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[Music] good evening everyone welcome to this evening school committee meeting we will begin with administrative business the consent agenda would someone like to move the consent
agenda thank you Nancy Sarah seconds second thank you Helen okay stevenh your vote Suzanne yes Nancy yes Andy yes
Helen yes Valerie yes Mariah well I'll also vote Yes and that brings us to the student reports yeah awesome okay is this can you me
okay um okay good evening everyone um several things have happened at BHS since my last report um underclassman took the mcast students begun choosing their courses the Asian-American Pacific Islander club and the South Asian student Alliance hosted a holy
celebration um the spring Sports season started and ramadon began um but for my presentation tonight I want to focus on something I've been seeing impact my classmates more and more since the pandemic uh food insecurity in Brooklyn is impacting a greater number of families than ever a reality that's
really noticeable at BHS um while Brookland thrives which as you know is this program providing um weekend meals to food insecure students uh we workland th serves children facing food insecurity in our K system uh there is not an equivalent program for high
schoolers so um I I have with me or I I was interested to see how like the town and District was addressing this need specifically for high school students um so today I have with me um Ariel chernin uh who's the operations manager at the Brooklyn food pantry and she's going to tell you more about the Pantry's effort
to provide food like directly to specific student groups at BHS So yeah thank you for being here Ariel thank you hi everyone thanks for having me um like she like um I was just introduced my name is Ariel I am the
operations manager at the brook food pantry uh we have just launched it's in a little bit of its infancy but a program uh partnering with BHS and specific programs at BHS to provide some food that we have at the pantry to give
access to to students uh at the high school now just a little background in case you're not familiar with the pantry we do have three Pantry sites uh throughout Brookline and we're open 5 days a week for families to come as long as you live in Brookline you're able to
come and get groceries that should last you a few days um your well your families are able to come once a week to The Pantry to any of our locations but we understand that you know students might not feel comfortable coming uh we also have a lot of we're very lucky to
have a lot of students who volunteer at the pantry so sometimes it might be uncomfortable for another student to come and see some of their peers volunteering while they're collecting food so we have been working with the school administrators uh for some time to see what would be the best way for us to to be of service to some select
groups of students we went back and forth a number of times um trying to find what would be the best solution what we've come up with and what we're doing right now which is our first stage like I said in its infancy is to we are working with specific three specific
programs with nbhs they are steps to success Ace and Excel those three programs with nbhs have um their own set of students they have their own rooms they have their own little areas uh where they can store food and we are
providing food directly to each of those programs and trying to curate to their needs so and they all have different needs so for example um steps to success has some students who wants who want to be able to take food home to cook at home or
share with their family or cook themselves at home whereas Excel wants food that the students can eat during the school day whether they come to school hungry as they haven't had breakfast or they need something in between classes so we're trying to curate to each specific program and
those students needs uh the Excel program is actually uh had this wonderful Grant awarded to them this year to give them access or to create a full pretty much a full kitchen within their classroom
space so we are able to give them you know rice that they can cook in a r in a rice cooker they have a crock pot they have an air fryer uh they have a full refrigerator they have a blender to make smoothies so uh we're able to provide them a lot more options because they
have add more resources at this time so because it's a small program uh right now we are able to really curate it spe to the specific needs is should it grow and and evolve we are we are open to uh meeting these students and these
programs needs as best as we can awesome uh thank you so much Ariel like the work you're doing is so incredible and impacts so much of us at BHS like so much and I'm really glad this can be like communicated to school committee and the whole District um and I think
especially just like thinking about how how how BHS fits into this and how BHS student fits in um this was something that seemed really relevant so thank you so much yeah thank you for thinking of us and for inviting me to come speak and we're always happy to you involved in the community we're so grateful for this
for the support um of every of everyone in the community so feel free to reach out if you have any questions or suggestions we're always here anything else no no okay any comments questions Suzanne yeah hi Ariel it's Suzanne fettis bille Ross's
mom uh thank you for your work and thank you Alice for for bringing Ariel here so I had so I'm conf I was just want a little clarification is your program the only program or is or Brookline thrives also at the high school so thrives is not at the high
school which is why we started this program at the high school um thrives only goes up to 8th grade so um this this was our our uh attempt to reach high school students who we found still had still had a quite a need yeah and so in thrives they give
them a a bag of food is that correct so if so this is different because they can kind of pick and choose what they want it's more of a shocking so our original idea was to actually have a full-fledged Pantry at the high school um and that wasn't that was the initial idea it
wasn't fully th thought thought through in a way that that would work I mean it would be very difficult to Monitor and manage and there might be a stigma attached to going and be hard to track who was going um and so this was this was what we came up with that works now
how it works to thrives if you're not familiar is we the thrives program packs and drops off at each School these pre-made bags that the students take home with them on Fridays to provide food for them over the weekend but what we were hearing from the administrators
at the high school was that students were really actually hungry during the day at during the school week so this wasn't this was a chance to give them snacks and healthy options that they can have during the day whether it's you know as soon as they get there or in
between classes lunch after school um not necessarily things to take home over the weekend yeah Goa and so we have you know a universal free breakfast and lunch right now and that's just is that just K to8 is that what that is to 12 K
to 12 okay yeah okay okay so they do have that I mean they've got breakfast and lunch every day yeah okay it um yes however that is if they are taking ADV full advantage of it what we have learned is that some students either
they don't get there early enough for breakfast or a whole host of things are happening that's causing them not to not to take advantage of their free options or they don't like the options um and so what we were hearing is that unfortunately even
with the free lunch and and breakfast students are still hungry and can't concentrate in class yeah yeah thank you so much thank you for your work I appreciate it I really absolutely thank you Helen hi thank you for all the work that
Ariel thank you for all the work that you do um I was just curious because I was thinking as you were talking about the high school does beep also participate in our early childood program and participate in this yes so starting last year we
included beep um as well as all of the elementary schools great and we are oh sorry along with all the elementary schools you said correct Al along with all the elementary schools so every week we're at I think we're at about 500 right now bags that are packed and
distributed uh between all the all the schools including beep great thank you and I suppose you can always use donations you can always use donations money donations or we can use money donations we use can use food donations
we can use volunteers um just general support for just things like this like getting the word out I think a lot of people don't know the extent of of what we do or what we're trying our who and what we're trying to reach um but yes of course we're always always grateful for
donations of any kind great thank you thank you very much for joining us that was very informative and we greatly appreciate the hard work that you do thank you and thank you Alice for highlighting this yes thank you Alice all right that now brings us to
the superintendent report good evening everyone great to be here with you tonight we are going to walk you through uh several items that we've been working on or focused on over the past few weeks so our agenda for
tonight is our community highlights uh my school visits some important dates and spotlights on excellence and before we get into that we are going to share a special video that our students uh made
for us and we hope you enjoy for minut yay time for yay time [Music] for hi my name is Nan my name is SL my
name is my name is my name is Ramadan in Ramadan muss fast from Sunrise fasting means not eating or drinking or doing bad W fast for the 30 days of fromone fasting is one of the
five pillars of this Lam alongside believing in God and giving money to those in need praying and hudge we fast to learn how it feels to go hungry like the millions who go to bed with empty stomachs every night we've also fast learn self-control if we can spend a
whole day without food and water we can do anything in Ramadan we give charity and feed others we also read our holy book the Quran and pray for prayers at night we decorate our houses with moons lanterns and
stars to have energy for the whole day we wake up Before Sunrise and eat a healthy big meal at night we break our fast with dates and water then eat a tasty meal and yummy desserts my favorite food is a
is my favorite food is sushi favorite Ramadan food is soup my favorite Ramadan food is ice cream my favorite Ramadan food the Egyptian mac and cheese at the end of
Ramadan we celebrate our hard work with three days of Celebration the celebration is called I those F us kids get even more drinks like toys money and candy thank you Betsy thank you Betsy for setting up
that video um the Brookline Asian American Family network was awarded a $6,000 Grant from Brookline Community Foundation to purchase over 400 books representing Asian American Pacific Islanders authors illustrators as well
as stories for our 8 K8 libraries the school librarians work with Baffin to look at our collections research the newest and best aapi books and develop wish lists these books will be displayed read and reviewed throughout aapi
heritage month and in preparation for the town of brookline's First aapi Heritage day Saturday May 20th after a thorough and thoughtful search process led by the interview committee including parents Guardians
and District staff two um and then the second round interviews two finalists emerg for lawence the Lawrence principal position both candidates uh Vanessa uh Belo and uh key chin met with Lawrence faculty
and Lawrence parents and Guardians Tuesday March 28th to introduce themselves as well as answer questions those who attended the introductory meetings are are sharing their feedback through a survey that closes tonight to help guide the final uh decision an
announcement a final announcement will be coming very soon as far as recently completed visits I was at um BHS Friday the 17th pierce the 23rd Baker
yesterday um and then I will be at BHS actually tomorrow um for another full day visit and then I have Lincoln upcoming on Monday so again a combination of two-hour visits where I spend time with the principal visiting classrooms
checking on instruction uh as well as uh other items that are top of mind for them and then my all day visits which I was at Baker as well as uh will be at BHS um those are days where I spend the entire day there talking with students
talking with staff parents Etc uh as the day typically the parents of course are in the mornings or afternoons uh but uh students and staff throughout the day and have been getting a lot of feedback positive feedback from those interactions and engaging with faculty and staff Wednesday March 22nd I visited
Beacon Hill with PSV leaders for the Medco advocacy day uh March 24th I was honored to be the mystery reader in Mrs kieran's third grade class at Lawrence along with BHS head of school Anthony Meyer and athletic director Kyle
Williams I joined the addressing hate in scho Sports training hosted by desie MIAA Mas and the Office of the Attorney General and that happened both Friday uh the 24th as well as Saturday and then on
Saturday evening March 25th I joined uh Brookline mus Muslim friends at their fourth annual community ifar held at United parish and we just saw uh an important video about breaking the fast the public schools of Brookline our next
slide Betsy the public schools of Brookline highlights the importance of world Autism Awareness Day Sunday April 2nd this occasion is dedicated to spreading awareness about uh autism spectrum
disorder and helping people understand what autism is the Day brings organizations and people together to promote the research diagnosis treatment and acceptance of those affected by ASD it is a celebratory day that
commemorates the achievement of um autistic people and that is Sunday April 2nd here are a few calendar events that I think we've shared before um tomorrow is um transgender day of visibility
Passover begins April 5th through the 13th hanum gante is Wednesday April ail 5th Good Friday which is a day of low attendance so therefore no school it's Friday April 7th and then Easter Sunday
is April 9th and last before we get into our um Spotlight on Excellence um remembering Margaret Stern Strom the founder of Facing History uh and ourselves and a
former rle teacher and with that I'm going to pass the mic to Helen to offer some remarks thank you Dr Giller um it actually my honor to speak about Maro sturmrom tonight uh she died two days ago at her home in Brooklyn
Massachusetts at the age of 81 she was survived by her son Adam uh and her daughter Rachel um and has grandchildren in the Brooklyn Public School System maros STM strum was a true legend the impetus for what would be her later life
work came came from being a seventh and eth grade social studies and English teacher at the rled school for 12 years from 1970 to 1982 Margot Drew on the pain of her Jewish childhood in the DM Crow south of
Memphis Tennessee to create Facing History in ourselves one of the most widely used Holocaust Education programs in American schools in the spring of 1975 according to Facing History she and fellow teacher
Bill Parsons attended a workshop on the Holocaust and realized how little they taught and how little their students knew about the genocide of Jews during World War II she and Bill decided to develop a classroom course on tolerance and human behavior that would look at
the ideas and events that led to the Holocaust the superintendent at the time Bob sperber supported their idea and the school committee voted her project coordinator for the fa in history and ourselves project in
1980 um both Bill and and Margot attempted for three years in the mid 80s to get a grant from the US Department of Education but were denied funding for their Holocaust curriculum in part because of the Consultants who who read the grants and were opposed to the
curricula because of right-wing groups such as philis Schlafly's Eagle form that objected to the program however due to persistent uh Congressional uh support she due to
pressure on the Congress for support for the grants the program finally broke through in 1989 and began to receive federal funds during the nearly 40 years stum spent as head of the nonprofit uh Facing History in ourselves until her retirement in
2014 its curriculum expanded into classrooms in all 50 states and more than 100 countries from that single course first taught in 1976 St built and grew Facing History in ourselves an international and
professional development organization that today reaches 3 million students each year in her resignation from Brookline in 1982 she noted that she wanted to serve the relationships with Brookline stakeholders who in her quote continue
to make being an educator the best of all professions um um I I knew Margo and I actually went to the Shiva today and and spoke to her kids and the outpouring from different people different Connections in
Brookline um uh our principal uas was there because he was friends with her son they went to school together so um great with great sadness that I I give this report thank you thank you
Helen and finally we want to turn our Spotlight the spotlight on Excellence to the Brookline High School physics circuit project March 17th I had the honor of
joining our ninth grade physics students teachers uh students and teachers as they shared or presented their circuit projects students had to build an extremely complex circuit project from scratch
in which at least six holiday bulbs lit up dimly and brightly utilizing series parallel circuit diagram design and that turned on and off many possible challenge switches the
challenge was simple but the broad array of solutions were a testament to the creativity and inventiveness of the class of 2026 the Educators and students had enormous enthus enthusiasm and pride in their work I was impressed with all of the projects
and therefore am pleased to shine the spotlight on Excellence tonight on this exciting engaging and collaborative experiential curriculum work joining us this evening are Ed Weiser chair of the BHS science department and BHS physics
teacher Julia magnet and Jennifer Spencer to tell us a little bit more about this great work I'll now turn the microphone over to Ed and before doing that um we asked the students about how excited they were what was the most
exciting point and uh a few of them had the pleasure of generating smoke and Sparks from some of the circus that they uh created so um but outstanding projects I was thoroughly impressed with what the students put together and the
thoughtfulness within which the Educators challenged them at this level so with that it thank you thank you Dr Giller yeah um thank you for uh coming by to see what we had to uh to offer and um and to Suzanne and to Helen too it
was great to see you there um and also Dr G thank you for uh noting that um that's how the kids learn yes when they when they cause fires um because it was interesting because we did a lot of work to make sure the kids understood short circuits so they knew exactly what was
going on right away um but nonetheless the circuit project we this is something that we've been doing um through many iterations over the years and it's so better than the pre-made kits that we have had from vendors over the many years to try because they try to make their kits foolproof and they're never
100% foolproof even our own but it all started with this build a kitchen project it was a pilot in one section many years ago and then it it grew to all of the teachers doing it and the full group with um it was a great project with some creativity and then during covid we actually sent home 500
at least 500 kits little Ziploc bags with with some batteries some light bulbs and we did our best with that um to the current iteration that um which is now a true experience in um this experience-based learning unit and see and Julia are you ready to
go OHP we can't hear you nope hello how's that good um thank you so much yeah uh it has it's coming along a really long way and really I the the point I wanted to make was um we
kind of started with this hypothesis a bunch of years ago six seven years ago where we were like what if we take an entire unit and completely flip it on its head and instead of starting with like here's a light bulb here's how you light it um what if it's just mess around with some stuff play with these
things how can you make a light bulb light and then how can you you know combine multiple bulbs to be dim and bright and oh by the way those have names series and parallel and then through this sort of engineering project um it almost makes kids or forces them
maybe perhaps to want to learn some of the like well why does it work this way and when I pull bulbs um from our many donated strands why does it work this other way and so that layers the mathematical sort of treatment on top of it so it's really become this like one
unit where we use the project to sort of teach all through um the the unit and so we we really have worked hard on making something that is so fun but also really challenging that students want to learn the physics and so what do we do to be able
