I'd like to call to order this regular meeting of the Boulder Valley School District for Tuesday, 12/16/2025. Board members may attend and participate in meetings remotely in accordance with board policy BME and state law. Laura, can you please call the roll? Bucher? Here. Chavez? Here. Medler? Here. Quinlan Ueda? Rajpal? Here. Temuwadi? Here. Ungar? Here. Thank you. I'd like everyone to turn their attention to the screen for a land acknowledgment this morning. The Boulder Valley School District resides and operates on land that is the ancestral homeland and unjustly and illegally taken territory of the Ute, Puebloan, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Apache, Navajo, and
48 other tribal nations historically tied to this land who have called this land home since time immemorial. We acknowledge the atrocities committed here, including the painful history of genocide, forced assimilation, and efforts to alienate the indigenous inhabitants from their homeland, supported by the policies of the United States government. BVSD is aware of the many indigenous peoples past and present and their dignified nations
and cultures who care for this land with strength and resilience. BBC recognizes the histories of the land in Colorado and the survival of many nations that carry their rural traditions into the present. It is BBC's responsibility to educate ourselves, our community, and our students so that we can embrace the wisdom and knowledge of indigenous peoples and actively stand together to address injustices. In offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm and honor the history, wisdom, oral traditions, and resilience of indigenous people and recognize the responsibility to care for and appreciate this land
together. I'd like to remind everybody that the mission of the Boulder Valley School District is to create challenging, meaningful, and engaging learning opportunities so that all children thrive and are prepared for successful civically engaged lives. Thank you everyone. Good morning. Happy to have you join us here today. It feels like a full house for a Tuesday morning. We're glad to have you observe and participate in our meetings. At this time, is there a motion to approve this morning's agenda? Moved by Jorge, seconded by Alex. Laura, can you please call the vote? Can we ask her? Booker? Yes. Chavez? Yes. Medler? Yes.
Rajpal? Yes. Temuading? Yes. Ungar? Yes. Motion passes. This morning, we will be taking an in-depth look at BVSD's strategic plan. And I will turn it over to doctor Anderson for introductions. Thank you, board president Rajpal, board members. Great to see everyone here this morning. Board members, this is our second in-depth update of the BVSD altogether for all students strategic plan. We had an update for you all in September. We've our teams put together, I think, a very thorough update, today, to touch on some of the things that we didn't get a chance to touch on in December.
And so with that that, I will turn it over to doctor Dela Cruz, our deputy superintendent, to introduce our team and get the presentation started. Good morning, President Rajpal, board members, and also welcome to our new school board members to your first deep dive work session. We're so happy to have you with us. We typically do bring a team to these conversations, and that's true today. So at the table with me are doctor Nativity Miller, our chief academic officer, doctor Emma Herzog, our executive director of academics, Shannon.
Sorry. You're not in the same order as what I'm looking at. Shannon Gamble, our director of MTSS. Across from me, we have Sena Nauer, director of student support services, who oversees discipline behavior, restorative practices, and bully prevention, and Tammy Lawrence, a director of student support services, who oversees counselors, mental health advocates, mental health supports, and trauma response. Not at the table, but also in the room, we have our executive directors of schools and our strategic plan support team members, all of whom are perfectly queued up
a wave there. All of whom are invested in this conversation and, of course, are deeply involved in actualizing the strategic plan in schools. Strategic plan in schools. We do have a substantive agenda today, focusing on the efforts and priorities within the All Together for All Students. Strategic objectives that you see here of no limits, in which we'll provide detail about depth of knowledge and cognitive lift. Next best steps, in which we'll report on MTSS implementation data. And valued and included, which will highlight discipline data and opportunities for the development of
our next two year UIP. As always, we're going to pause throughout the presentation for questions. We are gonna be bringing you a progress update in the spring again on our efforts in the define the destination post secondary success objective. So that's not part of today's discussion. Today's deep dive is into the work of these three objectives and will convey the monitoring and shaping of leading indicators in the form of live data, adult actions, and short cycle improvement planning.
And, of course, the lagging indicators in some areas where we're discussing more periodic data. In last Friday's board update news and notes, you received three documents to refresh the memory of continuing board members and to build understanding for new board members. Those were the MTSS implementation summary, the BBSD discipline framework, the data reporting cycle. And today, you've received a hard copy of a depth of knowledge document that will be referred to as well. As doctor Anderson said, we bring the board updates in, a pace and cadence.
And you see that pace and cadence here, and we bring these updates and review the data that's available at the time, and that was detailed in the data reporting cycle that you received in news and notes. We were all here with you, in this cycle last year that you see here. And in September, we came to provide a data and strategic plan focus update. And today, we're here with the December 16 progress check. So we'll be back again in spring and summer. I also wanna let you know that we've updated some of the data points because they they updated in this lab.
We wanted to have current, visualizations for you and numbers. And so today, you may see some slightly different numbers, and we will update those in board docs after today's presentation wraps. So we're gonna start with a brief overview of our All Together for All Students strategic plan, which comprises four strategic objectives that focus our work, which you see here and that I also named, in the agenda slide. We have defined success markers that we're aiming for within the five year cycle of
the strategic plan. So, by 2029, what we believe success proportional rate of students BVSD discipline framework, and
a decrease in out of school suspensions while reducing disproportionality. So we're going to begin by diving into our first strategic objective, and this objective is no limits. And it sets the expectation that all students experience grade level standards, standards based instruction. We know that this requires a multi faceted approach, and that's indicated by those leading measures that we name in our UIP and that you see here in the implementation measures. All of these measures require an understanding of the depth and rigor of the standards
and the cognitive lift needed for students to engage in engage in deep learning. Nativity and Emma are going to talk about depth of learning, professional learning or depth of knowledge, professional learning, where we've been, where we're going, and they'll connect this to extensions and differentiation and how these are part of a larger MTSS system that we'll also discuss today as we move to, talking about tiered supports. And with that, I'll pass it over to Natividie and Emma. Great. Good morning. Alright. There we go.
As you know, depth of knowledge is in our strategic plan. And depth of knowledge is a framework that is used to analyze cognitive demand for students. And as an academics team, we're responsible for leading professional learning for our leaders during PK-twelve sessions. Our goal as an academics team is to provide leaders with the learning and resources that they need for implementation. And we work in collaboration with our executive directors of schools for implementation. As you can see on the slide, this year, we are facilitating a four part
arc of learning that is focused is focused on leader learning around depth of knowledge and cognitive lift in connection, as Doctor. Delacruz said, with grade level standards, as well curricular resources that they already have. Through, and helping them think through their instructional observations, which again is where we work in collaboration with our executive directors of schools and they take the baton, so to speak, for, implementation.
Each professional learning we provide, we try to include resources for our school leaders that they can use in their buildings to help guide their work. And, there and so now I'm going to pass it to doctor Herzog, and she's gonna talk about, the the expansion of that work into gifted and talented and acceleration and differentiation. So board members, just a little bit of background on what Webb's depth of knowledge and cognitive lift are. And for folks who may be watching this who aren't educators, Webb's depth of knowledge
is a way to really think about, the level of thinking that is happening at any point in time. With the idea that, you know, the further you advance in school, topics change and get harder, but we want our our students to be able to think deeper within those concepts. So as opposed to bit to recall or taking a vocabulary quiz or a, a, you know, multiple choice or a matching type of an activity, you wanna be able
to evolve kids so they can analyze, synthesize, evaluate, create with what it is that we've taught them. So that is the basis of Webb's depth of knowledge. And cognitive lift is, you know, it's it's funny. And we've been in a lot of classrooms, and, and certainly our team has. And I think we're doing it right when our kids are working harder than our teachers. Mhmm. Right? And so as we think about what cognitive lift is, you know, we're asking our
teachers, our leaders to to really create conditions in our classrooms where where that you know, the kids are doing, you know, a lot of thinking, not a lot of paying attention, note taking. Right? And really evolving our instructional practices and methods from one where we're just, transferring knowledge to where kids are taking what they're learning and applying it in ways that allow them to think and learn. So I wanted to I hope I you weren't gonna say that on the next slide, Emma.
Maybe you were. No. You never know. So if I did, you know, I'm I'm I'm stealing your cognitive lift. I apologize. But in any event, I just think that I'll I'll interject to make sure that, you know, any terms that I feel like our general public might want a little bit of depth on, I'll I'll just try to interpret that a little bit. One thing I would add too is that, what we've really tried to emphasize with our leaders is that if you look at the resource that you have, it has, depth of knowledge as from levels one to level four. What we are saying is we are not expecting kids to always be in a
level four, but we are hoping that kids experience a one through four throughout their school day on a consistent basis. And I just wanna jump in. Particularly the last school business we went to, I'm thinking, like, Shelley Rule's math class in particular came to mind. She was really using a lot of that and asking the learners why, and really kind of elevating that conversation about their thinking. So it is just for the new board members who haven't been able to be in our schools. We are seeing that on-site visits, which is really exciting. Board president Rajpal, you queued me up perfectly.
So as our principals and assistant principals have been learning about Webb's depth of knowledge, they've begun incorporating that learning into their school leadership, and we're seeing some beginning application in schools as a result. We're seeing principals leading their staff either as a whole school or starting with a leadership team through initial shared learning about Webb's depth of knowledge and how to use it as a lens when planning for instruction. We've heard from many schools how helpful using resources from our p k 12 arc of learning has been for their leadership. Principals have also shared that when they visit classrooms, either on their own with a member of the SPST team, their network executive directors or directors of teaching and learning,
they're thinking about trends they're noticing across classrooms in what students are doing, what the task is, and what the related level of cognitive lift is in alignment with that standard. From there, they're discussing implications for their next steps in alignment with their ninety day plans. Some schools are also beginning to connect thinking about cognitive lift with their data driven instruction cycles, from unpacking a standard and thinking about the culminating task to revisiting how students did and planning for a next step reteach. Some schools are also beginning to embed feedback related to Webb's depth of knowledge in formal and informal observation debriefs.
It's been important to start with shared learning and understanding first, and it's been exciting to see how school leaders are applying their learning in their individual school contexts. Just one point of clarification. Emma, mentioned something that's really, really important for our work, which is this idea of unpacking standards. Would it be helpful if we explained what that meant? So Do you have a quick look at it? So when I think about unpacking a standard, I feel like that is one of the major buzzwords in education in 2025, and everybody says it. And actually doing it is pretty critical. Right? Because we all know the standards, and we look at the standards, and we see
the standards. But And the standards are what the state defines within each content area, what kids should know and be able to do. Right. Thank you. But when you take one standard, any grade level could even be first or second grade low lower grades as well. And you really think deeply about what do the verbs say, what's required that students know and are able to do as a result of that standard, what does it mean for how I'm teaching the standard, and then to doctor Anderson's point, what does it mean for how I'm planning my questions and tasks to make sure students are doing the work of the lesson?
It's pretty easy to check a box and say we're teaching what the state says, and it's a lot harder to deeply internalize what it means to show mastery on each and every standard in a way where the students are doing the thinking. So when we talk about data driven instruction and unpacking a standard, often, typically, those cycles will start with looking at an upcoming standard or standards, deeply internalizing what it means to teach that and then planning accordingly for where you're going with your tasks and questions. And this becomes critical because if you look at the standards, vertically, right, from grade
to grade to grade, there's nuance. You may be teaching the same thing, but getting, you know, deeper within the the level of thinking which you're asking kids to do. But if you only stay in, like, that those early stages of Webb's depth of knowledge and don't get get kids to think, what happens to students? What do they say? I learned this before. Right? And they're not you're not challenging kids, and then the kids are getting bored, and then you're getting all kinds of other issues. And so whether we're talking about our students on grade level, above grade level, or
working to get to grade level, making sure everybody get gets access to the depth of the standard, meaning that they they're challenged with what it is we're teaching, is critical and, and certainly really, really important to the ways that we're trying to make sure, that we're teaching our kids so they're engaged and everybody's learning and growing. And I think the the only piece that we would add to that part, and it goes on One question before we move on. For the teachers and the training, what is the frequency? And do they have a, like, a long term plan and goal?
And what does that look like? I'm glad you said that. That's what I was gonna comment on. So, I think one of the things when we talk about the DDI and unpacking the standards, we are super grateful for our SPST data coaches as well as our DDI coaches for the district because what they do, they cover over half of the schools that we have in our district. And their job as coaches is to teach the teachers on-site with real data, real assessments, real standards in in with those with the curriculum that they're teaching.
And so they provide, what I would say, embedded coaching on a consistent basis because they each have a caseload of five schools and they are there on a weekly basis, assisting teachers in understanding the process and utilizing the data that they need in their schools and the curriculum that they're teaching. So I would say that they provide the embedded coaching consistently. And then what we're doing is working with the leaders, at these sessions so that then they can lead some of that work at their buildings. Can you repeat what DDI stands for?
Yes. Data driven instruction, yes. And then strategic plan support team, SPST. SPST, Alex. Thank you. We get so in these activities. And I don't wanna take us down, too far because there's so much to cover. But I am curious, our professional learning or professional learning opportunities are with the school leaders, and then the coaches are helping the people in the classroom do this. We where and how do we get data that's not anecdotal about the teacher buy in and implementation that could be, like, shared with other colleagues or that could be
shared with the board? So we could say, hey. The teacher's satisfaction with their history of district run PD where the teachers don't even show up. So I'm really curious if there are metrics for that that we could see as a board. So we're talking about two two different things. Right? You're talking about, professional learning sessions that may happen on on dedicated professional learning days and times. And then you're talking about this this idea of job embedded professional development, which is
really the application of what you've learned, over time, the refining, the deepening, and the understanding. And so, I'd have to check with our team in terms of I we do collect. I I know that we collect information on, the sessions that we're that we're providing in terms of, quality and and suggestions. I don't know that we've done anything around the effectiveness of some of the job embedded things that we're doing. But then there's also professional learning that happens at the school sites that's school directed.
