next one is served basis for children ages 3 to 10. Please contact the board office with any questions at this time before the board goes into close session I call for any speakers to the closed session items listed in the agenda. There will be a total of five minutes for speakers. Are there any speakers for public comment? There are none in person. There are no virtual participants. Okay. I now recessed this meeting at 5:04 P.M. S.F. Gov tv san francisco government television S.F. Gov tv san francisco government television and S.F. Gov tv san francisco government television S.F. Gov tv san francisco
government television S.F. Gov tv san francisco government television . More items on the agenda they would like to comment on. The attendee will need to have a functioning camera in order to communicate with the interpreter and the port when it is the attendees opportunity to provide comment. The zoom hosts will promote the attendee to panelist and enable the attendees video. Translation go ahead please. Thank you. As it used its operating interpretation services in spanish if the unique interpretation please please the following phone number could be number. This message will be repeated in spanish because any one italians in the cities learned the interpretation in the region and your senior citizen interpreter is important to me. What about magazines and telephony to access?
We know that this will not go away. That is what say they say they think or do we know and state whoever it is that they cannot do anything? Please. Thank you. Our big idea why would you for what? You take on too much. Therefore you also knew that what would be the miracle? Google meeting my whole life they couldn't see how that as not being my home my get safe out safe and safe. sounds. thank you. Um moving to close session report out item c one vote on a student expulsion matters. I move up to approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one good school student matter number 22024-2025-23 for the remainder of the spring
2025 through through JUNE 4th 2025. Can I have a second second roll call? MR. Seal? Thank you, commissioner alexander. Commissioner fischer? Yes, MR. Gupta? Yes, vice PRESIDENT Julie. Yes, MR. Ray. Yes. Commissioner wiseman ward. Yes. PRESIDENT Kim. Yes. i move approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one high school student. Matter number 2024-2025-24 for the remainder of this of the current spring 2025 semester and the following fall 2025 semester through DECEMBER 19th 2025. Can I have a second second roll call? MR. Steel. Commissioner alexander. Commissioner fischer. Yes, MR. Gupta. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Huling. Yes. MR. Ray. Yes. We saw a whiteboard. Yes. PRESIDENT Kim. Yes. Six eyes. I move approval of the stipulated expulsion agreement for one high school student MADAM Number 2024-2025-25 for
the remainder of the current spring 2025 semester and the following fall 2025 semester through DECEMBER 19th 2022 2025 during the enforcement of the expulsion period student will attend youth chants. Can I have a second? Second? Okay, MR. Steel. MR. Alexander can MR. Fischer. Yes. MR. Gupta. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Huling. Yes. Commissioner ray. Yes. Wise wiseman word. Yes. PRESIDENT Kim. yes. Success in five matters of anticipated litigation the board by a vote of five eyes one commissioner absent commissioner alexander and one commissioner recusal of commissioner fisher gives direction to the general counsel in the matter of student aa versus as opposed to each case number (202) 411-0530 the board by a vote of seven a's gives the authority of the district to pay up to the stipulated amount. Hello everyone and welcome to our meeting today as a board of
education follows the student outcomes focused governance model based on community input. The board has adopted our vision values, goals and guardrails in order to increase the portion of board meeting time we spend as the outcomes. Every other regular meeting is a monitoring workshop. This model also calls on the board to empower the superintendent to take full ownership of the strategies used to reach those goals within the guardrails set by the board as we implement this new governance framework, the board will continue to adopt new systems, routines and policies that improve student outcomes. We encourage the public to follow this work on our website at as if you see that you do use such governance as we commit to finding new and improved ways to more meaningfully engage with staff, students and families. Moving to item d public comment to align with our effective governance model public comment will last for one hour or until 8 P.M. Whichever is earlier. We aim to respect staff, family and community time by beginning board business no later than 8 P.M..
Our hope is to conduct board business in an efficient, effective and accessible manner during reasonable hours. Each participant MAY speak for up to one minute. Staff will take the participant at the one minute mark at one minute and five seconds. I have asked MR. Steel a mysterious to please turn off the mic and transition to the next speaker. I asked members of the public to please respect that one minute limit so that we can hear from as many speakers as possible. I encourage speakers who are speaking on the same topic to collaborate and combine their comments. The board can hear all viewpoints during our limited time. Please also note that the board accepts written public comments via email to the to board office as opposed to you. We will hear first from students in person on agenda items then general public and personal agenda items followed by students in person on non agenda items and then the general public in person on non agenda items regardless of
whether in person public comment is complete we will save 15 minutes for remote public comment taking commenters in the same order as in person. Any time remains we will then return to in-person public comment. As a reminder board rules in california law do not allow us to respond to comment or attempt to answer questions during public comment. If appropriate the superintendent will ask staff to follow up with speakers. MR. Steel thank you. So I do have four speaker cards for students. If I don't call your name you can come up with these students. Kalani price you can learn at the podium. Mariah amaya and kaia anderson your line up you have one minute. Oh, excuse me. This is this is kurt, one of the sign language interpreters. The board member is microphone and are very, very full of static. It's really hard to understand what you're saying especially for judson. Is there a way to fix that?
please? We'll work on it as best we can right now. oh, good evening. My name is malia and I'm currently a senior in high school. I'm here on behalf of the art series. I believe it's important for our high school to have this because it's a system that shapes the school and brings us together. G.G. Who happens to be my mentor who's also a part of the art series class ification is a motivator. She pushes you to be the best version of yourself she knows you can be and is also a coach an active role model in mission high school. I wouldn't want to see the school impacted in such a loss of losing a great mentor who's been there 20 years. My question is why are as heavy as these schools taking away this position and defunding our teachers? thank you. I gave an earlier I a which was the last PRESIDENT Said we
didn't hear anything. It's very simple. There's some issue with the microphone. I'm sorry we're unable to listen to what people are saying. If somebody big said or change microphone thank you. We're trying to work on it right now. it's getting very problematic. Okay. You luis, is it all of the microphone and how does this one sound? Can we test? Is this mic working? This one sounds pretty good. how about this? How about this? And for the public speaking, if people who are speaking can stand back from the mic just a little. I think part of the problem is you're so close that it muffles what you're saying and it really makes it hard to interpret your comments. Thank you, kirk. hi. my name is a my I'm a senior from mission high school. I'm here on behalf of the our
series. I have connected with our series. They have provided me great support and pushed kids to be better. In this community we meet our series especially gigi. She's on. She has provided great support especially being a cheer coach and pushing and pushing kids to be the most successful and best version of their self. I believe this position shows mentorships and they even help solve and provide the community with their hands on mission high school is dependent on the mentors we meet and I would be disappointed to see her leave. It is upsetting that mission high school in san francisco is letting go of a black mentor gigi housley who does so much for her students. She is my cheer coach. She helps other students as a peer leader and she gives advice to black students. This decision is a big loss for the school. She does a lot like teaching teamwork and school spirit through cheerleading.
She creates a safe environment for students who are misinterpreted. Removing gigi is also removing a strong partnership between peer resources a program that empowers students to support one another through mentorship . Removing such a program and individuals can lead students feeling isolated which cuts off our support and networks. My question is why is nsf usd doing this and why are they cutting funding for our programs and teachers? Abmas and I we need to ask why especially since these are the teachers that we feel comfortable with interested. Please reconsider her position . thank you. okay. That's all we have for students and we go to knowledge and items stuff and we'll call five people up at a time you can let up at the podium. Mosquito did you have to be a whitley? Amy rachel and glenda rodriguez for me. MR. Statistics just to confirm
this is agenda items right? For non they are not agenda items I grabbed the wrong stick. Okay so because we should start with it we should I apologize like it to you momentarily there's only a few my fault I'm not at my finest right now and if members of the public can use the one at the podium or not at the podium and the dice that might be helpful for so I have two cards for agenda items amy brownstein and sarah newman come up to the dais please. good evening board. My name is amy and I am the reading specialist for tiff at george peabody. This is my 25th year with san francisco unified. 19th year at peabody and my eighth year in this role where I provide direct services to students our work directly affects third grade literacy goals. we are certified and trained in programs aligned with the
science of reading programs that support students with phonological difficulties. The work we do is necessary and effective. We serve on leadership literacy and care teams that support student achievement and often provide support and mentorship to staff members. we screen assess and provide intervention to students with reading difficulties and at risk for dyslexia. We are not teachers on special assignment. We are teachers that work with children and provide essential instruction. We are members of school communities. Please allow discretion for any funds to pay for these crucial school sight teachers. If I am forced back into a classroom, teachers like sarah newman who is about to speak after me will be forced to go to another school because she has less seniority than I. thank you. thank you. And just a gentle reminder if you could speak away from the mic so that interpreters are able to hear. Thank you. hello. My name is sarah newman and I am a parent and a teacher at
george peabody elementary. This is my son nate who is a current fifth grader. When they entered kindergarten at peabody he was flagged for potential dyslexia and delayed processing. Our literacy specialist MS.. Amy brownstein bloom, who you just heard from, took my son under her wings and helped him learn how to read even on zoom ,no less in his first grade year. Amy worked with me each academic year building his reading skills and confidence. Today nate no longer needs her support and is reading at grade level and recently graduated out of those minutes to take this position away from amy who has dedicated her life to this job and her students is beyond devastating to me and so many other families who have received not only support for their children but love and understanding. I want you to let us use discretionary funds to pay for our literacy teacher. It will not affect the budget. To think of all of these success stories that exist
okay, the former group I called it before mosquito. Gigi has be a whitley. Amy rachel and glen and rodriguez. Good evening. My name is missy carroll and I am an instructional coach at francis scott key elementary school. I'm here to talk about the decision to eliminate assistant principals from elementary schools without regard for school size and the impact on student safety. this will have the francis scott key take five school community includes 550 students 75 staff members to moderate to severe special day classrooms 80 students with ieps and over 1000 family members. We have the largest afterschool program in the district with about 25 staff serving 300 students and a program that runs from 2:00 until 6 P.M. Daily. I understand we are in budgetary dire straits. However, making sweeping changes without regard for the impact on student outcomes at
each school site which the guardrails were written specifically to protect will not serve anyone well to ask that one administrator be responsible for over 625 people on a daily basis is unreasonable, untenable and very likely unsafe. thank you. good PRESIDENT. hello. My name is gigi housley and I am a r 11. I'm here to speak on behalf of the r levins in how important it is for us to be in the schools. We are the connection between the students families into in the school. So taking the heart out of what's given to the kids is only going to hurt them more like we are people who understand them come from communities like them. And so if we take that away, what are they going to have? We wear a lot of hats in the school is not just one hat so it's not just us being a c wise as being a counselor, a support system mentally supporting the students in all. So to take that away from the black and brown students is
going to be devastating. thank you. Oh, good evening. Can you hear me? Good evening. My name is nevaeh whitley. I'm a parent educator at mission high school. I'm here on behalf of the our series seawall. I believe this role is needed in schools to provide the one on one connection between parents in the school community . Being we are in 2025 everything is mostly virtual so we don't often get the social interaction with another human being as we should. Our living position is in place to build the connection between them and the students as well as their families. Most importantly. Without this I feel the school and the students will feel the shift from being cared and watched over closely to now a loss of appreciation. Every student deserves. As adults we are role models for the students we work with. It's important to practice what we preach. We cannot build a community within schools if we're tearing down the workers behind the
scenes. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Okay. Good evening. I'm here on behalf of our series position. I'm a mission high school alumni and from past experience I've been mentored by someone in this position that has put a tremendous impact on my life. So the support and activities that is provided by cba our series encourages students to come to school and feel supported without a sea wall. This is going to put a drastic drop in save usd as a whole because the individuals in our series are the ones who support the students when and we can't eliminate eliminating these services show how unorganized and supportive the board of education is. The people of color. Hi my name is amy rachel. I've been in the district at mission high school since 2006. I had like a little speech planned but then I'm here following like these amazing people. Number one a lot of them are
alumni. A few of them I taught and the fact that I have to come here I think it's been like three times within the last couple of months I've been in front of the board different iterations like multiple times but this is too much like we're coming here to ask for the cuts to stop impacting our most vulnerable populations the people who come from the communities to serve the communities. I am a teacher who needs people like gigi. I need people to come back. I need people that rely on you to know that this district is going to keep us safe to empower us to move forward. What is education if it is not going to empower us to continue to do the work that we need for our communities to put to call the final group? ryan ben article sorry for mispronouncing milly robert roth I think it says danny leonard hanson lee and then tiana tillery will be the U.S.
Rep at the end. One minute. Go ahead. Just hit this button. It's already good to go. Hi, my name is ryan van arkell and I'm a teacher at francis scott key. So my fourth year with the district and my children go to jefferson elementary. I'm here just advocating for keeping the ap position and the other needs. I see the amazing things that our ap does for our school and I wish jefferson a school that slightly smaller that needs an ap that struggles to make meetings and be there for students like my sons who need support and it's sad that francis scott key something that's built such a powerful name and a great school in the district is going to lose the type of things that have got it to where it is today and it's just very sad. thank you. Okay. hi, my name is mae lee.
I am an alumni of sfe usd and a current employee as the a in the a-series. I'm here to advocate for my students myself, my coworkers and the city that I love and grew up in. I provide after education for primarily title one schools across the district and we are looking at closing our program that's been around for 49 years. it'll be our 50th anniversary next year. We serve hundreds of students every year providing outdoor education. We do a field trip for third graders we've served we're on track to serve 726 third graders and 480 two fourth and fifth graders at our overnight camping experience at fort funston. I'm very proud of the work we do. I am I deeply love and appreciate our public parks systems and I think the work we do is so important especially as we are moving into a world
of of intense climate change. so thank you so much. Yeah. Oh here. Hello. My name is robert roth and I've been a teacher and educator in this district for 35 years, recently retired. And for the last 15 years I've been in mission high school. And during that time I've had the honor of working with chichi parsley. And I've seen her work her magic with students, staff and community members. In this day and age when our students are under attack, when our schools are under attack, when the issues facing african-american students and families are once again being marginalized, it strikes me as incredible that G.G. Just got a pink slip and that her job is once again not guaranteed. If you come to mission any day of the week, you can see G.G. Surrounded by students. she's a mentor, a link to the community, a voice that is trusted by parents who want to
see their kids succeed in school. She knows so many students and their families. She knows their backstories, what makes them tick and what their struggles are. Her work with dwi students has simply been remarkable leading the district to congratulate mission for its work. Thank you MR. Ross in that arena. she is irreplaceable. I'm taking I called a group of speakers. I thought mainly when robert rothwell denny leonard or daire leonard hanson lee and then tiana tillery hear me you don't need to be too close. Thank. my name is danny leonard from the warm springs indian reservation and I spent many, many years with the bureau of indian affairs constantly reducing all of our educational funds so that we can be educated as tribal people.