to help them and support them through that process is one we put them in teams of kids um so they work collaborate collaboratively with each other um but they have their own responsibility so they are responsible for their own bulbs they're responsible for explaining how they work for making them work and also
for putting together what we've referred to as the challenge switches um and these are made from cardboard paperclips Brads these are you know basic and recycled materials um and we challenge them to make switches that they see in their everyday lives things
like push button switches or slide switches or a switch that turns on um on one end of the hallway and then you turn it off on the other end of the hallway um and then students will come up some with some crazy creative ideas for different kind of switches um one group
this year came up with um a Swit to uh basically have a swing from a tree that then lit a bulb as it crossed uh through the center um was a pendulum switch um another another student decided to make a clock and was really wetted to this idea of making a clock where you turn um
turn the dial to turn the hours all the way through and then we challenged him and said do you think you can make it with minutes and we didn't have enough time for that but um that was one of the what what a couple of the really fantastic fantastic things
Julia heading over to you oh thanks um one of the key things with this project is um one of the things we're really excited to communicate through hopefully you see a variety of very different sort of themes is that when kids get into their groups we're also using this as
their really like first pretty vulnerable group building experience in nth grade where they've known kids in their class now um AC you know from kids from many many different elementary schools and so we've built trust over many months but this is the first time
when they really have to like rely on each other to get each other's part of the thing done but we build in these sort of like design moments so for example you'll see here like one group um we we sort of challenged them right at the beginning to like choose a theme
that actually is something you all care about and so it's this almost like team building experience this group on the left for example decided Well we love like carnivals and like wouldn't it be amazing and authentic to create you know sort of like a day or a a carousel or
something that when it turns these lights turn on because it's something we all care about or um on the right I can't even imagine what this might be but perhaps like climbing a mountain with some crazy animals and so um what's amazing about it is they're they're
undergoing this like trust building team building experience for through the design but then we asked them to almost reflect on it I'm happy to show you the next slide too um afterwards we almost ask them to reflect on the experience and what so many kids say afterwards is
you know you have to really trust your people that they're going on their own path and while I might have like drawn my circuit diagram first figured that out used a tool or a Sim to figure out what I need to do and then just build it other kids take this longer process and
yet we all get to the same place in the end so it's kind of this beautiful um messy very you know sort of engineering design process that's iterative and yet um we all get to a a same place and not in the same order right and so on one of
the next slides there's a video of a student who um student oh there it is perfect kid loves um baltim Orioles and they built a strike counter so see if that plays well oh shoot hold on a second let me see if I can get it
like that and then here's number two and then number three like that that's fabulous thank you love that super cre creative and that that um that teamwork
is what pushed it to that next level and there was a lot of good uh circuitry going on in there um I just want to add one other thing that's amazing is through the share out process this is one of the first years where we've um been able to have all of the presentations across
almost every single physics class on the same day and so it's amazing to like even after kids have gone through this massive design process on their own and seeing their group members parts of the project um seeing them go up to each other and say whoa I didn't even know you could do that how do you do that and
then um having this like physics level um sort of dialogue on like well how did you build a switch that works in that way or that turns on these bulbs in that way in this um way that they almost have this new language through their EXP experience of the project to also further understand each other's really
create um like creative and challenging ideas back to you Jen yeah so then the you know this is actually part of the state standards it's only a few questions that are there but it's it's it's part of the state standards and so um you know physics is one of the
curricula that have pretty much everything in it and so we really try to try to put in a lot of different um a lot of different projects and engineering and and Expos them to a lot of different kinds of science um anded I think I just talked about your uh your section right there oh that's fine and
the sters also have uh the engineering process involved in that but they obviously don't test it on the exam um but nonetheless we have found that over the years that our students well our students always outperform the state average but um on this particular standard with um electricity and you
know Series in parallel circuits they don't just they're not they're obviously really good through their maap math um skills of algebra and working with those numbers but they do a much better job of understanding series and parallel circuits and the logic behind that um
throughout um all of the demographic subgroups as well we outperform the state and uh and our high need students actually outperform the highest highest need students in the state by the widest margin you could um you could imagine so I think the the last slide is all about
um the fact that without the community we actually wouldn't do this as well the Innovation fund has been a big part of this journey and um people keep giving donating um their holiday bulbs to us so that we can keep it going even though we do recycle as many of these bulbs as
possible and I think that's pretty much the the presentation and inal so I'm happy to add it a little bit more if we want to talk more too um um so the students just to wrap us up um the students also reflect on their processes at the very end of the at the
end of the project um and so we ask students to share advice to nth graders so I have a couple of samples of students um writing about what they uh loved about the process and also would give advice to ninth graders um Alana Bron Jones says help your groupmates understand how your own part of the
circuit works and watch how everyone else's sections connects to the battery so as to better understand how the project will work as a whole uh we ask the students to bring them all together at the end and they have one battery that they have to share um Annabelle Schneider says the biggest thing that helped us definitely was
communication before each build we would plan out what we were going to accomplish that day and what part of each of each of us would play in it and so with that um we thank you for all of your time the Innovations uh Innovation funds support um Dr gillery
and school committee members for coming through on that day the kids were so excited um to be able to share their their fabulous work thank you very much any questions comments from school committee members Nancy that's okay how many bulbs how
many lights do you need I have a lot of lights for you I mean frankly frankly we need a lot because uh you know that we cannot use um LED bulbs it has to be um the regular old incandescent bulbs oh I might have a lot more bulbs for you now
then and we honestly will take broken strands that is actually what we do is take broken strands because there's bulbs in there that work the kids will find them do you care what size they are you know there's fig okay okay that's
question one question two um um how can we help you like you know what can we what how can we support you how can we help you this is terrific by the way this is amazing I love that this is collaborative I love that the kids are learning on you Pro this is Project
based learning you you know at its finest um I love that the kids are collaborating with each other in electronic speak I'm sorry I don't uh you know I don't I love that they're talking to each other in the lingo this is amazing this is this is terrific terrific terrific stuff great thank you
um I don't know maybe Jenna Julie can speak to this more but I mean we do feel like we've been uh supported greatly from The Innovation fund from the community and I I always appreciate that question about how you can help us I think that um moving forward there are many things that we are still um that
are gnawing at us in terms of um greater opportunities and accessibility for kids but this project um I don't even know what we like how we would improve next time um but we but Jen Spencer and her husband actually made these designed these 3D printed gizmos so that we could
put caps on rechargeable batteries so that they wouldn't short circuit but some kids didn't use those um and it was an enormous a project so I think it's it's always this this balance between I think we just need time to be able to do this so I appreciate the fact that you know we've been working on this project
for many many years there you go let me know where to drop off the bulbs let me know let me know how I get the bulbs to you I'll back up my SUV wherever it needs to go everybody knows that if if those lights show up at the high school it comes to us okay got it okay the
short answer is drop it anywhere and they they know where to send it the long answer is if anyone's watching at home I send out out a very annoying email that I think some people are like used to getting around the holiday season hey did you take out your bulbs from your basement and they don't work we'd love
them so keep an eye out for my future badgering and this is one of the many projects and things that we do throughout the year this is the first time we've invited um any of the community to come in um so we hope that we'll be able to offer that um again with some of the other other projects
that we do throughout the year um so I think your your support in person is also really helpful to the kids it's nice for them to be able to show off um show off their skills definitely absolutely please invite the the community and we will all come Stephen than you so much yeah thanks so much for
this presentation um I think it was also the the second presentation in as many school committees that featured a a Hands-On pedagogy so it's really interesting to see all the Innovation coming out of PSP around hands- on pedagogies the thing that that really was interesting to me about your
presentation in particular is that with Hands-On pedagogy at the secondary level it's not just about standard space competencies but I think also around giving kids a leg up on on exploring identity formation wor so they could start to think about themselves as as an
engineer or as the stem professionals so what I'm always curious about with um Hands-On pedagogy at at the secondary level is leave behinds for these kinds of activities because I feel like you're you're exposing them to professional Pathways by kind of triggering some of
the thoughts around identity formation so for those I'm assuming some kids probably verbalized their thoughts around I could see myself as an engineer or I'm someone who likes to do this sort of thing or I I want to explore more of this what kind of resources do you give to students who
want to continue to to uh explore opportunities relating to uh design thinking to engineering programming Etc well so we're so lucky to have an incredible list of like just incredible course selection so through this project
we do a lot of dropping of like hey if you love coming in for an hour a day and like building and creating and designing and struggling and succeeding like take our engineering classes Aubrey love does incredible things with both ninth grade 10th grade students and then this
amazing sort of like 11th and 12th grade block and a half long course um so that's just like opportunities at the high school as well as our incredible visual arts department who has a lot of opportunities and Ed does an incredible job although I don't know that he'd say it like curating a lot of Summer opportunities
and putting that up on our BHS science website and sending it out through the um sort of canvas announcement channels that students check daily so um we do a lot of work on trying to get kids into places around here in Boston and our greater community and so I'm actually sitting in
um the room 105 at the stem wi with some 3D printed leftovers here's a whole 3D printed um it's a little bit of chain mail it's very complicated and they start with a making a switch plate but this is my favorite 3D printed
flower beautiful and I think Jen would be pretty upset if I didn't also use your question as an opportunity thank you so much to also say like well this project is an incredible engineering project we also do a lot of skill building around skills that again aren't
necessarily um part of the standards specifically around programming so we start our kids in the very early you know parts of the Year getting them to get comfortable with spreadsheets not just for data collection in terms of tables but in terms of writing functions to do mathematical analysis for them and
again not just like using them to make graphs but actually like do large data set computations and so the more we look at this as like an iterative skill that we try to build opportunities on in the rest of the year and it's it's amazing to see like how many times kids will be
like I don't want to calculate this I'm going to whip out a spreadsheet and get you know like a computer to calculate all of us for it um all of it for us and then our good colleague Tyler Brown is really starting to think about like how can we and again just sort of like at the experimental phase like how can we
incorporate um actual programming so more like python type coding languages into the physics curriculum and we're at the you know beginning stages of it but like to do a purpose because actual scientists and Engineers use code and
use software to solve problems to model the real world to like you know be able to see something computationally that we can't see you know in physical life and so we're we're still I think working a lot and hoping to get more time to
really build those skills too throughout other projects or other um units through the year thanks a lot we we are just three representatives of the entire physics department the varied skills that we have and the varied connections that folks have um throughout the physics department and the larger
science department is pretty large so in terms of connecting kids to to different things we it's we we we try to think of all of the things but if um if folks have different ideas of uh opportunities please you know definitely let us know
um and we'd be happy to pass them along to kids but I think for me the really exciting takeaway from those responses is that there's actually a a specific Hands-On learning pathway that BHS offers for kids who get really excited about that course like they can graduate say to 3D printing other specific things
they could do next after this course so they can that that if something gets sparked in them they can tend to that flame over further opportunities at BHS ciruit Pro is actually yeah it's very much aligned with our core election process so just as they circuit is it is
it like a is it funding dependent that that pathway or are there just Ellen shaking her head no so so that's just available that's exciting to me thanks great thank you Ellen so just to answer your question first um the found uh The
Innovation fund funded the first engineering by Design course sort of you know designing it figuring the curriculum and all that and then it just took off so that became two courses and now I understand there are three correct
engineering by Design courses so yes yeah the introductory one is a semester available to all grades yeah but I just uh first of all I wanted to thank you I know Suzanne was there with me too um this was the most exciting it just made
my day coming in and seeing all these projects it really did you know you talk to the children you see what they're able to to put together their creativity uh this I think was certainly a physics project but to me it was a
steam project because it the Arts you know there were some of them were incredibly creative with ski slopes and and Ferris wheels Etc and the way they they put them together was really pretty impressive um the one other thing that I
I could say is that so I asked one of the kids you know what did you learn from this project and he said persistence you know and I thought gee that's really we if we can teach that to children that you just keep on trying
and trying till you get it we've made it so great right thanks apprciate to the teachers um who all allowed us into your classrooms and thank you to you Ed for doing this you're very welcome yeah they did
an amazing job and it was great to see you great anyone else all right back to you Dr Giller thank you and with that the public schools of Brookline Spotlight on Excellence is awarded to the Brookline
High School physics team with sincere appreciation for your dedic ation to designing and teaching the physics circuit project that provides a challenging engaging and Collaborative Learning opportunity for our ninth grade students congratulations to you
all thank [Applause] you I really appreciate it thank you for joining us and for that presentation and next up we have public comment and no one has signed up for
public comment so we will then move on to presentations and discussions of current issues using data to support instructional objectives and first up will be a panorama update good evening chair Perman members
of the school committee and Dr gillery I'm delighted to introduce Dr Matthew duah our assistant director of guidance clinical services and social emotional learning who will present on students social emotional and mental health and
then Michelle Harmon senior director of teaching and learning K to8 who will present on the fall winter literacy screener mclass these data offer the district valuable information to support instructional decision making having a
pulse on students academic and social emotional needs shines a light on the core of our work we have a total of 75 minutes for both presentations so I'd love to um now introduce Dr Matt DUIs thanks Grace I'm gonna share my screen
and I just want to sort of call out uh Julia and Jen for sort of describing the work there're just doing in the classroom uh we talk a lot about this idea of embedding into academic instruction and Julia and Jen just gave a beautiful example of what that can
look like um so uh as as Grace said I'm going to give an overview of our most recent round of universal screening and I'm really appreciative of being able to have time this evening to do so as folks might appreciate from previous presentations I'm going to give out
quite a bit of information over the next 20 or so minutes but I want to make sure that we have time at the end for folks to ask any questions or to offer any comments or thoughts that they have about any part of this work um as a reminder these are the six
areas that we measure within our Universal screening work uh for time this evening I'm going to really narrow our Focus to school belonging to supportive relationships and more specifically on the percentage of kids who can identify a safe adult at school then I'll offer some updates uh
regarding kids experiences of both unpleasant and pleasant emotions uh what I also want to offer is that we're going to narrow the focus to grades three through 12 so in those grades kids are self-reporting about their experiences at school and they complete that survey
in the fall the winter and the spring and so the reason why we measure these areas because they give us a really really good understanding for kids overall mental health and their overall social and emotional development and we know that each of these areas they
impact kids ability to do well in school when we take a step back and we sort of think what is it that we want to know about kids' mental health what do we know what do we want to know about their social and emotional development uh we need to be really interested in understanding their social and emotional skills uh we just talked a little bit
about persistence super important uh skill we want to know kids ability to form really healthy and meaningful relationships we want to know kids's ability to feel a really intense unpleasant emotion and to navigate it skillfully uh we also want to have a really good understanding of kids's
