come in and support our students through the summer and through the programming we're going to see the results of and I just want to give a shout out to our staff who showed up and gave that support to our kids so this is the second summer that we've done this kind of full-blown evaluation of ver of multiple programs and we have a lot of Community Partners who make this work possible that will kind of probably mention throughout the report but we want to say uh thank you to all of them up front because PSD is not doing this work alone so the first thing is I want to start off the board
109with the district ends in my mind there's two District ends that are being directly supported through the summer programming from both this summer and last summer okay the first district n is the foundations for success and through a lot of work that the DAC and various staff do and the Board of Education identified three priority Performance challenges directly related to these foundations for success and they're in our unified Improvement plan right so literacy which my friend John just mentioned is the gateway to learning so it's a very very important component of foundations for Success mental health belonging which includes connections and opportunities that sets our students up for Success mental health well-being and then graduating with options so you need students need to graduate and a quick shout out again to PSD staff and to
110our community our graduation rates have gone up substantially and it's a real celebration we're moving in the right direction with many subgroups as well as overall so more on that later when we get to the monitoring report but so these three pieces keep your keep your eye on those because all three of those are supported through the summer programming that we conducted this summer and Pat and in past summers the other district and I want to quickly tie into before we launch into the details so we're going to kind of go like a funnel from kind of Broad and we're going to just dive deep down into the programming that support it these ends is the above and beyond end and really quick I'm just highlighting I have a bar graph up here like a
111horizontal bar graph where Red's on the top bar and then two shades of green below it and basically that bar graph is showing us the percentage of students that indicate that or I'm sorry the percentage of parents that indicated or or you know parents who indicate it that their students are not attaining or or experiencing their above and beyond which was about 24 from the spring 2020 survey and the reason I put that up there before I move on I guess real quick I want to mention that's about 10 percent higher when we ask the question about Community opportunities for above and beyond there's about 10 percent more parents that say their kids are not accessing those opportunities and if we limit that question to the bipoc population it actually jumps up by a further
11210 percent and so it's a clear signal that students in our community need access to Career exploration their interests and passions both in school and out of school right so what is summer programming look like in this slide we've got five pictures up there the top left one is some students petting a turtle at Camp Seoul the bottom left one we've got some students on an outdoor hike the center picture and the lower right picture are both students gathered around a teacher an adult who's ex you know sharing an experience with them that they're having and the upper right is of course Dwayne schmitz's favorite because it's rock climbing which is my favorite sport at any rate the point to this is that students and staff engage with each other and they in in all
113the different programs we're going to talk about and they engage with each other around experiential learning opportunities and by doing that there that that increase student engagement appears to have once again this summer translated into learning gains that we can measure how do we measure that remember we're doing we're doing a funnel so we're going from wider to to deeper and narrower so the first thing that most people would think of if you want to know you know what's the evidence that there is any student learning but before I jump launch into that I just want to quickly mention that even if the student student learning gains had just you know minimized summer slide we would call this a success but we have evidence of not only minimizing summer slide but we actually see accelerating
114of learning much of the summer programming we do we would call it a success if kids just had a good loving environment with adults and activities through the summer the learning gains are an added bonus that of course we're interested in and we have evidence of so the first thing you might do is you might say well how do we know well we look at Spring to Fall gains so the gains over the summer time for the grades like three through eight let's say really it's you know first grade through eighth grade we can use acadians for the younger grades in map for that stretch as well so we have a couple assessments that we can use for this we look at gain scores now we and PSD don't do just straight up gain scores
115we use standardized scores and we create something called a growth effect size it's in a standard deviation unit and it's a real simple metric if it comes out zero the students held their normative position relative to National grade level peers over time if that number comes out positive as opposed to negative that means those students actually move forward in the normative data pile if you will relative to grade level National peers peers if that number comes out negative that would be an indication of what superintendent Kingsley had mentioned called some people would call Summer slide that during the summer we can sometimes see a little bit of academic backsliding right so it's a fairly easy metric to look at and get a quick glance of so when we do that we've been sitting here looking
