Welcome to the regular meeting of the Board of Education for Tuesday, September 30. This meeting is now called to order. May I ask Mrs. Smith, if you would, can we have a roll call? Oh, I'm just sitting here. Oh, duh. You know what? I'm going back two meetings ago. I know right. We're done listening. Then we have a roll call. Yes. Thank you. Miss Smith? Here. Mister Residio? Here. Miss Hybridge? Here. Mister Holt? Here. I myself am here. And president Reese? I am here. Thank you. We now stand for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the
Republic which stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Is there an approval of the agenda? Mrs. Hymer? I move to approve the agenda for the regular meeting of the Board of Education, Tuesday, 09/30/2025 as presented. Support. Motion made by Mrs. Hyrich, supported by Mrs. Smith, to approve the agenda. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? That motion passes. Thank you.
We'll now move to announcements. A few. First, I wanted to, draw attention to the budget both at the federal level and the state level. From a federal perspective, we will be impacted, obviously, by, what's going on with the federal budget. But I wanted to draw attention to head start here for a moment. Head start programs, many were reduced earlier this year. If you recall, I think I mentioned that there were some organizations that lost their funding, impacted hundreds of students, and or children, across, the Metro Detroit area.
Due to federal requirements for operational efficiency, our own head start programming maybe, in a period of transition. I know the district is considering options at this moment and, will make some decisions for the 2627 school year, but wanted to make sure that the public was aware that we may be impacted by, those changes. While we await the state budget, which we hope will be finalized tomorrow, there are questions that have risen about free breakfast and lunch, and I wanna appreciate or recognize,
our superintendent for being proactive here with respect to, evaluating options. I think we all wanna make sure that, students are not hungry, that they're focused on learning, and families are saving money and time with respect to, lunches. This may be in the superintendent's report, but, I do I did wanna make mention because the superintendent alerted us that, any changes in lunches require a thirty day period of notice. So to the extent that something might happen with respect to free and or, free
free lunches in the state budget, if that were removed, and I hope it is not, but if it is removed, there is a one month period of time, that the district would continue to provide those lunches, under our legal requirements. If the budget is not passed, I think we've mentioned before, the risks the risks to school districts. Schools would not be able to draw down their monthly school aid fund payments. The next one is scheduled for, mid October, about October 20. That could be delayed.
This highlights the importance of a strong fund balance. Best practice, is to have about eight to ten weeks of cash on hand. Farmington has about four to five. On September 25, just a few days ago, the governor and legislative leaders announced that they had reached a budget deal before the October 1 deadline, but not had not released any details. So we are hopeful to hear something later on tonight, early tomorrow, to understand where we stand.
The board of education had a retreat this past Saturday. At our retreat, we reviewed several things, one of which was protocols in response to some concerns from the community around transparency. What we've done may feel less convenient, but it is not less transparent. In fact, we do far more than the open meetings act requires. With respect to correspondence, we've included in board packets the items of correspondence so that all members can see messages that were sent to the board's email. These are not intended as a public communication channel, but we share them for transparency
purposes. We are sharing them for our board members so that our board members understand what correspondence we've had. Names are now removed, for privacy consistent with best practice. With respect to minutes, we are returning to our correct practice of posting only approved minutes. Meetings are televised and recorded if someone wants immediate access to information. This service is not required by the OMA, but is provided for public convenience. Board materials are posted after our meetings. The board must receive them first as meetings are of the board, in public, not
public meetings. This allows our members to prepare in advance and reduces unnecessary strain on staff. The public still receive information prior to major actions unless there's something that requires immediate attention. And in those instances, the board will determine whether there's a benefit to providing information prior to the meetings. We also spent a lot of time on data. We, reviewed test scores, from across the state and also specific to Farmington Public Schools. Test scores show, across Michigan that three of four economically disadvantaged third graders failed the
twenty twenty five read reading test. Equity programs nationally are being remains committed because we know that one size does not fit all. Teaching must be individualized. Data shows that our work with noticing and PLCs is helping with student engagement. We will continue to monitor progress and align our investments with fidelity. At the state level, Michigan's education system has been trapped in constant change. New increased spending, while states like Mississippi and Tennessee and Indiana, by contrast, who've chosen
long term strategies and stuck with them and now are leading the nation in reading. Locally, Farmington Public Schools has also seen instability. We've had five superintendents over a ten year period of time and over a dozen board members in ten years. That turnover has also created distractions and inconsistency. But in the last two years, we've focused on stability and servant leadership. At our retreat, we had a rich discussion on data and student outcomes. So rich that we weren't able to get to all of our items on our
agenda. And we plan to have a special board meeting to discuss our board goals and the superintendent goals at a later time. While we realize that the data tells us we have more work to do, we're really pleased to leverage this data in order to validate where our investments are making a difference and identify where there are opportunities to ensure that we're adopting investments consistently and with fidelity and frankly, where additional focus is necessary. We plan to hold a special meeting, to finalize our district board and superintendent goals, as I mentioned, and we will also make data a regular part of our conversations
moving forward. We were also encouraged by ongoing progress and representation, culture, family engagement, teacher leadership, instruction, and curriculum with respect to our previous equity audit and the and a status update. And, the board supports these efforts and sees them as key to closing some of our gaps. Finally, I wanna be mindful of the tragedies around us over the past several weeks. We pray for the victims of the Grand Blanc church shooting and extend our thoughts to our former, board, secretary and executive assistant to, doctor Coffin, Kathy Steren.
She is now in hospice care, and, she was a tremendous asset to us when she was part of our Farmington public schools family. We extend our thoughts and wishes and concerns and prayers for her and her family as we are reminded to hold our loved ones dear and show appreciation to our colleagues and to our community. And that ends my report. We will now move to public comment. This is the opportunity first opportunity for public comment. As you recall, you will have three minutes to provide for public comment.
There is another opportunity later on in our agenda. You have one opportunity to, submit your public comment, but you have two chances to do it. We ask that if your public comment is specific to a person that you refrain from names to protect privacy. We also ask that you address your comments to directly to the board and not anyone in the audience. The first person we have is Don. I think this is, My name is Don Keneally.
My wife and I live at 23101 Lakeway at the corner of Lakeway and Shiawassee across the street from Farmington High School's student parking lot. We've lived there for the past thirty years. I'm addressing you this evening to seek your help please. I am asking for your assistance with the parking lot lights that shine directly into my house. Specifically, it's the parking lot lights that are pointed south and west that are the problem. These lights are configured to illuminate as much of the parking lot as possible by focusing their beams nearly horizontally.
However, this results in illuminating my house as well. These lights activate, starting at approximately eight p. M. And stop at approximately eight a. M. Essentially, they're on all night long. Since last December, I've been trying to work with FPS facilities management on a resolution to this issue, but to no avail. I've been told, that the person I've been dealing with has indicated that the lights that are shining directly into my living room and my dining room are coming from
the Shiawassee street lamps. However, I disagree with that assessment. While there is some ancillary light pollution emanating from the street lamps, those lights are focused vertically straight down. To gain perspective on this issue, I would encourage you to take a slight detour on your drive home this evening by driving east along Shiawassee towards Orchard Lake Brook. As you approach Farmington High School, I would ask you to observe the lighting conditions of the houses and yards along the South Side of Shiawassee. As you approach the corner of Shiawassee in Lakeway, you'd gain a better perspective on
this issue. I understand the need for the safe lighting within the student parking lot, especially as we enter the fall and winter seasons when the sun sets earlier and rises later. However, please note that when this when there is snow cover on the ground, the problem of excessive lighting into my house from the parking lot lights only becomes worse. Please know that I'm not asking that the lights in the student parking lot be turned off during times when students or visitors would be using this lot. That would be unsafe and irresponsible.
As my de facto neighbors from across the street, I am asking for your help in getting this issue resolved. My respect to you. Thank you. The next, person is Henrietta Forche and then Mark Forche. And those are the last public comment forms that I have. So if anyone else wants to make public comment for this public comment period, please, pick up a card. Otherwise, after Henrietta and Mark Forshee, we will have no more further public comment. Good afternoon or evening. My topic is the benefits of transitioning away from DEI.