emotional experiences and as we're looking at that we want to have a good understanding of both Pleasant emotions so feeling excited feeling happy feeling hopeful then also kids experiences of unpleasant emotions like feeling worried or frustrated uh and lonely and then
finally uh we need to be deeply interested in understanding kids access to protective factors things like having strong School belonging having a safe adult at school what we're increasingly understanding is that when kids experience challenges within the context
of protective factors they're far more likely to navigate those challenges in such a way they come off the other side of them with stronger skills so that is that is really really fundamental in understanding kids experiences um within our schools um our school
teams are using all of the data from the universal screening to understand how to support kids better the two areas that gain the most amount of focus within our schools right now are around school belonging and kids being able to identify a safe adult at school and what I want to offer is that we are on really
strong ground to be focusing on and to be prioritizing these areas what we know from research and certainly from lived experience is that school belonging in supportive relationships have this really meaningful influence on academic
performance and when I say the statement that school belonging has it mean that school belonging is a meaningful predictor of academic performance it's not un commmon for me to then be asked so why does that relationship exist and what I want to offer at a high level is that school belonging influences the
cognitive processes that are involved in learning uh down below here you see an image of the JK doson law um and this is something that we've understood for very long time in kids as well as in adults is that our level of stress has this really meaningful influence on our
capacity to perform when we apply this to the classroom what we're really sort of thinking about is that kids' level of stress their emotional experiences in the classroom in their capacity to learn and what we know is that the complete absence of stress isn't particularly effective for helping support learning
there's actually The Sweet Spot of stress that's sort of depicted here in this green zone and when you ask kids to describe what does it feel like when you're in that space I bet a lot of kids are going to describe what they felt like during that circuit project we just saw they sort of this idea that kids are feeling safe they're feeling supported
and challenged um maybe a little bit worried maybe a little bit stressed right they're sort of conceptualizing that challenge is something that they can navigate um when kids are hanging out in those Tails particularly in the right side of that tail there where they're feeling overly stressed a different um
it's really important to know that a part of our brain called the lyic system is activated um and the Olympic system does not do a particularly good job at helping support academic learning actually in many ways it's sort of incompatible when kids are in that green zone we actually get a flood of dopamine to the prefrontal cortex and that's
where kids do their best learning right that's where kids are able to concentrate and focus and be flexible and persist right a couple weeks ago um in the Middle School review we talked about this idea of instructional minutes and how important they are for supporting academic learning and that's
absolutely true an additional layer I want to put put on top of this is this idea that we also need to be interested in the number of minutes in which kids are able to actively and meaningfully engage in high quality evidence evidence-based instruction and so we really need to be interested in the
number of minutes each day in each class period that kids are hanging out in that green zone and so in layering School belonging onto this idea we know that school belonging has this really meaningful impact um on what kids experiences are within the classroom where they're going to hang out on this
curve you can to play this out in your own lives when you enter a space where you believe deeply that you belong it has this really meaningful emotional regulation property to it and we know that students with really strong School belonging are likely to spend most class periods most school days hanging out in
that zone in contrast when you walk into a space where you're questioning your belonging or you feel like you don't belong you're very likely to hang out in those tales and so it's going to have this really meaningful impact on your ability uh to benefit from instruction where you are in this curve is also
going to influence how it is that you perceive interpret and respond to challenges as we just saw within the work that Julian and jendes did we want to challenge children that is incredibly learning for um incredibly important for learning uh and for supporting skill development when I present to you a
challenge when you're in this green zone you're very likely to interpret as something that you can work through something that you can navigate when you are presented with a challenge when you're hanging out in those Tales you're far more likely to interpret it as as a threat and it's not going to help support learning in the ways that we
wanted to and so for us given this really meaningful impact that school belonging has on our brains our ability to learn it's really important that we're thinking about school belonging not as a luxury item as we talk about school belonging we don't think oh well wouldn't that be nice if we were to achieve equity in our school belonging
data we're sort of conceptualizing this as a necessary precursor in creating the foundational uh experiences that help support learning right School belonging creates the conditions to allow kids to do their very best learning uh in a moment I'm going to present some school belonging data and with that some of the
discrepancies that we've observed across time in those data and you're going to see that they're going to mirror very closely some of the discrepancies we've seen in our academic outcome data and that isn't a coincidence that's additional evidence for how School belonging influences kids academic
development and how it influences their academic performance as I I go through um our updates uh from the winter I think a lot of this is going to feel pretty familiar uh to the update that I provided in December and at a high level what I
really want people to take away from from this is that we're increasingly seeing more kids being able to identify a safe adult at school uh we're seeing uh increasingly more students being able to endorse strong School belonging and although we're seeing those increases
across all student groups We are continuing to see significant disparities in that outcome we're seeing fewer students uh reporting to almost always or frequently feeling worried and then we're seeing uh similar levels of pleasant failings things like hope uh and happiness so again I'm gonna I'm going to dig into
each of these a little bit more but if you have any questions at the end feel free to to ask me and so uh starting with our school belonging data uh this slide has quite a bit of data on it but what you're observing is mean School belonging across grade level across time so we're
seeing two and a half years of data here and to remind folks we measure School belonging across a 1 to five scale there are multiple items that go into this composite uh a mean score of three and a half or higher indicates strong School belonging so that's where that dotted
line is set and so as you can see across time we've seen these really important increases in school belonging across all grades and so that's a really really important thing for us to name and we should absolutely celebrate that another way that we look um at these data or
looking at what is the percentage of kids who are endorsing strong School belonging and it was important for us to understand here there's a Continuum right and we can sort of categorize this as as um High School belonging medium School belonging and low School belonging and for us it's It's never
enough to just I think we have about 3% of kids with that low School belonging area we need to be deeply interested in the percentage of kids who are sitting in that green space on this on this uh chart right that's where school that's where school belonging becomes this asset becomes is a protective factor for
helping supporting uh kids engagement in school to give an example if you are strong in your school belonging and you're experiencing challenges you're far more likely to attend school and to access those supports to then help you navigate those challenges and so you see
across time we've seen these nice increases um pretty stable from the the fall and the winter um that's not super surprising to me that we've seen these pretty rapid increases over over time so as we getting close closer to 100% we're not there but as we get closer to 100%
we would anticipate a little bit of flattening um in terms of these data what I also want to offer and this is going to apply to um multiple pieces of data that we look at there isn't necessarily a gold standard in terms of the percentage of kids that we want to
be uh sitting high in these areas conceptually when we think about multi-tier systems of supports we're always shooting for at least 80% of kids um achieving our Benchmark so in this case to be 80% of kids um reporting strong School belonging uh for that that
gives us really good evidence that our tier one programming is working for kids and then allow also allows us to use our resources really efficiently for helping uh kids who are not quite there yet uh we do observe uh differences in school belonging across grade levels and so in
grades three through five uh we're sitting a 75% of kids being able to endorse strong School belonging that's pretty similar from what we saw in the fall but that was pretty significant increase from what we observed last year in the middle school that number is lower it's sitting at
65% and that number was pretty similar to what we saw in the fall but that was an increase from what we saw last year um you'll notice obviously that there's a decrease here right we're going from 75 to 65% and then again in the high school that numbers 56% and what I want to offer is that that plays out a lot in
the research where we see school belonging typically peak in elementary school and then decline as kids get into middle school and high school and there's likely some structural reasons for that for how school is experienced by kids right you're moving from class to class and you're not spending as much time with the same group of people and
so that has an impact on school belonging and there's also some developmental things that are going on for for kids but across these three areas we're seeing pretty similar increases pretty similar levels from the fall but again in the fall we observed these nice increases from last
year as I um introduced uh in December and it just sort of noted before um we should uh celebrate the fact that we're seeing these increases across time but it's really important to pay atten that one pay attention to that once kids hit Middle School we're seeing these really
meaningful discrepancies in school belonging and so you see here that we're seeing these differences based on race and ethnicity we're seeing that based on participation in steps and in special education and in Meco and again here a lot of these discrepancies we've talked about in relation to our academic
outcome data and again we're seeing it here with our School belonging data and what I want to offer is I know Jana in this space and hey young have talked about uh School belonging in terms of their Equity work and this is a a really important uh space where there's intersectionality with social emotional
learning and Equity it's a space that we talk about a lot because we know that in many ways it's sort of the North Star in understanding how this impacts kids ability to benefit from instruction and so this is a thing that we're going to continue to work at for all kids in going into um having a safe
adult at school the way that we measure this question is that we ask kids if you have a challenge is there an adult at school that you can go to um then after students answer that question if they say yes we ask them to identify who those adults are um and it's great to see kids oftentimes naming multiple
adults then those adults we really want to make sure are available for kids when they're experiencing a challenge and so we see um particularly last year in regards to the year before that we saw these nice increases in our safe adult data uh right now we're sitting at 7 75%
of kids across the district are able to identify a safe adult at school and we do see some differences in these data across student groups and so to celebrate uh kids in steps kids in special education kids in Meco are more
likely to be able to identify a safe adult when you look at those data and sort of see who are kids identifying it's really common for them to be naming uh adults within their programs or adults who are providing them support and so this really good evidence this is
really good feedback on the power of those supports for for kids um on the inverse of that we are observing kids who are aapi and kids who are Latin X being slightly less likely to be able to identify a safe adult and when we think about why that might be we know that the percentage of kids in our
buildings who are aapi kids who are Latin X that does not match the percentage of adults in our buildings who are Latin X and and who are aapi and so I know Jana has talked about the importance of hiring and maintaining educ ators of color and Educators who are Ai and so this is additional
evidence on the potential power of what that of that what that work can do for for kids uh we do observe some differences in our safe adult data across grades so um in grades three through five we're sitting at 82% of kids and again as
we're getting closer to 100% And that's our aspirational goal um as we get closer to that we're we're going to expect a flattening of of these increases across time uh but right now we're sitting at 82 % for grades 3 through five uh in middle school that number is
70% and in the high school that number is 74% um it was pretty interesting to see within our high school data I didn't break it down here but typically um in 9th grade because all the adults in a child's life is new that's typically we see the greatest dip um in kids being
able to identify a safe adult but by the time kids get into 12th grade it's approaching like 80% of kids are once again able to identify a safe adult adult and so that's the power of the relationships that a lot of kids are forming within the high school across time all right and so the last two areas
I'm going to talk about are kids experiences of unpleasant feelings and pleasant feelings as we're uh teaching kids about their emotions and we're helping kids uh develop healthy relationships with their emotions we really want kids to understand that um occasionally feeling moderate levels of
unpleasant emotions is really normal it is really healthy it is really important for kids development we want kids to understand and really appreciate that when when we think about positive mental health we're really talking about this idea that you're having emotional experiences that are matching the
situation both in so how big the feeling is and how long it lasts for when uh we start becoming worried for kids we using an emotion word there um or when kids are reporting to almost always or frequently
feeling unpleasant emotions for durations that last two weeks or longer we know that that chicity of unpleasant feelings can really have a negative impact on on kids functioning and so when we look at these data we see that those experiences those chronic
experiences of unpleasant feelings are not equally distributed across students and so there's a there's a lot of information there right um so we're seeing some differences again based on race based on participation in Meco special education steps being an English learner and so thinking about why that
might be we're sort of thinking that there are probably some additional stressors that are going on for kids both potentially at school and outside of school in uh in thinking about um and so within this area we measure things like worry feeling lonely feeling sad feeling
frustrated the the feeling and the emotion that we've we've thought a lot about over the past uh three years with kids our experiences of worry and anxiety we've definitely as as a nation seen increases in those areas for odds when we're looking at the percentage of kids who are reporting to
almost always or frequently feeling worried um in grades three through five the numbers at 10% that is very similar to what we saw in the fall but in the fall we observed uh a decline from what we observed last year in the middle school that number is
at 18% which was a slight decline from the fall which was a decline from last year and then at the high school the numberb is at 34% again that's a a very slight decrease from the fall which was a decrease from last year right and so
overall we are observing some decreases in the percentage of kids who are reporting to Os sois or frequently feeling worried and then again as we're sort of thinking about this overall understanding of a kids's mental health we need to be just as interested in
their experiences of pleasant emotions to you give an example if you're a kiddo who is often worried but at the same time you're often hopeful that's a much better place to be in than if you're feeling really anxious really worried and you're not hopeful so when you think about kids in
reporting to almost always or frequently feeling these unpleasant emotions again we're seeing very similar differences in what we observe for unpleasant emotions right that so there's differences in things like feeling loved and feeling safe and feeling happy and feeling
hopeful and again when we're thinking about why they might be the we're sort of thinking it's probably some environmental things that are going for kids again potentially at school and outside of school and what I want to offer is that these are data that that school teams are really responding to
right so when a child's reporting that I'm almost always worried I'm not feeling hopeful I'm not feeling happy these are data that school teams are using to provide kids additional support so um and in breaking down two feelings I sort of want want to comment on here um in grades 335 we see almost
80% of kids reporting to almost always are frequently feeling happy and that's been pretty stable um across time you see only uh two data points here for um hopefulness and the reason for that is that tends to be a more abstract emotion
for kids to comment on um to address this we introduced a mini list a mini lesson that kids go through before uh taking the the survey to help them answer this question and so about 60% of kids report to almost always are frequently feeling hopeful in that grade
band moving to the Middle School uh 76% of kids almost always are frequently feeling happy um relatively similar a slight decrease from the fall but that's an increase from last year then feelings U of Hope are maybe slightly up this year relative to last year and that's
number is sitting around 60% and then finally in the high school it's around 70% of kids reporting to almost always are frequently feeling happy really similar to what we saw in the fall but that was a slight increase from what we observed last year and then feeling hopeful is at 56% of kids um and
that's been pretty static across time so uh that's a ton of information to sort of collapses so what we're observing are increases in protective factors that's really really important we're seeing some decreases in unpleasant feelings Pleasant feelings pretty pretty steady but I really want to sort of drive home
here is that even if emotional experiences remain unchanged in dramatically increasing access to protective factors that's a much better place to be in now ideally right we're addressing both at the same time but although we still have a lot of work to do we are sort of moving in the right
direction for for kids a couple limitations I do want to note here um our response rate for the survey in our elementary schools is really strong uh in most schools uh we're sitting around 95% of kids are taking the survey uh when I offer that number to colleagues
in other districts they're really jealous that were able to achieve that and I think this is really important comment on how important people uh believe this survey is and how useful they feel like this information is in supporting kids what is always the case when you do Universal screening um
districtwide for all grades we do have a lower completion rate at the high school and so that number is around 65% um we uh myself and and Emily mcginness who runs the advisory program we were thinking a lot about uh continuing to really help kids understand why they're being asked to