116at this slide it's a bar graph and we see it's kind of an ordered fashion there and we can see that each of the summer programs that are listed had a positive growth effect size so we didn't just hit zero we exceeded it so we accelerated learning during the summer we didn't just negate the summer slide and that black bar on the far right with the negative 0.021 that's the students and PSD that did not attend any of our summer programming okay so you can kind of see that summer slide on the right is just two normal curves lined up over each other it's just a visual to help us see what does a 0.123 growth effect size mean basically it's it's moving from that black line you know as you drop from that top
117curve to the bottom curve the black line represents the the PSD students that had a little bit of Summer slide and negative 0.021 and the blue line moved forward in that normative pile indicating that summer of Discovery positive effect size okay so we can see that in Reading overall we had gains when we look at a similar picture for Math and this is Maps data once again we see most of our programs show a positive growth effect size a couple of our programs did not show that positive and one of them stem acts overall across math scores and all grade levels had a little bit of a negative effect size right like I said this is kind of a high level view just looking at gain scores we're going to dive in just a little
118bit deeper so that if you want to get a little better information on how well did these students do you want to estimate something that statisticians researchers would call the counterfactual what may have happened what would have likely happened have the students that we supported in the summer not been involved in that programming the way you can one way to do that is you create a matched comparison group and so this slide I want to look at it in three different zones okay the whole left hand side of this slide is showing a series of bar graphs in a couple histograms for 163 students that were in stemx Middle School reading and and those are represented with those blue um bars and then the comparison Group which is 163 students carefully selected to match kid
119for kid this the student participants based on ethnicity prior achievement level which the achievement level piece is the histogram part the gender you know their um IEP status a whole series about seven variables to get a nice match comparison group and the purpose of that whole left side of that picture is so you can see those two different groups of 163 kids and you can see they look very similar in lots of ways right then when you look at the upper right part of that graph and you see that green line graph with a blue dot at 0.07 up kind of high on the right and the Little Red Dot at negative 0.02 on the right side also that blue dot represents the growth effect size outcome for stemx Middle School reading based on map
120for those 163 students that participated that red dot is the same outcome on maps but for the 163 kids that were the match comparison group the difference between that .07 and that negative 0.02 would be the estimate you know the difference is we think you know it's a good estimate of the impact of the program if you will the last piece that slide in the bottom right is the Anova kind of statistical test because I knew at least a couple of board members were going to ask me are those differences statistically significant right and so you run that Anova which is a real simple statistic process but it's appropriate for this scenario and you get that significance level of 0.025 and the truth is on the kind of right side there and as long as
121that's less than 0.05 you've got a significant effect but I do want to mention we're doing what's called a one-tailed test not a two-tailed test so you actually take that 0.0525 you cut it in half and that's the number you compare to 0.05 at any rate it's just in there to indicate this is a significant it's not just visible it's significant okay so stemx Middle School reading based on map data for 163 kids did show up as a strong Positive Growth effect size if I had to sum that up we did that in the report remember there's a 39 I think yeah 39 page report we did that type of analysis for every summer program we did crossed with every Assessment program that we use in the district you know Katie and Sir maps for
122these Elementary and Middle School levels and this table that we're looking at is the result of all those comparisons I think there's 16 comparisons probably there and 14 of the 16 have some level of green in those columns to the right which indicates that there was evidence on one level or another of Positive Growth for those student participants reading those columns real quick across that First Column with the green it's really the first second third fourth column over that says no programming greater than no programming that's just comparing hey to this group of students have participated do better than the same age group or grade level group and PSD but that did not participate in any summer programming the answer is yes in many cases right the next column over that says greater than comparison
123group that's a comparison of the growth effect outcome for the student participant group versus the match comparison group and that last column which is the the hardest one to gather the or to really show the evidence in is that those significant gains in the prior column are in fact statistically significant so we see that in three cases that's the deal the bottom line is this everybody it's observational data all right we're not running experiments we're not we don't have a pool of kids that we'd like a hundred kids that we get to randomly select 50 of them to put them in Camp soul and the other 50 are the control group we're not doing that so it's observational data we take students we select them carefully based on some criteria to make sure we're helping