So, you know, there's like three kind of aspects of how we're asking our our educators to learn and grow and and learn how to implement some of these new and different strategies. And it's a combination of kind of if you were to triangulate all that data in the middle, the end result. And so let our team think about what that could look like. I don't think it's like I don't think it's straight line. We'd have to think about it. What I could tell you is that for our professional learning, we have over the course of the last year or so, we have started planning that in January for
both kickoff and all year long for late start. And so one of the things that we're doing is asking our teams, like, what are the things that teachers need? We're not just doing things that we feel like doing. We're looking at curriculum adoptions, assessments, and then these skills and strategies that they need for data driven instruction or other things and strategically mapping that professional learning throughout the year. Thank you. That's helpful. I appreciate the multi tiers of strategies about how this is all working and the metrics not matching up.
I was thinking, like one data source that might be useful would be the Colorado Teaching and Learning Conditions survey. Right? So in general, you end up having school level data on how people feel about whether they're being supported in their work as teachers. So I would encourage us to think about that as a potential thing to bring back to the board. And I'd also suggest the reason to start setting it up as sort of a public part of this process is that we have intentionally picked the high priority schools. And as we see the benefits of this, we will likely be spreading it farther and farther in the district and we'll be going to places that may not have
that internal sense of urgency about all all this. And if we can show them that the teachers like this and it makes their job easier and they feel more effective in some credible ways, that will help us with later, dissemination and diffusion. That's why I'm interested in it. Diane, and then we'll pick up with the slides. As a as a former teacher, I'm imagining that some of these coaching sessions probably feel a lot like, team planning sessions and not necessarily like they are instructional.
Someone standing up and telling the teachers what to do. It's like they're planning together Yes. For what's gonna come next. And I can't imagine that that wouldn't be useful to anybody to have an extra team member. Doctor Anderson had mentioned that, Webb's depth of knowledge can be very helpful when we're thinking about extensions. So as we sort of close out talking more in-depth about Webb's depth of knowledge and move into talking about MTSS, multi tiered systems of support, as the next portion of our update, we wanted to spend just a little time also talking about our gifted identified students, specifically in the context of both of those things.
We know from research that while being gifted is one label, it spans a variety of different profiles, traits, and behaviors. There are six profiles of the gifted learner as shown on this slide, and each profile includes different ways giftedness can present in a student. These profiles are something that we're keeping in mind as an academics team, team, whether it's a content team, our gifted team, or our MTSS team under Shannon's leadership, and helping schools to effectively support all profile types in the classroom. For example, the successful profile is one that's often associated with gifted students. Students who do well in school, rarely get in trouble, can be for perfectionists, learners
are more likely to act out, present as angry or depressed, and have poor attendance. On the next slide, doctor Miller is gonna talk more about how our gifted students are doing and how we're leveraging Webb's depth of knowledge to meet their needs with meaningful extensions. But we wanted to include these six profiles to also note that we're always keeping in mind that one label of gifted spans a variety of student presentations and needs. When we think about programming for gifted learners, one important option is acceleration, which many people talk about. But another important consideration is, regardless of the course a student is in, is how
differentiation and extension are embedded intentionally on a daily and weekly basis to support student learning. Instead of just another worksheet or more additional work, we define differentiation and extension in alignment with the center for MTSS, differentiation and extension in alignment with the center for MTSS. Differentiation meaning tailoring content, process, product, or environment to meet student needs, and extension, meaning targeted learning activities that deepen students' understanding of the core curriculum content. They involve more complex or challenging versions of the same skill or contact concept, requiring
higher order thinking, as we talked about, such as analyzing, evaluating, creating, and problem solving. Differentiating differentiation and extension for us is helping us aid in meeting the needs of all learners, including our advanced, gifted, or high achievers, making lessons more relevant, engaging, hands on, and applicable for all learners, and increasing the depth of discussion and thinking related to the standard, as we mentioned with DOK. As Doctor. De La Cruz and Doctor. Alsine shared with you in the September work session, our CMASS overall, we are seeing
strong growth from our gifted students. We attribute that in part to the work and learning we have done with webs of depth of knowledge as well as the curricular adoptions, thank you, over the last several years. We are ensuring that our lessons have intentional cognitive lift for students through our depth of knowledge and we believe that that will help build our capacity, to continue to embed meaningful differentiation and extension in daily instruction. Additionally, having high quality curricular resources helps us ensure that differentiation and extension align with
grade level content and standards. They both differentiate and extension are critical for our learners who've been identified in a gifted identified area, but they also matter for all students who show mastery in one topic and one unit, but maybe not another. And may need an embedded extension for one unit or another. Focusing on depth of knowledge allows us to build our capacity and understanding for how to design instruction for each and every student we serve. After questions, director of MTSS, Shannon Gamble, will be sharing with you the work of our Question?
Just waiting for that slide to turn over. Board members, any questions on this first, of the strategic plan? Yes? Thanks very much for the presentation. I have can you go back a slide? I just had a question on the gifted and talented piece. You know, this is one of the things we hear about a lot from parents is not feeling like kids are being challenged sufficiently. And so I was wondering if you could give us some examples of kinda what this I mean, I I think we understand the concepts, but what does it look like in in a classroom in reality? Like, what does this look like for kids who are not just getting an extra worksheet?
So I think in connection to what we talked about with depth of knowledge and cognitive lift, our hope is that if they're at gifted identified in a certain content area, that teachers would teachers and leaders would be able to know that. And if student has mastered, say, a social studies standard and or wants to raise their cognitive lift, they would, an activity might look different for a student who is just learning it for this first time and then somebody who is, you know, wanting
to extend their learning. So, if you look at this, this might might help. So, let's just say, like, a level four, they might things that we we say to connect are to relate or make connections. So, they may do some sort of debate or something with another group of students around a concept, or argue a side of a story in social studies. Whereas, if you're learning it for the first time, you might simply being identifying or recalling information as you're learning it. So, you can you can what we've been teaching leaders is how to span the
depth of all through it with the one single standard so that they can see what it looks like for a student. The other oh, go ahead. I I would say that as importantly, if you're a parent and, and you're seeing that your your student is doing the same thing always as everybody else, then we're probably not doing what we need to do. Does that make sense? So and this is critical, board members, for our strategy and for our health as a district that we that we learn how to leverage our depth of knowledge and
that we, are able to differentiate not just down but up. Because otherwise, what will happen is you will have, I think, and this is some of the the what Jason, I think you're referring to is that parents will want to go to schools of all gifted kids. Right? Which then if we can't serve them in their neighborhood schools or in all schools to make sure if you're a gifted learner, you know, your needs are being met, I think that that's that's the risk. And, but I would say that if you're a parent, right, or if you're wondering
is my my gifted kid getting what they need in some places, and we've had this discussion, the gifted kids get the pull out. Right? Like when I was in Fulton County in Atlanta, one day a week, you went with the gifted teacher. Now what you did may or may not have been been strengthening what was happening in the classrooms. It was like a whole different special thing where you were maybe challenged cognitively, but not maybe through in the context of the standards and in your peers. And so we don't have that type of a pull out model. The state doesn't resource us in that way. But if you're moving here from another state, that is the traditional national model, especially
in elementary school. So, it could be that folks are used to something else and they're not seeing that so they don't know what's happening. So for a parent and if a parent were to come to me and say, gosh, my, you know, my gifted kid isn't being challenged. I'd say, well, you know, what are they good at? You know, are they ever are they ever doing things that are directed intentionally by the teacher that, challenged their thinking? The other telltale sign is you get finished with your work early. You can do do what you want, some independent project that may not be directed to get you to deepen your thinking.
I would say that would be a red flag too. But not easy. You know, differentiating is hard and I think that, you know, because of our intentionality with our high quality instructional materials, our standards based instruction, our MTMSS process, and now our focus on depth of knowledge. Over the past seven years, we have created the conditions to be where we're at today for teachers to have the the the support and systems that they need to be able to do this well. I'm gonna piggyback on that, and then I saw Alex and Anna.
I think it would be exceedingly helpful. I think a lot of parents don't parents of gifted learners automatically jump to acceleration. And I think there's an under appreciation or a lack of understanding around extension enrichment, which is really I think for a lot of kids can be the best path forward, not just leapfrogging ahead. And I was I'm just putting a plug in, the communication to our parents around the good work we're doing around extension enrichment and what that looks like so they know. And dispelling some of the myths around the only way to be challenged is to
accelerate would be exceedingly helpful whether it comes from probably, like, the district level or site based. But I think we need to educate our parents that this is a really these are two really powerful ways that we can meet our gifted learners that aren't necessarily, you know, jumping ahead or in ways that may not be developmentally appropriate or academically appropriate, so we're not leaving gaps in understanding and knowledge. I think parents don't really understand those parts of gifted education. And and I think that's where we're really trying to lean in with the MTSS work. Right? That it's not if they're not making it's for every student.
And so what our hope is is that if schools are implementing the framework, they're sitting at the table, a team, a leadership team having the conversation around what does an extension look like or can it look like for x, y, and z student. And so, that is the work that we were working towards, but that's our best hope is that they would that we'll start to use the MTSS framework to serve all kids both academically and behaviorally. Thanks for that nativity. Alex, Anna, back to Jason. Nicole, you were said a few things I wanted to say.
So next up, I agree. I guess one of the things I've been thinking about after a couple of years of hearing from frustrated parents of gifted and talented students is at that communication level. And I do think people are expecting pull out program and that's not what we do. And that the kids have different challenges and we need to talk about these things, but we're introducing a whole bunch of, jargony words. So extension enrichment, acceleration, integration into curriculum, are all harder to visualize than I don't mean to be patronizing, but there is much more nuanced than what's the pull out
program. And, so I I do think communications about this is really good. And it's not gonna be from the board or the superintendent. It's gonna be from teachers to the parents. And it's gonna be from teachers to the kids, so the kids talk to the parents. So I might think about what the words are. So when mom asked their son, how did it go in school today? They can say, I did this really cool thing, and they might use the word extension, but they might say, I got to do this other thing. Nobody else did. So that the parents and the kid are feeling it too with normal words. And then the other thing I I really I've harped on this before, but I
really wanna know I do believe that we have different senses of urgencies for different populations and different schools. And so we are focused on our high priority schools, and we have gifted and talented students everywhere. So, I think, the lack of the sense of programming is one of the things that contributes to open enrollment choice, white flight, and actually exit from the district. So I do think we need to, like, talk about it, not just in our high priority focused improvement schools, but in the others.
And then as a district, help our teachers and leaders think and talk about it to parents. Because I really do think gifted and talented is a $200 program. We're probably spending $40,000,000 figuring out how to implement our strategic plan. Right? So, like, the scale of what we're investing in this stuff is so much greater than the gifted and talented program, and I don't think parents can appreciate that the way we talk about it. And if my question is gonna get answered in the next section, that's totally fine. Similarly to what Jason was asking in the differentiation and extension, what and how do
the coaches teach the teachers on how they implement that during the day and if you also have a real life example of how it plays out for a student, during the day? So, when I mentioned our coaches, both our SPST and our DDI district coaches, I think it can play out in lots of different ways depending on the school. So, often our we what we tell them is that we're meeting the principals where they are and wherever their end point is. So, often you will find, I would say for my DDI leads, their day looks
very different every day. In some schools, they're working with a group of teachers in a small setting like you mentioned, where they're talking about the standards but they're also, they could also be modeling in the classroom for the teacher and giving feedback. They could also be coaching a principal who wants to actually do the work with the teachers. And so, often sometimes our teachers are just coaching the principal to coach their teachers. And so, I think it looks a lot of ways, based on our five different coaches that we have at the district level.
We also work, M and I lead the coaching cohort. We have schools that have coaches, building instructional coaches. And I would say the same the same would fall. That they have a variety of where they depending on what the principal needs, lean into either the leadership team and they're working with that team, or they're working with different grade levels or content teams. So it's it works in a lot of different ways, but they are their whole sole role is teaching and learning with the teachers and practicing these skills and getting
feedback in a timely manner. I think one thing I would just add, what what doctor Anderson said about the pullout model really resonated with me. And so I think something that we have started doing as an academics team is making sure our noncontent but supportive teams like the gifted team are really deepening their understanding of our curricular resources. Because I think historically in gifted, it was like, okay. You do your stuff in your classroom over here, and now go over here and play this game or do this thing or do this project that may or may not relate to the math lesson you just had or the ELA lesson you just had. And so part of our work now is when we talk about extension, you just
learned about this particular math thing. You got done with it. Rather than five more pages of worksheets at the same level, what's an applied problem you could take on with a couple other students in your class who are ready that relates to that standard, but to doctor Anderson's point, is maybe bumping it up a level in preparation for the next grade or the following grade. So it's definitely a work in progress. But when you act ask, like, what might that look like over time? To me, that's sort of we need we're building our capacity as a team because everyone needs to deeply understand content standards in order to then then get to that
place. And back to the multi tiered systems of support connect connection, Shannon will talk more about it. But as schools are operating within that frame, as we're planning for our learners who may need additional support to access, we're also planning for our students who have already accessed and mastered. So to Alex's point, it it really is like a both and, and that structure allows us to do it at the same time. Thank you. I'd just comment on the education piece. I think Nicole and Alex cover that. I I do think, you know, that it's not necessarily your job. I think your job is to implement and you're doing that.
But I think there is I think as as both Alex and Nicole said, there's a real kind of perception that we are not serving our highest you know, our our gifted, intelligent students, our highest achieving kids. And I do think it contributes a lot to people leaving the district. And so I think you know, I don't know that it's a email to parents or, you know, communication from the board. I don't think that's effective. It's gonna it should be something where we, you know, we embed this in back to school nights. We embed this in, you know, as as teachers communicate with their parents for the first time about here you know, not just addressing all families.
Like, this is what we do to kind of extend the learning for your kid, and this is what it would look like. And I think, you know, this this stuff is really helpful for us who kind of were, you know, more in the weeds on this. But I think talking about depth of knowledge nativity, as you said about, you know, maybe it's a debate or maybe it's a, you know, really giving people an understanding of what this looks like. So because I think, you know, whether it's people's own experience or just this idea that if your kid is gifted gifted and talented that they get this special, you
know, bus to a middle school to take math, that they get pulled out. And I think we need to help educate folks that that is not the model, and this is the model, and this is what it looks like, and this is why it's more effective. And so, you know, not necessarily your job. I think it's all of our jobs. But, you know, one important piece that I think is, you know, the very first time we communicate with parents, which is back to school night, people need to understand that this is what it looks like for your kid, and this is the way they'll be challenged in this classroom. So this is exactly how it's supposed to work for our new board members. Right? You have board members hearing from constituents trying to know and understand what we're doing.