complete the survey and really helping them understand what we do with the information and how it's so important that their voices are being heard as they sort of building supports and so we're really continuing to think about how we can support kids to take the survey when I dig in to think about who is taking the survey and who isn't I
haven't found anything yet that is super predictable in that and so I do have some comfort in generalizing those 65% of kids to the general BHS uh Community but that is something that I want to continue to look at but I also want to name and this is really important is
that we do not have disaggregated data for students who are lgbtq plus and that's important for a variety of reasons uh it's really important that we have a really accurate understanding of their experiences at school and that's going to help inform what supports they might need and then allows us to evaluate the impact of those supports
across time um what I do want to offer is that in May students in Middle School through the high school are going to compute Behavior many of the same areas I just described here and students are able to offer information sexual we're we going
to analyze those data summer and I'm sure some for updates to the community that um and so so as I mentioned schools are increasingly really comfortable in using these data to support students uh
it's really common for school counselors and for teachers to look at whole class um look at their whole class data and then to use that information to really Drive their tier Oneal support so for example if they observe have eight in their class who all have needs regarding emotional
regulation that's then going to inform what their tier Oneal instruction looks like uh we also share out information um within most a lot of adults within the building about which kids are are able to identify a safe adult and which kids aren't and there's a lot of teacher-led interventions that are really meant to
help kids identify classroom teachers as their safe adult uh really common within our schools for our clinical staff uh to use this information to identify kids who can benefit from therapeutic groups so like a social skills group or a worry group and then we're using uh this
information uh to help identify kids who need individual counseling um the last thing you were on the past slide and yeah can go back to the other slide this one nope sorry the one where you I think
you were talking about yrbs data but this one yeah could really your your a audio was off so we could oh sure okay yeah yeah so sorry so I will I will repeat that yeah so what I mentioned here is that we do not have disaggregated data for kids who are lgbtq plus and that is really important
right so we want to be able to have this information to understand and really to inform the supports that we're offering kids and then to have a really good understanding of the impact of those supports across time and so uh in May we're going to administer the youth risk behavior survey to students in middle
school and in high school and that survey measures many of the same areas that the universal screening um that the the data just offered measure and then students are also able to offer data about their um gender and sexual identity and so we're going to be able
to disaggregate these data in really powerful ways and I'm hopeful to be able to present that information to the larger School community so we have a really good understanding of those kids experiences um so the final thing I just want to um name here is that um what's
sort of interesting to me on uh March uh 12th 2020 so the day before things shut down um I was actually sitting on a panel and the panel was about the Mental Health crisis that we're currently in with kids then obviously the next day everything uh shut down and so the
pandemic certainly didn't introduce the Mental Health crisis that we're in but it has absolutely intensified it and the intensity of the needs of our kids in our buildings with the highest level of Social and emotional need have never been higher uh the investment that we've had in our adjustment counselors has been
so so pivotal been so critical in allowing us to meet the needs of all kids and what I want to offer is that because we have our adjustment counselors supporting kids with the highest level of need that allows our school counselors to do a really really really important uh work within tier
Oneal instruction and to really be thinking about preventing challenges with kids as we're thinking about meeting this moment and in the years to come it's really important that we're both thinking about prevention and response really want to be thinking about these
experiences that can help prevent more significant social emotional challenges in kids then when those challenges do emerge that we have the resources to respond to them and so the way that our clinical teams are built right now it's really allowing us to both do that prevention work in that response work um
and so I know I just presented a ton of information it sounds like I might have cut out a little bit too so if any folks have any questions about anything I presented uh feel free to to ask and I'll stop sharing all right thank you very much for that presentation who would like to
go first with questions or comments Stephen thanks for that presentation Matt um you mentioned that we're still in a mental health crisis is there a definition of that Mental Health crisis and is there a way that the data you presented can show us that Mental Health
crisis and what would it look like to exit that Mental Health crisis yeah it's a beautiful uh question Stephen so typically we're thinking about that on the sheer number or percentage of kids uh who meet criteria for a mental health diagnosis and so we think about the last
decade so the percentage of kids for example who are meeting criteria for an anxiety diagnosis or a major depressive diagnosis that has increased significantly so then maybe I should rephrase that question to ask you how does how does seal surveying interface
with mental health health crisis is there a way that it shows up in the data yeah so so we're not uh surveying on any symptoms that are directly correlated with the mental health diagnosis the closest version of that is looking at kids emotional experiences so for example when we think about something
like an anxiety um this sort of diagnosis we would be thinking about how often are you feeling worried when we think about something like a depression diagnosis we would be thinking about feeling hopeful or feeling sad so those are the closest versions uh to that what we're really trying to be thinking about
within this survey is not just those emot experiences but thinking about uh the skills in the environmental protectors that will allow all kids including kids with mental health diagnoses navigate their emotional experiences more successfully um because we think about when kids do have a
mental health diagnosis when we think about uh we want kids to come away with from therapy it's those really strong social emotional skills and lifting up and increasing access to protective factors and so for us when I when I talk about that idea of that prevention-based uh SK um space so explicitly teaching
kids how to identify their feelings teaching kids how to regulate strong feelings that's meant for all kids and it's particularly helpful for kids who will eventually um come to present with a mental health diagnosis Suzanne thank you David thank you Matt
for this uh I have a lot of questions but I'll just start with one or two so I I think I heard you say that you take a look at the whole class data and then think about your tier one uh practices best practices at
tier one is that right is that what you do y and so so my question is what what happens how do you get to tier two or tier three and how do we share that with family should if families were concerned would they contact you contact the
school just kind of walk me Beyond tier one if you would that's great yeah so and just to be really um specific for the community so we're talking about tier two tier three so in General within the mental health space we're thinking about small group therapeutic interventions for kids right
so that might be five kids um who are coming together to work on social skills or to worry uh to focus on skills that are going to help the manage worry and we're thinking about tier three typically we're thinking about individual counseling for for kids and so school teams are absolutely able to
use the data that I just described here right so kids are commenting on their emotional regulation uh skills kids are again they're talking about their emotional experiences and so this is a really um good way to identify kids who could benefit from that additional support um every uh uh building has a
clinical team on that clinical team sits our school counselors or adjustment counselors and school psychologist and so it's really common for either a classroom teacher or for a parent to reach out to one of those people and describe a concern and usually there's some collaboration that goes back and
forth and sort of thinking about based on the student needs what's going to be the best match for a kiddo and I would say a lot of times based on the needs of kids that tier two um intervention where kids are coming together to work on a skill is oftentimes a best match for
kids and do we do we use child study teams to take a look at some of this I mean is that that would be an appropriate place for a teacher to bring someone of concern or absolutely yeah and would say what's uh powerful about that process as well is that it's not uncommon for uh kids to have received
one type of mental health intervention and maybe they didn't respond to it in the ways that we want to and then being presented to child study team to be thinking about are additional strategies that we can be thinking about um again when I um when we're thinking about mental health interventions there certainly the supports that are
happening within a clinician's office when we think about mental health interventions we also need to be thinking about the generalization piece right so kids are learning a set of skills with the clinician they then need to generalize those schs out into the classroom right those skills are meant to help kids function to help support their learning right and so that child
study team is actually a really important helpful process to be getting every adult on a child's team on the same page for thinking about how they can support uh the child day in and day out yeah thank you very much thank you for your work it's so important
Andy yeah um so Matt could I ask you to go even a bit further into these clinical teams that you've been describing so you said toward the end of your presentation that they've been designed um so that they can engage both in prevention and in response do you mind just elaborating more on just the
thinking behind that and in particular the precise role of the school adjustment counselors that group awesome well thank you uh Andy for that so that's really really important so uh in general so in our clinical teams we have school psychologists we have adjustment counselors and we have school counselors
some people might have used the word guidance counselor to describe them but we we we use the term school counselor and so what we're really thinking about is that we want kids to actively learn before challenges emerge right we want kids to have a really really strong set
of Social and emotional skills that they can apply to any situation that they might find themselves in and so what our school counselors do and most schools have three of them that are based on grade band so a k to2 a three through five and and a six through eight counselor and so they're doing a lot of tier one work where they're pushing into
classrooms and they're Consulting with teachers they're leading whole class SEO lessons sometimes they'll do uh rotating groups for all kids to focus on belonging or some additional uh skills but their goal is to provide support to all kids then we of course we're going
to know just like the academic space that there're going to be some kids that are going to need additional support and so what our adjustment counselors do is they're typically working uh with kids individually in individually count in individual counseling or or small groups of um kids um with in that tier 2 space
right and so that division of labor allows kids when they're presenting with higher levels of need to get exactly what they need and at the same time we're making sure that all kids are having access to experiences that are going to lower the likelihood of them needing those more intensive Services
what we know is that when that prevention lags over time more and more children are are going to come to need more intense Services right and anytime we can prevent challenges that's way better for Child Development right and so uh being able to um have really
robust supports in both of those spaces is has been really really important um Andy was that sort of was that an okay amount of granularity in that yeah that was that was really helpful um the third the third group you mentioned were the psychologist so how did they fit in I am school psychologist by training so it's
bad on me for for getting that group so um as people appreciate our school psychologists do a lot of Assessments of of children every single one of our psychologists also has a counseling uh case load and so they're typically working uh with kids uh who have um Counseling Services on their IEPs and so
really again so all three of those uh folks working together is really helping us support all kids Nancy um I I'm I have so many questions I'll I'll try to hit the best one so
how because I'm I I have to admit I'm a little uncomfortable by what was presented here how do we Stack Up maybe this will help against like across Massachusetts how how are the kids doing how are the I it feels like the kids are
not okay I mean a very alarming statistics 74% of the 9 to 12 year uh 9th to 12th graders can't even identify a safe adult so that 74% can sorry so 74% of kids can
identify oh can I'm sorry yes can I'm sorry that still leaves 26% of our high school that cannot identify a safe adult which I think should be a very
basic trust you know element of trust just one safe adult in the entire school that bothers me a lot I think it was a little bit better from the winter it bothered me in the winter and it bothers me now um Alice I'm not going to put you
on the spot but I I'll talk to you after as CH because Alice is in high school and I don't mean I'm not going to Corner you but I'd love you to comment on some of this too if you can you could say no that's okay um uh I don't know like so I don't know
that was a lot and I I just have a million questions and I have to say I'm worried I mean the numbers are better but the kids don't it doesn't feel like the kids are all right and then do we have any qualitative information and
hopefully it's all Anonymous so but do we have any reasons why we I mean 65% is not I I I'm I'm nervous I'm gonna be honest with you yeah so uh to answer and
so am I so in In Living in this space right you're you're spot on right we definitely have a lot of work uh to do right and so as I present this I do have hope and that it's better and we're certainly not where we want to be that's absolutely the case right and uh it's
been the case for a decade that we've been in this really really challenging space now fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it we do stack up very favorably um with other communities and so I didn't offer it here but there are some um Norm sort of
national averages um that Panorama offerer off offers and so our safe adult data and our school belonging data stack up really strongly like our data are higher than like 80 to 90% of of schools right but for me the really important thing is is understanding within our
district is that really the goal that we're setting for ourselves right and we I think we should have stronger um um expectations than that right and so um again so it's great that we are increasing over time but Nancy you're spot on that we have a lot of work that
we want to continue to do forgive me I don't mean to be a glasses I I'm hopeful I'd like to be a hopeful person yeah um on that on that Spectrum there um but have we dug into why have we asked why they don't feel like they ident I even
yeah so yeah so what kids will um and kids give beautiful answers to the to these questions right well well kids will um typically say is that when adults see them as more than just a student within their classroom that is
infinite that is so important for them right and so that's the experience that we're really trying to offer for kids right that the adults in their buildings see them for entirely who they are um and what I do want to offer in sort of um uh offering what we do with these
data so after each round of surveying every single school um and our clinical team then sort of pushes it out um to to staff but every single uh School receives a list again of kids who are able to identify a safe adult and kids who are not able to right and then we
want to put that information in all adults hands right so we're taking a team approach and helping support uh that kid and what I want to offer here is that it is a beautiful experience observing both when an adult is named as a safe adult and how powerful that is for them and when they don't get named
as a safe adult but it's beautiful that we have a lot of Educators who kind of take it personally which I kind of want right because they want so badly to be that safe adult and so we have a lot of adults who are who are going to continue to be pretty stubborn in this space and continue to work on it and so I I I don't blame you at all for looking at
that and being like that's not great because it's not right we have a lot of mental health needs that we continue in the district um I do feel pretty confident um that we have that we are positioning ourselves to meet this across time the last three years have been incredibly challenging yeah I know
I I yeah yeah but I do I do feel like we do have a lot of structures in place that are going to continue to impact this positively across time and and can you report on any of the quality so I'm sorry if you answered this do you have
any qualitative data that you can share um about some of the kids that don't feel or do not feel belong like they belong or don't feel safe is it like fear of retaliation is it fear of B you know what no yeah so it's that it's that the
idea so when we break so the questions themselves and kids will comment on this qualitatively it's this big idea that just feel like people don't understand me or I just feel like people are not really interested in me as more than just a student in my classroom right it's sort of that that feeling piece of
like when I look around my spaces I feel like there are people who are deeply interested Ed in my entireness as a human right so that's what kids are are sort of describing there and that exists both with the adults in their lives and also with with their peers what I also want to offer as I didn't describe it
here um we ask kids three supportive relationship questions we ask kids do you have a safe adult at school do you have a peer at school that you can go to when you're having a challenge and do you have an adult outside of school that you can go to when we ask kids that outside of school a question well over
90% of kids say yes when you ask kids about peer it's well over 90% of kids it's a very small group of kids who say no to all three of those questions and those are kids that we rally around those are kids they were most concerned about um so you know it's positive that
if kids are not naming a safe adult at school they have other people they can go to and we still want to be deeply aspirational and get that closer to 100% let's just keep talking this is this is great stuff let's let's keep talking okay Mariah
thank you and thank you Matt for this presentation it was really um I think I I I am I agree with what Nancy is saying about concern but also I feel tremendously appreciative of the work that's being done of the fact that
this survey I think that um I don't remember if this was already happening before panel two but I remember that panel two brought up the importance of the universal um uh survey screener for exactly this reason to see that data coming in starting in that fall of 2020
and being able to look at it and the change over time um is really great to see the Improvement in student um indicators um and also to as as you mentioned you know to validate the work
of the staff and the Investments that have been made in this area so I'm really I'm really glad that this is happening and we've had this presentation tonight um another couple or one comment and then a couple questions one is just also that I think it's so valuable that you're looking at
the peer sort of the the vertical and the horizontal relationship so I'm so glad to see that too um I have three questions one of them is and I think this is a little bit tied to what Stephen was talking about earlier but I'm not sure if you answered it already
I'm going to ask again is are the are the things that um the mental health will say like Risk mark ERS I guess I would call in your in your survey do are they used or are they at all do you find