124the kids that need us most we prioritize those students we're providing Rich quality experiences of a couple different types with Camp soul and summer of Discovery and other programs that we have listed here HDT tutoring and literacy and math stemx if I didn't mention that one and we try to provide these enriching experiences and on an overwhelming level the evidence comes back this summer as it did last summer that we see positive gains for the students so I believe it's money well spent it's time well spent and we're thankful to the staff that took their time to deliver those Services it matters now let's shift gears to high school so high school instead of tracking acadians and map type gains or trying to look at and by the way peace out sat and all that
125doesn't work is great because it's just one time a year in the spring we'd have to wait a while to get the evidence and I don't know if it would be that valid but what we do have is the credit counts because that's what summer school for high school is really about is kids recovering credit or moving forward with credits there's different scenarios kids go into this summer school experience for but one thing I want to mention is that PSD summer school experience like the other summer programming it was all expanded like the end counts went up the number of kids we'd provided services to was substantially expanded so we had um 490 students or yeah students who completed courses that's 63 percent of the kids who enrolled completed the courses and of those that
126completed the course is 89 had a b or better okay there was a special program that was run through the Matthews House services were delivered it was funded with you know partnership with the Bohemian in the city the Bohemian foundation in the city and it was an Innovative program where our supports were given to students on enrolling having computer access live one-on-one assistance through the course and check-ins and a financial incentive to complete the course for up to two courses a student could make a thousand two hundred dollars and for that program which is uh it is PST summer school but with these supports to help kids successfully navigate to summer school through to credit for that group of students we had 36 out of 38 students who finished for credits that's 94 percent up
127from 63 to 94 percent and um 52 out of the 55 or sorry 52 out of the of the completed courses result or 44 of 52 resulted in a Grade of b or higher which is 85 percent so the percentage of bees was pretty stable but the percentage of completing the credit went up a lot under that program okay so PSD spent money to do all this as well as staff effort and time and planning and so this is this is a quick table that gives you a breakdown of how much money each one of these programs costs PSD keeping in mind Boys and Girls Club and other groups out there were raising money and providing money Matthew's house and I'm sorry Bohemia and the city and others and so but this is psd's cost
128for these Services kind of a quick breakdown so as we before we just open up to the conversation and welcome questions what has PSD learned right we've learned a few things I want to remind you that we've been evaluating Camp Seoul since 2017. so we have a few years in a row of Camp Seoul leading up to this last year we did a now an analysis very similar to this one and all the programming that we did and now we've got this programming so a couple things step are kind of stand out one thing is that when we invite students Into Summer programming that's got an experiential learning kind of component to it where there's career and interest exploration students see appear to be engaged and they those programs appear to have the biggest growth
129effects right we also check to see if there is any impact on attendance in the fall and on their self-reported levels of student connections while at school in the fall and it turned out that there is at the middle school you can see an association and specifically for the programs that were also the same programs that showed the highest growth effect sizes relative to the relative to the comparison groups so it's I'm just saying it appears that when we do successful summer programming like we've done T summers in a row you know via these analyzes there looks to be an impact that that does fall into the fall we do have a way of following up and analyzing that a little bit more deeply with achievement and stuff like that but we have to wait
130for a few more scores to come in what else have we learned it looked like the literacy was impacted more strongly than the math outcomes by the summer programming so that's kind of interesting I had a list of things that I should not forget to mention along these lines um HDT like high dosage tutoring in stemx have some powerful effects but when we look at the way we recruit into those programs there's room to make that a more Diversified group of students that were inviting into those powerful experiences we've got a group of Administrators and staff working now planning for this upcoming summer of 2023 and they're looking at these kind of results along with their experiences and the experiences of the people that deliver the services to help inform us going forward into the