Good evening, members of the board. Thank you for allowing me this time. Today, I propose discussing an important shift, transitioning away from formal diversity, equity, and inclusion DEI programs and opting instead for approaches that emphasize fairness, belonging, and merit based decision making. These benefits will, one, promote objective, fair decision making, move from identity based metrics to
objective data driven frameworks, ensure fairness, transparency, and trust, two, support merit based systems and neutrality, reassure community that opportunities are earned on performance, build trust among stakeholders, three, reduce risk of backlash or legal challenges. Neutral systems are less likely to be seen as divisive or ideological, reduce vulnerability to
funding loss or litigation. Four, maintain inclusion while avoiding polarizing framing. Shifting to belonging for all retains inclusion goals. Minimize political backlash. In summary, transitioning away from formal DEI programs toward embedded objective frameworks combined with inclusive language centered on belonging can uphold fairness, enhance trust, reduce controversy, and still support every
student's needs. Thank you. And the sources are Berkeley, CMR, why organizations excuse me, organizations should shift from DEI to decision making, Ed Week, how a DEI rebrand is playing out in k 12 schools, Brookings, the promise and pitfalls of DEI in education. Education Week video panel on inclusive practices and student outcomes. Hoover Institute, debate on DEI and meritocracy in schools. And TEDx, building belonging without polarizing labels.
Thank you. Thank you. Mark Forshee. Hello. I ask that the board change the meeting time to 07:00 because we don't have many parents come and and hardly any on a regular basis. So just change it from six to seven so they can get here. And also, whoever's in charge of the microphones, I I would ask if you'd please ask that person to turn it up. Because when we're back here, we can't hear it as well as you can hear each other. So it's, and some of us are a little older too.
So that would be good. Also, I've been coming here for four years and the main subjects is DEI on occasion reading, but there's a whole variety of subjects in this whole school districts, but I don't hear much about the subjects and improving specific subjects. And I don't even know if any of subjects like, teaching students to to have, sound minds and clear thinking so that as adults, they're good rational people who know
how to think and they're not confused. I I've never heard any discussion of that. And also, I've heard nothing about how are students developing so that they're they're good hearted people, so that they're full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self control. These qualities, I I don't hear anything about those kind of qualities. And then, also, oh, I forgot it.
I had my third I didn't bring my notes. Okay. But these kind of things are not discussed. There may be we have languages, we have math, we have English, we have history, all these things. But these kind of things that develop the character in the minds of the students, so not only do they have the knowledge, but they become really good people. So they put the knowledge to good use as adults. And maybe some teachers are doing it. I'm sure there are some quality teachers who do that and part it implicitly.
But I, I really don't hear it talked about here. So that would be really good to hear. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any further public comment? Any further public public comment? Seeing none, we will now move to correspondence from the secretary. Thank you, president Williams. The board received communications regarding the following topics, student request to speak at a board meeting, protecting student athletes, with regards to transportation, the economics of education reform, literacy and
AI presentation, invitation from prosecution O'Donnell, teaching courses to read a grade level, strategic plan, district dashboard, the bus distance policy, public comment on literacy, several communications from the office of head start, and several letters from, from the extent of high school students regarding school reputation, seating selection, library, and school lunches. The board acknowledges all communications and response as appropriate. A list of correspondence is included in the board packet, which is available on the
Barbary Public Schools website. Thank you. We will now move to the legislative update. Yes. Thank you, president Peeves. Oh, there. Is that better? Okay. Thank you. Yes. The budget, of course, is looming large for all of us. We still do not know what the state has appropriated for schools for this year. We are hopeful that before midnight this evening, we will have that information so we can go ahead and accurately plan out the rest of our fiscal responsibilities for this
year. In addition, regardless of what happens this evening, I just sent an email to each of the board members and doctor Coffin. MASB, the Michigan Association of School Boards, is hosting a special webinar tomorrow called views from the capitol what now edition. It's from noon until 01:00. You can click on the link to, watch it virtually if you aren't able to be there in person. It's on Friday, October 3 at noon, and the, legal experts at MASB will be
talking about whatever decision decisions are or are not made as of tonight at midnight and how that may impact public schools. So that is all. Thank you. We will now move to the district update. Doctor Coffin? Thank you, president Wiens. Really, you'll see a lot of what I was gonna share tonight is gonna just support and reiterate a lot of the things you heard, from president Weems and and, and and doctor Blau. First, I really wanna start, by expressing my sincere gratitude to this board of education
for the incredible conversations we had at our board retreat on Saturday. As president Weems has already mentioned, we spent over two hours diving into how the board operates, both with their practices and their protocols. And then we dedicated another over two hours solely to student data. That focused was on the student achievement and the work that we're doing to make sure every single child has a path to success. It was invaluable for me, for our team, and I think for this board.
Your commitment truly to this work is very inspiring and and greatly, greatly appreciated. As many of you mentioned, we're still waiting for Lansing to approve their budget. This delay, as you know, creates a lot of uncertainty in our financial allocations for this school year. And our team is constantly monitoring the progress in the legislation and modeling, different scenarios so that we're gonna be ready wherever this lands. One thing is as president Williams also mentioned is there are, we have our current
universal free breakfast and lunch program. This program is dependent on our final state budget being approved with funding. Right now, it is running. So any families who are, you know, tomorrow, we're still in place with free free and re the free lunches and breakfast. But without the state funding for the year, that could impact it. If there is a change, though, we will notify our community immediately, and we do have that thirty day, timeline for people to prepare if there has to be a change. Hoping there won't be, but we're gonna we'll make sure you know.
It is the start of the school year, so we're really excited about a couple things happening with our students. Student roundtable. We're, gonna meet in the next couple weeks for our planning meetings. So very excited to meet with our student roundtable leaders as they, decide the format and how they want to, work this year together as a leadership team for our students. And there is, something else we're launching this year is called the lunch and learns across the district. So the board will be getting a list, for opportunities to join, me in meeting
with our students. It'll be the principal and, a small group of students. And really the focus for that is to learn more about their school experience. What are they proud of? What's their experience been? And just talking about the real just getting to the real, conversations around what's happening in our schools. It's really nice to just hear directly from our students what they love about their school and what their experiences really are like. That's all I have this evening.
Thank you. Thank you. We will now move to the 2020 bond quarterly update. Yes. I'd like to welcome mister Scott Smith, senior vice president of Plant Moran Reel Point, up to the podium to share the 2020 bond quarterly update. Thank you, and good evening. Pete. Good evening. Thank you. It's, it's my honor to, be able to present to you guys an update. Really, it's gonna be focused on what happened over the course of the past summer, months here in the district as it relates to the 2020 bond. Really, the focus, again, will be, those updates.
We have a few financial updates that we present. We were last year in April. So time has really flown, but I usually start out here with just a quick snapshot of really the bond in of itself. And it's just really a reminder that it consists of a lot of things throughout the district, that the the, taxpayer supported in, March 2020, going back over five years now. But the bulk of it does go towards construction and district wide improvements at the numerous buildings. But there's a fair amount of furniture, purchases of new buses, and a a large
allocation, to promote all the new technologies throughout the district as well. So that's kind of a quick, snapshot of how that's broken down. It's consistent with how it's been throughout as well. On a financial end, these numbers have changed just slightly. We're tracking now just under just over a $109,000,000, and the difference since April has been about $400,000 that we've, put back into the bond as a result of earned interest, through the district investing the proceeds from the bond sales.