that they're correlated with um IEP diagnosis later on like are they something that if you flagged that you would say well this student is it risk for a um Health uh indication on an IEP do you use the data in that fashion to
perhaps identify students who would benefit from a health-based IEP or is it not used in that that way so awesome question so the the tool itself isn't um super helpful in terms of diagnosis but the there's often there's not uncommon
that we would apply what's called a multi multiple gated strategy where for student for example is flagging with a lot of anxiety a lot of hopefulness can't identify a safe adult has a lot of school belonging it's not uncommon for those kids to then meet with a a clinician and do more diagnostic testing
or do a more narrow band rating scale to a Sesser for symptoms and so and I would also say that when when kids do come to be evaluated for special education it's not uncommon for this information to be used to try to identify what are some additional questions that we can ask um
kids so this tool itself not diagnostic but sometimes it can put you on that path for getting more information that would be okay that's great then my second question is um and maybe this is very obvious but it wasn't to me you said the survey doesn't include gender identity yep and or I'll say gender
sexual identity why why doesn't it yeah so the we pull all of our so I just presented a ton of demographic data so we pull all of our demographic data from Aspen and so kids from our student information uh system so we're not asking kids any demographic uh questions
they just get the survey and then the demographic information is is pulled in so that's the the reason for that and then my last question is um for the adults who might for the adults who aren't
identified as safe adults because you have students identify adults who are safe adults so for the ones who aren't named is that an opportunity for targeted sort of professional development or other opportunities to increase that relationship component of
their practice not that like you know a student just might not name them but it also might be an opportunity right for sure yeah and so what I would say so we haven't necessarily provided that targeted support so having a list of educ ators who aren't named but I would offer is that um a really consistent
part of our professional development is hanging out in the space of relationships in belonging so just an example that myself and Kendall Jones last month we did a a full faculty PD for uh BHS and this this was the entire topic was on belonging was on relationship building and so I feel
pretty uh confident um that our staff have received very explicit professional development in this space and we're going to continue to talk about it because how incredibly important and how linked it is to our academic outcomes and so I I super appreciate that as
being this really important qualitative tool that we can use to help structure that additional support for staff and I and I would love to see just how we can really highlight or recognize those adults who really go above and beyond and get named I think ASA said that at
Heath he did something where he went around and like gave some sort of Kudos right to all of those safe named safe adults and I just think that's so Wonder F and I'd love to see how we can expand that yeah so a lot of our schools do that and it's it's um a lot of our clinical staff what they'll do is they'll have a list of adults who are
named as a safe adult and there's a couple ways they do it sometimes it's a email sometimes it's a note that they'll put in people's boxes and the to see adults light up in the way they do when they receive that information is such a culture and climate lift um and we
really want to acknowledge the really powerful work that they're doing um kids make us earn these relationships right and they should right these relationships aren't an accident right and so we really want to make sure that adults are knowing the power of their
work thank you thank you Alice okay awesome um I have so many questions um my my first question has to do with uh just all of the like really upsetting um disparities and inequities and I was wondering um if there examples
of other districts similar to Brooklyn or not similar who like implemented like any policies that have in any way shrunk these like I was just wondering like if you have any knowledge of that that is a beautiful uh question so
one thing um I'll offer is um I'm part of a group that's working uh with a organization called Castle so it's a collaborative for academic and social emotional learning and so I'm able to meet with folks uh throughout the country and what I do want to be really honest with is that a lot of school
districts are continuing to Grapple with this and so um that's really challenging right so I wish I could tell you Alice there is a school that is nailing it and we're not seeing these discrepancies unfortunately this is pretty pervasive right now throughout education um and so
that is just a comment on that we still have a lot of work to do and Alice what I'll offer is that hearing directly from you and your peers is so fundamental in this work uh one thing that I I think is really important about this survey is that this is information that's coming directly from kids right it's not adult perceptions it is student perceptions
right and so I do feel like we're on Solid Ground of continuing to use your voices to inform the type of supports that you and your peers are getting okay no thank you so much that is so so full I have and then I have I just have a few more questions um my my
second one has to do with actually the thing you said about uh filling filling out the survey and like 60% and what you just met student voice and like only 65% of high schoolers and like I'm going to be so honest like I never do those surveys like me my friends like never
like we just go and play like snake game on our computers like I never do this but like if I but like now I'm like if I had actually known they like mattered I would do them I just like didn't think it like went anywhere so I don't know I was just thinking like with like I just I don't know with with Miss Miss
mcginness or whatever if there's any way that that if there if there's any input you need from students about how to make people feel like it actually matters because I'm just like oh why would I do this it's like 10 minutes of my time be St but um for the most recent round of surveying I recorded a brief video where
I sort of talked to kids about why I don't know if your ADV showed that but that was sort of the mechanism that we tried to okay okay okay yeah I don't think why it is that we're asking you these questions and what it is that we do with that so I think you have a lot of influence in the school so if you
could help me so we're going to do it again in May a good word that we're going to have another round that'd be incredibly helpful awesome right right right right right well actually is there is there a student body that would be appropriate to partner with to spread that message
rather than have it be like a i there's there's like pure leaders I don't know if people actually like listen to them like I'm trying to think of like one that's actually like like I would like be like oh yeah I'll do it I mean I think there's there's like a bunch I have to I'd have to think more of that but yeah I can I can get back to you on
that yeah yeah yeah um and then my my my third my third question is like so I know I know for for me I got like a social worker a few years ago but that was only that wasn't that was only because like I got that I did that process like I know like my parents reached out to them so I'm wondering
like if you're just like if you if you don't if you do you what are the means for getting that can you get that just from like filling out this survey like I don't know how do how do most people get that yeah thanks Al so um we have a we call it the raiseed hand question on the survey and so the last question on the
survey we ask kids do you want an adult to follow up with you after the survey is completed um and I would say maybe like 3% 4% of kids at the high school say yes to that and so any student who says yes to that question either a guidance counselor or
a social worker sometimes your advisory teacher is going to follow up with you to see if you need additional support and there are a lot of kids who have come to access additional support from a social worker because they answered that question I know how vulnerable and hard
it is for you to walk into a stranger's office and say hey I need help and so we want there to be this really easy way where you can raise your hand and say hey I would love for an adult to follow up with me so that's one way that we really try to try to do that awesome awesome thank you all right I have a
couple of questions regarding what you were talking about toward the beginning of your presentation with the when you had the jks Dodson chart that was up and you talked about how we also need to be concerned about the minutes of instruction to make sure that they're
qualitative and that students are going to be in the right frame frame of mind to most benefit and I'm wondering if there is any documented correlation between number of minutes of instruction and where a student falls on y's
Dodson sure yeah so obviously the longer that a class period is uh the more likely they can lose some engagement across time right sometimes teachers will talk about the difference between a 50 minute class and a 60 Minute class right but there there's absolutely uh
from pedological place when you're using really engaging strategies they can ensure that those high quality minutes are going to be there whether it's a 50 minute class or a 60 Minute class uh within this space we talk a lot about this idea of embedding social and emotional learning directly into
instruction right so in practice that oftentimes looks like a welcoming routine that's using really really good engaging strategies for kids and then being really thoughtful and intentional for how um kids are leaving our learning spaces again Julia and Jen gave us this
beautiful example in road map of what that can look like for kids and how it is that that we can support learning right so I imagine if we were in those classrooms on those days we would have seen all those kids in the green zone that were really really engaged right and so for us as I say that I want us to
be thinking both about the instructional minutes and the number of minutes in which kids can actively participate in instruction because both of those are going to be really important for supporting learning now if as a general matter the longer the class goes for the less kids
are going to be engaged this survey covered grades 3 through 12 so I'm curious about grades three through five in particular where you have for most of your day one classroom teacher and would this seem to indicate to you that perhaps if to keep the number simple
let's say there's one hour of social studies that students would be better off breaking that up into two half hour periods with other subjects in between or yeah no so it's say not necessarily so think um I think what it sort of comments on so I think people can be really successful in a 60-minute block
but it just requires really some very real intentionality and how it is that you're building out that lesson right so obviously if you're you know in any class right if you are up in front of your classroom for 60 minutes you're just talking at kids most kids aren't going to benefit from that right but if
you go into you know a three to five classroom right within that 50-minute period kids are up they're moving they're working together they're answering reflection questions and so really just thinking about what's happening in those minutes to make sure kids that are actively engaged and
they're not sort of moving into those Tales then also Beyond minutes within subject areas uh is there also as the day progresses students become less engaged because they've been in school longer for the day so they're sort of a yep and I would say yeah say you know
teachers sometimes it happens at the high school where you get kids right after lunch or you get kids at the last block and that's real right but when we think about how we structure a classroom we always want to be begin with a really thoughtful welcoming routine right we know that it would be great if every
single student entered a learning space in that green zone it doesn't happen in practice right and so there are some teachers who absolutely know yeah the first five minutes of class we need to really be thinking about energy boosters I need to regulate kids I got to get them into a space where they can benefit
from the instruction that's going to happen right and that's just that's part of what it can look like to to teach during those those time periods and so again it's just sort of that thoughtfulness piece that we're not just thinking about the content but we're thinking about the how part of it and how it is that we're structuring um
lessons to allow kids to engage all right thank you any further questions Helen thank you um well thank you for the presentation first of all but second of all um we how long have we been doing
Panorama this is our third year just we didn't do it before then did um a smaller version of it in the two years before that yeah so we did um a lot of the school belonging work we started off just in ninth grade and then the year of the pandemic hit we were doing it in
ninth and tth grade and then that Following fall is when we started doing it districtwide because well I guess then it doesn't answer my question because one of the thoughts I had if if we had been doing it before the pandemic and before we hired the social workers y
would we see a difference you know from before the pandemic I mean taking into account the factor of the pandemic but yeah in in responses and we don't have that right right right I thought we had started earlier for some reason but I
guess yeah one the mechanisms as we're thinking particularly within that the fall of 2020 where a lot of kids were remote we obviously really were struggling to when you're not with kids you need to have some mechanism in place for understanding what they're experiencing so that was one of the
motivating reasons for for doing this district-wise then of course over time now to evaluate the impact of our supports it's certain helpful in that space yeah it would be awesome if we we had pre pandemic data we don't in the reason I'm saying this is I remember seeing at MC a presentation on Panorama
years ago yeah yeah so I think we I think we we had used it previously for some uh staff uh surveys looking at climate and culture but for that student um Administration piece we weren't doing it okay thank than you thank you anyone
else all right well thank you very much Mr du for that uh very informative presentation as you could see it really captured a lot of interest and there's certainly a lot of material there for us to digest and I'm sure that we'll have you back for further discussions thanks
everyone so that brings us to mclass literacy update with Miss Herman good evening thank you for having us here tonight um I'm going to just share my screen
see and can you see that we can yes great okay so um I want to share the agenda for tonight it's an update on the universal screener which is the mclass screener and you know as Matt was talking I remember two years ago and I
think this was really um key is to remember where we were at with the very first level of Panorama data and when we started two years ago and thinking about that's where we are right now with this Universal screener so as we um talk about this today we're really talking at
a high level and so what we're going to cover in the next few minutes is we're going to talk about the success of our implementation what data is collected so District level classroom level student level what have we learned so far and
what are our next steps and um just before we get into this data specifically I want to remind you that the purpose of this Universal screener is to determine who are the students at risk for having poor outcomes in reading
it is not diagnostic however it does provide us um information that can be used for tier one instruction so where we're at now is our year to date so if you see this timeline it kind of talks about where we start
started and where we are now so uh at the beginning of the school year we ensured that all K to2 Educators were um trained in the administration of the mclass and that was a very Technical Training and if you remember we found
out that um our teachers the the what we contracted for didn't meet our needs so um we we want to remind you that this implementation takes time and so what we did was we followed up by really making sure that our teachers had the proper
training through our literacy Department um we began the process for this by setting the goal of administering successfully so our big goal for this year was to administer the assessment it was also important to ensure that the teachers were supported in beginning to
understand the data and that's what you see here on the October and January um dates the October that used to say October 25th and January 25th where we ran educator data data meetings and then
to have the ELA Department continue to partner with teachers and provide ongoing support so that we can continue to learn from this data so what we'll do is we're going to take a look here so as I said before um you know our goal was
to assess every student who uh assess every student in K to 2 and so the administration was needed to be done in timely fashion we gave three week windows and we wanted 100% participation so what you notice here is where it says
not complete there were students who were not assessed and I want to talk about why that happened and what we learned so when we purchased the system um we were we received our own District coach and the coach was a specialist from the program who had been a literacy
specialist in the past and supported us in understanding why we might not have uh assessed L uh level one and level two um Els and then students in specific programs to to um assess their reading
and what we learned was that actually we want to find out about where the students especially our eels are at and so this is not a permanent thing that we're going to do we're going to make the adjustment and assess those students going forward it is to get a baseline
because they are receiving instruction and they we can then look at their growth over time um and then also um wanting to note that the E the subpar programs or the SE the spec specific programs that we do not assess
are students who are for instance uh non-verbal on the autism spectrum and that's because most of this test most of this assessment is done uh verbally between an an adult and the student so what we did learn though is
that if you look at our numbers from the beginning of the year assessment to the middle of the Year assessment and that's the two lines at the top we assessed the same number of students during the first window and the second window so that was huge in addition we had every student
who we had slated for uh being assessed in the first two two windows assessed within our three-week window so we were very very successful with that and so having been successful with that we moved on to the data and I want to show you what kind of data we get both at the
district level at the teacher level and at the student level so from the district we can look at many facets for example we can compare student performance in one measure across different uh breakdowns by student
demographics by period from The First beginning of the year assessment to the second year assessment we can look at how students are performing in particular subtests over time we can also look at performance between the assessment windows and I'll show you a little bit of that through the next um
two slides in addition we can use this system for Progress monitoring and so what we can do is at any given point in time we can assess a student within one subtest and therefore that data can also
be uh tracked districtwide and schoolwide so when we look here I want to make sure that as we're looking at this this is our beginning of the year data for grades K one and two at the district level and our middle of the
Year data and I want to make sure that we don't overreact to the data uh this is the first year and so what we're really focused in on is getting valid and reliable data and so we are learning the process we are learning to score
students properly so I I just want to make sure that we don't overreact to the data because again we're in our first year so for instance we did see a drop in kindergarten in our data however there are a couple of things that could have impacted this number one was the amount of instruction that happened
between the first and the second assessment and the increase also of the demands of the second assessment in addition we may have assessed too early and our reliability because of our our first time through this and our valid