And now I look at the situation . There is a concern. I say collateral cohesive damage to the integrity of our people and for the integrity of taking care of our young people. And if we hadn't had the elders and the seniors to look and make sure that we took care of them, we would not be able to do what we do now. It happens that 20 years after 20 years we passed the language restoration act for the american indians in washington and now the tribes can actually use their school a program to teach their native language. And that is incredible. And it's important. And now I look toward it's innovative and important. You know you got the tipping point from the mayors program. I think the mayors program has been incredible chance for collaboration. And of course, you know, you were in the place of intelligence. Thank you.
All those places have to come back and support the integrity of this community that this community educated their kids. Thank you very much. It's also you can go right it. Yeah. good evening. My name is hanson lee. I'm coming from shanghai. Since 1980 and I send out my kids to go to san francisco unified school district and they go to alice for you and I did my many project as a contract with the school district. oh, that most proud of san francisco's school district. To me it's diversity. Look around the diversity in the back and look around the front. It's all diversity. Diversity requires special attention to the people that provide special needs which also including our nature our beach. I'll plan and you know overnight give the kids experience of our nature. Those are all part of a special
that made me proud of being part of this community. I urging you be careful about cutting those so called not directly impact this score. Thank you. We're not here to compare scores. Well, I thank you very much people. Thank you. Thank you, MR. Hilary's the other speaker for the evening. The name everybody. and before you go real quick just to acknowledge the public ,ussf has the privilege of speaking and there is no time for us f as our labor partner to be able to present to the board so go ahead. thank you very much. Thank you, PRESIDENT. Good evening, board members, superintendent and community members. My name is T.A. Tillery and I am the vice PRESIDENT Of educators with the united educators of san francisco. And I'm here to speak tonight on behalf of the essential para
educators whose jobs are on the line. I want to acknowledge the difficult financial decisions that must be made to balance the budget. I understand the challenges you MAY face in ensuring that our schools have the resources they need. But I also know this these decisions should not come at the expense of the lowest paid workers of S.F. Usd. The very people who hold our schools together the proposed layoffs of school security aides, child welfare attendance liaisons or seawalls, family liaisons and so many others just to name a few will not just cost jobs. They will cost us relationships ,safety and trust. These are not just positions on a spreadsheet. These are people who know our students by name who speak their languages, who recognize when something is wrong before it turns into a crisis. Let me remind you of what's at stake. Our school security aides are
not just guards in the hallway . They are mentors the escalators and protectors. They build relationships with students who often feel unseen guiding them back on track before problems escalate that they have been the first line of defense when weapons have made their way onto campuses. They intervene in conflicts before they turn into fights. They coach. They listen. And they keep our schools safe in ways that cameras could never I never do. Excuse me. Cutting even one of these positions puts our students and staff at risk. Our attendance liaisons do more than count absences. They show up. They knock on doors when no one else will. They'll meet families where they are. Understanding that chronic absenteeism is often a symptom of something deeper academic struggles, mental health challenges or transportation barriers or fear bullying.
they don't punish families. They support them with students disappear from our classrooms who will go looking for them? Without these workers we are abandoning the very children we claim we serve. And then there's our families alliance, the trusted bridge between schools and communities . Many of them have worked in their schools for decades. Sometimes serving multiple generations of the same family. There are often women and people of color speaking languages of our families making them feel seen or heard and valued. When a parent needs help navigating the school system, it is the family liaison who steps in. When families struggle with housing insecurity, special education services or simply understanding a school notice it's the family liaison who make sure they don't get lost in the bureaucracy. So I ask you who will step in when these positions are gone? Who will mentor students who have who will mentor the students cut in the hallways before they get suspended? Who will check in on the student who doesn't?
Who hasn't been to school in weeks? Who will make sure our families especially our immigrant families feel like they belong to our schools. Once again, I recognize the hard decisions that you have to make. But balancing the budget should not come at the expense of those who already earn the least. These workers are not a luxury . They are a necessity if we truly believe in equity. If we truly care about student safety, attendance to family engagement these are the positions that must be restored . Tonight I urge you to reconsider all educator layoffs rescind them. Invest in the people who invest in our children every single day. Because when we cut these positions we aren't just losing workers. We're losing trust, safety and the very fabric of our schools. thank you.
Thank you very much for sharing . We also recognize that the public MAY be experiencing some technical issues when watching the meeting over zoom so the public MAY tune into the meeting via S.F. Gov.Tv and listening to that broadcast I believe that is a much more stable livestream. yes. Do we still have public comment? Yeah. Earlier I had called someone and they didn't hear me call them back up so I'm hoping it's okay to. Okay. Glenda rodriguez, stay with this microphone. when I noticed my number is glenda rodriguez is esther yaki but up. jeremy lee said benguela is going to hillcrest and jackie in low. These two seniors gay and trabajando photos as you all know personae importanti know photo como familia como always bana isa improv palo up
or yandel in production. I think gaga is there as extensively in otro seahorse quando no trophy or italian freedom also I think gaga jamal's ep with asylum proceedings aborted more importantly but nuestra familia garcia's. and we have a letter signed by thank you. Translation. Were you able to hear that? Translation. I'm sorry this is a spanish interpreter. I. I didn't understand anything of what the mom when mom said. I'm sorry. I'm going to be unable to interpret what mom said. I'm very sorry. Okay. Every my parents I believe staff are working on figuring out more stable wi fi. That MAY be a contributing to it. For now I think we should just move on then. Okay.
Thank you. That concludes our speaker card to room. Yeah well the other out I mean there is no there's no other in-person public comment, correct? No. Okay. So the question is I think when we go to zoom what will happen in that part? I don't know yet. So why don't we try to go to zoom and see what what happens? Okay. At this time we are going to a virtual public comment. Each speaker will have one minute. Can we please have that repeated in spanish and chinese? Why? No, no. Just in this moment one of the comments for everybody for linea. So I mean look, the person that you think you are that way I, I don't want to invite them also we're going to we are just wondering as the immigrant PRESIDENT Kim, how long are we
dedicating to virtual public comment? How many commenters do we have ? we're early on time so we can just still one minute per person please. Yeah the first person will be c lozada. Hi my name is karina lozada. I also I also employee of san francisco unified school district. Been working as a substitute for about 12 years. Also worked as a teacher. I was in the parent teacher program. My daughter goes to longfellow elementary school. I'm here to advocate for and MISS Marti mayes and she is our community liaison. She is a vital she plays a vital role to our school and longfellow she bridges the connections between the spanish and the filipino community and provides spanish translations. She's also the event coordinator and she also plans
event planning. She's a tremendous part of our school. I feel like when my mom came to this country in san francisco my mom came to this country with dreams and now san francisco is a sanctuary city and I just feel like it's falling apart and it. Thank you. Thank you. That is your time. I'm sorry. I'm chris. I'm I'm chris klaus, a teacher at washington high school. Schools need more people, not less. Tonight I want to specifically call out my concerns with the proposed new school nurse model. I believe the letter signed by 1900 members of the community was delivered to MR. Steele to give to the superintendent the board earlier tonight. Please read it carefully and know that there are more people who simply did not get a chance to sign on before it was submitted. We're also very worried about the consequence size of the cohort staffing for school
nurses medical emergencies do not wait for a nurse to be on campus to happen. Kids get injured, they get sick. They need medications administered and they need the guidance that a properly trained school nurse can provide when they are a fully integrated part of the school community. Please show more respect for nurses and more care for our students and stop the change in our staffing. And before you look to cut cut costs elsewhere by sacrificing other members of our school communities reassess the district's practice of contracting out positions at greater cost than hiring a director. Thank you. That is your time. Joanna. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Hi, this is joanna lynn. I am a parent of harvey milk civil rights academy. I am asking you to please reconsider your baseline funding for social workers
and librarians. Social workers are needed every single day at school. It is not enough to have them part time at our school. Just like nurses, kids cannot wait when they need social and emotional support. Their families need exposure to these social workers every day to build a consistency and trust that is needed to actually support them effectively. Similarly with librarians you cannot have a robust librarian program when you have a librarian who is unable to see students every single week let alone every day. It's just simply not enough. So I appreciate that you're doing what you can and have to make tough cuts but you must increase your baseline. It is simply inequitable, inequitable to leave school sites to fend for themselves about these positions. Thank you. Thank you. Did you see this in terms of taking notes when back in.
This is for our interpreters. Would you all mine signing out and signing back in. This is so that we can reset your connection and please interpreters sign out and sign back in. Thank you. Also in the meantime, members of the public. You can go to S.F. Gov tv and stream as we're having technical difficulties though so you can hear it there at S.F. Gov tv marti mays. Hi, this is marty mays. Is it my turn? Yes. hi, my name is marty mays. I'm the apparently ace on at longfellow elementary and I apologize for not being there in person today. I wanted you all to see my face and see my my passion for my job. I was leading a tech and hinder incoming family tour this afternoon five so I'm not there in person but I wanted to congratulate the district on getting so many kids
in kindergarten but who's going to do the job of calling every single family on our list inviting them to school and welcoming them more than a family liaison can are our our commitment is unmeasurable. we love our people. We love our communities. We love our school. We love our students. We love our families. We love our job and now we're getting cut. We're getting laid off and it's just not it's not right. We're here to serve families. We are servers. We are people of the community. We are just like, you know, the student, the family themselves and we love our jobs and I really need you to reconsider and you know, taking our jobs away. We're a vital part of the school district. Thank you very much. Thank you, MISS Marty. Nikki, I. Good evening. My name is nikki santiago. I am a reading member and parent of fellow elementary school. I'm here to advocate for
s marty mays who just spoke. What she said is incredibly true if not purpose. Marty is marty is long fellow. He is a pillar and a beacon in our community. Everybody looks to her whenever we need anything at school she greets us in the morning when we leave school she's just as happy like all the energy that she has she walks into the school and the love that she gives not just the teachers, not just their staff members but the students and the parents and the community at longfellow it's unmatched and for this district to propose budget cuts that affect not just the vital positions that make our school run it really will affect not just the community members but the students that already need so much support from you all. So thank you for your time.
Thank you so much tory hi, good evening. My name is tory lindemann. I am a teacher at longfellow elementary. I'm so happy to hear some of the voices of my community members here tonight as well. I'm also here to speak on behalf of the our serious paraprofessionals who received preliminary layoff notices on MARCH 15th as MS.. Marty mays herself just said, she's our community liaison. It's not it's an understatement to say that she's an integral part of our school community. Losing her would be a monumental loss to our school her leadership relationship building organization, community, haitian and expertise just to name a few really allows teachers, students and families to thrive. She's been in the district for 12 years. She's always been at longfellow, both of her children have attended our school and we truly cannot imagine our school community without her. So I ask that you please
rescind the preliminary laid off notices and prioritize. These are serious paraprofessionals who have tirelessly dedicated themselves thank you to worry about is your time. Thank you. see high. my name is chandra and I am a school social worker at longfellow cemetery and I am here in solidarity with the family liaison who received preliminary layoff notices. But specifically I'm here to speak in support of marty mays longfellow's phenomenal family liaison of 12 years. It's not just about the role. It's about the person and we are fortunate to have someone with so much skill who has so much heart. She not just works above and beyond. She works with love and compassion for all the families that walk through longfellow's doors. He makes folks feel welcome and she has trusted he's the heartbeat of our school.
The list of what she does for and in collaboration with our community cannot be overstated . In fact I emailed you a list. Our school cannot function at its best and I say it's best without its heart. And that's MISS Marty because she's the heart of longfellow. You can ask our families, ask our students, ask our staff, rescind the layoffs and keep this money at longfellow. Our community needs her to meet what you say are going to be thank you, shonda. That is your time. Thank you. Tracy louis all right. just checking, making sure everyone can hear me. I guess longfellow is in the house. I would like to speak on behalf of MISS Marty mays. Guys, take your notes. I want to see hands on papers. Everyone has express themselves how much all the individuals not just particularly longfellow and MISS Marty mays but everyone has shared their stories for impactful individuals in schools. So I'm here with a question
will these stories make a difference? Will the seats that you guys are occupying make a difference? What is the plan if you remove a heart from a body, will a body still operate? You guys are such important positions please take it into consideration not just also for MS. Marty mays but for all the other stories you guys have been privileged to hear tonight. Thank you tom. Tom that concludes virtual public comment. Thank you to members of the public and our broader community for joining us tonight to make public comment at this time we will move on to item e! Board self evaluation to align with our effective governance practices. The superintendent and her team are tasked with providing a draft of each agenda 12 days in advance. Once that draft is made public on our website board members have made a commitment to submit clarifying and technical questions and staff have made a commitment to respond to those
questions in advance of each board meeting. this q&a doc is linked into the board agenda on board docs today it is linked in item I one we invite the public to review those questions and answers alongside our discussions today. Additionally to create more space focus on student outcomes we will be moving most items to a consent calendar and identifying only our highest priority agenda items to discuss board members are reminded not to restate questions or answers, restate questions and answers answered by staff in advance but instead to bring forward strategic questions that allow us to better understand our progress towards goals and the underlying strategies so that we can better be informed on our decision making and partner with the superintendent as we hold her accountable. At this time I want to just make sure that you are on zoom and able to be heard. You are either a I don't see him on but I did reach out to him. Oh, okay.
Thank you. I have also texted him I mysterious do you see him on at all? I don't think I just texted him as well probably does have anything to do with he's asked me okay he's come in already. Okay. As MR. Kraybill joins us board just some housekeeping for this item. So this board self evaluation will be split up into two sections one section where we'll talk about a reminder for us a refresher if you will around effective question asking and progress monitoring. And I have asked MR. Kraybill to walk us through a reflection of that for 30 minutes and then we will switch to our board self evaluation that MR. Kraybill will walk us through
again, I've asked to limit that to 30 minutes and then after that time we will move into our workshop on student outcomes for goal one and goal two and that I believe MAY be MR. Green good evening. Hello sir. So I just reviewed with the board that will split our time up into two sections as we've discussed and thank you so much for being here today to support us in our summary of progress monitoring an effective question asking and then our self evaluation or I'll turn it over to you. excellent. Always a joy to be with you all tonight. We're going to move pretty quickly have had an opportunity to just check in and make sure that you all have the information you need. And so we'll start with self evaluation.
And so if you have your manuals in front of you we'll just simply go through each manual and I'll quickly ask just two questions. First, where are you now first, second, third and fourth column and then after you've reached a consensus on each of those and I'll be taking notes while we do this then my follow up question will simply be what are the steps that you want to take as a board over the next six months to continue your has a board being focused mostly on outcomes and so very first page vision and goals the board will in collaboration with superintendent adopt goals that are student outcomes focused. Where are you now just from a process standpoint I encourage all the commissioners just so I'm not speaking all the time all the commissioners you are welcome to just come off mute and and have this be a conversation so we can move along quickly. A.J. Can I ask a clarifying question?
Yes. In our very unique situation with a new superintendent where we have our interim metrics, we still do have goals and interim goals but we also recognize that our superintendent is working on new so would you so I guess I would love your clarity and your advice on how you would recommend that in a situation like ours we move forward. yes, that's an important question. Your interims remain in effect until replaced. And so while it is certainly appropriate and very much expected that your new superintendent will come up with her own interpretations of the goals and guardrails and formulate those interpretations into a set of goals and interim guardrails until she does so, the existing ones remain in full effect and so it is still the question is does the board have those and are they in effect the answer is yes.