We've got about $15,000,000 of uncommitted budget within that, and, spent to date is just over $92,000,000. And that's up about $6,000,000 from April with the bulk of that, again, being, related to the summer improvements. This takes that information just a little bit deeper, and I won't get too deep into the numbers. But, again, the actual approves are up about $6,000,000.04 and a half of that is construction, about, a million and a half of technology,
and about half million of buses. The biggest change really is in our forecasted commitments and our owners reserve contingency. That number was around 3,500,000.0 before, but, working with the district, we've reallocated, budget to support the new, proposed addition at Farmington High School. So, again, we're tracking at a 109,000,000. We've got about $250,000 of money that's currently unallocated to be used, accordingly. And then the the the charts down below are really just a depiction of of those expenditures. From a construction standpoint, it's all yellow, and that just means we're really in the
closeout phase. We've successfully completed all these projects over the past summer, and I'll share some photos shortly of those areas. So we're gonna spend the next few months closing them down financially, getting all the punch list done, and working out any loose ends related to those projects. I wanna share some photos. So what we call bid package 14 is, our athletics package, and this consisted of scoreboards at all the middle schools, the two high schools as well, multiple fields at the high schools. We updated the lighting at the stadium fields and also added lighting at the auxiliary
fields, which was not previously there. So just some photos here of the new scoreboards. The lighting is much more impressive at night. I think one of the, true benefits of this lighting is it's it's the LED technology. It I was here the other night, and you just don't get the spillover. It's very eccentric to the fields. It also has some up plating as well. Some more photos here. This this just shows the the scoreboards at the, middle schools, East, Power, and Warner. I also had a chance to talk to, missus Robinson too about feedback she's heard
from the community from, within the district, and a lot of this has been very favorable. The sound system's been much improved within the stadiums. The lighting is being used. The the board supported an alternate for some theatrical lighting, and the programming's been wonderful. It isn't just used at football games. It's been used at all sports, so far. So there's getting great versatility with it. The marching band has received, gave compliments to being able to use the auxiliary fields now as the light as it gets dark earlier in the day. So just being able to use the facilities the district has for longer periods of
time has been a huge benefit. Bid package 15 was the improvements at transportation. These are some aerial photos which show kind of a better depiction of what really happened here, but, we did some paving pretty much throughout the entire lot. We expanded the, service bay. It's kind of a little bump out in the upper right picture so that our longer buses can now, be fully enclosed and lifted for service. We did some improvements within the service bay themselves. New lighting, new paint. You'd be surprised what what a difference it's made. We painted the exterior of the building.
This is a building that hasn't been painted in a really long time. So some heavy scrubbing to get the grease out, made a world of difference. So, again, the improvements really were centric to the service side of that building and the parking areas. And then our last bid package was number 17, which included, parking improvements at three sites. So we had work at Visions Elementary or unlimited, which in included a new walking path. This is something, again, we wanted to include in the original, but we're unable to do so. We've included it here now.
Good feedback from Doreen in in terms of how that's benefited the student body there. We also did the West Parking Lot, which was in pretty rough shape and improved the drainage, heading into the winter. The new basketball court at East has been successful. Lots of good feedback there. And then, really completing the thought at Farmington Central High School with the East Parking Lot to to to support all the parking lot we did in prior years. Lastly, looking ahead, just an update. We are still continuing through the design phase of, the multipurpose room addition at Farmington
High School. We're through design development. We're reviewing estimates. We're tracking for awards late this year or probably early next year, for that project. If things go well, we'll start that construction in the spring next year and try to have that opened up for early twenty twenty seven. Also wanted to give a quick thanks to I'm here just re representing really a bunch of people. A lot of people gave a lot of time and effort this in this summer with McCarthy and Smith, lots of folks from the district, and, Wakeley Associates as well, our architectural firm. So thank you to them as well.
Thank you. Missus Smith. Scott, I wanna say thank you so much for all the work that you have done, and I have had a pleasure working with you, Plant Moran, McCarthy and Smith, and all of you for the past ten years. I've watched our buildings go from prehistoric to now modern day and to walk in and see the work that has been done. But I'd also like to say I do have the concern. I don't know if it's you or our people, the district's people, to look into
that lighting situation, with the family that stood up earlier. I happen to know where that house is. I had two children that went through Farmington High. So I applaud them for at least hearing and watching the traffic over the years. But I would like them to be able to get some sleep if the lights are flashing into their house. And as they stated, in the wintertime, when there's snow on the ground and lights
reflect, it could be a lot. So I don't know if that's you or if it's our maintenance people. I'd like that to be looked into. But I really appreciate all the things that you have done, the building improvements. Spot on. But if that's your lighting because I will be driving by tonight, so I don't want people to think I'm stalking them. But I will be driving by taking a peek to see what's going on. And, if you could, let's talk about doing something with that lighting. Thank you.
Thank you. Any further feedback, missus Heinrich? Yeah. I I just wanna I wanna thank you for the work you're doing. Home homeowners know that home improvement projects always take longer and, all of these projects are well managed by you and done in a timely manner with, with the school district. There's just a small window of time when students aren't in the buildings. And so I think that's really wonderful. And I want to applaud you for the work you're doing. And also thank our community. Since I came on the board, we've had to spend money available.
And all these millions of dollars that we've spent is thanks to the community for investing in our building, in our school district, and allowing us to, update our facilities, which, isn't a constant and it's a constant cycle. And just because we're finishing things up doesn't mean that we're done. But we're we're in a good place. And it's, with thanks to the community for supporting our school district financially to be able to do these things. Mister Paul?
Yeah. We really appreciate I really appreciate that for the upgrade to the to the buildings in which makes makes a very community oriented type of, field in which that people can now, go and participate with with the schools, such as the, basketball courts and the walking, paths. Those are, those are things that shows that we're we're just not doing things for us, but we're doing things for the community.
I know for a fact at East, I know that outside basketball court are used very, very frequently. So it gets a place where kids can go, you know, play a couple games, hang out, and join themselves instead of being knocked into their rooms and and on their video games and tablets and all that stuff. So I love the XRAC too because we just gotta provide a space for these kids and people actually come without any kind of, you know, person yelling at them, get off my lawn type of thing.
So, you know, I really do appreciate that. Thank you, board members. I think, you know, we've all appreciated the, updates over the years. And and most recently, I have to tell you, I have really enjoyed the football games. I appreciate the the lighting there. I think, it's really rewarding to see the, community members and our kids really appreciate. The light show and the sound quality is so much better than it than it was before. This was a really good, investment, and it's it's nice to see little things like
that, sort of pan out. So, just wanted to make mention of that. I'm appreciating this season. Thank you. Thank you. With nothing further, we can move now to our, state assessment update. Thank you. I'd like to invite miss Rhonda Henry, assistant superintendent for innovation and strategic initiatives, as well as Margaret Hendrickson, director of curriculum instruction and assessment, up to the podium to share, an update on our assessment date. Good evening, president Weems, members of the board, and doctor Coffin. Over the last month, the month of September, you have received weekly data snapshots from
missus Hendrickson and I beginning with when the data was unencumbered the September. Data snapshots on literacy and math and some of the early indicators that we are seeing from our current work. Continuing throughout the month of September, you've you've received the high school literacy and math data. Also a comprehensive student update report. And most recently at the board retreat last Saturday where missus Hendrickson and I reviewed trends and themes from the data.
And we would be remiss without giving you our gratitude and appreciation for your diligence and, keeping the expectations high and for your being a partner in the work. This is system wide change and, we appreciate your your commitment to that work. Last spring, we worked on creating the first Farmington Public Schools blueprint, and we continue to refine the blueprint. The blueprint is a clear and thoughtful framework that has the student experience at the
center. For tonight's, presentation, we are focusing on curriculum instruction and assessment and how analyzing data leads to the continuous school improvement cycle and district school improvement cycle. You can see from the blueprint that the foundation of our work is the vision and the mission with our graduate aims, the profile of a lifelong learner, the critical skills that we want to see our students achieve so that they're ready for their
future. And those are critical thinking skills, communication, adaptability. That's a big one right now. Being able to adapt to new situations. And so when we talk about educating the entire child, it's that's the promise to the community, The profile of a lifelong learner. And then our guiding principles, our instructional model. We've been reflecting on themes from systems that are showing growth, and there's three themes that that we've been reflecting on. And the first is that systems that are impacting student learning have prioritized engaging students
and parents in different ways. And this is our strategic plan. The profile of a lifelong learner, again, those critical skills that our students will need for their future to be successful. And then being very consistent about our tier one instruction in order to maximize learning for all, and that's our guiding principles, moving instruction from acquisition to meaning making, to transfer, solving real world problems. And most importantly, positioning our students to be successful. Giving them authentic tasks and then noticing what they bring to the to the learning
task. Tier one, this is a, a depiction of our multi tiered systems of support system and we have been really focused on our tier one. Tier one is where students spend the majority of their time and ensuring instructional equity across all classrooms. And so a good tier one is that teachers are effectively using, effective high yield strategies in their classrooms and that all students are being taught core content.
And thirdly, that the environment is conducive to learning. And so that's where we have been investing our time. Professional learning, making sure we have quality instructional resources for our teachers, implementing those resources consistently, and, making sure that all of our students have access to tier one. This is the most critical part is ensuring tier one access for all. The second theme impacting students learning from systems that have impacted student learning is that
the system had a plan and they stuck to it. And that stick to it ness is so important to reaching goals. And this is our district improvement plan. Since COVID, we have implemented consistent literacy and math, content and strategies. And and we're sticking to it. And the third theme from systems impacting student learning is that those systems pursue pursued reading instruction earlier than the state. And that's what that's what we did in Farmington.