may not have been accurate and then also we're going to use this information to determine when should we start assessing kindergarten students next year however what you're seeing in uh SEC first and second grade our Baseline composite scores uh we have increased the green
and the blue slightly in both of those which means that our students are continuing to grow and what we're really looking for is growth over time when we move here this slide demonstrates trends that we hope to see as we move forward so this is a
celebration for us so we were looking at this word reading and what you'll see is that the Red Zone and the yellow zones are getting smaller but we're also seeing like at grade two many students are testing out so if you look at that striped line that's where the test shut
down and said students had gone above either met the Benchmark or gone above it and I want to keep in mind that the again the demand of the assessment increases over time and we also want to talk about one I also want to share one other piece of data so again one
question just because you said these those um slanted lines are where kids have tested out so who are the blue people the blue so the blue students started at a higher rate level to that begin with so what happens is is that
the test sort of self-regulates so it shots down so at a particular time for students that were on grade level it just said not to go any further but there were also students who got bumped to the next grade level automatically so the blue kids were were
already testing above and they continued to test the green students the system said you've reached your goal you've got above we're going to shut the test down because it wasn't worth spending more time on it I see so those the blue students just wanted to do more they had
already started out at at the above at the higher level Beyond yep okay thank you um so the one thing can I ask a followup on that I'm sorry I'm just also confused so for the blue students though they were already blue in beginning of year so how would they have started at a
higher level at the beginning of the year the no no no the first the first assessment they keep going the first assessment's when they determine if they're about Beyond grade level the second one they may be Beyond grade level but many of the students in the green have already they the test just
shuts down for them and says we don't need any more information so green and blue are above grade level green green is they striped green is at grade level blue is above okay I'm not following it but we don't have to get into it now it just
all good even if it's it's all good data exactly but the here's the even better data though and this is the part I think is really important so at the beginning of the year we look in our first assessment our number our percentage of
students that were at risk for dyslexia well for potentially having a disability in Reading with 7% we have knocked that down to 1.7% with instruction so we have moved 27 students out of the risk factor and
so what we have to keep doing is we've learned what's right for those students we have to keep that going so that those students remain out of the risk factor and move towards the green and blue zones Michelle can you say that again we're looking at the Red Zone from grade
one I'm sorry can you we're not looking at the Red Zone what I'm doing is just sharing an anecdotal piece of data that says that our risk factor 7% of students were at risk in grades K through two at the beginning of
the year for having a a specific learning disability or a PO reading outcome they were at risk in our second assessment data we have knocked that down to 1.7% within our K through two students
do do you have um it's not on this yeah do you have a chart that that that has relevant data to that point it's not a chart is it this is Suzanne it's not a chart it's a it's a a waiting of different factors no I know that the risk factor is a specific
calculation that's stepen specific about the so so you're you're referencing a risk factor which I know is is none of the colors on here but rather something that's determined separately correct from these colors so when we looked at
this at the curriculum subcommittee a while ago we looked at the growth from Boi to Moi and it it didn't suggest what you're saying so far as I recall say more I think I only showed you the risk for the second for the second window at
that which was one we definitely didn't discuss the the that the risk factor declined as a result of of or or specific or sld the risk of sld declined as a result of our educational interventions so well
let me back up I want to clarify that the risk did not decline as of interventions I want to be really clear this is about tier one instruction so after the first assessment we determined that 7% of our students were at risk for
having for at risk for either having dyslexia or poor outcomes in Reading there was I mean like that it was clearly they were at risk through our tier one instruction between October and the end of
January we moved 27 students out of that risk factor intervention I'm thrilled to hear it I'm just really hear see the mclass data that backs up that point so you want the individual student
breakdowns their sub tests or so when we calculate risk factor do we do it with mclass data yes so can we use mclass data to describe the point you're making now can we visualize that information
here we can visualize that so I think what we can do is I can take it offline and just pull the report I it's the same report I did show at the um it's the more detailed report that I showed at the subcommittee that uh demonstrates that
data great yeah absolutely what I'll do is just what I will do is Lay assessment one on top of assessment two and that would be really helpful thanks Mich I know I know the risk factor deriving the risk factor can be
confusing so helping us see that using mclass data I think would go a long way to helping us see how we use mclass data to derive risk factors and to understand how we move students in and out of risk
classifications using the screener which is the whole point of using it in the first place so than absolutely absolutely we were just not going that deep so sure I will absolutely send you that I just took a note of that um Val do you want to ask now or do you want to
wait until we've completed I just have a couple more slides I can wait it's about intervention and what you were just talking to Stephen about but I can I'll wait for the rest of the slide okay no that's completely fine all right so quickly I just want to
share with you what a teacher sees so just to to reference this again this is uh District level data from the mclass and then the teachers see a slightly different screen so whoops got stuck so
this particular screen is um shows a teacher high level data so if I am the teacher I see this I see that 14 out of 17 students were assessed I know the students that were assessed in this particular um assess in this particular
classroom were students who were um El's who had just started in the school and I also can look at what's how's the percentage of my students who are performing at Benchmark above Benchmark um showing up here in terms
of uh how they're performing and so you can see by a student and this can help me with a lot of information around like what do I do next who needs who are the students that need more what are the specific areas that we are um looking at
and so this would be uh a student then let's look at the student data and in this student data what we can see is that the system sets goals for us and so this is one particular area one one student who said um inic
awareness but what's really important is this line here that that is going up because it's showing the trajectory of instruction and it is showing that the student is making steady progress if this line were really flat or even
steeper what it would be saying to us is the student has a really far way to go to meet meet The Benchmark but from this to here to here this student is making progress and the system also sets a Target so a realistic Target of if we continue our instruction where is the
student going to land and this is the the teacher data so I'm going to move now to talk to you about just quickly about what we're doing with this and then I'm going to come back to one point on on the determination of
Dyslexia so here we have just what are our next steps so we need to continue to use RM class data and we need to triangulate data with students so for instance um I Heard a question go to Matt before about um CST and what comes
there so we want to take multiple pieces of data when we determine a student when we determine the needs of a student so mclass helps us say this student's at risk so we need to look further and to pull in other sources of data whether
it's um reading records from the student from the classroom um or other information that we may have we may look at see how attendance data Etc and really what we're doing the first thing we want to do is determine next steps for supporting tier one instruction so
when we get any of this data back we look at who goes into the small groups within the classroom who needs more time I always call them at bats who needs more time to become more proficient at with any specific skill and then identify additional materials for
specific students so for instance we've spoken about some of the materials we've brought into the classroom who needs to uh spend more time with those materials or what other material do we need and then talking about supporting students in tier 2 instruction in the classroom
So within that classroom we might need to not only more at bats but more specific direct instruction for support and then also we might create some small groups that work together at during additional time to uh really get at
specific skills so I'm going to stop sharing now and you know Matt reminded me Matt reminded me which I appreciate about the determination for the dyslexia piece so one of the the big thing that the the assessment puts together is the
composite score if a student has a below average below uh grade Mark below Benchmark on the composite score and has a below Benchmark uh a below Benchmark well below benchmark on their ran which is a rapid naming assessment so I'm
gonna stop there and give you some opportunity to ask some specific questions and just um just know that some of them we aren't going to have the specific data here tonight B go ahead thank you um thank
you Michelle so I had a couple of questions the first one is where Stephen was with you before although my my questions on the intervention and the second administration of the screener so I'm trying to
understand kids getting screened out there what the interventions were and what that what that really means okay so I I think the first thing to be really clear on is mclass does not is not
mean interventions so it's it's not that we got our mclass data back and we started giving kids like sending them to the reading Specialist or using OG or Wilson with them directly I want to be really super clear about that what happened was teachers were given that
information and really pulled on those students and provides um like more individual instruction within the classroom more at bats more practice paid more attention to specific skills within the tier one instruction at the
classroom level that is all that really has happened with the students that moved specifically okay and then my second question is when and under what circumstances do uh does the district recommend that a student get a full
neuros to actually good question good question so we I think I so in December you also heard from the new teacher Center so one of the things that we are doing is really being intentional about when a student moves to a to a neuros or to a recommendation for evaluation and
so seeing at risk in the um mclass data especially at kindergarten and first grade the that is very far from the first um the first intervention or the first idea that happens students would
go through classroom inter classroom specific instruction tier one instruction they would also move to tier one and tier two instruction and they might even move into tier three that would happen potentially with the help of the child study team that so that we
can track what was tried with the students I think one of the things that has been a misconception and I think this might be what you're getting at is in order to get um OG or Wilson support for students especially students who need ter three support that does not
mean you have to be on an IEP we have people that can provide that so our big goal is to support students in Reading before they get quickly to an IEP an IEP valuation I still I'm still not clear that when when the district would
recommend or when are you looking for a number because the the thing for us is I mean like we look for the growth over time so that last let me I'm going to share for one more second that last uh I won't share but that last screen that I showed you that had the graph of the
student we watch that growth over time and so if we are seeing appropriate growth for a student that's what's going to make help with that determination so are you looking for to say like we use a certain amount of time or a certain amount of
intervention and then they automatically I I just want to make sure I'm answering your question a grade level um growth you knowly reading is a reading it gets harder to learn to read and and more challenging when you're when you're uh
reading to learn in older grades so I'm wondering what point okay I I think I understand yeah I think I understand so if we so because we're going to give this screener multiple times in the first year in I mean sorry in K through
two and because we can use the subs tests for instance even that that rapid naming we can use those subtests multiple times at any time with the student even though it might be outside the window we would want to continue to
see we want to look at those and see growth if we are not seeing growth then we would start to address whether a student needed to go for evaluation certain other interventions but we want to see the we we need to see growth and the the the value of the grow the data
that we get is that we can see that growth over time and that we get information from the system to see if it's a reasonable amount of growth if we see that a student absolutely I I'm not going to tell you when a student's going to be referred to an evaluation because I think that's outside the scope of
teaching and learning I think I would have OSS speak more to that but I will say if we don't see appropriate growth over time we are certainly going to be looking at the why thank
you Mariah thanks um thanks Michelle for presenting on mclass I I have two questions sure one is um I heard you say I think I heard you
say that this year the educators are also being trained on the administration of the um screener and so and that the data may still be I don't know if I'm going to use the right words or your words but
I'll say more variable or perhaps due to sort of um that um that learning curve that people are still on so have you Quantified or does mclass provide
quantification of how reliable the results of this are especially in this learning curve phase of the yeah year an excellent question because students are being tracked into different things and risk factored and
everything else I mean there's there's consequences for individual students of the results of this exam not saying like well I will say I mean it could be positive or negative consequences right they could be receiving unnecessary interventions although I presume no one's relying just on mclass it's mclass
plus other observation but especially where and I'm gonna com I'm gonna combine I'm gonna ask that question I'm going to combine it with the part where you talked about going from a 7% to a 1.7% and um that that that number a little bit
bothered me and that um or at least the way it was described um I know I'm working on it I'm working on it sorry I've got a sick ksh at home who's fussy um about how we think about what these risk factors mean I'm not sure that we
like children who had for example children who were in that 7% for dyslexia there was nothing that happened that made any child who had dyslexia not have dyslexia okay I do want to interrupt you for one second this is not a diagnostic so this is not going to say
they had dyslexia no but that's my point of the way it was phrased earlier I think could almost I don't I'm not saying you said that intentionally but the way it was phrased was like they had um they were 7% high risk or whatever the word was
for dyslexia or other you know poor reading outcomes and I just want to be clear that like it's not that they were um anyone who had dyslexia still has dyslexia just because we tested them in the middle of the year and the risk factor went down okay let's
back up the we haven't we haven't determined that they had dyslexia I understand you said a risk factor a high risk a a risk factor but what I hear you saying is somebody that had dyslexia wouldn't not have it now so I want to I want to clarify that we've never said
that the 7% had dyslexia I understand all I'm saying is when we talk about that being a number that we should be really like happy about that I think the word was used like knocked it down and I guess my question is well what did we knock down necessarily maybe okay yep
yeah so I guess that's my question and then the other part of how can we be sure of the what is it like the going back to the you know what does it mean and does mclass give us any data on how reliable the this is given this training phase so the first thing is one of the things that we learned after the first
assessment is we didn't know that we could continuously give these assessments the pieces we kind of thought that it was specific windows that we had to use once we learned that we've been working so our literacy department works with teachers and they
send them back and say like if this data doesn't look right on a student let's redo the assessment we also have done a ton of norming so having two adults sitting with the same child and doing the assessment and having both of them record to see how close they are so
that's part of what we've been doing to increase our reliability the other thing I would say is that actually our current assessment our current data is probably more reliable because of the amount of practice that we've had since we started
so the other thing is is it does not surprise me that our risk factor our risk was more at the first assessment than it is now because we had had students that had never been in school hadn't been reading before and so I
think that that's um that's something that that just increased and um that's increased for us and so um we also had increased performance on our ran and so the data that Stephen's
asking for you'll see that in the graphing that our students that our students who performed some of our students that performed poorly on the rapid naming in the beginning of the year has have increased their performance and that's really part of what helps us determine whether a
student's at risk thank you Stephen thanks David I just want to take a giant step back first of all and say to Michelle and OTL just congratulations on a really strong roll out of mclass I
I wish I had started by saying that it's just clear that the roll out was really successful just by the number of students participating this and it's just really reassuring to me as a school commune member but also as a parent as a parent of a dyslexic kid that we have
really strong data now coming in in a really reliable way so it makes me feel confident that we're going to be able to make decisions relating to really strong data going forward so just just a sincere thanks on that um and I just have one one other comment to make also
um thank you again for providing what I think is a really strong and succinct um summary of what was presented at at at curriculum subcommittee I don't know like a month ago maybe mid mid February yeah I just want
to point out one thing that that I that I remember really caught my attention at the subcommittee meeting that I don't think was in here the the illustrative slide that you had in here that sort of Dove down into one specific category was on word reading which I think which showed a normal distribution for
Brookline students um but the categories that were concerning and I think that relate to issues that pertain to our curriculum have to do with decoding and phic awareness where if I remember right pH I think it was phic awareness that we
had 38 kids at the at the middle of the Year assessment of that were at 38 it was 38% that was uh that were in the red zone and that was that wasn't normal distribution so that was something that that made me panic when I saw that so so I thought I wasn't in here but I just
wanted to note that that there is an area that mclass um seemed to point to that that will be interesting to study further when we do the literacy review that will when we look at the curriculum in
Greater depth that I I all I mean to say here is that mclass I think is already shining a light on some of the specific subvariables um that may or may not have something to do with our curricular choices okay so a couple of things like total transparency I tried to cut the