Thank you. All right. With that clarification, if there are other questions for clarification about the how to those self score, feel free to ask otherwise where are you all now on vision and goals someone want to get it started? I'm looking for consensus so I'm sure. oh go ahead. Okay I think with that we've met the third column which is that through the third column which is meeting student outcomes focus but that we have not made it to the mastering student outcomes focus column. I would concur with commissioner ray. I feel like what we've heard in our past outcome reports is that we don't necessarily have all of the interim goals are predictive of their respective goals and or influence by the superintendent and the superintendents team so that second that second paragraph in mastering student outcome focus is one that we're working
on currently to actually just I think that we also need to work while we did use a process previously that included students, parents, staff and community members, I think we the latter part of this last column and the first paragraph leading them to express ownership of the adopted goals is something that we have not done at this point and hopefully we can educate the public more and make sure that they understand what we're doing with student outcomes focus governance training and find ways to do that. Thank you. All right. I certainly lack of consensus on this point. I just the one thing I really want to point out in that green column meaning student outcomes focused is the one to the third paragraph all interim goals pertain to student outputs or student
outcomes not inputs or adult outputs and I think that's something that we as a system we've had a lot of conversations about too much focus being on the adult outputs and adult work and not enough on the student outcomes. So I think that's something really important to highlight as being part of that metric there any other reflections on the vision and goals before we move on? I guess I would say that this is the one outlier for me where I actually think that we have met all of them including blue because although we have planned future work to do more community training we did previously use a process to bring the community along and creating the existing goals and and my understanding from a conversation audience with staff is that the goals that we
have are statistically predictive. The interim goals are statistic actually predictive of the final goals and are influenced by the superintendent and there was a root cause analysis. So although I MAY not meet this on the other ones I think we actually have achieved all of our goals for now and then we have to start again when we get to our 36 months. I think DR. Reto connor would be very proud of you for that answer. by the way, I can can I might be the staff I'm referring to just to clarify so you think we're at 35? I do think or 35 for the first four visioning goals. Okay. So I guess I would maybe going back to I think it was commissioner ray I, I think I'm not there because I don't know given that we have to check off everything in that last box,
not just one in order to meet it. I agree that I don't know what we did use a process. I don't know that folks yet feel ownership of the adaptive goals and I think that you commissioner ray who raised that so I think that would be my reason for not feeling comfortable being in the blue column yet. I think it's generally agreed with that as well that the process was clarified relatively public but it's the ownership part that I was passing on and hhs there's an emerging consensus around meeting focus rather than mastering focus and that a key next step for the board is to upgrade its community outreach and engagement work. Is that a consensus summary? Is there any lack of consensus on this point? I agree with that but hearing none let's go to the next page values and guardrails the board will in collaboration with the superintendent adopt guardrails that represent the
values of the community. Where are you on this page of your self evaluation? I believe that we are not student outcomes focused because we do not meet all of the criteria for approaching student outcomes focus because the status of each interim guardrail is not able to be updated multiple times during the school year. We have some existing interim guardrails that depend on, for example teacher staffing on the first day of school as measured at one point during the year that don't meet that criteria. So I think we're unable to get any points on this one but I'm excited that the superintend wouldn't has been asked by the board to update the interim guardrails so that we can move beyond that I would add okay so who recommendation two are in the red column and that you will remain there awaiting a refresh of your interim
guardrails on the part of the superintendent. Is this a consensus or are there any other comments I'd like to add one other comment with regard to the guardrails the orangish column indicates that each guardrail should describe a single operational action or class of actions. I think that our guardrails don't always meet that that level of specificity or focus so I would I hope the superintendent will consider that when she is redrafting the interim guardrails or sorry consider that in that reflect I also think in that respect I also think that our broad guardrails have that there is an issue there. Thanks I think that silence is consensus. Any other reflections? Well we're coming up against that 36 month period for community listening sessions to
in not student outcomes focused . So thank goodness we put that in our metrics. right. All right. So it sounds like there's an emerging consensus that you do all of kind of not yet focused on those guardrails but that you have work to do around listening to community and you are reliant on your superintendent refreshing in terms of bringing those back to there. Any other reflections on this one before I move on? All right. Monitoring accountability where you at? I had us at approaching student outcomes focus and I think that is because we don't meet everything and the meetings student outcomes focus that I believe that we don't I actually had us in the read why
not because we don't track use of time if we do I do we just have talked about oh you just oh well that's good. thank you. not today. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I didn't really think about this. I mean I'm not complete today. I didn't mention that but yes i do. I have a time tracking spreadsheet. I think I have us in the read if I understand correctly because there's a little bit of a double negative but the school system has not achieved any of its interim goals during the previous 12 month period. Does that mean we like we have missed our interim goal marks which I believe is true which then means we don't yeah, I thought does it does it mean we have missed any or does it mean we have not achieved a single one? It's the double negative that is holding me up. Welcome to yeah can you clarify
that I mean I was unable to understand the comment. It was a little bit garbled. could you repeat are are we asking ourselves whether we have in the last 12 months achieved at least one interim goal or are we asking ourselves whether in the last 12 months we have failed to meet every interim goal like whether we've missed one or are we trying to bat a thousand or are we trying to get more than zero? So I'm curious am I the only one on zoom who's having a little bit difficulty understanding board members maybe? well I mean I don't know that for sure but we are we have had technical issues throughout tonight's meeting so staff are checking on that right now.
Can you hear me when I speak? yes. Okay. Yes, I can hear you well, is the metric whether we've met all of our goals or whether we've met more than zero of our interim goals to sign language interpreter I am struggling to understand about 90% of you. Okay, so it's not just me. It's you know, it's been very garbled for the whole meeting and it's really hard to interpret. Thank you for letting us know. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. This is going to be can anyone hear me? Test, test, test. Okay so chair or what questions were there about monitoring accountability or was there a consensus around being at approaches so the question right now is regarding the last item under our student focused the school system has not achieved any of its interim goals during the previous 12 month period.
The question is does that mean that we effectively that we have achieved at least one or is it saying that that we have not achieved all of them? you know, so it literally means we if you have not achieved any of them okay then that is definitely there's more than zero problematic. Yeah so we're good. Okay so we are I think the consensus was we are well the consensus for the board is a question of are we at approaching knowing that definition I believe we are at approaching not at zero and is there a specific next step that the board wants to take? I'm getting to all right then I would recommend that the board a.J. Can I ask you to pause for one second because I think in order to hold a legally compliant brownback and I we know our board policies do say that even if the online is not working, we are able to move forward.
So the question is how challenging is it ongoing for people to hear on the website? Yeah. And for aj to be honest well for aj but also I would think our board policy is one thing but also ada like we have to be we have to make sure that our sign language interpreters can can provide accessibility for other members of the community as well, right? So so for a j and for sign language interpreter I would suggest muting your audio on zoom and watching instead on srf gov tv because if you leave your mic on we will be able to hear you aj but if you mute us and have the audio from the other feed you should be able to hear us. The issue appears to be with zoom's internet connection. There is not an issue in the room so it's very difficult for us to tell when you can and cannot hear us and we have
been unable to fix it through several attempts throughout this meeting and our interpreters are logging out and they will stream via srf club so that okay being a less what those instructions were because again we were not able to hear that meeting. I can you please put it in the chat of the zoom so people can click on to the link. Unfortunately our chat is disabled because it's a webinar but if you go to S.F. Gov t v.Org there is an option to stream the board of education meeting so that's us gov tv talk it's clear for that instruction is to log out and yes for interpreters are you able to hear me? I'm also communicating okay yeah for interpreters we're asking you to log out and and uh use as if gov.Tv to be able to access the live stream I
would have to make okay. all right. Please don't log out. Please just turn off your volume from your zoom and then we will be able to hear you through your microphone on zoom because we can hear everyone fine and then you can hear us through S.F. Gov tv if you listen through S.F. Gov tv yes I just checked and I can hear the audio very clearly on tv. However it's probably about a minute behind so real time. Okay a.J if I if I speak are you able to hear my voice? are you able to understand me? So basically I recommend one next time I'll just show up in person or is there is a phone line that I can call in okay. So for this as staff I think hong MAY is trying to figure out the logistics and technical
difficulties. I'm just going to take a bat at trying to move us through these tables here for the sake of time and then we will you know people can still hear us through S.F. Gov so I don't I'm not A.J. So watch yourselves. So the last yeah, the last question was on page four for monitoring and accountability what would be a next step of an area of focus for the board board colleagues the faster we respond the faster we're able to move forward. I'll ask a question does our board monitoring calendar span the length of our goals? Yeah, it's actually something we're working on right now. We do have a governance calendar that extends the next three years two years I believe we are revising it but we do have one. Yeah, this is kurt the sign language interpreter. I'm getting both yes, we we recognize our technical
difficulties happening right now and staff I believe are trying to work through what that might what the resolution might be for the purpose of our meeting where we're going to move forward and folks can join on S.F. Gov t v thank you. so are we then at the board has on the green we have not yet accomplished the board has been provided copies of but unless required by law did not vote to approve disapprove superintendent's plan for implementing the board goals and working to ensure the plan includes the timeline was that we're clear of that because it was approved previously. so if there is a legal requirement to adopt something like a cap then the board certainly needs to vote to do so. What this is suggesting is that if the superintendent has other plans where there is not a legal requirement then the board should not adopt those for fear that the
superintendent would come to believe the accomplished accomplishment of the strategies is sufficient for performance when that is not true accomplishment of the community's vision the goals and the community's values the guardrails is what's required for performance. But why are we not here? I don't think. Yeah. Yeah. So what vice PRESIDENT Huling is bringing up which is worth asking ourselves is the bottom of approaching student outcomes focus around being the superintendent evaluation on performance regarding board goals, guardrails and interim goals and guardrails I mean understandable given our conditions of our district right now we actually had added a layer of goals on her and ourselves metrics thank you commissioner fisher and and one could argue that that is indistinguishable from the school system performance. So arguably it could be said that we are at not not student
outcomes focused and that is actually the point of work is to actually get ourselves out from underneath metrics and focus back on goals. Maybe that that is where we are right now and I don't know if you are any of that but I feel like I sounded smart on that. so so maybe I did capture those and if there was a consensus for that I recommend we move on to communication and collaboration. fantastic. Okay. We are giving ourselves a zero and our focus will be to move the superintendent and ourselves towards our goals monitoring and away from our metrics at some point I'm just going to keep this train rolling here communication and collaboration. Does the commissioner want to start us off with uh perspective? Can I just say how excited I am to not be in that third paragraph?
There were talking about eight hour board meetings. Yes. Anyone? I am actually not sure whether we received the final version of materials to be voted on at least three calendar days before the board authorized public meeting. Yeah and so I would like to ask if we have fulfilled that requirement or not. This is for the whole first quarter I think. Yeah. Um so just to recap there was one time in JANUARY where we received a last minute changed um budget budget um I don't know for this meeting I believe we received everything on time so I guess the question is to A.J. Is there what is the timeframe that we're measuring this project ular requirement on this is a quarterly self-evaluation and so you're
looking at all of JANUARY, FEBRUARY, MARCH. okay so I guess that's where we end. We have a lot of growth opportunity in front of us. Yeah. So so because of that we are working towards a more judicious way of presenting materials to the board and so we are working the opportunity here is around the three calendar days before a board meeting to ensure that the board is receiving all materials right for final final material. Yeah. Okay. Did you get that final materials at least seven days before? well right now we're expectation is 12 days in advance. We receive a draft and the friday before meeting which is three days before we received the final final there was a meeting in the last three months where where we had we did not have a final final document that friday. So that's what we're we're holding ourselves to a strong standard here.
Excellent. thank you. Yes. Unity and trust. I guess you want to go for it. Oh, sorry. I had us meetings. Student outcomes focus. I say this I should sound more confident and we did a lot of work to get the ethics and conflict of interest statements ready. Um, and we voted on it again this past JANUARY so that's why I think that we hadn't been able to get there before but that we are there now. that's what I also had to um so I will just agree to that and the other reflections on unity and trust one of the things that stands out to me in the final blue collar mastering student outcomes is paragraph two all board members and the superintendent agreed during the most recent self evaluation that none of the board members have given operational advice or instructions to staff members.
Um I'm guilty as charged there. I know that so I think that is a big area of reflection for me . I hate to do this kind of thing I think so for our ethics and conflict of interest I think we still have on our to do list to further update it to reflect additional amendments to the state lavin act about conflicts of interest yes, but okay. We're going to have the two lawyers go ahead. Yes and no. I actually I don't the three lawyers that's also what I had I didn't know if we'd updated it well but that this doesn't it it doesn't say updated it says I mean I think that we should and we can engage in in another round of this but we do in fact have one we might want one that's better that's more updated that reflects changes but we have one point taken
and the law is always changing and will basically every six months need to continue to review. So I think we're as current as we essentially could be but next steps would be and maybe I don't know where this would go but maybe we do have some type of ping reminder to to engage in sort of a check in to see do we need to update are there new changes to expectations, legal expectations and ethical responsibility? I believe there will be some board work coming forward on this shortly. So and I would just like to point out our next section is continuous improvement. So it's where I think it is. is there anything else on unity and trust before we proceed? Okay, continue improvement I think does anyone want to get it started on continuous improvement? I think we need to have our monthly reports of the percentage of or authorized
public meeting time that's invested in the monitoring in monitoring the board's goals and interim goal before we are able to complete approaching student outcomes focus. And so I think right now we're not student outcomes focused and that is something we need to work into our governance calendar and we should put that as a pin actually to add to our ongoing conversations about those revisions. Yes. You didn't add it on. Yeah. Any other reflections on continuous improvement? I think the need to track staff time and cost in there as well. That's something that's listed in our approaching student outcomes focused and we have not discussed that at all either. that is something that is typically done once per year when the board is doing its annual summative
self-evaluation. But yes that is a process I can provide to your superintendent so that when that time comes that we can get that done as well. I think we could also work into the schedule ways to recognize students as they're making progress toward the toward the broad goals or the interim goals. Yes, I think that one thing that board leadership has been discussing with aj is how we make our student monitoring and uh student goal monitoring reports more student focused and move them there. They've continued to improve and we want to continue we want to engage in continuous further
improvement and so one thing we'd like to do as we move those reports away from talking about what our adults are doing to what are children learning and accomplishing and focusing on the on the ground results in the schools rather than what's happening with central office or site leadership as much is actually bring in students who have made progress and hear from them about what has been helpful for them. And so that's one way that we could both I think improve our monitoring reports as ages recommended and uplift the hard work of our students because even when as a district we might not be meeting a goal we have a lot of kids working really hard and learning a lot of stuff and they should be celebrated but.