In elementary, we've been focusing on knowledge building literacy and foundation skills. Secondary, redesigning units of study with the focus on language development. And that is our district school improvement plan district improvement plan. Today, we will provide a high level state of, student performance data in Farmington for literacy and math. You have received the comprehensive student report, trend data. That's something that you will you will see every cycle of data.
You will see that three year trend data. We'll give specific highlights relative to early impact. And most importantly, that cycle of continuous improvement is how does the data reinforce and inform our literacy and mathematics work, our current work. Just wanna touch on that we utilize five levels of assessment in a comprehensive balance assessment system. Today, you will hear about our state assessment data. And that is it's important because it holds us accountable.
We also use the data for program evaluation and when we look at our curricular resources. However, it's not the the sole data piece that we base our success on. And ensuring that we're triangulating data, we're using multiple measures of data to make those day to day informed decisions is what our work is. So in reviewing our literacy plan and our student performance, you know, we acknowledge that we're not where we wanna be. We are either at or above the county level when we analyze our district data.
We are seeing pockets of bright spots especially in our elementary and, but, you know, we we we need to expand that and we're not where where we want to be. This slide shows quite a bit on it, but I wanted to highlight that we have been tracking cohorts. And you can see here, this is the MSAT proficiency proficiency trends in literacy from 2023 to 2025. And we have been looking at the trends of those cohorts as they move through
our system. Fifth grade cohort, one highlight is that they've demonstrated steady growth increasing from 47% to 54% over the last three years. And that reinforces that, you know, implementation of high quality resources, EL skills, and wit and wisdom. It is showing some positive impact, early impact. And then there are some of our subgroups who are above the county, level in grades three through five. We've also looked at buildings with the largest percentage of economically disadvantaged and we are
showing meaningful gains and this is this is one of the highlights. As you can see from the chart, you know, we've had, significant increases over the last, few years in those buildings. You know, fifth grade Wood Creek increased percent proficient by 18%. We had 20% at Gill since 02/2024, and we're keeping a close eye on those gains. As we think about staying steadfast in our work, literacy k 12 has been a
primary focus. As we think about where we sit right now in elementary literacy, we've taken the last three years to rebuild our assessments and our core resources, as well as introduce some new intervention resource. And so one of the things that we will be working on this year is continuing to implement EL skills block, which was our foundational skills, as well as WIT and WISDOM, our knowledge building resource. That all comes out of the science of reading, and we started that work ahead of the grants coming from the state around early literacy.
So we're very proud that we had a plan that could make use of those resources, make use of those grants without having to punt quickly. So we've had a few years. We will be in year three of E. L. Phil's block this year, year two of wit and wisdom. And one of the thing that's gonna be very important for us is to provide targeted professional development in both of those resources. Knowing where our staff are with those resources, what are the professional development we can do this year to increase their capacity and maximize the impact on students?
So what you'll notice here is some continued supported implementation of those two resources as well as very targeted professional development on what's called scaffolds and supports. How does the core resource allow every student in that classroom to access grade level content? That is often what is missing when students are performing lower than they are capable of. We know all kids can succeed at high levels, and so we're making sure grade level content is accessible by all. There's big shifts in writing from balanced literacy was what we used to do to
wit and wisdom. So we're bringing in the publisher to do very targeted professional development on writing in wit and wisdom to shore up the differences in thinking about how writing instruction occurs and how to maximize that impact. And a lot of the work we do with our foundational skills is small group and independent practice. How do kids get what they need when they need it? So you have that core instruction with EL skills block, but a big part of it is moving kids into flexible groups, meeting them where they are to support them in accelerating their learning regardless of whether they might be a little bit behind or
might be ready for something more. So by monitoring what's happening in the classroom, listening to our teachers, we know the next step to help move the data forward. And as, miss Henry shared, we are seeing certain grade levels increase in performance, now seeing trends. We haven't seen a multi year trend in a lot of places, and we're starting to now see a third year trend. So that is telling us that the that the the work the work is happening. The last piece that I'll say is while we focus on that tier one, which
miss Henry spoke about on that triangle. We're also supporting kids who need extended learning opportunities with their foundational skills because we know how critical that is to third grade proficiency. So in the last few years, we've actually used UFLI, which is a foundational skill intervention resource with our upper L, which is why we're seeing those gains in our grade some of our upper L grade levels because they don't use EL skills block, but we are using an intervention resource, and we're expanding that to k two.
So we've now rebuilt our tier one, our tier two, and our tier three supports, which was on that triangle. So we're very excited in the investment. Now we need to see it through with targeted professional development. And in in secondary literacy, we are seeing that our middle school MSAP literacy performance is consistent with prior years. Again, you can see the college board literacy trend on the bottom here with proficiency gains in eleventh grade over the last three years, which is greater than the county.
We, again, recognize that this isn't where we want to be, and that we have work to do. But you can see that, the PSAT, SAT show slight gains in eighth grade and eleventh with both grades sitting above the county. As we think about the work for literacy in middle school and high school, we have to think about the learning gaps that students might be coming in with at middle school and high school, and how we continue to allow students to have access to grade level content while providing them the support for skills that might not be
quite where we would hope them to be, but we can get them there. And so in both, in our teaming model at our middle school, we're able to provide supports for students who might not be there quite yet, but can access grade level content. But one of our key pieces at middle school has been language development. Just like we have foundational skills at the elementary level, there are foundational skills at the secondary level. So the for the past two past two years, we've been working with a resource called Patterns of Power that does language development.
To the rest of the world, think grammar and vocabulary, but in a much more intriguing way, daily routines to build that. Because without that language instruction, students struggle to read and write. They might have reading fluency. They might have comprehension. But once you get into middle school and high school, you need to be doing broader language instruction in order to move comprehension forward and their writing ability. So we are continuing that work in middle school and expanding it to grades nine and ten this year.
The other thing that is really important in tackling middle school and high school literacy is that kids are engaged in texts that are meaningful to them that they can also choose. So have it meaningful topics and themes and have choice. So we've been resetting all of our middle school and high school classroom libraries over the last few years. We know that our middle school is doing authentic learning and integrating literacy in real world context, which also helps our profile of a lifelong learner, those skills we want that are enduring.
And we've also been redesigning our eleventh and twelfth grade courses to integrate literacy into topics and themes. Contextualized learning, authentic learning and literacy is one of the biggest ways to move, adolescent learners, but also provide foundational skills. Hence, we need that patterns of power work where we're doing foundational skill work. We also have ELA support positions at the high school, to support students that might need some extra support. So we're very excited about continuing contextualizing literacy learning and also doing foundational skills.
But we also know our teachers need time to grow in their capacity, so we are continuing to do professional development on patterns of power, as well as having targeted learning around writing really quality units of study that's literacy focused in either project based units or theme based units. When miss Henry talked about having a plan and sticking to a plan, I think sometimes the board are like, what are we doing? When did we start this? When is this happening here? So I designed this graphic just to reflect on a staged approach to our literacy
work k 12. The idea that we started some foundations just coming out of the pandemic around some professional learning, but between 2023 and '24 and now We've added new instructional resources. We've added professional development tools. We've added intervention tools. And while I won't go through every line or row on here of the work, you'll notice that new things are appearing and some things are continuing. A lot of work for a three year period of time, we're continuing on the plan and continuing to add as we go along.
In the area of mathematics and student performance, we're seeing similar trends that we, you know, are not where we want to be, but either at or above the county level. In elementary math, you can see the MSAT trends grades three through five, with shifts in performance within two to three percentage points, from twenty twenty four to 25. Grade five has the most very varied performance across our building that's that has been consistent with prior data.