You have experts on the team doing the right work. And then how do we marry what we're doing with the experience of folks within our community and explain it in a way, that connects the dots. So just a just an observation as superintendent there. And I think one thing we'll we didn't I don't I think I failed to mention this when I talked about our, arc of learning with leaders, but that's one of the things we've been talking about with our executive directors of schools is what does it look like. So we've learned all the things. We've learned what the big words mean and how it looks with standards and curriculum.
But what does it mean for me as a leader as I lead in my building and what can that look like? So, I we have a session coming up in February. Actually, January. I'm not sure. One of those months. But anyway, we that's one of the things we can add is thinking about, the application piece in the in the school, but also the communication piece, which is something I don't think we've touched on. Jorge, then Alex, and then we're going to move on to next best step. Thank you for the discussion. It's been great kind of getting a better sense of this. And I feel like we're the sandwich school district, right?
The gifted and talented are kids in the middle and the kids that we're trying to bring up from the bottom. And so I appreciate, that you highlight at risk kids who are also gifted learners, underground or under group kids as part of that twice exceptional. And so I'm curious kind of what the district is doing to kinda help us identify those kids who are seen as at risk but actually need more challenging stuff. Right? Especially because we're making great progress overall as a district, but our disproportionality or our disparity is still there. And that's really it's it's it's hard to move that needle on that. So, I'm curious about kind of what this differentiation might look like, for those kids
who are at risk in those under groups, underrepresented groups, and and kind of how we can kind of what what's is kind of what that looks like. Yeah. I mean, I think going back to what Emma said, I think our first take was understanding the standard. So that unpacking the standard, right? So we what I think we're at a place where we're where we have done the work to unpack a standard and understand what students are no enabled to do. Where we are now, it feels, really understanding individual student need, which is hard, right?
So what if they're below grade level, what are what is their need? Is it just the standard or is it actually a skill gap that's preventing them from accessing the standard? And then if they're identified gifted, many of our gifted identified students are not identified in the content, in math and language arts. It might be talent, or something else. And so, that is that is where we're leaning in to help teachers understand where are the gifted identified areas so that you and what's areas so that you and what's challenging about it, as doctor Anderson mentioned is, you know, in a school that
has a large student population, every student could be identified differently. Some might be 2E, some might be content, some might not be. And so I think that's the challenge is is utilizing the resources that we have, their ALPs, IEPs, intervention plans, all the things to understand where students actually are so that we can plan instruction better for all the students that we serve. And I just I'm I'm biased, but I think leaning into the MTSS framework as an everyday, every week, every year process is how we do business is really the
way to know and understand each and every student in our system, and again, both academically and behaviorally, which I know our team is gonna talk about later. I would just add two very small things because I fully agree with everything Nativity said. One is we're constantly working on expanding who has access to our gifted screeners. So, for example, just in talking with the gifted team last week, like, several examples where we have students in sub separate full time programming, and they're still getting access to a gifted screener. And then I would also say just ongoing collaboration with our friends across the table of really, like, when we have students who are presenting at risk.
And twice exceptional is so multidimensional in itself, right, because you can be any type of two things as activities said taken together. And just really working to get to, like, what is the root underlying cause of the behavior and trying to support the student with that as opposed to how the symptoms might be presenting. Don't feel like we need to have a discussion about each of these three questions, but I I do have three I wanted to raise. I know. Yeah. So, and again, I'm thinking about this from both a teacher and a parent's perspective.
When we deepen and unpack the the standards and when we, deepen the knowledge of the kids working on the standards, I'm I note that our standards are pretty heavy in ELA and math. So does this take more time out of the day so that the things that aren't in the standards or not in the assessments aren't aren't still there? Or are the teachers using their ELA time more deeply and their math time more deeply with this? Or are we eroding the circle time with music or, you know, whatever the other things are that are not about this?
That's that's number one. Another question for us in the long run, when we're working on this in the schools, and this I would like to hear a little bit on but maybe more later. But for the sake of our community, is all this work easier with a school with 1.5 classrooms per grade or with three point three classrooms per grade? Is there advantage to more colleagues in your school to do these groups well? Or is small n of teachers make this easier to do? And then as we get into it, you know, how hard is this for a
teacher to learn to do? Is it five years of support when a new teacher becomes a master of this? Does a master teacher who's already been here twenty years, is already doing a bunch of this and we're just giving them a little coaching to tweak? So what is it as we think about our HR and the great teachers we have, like, how is it different for different teachers to get up to speed on this? Is it more helpful for a new teacher or more threatening to a senior teacher? And how does that work? So answer any of those you want to. Great teachers are the answer to all problems, first and foremost.
Let's never ever ever forget that. I would say that there are advantages, significant advantages to a three round school in meeting differentiate in differentiating, meeting different needs of different groups because you have more people. And you can organize kids in different ways to do different things that you just can't if you have one, one and a half. And it's hard. It's hard. Yeah. You know, differentiation is is is something that we talk about, but it's really teaching a group of kids. Not one thing, but maybe three, four, five different things at the same time.
While, you know, while managing the classroom and putting on band aids and doing all the other things that our educators do. So, I love the question, Alex. It's the right question. Yeah. It's hard. Great teachers are the answer. Schools with more rounds create systems and structures that give you more resources to meet individually needs of kids that, but I would say that there's teachers in the school district that meet the needs of every single kid in their classroom every single day, regardless of what's happening within the greater school of systems.
I think that that's right. So, you know, I will I'm I'm just really proud of the progress we've made because, we're being super thoughtful on how we really wanna do this and do do this well. And we've got the systems that we can build upon and support and plug into that let us do that. So, I think I answered your questions. I I do have an idea, though, board members, because I know we need to move on. At our next school visit, would it be helpful to look at some gifted and talented differentiation and strategies Yes. As a place to look, where it's working well and maybe where we're still in
progress? Does that sound like a a good idea? I see the team taking a note as we're planning our next school business. That's good. Thank you, board members, for the really thoughtful conversation, suggestions, and considerations. As Nativity said, with depth of knowledge and cognitive lift, we are really looking at practical application next now that there's been some extensive knowledge base that's been built. And part of that practical application, can, should be, and will be the communication that you referred to and working with our leaders on those talking points and how to
embed this, the communication around extensions, differentiation, and real, layperson, if you will, conversation around what depth of knowledge looks like and sounds like in classrooms. So thank you for those. Moving now to the next strategic objective, next best step, as defined by implementing and tracking tiered supports and instructional strategies. This is really referring to multi tiered systems of support and using data to drive
instructional decisions. So to be clear, when we talk about multi tiered systems of support, or MTSS, we're talking about tiered supports for students and the structures that need to be in place to do this. And this is where we focused our efforts, toward changing the conditions in schools in order that we can provide those tiered supports. And because the effectiveness of MTSS relies on consistent, high quality, tier one universal instruction.
That's been a priority of ours. We've taken many deliberate actions and made many deliberate investments to support this in schools, such as initiating and sustaining a standards based focus and data driven instruction practices, investing in high quality standards based curriculum materials, as well as consistent Such as the new MCAS literacy assessment and progress monitoring tools. The resources that we've placed in the BDSD instructional playbook so that every educator can access what they need when they need it.
And short cycle improvement and planning across schools with ninety day plans. Our strategic plan support teams, or SPST teams, are providing intentional focus along the lines of a double dose, if you will, of support to schools to deepen MTSS data driven practices and use of ninety day plans. And something that we're doing that we've never done before in BVSD is that we're aligning our MTSS, foundation to a national MTSS standard, as Shannon's going to describe.
Although the indicators you see on the slide name the implementation of MTSS applied to academics, as well as data driven instruction, what we know is that we have to understand our implementation landscape. So, Shannon will share a balcony view looking at the ecosystem within each school and our system as a whole. Thank you, doctor Dela Cruz. I was thinking that you could consider this little segment of, today's meeting a little bit of a palate cleanser between the deep learning around some of the academics and
then moving into the nonacademic pieces that Sennen and Tammy will share share next. So we're gonna kind of, as doctor Dela Cruz said, come up to that balcony level, and we're thinking about implementation of a system around MTSS. So we're going to look at how our fidelity of implementation of MTSS looks across the district. So, looking at the systems and structures that need to be installed and maintained for us to be able to be at full implementation. I'm gonna walk you through the phases of implementation, some bright spots, areas for growth,
evidence of progress, and close out with some final reflections. So we'll start here with kind of a a big picture view. Where are we in terms of implementation of a multitiered system as a whole? This visual here is from the Center on Multitiered System of Supports, and it's an example, as doctor Delacruz said, of how we're aligning to some national standards for MTSS implementation. Over the years, we've moved from planning and installation in the early years, and into implementation in school level monitoring and improvements.
Over several years, we've continued this work without really having a standardized way to monitor where we are and to ask whether all the work that we're doing is really sticking when it comes to how it's implemented in schools. And we know that monitoring is a critical component to get us to sustainability. MTSS is not static. It's an incredibly dynamic system, and we know that we can't build it, put things in place, and say, check. We did it. We did MTSS. We have it in place. As the center on MTSS explains it, effective MTSS implementation requires teams to regularly engage
in continuous improvement activities. To improve the efficacy and efficiency of MTSS implementation, but also to address the evolving needs of staff, students, and state and federal demands. MTSS teams continue to build infrastructure and align existing systems to ensure staff can sustain full MTSS implementation even when faced with staff turnover and changing priorities. So this is the real challenge when it comes to implementing and sustaining MTSS. So now more than ever, we need to make sure that we're really closely monitoring
and adjusting our efforts so that we can maintain a strong system. One other addition that's a challenge that that Shannon hasn't stated. You know, we hire a lot of experienced teachers. And everywhere you go, they talk about this differently. So we could be talking about MTSS, and if you came from Adams twelve or Adams fourteen or GEFCO or Westminster or St. Vrain or Pooter, they'll they they may not have the same understanding, different definitions. But if I were to ask an experienced teacher, do you need training on MTSS?
They would say, what? No. I've been trained on MTSS. But it's different. This is a problem. Right? So it's just it's it's it's just one of the challenges that that by creating these strong clear systems on how we do business in BVSD, it's one of it's the only way to overcome this challenge. Because implementing MTSS isn't like, something that that is the same everywhere else. It's nuanced and different and not maybe as connected to everything else as we're really
attempting to build. Hopefully, that was okay, Sydney. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks. I think the other thing that's really great when we think about this in terms of a continuous improvement cycle is that that type of work is becoming more and more the fiber of the organization as we scale out the use of ninety day plans across our schools using data to set short term goals, monitor actions, and outcomes, that is all mirroring exactly what full implementation of MTSS looks like. So the short cycle planning that schools are doing with ninety day plans is MTSS
at a system level. So last spring, our MTSS department collected implementation data across our schools. In these conversations, we had, consistent facilitators from our department to increase our, consistency of scoring and make sure we had some inter rater reliability. We used the tool called, we've called it the BVSD MTSS rubric, which we've standardized, and adapted from the National Center on MTSS's MTSS's Fidelity of Implementation Rubric. We took their tool, and we made it match with CDE's COMTSS, language and kind
of the way that they organize some of their components of MTSS. So along with using the rubric to gather quantitative data, we also gathered really rich, wonderful qualitative data from these conversations, and we were able to synthesize all of this and integrate it into a broader analysis. The purpose of having these conversations was really to analysis. The purpose of having these conversations was really to understand as a district where our bright spots are and where we need to focus on making some improvements. It was not to rate or rank individual schools. So we'll start by looking at some of the big bright spots that jumped out
from these conversations. This is where we saw the highest concentration of schools scoring with either a four or a five on the rubric. So a score of a four indicates implementation of of an item, and a five indicates that it's not only being implemented, but it is thoroughly and consistently operationalized across all staff, clearly documented, clearly communicated. So I think it's important to think about that difference of moving from a four, which means strong, good things in place.
A five is where, I could walk away and it would continue to happen because it's it's a process that is so clearly communicated. So reflecting on our some of our school visits and I don't have the numbers, so I'm gonna say some things. But I think I'm right, but I could be wrong. Cole Elementary, five, four or five? Well, there were a variety of scores across the rubric. So there's not like a one single score for each school. I'm just thinking to the meeting that we had to call elementary board member. She'll remember that and how intentional and system with the data driven instruction piece.
Make a note this might be something else that we wanna look at in our school visits. Some fours and fives. Alright. Sorry, Shannon. I totally messed that up, but back to you. Can I ask it's related? Mhmm. How does this look different at a primary school versus a secondary school? And just so I can frame as you're going through bright spots areas of growth and takeaways, like, how does it look different, and are you are you assessing it differently or looking for different things at a primary versus high school, for example.
So the the assessment piece, the rubric is universal, could could apply to any to any type of setting. What's different is is the ways in which things become operationalized. So I'm trying to think of an example of some specifics. All schools have, an expectation to provide standards based, evidence based tier one instructional practices. What that's going to look like in a biology classroom in high school is gonna look very different than a first grade, you know, reading lesson, but still having those
standards aligned evidence based practices in place for for tier one. When we look at things like meeting structures, data conversations, looks very, very different. Our high schools, for example, are, you know, would be meeting weekly, pulling some really high level data, drilling down from thousands of students to the students who need support immediately, tomorrow, or today, coming back next week. So there's this this kind of fast, turnaround of getting supports out to students immediately at a large scale at a high school where, if you think about an elementary
school, it might be more about looking at some of the academic needs of students that are coming up through formative assessment in those conversations as well as thinking of the whole child and some of the socioemotional piece of what this teacher is able to know and understand of being with that student all day. So I think when it comes to how this is operationalized, it looks very different at different levels. But the key principles of an MTSS framework and the practices that need to be in place, the systems that need to be built are universal.
