good good afternoon everyone i'd like to call the educator effectiveness committee to order roll call please mr appel Dr armstrong mr berkin here mr castile not present
miss Champagne here dr clark not present mr harris Mr hollis miss Holloway miss Mallerie here mr morris miss Boute we have a quorum
thank you next item please your first item is 2.1 consideration of a presentation from Southeastern University your recommendation is to receive motion please mr harris first and second Miss Dr armstrong uh Dr bramley would you please introduce our
guest oh yeah thank you thank you thank you uh Miss Holloway so I'm I'm proud to welcome to the uh table Dr paula Calderon uh to provide information relative to uh programs and the ways in which they educate uh our future
teachers uh at Southeastern Louisiana University i had the good honor uh within the last month uh to uh go down to South Eastern uh visit with Dr calderon and many of many of the students like a whole giant room full of
students and teachers and faculty members around education in the state of Louisiana uh and then following that had the opportunity to engage with many of the students in conversations about their interests their desires and what they intend to do beyond Southeastern so really looking forward to Dr dr
calderon's presentation today to share information about uh what they are doing within their um school programming dr calderon thank you so much um as uh Dr brumley said I'm dean of the College of Education at Southeastern and I'm also president of the Louisiana Association
for Colleges for Teacher Education and um Dr brumley I have to say that word got around when you spoke to our students dr brumley was the last person in the room every He did not leave until all of the students and all of the
faculty and all of my lab school teachers had left and so um you uh you made a big hit there so um I have quite a few slides but I'm going to rush through them because I know my time is limited and I'm happy to answer questions at the
end as uh Southeastern approaches its centennial so does teacher education southeastern was uh started as um Hammond Junior College for the ex for the main purpose of providing teaching
certificates and so we're happy to say that we are also embarking upon our centennial i have a few numbers here um just and this is from title two it these are public numbers and it just kind of shows you the top five
universities that have prepared teachers over the last five years uh some of the names have changed some of the names have stayed the same you can see the numbers and you can also see the universities and um in 21-22
Southeastern enjoyed a spike somehow and ended up with the most number of certified teachers prepared and that's at the four-year undergraduate level and the alternative certification level uh this graph I've been collecting title
two information for about 15 years uh at two different universities and again this is all public information and it shows you the green shows the total of teacher education in Louisiana the blue shows the university programs and the red shows our non-UN university programs
and as I mentioned at lunch today members over the past 15 years nearly 75% of all of Louisiana certified teachers have come from the universities and it is something that we're quite proud of the certification programs at
Southeastern you can see that we have 15 certification areas uh at the undergraduate level two postbalora alternatives teacher certification at all the certification areas uh from art to business to physics to world language
Spanish to whatever whatever your heart desires and we also offer the certificate in international education awarded by the international balorate this is offered at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels and Southeastern enjoys the distinction
as being the only university in the Gulf South to offer the credential from the HG that that gives our students the ability to teach in international balorate schools that would be LSU Lab Kho France uh Hammond High Magnet
Hammond East Side and many of others um in any country on the planet and so we like that distinction very much we partner with over a dozen school districts and yes it gets to be a lot um most recently West Baton Rouge West
Fiana and Jefferson parishes have asked for our residents asked forus and we just right when I was typing up this slide the phone rang from somebody from St landry saying does South Eastern work with St landry Parish south Eastern works with any parish let
me just be clear there we are happy to take your students and those are uncertified teachers from St landry Parish who are now joining our certificationonly program to become certified teachers this is uh one of the pieces of information that I know you wanted was
program impact and so this information comes from the uh teacher preparation quality um and I can't remember what it is but the TPQRS the teacher preparation quality rating system you will see that
75% of the data are unavailable because 75% of our teachers are not in VAM grades and they're not in VAM subject areas 2% are ineffective and um 19% are
in one of the effective categories because there's such a huge number in nonVAM scores I wanted to let you know what we do as an accredited university we take the um focus groups case studies
classroom observations of our completers and we collect the data on this to satisfy national accredititation standards because obviously with 75% or what was that 70 yes 79% missing we
can't just say we do a wonderful job i mean we know we do but we can't just say that so we have to have a way to prove it and in order to prove to meet that standard for national accredititation we have to find another way to prove program impact when we observe our uh
program completers in the classroom we do pre-ests we watch our completers deliver instruction and we deliver post tests to see if there's any growth we interview the
students in the classroom we interview the teachers next door we interview the principles and that is the only way that we are able to make up for that dark blue slot there because there's no data right now from the state so we've had to come up with our own ways and since you
asked about program impact in previous correspondents I wanted to make sure that I was able to show it to you um Mr morris this is just for you about artificial intelligence and um I'll go through this
quickly artificial intelligence you're not going to beat it you're not going to get rid of it it's not a curriculum it is a tool just as Encyclopedia Encyclopedia Britannica came along one day it is now part of our everyday lives think about
how instruction has changed with spellch check translation software and calculators when I took the ACT back in the Stone Age calculators were not allowed now students can take the ACT with the calculator teachers and
teachers teacher educators need to adapt and transform educational program and assessment practices so that students can use AI tools ethically and effectively we will not be successful in trying to ban the
use of such technologies but we can embrace them work with the schools work with the current teachers the current administration and the future teachers to help them support their students on how to use these tools ethically in accordance with the principles of academic
integrity we do not consider work produced even in part whether it's an image or text by AI tools to be the students own work just like when your fifth or sixth grade teacher told you that if you
submit a term paper with a whole bunch of quotes in it it's not accepted as your work because you copied everything from World Book Encyclopedia or Encyclopedia Britannica as I mentioned here the
um the a the AI generated software and the use of AI must be um must be quoted must be referenced just like any other book just like any other reference and this statement was
taken from the international balorate we use it with our students who are in the international balora program and we've let it permeate through the other programs to show that yes you can use AI but you have to use it responsibly and
ethically and of course I have my little plug at the bottom that we do offer the international balorate educator certificate so the teacher registered apprenticeship program uh as you already know because you approved this
uh southeastern Louisiana University and Tangabo Parish became the first uh Louisiana Department of Education sponsored apprenticeship program we are moving forward on this we are meeting on this and I'm not going to read these slides to you you have them and you
created them for the last last year's Bessie meeting um we we are moving we are moving forward on this and hoping that with a little help from legislation our school districts will be
able to put a line item in their budget to hire our teacher candidates remember our residents are in the classroom full-time in two semesters and they're not receiving a paycheck and they're paying full-time tuition we're hoping
that our residents can be paid and hired as either substitutes paraprofessionals apprentices it's all the same name it's a paid residency is what we're doing and have then have an agreement to let those
let those residents return to the schools and teach sort of like a loan forgiveness program and we are excited we've been working with uh Kevin Nanny on this and Tangible Parish School System so if you've been here as long as
I have you remember the star days students teaching and reaching this is a situation of where South Eastern Louisiana University listened to the districts we brought students in left and right for the star program they came to a shadow
day they followed students around they got to sit in education classes and the principles said "Look because of school performance scores I can't release anybody to be a star teacher but if you change to dual enrollment I can do it."