slides down and I oh no that wasn't criticism I just wanted to make sure that I wanted to bring no that that's there you're correct that's there and I I wanted to show the sort of the celebration to show what it looks like when the distribution you know when we yeah see that we did we have identified
some areas that we are working on um I think that Kristen's I have to I have to shout out the ELA team this year they have been amazing in terms of like turning around and saying like we need this for our students and and getting that and I think you're right we did we
did see um we did see some concerns in phic Awareness we absolutely did and it's something we're we're on and one of the things you know just just so you know we've been walking classrooms at every single School in the last three
weeks with the new teacher Center and looking at what are we seeing happening and um that's also a piece of determining like so what do we do with that information so I think yes we get that from mclass and then we turn around and we look and we say what's what's
really going on and you know is it and again the other thing that happened with us this year is that we we implemented heger at K2 and we added in the word the the spelling connections that's that's the
continuation of the fundations and so it's a little tricky right now because we did both Implement mclass and Hagerty at the same time and so I I appreciate you calling that out and again I'm happy to provide additional I don't mean to suggest that OTL is not responsive to
what you've already discovered to be potential holes in our literacy curriculum and I know that hegerty is a deliberate response to what is perceived to be a possible area that can be strengthened um and I don't mean to suggest by saying that the liter literacy review is forthcoming I don't
mean to suggest that that's where all the Improvement will happen but I but I just want to flag that mclass is showing up some some early um areas that we could be working on that I know that you already paid attention to oh yeah no and I appreciate I appreciate you calling that out and that's that information is
also still posted and from what I understand from your initial question also before is I think what you're looking for is the breakdown slide that I did not do here to go as deep as we did I just think risk factor is confusing and it's not it's not as neatly grouped as the as the colored
zones so I think showing how it's how it's derived especially if there going to be changes to it as a result of tier one interventions it would be helpful to present that visually it's just easier for me at least to absorb that way great
thanks all right anyone else well thank you very much Miss Herman for this presentation as you can see it's a topic of great interest and will continue to be and thank you very much for Gathering all that helpful data from which we can begin to make inform
decisions over time great thank you all right so next up we were going to go to dist an update on the district strategic planning process but we do have Dr given waiting so we're going to go to her and then we'll
have the update on the strategic planning process thank you David um I am pleased to introduce uh do a candidate for a deputy superintendent of administration and finance Dr Susan given in the public
schools of Brookline the deputy superintendent for administration and finance serves as the school admin business administrator for the district under chapter 71 section 41 grants the authority to the school
committee the um responsibility for hiring this role I recommend that the Brookline school committee hire Susan K given as Deputy superintendent for administration and finance through a process led by Human Resources Director
Ty Fluker we have been actively searching for a talented and experienced Deputy superintendent for administration and finance since the fall of 2022 in total five candidates were interviewed out of a review of approximately 15 applications in
addition to miss Fluker the members of the interview team included interim Deputy superintendent for student services Leisa o Connell Deputy Town Administrator Melissa gof Baker School principal torren Lewis PSB budget
analyst Donna Chisum and PSB grants coordinator Kelly Durkin durgen Mariah nobrega Finance chair subcommittee chair here and I interview Dr given and concur with the overwhelmingly positive feedback from
the interview committee Dr given has 17 years of experience as as an assistant superintendent for finance and operation and the uh and I'm going to say this wrong so Susan correct me when you come on uh Mas masconomet Regional School
District her work there included leading negotiations with bargaining units initiating an induction program for new administ trors extensive collaboration with principles and directors on District initiatives and guiding the district through two significant financial crises without the need for
educator layoffs Dr given also served for six years as a school business administrator in Pentucket Regional School District she is presently the interim director of strategic initial initiatives at lab collaborative and recently served as superintendent of the
new market School District in New Hampshire Dr given earned her Ed at upin her Masters in school leadership from North Eastern and a BS in business administrations operations management management information systems at Salem
State University Dr given's extensive and relevant experience her proven record of accomplishment and her leadership skills make her the Clear Choice for the dep position of Deputy superintendent for administration and Finance in the public schools of Brookline her wide ranging skill set
will enable her to seamlessly transition into our school district and successfully lead the important work in the office of finance and administration so with that chair permit I'll turn it back over to you all right so do we have Dr given on
with us you do I'm not sure um how to get the video going but give me a second here all right voila ah very nice to meet you
nice to meet you as well no go go right ahead if you'd like to introduce yourself to us sure well I it sounds like uh that introduction was quite extensive but uh I do want to say good evening and thank you for inviting
me here tonight um I'm really excited about this opportunity and I look forward to learning more about uh your vision and aspirations for students um and you know I I don't know if you have any questions or I certainly
don't want to uh take too much time out of your evening um as I know you have quite a few things on the agenda so I'll let you uh take the lead on on what you would like out of this uh introductory
meeting all right very well then does anyone have a question for Dr given go right ahead Helen can't let you get off without any question questions I'm kidding um so um I'm
curious what would you see as your biggest challenge coming to Brooklyn the commute um that's a that's a challenge depending on how far you're coming from right or or or Which Way um
the uh Google Maps takes me to get there I suppose but uh my biggest challenge um I don't know if it's a challenge so much as um I think coming into Brookline it would be important for me to get to
know people um really get a you know good understanding of your vision and um I certainly have read what your goals are for this year and um they uh really align with my values and uh um I feel
like um I'll be able to help you move towards achieving those uh those goals that you've set um but uh in order to achieve those goals I have to know where you're at and so I would spend some time really trying to get to understand where you are in your journey towards
achieving those goals uh there's an awful lot of data and information that I would need to um get familiar with um as quickly as possible uh in order for me to be able to provide you with advice um
and support you um uh in in part through the end of this year you know I'll do a little transition this year and then uh into next year so I don't know if that's a challenge but that would be you know really the order of uh uh my priorities coming into
repine and so you would be able to start right away is what I hear you say no I no I'm under contract uh until the end of the year but um don't see why I wouldn't you know be able to spend some time in Brook line between
that okay thank you could you maybe describe some of your prior experiences around dealing with other stakeholder groups and municipal government such as select boards Mayors um Town
meetings uh my whole career actually um I think one of the um things that makes uh maybe my experience a little more unique than uh the average candidate is that I worked in Regional Schools for uh
about 25 years so I've had an awful lot of experience working with Selectmen and um town finance committees and town finance directors trying to um um you know communicate uh with all
of those stakeholder groups the needs uh of the school district and also be able to translate some of the limitations from the municipal side um that uh could create challenges for us on the school side uh trying to accomplish our goals
so I have attended many a town meeting uh done uh presentations my entire career to all different forms of stakeholder groups because when you're involved with multiple towns uh the superintendent is not able to be all places at all times um also as a
superintendent of schools certainly uh addressing town meeting um developing an educational plan and the uh financial plan that supports the educational plan and communicating that broadly uh is also uh something I've had experience
with so very comfortable with uh communicating and translating uh frankly um our learning outcomes uh our goals and how that translates into the resources that we're
requesting thank you any other questions suzan you know I'm just kind of fascinated I've been in education all my life at but I was would never even consider being on the financial side I mean it just feels so separate from education you know from the educator
side um so I'm just W you've alluded to this idea of understanding our goals around education teaching and learning and then how that how you can push that forward in the budget could you just say a little bit more about like you know how you got into public school budgeting
and finance and and why that excites you yeah well well you know um well I'll tell you uh in my family um uh you the women in my family either became um in
the area of business and finance or teaching and um my mother uh lean towards the finance piece uh my grandmother a teacher and so when I got to the point where I had to make a decision about you know what direction I
was going going to go in I I thought it would be more lucrative to go into the area of Finance than it was to be a teacher so um I headed down that path um but uh I never really got away from teaching and so even when I was in
college I was tutoring and I was working in the labs and you know ta for for teachers and um that's kind of how I made my way in part through through school earning money um so I really never got away from teaching um of
course I've taught at the college level as well and um I really found that my love lies there but I have a skill set that I've developed um in the area of organizational leadership that has served me very well um when I I think
that uh that skill set in Brookline could be something that could help you to um Elevate um uh the school district and help you to keep your focus on instruction you know I always say that
um i' I'd rather have the conversations not be about money because you're confident in um the finances uh and and so you're not having conversations let's say about overrides not dominating your your world right so um so it's something
that I do I love teaching and learning uh and um and I understand how to align resources in order to accomplish our goals and I think that's perhaps the skill set um that maybe attracts uh you to to me at this
time thank you very much Mariah thanks David and thank you Susan for joining us tonight I'm very excited um during the um during our meeting you discussed your sort of philosophy around maximizing the instructional minute and
I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that here and how that aligns with the finance work we started to talk about it a little bit a minute ago I'm wondering if you could just talk more about that yeah so there's certain um certain elements um so I've had this
essential question that's really driven me throughout my career and that are what are the essential ingredients present in schools where students and staff Thrive and Achieve at high levels so not just Thrive but achieving at high
levels and so I've I've really tried to uh understand all of the different facets of education and and how in those school districts that are performing well um you know how how they're accomplishing that and there's certain themes um that I've seen you know as
I've gone through this Learning Journey um you know one of the things that I believe matters most is is uh quality instruction and an in the instructional minute and so the more
that we can enable staff uh to focus their attention on the instructional minute uh learning outcomes will improve and um so that really um drives a lot of
the way that I think about how do we you know how do we go about the business of educating students how do we provide resources um to teachers so that they're they have them ready and available to them and they're not having to think
about you know is my class clean will the lights come on does my technology work um that they're actually able to come in and focus on developing relationships with kids um identifying where those gaps are that you were talking about earlier uh working on
planning um and not having to spend their time trying to track down things that they need in order to get the class up and running for the day so um that's really a passion that I have you know how do we how do we focus our energy on the instructional minute and how do we
eliminate the barriers uh that prevent us from keeping our focus on that instructional minute thank you anyone else Nancy sorry Hi and welcome uh Nancy Gore um a
lot of what I've exper this is my first year on school committee um and a lot of what I've I've yeah thanks um we um I've noticed about the person prior in the position was um uh around negotiation can you tell me a little bit about your
experience in negotiation and when of uh negotiations and you know have you ever been in a tough position in a negotiations how did you work way through that um I think when I was born I was in a negotiation meeting if feel like I've
done it my whole career um and in fact um my very first experience years ago in public education um I worked for Beverly Public Schools and they went on strike um and so that was a little challenging situation where I was the
one that was presenting all of the data and I was in court testifying about um you know the impact some of the um proposals would have um on the on the resources available within the in the school so yeah that I I I think that
that introduction to negotiations was maybe a little uh trial by fire yeah and so after that what's really hard about negotiations you know I think one of the things that I've learned over time is that um you you know to be hard
on the issue but soft on the people um that you have to preserve your relationships um because the work is done through people and so you don't want to damage relationships so uh being a good listener trying to get uh people
to look at the issues from the same side of the table um helps you to be able to come up with different strategies or ideas or ways to be able to meet the needs of the of of both parties um so
IBB I've I've used that model before which is uh interest based bargaining it can work in some places it takes a tremendous amount of trust um uh and sometimes um unions are not um interested in in using that type of an
approach especially sometimes they're not and that's okay too um I have negotiated using all kinds of different um ways with and without um uh uh uh uh
facilitators or attorneys involved uh both with and without I uh have seen negotiations get really heated and go to mediation so um there's not much I haven't seen or experienced in uh the realm of collective
bargaining initial contracts I've negotiated those I was I was the primary uh person that negotiated all contracts that were non- teer contracts uh at masit and at Pentucket as well so I have I I've had quite a bit of experience in
that in that domain wow um great thank you very much all right anyone else okay well thank you very much for joining us this evening Dr given we are going to meet an executive session later
today to discuss you and then we might uh return and so stay tuned okay very good well uh it was a pleasure to meet you all I look forward to working with you um in the years to come all right so now we will move to
update on the district strategic planning process all right so this is a brief uh update on the strategic planning process we completed session two today um our first session again was March 16th and that
was the envisioning the future session and you uh school committee will remember you did this last summer uh with Dr Lori lus uh as well as identifying common themes and categories so you've actually did both of these um
as a as a committee group and so the community planning team met again today to identify common themes uh comparing um what the work that was done last summer to the work that was done um more recently and several of you uh
several committee members were actually in the room and I'll let you share your your thoughts or your experiences with that upcoming we have Wednesday March 5th where we'll be taking a dive into a root cause analysis and begin and the initial drafting of objectives and
initiatives and then May 24th is a final draft plan revisiting objectives um but there are some other administrative meetings that are in there but these are the meeting dates for the Strate uh for the community planning team and I'm also looking at later in April to add an
evening community meeting for expanded Community input for those that are not on this on the community planning team but to actually take them through some modified versions of this so we want to get this date out and we'll begin communicating it um as well with the
time that goes along with that for those that are not on the team some of the feedback uh from the first session um Dr Ruth Gilbert Whitner shared this morning uh that uh participants found the envisioning
worthwhile the protocol was great surprisingly fun and interactive um that the process has been collaborative productive and it's a strong start um one uh person asked about how data is driving the process and we actually talked through District
data this morning similar uh to what Matt Dr Deo shared with you this evening we understand we better understand the district's needs uh somewhat an overwhelming start many voices and viewpoints this uh process is putting us
back on track I'm hopeful for what is being done will come to fruition we share similar Visions for the future and I think uh folks as they the various groups shared out today uh this resonated again a great step first
step forward in moving our goals forward uh we developed a strong Foundation this has been thought-provoking exciting and full of Hope a great setting to allow for communication so this is what uh members shared about the experience and
so some upcoming milestones we we're going to be launching a strategic planning website that will have all of our doc documents on it as well as um the community members and important dates uh and information and then once all this is said and done this uh
product will come to the school committee for your Collective Engagement review reflection input so that then we can be in a better spot for starting off or launching so with that that's a brief uh drive by of the strategic planning
process access to this point any questions comments go ahead Suzanne yeah I'm just going to kind of affirm what Dr Giller said uh there was a lot of talk a lot of conversation
people were very engaged um there was a comment that they thought that our uh observations uh at our last session were and this session were a little more optimistic than they were last August which I think really is a credit to the
senior leadership team and Dr gillery moving us forward uh in the work that we need to do it was amazing to me uh how common the themes were so there were six working groups and we reported out and
uh maybe there were 10 themes total that we had and they pretty much overlap so people I feel like people are kind of on the same page having the same thoughts and um it was actually it was very engaging and it was good to hear so many
different voices there were many many voices and so that was good Helen did you want to add no I just wanted to Echo what you said that's all I'll be very brief but I think it was really quite you know exactly what you said that you know even going from one table to
another table they mixed us up in terms of who we were sitting with and who we were talking to in terms of putting together the themes and you know it was you know the second table from the first table that I was at very