I'd also say that at a high school, you have, like, as as we think about the other aspect of of MTSS, like, we have advanced, you know, IB, AP, like so some of the differentiation happens as this the as we schedule the students in terms of what it is that they need, as opposed to being in, an elementary school, which is everybody's kind of in in just in a round. And then in middle school, depending upon where you are in middle school, some of them have some of that and some of them don't. So I think the structure of how kids get, you know, their schedule also impacts
how those things could be different. Yeah. And I think, you know, as a district, we've been really intentional on starting to focus. We focus our energy first on elementary schools, moving to middle schools. We're not entirely, you know, in the weeds at our high schools. And I just think of, like, use of standards based assessments. Are they consistent horizontally even within a building? Or, you know, just how how these scores might shake out differently based on where we are with our level of intentionality around supporting different schools at their levels, just
brings up a lot of questions I'll keep to myself right now. Alex. Yeah. I just wanted to have one of the questions in my head not disputed myself on this one. And the high school question is great, Nicole, because I I totally agree. And I and I understand the prioritization that we have and sort of the fallback to the scheduling sort of solution to this. But one of my personal big priorities is helping us really understand how we fulfill the potential of all the kids. And in our secondary systems, the kids in the middle are often, like, doing okay and not a fuss and not challenged. And so we have all our grad plus stuff and all sorts of things to
challenge them. But I do I would love to hear more deeply at some point what our secondary schools are doing so that that kind of, multi tiered system of support is not related to just the scheduling. I'm not saying that's what you said, doctor Anderson. But that the kids the students, because they're not kids anymore by the time you get to high school, are really finding challenging engaging stuff without being pressured to be in an AP class or an IB class to do it. And that's where I think historically some of our most high performing, quote, high performing
schools have dropped the ball the most. Is how do you make sure the kid who's not in AP and IB is having that kind of exposure to deep knowledge and cognitive lift that an elementary school is being supported to do? I don't know how we support a high school teacher in a non AB, IB class to get that cognitive lift going as much as possible. Jorge. This guy piggybacks off of these questions a little bit. In terms of understanding what is presented here, spring twenty twenty four is when the rubric was developed or when the data right now, we're talking about or so is that the starting point from 2024?
Do we have more recent data? Have we seen in terms of our implementation, what does that look like? And what is the progress been like in terms of where we're at now? So spring was when we collected the data and had these conversations with schools. So these trends are coming from that data from last spring. Schools all have while I'm kind of sharing district trends and areas, each school has their own reflections and their own specific areas for growth and bright spots, which then they've woven into their ninety day plans. And so, right now, where the data sits is within those measurable outcomes in the
ninety day plans depending on how schools decided to focus their next steps and improvements, in there. I we at some point, it would be important for us to come back and have these broader conversations again to look at trends over time. Okay. So when we think about these bright spots so, again, these are the these are the, areas where most we had most schools score at a four or a five. We the first one here is around an assessment calendar. So schools pretty consistently following a defined assessment calendar, communicating those schedules to both school
as well as families, using a body of evidence to assess student needs. So this is really about, using more than a single data point to tell a story about a student, but bringing in a variety of data to understand what the needs of a student might be. We saw a bright spot with our, systems and expectations for multiple means of two way communication with families and caregivers, that would be used consistently with most or all
staff. Student support teams are in place in schools to engage in problem solving for individual students. So this is kind of the thing when people first think of MTSS, they often think of this team, which is where you have a a group who comes together around a particular student and does some problem solving to get some supports in place for that student. These teams are not only in place, but, there's time set aside to meet regularly, and schools feel like they have strong structures and processes, with these teams.
And the last bright spot here is around our standards based assessments. So schools are using formative, interim, and summative standards based assessments to monitor students' mastery of grade level standards across content areas. For our areas of growth, we noticed that there was a need to address these items that you see here on this slide. They're all closely related, and they all fall under the response to intervention kind of piece of MTSS. So progress monitoring tools, diagnostic assessment tools, and then thirdly is the ways in which
these data are used to measure a student's response to intervention. So there are three ways we're we're addressing these needs in our system. First, by filling some of the gaps that we have in our assessment inventory. Secondly, increasing awareness of what we already have. So we noticed that, in these conversations, we would say, well, have you have you are you using this? And said, I didn't know we had that. So really just making sure that our schools are aware of what resources they do have available. And then third, providing, professional learning training and coaches so that the tools are being
used correctly and as intended. We're excited to have our assessment resources like MCAS, IXL, and MAP to address some of these needs more consistently across the system and pairing those with some intentional professional development and coaching. So we do expect to see these implementation metrics change, as we continue to grow as an organization, and we understand that this will take time to learn and use these new tools and to integrate them into practice. K. There are some some areas where we noted, some evidence in progress that maybe wasn't
reflected necessarily as a quantitative data strength, but it came through really strongly in our in our conversations with schools. One that was celebrated by our schools was regarding the implementation of data district wide approach to planning and monitoring our core instruction. So we attribute this growth, to, first of all, having availability of standards based assessments,
paired with clear expectations that are for using those that are outlined in our instructional expectations, an investment as doctor Miller talked about with our both our DDI district coaches as well as our strategic plan support teams, and the data instructional coaching cohort to build capacity across schools. The other area that, that we're seeing some evidence of progress with implementation is in that the strongest, most consistent areas of MTSS implementation align directly to those in which
BVSD has provided some clear guidance and resources. So our school teams reported sorry. I'm just gonna click through all of these so they're just up. Now I have to click and talk. Our school teams reported strong implementation of academic evidence based resources and practices connected to leadership development, our adopted materials, and guidance provided by the district, including a BVSD instructional model, the MTSS guide, and the instructional playbook. When we were having these conversations in schools, it was not uncommon to hear things like, wow.
This conversation would have been really different if you would come if you would come here five years ago and asked us these same questions. Or, okay. We're not there yet, but we are so much further along than we were even just last year. So there was definitely a sense of pride and growth and, in continuous improvement in all of these conversations. And we believe that this is in large part because of the strategic investments that have been made to increase coherence and equip schools with the resources that they need to implement best practices within MTSS, starting with strengthening our tier one.
So we have, as you can see here on the slide, protocols to guide database problem solving and decision making. We have an aligned assessment calendar. We have standards based assessments being used to drive instruction, investments in high quality standards based instructional resources for tier one and evidence based intervention resources, and consistent use of the assessment tools that we that we have provided. As I mentioned, MCAS, IXL, NWEA, CommonLit, and so on. I've been hearing a lot about this instructional infrastructure, particularly our, our standardized assessments.
Just as a look for, I've also heard that there's inconsistency in how like, some some teachers are putting these as grade book items and assigning point value, and some teachers are not. And what does that mean when you have an exam that's a beginning of the year, middle of the year? So there's some inconsistency in how that is tracked and then how those reports are also shared with parents and explaining particularly of, like, a beginning of the year standardized assessment where a student is not expected to get an a, but a grade might
show up in a grade book. That's so there's some inconsistency in that aspect of these standardized assessments. We don't wanna do that. We don't wanna do that. So if we're hearing that, we need to correct that, of course. And just to clarify for the team what tier one instruction means and how many tiers there are, in an MTS model. A little gun shy because I messed up last time. But tier one, is whole group, whole class instruction. Tier two is if I didn't get what was taught in whole group instruction, it's
not too bad so sad we're moving on get a tutor. It's let's circle back and and figure out what we need to do to group you in a small group or give you some independent support. And then tier three is when those tier two strategies continue to not work. We looked look to add more intensive interventions. Sometimes that ends up in IEP, sometimes five zero four, sometimes others like real intensive services. With the idea that tiers aren't necessary like, if you're in tier two or tier three, the idea is to try to get you back to tier one. Got that right?
And and just to add that it's that that example was academic, but it it applies to non academic areas as well. Deanna and then Alex. I'm interested, in some time getting to see the aligned assessment calendars and what that looks like. I think that one of the variables that we are bad at taking care of is the fact that it might not be, the standards or the depth of knowledge that a kid can't get, but they don't have enough time.
And so I would like to see how schools are adjusting for students that all they really need is more time to get there. Not that you got it wrong. But I do think, in following up on the discussions we've had with our neurodiverse community, in particular, tier two is not a place to stay out of as long as possible. It's not always a path to IEP or five zero four plan, and it's not always an intervention to get back to tier one. There are kids who need that support all the time, and that becomes something you
know about the student and incorporate into how you serve them all the time. I got some more questions, but I'll wait till the question slide. Okay. So, there was one more button to click there, assessment tools. On this last slide, there's several pieces here, so I'm gonna talk through each one. These are just some reflections that, our team had as we kind of looked broadly at the trends and all of the data. The first is really about the mindset regarding the purpose of MTSS as we were we were just discussing. So as we all know, there's so many misconceptions increased understanding among their staff that
MTSS isn't a single process. It's not that team that meets about that kid, but really that it's, and not a pre referral process to special education, but that it's a preventative school wide framework that encompasses academic and nonacademic areas for all students. As we discussed earlier, it's not just for students who are struggling, but it's really for all students, including our advanced and gifted learners whose needs can and should be met through an MTSS framework. The next is something I mentioned earlier, regarding our ninety day planning.
So as schools are beginning to make meaningful connections between the continuous improvement model of MTSS and the short cycle improvements we saw really clearly with our schools when we had these conversations last spring. Our schools who had already been engaging in the ninety day planning work, whether it was as part of a UVA cohort or with alongside the strategic plan support team. When when the MTSS goals were already baked into the ninety day plan, implementation of
this framework felt much more authentic, much more tied to the day to day work that the leaders were were guiding. And our principles this maybe is me being a little, just giving my opinion, but there seemed to be some more autonomy and ownership in terms of how the work was being led at the school when it was what is built into the work of the ninety day plan. And and, also, I would would add that in those examples, the leaders were able to really articulate really clearly how they've determined what actions need to happen next, how
they're monitoring, the impact, and most importantly, how these moves are meeting the needs of their school community. The third reflection here is regarding our school wide behavior systems. So when we had these conversations last spring, the vast majority of schools reported confidence around having processes in place to monitor their school wide behavior systems, and having consistent alignment of school wide behavior expectations across classrooms. Yet at the same time, we understand that, the needs of students and staff continue
to evolve, and so our support in this area will continue to evolve as well. So we're not marking this one as a a done. We've arrived. This is something that we're paying really close attention to. And so you'll hear from Sam Tammy and Senan later about some of the ways that, we're thinking through additional supports, for schools and how we're continuing to listen and learn about current needs that are happening. The fourth piece on this slide is around resources. So as I'm sure you can imagine, any conversation about MTSS or or any school
improvements, the topic of resources is going to come up every time. So our schools are looking for ways to to meet the needs of kids, families, and staff, which are constantly changing with less and less. And they're asking, how can we sustain our efforts with increasing demands and decreasing resources? We all know that this is the million dollar question that that you all are coming together and ask all the time, and that we'll continue to problem solve through together. And the last the last reflection here is something that I don't think prior to
this that we've really named as a key factor in MTSS implementation. The challenges for implementing implementation are there are unique challenges relative to a school's size. So for example, a small school with one administrator, part time counselor, a point two five interventionist, and itinerant staff faces some unique dilemmas when it comes to the logistics of planning for MTSS. Scheduling meetings, professional development with part time staff who attended that one with somebody here
on Thursday or were they at their other school becomes an added layer of complexity. We have schools, you know, running multiple committees and leadership teams with the same 20 people just just putting on different hats and running to different committees to do the work. And we know that teaming is a core component of MTSS. So when you have a middle school with one math teacher and one social studies teacher or the first grade teachers don't have the same planning time because their kids don't have specials at the same time, having that collaboration becomes incredibly complex.
On the other end of the spectrum, our large comprehensive high schools, as we kind of talked about earlier, also have unique challenges but very different due to their volume of staff and students. So, when you think of needing to orchestrate the complex meeting structures and communication structures instructional practices across classrooms or responding swiftly to the mental health needs of our students while managing record keeping of over a thousand students that can feel really daunting and difficult to tackle. So these challenges really reflect our current reality of being in schools.
So we know that solutions we can't find solutions in a in a research or a book somewhere because this is a constantly evolving, situation. So I think our best move here is to really make sure that we continue to walk alongside our school leaders and our teachers as they're wrestling with these challenges, listening to their needs, cocreating solutions that are that feel feasible and sustainable. And, ultimately, if we really lean into the implementation science and thinking about the continuous improvement cycles as a way of doing business, that will help us continue to to
shift and stay nimble as the conditions in schools continue to evolve. So now I'll move to the questions slide. Well, we know Alex had a question, so we can start there. Okay. First off, I just wanna say thank you so much for this, presentation and this chance to have this conversation. I wanna check-in later with, everybody on the on the board and see how they feel about this level of inquiry because I'm super excited, but I'm a data implementation nerd and this is what I live for. I guess the first question for me is as we try to, look at this from a family facing perspective, I would encourage us to work with Randy and his
team and really figure out the family facing language we use about this because, we on the board get coached on what MTSS and DDI is, and I just think there's a lot of better language to explain this to families. The it's it's also that the the language around what we do, MTSS and DDI, are kind of very teacher facing and school leader facing. It's not what the student experiences because of it. So and I think we wanna get to what we here at this school, we really look at how the students are doing and we make adjustments in how we
interact with them in the classroom, in order to better, you know, always be changing to help them learn the most. Like, that's what MTSS and DDI kind of are and from a family or kid facing. So I would like just to work on the language. Secondly, I'm so excited that we have an assessment system and an assessment calendar. I I know this place from a long time ago when, we had 56 different schools with 4,000 teachers and they were figuring out what assessment they wanted and that meant there was no support, no ability to do this. I'm I wanna ask about two things.
One is, how do we make the there's a an impulse in America. I hear it all the time as an official of assessment's bad. It's why kids lose their souls and that's why they shouldn't be in school and you're not doing anything. You're just testing them all the time and there's way too much testing. Right? And so there's no distinction between CMASS, which is used to give us our summative data and compare to other students and schools across the state at which we rock, to formative assessment that's used for all this stuff, to the assessment that's linked to our curriculum that is part of what teachers do every day to understand if kids
understood what they thought they taught. Right? And so, I think we need to, again, have a family facing version of this that builds the constituency for smart modern teaching, which uses formative assessment in all these complex ways. So we've made great progress because we now have the system. I still talk to families in the grocery store who are like, how we my kid's being tested too much. And they don't under or they disagree or don't understand or don't think that the role of assessment is so key to making sure every kid is differentiated with and
that they get a different experience. So again, it's a, sort of outward looking thing about how we communicate that, which does go down to how teachers communicate and how leaders communicate as well as people here. And then related to that, I'm so curious how we as governing board people and other people in the public, is there a roll up of the data that comes from our assessment systems that lets us have the kind of inquiry that a SAC would have into their school. So when do we get who all gets the data from this assessment system?