So that's what we did we removed the STAR program and we created dual enrollment which goes right along with the pre-educator pathway so um students in dual enrollment courses are invited to campus twice a year in the fall for Gumbo Yaya and in the spring next week
actually for Strawberry Jubilee they learn what it's like to be an education major at Southeastern they sit in education education classes they observe our lab school which is connected to my building and they pal around with college students all day and this um is
one of our dual enrollment instructors and the young lady to the right is a former dual enrollment student she's an early childhood education major and she's a college ambassador and we would not take anything for having her she is bright and bubbly and you can tell by
her smile that she is a wonderful representative for the university and these are just some pictures of the high school students on campus at South Eastern observing college classes
we also do academic um academic signing at the high school and if I had put more than two pictures you could have seen my hairstyle change quite a bit through these pictures and these are the students who have completed either an educator's rising curriculum or a
pre-educator pathway curriculum and they have committed to teacher education at Southeastern Louisiana University and our mascot comes and uh this is uh one of these is at West Baton Rouge Parish
and the other one is in Tangabo Parish something we have implemented is 240 tutoring um you know that we have a $5 million federal bridge grant that was not terminated i'll get to that later and with the grant money we purchased we
purchased excuse me 240 tutoring for Practis Success we've tied it to a class and students actually have to do lab hours and if they make a certain score on the practi practice practice exams
it's a guarantee that they will pass the practice if for some reason they don't pass 240 pays for the next the next round of of uh preparation and might even pay for some exams and so since uh you wanted to know how are we keeping
students in education once they get into education many of them leave because they are unable to pass the lure exam well we've implemented uh 240 tutoring and it has shown very good
promise we have also begun an LLC which is not the same that LLC means to most of you this is a living learning community at 12 Oaks Hall this is an upper class dorm but our education freshmen get to live here the research
shows especially if you look at things from the Gardener Institute research shows that students living together taking classes together supporting each other and um and just and studying together keeps them in college and it
keeps them in the program and so this is for any of our education majors male and female and they get to live in one of the newer dorms and it is very nice their Southeastern 101 class is taught which is now a Southeastern 1010 class
is is taught downstairs so they can go to class in their pajamas because we all know that kids like to wear their pajamas to class so um that is another move toward recruitment that we have initiated at
South Eastern here's the grant bridge building rigorous induction and development for growing all educators when um March 2025 got here and the federal government cancelled the teacher quality
partnership and the seed grants there were six remaining in the entire United States uh Sunno Sunno's grant did not get cancelled and u Southeastern's grant did not get cancelled we don't know how there have been some lawsuits i won't go
into all the boring details but the grants that have been terminated were reinstated and now the Supreme Court has is has not ruled yet but it looks like they're going to rule to have those
grants to continue termination very sadly because all of these are for preparing teachers preparing future teachers and we definitely need the grants so right now we're holding our breath because when this money goes I have to fire three staff members and um
that hurts but with the bridge grant we have been able to do things like the LLC the 240 tutoring and we follow our graduates into the schools and we give them a two-year induction program we
form mentors at the school specifically for induction and our residents our candidates who graduate immediately go into the district we have partnerships with Tangabajo Parish St charles Parish
and St tamony Parish and uh those instead of just saying hey here's your diploma and here's your keys to the school we're out in the schools with them where it's a non evaluative support we run through the pop cycles just like
you would with any NIET training but it is non-evaluative and it helps the candidates grow and what we're trying to do is get our graduates past the two to five year mark of attrition is we're
trying to keep them as long as possible so that's what the bridge grant is for we are also in um in partnership with um with NIET who conducts our evaluation as a grant uh as a grantee and who does our
training for us and as you know the LER is based on the NIET's L um ATR aspiring teacher rubric okay um we also instituted a
pending ceremony and um my my good friends from LSU heard about the pinninging ceremony and said "Hey can we come watch we might want to do this." I said "Absolutely." The more we can lift our residents up the more we can ev um
elevate the profession and the more we can give some pride to our students nursing has pinning business has pinning why doesn't education have pinning so we started this about two or three years ago we do uh one a semester and we ask
the students to wear this pin on their school lanyard so that when they are walking around the school and somebody says "Oh look you went to South Eastern oh you're a great teacher you went to South Eastern." So that's our that's our pen we give it to the students when they
go into their second semester of residency and they're on their way to graduation we also have this sign for our mentor teachers and if if Dr brumley is a mentor teacher he gets a sign right outside his door and if he decides he's
not a mentor teacher the next year we'll just move his sign to Mr morris's room for example and put it outside his room it gives some recognition to the university recognition to the college of education and it also allows people to
say I think I might want to be a mentor teacher how do I do that and we get the phone calls asking about this this one is a little odd but this is how we keep our young mothers in the college of education there is a lot of research
about pregnant and parenting students and how they don't finish college and so I took one of my faculty offices and we created basically a mother's room a lactation room for those students to do what they need to do and continue in
class this is right in the teacher education center there are a few across campus and I have we've had lots of results of students saying you know I was going to drop out but because I don't have to go to the ladies room to
take care of business I can go to this room privately I'm going to stay in school and I'm going to be a teacher and so this is just another initiative that we've had the Energize Project which I'm sure you know about um this is the project
to prepare certified teachers who are interested in computer science to take and pass the computer science practice exam uh the state has wonderfully given us two contracts and we're hoping for a
third uh our we're in Energize 2.0 now and so we're hoping for Energize 3.0 we have been able to train teachers you know I mean it could be an English teacher it could be a math teacher it could be any other STEM teacher because we know that legislation is coming uh
actually legislation is here but August 1st is coming and we know that computer science needs to be taught in the classroom so we have reached out to all of the CTE coordinators and computer science teachers and STEM directors and
we teach how to we teach about the practice exam we've got some pretty good data on what is slowing us down algorithms might be one of those um coding it can come or go coding seems to be a little a little bit of an issue but
we've got talented people from the computer science department and from my education college that are working together to make sure that we've got some computer science teachers in all of our Louisiana schools and uh we've got