Ag before we move forward I do want to offer any time to our board delegates if you have any thing that you disagree with on on our own self-evaluation, we're wonderful. Great. Thank you, A.J. All right. So it sounds like we completed the quarterly self-evaluation. I will type up notes from this and provide those back to the full board for your consideration. This is effectively your first self evaluation as a new board and so I consider this your baseline. It's not about where you are today. It's always about continuous improvement just like you never beat up your students for their current level performance. You always just recognize that that's baseline data that tells us where we need to grow to improve. That's the same thing for you all that this is just telling us where we're at now and the expectation is as a governing team you'll get stronger and stronger as the months pass.
So with that, are there any other questions before we transition away from your self feedback? It does not appear that there irony. all right then let's go to our second happy to put any action which is monitoring you all should have access to a document that I provided that analyzed. We have an instrument for analyzing the effectiveness of your monitoring conversations. Do you all have that document available to you now? Yes, we do. All right. So I want to start by inviting people to review cell a three of that where I provide some overarching notes about the meeting itself. And so if you could look in the cell a three there just some overarching details about the conversation that I share and then if anyone has questions about any of those whether board members or staff because there are comments in there for both of you, just take a moment to review those. If anyone has questions this
would be your time to ask . Hi I just any board members or staff members have questions or comments on page three I just wanted to ask about when would be the appropriate time for us to inquire about the creation of customized plans for each school which is in that cell you're talking about? Yes. So the the board's work and monitoring is to evaluate system performance, not individual school level performance. And so while it's perfectly appropriate for you as a board member to have that conversation with your superintendent or for the board to decide that it wants to have that conversation, this simply isn't that and so if you want to have that conversation certainly either work with your board chair to host time for having that conversation. Generally I would discourage you from doing that in a public
board meeting I generally discourage boards from behaving in a way that might look like they are singling out or beating up on individual schools but certainly you definitely have the right to know what's going on in your individual school board members. And so even though monitoring conversation isn't the ideal time for that, you could certainly avail yourself of time with your superintendent to have that conversation or as a board to decide that you want to have that conversation. All I'm suggesting is monitoring is system by design is intended to be system wide and I actually wanted to follow up on that because this comment seems to be so the full comment here is staff mentioned that they quote created customized plans for each school unquote if central office created the plans on behalf of the schools that's deeply problematic. If central office required schools to create plans separating separate from
existing improvement plans that's deeply problematic if schools are modifying their own existing plans by removing things that are lower alignment and adopting things that are more aligned with the goals or guardrails that make sense. And I think this gets to some of our tension as a system frankly. You know we at the central office are gearing towards coherence and alignment and structure and yet are as we're hearing every day from our schools, each school has a unique and individualized population that they're trying to individually plan and meet the individual needs needs of the students so I think that's a big part of the tension that everyone's feeling in the system right now. So to see it named explicitly here was I appreciated that. Thanks, A.J.. Other questions reflections about a story before we move on and to lee's point that was obviously a comment targeted at
staff something to just make sure that you're absolutely clear about in your monitoring reports that central office is not generating plans on behalf of campuses but are working on collaborating to support the campuses as campuses generate plans for for themselves. Any other reflections on a-3 before we get to the rest of the doc, I appreciated how you well maybe not appreciated it but had to do some self-reflection on the amount of monologuing that I did and the limited number of questions I asked in the zero time I gave for staff response. So to speaking of growth PRESIDENT Kim, that was a reflection for me and thank you for that. I always appreciate public officials who are willing to be reflective with their practice publicly. I think that creates a type of culture and climate that leads to high achievement and certainly encourages staff to feel more safe and comfortable to do likewise
moving into the rest of the document as you have questions this is your time to ask them. As you can see from the far right column, the notes column, the basic theme of this meeting was board members didn't ask questions and staff didn't have trip. I would recommend working on both ends of that dynamic. Other questions you have about this evaluation of your most recent monitoring and conversation. Before I go over one more item any of the questions or comments about any of the elements of this evaluation of your monitoring conversation? Okay then the main thing I would point to is that we have five criteria that we use to evaluate the effectiveness of monitoring questions. Again, any questions you have are always fair game. Any questions you have the only thing we're saying is monitoring is that there's a season for questions. There's some questions really help propel the monitoring conversations and other
questions while equally valid and appropriate you all can ask whatever you want. We just would recommend that you ask them outside of the monitoring conversation so whether through your q&a process or through your one on one with your superintendent or something of that nature is that monitoring conversation benefit from certain types of questions that really help you and your public and your staff get clear about what's working, what's not working or what have we learned from that and then ultimately what do we strategically what strategic pivotal we're making? And so some questions help further that conversation more than others. The intention of this instrument is to suggest that these five criteria is is it a strategy focus question measure focused ask oriented results focus and time bound that these the questions that meet all five of these criteria tend to generate a stronger monitoring conversation. So again any questions you want to ask a fair game but what we
are the coaching is ones that meet that criteria asked during the monitoring conversations ones that don't meet the criteria generally try to ask those before the monitoring conversations in the q&a document or ask them at any time in a one on one with the superintendent. So my recommendation to you just to speed up this evening is in advance of your next meeting I extend the invitation if you want to practice on this a little bit I'm gladly myself or someone of my team will make time to do a one on one to go over some of your questions with you and help to identify which ones are strong and how to make them stronger so that you are absolutely as well-prepared as you can be for your next monitoring conversation which I don't know that there's one in APRIL I think it MAY be in MAY and so
we've got plenty of time once you receive that monitoring report if you want to workshop this a little bit, myself or someone of my team will make time to do that with you. Other questions about these five criteria or about this instrument of evaluating the effectiveness of monitoring questions. Any questions or comments then I look forward to making myself and my team available. We're at your request. We check it any time. MR. Chair, back to you. thank you, A.J. I also will just acknowledge I think I, I take seriously the opportunity as board chair to try to focus us in our conversations and and so I personally have done a lot of reflecting based on our last meeting of what we can do to ensure that our conversations are more data centric and focused on our progress monitoring. If you all have feedback which I think many of you have
reached out with I absolutely welcome that. And this is hard like it's hard to just continue to stay focused on student outcomes and progress monitoring only and what it means to discern between and a effective strategic question with the many, many questions that we do have out of our own desire to learn and understand what staff and the district are doing. And so I just want to acknowledge that that especially as we kind of ramp up in our own awareness and understanding of of district work. Um, we we have work to do ourselves so I just want to acknowledge that I think the commissioners and my colleagues here um for joining us on this wonderful endeavor. Yeah. Go for. I appreciate that we've taken additional time to reflect in particular on the this is
monitoring report from FEBRUARY 25th because I think that that is one that generated a lot of concern from the board and so I think it's helpful for us to reflect on and plan for how if we have, you know, future concern reports how we can more productively work um to address those issues including addressing them in advance of the board meeting and including you know not presenting to the in front of the public information that is not ready to and I just want to share that a reflection and for me after coaching sessions with aj is that you know in this situation that we shouldn't be in a situation like this in the future because we as leadership need to communicate to the superintendent more directly when something is not ready to be presented to the board and that when we as a board
have a strong reaction that we should be holding the superintendent accountable rather than having that discussion directly with staff . Um so you know thank you vice PRESIDENT Who and to that end just to kind of bridge this to what we will have as a meeting next month um uh part of the reason why we have in our metrics an opportunity for us to rethink around progress monitoring and just building off of our self evaluation around how we engage with the public. I think some of that work we can anticipate coming out in the next few months as well. Thank you. Um okay. That being said let's move now on and thank you for your time and I believe that you're going to stay on for this portion here. Uh to item f workshop on
student outcomes uh, item one progress monitoring goal report goal one third grade literacy and I will turn it over to the superintendent. Thank you, PRESIDENT Kim. Um, as we all heard as of usd is a school district that has fully embraced our student outcomes focused governance framework so much so that we are holding ourselves very much accountable to not only how we as a governance team works but also how we as a implementation team will be moving the needle for our students. Particularly in literacy and in math. So with that I am super honored to introduce and to invite our amazing team here to come up and share with you the progress towards our third grade literacy goals. So sorry I'm just trying to
find everyone. please don't fall our third grade literacy goal. This is a very important step in ensuring that we are providing the necessary supports for our students to achieve the very bold and audacious goal that we as a governance team have set for ourselves and for our community. So I'm going to hand it over to devin krugman who is our executive director of content team and is part of the curriculum and instruction division. And maybe you can introduce your panels here. Sure thing. Thinks he can do it. I'm sorry. No, go for it. um. I will pass it to the panelists to introduce themselves if that works. all right. Jennifer steiner, assistant superintendent of middle school and k-8. Bonnie lowe assistant
superintendent elementary cohorts two, three and five. Hi christy eva assistant supe of early and go at one. good evening we have kim manager of inquiry evaluation research from rpa. And I will get us started. Good evening PRESIDENT Kim vice PRESIDENT Huling, members of the board superintendent, two members of the public and our dear esteemed colleagues. We have the pleasure of sharing with you the eagle one progress monitoring report. as things stand um as of right now I just would like to point out that the deck that we are about to share and present to you is a compilation of both a summary of what's contained in the report as well as some of our responses to your questions and inquiries that you shared with us in your questionnaire. Next slide please is a summary of the data uh, the left side is the progress that we're hoping to follow for the next several years. The right side is a more important part as you have already seen in the report.
Overall goal one and interim goals 1.1 and 1.2 have outperformed last year's cohorts which is great news and also for overall goal one and interim goal 1.2. we have the positive trajectory and the larger positive trajectory for interim goal 1.1 which is our african-american and pacific islander kindergartners. So we are on a very good track as you can see unfortunately for an interim goal 1.3 we did not meet the interim goal that was set um um uh two for us to meet for the the winter timeline which has come and passed. Next slide please. to summarize some of the successes and challenges on the left side of the successes we have curriculum implementation and that is going really well. But one thing to point out is that we don't typically expect immediate impact of curriculum implementation because we anticipate it to be a multi-year process. Um so it is a good sign that we
are starting to already see some early signs of promise showing to the promise and the investments value for language arts and literature literacy specifically for coaching which is the second bullet up. We have laid a strong foundation for instructional coaching uh specifically having developed a relationship between coach and principal on the one hand and coach and teacher on the other during the first semester. A lot of time has been invested in learning the curriculum together and in the second semester the work has shifted to providing differentiated differentiated support to teachers so that the teachers can in turn differentiate with instruction to their students. The third bullet is about institutionalizing support for kindergarten cohorts of african-american and pacific islander students. That is that each and every by name initiative um we are really getting into the groove of regularly providing information to teachers and we're certainly seeing the effects uh paying off in terms of student outcomes. on the right side are some
of the challenges kind of paralleling the overall strong progress in curriculum punctuation is the variation and the integrity of the implementation as we would expect to see from any sort of implementation in any large organizations, right? So we see these variations in terms of the fidelity resulting from multiple different factors might leaders coaching strength of school structures and varying levels of support that students and teachers need. And so we'll talk a little bit more about the importance of providing differentiated support as we move forward. And lastly the need to strengthen the support of multilingual students uh through both strengthening the english language development program as well as pathway programs. and I'll hand it over to MS. Quickly. Thank you. so in order to better understand the root cause analysis of the successes and challenges that we're just highlighted, we employed a school improvement framework
that evaluates the causes leading to achievement of student outcomes or otherwise. And so this reaves framework was taken and applied to the system at large and it is applied based on the theory of action that was included within the board report. So with this theory of action the understanding is that if we view it as a pipeline where that pipeline is watertight from beginning to end in the system across all levels we would see attainment of the student outcome goals as highlighted. So we would see pace growth from fall to winter that either matched or outpaced the district averages and for lack of a better descriptor where we don't see those student outcomes being attained we would assume that the pipe to a certain degree is leaking in some place. So there is one step within that theory of action where there was a leak whether it's in regards to instructional practice and student site collaboration structures or otherwise. And so to better understand how to address some of the
challenges that were highlighted, we employed the school improvement matrix to our school sites and we did so through the lens of case studies. So we have four different case studies that were presented within the report each representing different places within that matrix. And so I'll begin where we look at school a which was our first case study. And so within school a we would consider this to be an exemplar where that pipeline of the theory of action is considered to be watertight. So within the theory of action we have and not just district actions but also school side actions teacher level actions and student outcomes. So in the case study of school a we see both the guards to go one and 1.3 significant gains for those students from fall to winter. In a deeper analysis we wanted to look at what is leading to those gains within the report we called out a series of
different examples and one in particular to highlight is the strength of that of that school's tier two model for intervention as highlighted in the case study report. This is an example of a school that no longer has their artist position. However what they have done is redesign their intervention block so that the schedule is built around the intervention block as opposed to the reverse. In addition, within this model they have a series of school staff different teachers, classified volunteers who are all supporting that intervention model in order for students to make gains towards grade level proficiency. In addition, they are also a school site that in the last two years has transitioned their language pathway program into a 5050 model which has resulted in significant gains for their multilingual learning learner students as highlighted by their fall two winter growth for goal 1.3 in the school b
case study this is an example where again in that evaluation of where the pipe MAY be leaking where we did not see those student outcome gains, we did see in this case a significant level of academic intervention need for that school. And so in this example we see a greater need for intervention and differentiated support for students who are significantly below grade level and proficiency and in the case of school c in this case we saw an example of a school which did not necessarily follow the theory of action. However we did see some gains in their overall four goals one and 1.2. However, a deeper evaluation of the school did reveal that those gains were not equitably distributed across all student demographic groups. And so again this is an example where a deeper analysis shows us where we can better work on the implementation of not just curriculum but standards
aligned instructional practice and then in the case of school see where we see a school as highlighted in the case study following many actions in the theory of action whether it's about school collaboration structures or instructional coaching we see that pipe is leaking where those structures are not then translated into teacher instructional practice. And so again this highlights where we can provide further support for that school in order to impact student outcomes we can go to the next slide. So this analysis of case studies allows us to consider the ways in which we might better impact student outcomes through differentiate aid and site support. And from this example what we want to move towards is a network of support that is individualized to the needs of individual school sites and so that system of support, in-school supervision should be targeted based on the individual student need as
highlighted by their outcomes in goal 11.1, 1.2 and 1.3. And so we have some examples where we see schools similar to for example to case study a as needing to support them in strengthening implementation whether it's about the use of star to monitor assessment, provide more targeted intervention or systems of support for students. In addition from our analysis of case studies looking at where we need to provide increase support for emerging implementation. So looking at examples such as intra classroom observations or providing more goal oriented feedback, helping leaders better identify instructional support needs of staff and how to be responsive to them whether it be with coaching or professional learning but really highlighting the need for differentiated site support . And if we can go to the next slide in addition to that we want to be sure that we're building and scaling the strong implementation and results we see in 1.1 there are a series of strategic actions as highlighted by the five bullets
that are part of one point one. We've seen really significant gains for african-american and pacific islander students in kindergarten on them explicitly we had 51 students who individually grew at least one proficiency level from fall to winter which is significant. But I think one of the things that we want to see again is the ability to have these systems scale. So for example the strength of the case management can be employed across other schools. In addition we've seen very strong outcomes for students who use a tool like a mirror at the appropriate dosage and cadence and so that is a tool that can be scaled from kindergarten as well into the same level of implementation for first grade where we want to see increased gains. And so one of the things that is a focus is not just being responsive react of lead to where there is differentiated need but proactively considering where we can scale strong implementation in systems like go 1.1. So with that we are going to go
ahead and pause. We have included additional information in the appendix for other components of the report but we wanted to focus the presentation on these specific areas so we will pause here for commissioner questions. thank you. I will go ahead and open it up for four questions. Um, starting with commissioner gupta. So first of all thank you so much for this report. I really appreciate it. I really appreciated the walk through in terms of the data, what its implications are and then where we go forward from here. So I really appreciate that. I'm curious I'm sorry for goal for school a can I ask you to just share share what the summary was and more layman terms as someone who does not come from an academic background it sounded really interesting. Sure thing. And just as one point of making
sure I understand process in the last progress management report we had done board questions and then collectively responded to them. should we go individually? Yeah no you are totally right and I actually had intended to do that today. No that was my fault. So thank you for holding for holding us accountable to that . Correct. So if you if commissioners recall in JANUARY when we had our progress monitoring report at that time we went around and all stated our questions and then staff were able to plan and then begin to pick a place to start and then we just had an open conversation and so I wanted to be able to replicate that same discussion style today. Thank you. And so so if we can do that um then we'll give some time for staff to plan their responses and then we'll just we'll start with our discussion commission to that. Oh sorry. Can I ask a question about that? Yes. Can we ask aj what he thinks the best procedure is for
engaging in monitoring conversations or is that not can we not do that now? Um we can ask ag are you on here? Yes. What is your I mean I guess my question would be for you do you have guidance on the format of our discussion versus the quality of questions themselves? No, it's sort of yeah you all I am tracking the questions and filling out the evaluation like I did last time and but it won't be disruptive to me whichever way you all choose to do it. okay. Thank you. So for clarification and ag does that mean I don't have to do it because you're doing it or do I still have to do I think it's great practice for me to do it but yes, I will provide it to the board. Thank you. You get a gold star commissioner fisher thank you very much. Yeah. Commissioner gupta do you want to kick us off then with any other questions that you MAY have and then we'll just go down the road button?