Is it avail I know it should be used in a UIP, Unified Improvement Planning process, the ninety day process. It should be perhaps considered by the SAC as they think about approving a UIP. And when how does that roll up to us as school board members in a way that also demonstrates the value of it so that we win the fight to protect assessment systems? I'm afraid we could lose that at a state, especially with the current federal changes and the ability of states to just waive all federal requirements for summative assessment.
We could also have a groundswell of people continuing to opt out and the people resisting the use of formative assessment. So I just want us to demonstrate its utility and also let people be familiar with it, again, with family facing language. And I guess, doctor Anas, I'm curious what your reactions are to that and to the team about, like, well, is it a bad thing if parents ask what the data looks like? Is it a good thing? Should the SAC have access to this? What do you think about the data transparency and insight and how we deal with
the public about it? Well, first of all, I think, I'm I think your assessment is spot on. These are national issues. And I think that, you know, being able to take a look at what's happening at the federal level. Right? Like, if you don't have if you don't have the ability to assess, you know, you know, I'm not talking about there's high stakes testing and then there's assessment. Right? That drives instruction and intervention. Right? So so the assessment to drive instruction and intervention, you know, happens through the assessment framework, which, by the way, you are right when I got here eight years ago.
It was, you know, we it the the assessments that we had, weren't even for yeah. It was a mess. Now now I'm really, really, really proud of where we are. But I and I and I do think this idea of this family focus family facing and focus language is the right thing. Right? Even as we've talked about some of the technical, nuanced phrases in this presentation, and I've been like, well, this is what that means. Right? Like, we probably need to have a lot of that. But it it is a critical piece.
In terms of the of access to the data, you know, to you know, there's we can certainly if we get data, and it comes in some of CSV file, then we can upload it into a a visualization through Tableau. And and we could do that, I'm pretty sure. And we do some of that. Some of that, maybe we haven't made it external facing. The question that we would have to have is when is what's too much? And if if you sometimes, you know, folks hide in plain sight. Oh, we're super transparent. We're gonna flood you with so much information. You can't go you can't understand this way from that way, and you don't know
how how we're doing or what's happening. And then we say, oh, but we're super transparent, but we're not clear. Right? So I think that that's the balance there. Certainly, we work with our school advisory committees, which also wasn't always a thing, to get them the data that they need to be able to develop improvement plans that then also align to our overarching district strategy. But in terms of the access to the data and what people see, that might be a good question for DAC to say what's too much, what gets too confusing, and at what level do you need to understand to be able to develop improvement
plans, alongside your principal and school staff. Piggybacking on that one, board policy IKA says that the district shall communicate to families district and state assessment calendars. And so that's it. Like, that document is a great place to just insert what do these what is the end what's the purpose of a district versus a state versus a school or your classroom specific assessment since we have to do it anyway? We're not I mean, it's just an opportunity to insert some of that detail that Alex is coming up with. Did you know that off the top of your head?
Did you? We just reviewed that policy, doctor Anderson. I know. I You know how I was pretty present. Policy. Deanne. I am, interested in in, helping those teachers that are isolated. Like you mentioned, a middle school teacher, that's the only one that teaches their content in that school. Have there been any plans to put together, something like an action research conference where, teachers could share what they've done, how it worked, and what kind of assessments they're using so that it goes across the district and it isn't isolated.
I would say that we have and this came out of our teacher roundtables that we did several years ago. For for folks that that are the only person that teaches their subject in their school, we've done some we've tried to arrange some of our professional development days so they could have some some time together. I don't know that we've developed anything in an action research format, but but it's something we're sensitive to. And I I would say we probably have done less with schools that are so small that somebody who teaches a subject that's widely taught throughout the district, but because
of their small school, they're the only one who teaches it. I don't know that we've done as much there as we have with maybe some of the under other subjects where there's one teacher in the school that does this, and they have nobody to plan and nobody to relate to and nobody to kinda bounce ideas off of. Additionally, our teams, Shannon's team, as well as our DDI coaches and leads, we often will coach a teacher, if there's a request. So we have a internal system to provide support. While we're small, we do lots of work and we try to expand around 56
schools. So if there's ever a request for a single teacher or a grade level, we will respond to that and send somebody that's on my team to to help coach. I can, add two examples to that too. In one of our smaller middle schools, it's it's not impossible, but they've kind of paired within, like, maybe, you know, math and sciences. You might not be, you know, teaching the same course, but there are some some planning that you can still do with a colleague. And so it's not that it's impossible. It's just an added layer of complexity and planning for the leader.
And then one example of kind of what you described that, is actually within our elementary specials teachers that, Aubrey Yeh, our amazing coordinator, has has, you know, put together structures last year where an art teacher for one school could partner with two other art teachers, and they could look at how they were planning with the standards and assessing. And so putting some some thinking kind of innovatively and creatively outside of the box to give teachers those experiences. One more question or perhaps a clarification since I'm sort of new at this.
When you say the word assessment, to me as a person who, who works with students all the time, I don't think those are tests always. Is that a is that truth? Is there are you actually talking about tests, or are you talking about projects that might meet standards? I think the way we would design define assessment could be used broadly to include a variety of project based assessments, tests, more traditional. Yeah. I think it could describe a variety of things. But our assessment district wide assessment framework is test.
Right? So we don't have district wide project based assessments. Those would be more school based, teacher based. We are more than halfway through our time today, and we are less than halfway through our content. So I'm gonna ask folks rather than taking a cover break, folks can manage their own comfort as needed. And maybe we start the evaluating included, get through all the discipline data, pause for some questions, head into bullying, pause. But getting through those chunks of slides just to help us stay on track. Does that sound like an okay tactic moving forward?
Perfect. Thank you. You you differentiated our meeting there. That is excellent. And I love the engagement. These are exciting conference, exciting work. And I think we're all very happy to see that we're actually living, not just talking about MTSS, but we're living the work. And so I think that's why board members have asked so many thoughtful questions to this point. Alright. With that queue, we are moving to the strategic objective of valued and included. And the work in this objective is comprehensive, as you can see in the implementation indicators on the right. And the aim here really is for all students to feel and have experiences of
being valued and included in their learning environments, for schools to engage in restorative practices with students when appropriate, and to consistently apply recommended resolutions for specific preventative measures discipline, as well as responsive and preventative measures to address bullying. Senen is going to guide us through our current context, responses, and next steps.
And, I know that we're going to pause for a break in between, but just to introduce this, additionally, we recently shared the Be Well Action Plan with the board, and the well-being of students is inherent in this strategic objective. So Tammy will also address related data data about the well-being of students and how our system is responding, but Senan will get us started. Thanks, Doctor. Dela Cruz. Good morning, everybody. It's an honor to get to present to you today. I'm excited about our work, and to share our bright spots and our challenges as
well. Alright. So the first section, just to kinda give you an overview, I'm gonna provide, some year to date updates around discipline, including how office discipline referrals work, how decisions are made during that process, our most common types of office discipline referrals, and our most common resolutions to those office discipline referrals, our year to date suspension rates and a comparison to some neighboring school districts, our year to date discipline proportionality, our year to
date adherence percentage to the discipline framework and how that tool is used. And then following that, we'll get to the kind of then what next and what are we doing in response to all of that data. Alright. So this slide gives us a nice foundation. It's helpful to set a foundation of the general process of what happens when there is an office discipline referral. Oh, thank you. I can't see those slides, I can just see my slides, so thank you. The first step always for the school and school administration is to restore safety, and
tend to injuries, physical or emotional, however those may look, on an individual basis. And then depending on the severity of the situation, parents or caregivers may be contacted at that point. Or depending, you know, if it's a less serious matter, then students are given a chance to share their experience, give their side of the story. Additional information is then gathered from any witnesses, staff, surveillance video footage as appropriate and available. Once all that information is gathered, the administrator might seek consultation from me, from their
executive director, or a level colleague at another school to be sure that their investigation is thorough and equitable and within in compliance with policy. Then with the facts as or as close to the facts as are possible to be gathered, the administrator makes a determination to the best course of action to be sure that the incident doesn't happen again. That the students who made the mistake learn from it, and that harm is repaired. Support plans might be written to provide longer term care for the students involved.
And then further follow-up is provided to caregivers students moving forward. Finally, documentation about the communication with families and with families and with staff, documentation about the incident, and any support planning is completed. Alright. So then considerations for the office or discipline referral process. It is expected that our school administrators make objective decisions regarding disciplinary situations while they
balance the distinct needs of the students involved, the the impact of the incident on other students or even the greater school community. And again, safety is the number one factor that is considered. So restoring it, putting measures in place to create assuredness that behavior won't happen again. You'll hear me say this a couple of different times because it's certainly appropriate, but the age, stage, abilities, and aspects of the students involved, and how those factors may have influenced equitable decisions with the guidance documents that we have for them that provide
procedural support. So, the codes that they are to use when documenting. An investigation checklist to make sure that they're following all the steps and everything is tended to. The discipline framework that you'll hear more about in a minute. And again, I'm available for consultation. I always tell them 20 fourseven, even if you're working on something after hours, if I can answer it, I absolutely will. We also have, assistant principal advisory groups at the middle and high school levels to discuss the most common types of office discipline referrals that are happening, so that we
can have really in real time conversations about how everybody's approaching the response to students so that if it happens at, you know, East network, Northwest, we're we're responding similarly and equitably. We also have ongoing professional development for administrators to stay learning on implicit bias, restorative practices, and we consistently review our discipline data.
Year to date, high level look at the top most five common types of office discipline referrals and the five top most common resolution types or the outcomes of the office discipline referrals. And you can see in the bar graph that the most common type of event is in some type of inappropriate contact, followed by detrimental behavior and disruptive behavior as the top three with peer conflict and then offensive language or offensive gesture lagging lagging
behind those three. Our top five resolution types where you see a very remarkable and positive difference between how often a restorative intervention is used as a resolution compared to the four listed after type of loss of privilege. I want you to please note that nowhere in this top five list is any type of exclusionary discipline. There are no suspensions, indicating that our schools and our leaders take a lot of
different other approaches that are restorative to repair harm and support students. You might be curious about the codes, the numbers and letters next to those names. The codes that are numbers are state codes that we get from the state. The codes that have a letter b next to them are distinct to us here in BVSD. Every year, we review the codes from the state to make sure our coding is current and accurate. And then the reason why we have b codes is because we wanna have a greater depth of knowledge about what is happening in our schools so that we can
respond appropriately and have just more accurate data. Is there any more you'd say on that, Stephanie? No. Okay. This next slide gives us a year to date comparison of out of school suspensions so far or at this point in the year. So August through November. You can see at the top in 2023 at this point in time, we had a 100 a 183 out of school suspensions. Last year, a 166. And this year, we've had a 160. So we're noting a downward trend.
We did, and then the analysis of this, take into account declining enrollment, and maybe that could be part of the reason that we're seeing fewer suspensions. However, when we calculated that the number of students enrolled compared to number of suspensions, we still note a downward trend over the past three years. This is my favorite slide. Oh, gosh. There's a suspense. Okay. So for for greater context, because it's so easy, you know, I've been in this district almost twenty years. It's We don't always get the opportunity to look outside and check-in with our neighbors.
This slide provides us some interesting information about the number of suspensions that are applied for misconduct in some neighboring school districts compared to us here in BVSD. These numbers are taken from the Colorado Department of Education and their raw suspension numbers for the last school year, twenty four-twenty five. You will notice that BVSD's numbers of suspensions are dramatically lower. This speaks volumes to the work that we do to keep our students in school, learning alongside their peers while we help them shift behavior, repair harm, and stay engaged.
Another important piece to note is that our neighboring districts also suspend students kindergarten, first, and second grade, and we don't. Again, just another point of pride about how we support our students and their engagement here in BVSD. I wish okay. Now I'm done. See you. No. Just kidding. Alright. This one's good too. The discipline framework. This slide will show you a percentage of adherence to our discipline framework that we implemented last school year as a part of our valued and included work, and we continue to be successful with this.
What this tells us is that so far this year, August through November, out of the sixteen thirteen office discipline referrals, 95.7% of the time, the resolutions to those office discipline referrals fell within the expected range of response that we would deem to be appropriate. Now, the small number of incidents that don't fall within that range are situations that are really exceptional or unique and have, yeah, just some unique circumstances.
So it's reasonable that there may be times that there's a larger or lesser response, again, given the circumstances with the students involved. And in those circumstances, schools are consulting with me or their executive director and and not making those decisions in isolation. Five years ago. Every school had their own set of codes, no common form, no common discipline matrix, no accountability for suspensions or exclusionary dish discipline.
Working with Equity Council or Latino Parent Advisory Council, teachers, principals, we have revolutionized. Like, it completely transformed how we look at, discipline and how we support students. No no restorative I mean, of all of the progress we've made, I don't know that there is an area that has been more transformed than in how we approach this. So I just wanted to for those that are new on the board, this wasn't
always the case. And we've been super intentional. And you're gonna see in a second, we still have work to do. Even though I think that, you know, in comparison to other places that aren't even tackling some of this really difficult work, and they just chalk it up as kind of doing business and suspending kids out of school. That's just how you have to do it to to to to to accomplish what you wanna do. I just I'm really, really proud of that. So I just wanted to kinda interject that. Board members, any questions on the first eight slides of the value you didn't include
objective, Anna? I do. I, and some of the what, doctor Anderson just said, answered some of those questions because I was wondering if there is, is reporting standardized and what is the process for a student to report incidents and then who takes it on. And then, we just talked about most of these being resolved within an appropriate, time frame. So, I'm also wondering what is that time frame on average? So so this is all data that comes from reporting to the state.