students from Lef Parish to Kato Parish all the way up and down the state of Louisiana our inaugural spring training of Energize was in spring 2024 we provided almost 800 Louisiana public school and public school charter public
charter school teachers with training and study materials for practice exam 5652 energize go for launch is our second one we don't know what we're going to name the third one yet but we're thinking positively and
um we are also creating a cadre of teachers who can assist other teachers in their parts of the state to train and assist certified teachers into taking the um the practice exam so that we can
stay current with Bessie policy and with legislation and I know I breezed through that but that was a lot i am more than happy to answer questions uh this isn't the end we've got a lot of work to do miss Holloway I just want to uh thank
Dr calderon for some of the innovation of approach that she shared with us today i really think the idea around the uh LLC is an interesting concept where the students are able to to live in the same uh dorm definitely a nicer dorm than uh I saw in the day but um right
very nice dorm and I think it's great that they get to uh do that and I think it's a a really clever approach so thank you for continuing to think about innovation in this particular space dr calderon thank you for being here i
just have to say don't take this wrong but you're like the Energ Energizer Bunny like for the last eight years I've known you you have brought so much energy and progressiveness innovation to higher ed and I so appreciate you especially with working with um
preparing effective classroom teachers uh thank you so much for that thank you Miss Hollow i appreciate that absolutely yes and I do want I have one more comment but I'll wait until after board members yes Mr um Appel thank you um two questions one simple one uh how do you
attract more men to the teaching profession that is a tough one probably with salary and we also try to make sure that all the girls in our living learning community are good-looking
you you would work very well you knew you were walking into that one i didn't know but I I I accept it that that's what we've had to do we uh whenever we have our recruiting events like our Lion Pride preview our scholars showcase and
our admitted students day we try to grab our male teachers from the lab school and our male students to show more of a male presence to encourage more males to come but that is a tough one well I just want to say that uh had it been a male sitting there at the microphone and making that comment you would be all
over the advocate as sexist but I just wanted to make that clear uh the other thing I had to ask was um one of the great problems that I hear of is specialty teachers science math so forth and so on these may not be I mean to me
they would not necessarily be people uh that are in the school of education but maybe in the maths school some form of science physics or chemistry or so forth h is there an effort to lure people that are trained
not as teachers but as mathematicians for instance into the teaching profession absolutely so we have two postbalorate programs the certification only program which is your program that just results in teacher certification and the master of arts in teaching which
is the degree granting alternate certification program and so those mathematicians physicists chemists and biologists who go out into the field and say "You know what i think I'd really be good teaching 11th grade chemistry." And
want to come back we've got the program and um both of those programs are 100% online so if you are in another parish another state we've even had members of the
military start the program in Afghanistan and then come back to Louisiana with their families and and not miss a beat on the program because they are both 100% online and so we are trying to reach out past the borders of Louisiana to get people in and and to
teach those courses well one other question and it follows the same track but um is there any effort to reach out to say retired people like uh uh the president of our board who's an electrical engineer that is now retired
uh is there any effort that to reach out to people like that to bring them into the teaching profession i mean they may not be able to have a lifetime to devote to it but they might have a decades perhaps that they'd be willing to give up in their retirement how many decades was that i'm I'm depends on you i'm just
pointing at you not me we we do reach out to industry we do reach out to our industry partners we even try to see you know hey you may still have a few years left as a chemical engineer an electrical engineer in a certain organization but you might
want to teach also why don't you come on and get certified and so we do reach out to industry um the ones that come to us are the ones who say "I was not meant to be retired right i need I need to do something i
was not meant to be retired." And those are the ones that come to us but the rest of them they they seem to to retire and go fishing and I'm not sure about you Mr morris and there you go look yeah well that's why I cited him because he is uh making an
effort to do something different with the rest of his life but anyway I just thought that would be a natural source of especially specialty teachers yes and I just was curious how that effort was going on but thank you so much i sure appreciate it thank you Mr depal thank you any other questions or comments yes
Mr morris please i had a couple for you so first of all thank you for the presentation i thought it was spot on so thank you for that uh my first one was can you give us a little bit more information you mentioned some legislation that you thought might be coming or pending uh specific to residents and apprenticeship
uh and providing some incentive there can you speak a little bit more to that sure absolutely i know the department has an update on the teacher recruitment recovery and retention task force and so I don't want to steal their thunder at all but um what we're hoping is that the
legislators will see the need for a paid residency and right now we're calling it a registered teacher apprenticeship call it a paid residency and somehow get a line item in the
school district's budgets for a paid resident several paid residents it could be a substitute teacher pay or a paraprofessional pay and once that teacher is paid during his or her residency for two semesters then if there's an opening in that district that
teacher turns right back around and teaches in that district as a loan forgiveness or a loan payoff okay thank you my my second thought was just to echo Superintendent Brumley's comment about the um the education living
learning community the 12 Oaks Hall um I had inquired about this with some other colleges in the state where the policy was that you couldn't major in education as a freshman and so I thought there in my mind there's a concern there that you're you're you're sort of got a break
in your pipeline if I'm recruiting students from middle school and high school and hoping they have some vision to choose this career pathway but they get to college oh sorry our policy says you can't major in education as a freshman well then they get interested in other things and and they lose their interest maybe in education but it
sounds like you guys have a continuum here where you don't have that break is that right i'll be perfectly honest Mr morris it's a quasi continuum it's not direct admit into the college because you need to have um a 2.5 GPA and you need to have 60 hours but you can
declare education and so if I'm a freshman I say "Hey you know what i want to be a French teacher." then I can join all of the education organizations go live in in the dorm in 12 Oaks with the education folks and what I'm hoping is
that people like me would stay in education if we put them off into another dorm and they've already declared education then they might get friends uh become friends with somebody from nursing or business and move into another dorm and so we're hoping that we
keep their friendship circle small and they stay right with other teachers but if as long as they have made a declaration of yeah I'm once I get to my 60 hours I think I want to be a teacher then we'll take them got it but you're building community right with a focus on