Like literacy, we see meaningful gains across our elementary schools. And this is both in schools that, are economically disadvantaged and, and others. The first bullet there, you know, Lanigan showing an increase over the last three years with an overall 18% increase in 2,024. And so, again, we're keeping a close eye on these trends. If you look down, fifth grade, Wood Creek increasing by 23% since 2024 and thirty
four percent since 2025 and is now above the county. It's important as we engage in new work to always look at district wide data at grade levels. But often you start to see the early impact in specific student groups, particular buildings, and or grade levels. And so by looking at those early impact measures, we can start to see what's working and how to improve that. So I had a pleasure of talking with Wood Creek, Lanigan, Gil, a couple of different principals saying, what do you think happened over the last few years in addition
to our district inputs, like the new resources. And it's very interesting to hear the story at each building and how their work augments the district work and how teams are actually finding interesting ways to solve problems. Doctor Coffin's always talking about bring the solution making closer to the classroom, and so it's been very interesting to watch that in play. Our NWA data, and our state assessment data over the last few years really indicated a strong need to focus at grades three through five. So one of the things we noticed following the pandemic since everyday math was just
adopted just prior to the pandemic and we were using in person resources for, remote learning for, some time there, We reinvested in our everyday math implementation to ensure all grade levels and all teachers were using that, but they needed more professional development because they were only in that resource for about a year and a half before the pandemic. And so the last couple years, we've been reinvesting with everyday math, the math games embedded to build strong number sense. We've also been excited about a new tool called Magma Math, which is AI supported
tool. It's not like a tool we've talked about before like DreamBox where a student gets on. It provides a personalized plan. This is actually used as part of core instruction. I I'll send you some videos as a board of ed. I know I've sent them to you in the past where kids are problem solving on their computers, getting immediate feedback from AI. All of their strategies can be shared up on the whiteboard and have flexible conversations around strategies and problem solving. It has been a game changer for some teachers and for students.
We prototyped it last year and are going district wide k 12 this year. It really supports the type of instructional learning, type of instruction that'll support learning, k 12. The other piece is we've talked a lot about found tier one resource. Everyday math would be that. Magma math is gonna support that. But we also recognize not all students are where we want them to be. They are where they need to be, and we need to meet them where they are. So just like we rolled out over the last couple years, UFLI as foundational skills
literacy. I know there's all these names for things. But we're rolling out Delta math, which is being used to do intervention in grades three through five this year. Every single grade level at each building will get that professional development. We also are still seeing some nice gains from our math support positions at three of our title buildings where we felt the need was, most critical. And again, professional development focus is where it is. We need to build capacity to ensure instructional equity classroom to classroom. For our secondary math, you'll see again the college board math trends here eight through
11. This performance reinforces our decision to adopt a new secondary math program for this school year. I would like to highlight that Warner Middle School last year piloted problem based resources, which included illustrative math. And they showed, over a 5% increase in their data. And so, again, that reinforces that, we thank you for your support and and adopting that new curricular resource.
And the early indications, especially from Werner, are favorable. I do wanna note if I if it's okay to add that there was a specific transition from 2023 to 2024 with the college board math assessment. It, one, went online just like the ELA, but the structure of it changed in a way, where it chunked, questions depending on where a student was and calculated their scale score, nationally, state, regional FPS noted some dips.
You'll notice that in the eighth grade from '23, '24, in ninth grade, in tenth grade. So this is our second year with our students experiencing that assessment. What is interesting is our eleventh grade never saw the dips from that 2023 administration to the new test set up for 2024. It wasn't merely going online. So just wanted to give context that doesn't take away from the fact that we're not comfortable where the data was before that assessment change or now, but reinforces, as
she said, our new resource. So we are implementing illustrative mathematics with significant professional development support by grade level or course. We are also alongside illustrative mathematics weaving in that AI supported Magma Magma Math tool, as well as continuing our math support positions at the high school. Professional development is is, I would say, 70% of the of the value of what my team as teacher leaders provide, including our instructional, coaches.
Nice to say that we have 65 teachers using this new resource. Each and every one of them are having a coaching experience in the first unit of study of that tool with longer coaching cycles to follow. So we're giving more support than they might like, but they deserve. So very excited about that. And similarly to literacy, just kind of reflecting on where we were post pandemic and the work we've been intentionally done. We did some professional learning learning early on coming out of the pandemic, and we
just continued to layer on additional professional development, refocusing on our core high quality instructional resources with the elementary EDM, adding different math support positions, and really making sure that we were ready for an adoption, of this magnitude. So did all the early work to make sure we were ready, and now we're here. And, again, thank you for your investment in that math resource. And in in closing, just wanted to reiterate that we are committed to system wide
change through the work of our of our blueprint. This is really our standard of excellence. I know today we were focused on curriculum as instruction and assessment and the continuous school improvement, district improvement process. We are also, doing quite a bit of work in our space and facilities and the use of time and and how we structure, our our instruction through team based staffing models. And so I look forward to giving you an update on that in the future
as it is one of our elements in the blueprint. Thank you. Thank you very much. Doctor Blau and then missus Heinrich. First of all, thank you so much for this thorough explanation of the many different kinds of interventions that we as a district have implemented over the past three years and the ongoing work, the additional resources that you are adding this year to continue to move our students forward in both of these key areas.
It is so powerful that you are creating time and opportunity for our teachers to get this professional development coupled with the ongoing coaching. So often over the forty years of my teaching career, the district or a school where I've been has provided training and bought all the materials for us, but not given us enough of that support and enough training. And the materials just sit on the shelves and no changes happen.
But as we have had opportunities as board members to talk with teachers, to visit classrooms, we have seen the differences ourselves as we've gone into these classrooms and and been able to see some of these, these materials and resources in, you know, in action. So, thank you for giving our teachers the kind of support and time, for professional development that is required in order for these tools to to be utilized with fidelity
so that they can make the kinds of impact on student learning that, that's that is possible. It's it's a heavy, heavy lift. It's not a matter of here, teacher, take this and okay. Go do this differently. In order to change the culture of how teaching and learning happen, This is what is required, and we're getting there. It's it's it's taking time, but we're only in year three, and we've already seen
some powerful, some powerful impact. So I encourage us to stay the course. All of the things that we as a district have implemented are all of what is recommended by the science of reading, the science of numeracy, teaching and learning, cognitive neuroscience about how a child's brain learns best with meaning, authentic tasks, all of these things. We have all of the right ingredients, and we we are we are in there
doing the work. And so I applaud all the effort that that the two of you and our teachers and and all of our, all of the members of our of our organization are putting forth to you know, on on behalf of student learning. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Miss Steinrick. Okay. I wanna start off by thanking you. I I put a lot of thought into this and I actually have three, like, main ideas I wanna touch on, but, we all have opinions on standardized scores, whether we agree or not or disagree.
And I've been putting some thoughts since we had these discussions at our our board retreat and since you've been sending our data snapshots. Back when I was in high school and took the ACT or the SAT. I don't know what it was. But there are college board exams for students that are planning on going to college, and not everybody took those tests. I mean, it was just the kids that were planning on going to college. We didn't have any test preparation. I had never seen questions like I saw them, but, you you know, that's that's
a conversation. And now we use those tests where everybody takes them, whether they're in the college prep class or they're in the, in the, CTE or career technical field class or whatever. And so we can have discussions about how good the tests are, how bad the tests are, what they say or what they don't say. But those, those are just meaningless discussions because, everybody's taken them and they're being used to rank our school district and, our, the public and everybody looks at where, where,
where do we stand or where do we rank? We're not comparing school districts that have, the same demographics. There are so many factors that go into these, but the state of Michigan puts out a ranking. And so that's, that's the reality of the world that we're dealing with. So the kinds of conversations that I want to have is how are you using the data to drive improvement? So that's, that's the question, Because if you don't measure it, then you don't know where you are and you don't know how you're doing.
As far as independent test as a as a teacher, I know that our teachers, we we teach within our classroom. We create our assessments. We know that our how our students are doing within our classroom. But as a teacher, I always like to have common assessments or outside assessments to make sure that I was preparing my students properly. And they were they were, you know, if I say that the students are grade level aren't meeting the expectations, I wanna know that they really are, not just my expectations. And so I think that we agree with those.
And so one of the things that, I want to ask of you is because the question is we want to have a conversation and this is what would help me as a board member and probably other board members also, is to think about creating a dashboard to show the specific measures that you're using to drive student success. When, and, and, you know, when Scott came up and was talking about the BOD money, he pulled up the dashboard and this is where we are.