Our data is clean as a whistle. We the data that we report is incredibly accurate because that was one of the things we're worried about is because when you start to dig into work like about this, what happens is that, you could incentivize bad behaviors at schools whereas opposed to filling out the forms, they just go off the books and tell kids to go home for a couple days to cool off, which is exclude exclusionary discipline. Right? So, I would say that the data that that you see here is is data
that we report out to the state. I would say that you're and I I can let Senan talk to this more, but, these these, resolution to a discipline referral is pretty quick. Within the week that it happens, if not, you know, sooner than at a couple of days depending upon what's happening. And, again, I can't speak to those other districts in terms of what's being reported, what's not being reported. I can assure you that it's accurate and that we're not, like, miscoding things to do things we shouldn't be doing.
Right? That's the adherence to the framework. So, if you do something, we're really clear on our matrix on where it falls on the matrix, which then gives you a range of supports and potential consequences, that you can choose from as an administrator. Where without any oversight or any, accountability, in this, what can happen is you can have administrators go rogue. Right? And over penalize and over discipline.
And and I've seen that everywhere that I've been except for where I'm at and where we are today, right now. So in any event, very, very comfortable with, really more I'm proud of kind of the work that we've done here. But I can when when we say we have 493 or four, suspensions, that that's what we had. And very, very clear and and really, confident of the data that we have. And what might be helpful is for our two new board members, and on part of their onboard onboarding is how what does this process look like?
What do vortex meetings look like? What what is that framework? And maybe a place where you have more time to really dig through process, not just the where we are at that time, if that sounds good to staff and board members to hold off on some of those very that it will take a lot of time to get to those questions, and I think they're really important ones. But I think there might that onboarding might be a great opportunity to dig a little bit deeper in the process. Yeah. That sounds great. And I will speak to the reporting question here in just a minute. Jorge and then Alex. First of all, I'd just like to, teachers, administrators, and everybody for for this trend.
I mean, it's I know it's been a lot of work. It's been a long, slow process and it's it's amazing, that we've made it this far. And and it's clearly not just, the discipline part of it, but it's what the work that lies ahead of that's done beforehand. Right? So I'd like to if you can if you could speak a little more about, what proactive strategies have we used, like, what's coming before this, right, to address this because the behaviors could arise still, right, but we're not just responding in a negative way. But what are we doing in advance of this to prevent this? And and where do our school safety advocates fit with all within all this? Thanks. I'm gonna get to the the preventative and the before part in my next section.
So if you don't mind pausing on that. Our school safety advocates are there to help in almost any capacity. So if there's a really in-depth investigation, they are available to help with that. If there's a situation that, you know, has major safety issues there, they liaise between, law enforcement as needed. They can be a consultant with the school administrators and another thought partner. They can help meet with families and explain procedural pieces and outcomes. So they really serve as a, side by side partner with schools.
And some administrators have a lot of experience and confidence and ask less of their school safety advocates. Some of them like to do everything with them. It kind of just depends and, it really is a beautiful partnership. This may be some of this we can talk about during the q and a on this larger section, but, and I'm channeling for the excellent input from Kitty Sargent on the board, who, has historically been our, copy editor. I'm sort of a graph copy editor sometimes.
And so when I look at slide 27, it would really help to know what those numbers are because all I can tell is the proportionality, not the scale of that. Mhmm. Which is important because when you look down at the, couple slides later and you see a number like one sixty, I don't know what proportion of all those other disciplines one sixty is. And that gets to sort of the the meat of my substantive question on this. I really wanna know the pre strategic plan baseline for these numbers because in my
estimation, we made a huge change when we changed the policy. And we went to being like the other districts with numbers in the thousands to be in a place with less than 500 a year. And now we're comparing whether we get from one sixty eight to one sixty when 95% of the change from that policy change is implemented. So for the last two years and the next two years whatever, we're watching noise in the system, not substantive data. By that I mean, whether or not our out of school suspensions are one sixty or one sixty eight.
The deal is we went from 2,000 to 500 and now there's individual cases that are driving specific things that don't really have anything to do with our policy or what we're overseeing, but we're just congratulating ourselves rather than moving on to the next question. So I'd love to hear some discussion of that. The next part for me is part of as a school board member, one of the things you get are aggrieved parents, who have been participating in these processes. And rarely are they the parents of the kid who's subject to the discipline.
So I even like to know what proportion of our disciplinary events involve another student and how much of it is disciplinary events involve another student and how much of it is a student versus the teacher or the school and there isn't basically a person who's the recipient of the bad behavior. Because the stuff we hear about a lot are the kids who are the recipient of it, and we focused our strategic plan and all our metrics on the perpetrator. And I have no data on the feelings of the kid who was harassed and the kid who was bullied, that I can interpret from this. And we get a lot of grief. We have a lot of people choosing to open enroll.
We have problems and disproportionality of enrollment by, by people who are the ones receiving it. Our LGBTQ community is always talking talking about how badly their kids are being treated, and then there's a disciplinary thing. And inevitably, the kid who's been bullied for three months is the one who slaps the other kid and is then the subject of the discipline. So I'm I'm really curious if we can I don't wanna change the strategic plan metric now? I know that's not my place. But I feel like the discussion we're having about out of school suspension is, at this point, not constructive to the important work we need to do for the next
two years. And in fact, we could be asking much better questions about school climate and culture and the experience of our students, and the question so people know they can't suspend the kid out of school. Great. We won. That's why we're at 500 and everybody else is at multiple thousands. But so what are we doing next? And I feel like our data is keeping us just in that track because a board four years ago picked that number, which was great. They did the right thing. But I don't think we're measuring the right thing anymore. I will say, I think that there's some validity in a lot of your points.
You know, the goal isn't to get to zero. Right? Like, at a certain point, there's going to be incidents where we have to suspend students. Right? There's There's gonna be incidents where we have to expel students, whether we'd like to or not. Like, there there that that is an appropriate consequence for some, situations. I will say that, some of that information you're asking to quantify like, I understand the spirit of what you're asking. I'm not sure you're asking to quantify like, I understand the spirit of what you're asking. I'm not sure that that's how to get to it. We do have some slides that that, that we're gonna go through that talk a little bit about the bullying. But and I think that we can have a greater conversation as a as a
governance team after that happens. So, but I do hear what you're saying. And, yeah. No. It's, at a certain point, it's maintenance, right, versus trying to even continue to to drop down to are we at that point now? I I mean, at at a certain point, you get there. I think when you look at the disproportionality, you'll see we have more work to do. Alright. So speaking of disproportionality, this slide shows a year to date and a three year comparison visual of our discipline disproportionality for our Hispanic and Latino students compared to our
white students. And obviously, this continues to be a prominent area for our growth in the realm of discipline. So, the orange bands with the key up in the top right corner, you can see, the numbers of incidents. And you can see that the the different student groups there on the left. And the orange band means much less favorable. The blue band is much more favorable. So we've made, as we were just talking about, strides in reducing suspensions, adherence to
the discipline framework, and our focus is continuing to narrow to determine the root cause of this challenge that we and so many other states and district across the nation face. We are facing this head on and continue to work collaboratively with our schools to name and tackle the challenge. Bullying reporting or these types of concern. So, most types of reporting is done at the school level. A child reports to a teacher, a parent calls the teacher or administrator, however, we
do have a link on our district and school websites for as a district reporting tool. This slide provides the annual numbers of reports for the past three years, And on the far right, the little gold shield, our number of reports made so far this year actually through yesterday, where we sit at 53 for essentially halfway through the year. Continuing with some bullying related data, here is a look at trends over the course of the school year in bullying related incidents.
You'll see that our trend data is lower at this point in the year than the past couple of years. This slide gives us bullying incidents by code. So the top code well, let me back up. This slide has this the same data as the previous slide broken down by types of codes that we use related to bullying related incidents. And we can see the prevalence of each type compared to the last two years, and to date the school year.
You will see that among the types of allegations of bullying and harassment, based on a protected class, race is the most common. So the the top code is allegations of harassment or bullying that are general in nature nature and don't apply to any protected class. And then ranking below that. So you can see that, race is the most common in the protected classes for the past couple of years. Note that these office discipline referrals are, not disaggregated in terms of the incidents that
have been founded or unfounded. This is just all of the allegations that have been reported and investigated. And to be clear, Simon, back to that slide, the the data for 2324 and 2425 is end of year data. Correct. And 2526 is like, we're gonna wanna clarify before we post these slides to clarify that. And 2526 is is year to date. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. On that fact, I mean, if if we're releasing these slides to the public, I I think doing it that way without comparing if you're gonna do a bar graph
or a figure, it should be the same time period. Otherwise, you're just misrepresenting for quick cognitive use by the the people who receive that graph. So I I don't think that's an appropriate way to share that data if you're trying to get appropriate conclusions from the audience. Another point I would make I can you go to the slide of 34? I'd be really interested to know how these break out by grade level. And I ask you that because I think allegation of sexual harassment is hard to code in the lower grades when you've got, pretty ambiguous things going on.
And, I think you might have a lot of uncoded bisexual orientation when sexual orientation is not really what's being manifested, in a world of, trans kids and other things going on. So just based on the anecdotal reports I get from parents, I I think if we knew by elementary grade, then we might see more, you know, uncoded harassment that is that if the kid were older and when they had the words to ascribe it, might be based on sexual orientation or, gender status if we use more than
just sexual orientation as a measure. Just to be very, very clear, like, we as we present this slide, I do think that you make some valid points, Alex. We're not presenting this as some type of win that we've done anything other than just presenting what actually the information is today. We're not presenting this as evidence of progress or anything along those lines. This is just where we are today. And I just wanna be really clear with that and to the extent that we have anybody being bullied. Right? Like, we have work to do. And, the the impact on on on students, board members you hear from the same
parents I hear from. You know, this this data is is me is in the big scope. You know, maybe you think, oh, gosh. There's not that much bullying on until your kid's bullied. And then then this becomes the most important thing that the district needs to needs to address to deal with. So one last point. If we can integrate the things we as a board talk about, when we have declining enrollment, I'm always interested in how we keep the families that are in our district. And one of the reasons they leave is because their kid is bullied or harassed. And so every one of those is a kid with an experience that may lead
them to leave our district. And so that's where I want a of, you know, the person who's experiencing the bullying and harassment, to be, you know, really a part of what we're talking about more. I just have a point of, clarification for from slide 31. Can you explain the difference between the much less favorable and the much more favorable percentages in the student body and what that means? I I can do that. And so as we really started to measure proportionality, if you look at the, in
the key up in the the upper right hand, so gray would be proportionate. So the the light gray bar is the percentage of Hispanic Latino students that we have or the white students that we have in the district. Right? The the orange line is is much less favorable because it's disproportionate going the, the wrong way. Meaning that we have significantly more, referrals of Hispanic Latino students by percentage than the
percentage of Hispanic Latino students we have. Conversely, for our white students, we have much less behavior incidents referrals, proportionally than we have percentage, of white students. So to to so both are disproportionate just in different ways. And so when we created this key, we tried to scale it to say that some disproportionality would be more favorable, some would be less favorable.
And that's how we used the color of the bars to kind of communicate that. So by looking at slide 31, you can see that we have a proportionality issue with behavior incidents for Hispanic Latino students. And, not necessarily proportionality issue for our white students. Yeah. This is one of those slides that should be like focus grouped because I think less than like 2% or 3% of the visual people looking at it will take the conclusion away easily that you're trying to give them.
Like, share it with Saks and say and you look at some other models. Talk to some people about how to present this data because I think this really doesn't communicate very well. I mean, you can figure it out eventually, but I'd be really curious, like, what percent of SAC members within five minutes know what it's doing. Knock the power onto this slide, but just Do you want me to go go back? I don't think we need to. Okay. But, you know, the number's clear. These are behaviors that include suspensions but are not just about things that end up in suspension. Right? So it includes a whole range of behaviors of different various levels at just different discipline referrals.
And so I'm curious if you could speak a little bit to what what rises to a level of parent notification or documentation parents should be contacted. But we wouldn't have a data point to say parent has been contacted or not contacted. The expectation the expectation is that you contact parents when when a student is sent
to the office on a on a discipline referral. And the doc the documentation point for these data then? Is the actual referral. The actual referral. Right. Okay. Great. And and one more thing for slide, the bullying incidents by code. Are those exclusive categories? Or could example, you know, a full range of bullying, right, on, like, gender, sexual orientation, and race and ethnicity? How are those coded here? So is it just the primary one, or can I have I can one incident fall into three of these categories? That's a good question. Yes. An incident could have multiple codes related to it depending on what happened, how many
students involved. Absolutely. K. I do think it's important too. One of the changes that we made several years ago is to make sure that we look at this data in real time. To board member Medler's point about, is the code being multi department group with Senan, Liz Lindell, our equity compliance officer, and, our data team where we go through a full report of every incident reported under that code.
We read the description of the incident to make sure it's coded appropriately, and then we're able to provide real time follow-up if a school, perhaps, is using a code in a different way than another school might so that we can have that across school comparison. One last question from Deanne and then we're gonna move on. Is there any attempt to, find out the data from teachers about some of the things they don't actually take the time to write an office referral to? So we know how many are actually happening in the classroom instead of just the
ones that are sent to the office because that process in itself is disruptive. So teachers may choose to Mhmm. To put a squash on it Mhmm. While they're there, so it's not disruptive. Mhmm. We don't have a data point on that, but it it it pulls us back to Shannon's comments about our MTSS systems, and the work that we, will be doing to enhance those systems across our school in terms of behavior in the classroom, how it's supported, what teachers are doing. Yeah.
And answering that bigger question. We we don't have a data point on that at this point. Alright. So now shifting gears to our response to what we are doing to prevent and intervene. And like doctor Anderson was just saying, we do have some bright spot, and there's spots and there's lots of work to do. We know that improving our disproportionate discipline particularly will come as a result of improving a variety of factors, B, B, the recommendations from the Be Well survey, that you'll
hear more about in a few moments. The next three slides provide a snapshot and summary of the proactive and responsive systems that are in place, at the school level, smaller grade level or smaller systems, and even individual student or teacher level. Alright. So at the universal level, you can think about this as what's available to all schools and at the scale of the school level. So we have professional learning, specifically around building capacity for restorative practices, in everything from
restorative questioning, implementing restorative circles in classrooms, all the way to restorative justice conferences after harm has been caused and there's some type of bullying prevention grant that I'll speak more about in a moment, bullying prevention grant that I'll speak more about in a moment, resources to support schools with classroom management, restorative practices support and consultation for schools with their school wide systems between MTSS and student support services department is in place.