community and trying to get them early because uh we know you know the first education class is not until a 2000 level class and so they're taking all of these gened classes with all sorts of majors and what if they fall in love with accounting well heaven forbid we don't want them to go to business right
and we want them to stay in education so um it's it's forming that community and keeping them together thank you for that i think it's very innovative approach uh my next question was um when we look at the teacher shortages throughout the state I'm looking forward to hearing
LDOE's presentation here shortly um you know one of the Well I would share an experience I had i substitute taught last week in Ascension Parish algebra 2 when I'm in the building I stopped by to see the physics teacher and basically I just asked him well you know what's keeping you here right he's had other
job offers and whatnot and his response was basically differentiated pay so so as long as we have um demand for the math and the sciences and so forth and I I shared in a previous meeting that you know I don't think the structure the manufacturing infrastructure we have
south of I 10 is going anywhere anytime soon that those facilities are going to be there but I'm really concerned about who's going to be operating those facilities and if we don't have the math and the science teachers in our house high schools then where where's the where's what's going to generate the student interest to pursue those career
pathways so I I really struggle with where's the succession plan how how do we know how many math teachers we have what's the market demand for math teachers um LSU told us last meeting that they graduated
less than 12 math teachers last year so how how do we know how many math teachers we need how do we know how many science teachers we need so that we can satisfy the market demand and then hopefully we've got that differentiated pay in place that's going to draw them in those fields but it seems like we
have to have some appreciation for what those vacancies are do you guys explore that in any way so you have some appreciation for those particular segments of education absolutely you can shake a tree and a social studies teacher will fall out of it so we know that we are and an elementary teacher as
well we know that we are oversaturated with um elementary teachers social studies and English teachers and we rely on state data and district data how many uncertified teachers do you have and in what areas so that's what we rely on
that's how we try to recruit but as you know enrollment in teacher education all over is going down so we're just trying to recruit period not not just math and physics we are trying to recruit people into education and it we use we use the
vacancy numbers from our partner districts or any information excuse me any information we get from the state department of education regarding teacher shortages to try to target go into the math classes tell them about being a high school math teacher uh hey
did you love your high school math teacher wouldn't you like to do the same thing that your high school algebra teacher did we do all of those and um sometime sometimes we have a bumper crop and sometimes we have fewer than 10 and that's where we are now is fewer than 10 a year in maths yes sir okay last
question um I appreciate your comments on AI uh Mr de Benadetto and I followed up a couple months ago with a couple of uh schools in Livingston Parish where uh the teachers had been using uh Conigo from the Khan Academy team and the
feedback we got overwhelming uh positive feedback we got from those teachers was where has this been uh I feel like I have my own admin um a lot of these check the box exercises that take a lot of time you know I can get those through much more much quicker um they can use
it as you said earlier as a tool and and the tool can go conduct research for them where they've got to come up with a really cool idea really cool approach to present something to students and and AI can come back with or uh in this case the Khan Academy tool can come back with three suggestions and just save them a
lot of time and brainstorming and and whatnot um so my question to you is uh well in my mind I see this as a tremendous aid for teachers based on the feedback that I got particularly in a heterogeneous classroom where you got some really high performers and you got
some kids that are zoned out and too embarrassed to to ask the the silly question to get me back in the conversation because I'm lost but with the tutor in the laptop the kids got the opportunity to re-engage and nobody knows you know I'm I'm checking with my tutor so um I really see it personally
as as transforming the education career uh now that every student should have their own tutor in their laptop uh at their level so my question to you is um it's still a little bit early in the game but where where do you see us in five years
it's a good question um I see probably less homogeneous classrooms like you said uh you know we teach our students to differentiate between the bluebirds the yellow birds and the turkey buzzards
and that's hard to do when you're just one person standing but as you mentioned if we all have our own tutor then we can each work at our own pace and then I'm not embarrassed that you're working on the advanced stuff and I'm working on the turkey buzzard stuff because I'm a
little bit slower in math for example and so I see that our classrooms could probably get and this is not a good thing but probably get larger and but definitely um less homogeneous to where we are teaching students of different
levels maybe we have a second grade classroom and a third grade classroom that's combined especially in smaller rural schools where you've got 10 second grade students and 10 third grade students and it's easier to teach both of those um in larger schools where you
already have 20 25 and 30 students in a classroom and you've got plenty of students to teach maybe as a tutor for a test tutor for homework but in some of our rural districts where we're short on teachers and the classrooms are small and we can
combine a second and a third grade classroom that's where I see it okay may maybe just one more quick one on the same topic though um you mentioned in your comments on AI about basically the guidelines you guys have put in place for using it as a tool um what what if
any thought have you given to helping teachers with how to use that tool so they can teach students how to use the tool that's what we do and so we allow assignments we we design assignments
specifically with AI and we also use something called turn it in which is basically your plagiarism checker right and so we find out okay let's say you're in an art class may art for elementary education ai can give you some suggestions some ideas and then you can
design your art project maybe you're in just an elementary ELA class and how can you use AI as a tool how can you use AI as a tool in your classroom and then that classroom the other 20 students in the
class are my ELA students right now they're college kids but they're my ELA students right now so I'm going to let you let you let you experiment a little bit and so not we teach the students and then let the students teach each other
and then they go out into the field and do that and not all of our districts are on board but they're getting there and and we know we can't run away from artificial intelligence but we absolutely teach them and incorporate it in our lessons instead of saying these
are the lessons that we did five years ago our syllabi have changed and we use these lessons now great thank you so much absolutely thank you thank you Madam Chair thank you Mr morris dr bramley if you wanted to say something yeah i just wanted to um since Dr calderon you're here as well as other
individuals from colleges of education from uh throughout the state i just wanted to encourage you to track House Bill 109 from Representative Thompson this year we have worked with him uh to put this particular bill in a in a posture where it will be more effective because it's the Go Teach program you