131summer of 2023. so getting a you know a good recruitment effort so that we're using these powerful experiences to help the kids that need us most is foremost on our mind okay um let's see I think we we also learned that we used a new curriculum nssi an acronym this in two areas of our summer program in Camp Seoul at the elementary level and a component of the summer of Discovery a partnership with boys and girls club we didn't get the results that we expected from that program if you will the way we delivered it this summer so we are also having conversation evaluating that to figure out is it our delivery of it is it the materials themselves is there a different direction we need to go with that so we're doing some learning
132around that so I think I'll stop with that and say this is um you know been of another celebration for PSD second summer in a row along with our graduation rates that are coming back with a substantial rise and so I would welcome the board to ask any questions they may have thanks very much Dwayne I'll put in a plug for your 39-page report you can I read it yeah um thanks very much for the detailed analysis seriously I appreciate it very much um before I turn it over to my peers for any questions could you elaborate a little bit on the uh you talked about financial incentives in the Matthews House program could you elaborate a little bit on the motivation for that and how that was used sure I'll take my best shot
133at all the Programming type questions okay but I also will be inviting my colleagues to jump in because the knowledge is all throughout the room but I'll just add these simple facts so students were like I said the funding came from Bohemian and my understanding is the city so it's a big collaborate or you know collaborative effort and the student could receive six hundred dollars for the successful completion of a course for up to two courses so they could make up to twelve hundred dollars the idea behind that is that when targeting which is what the Matthews House program did targeting I'm just going to say it like this the kids that need us most there's a there's other ways we can probably Define that but when they did a nice job of targeting kids
134to support them in gaining their credits during those summer months you know students have an alternative option they can work during the summer and for a lot of students that's a serious option because their families need that support and so this was seen as a way of kind of balancing the scales if you will for the students who need that kind of time to catch up on some credits that they need to make up towards graduation does that make sense it does thanks that's the clarification I was looking for I appreciate it are there other questions or comments from the board members Jess go ahead um first thank you as always it is a very good report and I do highly recommend also that people read it thank you Justin um I I feel like
135it's going to come across as a criticism but it's not intended to I do wish you would have included in this presentation some of the um data about the attendance and the connectedness in the presentation just so that parents and people at home could actually see that too but hopefully they'll go look at the report um and catch that um on that note also it I'm curious if attendance or connectedness had shifted for some of those other programs like I think I only saw it for stemx here's the pattern I think I saw keeping in mind we're moving in a fast pace we're working a lot of different things up here right but some of the stuff I saw in doing this work is I saw a definite Association at the middle school level I
136didn't see it at the elementary level which I thought was interesting but keeping in mind that that connection survey is just for fourth and fifth grade so it's not as you know robust uh sample if you will that has that connections data and attendance at elementary is largely driven by parents and by Middle School it's starting to become a little bit more student driven right so there's some things to keep in mind but there was a pretty strong pattern I noticed in the Middle School level not so much the elementary and it was more than just those two programs that were um you know the most had the most significant gains compared to their match comparison groups also it seemed to me like it was the programs that were more highly Associated if you will
137or affiliated with PSD that tended to have those stronger sorry attendance and connections affects The Following fall and I don't just hypothesizing but it made me wonder if when our students during the summer are working with PSD staff or maybe this PSD branding involved in the work that's going on that somehow that translates a little bit back more directly to the school setting I'm not sure that's kind of going out getting in front of my skis um sort of a follow-up to that I guess the first thing you showed on here was parents um view of their students interests being connected in and some of the programming is more geared towards students interests or career possibilities versus like high dosage tutoring which is very hyper focused right um and I'm curious kind of how that
138will play out with the connections data if that'll shift if there's any way to even look at the students specifically from those experiences from last summer and the connections data that their parents or they themselves feel for their interests and if that shifts at all as well I love that I love that question and the observations so we'll keep with this we're going to keep studying this at the request of the board there was a request earlier about you know being able to see what's the impacts into the future of the current programming right so we are working on that and we will each summer be doing this kind of evaluation and even in the interim we'll be evaluating HDT at the end of this semester the the fall in the spring and each semester