So, all that means is that the MTSS department and student support services and our teams meet weekly to discuss needs of schools and really decide the best approach to respond to the school, who's the best person to do it, and then execute from there. In terms of targeted support, so think about this as what's available for all schools, but on a smaller scale. One thing that's new this year is the use of the disengaged teen book, which is a newer research based book that categorizes disengagement in a nice contemporary way that's
really actionable and usable for parents and caregivers and educators. And we're using the book in professional learning with our assistant principals and deans, specifically. Some of our schools have opted in this year to being a restorative practice steps are in their school. And that might be just focusing on what restorative mindset means, how to build staff
capacity for, implementing that those practices and mindset in the classroom to larger school systems as well. We also provide support for ninety day plans on culture and climate goals, if schools need that support. And particularly this spring, our schools who need more support with discipline disproportionality, will be having particular support in their ninety day plans this spring to have a focus on improving that in their school. And then at the intensive level, or you can think just smaller scale, this is
when we're talking about really individualized student level support. A principal might reach out to Shannon and her team and say, I've got a teacher that needs some It's a newer teacher and they might need some particular support with classroom management. Or we've got a student that, is in general education and we are really struggling with next steps for how to support them differently. So again, that's where our departments collaborate and respond to the school's needs there. This next slide is an update on what is happening with our bullying prevention grant
cycle. At the beginning of each school year, the school team, who's responsible for implementing the grant work, uses data to decide their area of focus. And that data could could be anything from their bullying survey, that's student bullying survey that's required as a part of the grant every spring, their student climate data, discipline data, or all the above to decide what exactly is their focus gonna be this year and what are they gonna do. Further, all BVSD staff have been trained in identifying and responding to incidents of bullying
and harassment. This training has been particularly enhanced this school year through Senate Bill two ninety six, where all staff were required to participate in a learning module by December 1. There are, I mentioned that annual student survey for students in grades three through 12, that gives us some great information as well. There are evidence based classroom lessons at both elementary and secondary levels. There let's see. We reviewed the data from the on BBSD online reporting tool a moment ago, and
the access for reporting concerns remains visible on our web site. And, just two weeks ago, we probably all got one of the beautiful email from communications just reminding our whole community about what to report, how to report. Please, we want you to report so we can help make things better for all of our children and families. There is also a bullying prevention and education toolkit that is revised every year and available to any of our schools and teachers. One other piece of information about the bullying prevention grant that I want to make
sure you're all aware of is that, in this now next three year grant cycle, funding is being reduced by 40% over the life of this grant, which is prompting us to make some changes. And one change that's already happened is that our bullying prevention specialist is now working half time instead of full time. She's able to meet a need as an as an elementary counselor half time in one of our schools, so that supports that need. And then she's now half time, again instead of full time, as the grant coordinator.
So it was a strategic solution to fulfilling a school need, as well as meeting a financial need for the grant. Next, an update on restorative practices. So I wanna just paint a little picture for you about what restorative practices, programming, and support looks like for schools. It is not, it is, I think, one of those buzzwords that's pretty abstract. But being restorative is not a task that you check off. It's really actually a mindset about how we approach other humans, how we approach students,
and really the work of being an educator. It means that we approach everything, knowing and understanding and acting from a place that everybody in our school community brings value. And our school. So, in addition to ongoing professional learning for our administrators, para educators, bus drivers, and all transportation staff, all safety and security staff have also received restorative practices training this year. And our restorative practices coordinator continues to collaborate with our colleagues in special education and
in MTSS to create professional learning content that's available for teachers and schools directly. And then the five schools that are our restorative practices schools, represent elementary, middle, and high schools. And they continue, like I mentioned before, embark on building that culture within their school and their capacity as a leadership team. And our restorative practices coordinator is available for consultation with schools at any time. She is on the phone with families explaining things.
She's going out to support individual teachers, principals, do RJ conferences. She is very adaptable and available. So beyond all of that, I think we all understand, everybody here, that behavior is communication. And there are a lot of factors that drive student behavior. And we would be remiss if we didn't pause to consider the impact and the presence of our federal government climate, the the economic hardship and food scarcity that our
families are facing, as well as just overall tension and increased violence in our own country and beyond. And we are seeing that stress in our students and our families. And that is very real and it's important that we honor and recognize that and own that as we continue with our work. And as I said, as leaders in student support services and MTSS, we work really closely together. We've had some really rich professional learning this fall that's continuing to help us narrow
our focus and drive our work. One of those pieces being a framework specifically for reducing disproportionate discipline. This comes from the National PBIS Leadership Forum. It's an evidence based five point intervention approach for equitable supports to reduce discipline disproportionality. We have aspects in place in all five of those components. However, that second bullet, and a few of your questions and comments have alluded to this, the second bullet of implementing a preventative, multi tiered, culturally responsive behavior framework, at
the district level, is our largest opportunity for growth here. And so while that work is happening on a request basis in our and in some of our schools, again, we're gonna continue to discuss how that can look and how we might flush that out through MTSSB, through valued and included. I think I was lucky enough to have the most slides in this presentation. So thank you for your patience listening to me. And now I will turn the floor over to my esteemed colleague, Tammy Lawrence. Good almost afternoon. I was gonna say morning, but we're gonna say afternoon at this point.
Thank you so much, for having us, today to share with you, where we are with all of our data. Okay. So, as we discuss other wellness related data, we'll talk about suicide risk and mental health referrals. Before we do, let's take a look at the overall trends with our BVSD Safe to Tell reports. For clarity, suicide risk review reports are also included in this data. Safe two Tell Colorado provides an anonymous way for students, parents, school staff, and community
members to report concerns about their own safety or the safety of others. The program was founded on the belief that prevention and early intervention are key to reducing violence and saving lives. Safe two Tell encourages young people to, and community members, to take an active role in prevention by giving them a direct, anonymous way to report concerns and empowering them to make a difference. The framework established by this model offers a sophisticated and efficient system for sharing information with local responders, schools, and district staff.
Callers can choose from 38 different categories of concern including bullying, depression, suicide, drugs, violence, and others. Once a report is received, school officials and law enforcement after hours begin the investigation. You can see that there has been a steady increase in reports from twenty twenty two to twenty twenty five. This data reflected here was pulled through the December 8 and not reflective of the full first semester. As we look at our behavior trends, it's important to recognize what important to recognize
that what students show externally is only part of the story. More and more, we're also supporting students who are experiencing internal struggles, particularly around mental health and suicidal ideation. In the first half of the twenty five-twenty six school year, we're seeing strong utilization of student support services across the district, reflecting the depth and complexity of students' needs. One key component of this work is our suicide risk reviews or SRRs. These are initiated anytime we're notified of a potential threat of suicide.
The purpose is to respond quickly, gather accurate information, and ensure that students receive the immediate support and care that they need. When an S. R. R. Is initiated, staff work to identify the specific source of concern, whether that's something a student said, something observed, or something reported by someone else. From there, the process helps to ensure the appropriate people are notified, including mental health staff, administrators, families, and outside partners when necessary.
SRS also guide teams in putting the right supports and safety precautions in place immediately. To this to do this consistently across the district, our staff uses an internal tool adapted from the Columbia Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale, which helps them assess level of concern and determine next steps, which includes a support plan. Looking at our looking at our data for the 2526 school year, we've completed 369 SRS as of December 15, with the highest volume coming from our high schools.
For context, in the twenty four-twenty five school year, we completed a total of 777 SRS, which was a decrease of 90 from the previous year, and an an additional decrease of a 186 from two years ago. This overall data reflects the ongoing and significant need for timely mental health response across our schools. Overall, S R R's remain a critical tool in ensuring students are identified, supported, and kept safe as quickly as possible. As a resource to support our students, mental health is our mental health advocates or
MHAs. Their role is to provide short term school based support focused on stabilizing students and addressing immediate needs. It is important to note that this support is not therapy, but targeted assistance within the school setting. Also, MHAs work directly with students who have experienced major traumatic events and need additional care to regain stability. Their goal is to promote academic success and resilience by offering intensive social emotional support, impacting their academic progress.
As of December 15, we completed 1,284 MHA referrals, reflecting ongoing high demand for support. The previous year total referrals for the year was one thousand eight hundred and forty seven and one thousand one hundred and eleven at semester. Every SRR and MHA referral requires a coordinated school based team, typically including school counselors, MHAs, social workers, school nurses, and or school psychologists to provide comprehensive wrap around support
for each student. This work often involves developing support plans, closely with parents and guardians, and partnering with outside agencies and community agent providers and community agencies. Although we are declining in enrollment, we are still seeing a slight increase in the MHA numbers of referrals for the year. We are continuously monitoring the intensity of the needs, especially oh my. Thank you. Sorry. My computer oh, no. It just came back.
That was weird. My whole system went down for a second. Let me find where I was. I apologize. Okay. So we're gonna start again. Thank you. Although we are declining in enrollment, we are still seeing a slight increase in the MHA number and referrals for the year. We are continuously monitoring the intensity of needs, especially as our providers are navigating this work while As a reminder, the board received an update earlier this year on the
B Well actions that are prioritized by our district. We are currently in the process of taking steps in alignment with the recommendations outlined by the Renee Crown Wellness Institute. For the board and for those watching, the be well project was created to help us better understand the perspectives of the perspectives of the people who are closest to our schools day to day experiences. That includes our educators, our families, and of course our students themselves. We wanted to hear directly from these groups because they see firsthand what students are experiencing and what supports are or are not working for them.
By gathering insights from all three groups, the project aimed to identify our bright spots, areas where we are already doing well, as well as gaps that need our attention. Ultimately, the goal of the BE Well project is to use what we have learned to strengthen and expand the mental health supports available to our students across BBSD. As you can see, the Be Well report identified five key findings that are guiding our next steps. There we go. I didn't know I had that extra thing there. Five key findings that are guiding our next steps.
These findings are focused on students' own reports of their mental well-being, how aware students and families are of the mental health supports available to them, How frequently wellness centers and other supports are being used. Families' awareness of mental health resources across BVSD. And the broader BVSD systems that are currently in place to support students' mental health. Our value to include working group has taken a closer look into those recommendations. The above data helped us determine where to focus first, what can be built out
over time, and how we can best support students across the district moving forward. And, now we are going to open up the presentation for questions. Sen and I are happy to answer. Thank you for that very thorough discussion. Doctor Anderson wants to kick us off with questions I can see. Thank you. You know, board members, as as you can see, the need for mental health advocates and mental health support continues to grow. You know, I think that that is that is that is a growing trend.
And as we know and think about the resources that we get to support mental health in our school district, those are are not I they're not they're not directly correlated to our need. So if the need goes up, there's no extra dollars to support the mental health of of of students, that are in our school district. And we we do a lot of proactive work to help kids so they can they can be mentally ready to learn. And so I would just say that this the the declining resources, is a challenge
for us. And then also, this is where some of the small school challenge that we discussed as we discussed declining role declining enrollment really shows itself because when you have growing needs and you're going from full time to half time counselors and you're reducing the number of mental health advocates, you know, thinking about how you can have schools that are more filled with kids and resourced fully versus smaller schools that are partially resourced,
I do think that that that comes into play. So I just kinda wanted to lead with those two ideas. I have a question. Looking kinda just doing some quick math as you were presenting, the suicide risk reviews, the, request for mental health advocate support, and the safe to tell reports, all were higher in the first semester than in the second semester. And I'm wondering, as we think about academic stress and the the conditions in which our students are showing to school, like, if we have if there's something at the
start of the year that maybe not that are we could help our students with to prepare or what that might be, or in the future, just looking at the data in those. I know sometimes we've seen data on different items that kind of show the month to month. Like, is it correlated with the start of the school year and there's a lot of unknown expectations and I'm feeling overwhelmed? I can't get out of the class that I thought I was capable of taking, but now it's too hard. Is it midterm? Like, I'm curious if over time, just because for all of the all three of those types of reports, the numbers were larger in the start of the semester and,
like, really supporting our kids, early will help them be successful throughout the year. So I'm just kinda curious in the future to dig into that a little bit more so we can really make sure our setting our kids off in a positive trajectory. I think that's as as you all contemplate homework and grading policies, I think that's an important data point for us to see to see what we can get to the extent that we could create a visualization that's similar to the discipline referrals by month. I'm wondering I'll have to go back to the team, but I could see what see where that be would be something to take into consideration. I think another area that, impacts that as well is we are coming off of
summer, and so students don't have that direct, supportive adults in a school system to talk to day to day. So oftentimes, when we come back to school, our providers are, you know, inundated with the different amounts of supports for our students to share what has happened thank you
very much for this really important work and for this update. Some of my questions are related sort of about information and they don't mean to imply that we're not doing the right thing. Just as a governing board member, I'm kind of disappointed in the information that I have to have insight into it. For one, I I mean, I think about when I came in, I was I knew we were doing a lot. Big priority, and I was a big advocate of getting evaluation to be part of this so that we could know what's working and what's not working. And I am frankly underwhelmed by the Renee Crown's information that we've got from it
in terms of the findings and insight. And I and I'm I'm really like, I don't know if more reporting is a good thing because things that weren't reported are now reported or if the thing that's worth reporting is going up. Like, without knowing whether an SSR is a good thing to have had or, or what the underlying thing that's reported, it's really hard to interpret whether we've improved people's knowledge of the mechanisms to report or whether we have a 40% increase year over year in terms of the bad thing that's being reported.