know we started Go Teach probably three years ago uh that helped students coming out of high school to get scholarships uh to colleges the challenge has been as we talk to individuals in higher ed uh both at the state level and individual universities is that TOPS comes in uh
first and and will pay for these students and then go teach can't be applied because TOPS has already paid for the tuition so the shift in working with regents and lova will allow the go teach money to go on first and then TOPS will come behind so these students that
are interested in becoming educators you know this is give or take but in many ways will have a full ride to college uh if they qualify for TOPS because they would get the go teach money and the TOPS money and I think this is really attractive to individuals
uh particularly in a times of economic uncertainty that they can know that they can go to college and have that essentially paid for so I just want to encourage you all to uh track Representative Thompson's House Bill 109 as it makes its way through the process because I do think it will really um
help u bring more students out of high schools into our colleges that want to be teachers great thank you thank you for bringing that to our attention thank you Dr bramley yes Mr uh Perkins so hi so whenever someone is saying that they
won't possibly go into education be a teacher what is your what are the objections what are their objections that you need to overcome i have said before that unfortun that our we are our biggest enemy our teachers who are observing in
the classroom hear good grief I don't know why anybody would want to be a teacher you kids are giving me a migraine we hear that it may just be said tongue and cheek it might just be a bad day but our students are listening the high school students are listening
well Miss Jones said she didn't know why anybody wants to be a teacher i guess I have to go be a CPA now so we do hear that um parents many times discourage their children from becoming teachers the media is not always our friend um we
don't get the great things that happen in the classroom we get when a student uh beats up a teacher and um puts her in the hospital we we hear that and you know that can happen anywhere that can happen at Walmart that can happen at the bank but for some reason it it pops up
in the media when it comes to education and so elevating the profession like we did with our pinning ceremony and um and just trying to speak positively going into the schools uh like where you saw the academic signing going into the
schools and we asked the juniors and seniors what are the what are the the barriers what are the barriers to education what do you think and I think parents still think that teachers don't make a lot of money i know that that has changed over the years and I know that
we have had some payraises and the money just the money comparisons just aren't out there hey you can be this and you can be a teacher and guess what you're going to make the same amount of money so a little bit is there um uh you know a little bit of it is is salary but um
it is it is what the juniors and the seniors or the sophomores and juniors and seniors hear on their school campuses in the media and hear from their parents is dual enrollment helping or y'all are actively in the schools doing the the dual enrollment we are actively in the
schools in dual enrollment for many things not just uh education and so we have our intro to uh special education and our intro to education courses basically the pre-educator pathway we have those in the schools and they're
small in number there you don't have 40 and 50 people in in those classes um it's for for Southeastern specifically they can complete our dual enrollment courses and then take them
anywhere else in the state and so sometimes our yield does not come from dual enrollment but we try our best you know we provide them with swag we provide them with teacher goodies we provide them with Southeastern goodies and those sorts of things but we are in
the schools and uh a Southeastern employee is actually the teacher of those classes it's their classroom teacher is the facilitator but the actual instructor is somebody from Southeastern and so they get to meet Southeastern faculty when they're in the 11th grade
thank you Mr perkins anyone else dr calderon on behalf of uh the board we'd like to thank the Louisiana Association of Colleges U for Teacher Education and for being with us for lunch partnering with us and if I may at this time would
all our university department heads please stand we have from across Louisiana please stand we I don't know about 15 20 of you we've got several look at them oh this is great thank you thank you for all that you are doing for
us thank you for your presentation next item please your consent agenda is ready for approval adding items 6.1 through 6.14 motion please mr morris second it mr
harris any opposition with no opposition next item please your next item is on page one item 3.1 consideration of certification preparation pathway proposals the recommendation is to approve as outlined
motion please uh Dr clark next Mr harris any opposition motion carried next item please your next item is on page four item 4.1 consideration of revisions to bulletins regarding educator preparation
evaluation and credentials the recommendation is to approve as a notice of intent revisions to bulletins 130 746 and 996 motion please dr armstrong and Dr clark second it any
opposition motion carried next item please your next item is on page eight item 5.1 consideration of an update report regarding the 2324 workforce data and key performance indicators the recommendation is to receive motion
please Mr morris and Mr burkin second it thank you miss Holloway before uh Dr shassan and her team uh make this particular presentation i do want to um share a few thoughts relative to the teaching uh profession and teaching
workforce uh first of all I would I would reject the notion that we have an overall teacher shortage um I just don't think that is true um we have certainly areas of the profession where we need
more teachers and we certainly need more teachers in every area moving forward um we have an 85% uh retention rate in the state uh we have a 3% increase in new teachers staying in the profession and our
overall vacancy rate has moved from around 2500 uh three or four years ago when the agency first began to track to something like500 to 1300 to under uh a thousand today and so if you look at our overall vacancy rate in the state uh
it's between 1 and 2% and I know that there are individuals who in this room that that own businesses and if I suggested to you that you would have a vacancy rate between 1 and 2% you'd probably take that um now clearly I don't want to um underestimate the the
need that we have for more effective teachers we certainly need more teachers coming into the profession and I want to thank this board for working over the last few years to help us break down barriers that were preventing people from going into the teaching profession you you have crafted policies that have
enabled um local school systems to be able to hire people that they otherwise would not have been able to hire that have been good hires through residency programs through the associate teacher pathway through new pathways for leader preparation and so you you all have
helped us be able to make movement on this vacancy piece and we know that we have a lot of work left to do um but I just wanted to uh in advance of Dr shassan and her team giving this report just let you know that the policies that you've passed are are helping us move in
the in the right direction and we still have more work to do uh Dr shasson you want to provide the report thank you Dr brownley good afternoon everyone janice Shasson Department of Education happy to bring you all an update this afternoon on the Louisiana educator workforce today's update is
comprised of two parts um I'll begin with a brief overview of a historical update that is given each year since 2016 called the workforce report and then um we will move on to a key
performance indicator update on programming and initiatives to support our priority of quality teachers the state workforce snapshot um the purpose of this is to communicate annual workforce data and trends to stakeholders and to support