Commissioner wiseman moore sure. Commissioner fisher we'll go the other way. okay. I'll go. So, uh, just echoing the gratitude. I do have a question on just the teen learning walks. I am curious. Um, so are the learnings are the lessons learned from the learning walks and the way that they're structured related at all to I can't remember the name of what the practices now but the kind of like coach teams of of leaders going into schools and observing what do we call that up instructional walks. Okay. I'm just curious like what what takeaways we have from because there's such rich information here on and deep learning walks that we we know around kind of like a pre implementation state of our classrooms with now instructional learning walks that are taking place with what might be learned after that. And so curious just like what we are taking forward if
anything from our team to be learning walks as we continue to observe classrooms that are implementing um the materials. And then the other question I have is around um so the variation in the integrity of the curriculum uh is one of the challenges that our named I know there was a really robust like spreadsheet tracker that was shared with us that was awesome. I'm curious what uh if anything we were hearing from our sites and educators around what the challenges are precisely around the implementation of that curricula and what what mechanisms are in place to support classrooms that are struggling with that. I know we talked a little bit about that and in some of that in the matrix that was given but I'm just curious to know more about what strategies are in place to support schools to understand what fidelity looks like. Are they do they have an opportunity to go visit school a for an example? What does that look like? Things like that. Thank you.
Okay. Um, I have a couple of questions. um, one is with respect to goal 1.1. Congratulations on having a lot of growth and a higher rate of growth than last year. And as was noted in the last monitoring report for this goal, the students also in this cohort being monitored also came in more prepared. it seems to kindergarten. And so one of my questions is is there a plan around perhaps strategic enrollment assistance or outreach to uh african-american pacific islander uh families applying to tech to get them greater access to early childhood education services so that we can also not just replicate the higher rate of growth within um
kindergarten but also continue to make sure that our students are more prepared and with that foundational classroom experience when they enter kindergarten. Um and then my my next question is I really appreciated the leadership and learning matrix with the examples of the different school models. I guess for me a piece of data was missing as to how one would draw the conclusion that school a um was leading in school b is learning because there's another potential conclusion that could be drawn when you have implementation with high fidelity but you get outcomes in some places and you don't get outcomes in other places which is that what you're implementing is not what's causing the high outcomes versus the other outcomes that there's a third intervening causal factor. And so because these are just examples of models, I'm wondering if there's evidence
that um we do believe that the adult actions that are being measured and the fidelity to adoption is what's causing the higher performance for example because perhaps a larger percentage of schools that had high adoption had fell into category a you know were like school a um for example um versus being like school be it um so I guess I'm wondering kind of how that conclusion was drawn from the data. Um, and then my third question echoes some of that commissioner questions in the that were provided in advance around the theory of action. Um, I appreciated the staff response and I am entirely convinced that a sense of belonging is a necessary prerequisite to student learning. I think that the question I have from a strategy
perspective for the district is whether it is sufficient for student learning. It seems that our theory of action should my understanding is that it should encompass what students what what action we believe is going to actually lead to the learning and so students who feel a sense of belonging and have a supportive curriculum are then poised to be able to learn. But it doesn't take the place for example of uh highly trained teacher or of a responsive curriculum. And so I'm wondering if there's any plan from staff to maybe um revisit that theory of action perhaps with additional guidance from our like once we get further student outcomes focus governance training for staff. This evening everyone thank you so much for being here.
I really appreciate the work that went into producing both of these monitoring reports tonight and it seemed like a big improvement to me over before and I very much appreciate the effort that went into them. I have a few questions. Um, my first set of questions is actually around the theory of action itself that is shown on page three. I am having seen a few of these reports now. I'm actually wondering where or what the source is of this theory of action basically why we adopted it, where we got it from. And how would we know if we actually did the things that are in these boxes? Like how how are we monitoring whether we're actually doing the things that are in these boxes here because there are several different items. My next question actually relates to what commissioner heeling was was talking about when she was referring to possible third like a third
potential causal factor as the basis for the improvement. I had actually wondered if if there was such a or a different reason for the improvement as well. I recall that we funded there's been a great deal of additional funding that's gone to several schools for literacy improvements recently in the last few years and I wondered whether or not those schools that received that additional funding and additional literacy work were the schools that showed um the improvement. Whether anybody has looked into that factor or not. And if in fact commissioner rate are you talking about the early literacy block grants is that would the extra money that's provided tutoring and other services? Yes. So I don't know if there is an overlap or between the schools that showed improvement and the ones that didn't but I wondered if that additional work rather
than the factors have been pointed to here could be an issue or could be it could be the reason if we're able to distinguish that. And also if not in some sense like what results are we getting from the. This is a separate question for a different time but if if that doesn't factor in, then what is that early literacy work doing those that grant funding for tutoring doing? I would hope it's doing something productive with regard to the impact that's listed on the theory of action table. I also had a question along these lines somewhat similar to commissioner healings as well which was that students could feel a wonderful sense of belonging at their schools and yet not actually acquire skills. You know. And so I just I wanted to raise that more as our folks are folks thinking around that. Yes. I think as commissioner huling put it, belonging is necessary but not sufficient.
So if you're not learning phonics or you're not learning your timetables or something like that, it's you can feel terrific about your school and yet not have skills. So if anyone has any comments around the thinking here where belonging is sort of prioritized. Should we just have on the kind of outcome side what students can do, what they know as opposed to whether or not they feel like they belong? That seems more like a strategy than an outcome. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. like to echo all the gratitude. Um, I was lucky enough to actually go to one of these sort of like instructional hour walks around. I was invited to my elementary school to sort of see a lot of the curriculum in action at my old elementary school and I learned a lot from it. I also realized that I'm almost becoming an adult and going back to my allergy school was jarring but um, I do have like
from my experience some questions on how we're hearing from teachers um, in this in like the working of the curriculum. Um I being there I was able to hear a lot of like some of the challenges that um, teachers were facing and I just wanted to very um in line with PRESIDENT Quinn's question of how we're sort of like learning from these experiences like going around and seeing the curriculum in action in those discussions that we're seeing how is like the teacher voice in those discussions that are coming from these walks like how is that being implemented into the strategies to then meet some of the goals that we're not quite hitting yet and echoing off of everyone? a great report as someone who wants to go into curriculum development. This makes me excited and hopeful for the next generation and I hope to follow in your inspiring footsteps. But I'm looking at this data and there are lots of ambitious endeavors which is clearly amazing but how do you expect this data to change with the proposed budget cuts notably with the loss of reading specialists and para educators?
And I'm bringing this up notably because you guys have the goal of having 70% of students reading on grade level by 2027 and I want to know more about the resources you plan on using in those cases. My second question is could you explain more about the impact and system of institutionalizing support for kindergarten cohorts specifically for african american and pacific islander students and what improvements have you seen since its implementation? Commissioner fisher okay, I can't type and talk at the same time. Um um yes I'd echo all the comments. Great report. It's so exciting to see growth. Um it's hard to follow the student delegates because they always have such amazing, amazing comments. So I would like to echo all of their questions. A lot of my mindset lately has
been around tier two. Um, you know as we saw in our report around special education strengthening tier one and tier two will hopefully prevent as many students from being referred to special education as as we're seeing um. And so a couple of the comments really stood out to me in the um in our response to questions. Um, one of the statements well that's if you listed is not currently have the identified financial resources to increase our staff positions. A designated interventionist is a recommended strategy. Similar to the math interventionist allocation the lesson study schools receive as part of their grant to improve student growth outcomes. Um uh in place of this strategy classroom teachers will need continued support and professional learning in the delivery of tier two intervention within their classroom. So my question is to you DR. Sue based on the recommendations of our professionals here, what does that look like in your budget
and our allocations for the coming year? How do we take this fantastic advice and operationalize it? Um, so that's one. Um uh the data and then um it seems there was another concern about you know, not knowing budget for next year and support and partnership of of T.A.R.P. Next year. Um and so I just I think a lot of my questions are really around the strategic alignment between our resources and making sure that our budgets are fully aligned to our goals particularly third grade math or third grade reading and eighth grade math. Um, so I look forward to seeing more as we see more coming out of our our upcoming budget reports. Um um but yeah, just I really really appreciate the detailed information and strategies
and responses here so thank you . so I did have one more question and first I just like to say we really need PRESIDENT Kim. We need to redesign our agenda so we get more of this and our student delegates are inputting in. That was fantastic. Thank you all for asking such concise and important questions . I'll keep this brief so when looking at the data for 1.3 interim go 1.3 and thinking through you know, why is it that we had 1.11.2 that went up and then 1.3 that went down you know, in taking in mutually exclusive comprehensively exhausted exhaustive approach? Um and wondering about some of the exhaustion of factors that MAY have played a role and if I'm not mistaken third was third grade the first kindergarten class that went through covid and if so then no they weren't. Okay. So maybe that's not that's not not an issue. they were what, fourth grade? That's my fourth grade. okay.
okay then never mind then that then I did the math wrong in my head. I was just curious if that played a role in some of the results of of 1.3. But every monday I would throw my question. Thank you. I do remember kindergarten zoom school having kids yeah that they were done in the bathroom while I was in meetings with clients. okay. So I have did you get that written down? Um, two questions and the first I want to be mindful because they don't want I don't there's obviously a tension between what we're doing with our budget and all of the resources that we need to to continue to do this work that some of it is really working right and we need more so if if this feels like a not appropriate question
you all can say like I have that later but I am really curious to understand and this relates to student delegate lam's question I just sort of building this is maybe I want I want to ask her question again which is like what do you think? Do you have an opinion about whether or not we can continue to make progress towards our interims and our goals given what we're looking at with our budget cuts? Because if our budget is supposed to reflect our goals and our values and we are saying this is what matters and if we don't have position x we actually are not going to be likely to continue to see these increases or we're going to flatline or we're going to go down, I think we need to know that. But I also want to be mindful that that might be an awkward position for you all to be in. So I if you can answer or if you can just thank you commission certain delegate lam for asking that it really matters because I think that's something that we are we are
wrestling with and the other question I had and actually released a 1.3 and I know 1.3 feels like a little bit of a because it's the one interim that didn't go up. But if I'm looking at the data in the way I think I should be looking at it, it didn't go down as badly as it went down initially so I'm wondering there was a change in that gap. I see of of sort of it's maybe by next time it'll actually be flat or even going up. So my question is were there change is from the 20 2324 data to 2425 data that would allow us to understand why we're starting to flatline and and maybe even start tilting up if that's the thing I see that I see a look that maybe it's not a thing but that would be my question because maybe what maybe this yes, it is still it went down but it looks like we're trending in the way that we need to. I just got a nod from reto so okay, I'll take that.