This is the spending and things. I think the data snapshots were good and it was nice to have those, but those are just little specific, snippets of information. We have a strategic planning dashboard that was just put into place and I've been looking at that and that doesn't show all of the things. When Chris O'Brien came and was talking about the multiples tiered systems of success and he said, Oh, you know, we use this one program and we spent $200,000 on it and it wasn't working because they measured how it was working and now they're
doing something else. And so I know that you're doing these things and I know that you're not just throwing things in there and, and, and whatever, but as board members, I think it would be helpful for us to have that information organized where we can look, pull up the dashboard and look at it. And I was just making some, some notes on, on some of the things like you're talking about the, EL skills block and you know, the new resource or the
UFLI. And so all of these resources that you're using, the middle school teaming, you know, how is, how is that impacting students success? In the high school you have the freshmen cohorts. And so how, how are you measuring those? How are those? And so, so the, the question that I have is, once you see these areas of weaknesses, you pulled up specific specific elementary schools and said, well, they're, you know, this school is showing these improvements. The school is showing that. And so what are the prescriptions?
What are the things that you're doing? How can they be organized into a dash board with the, with the charts to show, you know, these are the resources and how we're following the trends over time. So I, I really think that that would really be, helpful. You know, slide 15, you talked about, the extra support staff. And so students that are being supported with the extra support staff, how are they doing? They talk, we're talking about this year offering, workshops to show the students how to
access the online, test preparation. So the students had actually accessed those test preparations. How are they doing? The student round table, we had students come and they said, you know, our parents pay for tutors and we go and we get this test preparation and we know we're doing fine, but some of our classmates, their parents can't afford that. You know, can you offer this from the school district? So tracking students that do the test preparation, how are they doing as opposed to the others? So I'm just kind of throwing out ideas.
I'm not telling you how to do that, but when we're having conversations with community members and somebody says, Oh, you know, our sixth grade math scores were 41%. Therefore, fifty nine percent of our students are illiterate mathematically, and they can't do mathematics, so they don't know their time stables, or they don't know how to solve an equation. Well, that isn't necessarily a valid statement, but, you know, statistics and these numbers can be used in conversations. So I can come back with, well, you know, we're using, the UFLI or the
Magna Math and we're showing that, you know, the students that are, are doing this in the classroom, we're showing improvement. And so, so that, that is the, one of the questions that I would like to see provided for us and so that we can have regular frequent conversations around these dashboards. And so we can look at the individual prescriptions and what you're doing district wide and say, oh, how is that working? And then as board members, we can make sure that we have the resources aligned
and, financing. And so we can say, well, it's important to fund these positions. You know, it's important to have these coaches because you're showing that in this building or these teachers are doing this, or when community members come and say, you know, another day for professional development, you know, I have to provide childcare for my and I can come back and say, well, you know, we're tracking these teachers that are engaging in professional development and we're showing that our test scores are going up because
they're doing this, because they're learning how to use these resources. So it's just giving us the data and information so that we can have those kinds of conversations. So that's kind of a, that's my first ask. The second one is I'm thinking, and my husband came up with this because he was Mr. Safety at his job and it was like, who's, whose responsibility is safety? And they used to say Dave. And he's like, no, you know, it's everybody's. And so my question is to this district in our community and everybody in this
room and listening elsewhere, whose responsibility is it for student success? Is it Doctor. Coffin's responsibility? Is it the classroom teacher's responsibility? Well, the correct answer to that, and I'm going to tell you, is everybody. Okay. It's the kids, it's the parents, it's the teachers, it's the support staff, it's the bus drivers. You know, it's because they get the school kids to school in a happy frame of mind. It's the nutritional services because we're feeding the kids.
So it's everybody's responsibility. Okay. And so then the other question, and you have it up there, I made a note, I think it was slide nine. What other measures can we use to show a student success? And on slide nine, I think you showed all the different things. You know, I'm like, what are the passing rates for core classes? You know, how about our attendance or graduation rates? And so I think that it would be helpful to include those things in the dashboard also, so that when we're we're talking about how are we doing as a
district, then it's not just one piece of data that the state puts out once a year that ranks all the school districts in the state. We can say, well, you know, in Farmington, we know that our students are successful because all of our students are passing their core classes. You know, we have very few failures. We know that the students are successful because when they go on to want to enroll in career and technical education programs, I was having a conversation with president Williams
and she said they have to pass a test to get into these apprenticeship programs. And so we can say, you know, we know that when our students graduate and they want to get an apprenticeship program, they're passing the test to get into them. We know that when, our kids are going off to college, they're actually enabled to enroll in college level classes and they're passing their classes. And so, you know, what other, what other ways can we move, measure student success? And, I know you're doing it, but I'm just asking you to like put it
on the dashboard so that we can, we can actually see that and so that we can have these regular conversations about data. And so this is just kind of, I love this, the whole picture, and I know stay the course. I mean, I know it as an educator. I know that we're doing the right thing, and it's just like and how how long is it gonna take? And I really appreciate, president Weems saying in her, opening remarks, you know, in the last ten years, we've had five different superintendents.
And so I think, you know, buying the flavor of the month program or bringing in a superintendent, that hasn't been working. And so are we gonna keep doing things that haven't been working? Are we going to start collecting data and showing these are the things that are working and this is what we're sticking to with fidelity? And so yes. So we we measure success in Farmington a lot of ways and not just one way on the state rankings.
So thank you for, for your work. And because I know that you're working really hard and I, I know the time that you're putting into it, and I know that you're taking it seriously. And I think all of our staff is also. So thank you. Thank you, missus Heinrich. Missus Smith. Thank you for your updates. I've been out of school for a while, so I had to chisel the test. So I know things have changed. At the end of the day, we're all here for the education for these students
to make sure that they are a success. My first experience here on this board ten years ago is we had a curriculum committee. And I know there's a lot of people that will say, well, that's getting in the weeds. But, actually, I don't feel that it is. I think that a curriculum committee would be spot on with members of the board so that we can know what's going on, continue to have those conversations with you, And then we won't have to have, you know, long, long conversations at the board
table. And we can have it where all of us will be in you know, the report will come back from a committee member or the committee chair and let everyone knows what's going on and keeping us updated and up to speed and then sharing that information with the community. That's number one. I'd like to know where are you all tracking the students that were at Wood Creek that were having those challenges? You know, now that they are they're having a success, as you said.
So those that were struggling, I'm pretty sure they're in other buildings. I need to know what we need to know. Where are they? What are they doing? And are they getting that help that they need, due to the fact that there was some issues with the testing and their learning ability. I know we purchased a lot of books in this district. You know, we have them come down here, and we have everybody look at them. And, you know, where I'm what I'm hearing is we're doing okay.
But when we pass these budgets and everything to purchase these books, I like to see more than we're just doing okay. Because we spend a lot of money on learning material for reading, writing, and math, and I'd like to see these test scores going higher. I'm I'm hearing that in the community, and it's brutal. I'd also like to say that, when you hear parents say that it's bringing down their property value, people are calling, they are reaching out.
When our schools fail, our community fails. So you wanna be able to stay on top of these conversations and have this open dialogue with the board, with the community. The last thing I wanna say is, and I know it might be hurtful to hear, I don't wanna hear COVID anymore, the pandemic. We have been out of pandemic for a while. We have to get past that it was the pandemic. We have to look at their we've gotta look at moving forward and helping those.
We had kids that struggled. We had kids that struggled that were at home. But we're past that now. We should be able to know how to pick up and start back over and, move forward. And again, I really would like to have a curriculum committee, because during the time that I knew about that, we were a premier district, and I want us to become premier again. I'm I'm walking the streets. I'm hearing the conversations. Most of it is brutal. And, I want us to see you succeed and be what we have here in
this community. I do hear people love that we have a new superintendent and that, you know, everything is you know, everything went built in a day. And we can't go back to when we were in high school and what we did back there because we didn't have the technology that we have now that we should be able to help our students. But I wanna thank you. I'm not tearing down. I'm just trying to give some advice to let you know what I'm hearing. Thank you. Thank you. Mister Cole? Yes. I've, really appreciate all the hard work and dedication that you guys, put into trying
to, get the information and raise up the scores of the kids. I know it's it's, it's a lot of task and and work. Me saying that when, when the layman person look at these, particular scores and everything, it's it paints a it paints a kinda like dismal picture, you know, in a in a way in which that I know we we're working hard at it, but but people want results. And and I know we had several superintendents over the last few years and tried
different methods and everything like that. How are we how are we getting the the now we're in our our teachers? Because teachers thought, okay. Well, am I learning this new system? And then, okay, again, this other training, will work will this work? Or should I just kinda, like, kinda halfway do it because there's probably gonna be another superintendent come in and we're gonna change up anyway and increase that, you know, that complexity that that no one's not really putting the true effort that they need
to have? How are we getting a buy in and changing our culture in which that we we we do see that you are putting different supports in that system and in a whole different way of, teaming up with other post, which I think is very excellent. But how, you know, how can we actually get a good buy in with with the whole district instead of just like, okay. If I just sit here and do my job because I've been here for thirty years and, you know, we're gonna come through another different way of teaching. How how are we developing, that that's okay.