similar uh themes and and places we want to be three years from now um what are the major themes that we need to work on and it just it was quite good Nancy just a quick question
um um we've been getting questions about what at what point in this process c um the rest of the community can be engaged and I just want to be very like clear that I get that information right I think from past conversations you said
they're pretty much kind of Welcome to engage at at a lot of different points in this process um how do we get that information out um like through parent leaders can parent leaders share that information and I want to make sure that we that we
let people know when they're invited at the appropriate time so they are approximately 40 members of the uh Community planning team and uh also no one's been turned away at the door for those who are not on the team who happen to show up so others are certainly
welcome to participate there's this forum on the uh 26th of April that is tentatively planned once that's confirmed that will get blasted out to lots of different stakeholder groups so that'll be an additional way to participate and then of course we ourselves as a
school committee are also going to be reviewing it and there can be public input of course at that meeting as well go Suzanne well I'm just thinking another possibility is once we have the website up uh we could certainly take
either comments emails public comment uh if people have input from that information from the website so and that's that's one of the ways we're looking to design the website to keep it going uh keep that information moving forward but it's uh what I'm looking
forward to doing is later in the month doing a a modified fa a facilitated version of the sessions that have already occurred so that folks can have that similar opportunity or experience I think one of the concerns
was that certain groups didn't feel like they had a seat at the table when really the table is open to everyone am I am I correct in that assumption it is open to everyone but I I will also add that in assembling this
team of 40 there was broad Outreach to a diverse set of stakeholder groups and each group was asked to recommend some people to come forward for who they would feel is representative of their particular interests and a lot of these
groups also have overlapping populations so for instance each school committee was reached out to that's of course a very broad group and then within each school committee some specific subgroups so there are members who are really bringing their experience from a number
of different groups even if they are officially designated as representative of one group sure sure um okay sorry uh Mariah and then Helen thanks I attended this morning um
for the first hour and I was um uh I was so struck by the positive energy and um and engagement in the room which it was very exciting to see um I I
do want to um emphasize that um I feel that we should be um bending over backwards to ensure inclusion um across and and be can still looking at who is not in the room even as they
may be representing multiple constituencies who is not in the room and continuing to um make sure that we can include um those voices that who are not present so I really I think that the plan itself can only be as good as
um the the totality of the community for who it's going to represent so you know and and I would look at Beyond um beyond the PSB Community to the entire Brookline community and how we can engage um members of the community who
are not um active PSB Educators or um or parents so I think it's really important for us to continue to um actively Outreach to groups we know how important it is and I think Matt even commented on this earlier this evening um about how
people really need to feel connected in as and so being asked matters so I really hope we will make those asks thank you Helen and then Stephen go ahead Helen well I think to the point of you know who's sitting at the table maybe
there you know when we put up the website we would want to list you know either people's names and who they're representing um and sort of to to have a and then you know broken down by I don't know
um it could be by interest group by race by ethnic group I mean there's a lot of different ways to parse it so that people can see the representation you know I mean because we say it but you don't know it you know
so maybe that's that's a one way of sort of being out there I mean I think you know I was surprised by how diverse the group was at at this meeting uh at the two meetings actually Stephen go ahead um slightly different topic but also
relating to the Strategic plan I know you've been working on it for a while and it's an ambitious document what's the specific output of the community engagement part of the Strategic plan the one that we're engaging with the community in for this month so when you say specific output
what are you what is there is there a part of the plan that they're engaging with so they're they're they're they're they're shaping the what the big goals the big the big broad goals yes that
aspect of it and then from there what happens is then the the administrative team that's responsible for implementing will then say well here are the action steps that need to go along to accomplish that and so then it'll come
to committee to say um what else are we missing what else needs to be included as such but the reality of it is is we don't want this to be the kitchen sink when you say when it comes to committee it's not just the goals that are coming to committee it's also goals the whole
yeah wait I'm confused now so the whole the whole strategic plan is coming to the committee or just the vision and goals are coming no the whole the whole we'll bring the whole thing to committee oh I I would think that the vision and goals should come separately because
that's an area over which the this is the same comment that I was I was issuing last summer I think I'm in the minority on this but I'll but I what I would encourage us to do is to really assume benefit and really TR let's let's try to trust this and try this out and
I'm not saying you're not the process I would just like to see the vision and goals part of this process be under separate consideration by the school committee than the entire than the entire piece okay just so we have a dedicated session for it since that does seem to me to be under the purview of
the school committee and so few things are that it seems great to have some specific time dedicated to it and I think um Let me let me look back at the schedule because again we're we're working like the wind to try to get this
wrapped up and I think that's the other uh piece that we need to keep in mind is that we started this our facilitator had to take a Hiatus we had to work like crazy to find someone else to pick this up uh for us to continue us through this
process so we have that constriction as well doesn't mean that we don't could even be under policy subcommittee that since I don't know I'll what about some the workshop time just to review what we
have we're reviewing our goals right right we do we do have on the docket for our Workshop a review of school committee goals which hopefully will dovetail nicely with the Strategic plan but it is an opportunity to discuss our vision yeah I just want to continue to
advocate dedicated time to consider PB vision and goals as apart from the entire plan thanks all right anyone else vampires don't suck a blood David I put my hand back up if no one else I don't know go go ahead Mariah I wasn't sure if
that was a fresh hand or not sorry it is there was one thing I meant to mention earlier and I don't know how it slipped out of my mind just that the biggest constituency for for Brookline education is students and how we engage students in this particularly the high school students I think um would be it's an
opportunity if they if we can make that happen um even if it means that they are just being explicitly invited to the evening session on the 26th all right so now let's move on to subcommittee and liaison reports Helen
Capital Improvements I don't have a report all right uh Suzanne curriculum sure on uh we last met March 21st uh with curriculum subcommittee um we did I start off with
a kind of a debriefing on the middle- grade review that we had um we're looking kind of at next steps uh there's going to be a process for priorities there's going to be like a prease December 23rd and starting in the fall
of 24 we'll start to see uh some implementation of some of our priorities and a second phase will be around fall of 25 So currently there are three priorities that uh we're kind of focused on one is deciding uh Baseline
experiences for all middle graders another is looking at uh academic win what I need what we do at that time and then the third one is student voice and choice voice uh we talked about that in the presentation so those those are kind
of the that was kind of the um the takeaway from our ID brief on the the middle grade review uh we talked uh I'll go to the easy one which is uh there's a k to8 World language review that should be starting like last
week or this week uh and they're hoping for some uh information uh teaching and learning is looking for that the beginning of May so I think it's going to be kind of quick can simple uh just to give us some input and see what we've got right now so that's World language
review um we did talk about enrichment uh that is going to be an ongoing conversation and uh one of the things uh that uh Dr way is encouraging us is to think about
uh clear Bas lines for our uh uh what we expect in our our classrooms for each sub and after we figured out what those baselines are we're very clear about that and they're consistent then we can talk about how do we supplement those baselines so um that's work that we need
to do and some of that work is being done right now in learning walks as the followup to the um csts review that we had and in the learning walks they're going to uh all the schools and they're looking for um tier one they're looking
at tier one instruction uh looking for high quality instruction and standards are rich tasks and uh do all students have entry into the tasks so those are kind of that's what they're looking for when they do on the learning walk so there will be some some report about
that uh that'll be across grades in content and our next curriculum meeting is April 25th at 3:30 at the high school so we're going to take a look at uh Career and Technical education there with Brit Ste stens so it should be fun
if you want to come yeah April 25th at 3:30 so it's a little earlier usually we're at 4: this is at 3:30 at the high school any questions for Suzanne one remark I'll make sounds like there are a lot of program reviews going
on now so I'm impressed by how our office of teaching and learning manages to have the bandwidth to undertake this all at once I have to give a huge shout out to um Gabe and Michelle and Grace Grace has come in thank you Grace I think you're
there yes there she I see her box um has come in and really helped us out she's not even working full-time but she is giving it 150% and uh you know it's it's moving things are happening I'm going to second that and this not acting like a
caretaker this the really proactive stance coming from Grace at OTL all right thank you next up Valerie diversity Equity inclusion and Justice meeting on the 13th of April all right
Mariah I'm sorry you had some more V I just said we hav't met since we last had full school committee on the 16th we're meeting on the 13th of April okay Mariah Finance Finance met yesterday um we focused on the FY 24
building user fees um it was a very successful meeting and we will have um recommendations to come to a school committee meeting I think some point in April for um full school
committee consideration um the other thing I'm going to report on is I haven't reported on the warrant for a couple of months since the last time I reported which was in late January I believe um Andy or I signed off on 4
million just over $4,125 th000 worth of um expenses and one of the things that I wanted to highlight which one of the things which I wanted to highlight which I don't think I did before um but maybe I did so I'll be repeating myself but it's for a
good cause um is highlighting um Sasha's work um in Food Services in um joining the mass School buying group for food um and the impact on that um it's great to see us looking at how we can be even
more efficient and effective in our purchasing um and so that's one thing that um that I have noticed um is the um I noticed the the buying group and asked her about it and yes that's something that happened in the past year so so
that's the updates I've got Mariah just wanted to mention that uh I did it last week and was happy to see that the trout coolers that you mentioned last year are um still an item for us Mariah and I actually got to see the
uh trout uh at Lincoln School yep Val and I saw them at D school as [Laughter] well all right next up suzan now hold on I just want to I'm trying to think if there's anything as exciting as the trout this year I'm like racking my
brain for anything exciting but no I think the trout is really the most unusual interesting thing the the live fish apparently they're nearing release yes that's right they are yes pretty soon they'll be headed to Jamaica
Pond I believe wow no are we allowed yeah no does get stocked at some point by the department of something that's the most excit more exciting than
the all right Suzanne government relations well I just to announce that Governor Haley signed the um whatever it is she signed the bill or whatever for um hybrid meetings going forward uh so
that's that's happening and I believe there's a supplemental budget bill that she she signed or that passed but Val may know more about that that that's the same bill Suzanne same bill what does that mean does that mean anything for us Val supplemental budget means that that the school food Universal um program
will continue that's right at least through the end of of this fiscal year sorry yeah all right Andy negotiations yep we U met with the beu on March 28th uh to um continue working
on the PA professional contract um we continued our exchange of initial proposals and we'll meet again on April 11th uh April 25th and May 9th so for policy I know that many of you will be upset to hear this but we're
not going to be addressing the substance use prevention education policy today so we're going to push that off to a subsequent meeting as for an overall policy update we will be having a lightning quick meeting tomorrow at 4 o'clock to review the uh Warren articles
to make recommendations to full school committee about potential Warren articles that we may want to issue statements on this is only been scheduled as a 15minute meeting in large part because there are only 24 warrant articles so much fewer than usual and sort of a
quick initial glance I I don't I'm not seeing a large number of them that pertain to the schools but that's obviously something for us to discuss formally at the policy subcommittee meeting so don't be late or you might actually miss the meeting entirely and uh that's it for policy any
additional liaison updates Helen so I have two uh one to make sure that the community knows that there will be a tour of driscal school tomorrow at 4:00 all are invited whoever would like to come we'll be starting at the historic
building uh up on top where the parking lot is the town parking lot um and then walking through uh both buildings and school oh shoot I meant thank you B for
keeping me out it's getting late um I meant the peer school there is a tour of the peer school tomorrow starting at the historic building of the pier school I'm really sorry about this guys um at 4 o'clock tomorrow afternoon also
um we are planning on having more tours for people who can't make that time um and um we'll be publicizing those um the other piece I wanted to mention is that I'm the liaison for the steps to success board and uh they had their meeting
yesterday the first one since last September I think it was um there's been some change in administration there uh there's an interim um uh person who's in charge uh and today yesterday was their
first meeting to sort of review what's been happening where are areas that need to be worked on and the uh search that they're doing doing for uh a new executive director this is for the steps Inc board
um yeah I think that um you know they're moving along that I think things have been improving since the pandemic um and uh you know this they're doing some hiring in different positions also uh
our and and we implemented as people might remember the third grade um first steps so they were now part included in the 3rd through uh 12th grade actually three through post uh through college uh
steps program um they're now looking at the k through2 um uh grades and trying to figure out the appropriate U way to because the system that we have and the
the way that we do three through 12 it is not necessarily what K through2 families need and K through2 kids so um their first uh ideas is to hire a family engagement uh person to help um look at
some of the uh things that can be helpful to families um but also to uh do a a study to see what is what would be the or hire a consultant to help with figuring out what do we do K through2
because as people remember we have through the uh our community engagement in cfce Grant Community community family community and family engagement Grant thank you um
through the uh Early Education um Department of Early Education and Care uh we get Monies to work with families from 0 to two uh who live in uh either either of our housing uh developments
and then um from 3 to 5 as people know we we have at least 40 kids who are on scholarship right now in beep um that's not the whole universe but that's certainly part of it uh so we have systems somewhat in place for the
younger kids um but that K through two was sort of a missing piece missing link and so that's that's what they're going to be working on uh from now probably through next year that's one of their
goals Suzanne yeah I just had an announcement the bef for client Education Foundation is having their trivia be on tomorrow night Friday at the high school uh and it's a big uh money raiser for them and the money goes to our our teachers and schools and it's
a really worthwhile cause so I don't know if there are tables available yet or still or um anyway be F to go I've done it before it's a fun it's a fun evening and it's tomorrow night go to the bef website and um I'm sure you can
find out all about it anyone else Andy um yes so earlier this week um lonus and I were part of a meeting a virtual meeting with h School leaders from our sister School in China um the ging School in xen so the the China ex
so on our end it was organized by Steve Lantos so the ideas that were resuming that exchange that was suspended during the pandemic um it's virtual for now but you know we will work toward resuming it in person when when circumstances allow so this was a sort of ceremonial meeting of
school leaders on on both sides there were speeches and songs yeah and um some some former students of ours who have participated in the exchange so all right anyone
else okay is there any new business all right seeing none I am going to move that we meet an executive session pursuant to Massachusetts general laws chapter 30A section 21A for the following purposes purpose three to discuss strategy with respect to
collective bargaining with the Brookline Educators Union per professional unit and to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining with the beu units ab and per professional unit with respect to the be's demand to bargain a program review and the be's pending
grievances arbitration because an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining and litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares for purpose two to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union Personnel Deputy superintendent for administration and
finance and purpose seven to review and approve executive session minutes from the following meetings March 2nd 2023 and March 16 2023 is there a second thank you Stephen Stephen your vote Yes
Suzanne yes Nancy yes Andy yes Helen yes Valerie yes Mariah yes and I also vote Yes we will likely return to open session for a possible vote to appoint a
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all right five 4 3 2 one all right welcome back everyone we've returned from executive session and I would like to enter rain a motion to appoint a new Deputy superintendent
for administration and finance Mariah would you like to make that motion so moved and you're moving that we name Dr Susan given to be the next Deputy superintendent of administration and finance subject to negotiating a
contract correct correct do we have a second thank you Nancy Stephen your vote Yes Suzanne yes Nancy yes Andy yes Helen yes Valerie yes
Mariah yes and I also vote Yes all right so welcome aboard Dr given pending successful negotiation is she with us and that uh concludes our meeting for this evening so thank you very much
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