So that's my question. is there anything aj here's my question. Is there anything that that you all can identify that would allow us to understand why we're starting to maybe trend upwards in the way that is a good thing? I know there's a lot and so do you all want to take a moment to kiki that's official language. Kiki to coordinate. Wow. so I don't know why I use kiki . You all look ready. Are you ready? Cap yeah. Yeah, I if y'all are ready, we are happy to resume conversation. Thank you. We're going to start with the lead side first around and and I would just yeah we're going to start with the lead part
actually and what's happening at schools. One of the things that we are really supporting are the site adamant administrators and then also the coaches and the teachers. So there is a question about how do we include the teacher voice. And so one of the things that did happen was a curriculum implementation survey and so we spoke about that a little bit last in the last session but we continue to use that data and not just like a one time thing but an ongoing way. So we'll bring back that data and look at it and discuss it with the coaches. The coaches are also going into the classrooms and giving feedback so we're finding that the feedback shouldn't just be like a one way feedback but there's actually conversations happening in terms of how what's happening with the implementation of curriculum and then also how can we do better as well? What are the challenges in terms of fidelity that we wanted to address was that there are a lot of different
pieces within that it might be that's how some of the teachers are saying they're experiencing it. so what with the coaching they've really helped in partnership with cni curriculum and instruction and also the coaching team to really help narrow things down so the coaches have a monthly institute on the first friday and then the coaches actually share a more like condensed I guess narrowed focus during the wednesday release parties and that's a time that teachers can work together as well in the glasses the learning walks are also a way that sites can go and visit different classrooms and that's something that lead is helping sites to be able to to coordinate. That's a good question about that though so that the coaching itself what is coaching centered on that's a good one so actually if we go into our case studies when we're looking at the coaching,
we're looking at the mindsets right and then the practices so we're looking at sites that with strong implementation like what's going well in terms of the mindsets of working with the curriculum. What we're finding from the surveys is that with a as a coaching that has stronger like a stronger implementation at a school site there's an openness more to really trying things out and then also putting things into action where there is more hesitancy I think in the curriculum implementation and the coaching does involve really listening to I think this resistance or hesitancy and then finding out what is it is it the task itself like is it the challenge of the resources? So some of the coaching really goes into like identifying what is the issue and then asking those questions to go deeper and then being able to find a solution to support the teacher and the implementation because I think I also give you an
example. Yes, that's useful. Thank you. So at one particular school I'm thinking of at the beginning of the year the teachers last year had used a curriculum they thought was going to be adopted so they piloted something else and this year they were like oh heck no, you don't want it. We don't want to do this new thing again. And the coach was like I'm having a really hard time getting people on board. We come to the wednesday release, we do the pta and people were like yeah I'm still going to use my thing over here. And so when we worked with the admin the coach and I sat down and we said what if we just pick one little thing that everyone's going to try this one little phonics routine or this one little whatever try something. And so this idea of mindsets right is like okay what can we all agree to try that we don't think is that strong and what we've already been doing and we'll all try that thing to to begin an implementation and so the coach has to sort of get in where they fit in, right? They can't just come in and be
like you're all doing this because that never works and so they both have to have some deep literacy knowledge but then they also have to build the relational trust with staff in order for them to open up and say all right, I'm willing to try this. So they both do one on one coaching. They'll do grade level coaching and they'll do a whole staff professional learning if that's helpful. that is I think the the mindset and uh relational component of coaching sounds really clear. I think my question what I'm struck by is I haven't heard yet anything about lesson internalization or quality of that internalization and whether coaching is actually centered on a teacher's ability to actually internalize the lesson and lesson plan and is that a component of yeah, it absolutely. Okay. So that's what bonnie was just talking about when they go to their coaching institute they're learning they're also
learning this curriculum it's needed that right right so they're getting all of that input then they're breaking it down then they'll be able to observe it and say all right, how can we get better at this particular routine or how can we get better at this particular lesson design and then the learning walks both the ones that teens are doing but also the ones that we're going on we're like are we do we see each and age curriculum happening in the classrooms and do we see it with fidelity and is the pacing right and are they you know and actually to the earlier question that commissioner gabbert gupta or gupta gupta thank you. Sorry was asking this idea that english learners went down like this the curriculum is all new so everyone's sort of trying to figure out where do I put this card when and no one's asking the kids to talk the way we're asking them to talk before they have to get the like actual curriculum down before you can go back to engaging in discourse and so that that dip is not that surprising to me personally. I think the coach is also
asking what's going to work like what's hindering where are you stuck and a coach can model a lesson a coach can help to lesson plan. A coach can help with some of the pacing so there's a variety of things but the coach can help to identify what way to go . all right. I want to talk a little bit about the t k and the pre k for enrollment assistance. So we have family liaisons and early ed that specifically support families who are transitioning from our own preschool programs or head start programs to make sure that they know how to enroll in our t k system or in our kindergarten system. and we also have a huge outreach program at some of our programs where we have welcome nights, family nights they come and visit the different programs because we know if you have a pre k and a t k experience you're even more ready for kindergarten and then if you just come to tc.
So that's something we've really been focused on is making sure that families know they have access to preschool. We work in collaboration with the department of early childhood. All of our cbo partners. So it's a really big effort to make sure families know we're out there and that they have access to the programs. Do we have any data or reason to believe that the increase in kindergarten readiness for african-american and pacific islander students is a result of those outreach strategies or data on how many students were actually like whether we're increasing the percentage of that vocal population coming into k with a t k experience or with a preschool experience for example. Yeah. So we have data that shows that if you have preschool and k that that combination so you've started somewhere whether it's early start or a preschool
program here or a cbo and you go to t k you're going to be more prepared than if you just go to t k or if you just go to kindergarten. So we're seeing an increase of the last two years while families had more access to t k and preschool there's a huge saturation of preschool in the city it's been a big piece with the prop c dollars of course and so if you have that double experience you are more ready than a child that's just entering kindergarten. So we're seeing those increases over the last two years. We just had a cry event actually with the city where we were really highlighting this work so it was a great event. It was last week around what are we seeing and what can we do to continue to support but we are seeing that it's super awesome that there's more pre-k and t k access and adoption. I'm currently have a preschool so like pre-k and tkr life and so incredibly valuable for kids enrichment and their readiness.
I just want to kind of push one more bit to ask um we have a friend we have a visitor uninvited visitor um do we know whether because we know that there are big kindergarten readiness gains when you have pre-k and t k have we been successful in increasing the percentage of incoming aapi or sorry african american slash pacific islander students coming in to kindergarten who have that pre-k t k experience ? Yeah. so last year we were able to open a significant number of more t k programs in certain neighborhoods where we were able to access more four year olds into the program. So we had a large amount of families that were enrolled in preschool. That transition ends specifically at pacific islander and african american families.
I can't help but give a shout out as well to a particular school. Bret hart api scores just went up 70% for a kindergarten so we really attribute that early add and continued efforts to support um there were two other questions that we wanted to address. um one was around um there was a couple of questions around tier one, tier two and budget. Um this is a complicated question but I'm going to take a pass at it and maybe DR. Su you'll forgive me if I get it wrong but you know there's two sort of competing strategies. One is how do we staff all of our classrooms so that tier one instruction happens and happens robustly in the school case d I don't know if you read closely but there's three classroom teachers that have been missing since the beginning of the year, right?
A long term sub or a day to day sub cannot do the same thing as a classroom teacher that has a credential. Um and this is a super unpopular thing that I'm about to say and I know it because I feel terrible saying it but our our tests that are being asked to go back into the classroom and the additional coaching staff that we're asking they have multiple subject credentials and they are high quality teachers and if everybody does decide to go back into the classroom and doesn't all leave us which we hope they don't um then we will have hopefully classrooms that get staffed at 92% and can then add back an intervention because without intervention, without tier two we aren't going to we aren't going to see the gains that we want to see. Right? We need high quality tier one instruction and we need interventions for the students that need extra support at the tier two level which is both supporting teachers to understand how to pull small groups and all of that but also
the push in support of artists and additional instructional coaches like it. Absolutely is going to make a difference and it will hurt us and if we can somehow figure out how to retain the amazing staff that have been artists and coaches and they don't leave us then we can add those back in with supplemental dollars, right? Because we know that those supplemental dollars in many places are available and we do believe that intervention is key. I mean I worked at a school where we had four interventionist arts and we needed all four in order to do the work we were doing because they had to help students transition from spanish into english. And for the students that didn't just transition naturally we needed extra support to do that. The classroom teachers couldn't do it on their own so I do think we'll see some challenges in the data as we transition but hopefully over time as we mitigate the fiscal crisis we can we can get back. And then the other thing I wanted to bring up was around the sense of belonging. Um, and I don't know if someone else was going to mention this
but we've been really digging into a T.A.R.P. Report called the opportunity makers which if you haven't read we highly, highly recommend and they look at three aspects of schools that have made a difference for students and sense of belonging, consistency and instruction and coherence and structures of the three things the sense of belonging is not the end right? The sense of belonging is a way in order to for students to be to connect into curriculum, for students to be able to feel that they see themselves in the curriculum, that they feel connected to an adult that they understand why they're there and that school is for them. And I absolutely think it is a precursor to learning but without the rigorous classroom instruction, without the the relevance doesn't matter without the rigor. But the rigor doesn't matter if the relevance is missing. And so those two things really do go hand in hand. and if we think about it as like three pieces we center on our focal students so that we know what we're doing is working for the students that
require us to spend more time and love and care with them. We think about sense of belonging for them and for all and then we ensure that every single teacher knows what they're doing in the classroom and we can support them through the instructional coaches and through supporting the leaders. And then over time we get better. So that's it. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead excuse our student delegate. Thank you so much for your participation tonight. You when you guys leave I always think about a jury trial because when you do voir dire and you don't pick a jury, you go thinking excuse juror number two. So we think an excuse the first student tells you on on that point I, I completely agree and I'm convinced by staff presentation about the importance of sense of belonging. I know that the district does a lot of really important work
in terms of our like our um social climate survey. I'm trying to forget what the current acronym is but um and that's really important I think that the disconnect is one of um just perhaps the the purpose that we understand as a board the theory of action to serve in the monitoring reports in the context of these uh these reports and lest you now become so focused governance system and that the theory of action as it's currently developed there's a I think a bit of a mismatch which and so one ask that I would have for staff is that as uh staff receive student outcomes focused governance training that consider updating the theory of action to fit the model of what the monitor report's purpose is supposed to serve within that governance context because I think that um the the purpose of the theory of action is actually for us to
be able to evaluate and test on a time limited basis whether the strategies that you're actually deploying at schools are working and I don't think a sense of belonging is the actual strategy that you're deploying that we are evaluating here. It seems like we're evaluating the effectiveness of the new curriculum the of the instructional coaches of, you know, high quality professional development for teachers as opposed to putting as much focus on artifice for example. And so the theory of action doesn't actually reflect that strategy of the actual steps that we're measuring here of whether they work. and so I guess that's my my ask is that after student outcomes focus governance training the staff take a look at whether they feel that the
theory of action can be more refined to actually describe when we're monitoring like we're the purpose of the monitoring reports is basically to say we're trying this strategy is a strategy working. But I don't think that the theory of action fully aligns with the strategy that we're working that we're implementing here. So I think to follow up on that our goals are supposed to measure what students know and are able to do right and so we can it's a lot easier to measure math and reading abilities than it is to measure a sense of belonging. Um I mean yeah the data anyway we can argue about that later maybe over a beverage or something but the whole point of the work we're doing is to monitor what students can do and what students know, right? That's that's the focus of this
governance system. So to tie it back to your point okay, what can I just get before you go? I just want to say one little tiny thing which is if a student doesn't feel a sense of belonging in class, they will not be in class and it does not matter how good your instruction is if they are walking around the hallways there are sparklers that are out in the common spaces instead of in our classrooms we could have the best teaching staff and the reduction in social emotional supports in our schools and the lack of self of sense of belonging will impact the outcomes. so I so and I for you dinner yeah I mean I, I don't know if I necessarily disagree. It's okay to disagree I think I disagree I mean here's where I think I experience attention right now right I think as a board we're very clear on our student outcome goals being the thing that we are focused on in monitoring and a theory of action articulate introduces
something that is not captured in our outcome goals, right and so so there's I think there is a opportunity here and perhaps even just a question of of what greater alignment should there be between what what our educators believe are critical components to demonstrate learning and growth for our students with what we have stated in our goals as the the thing that we are going to be focused on in progress monitoring and so and and I wonder if this is a this is something worth asking ourselves is well and not as a board but as a superintendent and her team around should a sense of belonging appear somewhere you're asking the child psychologist right? I think I have it is for yes right because because response so I think I agree with all of
you sense of belonging does belong as a guardrail and it has been and it has been noted in guardrail to under the whole a whole child. So you know I think we leave it in guardrail too and we'll focus this one on student outcomes so it's a guardrail to say we have to make sure that the guardrail is achieved so that the student outcomes can be well. So then I would just say then because then I would say that there's a question around the alignment of our planning structures with our progress monitoring reports, with our interim goals and guardrails with our ultimate goals and guardrails, right? So like if I if our theory of action I mean I think there's a question here of what is our agreed upon definition of a theory of action and what goes into that theory of action because I would imagine I mean not imagine I know that you are also probably doing a lot more work that goes beyond explicitly looking at our
student outcome goals per your jobs. Right and and so it begs this question is the use of our theory of action merely to reflect the goals that we've stated and the progress towards those goals or are we is there an expectation here that that theory of action actually reflect the work that you are right. So like and there's a question here on our use of a theory of action and therefore then what goes into a theory of action that probably is a a it's important to to agree upon that if it's going to go into a progress report. Right. Because our focus is on then very explicitly for outcome goals. But I think we as a board have to be careful what happens. We split our responsibility here is to hold the superintendent accountable, to hold the staff accountable to do this work. The theory of action is not our job. That's the superintendent and staff's job, right? so and I really appreciate DR.
Connor your comment about the the guardrails and sense of belonging being there and to the point of part of the conversation we just had earlier we have a lot of work to do around those guardrails and making sure that our interims are measurable. So I'm glad that we're tying all of that back together here and I really, really appreciate the comment. I mean I'm I'm a maslow over bloom girl day over day, right? I mean like if if you know we are not meeting the basic needs of our students they're not showing up ready to learn and that's that's key. So I really think you thank you for naming that as well. I'm also recognizing the time so because we also have goal to next so can and a vote on a math curriculum now hopefully that'll be quick yeah so commissioner rey if we can have it have you close with this final remark and then if there are any final comments that commissioner is want to make before I move on we'll make some questions final questions, remarks or comments. Question that thank you.