decisionmaking for statewide improvements regarding recruitment and retention this data was reported by school systems from the endofear data for the 2023 2024 school year not only do we produce a statewide
report but we also produce four regional snapshots which summarize workforce data for each region while the same workforce data elements are displayed in the regional snapshots these reports disagregate data based on that region and show a comparison to the state from
that region this slide notes a few key takeaways from the statewide report of note retention increased for teachers with one to five years experience which is an important group of educators
because this represents our new teachers and this is um part of the population of teachers that we've struggled with retaining in years past so I think it's really important to note in this key takeaway that we are retaining more new teachers than we have in the past and we'll break each one of these
down a little bit more to begin with our total teacher workforce increased by 843 teachers the total number of teachers is 52,88 i want to note here that this includes teachers who are what we would
call a teacher of record um meaning that they are assigned to a class of of students or multiple classes of students but this number also includes anyone who is assigned a teacher code so this could include literacy coaches librarians disciplinarians etc and so that gets us
to that nearly 53,000 number um that question that some of you may have might be around you know how did we increase the teacher population by 843 teachers from yearover-year data and I think there are
a few things that we can make some assumptions about one is that we've had increased funding over the last several years due to stimulus dollars that have included um increased spending in salary and benefits and so including more specialized supports with things like
literacy coaches the next slide just shows our retention data and Dr dr bley already mentioned that Louisiana is retaining 85% of the educator workforce and this number did remain the same from one year to the next and just a note here that
this does include teachers who left for promotions so um that is counted against that ret that teacher retention rate even if they are promoted to an assistant principal a principal a district level position but noting here that that retention rate did increase by
3% for teachers with one to five years experience we are often asked about how many certified teachers we have in this state and so all of this data um presented so far does include our traditional public schools and our charter schools and this really breaks
that down when it comes to certification because a common question is you know what's our number our percentage of certified teachers in both traditional and charter schools knowing that charter schools do have additional flexibility and autonomy when it comes to employment of
educators 69% of teachers in traditional public schools are certified in the courses that they are teaching a little note here is that teachers are certified we consider them as certified when they hold a valid teaching certificate if a certified
teacher teaches a course that is outside of their certification area then we would consider them in that column there as teaching out of field a teacher could teach both certified and out of field courses and so you'll note here that some of these percentages don't add up
to 100% and that's because we have some duplicates we may have teachers teaching within an area they're certified and outside of an area where they're certified teachers without a valid certification or with a certificate that has expired are considered uncertified in this
table another note on retention is that the three-year retention rate is 8% higher for educators prepared on an undergraduate teacher preparation program pathway so this data tracks teachers from both undergraduate or we might also refer to
that as traditional programs and postvocalorate also referred to as alternate certification programs to their initial and hiring and employment over a three-year period this data shows that undergraduate retention rates are higher over a three-year period than
postbakalora retention rates not a part of this report today but I think really important to mention is that and I think a really good segue from Dr calderon's presentation is that we have overall increased the number of completers from Louisiana teacher
preparation programs and so precoid in the 2019 2020 school year there were about 1,750 um completers exiting Louisiana teacher preparation programs we had a dip throughout those COVID years of students
who were exiting teacher preparation programs in our state but during the 22 23 school year we then superseded that pre-COVID number with 1,776 candidates completing programs so I think that's a really good sign that
we are increasing now year-over-year the amount of students who are exiting teacher preparation programs to keep that pipeline strong in years to come and I think that's really due um in large part to the hard work of our teacher preparation
providers this brings us to the end of our slides with an overview of works force reporting so next we'll take a look at our key performance indicator around our priority of quality teachers and the programming to support this area the key performance indicator around
quality teachers is to increase the percentage of students in a classroom led by a high quality teacher and I wanted to make a connection here briefly between all of our KPIs and Louisiana's accountability scorecard um I think this is just really
important to do because our key performance indicators are measurable values that help track progress towards strategic goals and assess the progress over time this month's KPI tracks the percentage of students who are being taught by quality educators and we all
know that quality educators will impact every area of accountability i especially want to point out those roads around growth of students we know that effective educators are important for every part of this but we when we think about growing students who are below
grade level it's so important that those students have access to an effective educator of high quality in order to move them into grade level where they need to be and this is our key performance indicator slide for our priority of
quality teachers you'll see here that our actual KPI data is not yet set since it will set a goal on growing our number of highquality educators we define high-quality educators within bulletin 130 in which standards for educator
effectiveness are outlined last spring you all voted to update these standards for effectiveness within bulletin 130 and we will not have full data to set this KPI until the end of this school year this chart captures in the top left the data from our legacy evaluation
system also known as compass and the percentages of high-quality educators from the past several years using that data the orange dotted line in the top right will project our new goal once our baseline is determined after this school year the key endeavors in the columns track
activities initiatives and programming that we have moved forward over the last several years to improve recruitment retention and increase the amount of high-quality educators serving students the bars there represent measures of several key endeavors including leads
training certifications overall teacher retention new teacher retention high school students participating in educator preparation pathways and schools participating in educator preparation pathways so we'll break those down just
a little more key endeavor one is set around our lead system which is our new evaluation system and this has been several years in the making and it's something we're very excited about we've hosted over 100 trainings across the state for leaders who observe and
evaluate educators leaders have to attend a multi-day training and pass an assessment to certify and be able to conduct these observations and these new evaluations so through these over 100 trainings that
we've hosted across the state we set a goal to certify 4500 leaders in the lead system and we surpassed that goal um by certifying 4600 leaders during this past