This is the way to do it, you know, and how can we actually improve on that? So that's that's my kind of broad question. Yeah. And and I can answer that, Thomas. You know, I I would say this is, you know, my sixth year here. And, it is more than a buy in for our teachers. They are committed to this. And that is very rare. And so I had a conversation recently with some high school and middle school teachers, and they talked about just what you were just saying. And they're saying now, we know we're staying the course.
We know you're investing in us. Mhmm. And so they're ready. So I I think that's important for for not only just this board to know, but the community, is that our teachers are committed to this work from from kindergarten all the way through, our high school teachers. And that's a great place for us to be in. And so that's that's how we run, and that's how we move. Doctor Bob. Yes. To add to that, doctor Coffin and missus Hendrickson have been at the helm of
this work for the past six years. So although our superintendency leadership has changed, the direction of their work has remained consistent. And so they have built relationships based upon trust and support with teachers and principals throughout the district. So there has been that continuum already developed over these past six years.
Also, we made the investment starting several years ago of including teachers, board members, and community members in the process of developing the vision and mission, working together as a broader community to develop the profiles of lifelong learner. So it wasn't something that came from above and was pushed onto our teachers and community. Teachers, board members, and community members participated in the design of the vision, mission, and
profile. And that has become our North Star, but there was buy in from the beginning because all of us had had a seat at the table and had voice in designing what we felt was the direction for our students in our community. So we're in a very, very strong, strong place with regards to that piece of it. Thank you board members for really good discussion. I know we had, you know, a good two hours, of discussion on Saturday about
data. I won't rehash all of that, but I do wanna thank you again for sharing this information with us. You know, I've also been on the board for about ten years. And as it relates to student achievement, you know, as I've explained before, I I appreciate the constant churn and change. And while we've had some stability over the past few years, If I were a staff person, I'd be just waiting it out, to be honest for you with you
on the next level of change. And so what I appreciated very much about what you shared with us on Saturday was how you're leveraging the data to actually see where the improvements and and changes that, we've adopted or invested in are actually being implemented with Fidelity and where, frankly, they're not and where there's some opportunities for us to, you know, make sure that that is happening so that we can actually see the results that that we're looking for. I really appreciate how you outline the staging of the work so that we can
appreciate and understand when things have gone into effect. Again, for all of us, we're still gonna keep asking the really uncomfortable questions, you know, about when, because we we wanna make sure that we're holding all of ourselves accountable. I I appreciated missus Heinrich's comment. Like, you know, we're all in this. It is no one person's responsibility. It is all of our responsibility. I think the board is, based off of what I'm hearing both today and Saturday, we're very interested in keeping data in at at the top of our thinking.
And, I'm really looking forward to, more discussion around our board goals and superintendent goals. I think this informs that very much. And I think at that point, we can start to talk about some of the suggestions that I heard today, inclusive of how we comprise our committees or what our dashboards might look like. I know we have a dashboard and I wanna make sure that we're reviewing that on a regular basis. I've asked superintendent to make sure that we have that for review sometime in the next month.
I think that there are opportunities perhaps for us to reconsider what we're looking at, what our key performance indicators are, and, make sure that we are regularly more regularly looking at this to make sure that we get to the place that we wanna be. But I think we're all really impressed with how you're leveraging the data to see and understand what's going on and where we need to, continue to press in the same direction that we're going into. Because I think we're all of the same view that we have research based practices that we are following, that we need to follow with fidelity.
And when we do that and measure, we're going to continue to see progress. Personally, when we get to the conversation around dashboards and data, I wanna make sure that we're having a conversation about attendance. And I think we had a conversation about that, in, our retreat. I think absenteeism, it has a direct correlation to success. Students who are attending school regularly tend to, perform much better on standardized testing. I know that we have some absenteeism, information.
I asked for that information, and I, became aware for the first time that, there's a huge disparity, in my opinion, between our economically, disadvantaged students and our, average students. It's about double, the absenteeism rate. And just for parents, who we're in this together lockstep, you need to know that chronic absenteeism is a problem. Chronic absenteeism is one absence every two weeks.
It doesn't seem like a whole lot, but it ends up being 10% of the year. And it really starts to compound itself, if you start doing this at the elementary level. Just real quick story. I was, I started school in The UK, and I used to leave to come home for the Christmas holiday. For me, I celebrate Christmas. And my teacher pulled me aside and told me I do not have the right to pull my student out of school. And I thought, who was she talking to? Because I'm the parent here, but she helped me appreciate that attendance is very important,
especially in an early age. You're talking about reading to young young students twenty to thirty minutes a day. It translates to hours a year. It translates to about 1,800,000 words a year. And if you're not going to school for 10% of that time, you're missing out on 400,000 words a year, and it gets compounded. So we're all in this together, and I think we have some work to do to improve our attendance rates. We're gonna have to partner with our parents and our community to make sure we
understand what's happening here. Because it's not just, I'm I'm convinced, it's not our curriculum and instruction. It it is the magnitude of other things that we need to figure out. So, I appreciate the discussion. We wanna further this discussion, and I'm looking forward to our next steps. With that, I think we can move on to our next agenda topic. Thank you again. We're going to move on to, reports from board committees. Are there any reports from board committees?
Didn't think so. Seeing none, we will move to discussion items. So we have here an update on board of education and superintendent goals for 2526. We did not get to this at our retreat on Saturday because we were so engulfed in conversations around our protocols and around data. So we will have this discussion at a future board meeting. And so with that, we'll move to public comment. I see one person coming to public comment potentially. Where's the oh, I see I've got two cards. Alright. We will start with, you guys have heard the spiel.
You got thirty, thirty. Three minutes. I'm sorry. Please refrain from using people's names where privacy would be appropriate. Please direct your comments to the board. We appreciate your engagement. First, I have, mister Eugene Greenstein followed by Bill Lovellway. He disappeared. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't see he disappeared. Okay. Well, we can start with you, mister Lovellway. Well, this is a very interesting discussion. I'm glad to hear it. It's about time. We're a, kind of an average school district in a crappy state with a 44,
forty fourth place standing, and it just doesn't make any sense. So, what I didn't hear here this is all great. I'm glad to hear it. I'm most glad that you're finally sharing some information. It would be awful nice if you shared it with the community. That's part of the reason that come people come to town. They already know you're not a good school district. And Michigan knows that because all of the governor, governor candidates have put education on
their, their list, and they'll do it wrong. They don't know what the heck they're doing. So I have a couple of comments. I diverted from my, plans talk, but it basically starts with, we don't do anything in terms of community dialogue. I've mentioned that before. This meeting should have been shared with many of our parents, and it would spread spread the good word that we are not an extraordinarily great district, but we're kind
of an average Michigan district. And we just assume go to, Mississippi and get good education for our kids. So what I've missed here was, a sense of urgency. And that, is what Eugene and I have been talking about. We have a gap in achievement in reading in about 1,884 of our middle and high school kids that you didn't even talk about. And you say, well, when we work on everybody, they will catch up.