MS. Wiseman award for for holding me accountable to that yes, go for commissioner ray okay. Um I have a couple of questions then. One of them is what I guess I want to ask the question that I asked before about the source or where the theory of action came from. I think at least for me it would be helpful to know what the context is here. Like a number of us have had questions around how to align these things but where did this originally come from and how if at all are we measuring or determining whether all of these things are being done? Second of all, if you can't for whatever reason answer this question right now whether for time or because you need to go back and think about it or something it it would be wonderful to get this question answered in some fashion as well as whether or not the question I asked about the schools that got significant funds to improve literacy I
remember actually bret hart was one of those schools now maybe the kindergarten you know, improvement has nothing to do with that money because they're very new but having a sense of whether or not there is an overlap between the schools that did well in the schools that got the extra money is something I would still I would like an answer to whenever you can provide it. Thank you. I can answer some of those questions. I do also want to make sure and I'll make an attempt to attend to some of the earlier questions that were asked as well that we definitely made note of and wrote down but have not yet responded to in particular the first one. Um, so one of the things that I will say in terms of the theory of action is collectively developed in order to organize their strategic actions across multiple departments and divisions. I think we definitely take into consideration the feedback on that in terms of revising the
theory of action for next year . In terms of the measurement, one of the things that you MAY have noticed in the case study design is they are individually written to have the individual metrics for each stage of the theory of action. So for example to reference the questions related to learning walks when we talk about in the theory of action the teacher's implementation of affirming and engaging in tier one curriculum and instruction that is the learning walk data that is collected. And so we do it in two different metrics one is externally conducted by T.A. P which was presented within the learning walks. We also conduct those as part of the instructional cabinet that meets monthly where we do training and calibration and then that instructional cabinet has teams organized by cohort who do monthly learning walks using similar to T.A.R.P. The core rubric to evaluate the degree to which we're meeting that component of the theory of action. So that's just the measurement associated with teacher actions and we have similar um measurement tools for other stages for example the
curriculum implementation tracker referenced earlier or the coaching logs associated with the instructional coaches. The other question with regards to I'm assuming or I'm going to make the assumption is schools who were part of the early literacy block grant that range of schools over the last couple of years received grant money to implement a series of more specifically foundational skills programs. There was a range of program supported not all of them were the ones that have been adopted by the district. Those schools I would say without being able to speak specifically to individually be within the current fall to winter growth we see a range of outcomes so in some cases we do see strong growth at those schools. In other cases we do not. And so I wouldn't say with certainty it's a 1 to 1 correlation that those schools are now producing gains that are at or above the district average. I can also address
commissioner gupta's initial question of elbel and I believe it was with regards to layman's terms for case study a and and I want to make specifically the to confirm was it about tier two specifically just some of the jargon here specifically with some of the jargon of glc and altie and just understanding some of that? yes. Thank you so much for that feedback. I do want to also make note as a point of feedback and reflection for us to make sure that we're fully explaining terms and not using abbreviations without having first defined the system or structure. we all do it. don't worry no more proud, no more. so some of those structures I can name so g l t refers to grade level team. So for example if I'm a school that has three third grade teachers we would meet together as a team of third grade teachers to do shared instructional planning together
I'll t refers to instructional leadership team which is normally comprised of a mix of administrators coaches, classroom teachers, para educators sometimes families depending on the structure to work on the schools instructional plan whether it be professional learning systems, certain schools or metric collection. So that would be for I'll t and then the other two pieces that were referenced were one was tier two instruction so that would be additional all intervention provided for students who are in need of academic support in a certain area it might be something like phonics, it could be math intervention but it would be additional targeted time that students would work with an educator, volunteer etc. To get additional academic support. And then the one other term that was referenced in that case study is 5050 and that refers to in language pathways the balance of language of instruction throughout a student's day. So 5050 for example in a spanish language pathway would
mean that 50% of the student's day was in english and 50% of the day was in spanish. I do want to give you a chance to respond to any last questions before we move on because I know there are a lot of questions that are asked by yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. I just had a very quick response back to some of the oral questions about kind of the research design as as how I think about it. Ideally we have a theory of action that that's the working version that we're constantly kind of gathering feedback and refining and modifying as we do our work and every component of that would be measured so that we would have a data source a way to gather them and analyze them. So all the data that's mentioned in the case studies ideally we would have the same data points gathered for every single school in the system and here comes the challenge, right? Because for some of those measures doing that at scale
becomes incredibly challenging. And one good example is the classroom observation right? So instructional cabinet has divided up into teams to go out to sites and do the observations made covers a small fraction of sites and even smaller fraction of classrooms and tatp has been doing systematically sampled classrooms and schools observations. Again very small fraction pales in comparison to the number of classrooms and teachers in the district. So ultimately we're not able to completely measure the theory of action for every single classroom and site throughout the whole district. Right. Which is part of the reason why we lean on this case study approach, right? Because we have domain experts who can look at the overall structure and the systems in the work that's being done and inform our hypothesis and I having been part of this team would sit here and say that it almost border on a true hypothesis testing it because we had some notions about looking at the implementation quality in depth. We believe that this school
will have good outcomes and it was truly blind because we formed these expectations before the star growth data came up. So as we were getting ready to prepare this report we were just, you know, sitting there crossing fingers. Hope we are right. Hope you're right. All right. Based on the implementation data and for I think many of these cases our expectation was actually bought. Right. Which is great. So that is to say that we weren't cherry picking cases based on the outcomes and backtracking to to be able to tell the story we truly had expectations about if we have all these right pieces in place we should see the good outcomes and if we don't have those right pieces in place then we shouldn't see the good outcomes and sometimes even when we had the good pieces in place we don't see good outcomes. Right? That's the case study be right which gives us the opportunity to then learn from it. Right. And I think one of the commissioners raised the question of do we know like it wasn't some third factor that's
causing it right. So case study kind of points to that and what we're learning from that is yes, some schools do in fact need some deeper interventions and differentiated support because it was now our modified revised belief that it's those factors that were the roadblocks, those challenges that kids faced in translating that strong implementation to strong outcomes. So we are engaged in these continuous learning cycles and that sometimes entails modifying the theory of action as we learn more and this is the endeavor that we're engaged in. Thank you for your questions. Can I ask a follow up question just of the schools that had high fidelity had the the far left column was high was the next column high for the majority of them? Did they also have high outcomes or was it more evenly
split that I guess that's for the schools you were able to gather data on like do we have um do we see that result of across the majority of schools with high fidelity I am seeing in terms of the implementation fidelity that correlation as well with some of the data as as well so I just one of the examples is the case study b so they were the high implementation and then the lower impact but actually when we had discussions with them they noted they actually had increases in goal one as well. They had a 4% increase and so we are looking at you know that fidelity piece with the implementation there is correlation so our low impact is actually like the 4% increase and we're trying to support as well with some of the gl 1.2 and 1.3 so comprehensively. Oh can I ask one question also just about our english learners interim goal 1.3 and the data on that just so I can
understand it better especially with the change in the spanish model because school had amazing results like fantastic almost you know 20% increases which is wonderful when we measure our english learners um ,it's like our spanish speaking english learners english proficiency some of them are going to get reclassified when they become proficient and so I guess I want to know more about how the data works. Are we essentially is the data under reflecting the learning growth of our english learning spanish speakers because when they grow we remove them from the pool and the only people who are measuring are the folks who have not met that reclassification goal and if so ,is there a better way for us
to actually track the success of the district in effectively teaching english learning spanish speakers english literacy is like one of my favorite subjects so I we're just cut me off. So I do think that my question is a great one, right? Because as students go through peer progress through their proficiency levels and we reclassify them, they are the most successful english learners and then they're no longer english learners. That's an accurate statement. The state does keep them as classified as english learners for two years. Yes. So they are considered english learners not in our documents because they're reclassified and don't have to take elc anymore but in our data for the two subsequent years. But you are right that students that reclassify actually are much more proficient than even sometimes students that were
initially fluent or not english learners because they have the benefit of being bilingual often. so there is some interesting data that you could dig down into. um and then I would also say that for students that are learning in multiple languages we expect that their initial data in english is going to be lower and that over time it catches that. We haven't seen that play out and one of the reasons we're going to a 5050 model is after the de lark looked at those recommendations which you heard what they were saying is this isn't playing out and as people have learned, you know, as the research has gotten more robust on bilingual programs and immersion programs, what they're finding is that the initial 9010 model which was the golden standard which definitely at the two schools I worked at we never we we even mix languages new research has come out around trans languaging and the ability of the brand to be able to handle two languages and so over time we expect that that will hopefully change.
So yes and no answer. so I guess my ask is could the team especially maybe in working with the superintendent on coming up with new interim goals craft interim goals that are able to fully capture the learning of our spanish speaking english language learners so that we have a way of understanding like for example is the data low because kids are learning and or is the data low because kids are learning and so we're taking the top of the bell curve off or are is the data low because the only kids in the data are newcomers and haven't had time to learn yet? Like I think our data isn't telling us enough about what strategies we can employ and where we're having successes and so that would be my ask is that you work with the superintendent to gather data that is going to more accurate lee and compass what's happening for students on the ground?
sure we'll focus on growth. We're going to have commissioner fisher and our conversation now with her final question and then we'll move to a goal to okay. Well so one of the things that we haven't talked at all about in our theory of action here is our afterschool programing and the the potential alignment there. I think what oh okay, I can do that too. I mean it relates to budget but particularly for our multilingual learners what de la has presented on in the past is the importance for homework support in the afterschool programs because very often our students you know if homework comes home in english and the family does not speak, read or write english, the family can't support with homework it right so making sure that so I mean and I was just at guadalupe last week where they were talking about the importance of springboard in the family component right so anyway that overall alignment I know yeah so when we so budget critically
important but I think my real question is that we'll put a pin in that we'll talk about that later. Um my question was really you know assistant superintendent load you mentioned earlier that the key component of is the coaching success success is focusing on the school admins and so again going back to budget right and going back to what commissioner wiseman ward asked earlier about like are we setting ourselves up for success or failure some of these things that we're talking about being integral to success like assistant principals we're cutting you know we're cutting that like how I guess still trying to wrap our brain around everything. So helping us with the bringing it all back together from a budget standpoint I won't introduce anything else, I promise. We thank you for the question. Commissioner fisher and thank you to the team here who's answered parts and pieces of your question.
I think in in summary we are we see the benefit of having instructional coaches providing hands on in the school in the classroom on the ground supports to our teachers and to the school community. So you will see in this budget we have preserved our instructional coaches for literacy and we're adding instructional coaches for math as we are going to now transition onto the math side. But that's how we're going to continue to support this. Similar to what I MS. Steiner said earlier, we need to have rock solid high quality tier one instruction so we need to make sure that we have teachers in. She didn't say rock solid, she just said high quality. I added the rock side high quality teacher certificated teachers in all of our classrooms so that we can move towards these big audacious
goals of third grade literacy for our students. And so that's the commitment that we are doing and making for our students to achieve these goals. thank you so much for your time, your work and for your your answers. I know this is we'll see you again probably I think in JUNE 2nd seconds. Oh, we'll also see you in two seconds but in JUNE thank you. Moving on to oh no, my script moving on to the next item which is goal three math goal two sorry. well, you know, this is why we need to move our meeting along. Moving goal to eighth grade math outcomes I will turn it to the superintendent and I'm just going to hand it right back to MS.. krugman to continue on with her presentation. thank you so much. Be here all night. We are going to go to transition on to gold number two which is related to eighth grade math.
We are excited similar to goal number one to present an update specifically highlighting trends related to strategic initiatives for fall to winter growth. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it on if we can go to the next slide. Thank you. Okay. good evening again everyone. Similar chart structure as goal one that you have seen uh, go on the left side is uh, tracking historical tracking of the goal progress year by year and then the right side of the uh the formative data. Overall I would characterize this as mixed but hopeful results. um, and as commissioner miller pointed out before I in terms of interim goal 1.3 right the dip is not as deep as before, right? So for the student outcomes at least maintain last year's performance in terms of interim goal 2.1 or improved right so
the the dipping from fall to winter is not as deep or they increased. So we see some improvement and the argument that we're making is that in large part we hypothesize that this is due to the curriculum that is being piloted uh throughout middle school we did not meet interim goals 2.1 and 2.3. So focusing on african-american students in third grade uh and hispanic latino students and seven eighth grade. But more on that later. but overall goal goal two is within 2.5 percentage point. Uh, meeting the end of year target um, so we have uh great hope that we are able to we should be able to meet that by the end of the school year. Next slide please. Summarizing the successes and challenges so a very extensive curriculum pilot uh, showing early signs of promise for promoting student learning especially for our focus student populations contained
in the school very similar to ela curriculum implementation which is in the first year uh for math we're not even in the implementation year. This is a pilot stage a very extensive majority of middle grade math teachers are piloting it so we generally would not expect to see uh large scale changes happening at this point. So this gives us great hope that we are on the right track and this giant ship is starting to kind of slow down and shift course in the right direction. also helped by exemplary implementation by some teachers leading to stronger student achievement as I will briefly discuss on the next slide and what's really working well in terms of the implementation this year and the math curriculum pilot uh that's happening concurrently and hopefully the implementation next year is that we are able to combine learnings from both, right? So math implementation is not
will not simply be building on the pilot experience of this year but we'll be drawing from what we're learning uh in terms of how the language arts and literature literacy curriculum implementation is going um currently as well uh and we'll be also drawing from the best practices in the lesson study as well some of the challenges moving forward. It's more of a goal, a mission as we move forward to generate more of these quote unquote exemplary teachers. So just to remind you example of teachers were those who had perfect attendance or professional development activities put on by ed services um as well as having high ratings 3 or 4 out of four on across all dimensions the core rubrics essential content area. So we want to focus on being able to support teachers in ways that they also become exemplary teachers in terms of implementing the math curriculum.
Um second point is focusing on maintaining and accelerating the academic outcomes for underserved populations of students. We see some really hopeful signs coming out of the curriculum. Pilot um so building on and sustaining and building on those those growth and lastly providing strengthened uh differentiated support for teachers which is one of the key learnings coming out of the pilot experience. Uh again not just in math but also in language arts and literacy as well. So uh strategies thing and then lining up the support so that we can we are able to provide those differentiated supports to teachers. Next slide please. uh, this is the fun part and this again was very much a hypothesis testing based on our work on uh, the math curriculum pilot. What it basically shows is that that the curriculum the pilot curriculum is a lot more effective than the current district math curriculum and promoting student outcomes. Just a very, very quick uh,
primer on how the analysis was done and was hinted at in the report. This is not an experiment. We did not randomly assign teachers uh some teachers to be pilot teachers and others to continue to uh implement the curriculum. teachers opted into it. Um, so given that that was a situation how do we go about actually teasing out the effect of the curriculum versus not? Um, so it's something that we do on a on a regular basis and looking at program implementation and program impact um we have the students that are in curriculum pilot teachers classrooms and we use software statistical technique to actually go out and find matches of similar students who are not in pilot teachers classrooms and these matches are based on being at the same school having the similar starting point and uh and the star assessment in the fall uh some of the basic demographic characteristics. So we're trying to create as
much of a control and treatment conditions as possible to make it to be able to make this comparison and the result is that it is very positive outcome and statistically significant. Um difference between the curriculum pilot and the existing supervised curriculum. What's even more heartening is that african-american students in the pilot had the largest gains among the groups that are represented here. Um and so we need to actually focus on learning more about what exactly facilitated that and being able to build on that and just to pick up the speed a little bit on the right side as a comparison of exemplary versus baseline implementation by by teachers. So just focusing on those schools where there were some exemplary teachers to be able to contain the comparison to those schools only um what we see is that the students are pilot teachers uh perform better than the students the pilot teachers who had just baseline implementation rates are doing the basic things in the classroom. But there are some teachers
that went above and beyond um and hispanic and latino students and exemplary pilot classes had the largest gains rate. So again I think there are some hopeful signs for 2.1 and 2.3 interim goals that as if we adopt this curriculum and implemented moving forward um some of these gains should be uh more widely uh experienced through our various classes and in schools. And again the last point is that uh we need to strategize and provide support for teachers to as many of them to become these exemplary implementers of the curriculum as possible. Next slide next slide please. so in considering how to respond to this data, we wanted to break our response into two parts one is specific to spring 2025 strategic response and then the next is a longer term vision and considering the 2526 school year. So in terms of spring 2025, the first thing that we just wanted
to name and highlight as called out in the report is that it is the initial design of the middle school math pilot to occur for the entire school year. So our hope is that we will continue to see these outsized gains in pilot classrooms continue from the winter into the spring administrate of the s. The next piece is that we have continued to provide differentiated site professional learning support as named in previous reports. we do have some work with achievement network for instructional coaching and we've redeployed those resources to better match them with teachers of higher need in the spring semester to work on instructional practice. And then the last piece in terms of vocal student support has two different pieces to it. One is considering the design of professional learning as part of tier one curriculum to need more support and instruction for educators around tiered intervention as part of the hopefully to be adopted curriculum. The second part is supplemental
supports. The first piece of that is we are continuing to work on engaging school sites in the use of why isn't for online tutoring as well as the use of excel and dreambox as supplemental supports. However, we are deeply evaluating whether or not those are scalable resources given some of the concerns that we've had in our usage data. And so as part of again the hopeful forthcoming adoption we are considering how to better employ and deploy supplemental resources that have stronger alignment to our tier one curriculum and instruction and to focus on fewer tools with higher usage and implementation by teachers. If we can go to the next slide. The second pieces are broader considerations for response plan to be inclusive of the 2526 school year a key component of that based on the data is that sorry to keep saying hopefully forthcoming curriculum adoption which
includes comprehensive k-8 math curriculum as well as all aligned professional learning for teachers, instructional coaches and administrators in that launch professional development plan. We are also looking at similar to language and literacy a phased implementation plan. One of the main differences that we are highlighting and that we see play out in some of the focus groups that we've done with administrators and instructional coaches is ensuring that as we think about implementation we have a balance of what we would call curriculum agnostic and curriculum dependent professional learning when we did our language and literacy adoption these were sequential we did a full year of professional learning on the instructional shifts associated with the common core prior to adoption that focused on the design of the curriculum and with the timing of math those pieces will concur will occur concurrently and so we do want to consideration for a balance of both.