139after so more to come on all of that because I agree thank you and then just one last question if I may um you said psd's cost was in this presentation do you have an idea of what the overall cost for our entire Community was I don't it's it's knowable we could figure that out but I don't know okay DJ um so you said a lot of good positive things and so I don't want to be a big bummer but uh yeah just a small one uh I I was disappointed I in especially Camp Seoul and the high high-dose tutoring I really was hoping for a little bit more of a of a bump on those and and so one of the things that I would be you know you said we were evaluating Camp
140Soul throughout um I would be and maybe it's in that report I have not read that uh 391 but comparing what kind of uh bumps we have seen uh in the past years and are we getting better are we focusing better on it I would be a little intrigued on um because I think this is such an important program and I'm really excited to be able to offer this and drive it I just want to make sure that we are are focusing in on that so I I would also say that I'm um and I think I've said this with two to you before about the Z scores I I I value them I like them but I think it makes it hard for us to go to our community and sell them without having
141you there with us every time to explain them and so I I think we need to also come up with a better way to tell our community what improvements we've seen and in a shorter version is something bite size that they'll read and listen to so that's a comment that I have that I I just I want to be able to I want I want the newspaper to be able to explain it well enough that we can celebrate even the small increments that we are making on there so I would throw that out there um I also um looking at yours I the the student count was a little hard for me to follow on the idea of um you know like on the very last when we're talking about the cost of whether you
142know like uh Camp Soul said 662 but then that doesn't really jive with the same numbers that we have in some of the other ones so I'm I'm sure some of those students are like overlapped and being tested twice but um I I was appreciative that that last slide was in there to give me a better idea of how many students are being served on that but um overall I'm excited that we are still making improvements forward uh I do hope that we can refine this process a little bit more so that we can really drive home especially those students that really need it the literacy one was the one that you know really kind of jumps out at me and that is one of our focuses and so I I really think that is
143something that um intrigues me and trying how can we get this better those unfortunately were also the ones that you couldn't say if it was significant gain or not because there wasn't enough data right is that why you couldn't or no they didn't come out significant oh well I mean there if in person groups yeah so okay DJ a couple things I'd want to respond with yep one if you read the executive summary it's got some statements some verbiage that would be appropriate for news releases so that that would be good for that right another um piece is that when you use um the z-scores I understand that's kind of Technical and stuff it doesn't lend itself to an elevator speech but it's also very accurate and useful for these purposes of doing an evaluation
144of did it work with regard to cam Seoul it shows positive gains on both math and literacy across the assessments we used it it negates the summer slide right and although those gains may look small to you visually or that number may look small like in the executive summary and in the report itself I give the example of converting a 0.123 effect size to 11 weeks of additional instructional time equivalent that's pretty substantial and I think the public can understand that that was in reading for summer of Discovery and for summer Discovery and math it was a seven week conversion it's in the report so instead of rattling off effect sizes you can say it was a seven week gain and that was about seven weeks of programming so summer of Discovery ran for seven
145weeks so they got a seven week bump in math which is a week for week equivalent like they were sitting in our schools but it was during the summer and they were having these enriching experiences right in literacy they actually got more weeks gained than the weeks the kids were in there relative to our regular school year and that's what we're talking about with the engagement piece being very powerful so that's the way in which you convert I remember last summer when we did this evaluation and I delivered it much like this and then Tracy Dr GAO you know came up and she may have been with some other folks and she was they were giving a follow-up thing at one point and she used that conversion language and that seemed to resonate with the
146board pretty good like additional weeks of learning so yes we can do those kind of conversions that's not a problem but cancel I want to give a shout out to because they they really did negate the summer slide they have positive effects in both growth and I'm sorry math and reading no doubt about it there's there's improvements we can make to programming in each one of these programs but that's exactly why we do these kind of evaluations to look back and reflect and say what went well what can we do better and that's what the team's involved in right now so I appreciate all the insight and the comments and such and I'm I am pleased you know with our summer programming and the outcomes and I think it is a celebration for PSD and