That, that's not gonna work. So, and when you talk about tracking progress versus the county, we got Pontiac in Southfield, in our county, what kind of a standard is that? Why what kind of excellence is that if we beat them? And, oh, by the way, you've heard about AI. We're so far behind the curve. We're never gonna catch up unless we change to a sense of urgency and address
some of these changes in an appropriate manner, which means line it up, do it, and set the standard tire. And I just ran out of time. So I'm just saying, get off your duffs. Thank you, mister McCoy. Next, we have mister Eugene Greenstein, and then we have Rachel, Rembis. I'm sorry if I mispronounced that. Well, I was very happy to hear that you had a great discussion on Saturday. Hopefully, in the future, maybe you could video those so that those of us who couldn't make to hear those great discussions on academics, you know, would be privileged to
to see what's going really what's really going on. I agree with, miss Smith's comment. We need an academic excellence committee, just so we can deep dive it. I was glad to hear that or see that, over the past three years, we've seen an improvement in literacy going from three, four, five. I think that's sort of what we were looking to see. I think that's very important. And as, Bill just mentioned and we mentioned, you know, eight weeks ago, we know
we can take these kids who can't read and jump them up. We just have to spend the money. And I appreciate the fact that we got, you know, budget issues at the moment because we don't know what's going on with the state and the federal. But we need to have a conversation that says when that problem, you know, gets dissipated, that we're gonna take a chunk of money, even if it means risking the rainy day fund, because the most important thing we do is teach our kids to read.
And we can't afford to let them get out of here without being able to read at grade level. So we may have to take some risks, that sort of life, but we have to do that. I think the other thing I heard, I was appreciate the conversation. Unfortunately, it's difficult to see all this eye candy and absorb it. But one of the things I didn't hear was a lot about what what went wrong and what are we fixing? What are the root causes? I was glad to hear we're doing some progressive things.
I'm glad to hear that phonics work and that's really important. But I'd like to see more data or more commentary on, you know, what went wrong? And how are these things fixing what went wrong? So we have cause and effect and we can track that too. I think it's important that we look at the raw data, not just the delta. I'm glad to see 18% improvement, but from what to what? And I'd like to see the data, raw data, between this elementary school and the
next So we know where exactly we're at. And I was, you know, to be honest with you, flabbergasted when I saw that math data. I'm not sure what 35% means, but it doesn't sound good to me and it was flatlined across all the grades. So I think that's a, you know, an issue of, okay, guys. What's going on? Again, all this stuff is difficult, and there is no instant solution. And we appreciate keeping the, you know, the the path going forward. Thank you. Thank you, miss Rachel Rembias and followed by Paul Steele.
Good evening. I'm here this evening to speak to you on behalf of my daughter and the other 16 members of the North Farmington, high school varsity cheerleading squad and the eight members of the JV cheerleading team. This is my daughter's second year on the cheer team and for two consecutive years I've witnessed this team suffer mistreatment by the district. I'm here today to speak up because I can no longer just sit quietly by. The district vision statement says that its goal is to educate learners to be strategic
communicators, empowered collaborators and compassionate community members, among other positive character traits. But district employees have yet to put these traits into practice when dealing with the cheer squad. Let's take a look at some examples. This past Thursday, at just after 5PM, parents and the cheerleaders were informed that the team had been completely caught from the North Farmington High School homecoming halftime performance that was to take place the next day. This was less than twenty four hours before the girls to report to the field,
and well after the team had put weeks and hours of time into perfecting a routine for this very occasion. Though the district athletic director informed our coach Tiffany McCreary for no re no reason was given for the cut. It was only after the outraged parents of the team members began sending a multitude of angry emails that this deplorable decision was reversed. And even then the AD promised the coach that she would cut the music accompanying the girl's performance if they went even one second over their allotted time. Why was this decision made in the first place?
If there was a problem with the halftime performance, did empowered collaboration or strategic communication take place? Was the AD or those who made this decision compassionate regarding the hours of hard work our daughters put into this performance and the emotional toll it would take on them after hearing that they were cut? Apparently not. Perhaps then you can see why this district vision sounds like a bunch of empty promises to me. However, the canceled halftime performance was just the most recent in a string of snubs that the cheerleading team has had to endure.
This past year, the team needed new uniforms. The district did not bear the burden of the cost of these. Instead, it was up to the parents of each team member to fundraise and make cash payments to make sure that our team was well outfitted for game time. Let me be clear. These uniforms are district property that the girls know are on loan to them and must be turned in at the end of the season. However, the district did not assist in covering any of the $5,000 costs of these new uniforms. This despite the board approving a purchase of rain jackets for the marching band on the May 6 in the amount of $41,531 and new music uniforms on June 3
in the amount of $73,430 Make no mistake about it. I'm not trying to put the cheer team against the ban. In fact, quite the opposite. I'm happy to see these clubs are being supported. I ask for a bit more time, please. I'm sorry. We have to be fair to everyone voting again. Submit your, letter to us in writing. I absolutely will. Who should I email to the all board members? You can do all board members or you can send it to the board of education. I absolutely will. Thank you for your time. Paul Steele. Hi. I actually wasn't gonna speak tonight, but I heard something that I felt that I
needed to address. So one of you just said that I don't wanna hear COVID anymore. We're over it. We're past that. Unfortunately, many of our kids are not over it. They're not past it. You know, when it was happening, many people in the community wrote, the majority of you, who were on the board at that time, saying that some of these kids are gonna take years to recover. Some will never recover. So when someone sits up there and says, I don't wanna hear COVID, someone who actively pursued keeping kids out of in person classes, I find it had been offensive.
Thank you. And just just for the record, I wanna make sure that, the context of that is understood. I I believe, and I don't wanna speak for missus Smith, that she was referring to our test results, that, that is not gonna be a cover for, this board and its accountability. So I just wanna make sure that that is known. Thank you. Alright. We will move forward to the next item, which is items from the treasurer. Oh, that would be me. Oh, I'm sorry. We have two action items. I was moving forward. Okay. There are two action items.
The first is a recommendation for approval of resolution on settlement terms, for the office of retirement services litigation. Is there a motion? Missus Heinrich. Okay. We actually discussed this. It was a discussion item at the last meeting and so now it's an action item. I move that the Board of Education approve the resolution on the settle settlement terms of Batista versus Office of Retirement Services litigation as presented and to waive the second reading? Support. Is a motion made, by missus Heinrich supported by missus Smith to approve the resolution
on the settlement terms of the, Batista versus office of o r s, and waive the second reading. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, miss doctor Blau, can we have a roll call vote, please? Yes. Thank you. Mister Vicinto? Yes. Mister Hall? Yes. Miss Heinrich? Yes. Miss Smith? Yes. Myself, yes. And miss Williams? Yes. Next, the approval of the twenty five MASB delegate assembly. Missus Heinrich. I I move that the Board of Education approve the designation of Ronald Risinto as
the official delegate and doctor Cheryl Blau as alternate delegate to represent the Farmington Public School District at the twenty twenty five Michigan Association of School Boards delegate assembly. Support. A motion made by missus Heinrich supported by missus Smith to approve the designation of delegates for the Massey delegate assembly. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? That motion passes. We'll move now to items from the treasurer. Okay. I move that the Board of Education approve the expenditures as outlined in the expenditure
printout dated 09/30/2025 as follows. General fund, dollars 23,429,433. General fund athletics, dollars 348,826. Capital projects, dollars $20.23 bond fund, $1,117,420 Nutrition services fund, dollars 512,298, benefits stabilization fund, dollars $2,629,407 Total, $28,037,384
Support. Motion made by missus Heinrich, supported by missus Smith to approve the treasurer's report. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor? Aye. Any objections? Any abstentions? That motion passes. We will now move to the consent agenda. Mrs. Heinrich. I move to approve the consent agenda as follows. A, approval of minutes. Number one, 09/09/2025 regular meeting. Number two, 09/27/2025 board retreat. B, Head Start director's monthly report.
And c, personnel items. Support. Motion made by missus Heinrich supported by missus Smith. Any discussion? The only thing that I wanted to make mention of is that, the head start, update or report is in here that includes, notification that the program must submit a noncompeting continuation application in order to receive funding starting in January. So I just wanted to make the board aware of that. The board must pass a motion for us to continue to pursue the head start continuation application. And so just so that you know, that is in the consent agenda. Any further discussion?
Seeing none, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? That motion passes. We'll now move to reports from board representatives. Do we have any reports from board representatives? Missus Heinrich. I do. I wanna talk about the Oakland County School Board Association dinner meeting, October 15. The program is guiding public schools for increasing academic achievement. It's gonna be presented by Scott Morell from MASB. Get education credits. It's a good opportunity to network and talk to, school board members from surrounding school
districts in Oakland County to see what they're doing in their districts and get some information and another, perspective on that. And registration closes October 8. So let Colleen know if you can attend and it includes a delicious dinner. Very good. Any other reports from board, representatives? Alright. Seeing none, that takes us to adjournment. We are now adjourned. Thank you.