So I'm I'm left just not knowing very much from this. You know, is it possible to catch, you know, what's the estimate from other data to triangulate whether the SSRs are catching all the kids who needed it? Can we use the Healthy Kids Colorado data and see if our data on bullying is wildly different from what kids are reporting in other instruments? So I would love to see a more, evidence based understanding of it. And I need to understand when we do get stuff reported, like, whether we think
a big number is a good or bad thing, and how that relates to the phenomenon we're trying to understand more deeply. And I I just don't see it yet. And then on a couple of just substantive things, one of the things that makes me nervous about Report, Safe to Tell is that we're putting it on kids, to report their their peers mental health issues. And I can tell you how many times I've heard of people who end up leaving the district because their kid reported somebody else's mental health crisis, and they suddenly lose their entire health group. I mean, entire friend group.
So I really want on the mental health world to check-in on the kids who are doing the reporting as well as the kids, who are reported on. I know, Safe to Tell can be anonymous, but I I know multiple people whose kids, social experience, own mental health, staying in the district, changed because they made a report on another kid's suicide risk. And so I I really feel frustrated in these topics because they're so important. We have to I think we need to make budgetary decisions to protect this work and invest more in it, and we're likely to have pressure to not do so.
The feds and the state will underfund us going forward. So that's why I think it's crucial to actually have a much better level of insight into what kids are feeling and how things are working. And I just don't feel like we have it. It's really tricky. Right? And I think about this a lot to the extent that, you know, the data that's reporting out is more of a current conditions versus trend data because of actions of the school district. Right? To to think about kids who are in mental health crisis or or at risk
of suicide. You know, how many of those factors are school related, home related, personal related, I think is really almost impossible to triangulate. Now now that being said, as somebody who's also data driven it's it's really it's really, I think, complicated, and challenging. I do think that there's other data sources that we could potentially triangulate. Right? You know, you have Healthy Kids Colorado. Not but not everybody takes that. Right? So you could pull some of that data. You can pull some of the data on the suicide risk reviews and mental health
advocate referrals. To your point, it's safe to tell is that awareness of the system, is that a bubble of mental health crisis that's going through with from a particular group of students, I think that is super tricky. So, you know, I've I've thought about this. I do think that we can continue to think about it more, Alex. But I I don't I think some of these things just are more of a, this is where things are right now, versus a, you know, I would never put
in a, a superintendent goal or a strategic plan, anything related to some of these data points Because I think some of them are more community conditions in addition to school based conditions. So, but making the case, right, is to it's that's what makes what's makes making the case hard. Like, if if I staff out and if I were to add 10 mental health advocates for next year, I mean, I don't have any data from next year on how many folks I would need to respond.
Right? Like, so, if you if you're always using lagging lagging data, then I think it's tricky. You know, making sure that we have the right ecosystem, dialing into data by school. Right? Because, you know, you could have outliers in this data that are school based where we might really have a problem at one school versus other schools. How do we allocate mental health resources? Is it the same everywhere? Or do we highlight the flip the places where we know we have more issues? And then do we differentiate based on trend data from previous years.
So, I'm open up I'm always open to new ideas around how we can better present data to to explain what's happening or to assess what's happening. I do think that, that there may be some limitations in in, in some of this data. And I would say that to, to the extent that the Renee Crown Wellness Institute had a research model, that may have told us some things that, we'd already assumed
we knew. Like, I think that's maybe some of the frustration. Like, we've we've spent a whole year figuring out what, like, that you know, we kinda did we know some of this already? So so the validation and, and then the the recommendations and some of the key findings. I mean, I think they're nuanced. I don't think they're maybe transformational changes. Things like, folks aren't aware of the resources. Right? I mean, you could have intuitively figured that out, but we validated that that's something we need to do. Expanding wellness centers, we could have probably intuitively figured that out. We validated that. What what didn't come out of that study is that there was something that we
were doing that wasn't massively not working or hurting or harming kids. But, certainly didn't give us maybe some of the transformative information that we would have hoped to to to deepen work. But again, you know, sometimes you do studies and sometimes that you, you know, you you you find things or sometimes you validate things that you may have known. So, I do appreciate how data centered this board is. I do appreciate the ways in which we need to think about using data to inform our community and inform our practice and inform our investments and inform our policy.
And in this area, I think there's some things that we could probably strengthen, but also Some limiting factors, but I do think that there's things that we can consider that we haven't considered previously. So I I know the team's been taking notes, and that's something we'll go back and reflect on. Yeah. I just wanted to to talk about the wellness centers and see if there's a way. I don't know how you kind of I mean, this seems well, how do we overlay kind of the wellness centers? I think, anecdotally, we're hearing that more and more students use them, that there's a greater need, and yet the data here shows kind of, you know, that the maybe
the need is not being met. And so I'm not sure how we're able to track wellness centers with this data and showing that, you know, it's there's real benefit to kids, that there's a need for expansion. I'm not sure of my question, but more just, like, I wanna be able to kind of connect the resources we have. I mean, we talk obviously about the need for mental health advocates and more counselors, you know, obviously, our budget limitations there. But here's an area where we potentially can expand and can provide more services. But I'm not seeing that reflected in this work, in this presentation.
And so I don't know. More of a question kind of for future looking future you know, looking at this down the road is how can we better track those centers, the impact on kids to this data that we're seeing here? Yeah. We did not sorry. Do you wanna go first? Sorry. We did not include wellness center data in the, slide deck. We really look at our wellness centers at a universal support for students. So all students are, you know, welcome. They know about the center. They know that they can come there and find a trusted adult. And we use that as a way to connect them with the supports available for
our tier two and higher tier three level of supports. We absolutely could look at what that looks like, but those teams in the schools, it's staffed with the mental health advocate. They work closely with the other mental health advocate and the school team, social workers, counselors, and the admin team to help support students. Couple of ideas. In in the findings, one of the recommendations was expand to middle schools. Mental health or wellness centers to middle schools. I will tell you that our funding for our high school wellness centers is at risk. It is, almost a 100% funded through philanthropy through our foundation.
And, you know, one of the tricks with philanthropy is that folks, get excited about new ideas. And then how do you transition some of those start up funds into ongoing resources? And, given our situation with declining enrollment and budget budgetary challenges and then the changing of the school finance act, we we are are relying on, philanthropy to maintain our wellness centers as opposed to, like, a start up.
This is a good idea. And then transitioning the cost over to central you know, to district, general there's work that we can do within the Be Well report that will help us. I do think there's other data that we can look at to try to continue to sharpen our focus on what are the things that are emerging as they're happening. And, but I think the our biggest risk is that, and and and, you know,
we have the data to show that the wellness centers works kids who show up. When they leave, they're feeling better. We have the that data. Like, I don't you know, so to the extent that I could tell you, if you go to a wellness center, it prevents a, b, c, d or hap I can't tell you that. Right? I can just tell you the kids are having a good experience and folks like them. And that's why we're kind of looking that as a universal because, gosh, this is working kids like them. We think that it's a preventative proactive approach, and we're also connecting kids to to more kids to preventative kind of opportunities. But, resources will become our biggest challenge here.
Any final questions, board members? Did you wanna present your last two wrap up slides? Is is that like a sign if your mic dies and you're done talking? Is that like a do we have some kind of strategic mic killing kinda As we transition to the last few slides, very few, I wanna just say a couple of things. Thank you for the thoughtful conversation, around the valued and included work we're doing. And in respect to, board member Unger's question regarding wellness center reports, our partners at
Renee Crown actually do track several domains of, wellness center data, including attendance, time of visits, students reasons for going, perception data before and after, and other domains. Also, I want to recognize my colleagues at the table for their expertise, and the expertise they bring to their work every day, and that they brought to this presentation and conversation. We have some other colleagues in the room who bring expertise to our schools every day, and that is our SPST or strategic plan support team. They are here.
We have two administrators and three data and instruction coaches. And what you see on this slide is actually the 10 schools that make up the first two cohorts of SPST schools. And so, the first cohort kicked off last year. I won't name those exact schools in the interest of time, but they are all included here, and the second cohort of schools is in active support by our SPS team now. One thing to note, these are not one type of school. It's a heterogeneous selection of schools.
We did that by design, with a range of readiness and implementation, when they enter the cohort. And then when they get to deep implementation over the course of time, with support from executive directors and a double dose of support from our SPST teams. Last year, the first SPST cohort, excuse me, school showed impressive results overall. And, the cohort the second cohort had an advantage. They started earlier this year. The cohort one started in October.
We were building SPST last year, and this year, it's definitely a well oiled machine supporting schools. SPST teams are charged with accelerating the implementation of the strategic plan in the cohort schools, and they are driving schools toward the established expectations of data driven instruction, core implementation, establishing and utilizing MTSS and standards based instruction. And of course, all of this work is driven with short cycle improvement planning and
ninety day plans, monitoring progress, and adjusting actions accordingly. All of those expectations are in place in every SPST school. And between our UVA schools and our SPST schools, we've seen that these evidence based expectations and practices are being, not only actively supported, but are resulting in greater outcomes for students across groups. Differentiated funding and support for schools has been allocated in the form of additional FTE at schools, but also through our SPST teams supporting schools.
Something that we have definitely, learned is the realization that we know focus enables excellence. Strategy alone is not enough. And in fact, we know that, the ways that BBSD has scaled out this work across all schools has been getting national attention, our focus, the results. UVA has asked our team to present at their annual summit in November, which we did. They amplified our the work that we're doing through its publication in a partner spotlight. Amplified our the work that we're doing through its publication in a partner spotlight. And what's proven to be true is that, success really comes from disciplined execution.
Focusing on fewer goals, acting on what drives those goals, tracking progress, and being accountable. In other words, a clear narrow focus, clear goals, monitoring leading and lagging measures. And that focus and alignment can be seen in a coherent manner across our schools in BVSD more than ever before. Of course, we still have work to do. We're aware of this, and we also know we've come a long way in building coherence. We recently asked our principals who've been using ninety day plans and short cycle improvement to guide their leadership for a couple years or more.
What's really value valuable about it? And they told us. So, we're gonna spend a couple minutes just watching what they shared, because it really captures the value and the impact on school improvement. And another sign from the universe. Okay. So, we will skip this for now, but send you the video. Unfortunately, because it's an excellent example of short cycle improvement making a big impact on leadership in schools and outcomes for students. So, this brings us to the conclusion of our presentation. We're always grateful for the opportunity to spend time with you.
We value the discussion and your thoughtful questions. And we're still here for any remaining questions that you might have. Just wanna thank you. Send send a thank you out to our strategic our student support services, the SPST teams, and our MTSS teams for all you do to help improve the opportunities and outcomes for our kiddos and support our teachers in that really important work and for taking the time to answer all of our questions. You do amazing work, and we wouldn't be where we are without all of you. So thank you for that. I I would like to move on to our next item of the agenda if
that's possible. Which which is? What's the next item? We have an executive session still. Yeah. Can I ask one thing? Okay. One final round of questions. First off, I just wanna thank everybody, who's presented and all the people that contributed to preparing for this. And I know I sometimes ask questions and can't can't understand what's presented. But that's in the spirit of trying to not only from my understanding, to make sure other people can understand what's going on. So I and I know that our disciplinary stuff dealing with climate and culture and our mental health issues are harder to measure and quantify.
So I'm not trying to figure out what the quantitative numbers are for these things. I'm trying to have more insight into them. And I I maybe it's a mismatch of like, well, there isn't enough numbers over. Got a few numbers. And those numbers aren't providing me insight. And so I'm if if it's qualitative, if it's people telling stories, if it's people giving me their expert judgment, I'd like to hear that as a board member so I can understand how we're doing on the mental health issues. So maybe it's not a strategic plan metric, but it is perhaps qualitative insight would be my suggestion. And then I do have a question for, my, fellow board members.
Like, we've been doing this for a while. We have two new board members. It was great at CASB to hear Nicole and doctor Anderson explain sort of their theory of change of how we work as a governing board. I think these meetings are super helpful to me and give me, a lot of information and insight. I'm curious how the other board members feel about this level of the depth of inquiry and use of this much time for it, if anybody wanted to share. Seeing thumbs up. Any other last burning can't leave for winter break without this question Alex, your question.
I think it's helpful for us too. I think it's helpful for our team to have these moments that we reflect in time, prepare, dig in, think through what's working, what's not working, getting great feedback from the board. You know, I've got, like, 10 really good ideas that came from our conversation today. So I think that to the there's benefit for our incredible and amazing team as well. Thank you again for that presentation. Board members, public as indicated on today's agenda, we have items to, discuss in executive
session. Is there a motion? I, Diane Bucher, make a motion pursuant to CRS 24 dash six dash four zero two four f to convene into executive session to discuss personnel matters regarding the superintendent's evaluation process, specifically the superintendent's mid year evaluation. Is there a second? It died again. Seconded by Anna. It is time to go. Board members, we will convene I need to Sorry.
Shall we reconvene? Okay. Bucher? Yes. Yes. Chavez? Yes. Medler? Yes. Rajpal? Now I have that one died too. Now I have three mics too, which yes. Temuading. Yes. Ungar. Yes. Motion passes. That was quite good. Microphone. Do you want this back so you can reuse it? Dean, I know you're off to exact here. Oh, yeah. I had one other thing to mention to you. I don't know if you saw news and notes, but I'm gonna have, a woman named Joe Carroll reach out to you. Okay. We're having, in January, we've opted to have to celebrate the board. Okay. And with the new board members, we do, like, a little feature story Okay.
About who we are and all that kind of stuff. So I just didn't want you to be surprised when you get that call. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. Hello, Diane. Hi. Chris from IT. Oh, hi. I was told that, you have an issue with your phone. Oh, I just wanted to get my VSD email on my phone. Oh, okay. Have the right, I don't have the right magic code to put in in the settings. Do you know what I'm saying? Not specifically. Not specifically. Except oh, I turned it off for the meeting. There it goes. No chairs allowed. The other thing we might need is to have you logged in to class already.
That would be the obvious thing. Oh, okay. So, basically, all we're gonna do is add, add an account. Right. To the Which, add tried to add it and then got to the point where Oh, it needed it needed different different, Oh, I can do that.
Yep. I hit that. Can we do better? No. Yeah. It's it's a known, That's a known. Okay. Got it. Okay. Okay. Do you mind if I hang on to this Nope. Not at all. See. You just drop it off for me? Okay. That'd be great. I I trust you. Okay? Well, I will certainly get a I have to go. If you can. Okay. Great. In fact, actually, why don't I walk with you? Sure.
No.