147our staff and our kids just sorry it's just more of a comment at this point I really appreciate Dwayne that every time you give us data you always live in reality but you send it with like the positivity and you find the celebrations but you always still live in what are we doing well and what do we still need to improve because that's exactly what we need to do with Summer that's exactly how we help students so I really appreciate that that sentiment thank you Nate thanks Duane and thanks to the staff and the community members that have participated in these programs I'm very excited about the progress we've made and I think it's a good investment and I look forward to a good summer this year and continuing to make progress and I especially
148like the idea of targeting I think that's important for us serve that student population that really needs it so thank you Carolyn and uh yeah ditto he stole my thunder there so so I I am too excited to see what we're going to do this summer and and I think that I mean considering the slide that could have happened and and the gains that we did have I'm really pretty pleased with the learning that occurred so I think that we have even a bigger opportunity looking back at the data and learning from it coming into this summer so um yeah thanks for putting this all together and keeping us on the straight and narrow yep my pleasure go ahead Brian um so I want to make a comment without with maybe running the risk of
149coming across as defensive because I just think it's really important around the messaging that we're sending to staff and families that we are taking risks you know so I think the partnership the collective partnership between Matthew's house the city of Fort Collins with our district is incredibly significant you know if you think about on average we're spending approximately about ten thousand dollars per student per year in their public education on average there's not one of us in this room or in this community that would walk away from a hundred and thirty thousand dollar investment when you're so close to the finish line and getting ready to cash out but students are put in that position every year as a result of hard difficult choices that they need to make with their families and so the
150data that suggests that paying and incentivizing students so they don't have to make that hard decision and how that looks and plays out across our broader Community sets us up to have a really thoughtful dialogue with other partners in a very robust way to celebrate that incredible success I want to say thank you to the Matthews House the Bohemian Foundation the city of Fort Collins and all the staff that were involved in that you know Dr Schmitz also talked about our efforts to implement a new curriculum which was nssi the national summer school initiative you know implementation science suggests and year one of implementation and sometimes you have a dip you have a regression but we're going to continue to evaluate what that means and move forward I also think the context of this data
151and again I don't want to come across as defensive but two years ago this District like every other District across the globe is shut down and so the likelihood of re-engaging students at a time where it was safe to do so and the opportunity for them to make exponentially higher gains was much greater than after a year of robust instruction which we provided in a very difficult manner last year but we still persisted and provide statistically significant gains and so I think that context matters and again I'm not trying to come across as defensive but I think we have work to do we know that we need to expand these opportunities to more students we need to continue to be very intentional in our efforts to diversify those who are participating and try to figure
152out ways to increase access but I'm incredibly proud of the efforts of our leadership and at the school level the district level as well as all of the teachers and partners who came to the table consistently trying to figure out how to make sure that hundred and thirty thousand dollar investment over the course of a child's educational career isn't wasted and I just thought it was important to share that thanks very much any other thoughts from board members all right well I will uh I will add a couple of things one of them is an informational uh piece for those who are interested in more information about high doses tutoring we're going to have an update on that at a upcoming board meeting here in the in the spring so I look I'm sure we
153all look forward to hearing about that and I invite you who are interested in learning more about that and how it's going during the school year to attend that meeting or to watch it the other thing I'll say is again thank you Dr Smith and thank you all to the staff who ran these summer programs we look forward to as uh superintendent Kingsley mentioned expanding the opportunities for more students going forward and to continued success so thank you very much thank you go ahead Carolyn after listening Brian talk about how important it was to give those students an opportunity during the summer who might not have had an opportunity because they otherwise might have had to work as a I grew up I was we were really poor we were I was free and reduced
154I got free lunches at school because my family wasn't very well to do and I did have to work and I did give up on a lot of extracurricular activities activities and things that I wanted to do because I had to work and I wonder how transformational something like that would have been for me and I wonder how transformational that was for some of our students and I'm really touched by that when you talked about that that really that really touched me from my experience thank you thanks for adding a personal touch Carolyn appreciate it thank you Dwayne and that is our last item unless I've missed something which I don't think I have so with that this meeting is adjourned a little glare on the count on the clock but I believe it's at
155about 8 44 p.m still on January 10th thank you very much