year there is an appendix behind today's presentation that also transparently previews our next set of goals and where we plan to go from here key endeavor two around quality teachers really represents a whole body of work
um that really spans across teams in our agency all around expanding and growing our educator and leader pipelines so we've done this in several ways by um promoting new pathways like our educational leader alternate pathway 4
that opens up leadership opportunities for individuals who may not have an educational leadership background or degree um it also we've also supported our PART toteer model with hundreds of PAR educators in our state enrolled in
programs to become full-time teachers we are actively recruiting to increase the amount of mentor teachers that we have who are able to mentor student residents and new teachers we've also provided support and resources for highquality professional learning opportunities that
are school day embedded and also through our Louisiana professional learning platform which we were able to create and make um really tons of modules for um with ESSER funding in a sustainability practice and we've also
begun to implement recommendations from the let teachers teach task force to give teachers voice and also um to relieve them of any burdens our goal our measure for around quality teachers was to increase our
overall teacher retention um and we didn't quite meet that goal because we stayed at the 85% mark and we hope to increase to 86% retention rate over the last several years we have lifted a project that we call the new
teacher experience project um and this has really worked with school systems to encourage them to really bolster their own induction training mentor teacher programs and this also includes our work around the leads evaluation system that
specifically targets new teachers with individualized coaching supports um and as highlighted previously overall we did see growth in that first through fifth year teacher and so we are seeing some fruits of the labor of that new
teacher experience project that is both hosted from our level at the state but also is encouraged and supported at the school system level and finally key endeavor 4 our educator preparation pathway um Dr calderon hit on this earlier she spoke a
little bit about the importance of this pathway and the work that they do in south at Southeastern um to support high school students with taking college level education courses during their high school experience so this is something we've been working at for a few years now and
we've um nearly doubled participation in the program over the last three years we've also used ESSER dollars to invest in building a curriculum for this program prior to us building a curriculum school systems had to purchase curriculum annually in order to
offer these courses at the high school level and so now there is a free Louisiana version of the curriculum that high schools across the state can use to offer these college level courses we set a goal of 2,000 students being
enrolled and successfully completing um education courses in high school and we met that with 2005 students enrolled in the program this year we also set a goal of 100 schools offering the program and we met that with 100 schools offering
the program so we hope to only continue that growth from here our educator talent and workforce development team has been hard at work providing a range of resources and supports from high school students to
the most veteran staff on school campuses so we have lots of exciting work in all of these areas still to come offering more Louisiana educator rubric Louisiana leader and counselor rubric training um to get even more leaders um
certified and able to conduct observations and coaching visits to teachers we've provided on-site support to local schools and school systems that will continue into next school year we also will continue to provide on-site support visits for Grow Your Own that
PAR toteer pipeline that we support across the state we're releasing that Louisiana pre-educator pathway curriculum that I spoke about a few minutes ago continuing to offer boot camp for our educational leader alternate pathway for individuals who come in from a different background and
we prepare them to lead a school we also this summer will host yet again our aspiring educator summer academy for high school students which is an invitation for those high school students in the ed prep pathways um to come together in the summer on a college
campus and really have this fantastic immersive experience um in working with teachers and learning even more about what it's like to become a teacher in this camp-like environment and also in July we will once again host for several
hundred of our new teachers statewide our new teacher experience kickoff for new teachers where we really just um hope to welcome our new teachers and induct them into the profession in a really positive way before they go out to serve students across our
state and this concludes today's update i'm happy to answer any questions thank you Dr shanso any questions board members you did a great job yes Mr morris i know somebody else has got questions
uh thank you Dr chason really looking forward to this one um I did have a couple questions uh the first one on slide four of your presentation i was really impressed we've been able to increase the number of special education teachers by
1,021 that's fantastic c can you help us with some background there how how were we able to do that yeah I think there are a few things there um for one we have in the last several years identified more special education students which I think helps
to answer that especially coming out of COVID as we've been able to conduct those evaluations of students that maybe were on pause during the years of COVID um I think one thing that has been very widely done by multiple teacher preparation programs across our state
was either to offer or pro or require a dual pathway um as educator uh preparation candidates are going through their program to also become certified in special education and I think that has really resulted in that large uptick that we see okay so so there may not be
that many more new teachers but there are that many more people with certification for special ed is that the right interpretation yes I think it's I think it's a combination of both i think we're seeing people uh return to uh get that certification but we're also seeing more of the educators coming in with at
least a dual certification i want to add two to Dr shassons one is um encouragement of individuals through our agency to be able to um ascertain the special education certification
processes for that and then the other is when we identified the um shortage content areas we identified high school math high school science and K12 special education so school systems are able to use their component their block grant of
differentiated pay to pay special education teachers more money and so the impact of that is you may have a teacher who is you know might be a second grade general ed teacher that sees that their system is paying a special ed teacher $3,000 more a year and they say "I want
to go be the special ed teacher." And so then then they pursue that path so I think that has helped too great just another example of differentiated pay i gave the example earlier with the physics teacher here's another example or actually several examples with special education and we we use the um
yes and we use the um the ESSER dollars for COVID to to fund individuals going through special education certification programs too so that that's also a big part of it great so so next slide where uh you speak to the additional 843
teachers it's not 843 plus 1021 it's 843 and some percentage of the 843 are special ed stu special ed educators got it thank you um next one I have is slide seven um I I think it's really
impressive where you guys were able to identify for us um another gap here not not as bad as a vacancy but where teachers are out of field um and you know we've got an English teacher teaching math we've got a teacher in the room but somebody's not certified in
math in that example um so it's great that you guys are able to bring us that quantitative analysis so we can identify where the specific need is um and so if if the numbers work out if I get it right there's about 13,000 un uncertified or out of field
teachers uh um in our system um so sort of the same question I asked Dr called her on is is how do we get some appreciation maybe a little bit more ingrained and superintendent brome we spoke to than just math science and special ed should
we be should we be looking at you know how many math teachers or how many science teachers or special ed so that we can appreciate where the focus should be to to recruit those specific fields or or not
we actually have um a page with several tables in our workforce report that outlines the vacancy and the content areas in the grade bands where we see those vacancies i thought we didn't have any vacancies i thought we cleared that up these are these are just people uncertified or out of field right there
that's an important distinction for me at we do collect from school systems um how many vacancies they have at any point in time and we do a collection we did a collection at the end of last school year um asking how many how many
spots they had open at that time and what um content area and what grade band okay can you can you guys bring that to us yes it is part of the workforce the overall workforce report so I can absolutely provide that okay thank you
Um next one I have I just have one or two more um Mr morris I want to add to that that that's a function of our new reporting system as well because if you remember four four five year it runs together several years ago we were
having to just survey school systems you know about vacancies and now with our new reporting system it's uploaded into that system and so it's a more we we have evolved into a more sophisticated approach for knowing the vacancies than we knew four or five years ago great
okay i look forward to getting that um thank you next one I have is uh with regard to the lead system so again for me just this is just another uh really impressive I guess revelation for me personally i think it's very rare in any
industry that you find uh uh an employee evaluation system that the employees actually like um that was certainly the case in my career um but here the the feedback I've gotten from teachers has just been across the board they're just really excited about it so just kudos to
you guys you know with the concept and then also being able to roll it out and then get that kind of positive feedback so I really appreciate that and then I want to make sure I have the right interpretation for the qualified teacher um it's it's on a fivepoint scale and
it's three or better is that correct yes yes we would call that proficient and above right okay and then last question I have is uh next slide slide 12 conduct leads trainings for systems who have opted into the learning year i
thought the lead system applied to everybody i didn't realize you had to opt into it can you help me out with that yeah so bulletin 130 applies to everyone we did give an option for this school year um that school systems could choose to use the rubric from the compass system the legacy system in
order to give if they felt like they needed their educators to have one more year of learning and support additional training they were able to use that for one additional year and then the expectation is moving into next year everyone will use um the new rubric okay so this is just a transition period yes
got it thank you thank you Madam Chair thank you Mr morris mr berkins I'll be very Thank you in the years one to five that's the most of teachers exit the education field correct yes is there
data for any kind of exit interviews as to why we do we have an um an exit survey report that I could provide to you where um as educators exit school systems they do take an exit survey letting us know their reason for leaving
i' kind of like to see that sure happy to provide it mr burton you can also see that if you look at if you look at that information there on that slide six um and this is what I've shared with legislators a number of times um the I
if if we can have a teacher um that stays with a school system for that initial period of time say five years then they're more likely to they're more likely to stay from 5 to 20 um because
they've made it through that first few years which is which are tough um and that's why we've invested so much in the new teacher experience work the last few years which has been a a statewide effort that we've led around trying to support new teachers and that's why for two consecutive years in a row we've
seen those retention rates go up i think it was five% last year 3% this year um so so that's important so if we can get them to essentially five give or take on either side of five we can most of the time get them to 20 and then once you
get to the 20 you hit that first retirement eligibility mark and then so you do see some some people begin to leave the profession and go into a second career but if you can hit that mark you can you can more often than not carry them to that year 20
m yes sir i have one more question uh following following up on Mr berkin's question on the exit surveys uh we've had previous conversations i forget what the number is like 30% or so check the other box uh and you and I have had some
conversations about that i know there are some vendors that provide surveys to get us help to understand what's inside that other box have you guys looked at that anymore any thoughts there to help us to appreciate what's inside the other box we have we've we've taken um a
really keen eye to our actual exit survey questions um brought it to several different teacher groups and we do plan on updating some of the questions within that survey moving forward um so that way we we can provide some of the nuances within that o other category and and I think the other part
of that conversation is folks might be reluctant to comment there if they feel like that information is going back to their supervisor uh so have you guys looked at a different approach there whether it be with an independent party or whatever so you present it in a way
where where folks don't have that concern and they can respond more transparently we have and that is something that we're working on to move forward thank you all right any other questions comments any opposition any sort okay
motion carried let's move on for the next item please your next item is on your next item is on page 101 item 7.1 consideration of executive session regarding discussion of the character professional competence or physical or mental health of a person the
recommendation is to convene executive session thank you can I get a motion to go into executive session please mr harris and Miss uh Champine seconds is there any Is there any public comment or board
discussion on this matter before we take a roll call vote in order to for this motion to pass 2/3 affirmative vote of members present is required may I have a roll call please mr appel yes dr armstrong
yes mr berkin yes mr castile is not present miss Champagne yes yes dr clark yes mr harris yes mr hollis not present miss Holl Miss Meerine yes
yes mr morris yes yes miss Holloway yes motion passes i will advise audience that we will be in executive session for the length of time necessary for the discussion no votes will be taken while the committee is in executive session all votes will be made in public
additionally public disclosure is not required of matters discussed in a properly held executive session at this time the educator effectiveness committee meeting stands in recess to go into executive session
can I get a motion to reconvene the educated effectiveness committee meeting and continue with the regular audit of the agenda to vote on the items discussed in executive session mr harris second dr armstrong
next item please your next item is on page 102 item 7.2 consideration of a records review regarding the reinstatement of a Louisiana teaching credential appropriate to the credentials of Mr michael Carter the recommendation is to grant deny or defer
madam Chairman um if I may I would like to approve the reinstatement on item 7.2 for Mr michael Carter 7.3 for Mr to John Grafton and
7.4 for Mr damon Jackson in Globo okay can I get a motion second second a second mr harris any objections any objections any discussion any discussion
motion passes motion passes that concludes your agenda