The other piece that we're looking at is specific to the lessons study network in considering the ways in which that professional learning model can be employed by instructional coaches who will be taking on the work of math implementation and how those same networks of learning can be integrated within the development and the systems of instructional leadership teams. Or I'll tease and with that we are going to pause for questions. Okay. Um who would like to start us off with our question asking? Go for it commissioner for sure. I'll start with one and then defer to the team. I really appreciate the heavy lift of curriculum and instruction this year with you know the implementing the new ela curriculum and now piloting a new math curriculum and now implementation potentially of a of a new math curriculum. I think my my concern my
question which is which highlights a concern you know as we saw last year with the controller rosenfeld's report for us as a district you know there were concerns that we were biting off more than we could handle with everything we tried to do last year. So really I think my question is to you and to the superintendent have we allotted enough resources in order to make sure that both of these I mean like these are our top two goals here third grade reading level, eighth grade math have we allocated all the resources we need in order to make sure that both of these curricula are being implemented with fidelity and actually getting the results we want for our students and driving the outcomes we want? Question number one I'll stop there for now.
Once again thank you for the report. I will be brief. I'm curious how we think about the implementation of this. You know, I appreciate the pilot and it's really fascinating. I mean this is another question for for a beverage or it's just sort of how do you control for which which sites get it and making sure that that matches the population. That is fascinating but as we think about going from piloting to implementation and then laying that over our goals that we have within our our goals and our interim goals, how how does that align and how do you think about that because I mean obviously implementation across you know all of our sites is a lengthy process and I recognize that our interim goals are fairly short term. So just love your your perspective and thoughts on how we match those two and I think this is a related question which is does the fact that we are adjusting and implementing
new curriculum make you feel like let me rephrase the question we are changing curriculum. We are implementing new curriculum after we've already set these goals that are we're now halfway through. does that impact the likelihood that you think that we will be able to meet them in the time that we've allotted? I assuming that this is going to get us where we need to go but any time we're doing some shifting it like you all have said, it doesn't automatically happen after an overnight because of the the work that needs to go into making sure that folks know you know how to use this and how to implement it so what if given that we're in the middle of our cycle 2.5 years in how likely is it that you all think will ultimately be able to meet those goals and maybe you didn't think they were realistic and in the first place. So putting that aside like is this something that we should be rethinking whether it
relates to interim or otherwise ? Um, ditto to those questions. Um, I had a question around exemplary teachers so in the pilot of of of really any curricula we know the investment of the teacher and wanting to actually spend the time and the energy necessary to implement and understand the curricula matters um and if this was a purely opt in initiative presumably we are getting our most engaged staff at the front of the line who are raising their hands and saying I want to try this and swap amplified this was math out with any other curricula you you will you will probably see at least some sort of gain because teachers are just invested in doing well what is our plan for everyone else when they do come online knowing that we implementation is imperfect and perhaps the folks who are
already most invested in making this switch are already steadily making it. I'm curious like what the next phase of that work will look like and what kind of I don't know about strategies but systems and expectations we are putting in place to ensure that we are prepared for that next level of folks who MAY feel differently about the curriculum that's coming. Um and and it's so so there's a question around that. Um, I also want to acknowledge I know we're about to have a discussion and action on the curriculum uh that have been selected as well but to tie this to general budget questions decimals math is extremely expensive. Um and so I we want what's best for our kids. I think there's a question here of maybe we will do what it takes but what what are what does resource allocation look like for a curriculum at this size and scale.
Um yeah just very quickly this curriculum is already paid for . We've already paid for this curriculum for the whole district. We've already allocated funds. Sorry sorry technicality like we've already allocated funds and these are one time funds that was allocated so we have to use it. but amplify this is back there's an ongoing expense here because there are licensed products. Right? I can talk specifically about the components of it. do you want me to respond now or not? So I'm recognizing the easy answer. There are ongoing costs because it's my understanding is both teacher and student licenses that come with them. What does those math well, I only know that because I implemented this myself so so I know that there's costs ongoing costs related to it in addition to additional costs. So I just have a question on that. But I'll follow the process
here by my own doing so thank you. my question builds on MR. Wiseman word and PRESIDENT Kim's questions which is it's like amazing that we've seen this level of growth just in a short period of time and I'm not an educator but I understand from listening to educators that that's often not the case when a new curriculum is implemented because there's so much learning. So to see results essentially in the first semester of implementation is really remarkable. And so my question is essentially I understand this is a pretty wide pilot. Um, if we were to extrapolate out these gains across the district how much growth would we have seen or would we expect to see and um related to that given that as students learn in one grade they come in to the next grade more prepared? do we expect to see accelerate writing results and to commissioner wiseman words
point what is the what is the limit on that in terms of do we expect them the increase to continue to grow or will it level out as perhaps PRESIDENT Kim pointed out, we bring in folks who MAY maybe have less excitement or fidelity to the new curriculum even the everybody again, I have four questions. My first question is related to the question I asked about instructional minutes previously in the q&a document . So sorry I understand based on the responses that there are varying reasons why the number of instructional minutes is as it is but I want to ask do you think that increasing instructional minutes in math would in fact improve our outcomes in math? This is one of our three goals stated so I wanted to ask about that. How big an effect do you think
increasing instructional minutes would have? The second thing I wanted to ask is um some of the things that are mentioned like implementing advisory to increased increased students sense of belonging. That's one of the things that's mentioned and the responses to the questions about uh why there are potentially fewer math minutes and I understand that there there is a family related effect there but you know perhaps a conduit for advisory teachers to speak to families and so forth. uh, whether or not it actually increases students sense of belonging do we have evidence for that that advisory itself does that I say this in part because I've never talked to a middle school student who thought that advisory was helpful to middle school students so or their friends who who find it to be a useful thing. But I'm wondering why we think it is helpful in increasing students sense of belonging. The next question also comes from the response to the instructional minutes where it says the decision is influenced
by the seventh period day so I wondered whether or not the district has done any analysis as to whether the seventh period day has impacted positively or negatively kids academic performance. And my last question related to something that I think it was MS.. Krugman mentioned what coaching support I didn't catch it all but who will the coaches be for this? Will they be the same people who were doing literacy coaching this year? Will they be different people? Will people be handling both math and literacy coaching? Thank you you can kiki again if you need a quick I'll respond to some other questions around the seventh period day and advisory. So I mean I think you know that the initiate wonder initially the middle grades redesign started in 2015 long before I
was the middle school assistant superintendent but I was part of the initial group of people that got together and thought about why do we need a middle school redesign? And there were a couple of reasons. One middle school is middle school so everyone's I mean not everyone's been in middle school. I went to junior high school but you know, like it is three years of like really tough times for students emotionally adolescence is kicking in. They've left some place that knows them for six years and then gone to this like desert of a place that often is way larger and um, they're they're a little lost at that age group. So one of the reasons we put advisory and was really around connecting kids to one another and a family connecting them to a homeroom period type of a person who could then have a connection to families is um allowing them to have some time for social emotional learning. So there actually is in many schools or was before we cut advisory to add instructional minutes last year for math more
social emotional time like it is less now and we are doing a study around the impacts of of initiate wonder that hopefully will have some results and I think they're they're coming out in the next year or so and to be honest I need to check on that but they they are doing a study right now and working with early implementers of the initiate wonder approach. the second reason about the seventh period day had nothing really to do with math. It was really about giving access to students with ieps and student and english learners students that need to take additional academic classes like yelled and essay in minutes or math intervention or math acceleration reading acceleration access to electives like we wanted those students to be able to take course and we wanted those students to be able to take a um a world language. And so this was really also about giving access to students to more than just their academic core and allowing them to still have their academic needs met.
So those two things existed in the in the middle school redesign and then it also allowed both first period for teachers but also for a common planning time for teachers to go back to that grade level time at the middle school level at the secondary level you also want departments to align so like how do you get both grade levels and department level sufficient time within the contract day in order for them to do the deep thinking work that allows them to be better at instruction? So like there were myriad pieces that came into the the redesign that would increasing minutes and math leads to higher outcomes. It's a great question. It's a good theory. It depends right to the point of like you need a high quality instruction, you need teachers that know how to do it. You need time for professional learning. And so our theory does include that this extra period where people get together and learn about what they're learning is
going to help math instruction and so we need like concrete data from that people that are our data partners to like back that up. Um but I do think that there are benefits other than just whether or not more minutes would add to more um instructional gains. We also moved toward a black schedule in the last couple of years so the examination of like how does the block work versus a 45 minute period is also an examination of some of the things that we've been looking at. So hopefully that helps. I think that the curriculum and instruction team is going to talk a little bit about the supports for math. But before I handed over I will just say as as we were talking about putting this report together and we were talking about this exemplary versus baseline and who does the pilot. We also talked about schools that pilot it all together. Right? So there are particular schools that maybe not every math
teacher wanted to pilot but the person who convinced them was persuasive and what I would say is that in the schools where we're seeing whole school implementation from the perspective of like when we bring leaders together to ask them what are you learning about what's working and math, they're like well everyone's piloting because now you're all talking about the same language and so there is obvious need for an examination of what do we learn from their implementation of language and literacy? What did we learn from the pilot and what do we have to continue that I'll let my colleagues talk about? But this idea of like what's the leader doing which is falls squarely in my purview and when we get together we ask them like really can you tell us like what that you're leading versus you're just lucky. Can you tell us the things you're doing in your school that are setting up structures for teachers to collaborate together at that are supporting teachers that need additional supports?
What are the new teachers getting that the rest of the teachers don't not need? What are the the math teachers doing in terms of looking at student work every single week when they're together to say which of the students are progressing and why? How are we learning to to PRESIDENT Kim's point like kyrie leveraging the tools that come with amplify dismas if we decide to adopt that to say this is a really amazing program that comes with a lot of assessment tools and allows us to learn in the moment that our previous curriculum didn't have in it. So there's a it's a complicated answer. It's not cut and dry more minutes with equal success if that makes sense. before we move on, can we just do a quick vote to extend our meeting time past 10:00? Sadly so sorry. So moved second commissioner alexander commissioner fischer . Yes. Commissioner. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Huling yes. Commissioner ray yes.
Commissioner wiseman ward yes. PRESIDENT Kim yes. For the record. MS. Wiseman ward said that she would vote no at some point so but not this because this is a very good conversation but one of these days please thank you. please go ahead so I can just build on that a little bit more about sort of the question related to as we go from those who piloted to the full scale. And one of the things I did just want to highlight is in the middle school pilot in particular we had 84 teachers across 18 schools that is I think all but 1 or 2. We had 21 being from the all but three middle schools and kids had at least one pilot teacher and 84 teachers represents roughly the majority 60% of middle school math teachers across both general education and special education. And so one of the things that
we really emphasized is trying to get as many pilot teachers as possible which really took all kinds it is a very wide range in some cases we had administered orders who volunteered a vacancy and that vacancy was then filled by an emergency credentialed teacher before the first day of school who had never taught before. So there is a really wide range of educators who participated in the pilot which is one of the reasons we were so extra excited about the data. But in particular I think it did give a really good picture of the range of professional learning supports that are needed in order to address implementation. These are teachers with a wide range of experience and expertise and so that's one piece that I did just want to highlight and the other piece that I wanted to name was related to the cost and so I'll talk about a couple of different components of what is built into the cost which is in our next action item. But I will briefly address now it was a as it was a question
and so there's three major components that come with an adoption and this is not specific to amplify does most math but has been part of every adoption that we've done between last year and this year. And the first is digital licenses. Often we purchase for both students and staff. those are annual licenses that do have to be renewed every year. The next piece is what we refer to as consumable materials which do have to be replaced every year. Those are things like workbooks and the next piece is physical materials that we do refurbishments for. so these would be things like the manipulative kids, these would be print teacher guides that are an initial purchase which is not small but that we don't do that full purchase year after year we do a refurbishment at roughly of 10 to 20% depending on the item in terms of amplify does MS. Math it has all of those components but the same is true for each image into reading. The same is true for imagine
learning and the same is also true for real education the cost of amplify does most math is roughly comparable to the cost that we purchased yale education last year. It is definitely not on the lower end of curriculum purchasing but prices aren't what they used to be and we've gotten the best deal that we can so I would say it is on par on par with our expenditures for ela. And the other piece that I'll say is you'll notice some contract differences when it comes to middle school we purchase on a yearly basis and for elementary school it is a five year contract cost and part of that has to do with locking in costs. Part of it also has to do with anticipated funds. Elementary school is a far larger purchase than middle school. We are able to absorb the consumable and refurbishment and digital renewals within our annual lottery funds which is not true of an elementary purchase. So we have taken into consideration the costs
associated with it. Some of the questions about switching to a new new curriculum and whether we are likely to be able to meet that target in 2027 as one of the commissioners I mentioned, yes it is exactly our hope that as we if we adopt uh adopt and implement a new curriculum that students learning would accumulate right? So the effectiveness of it would build over year over year. It's this year's sixth graders, right? Uh would be in eighth grade and 2027. So um, they would have at least two more years of under the new curriculum and on all the aspects of teaching and learning we are hoping that the new curriculum will be an improvement over um over what exists right now and to commission the weismann words question before I believe it was always our plan to actually adopt and implement the new
curriculum uh because the curriculum out of by 20 some years ago did identify that as fsd would not be able to make progress on on math in the absence of a new and different curriculum. So that's exactly what we're doing and yes it is unfortunate that it is coming in the middle of a cycle. Obviously if we ideally would have come sooner and earlier in the process so that students reaching eighth grade in 2027 would have had more years under the new curriculum. but we are working with what we have and we're learning lessons from the pilot and through the implementation we will continue to iterate um exactly like the the language arts and literacy curriculum implementation that we're going through right now. We'll learn through the implementation. It'll give us a better platform to to learn those lessons and improve and to be able to provide differentiated supports and guidance to teachers and to students so that um we continue to strive for the the target
that we have set for 2027. Can you quickly on adoption of the curriculum itself can you share what is what was current what was the case of k-8 math curricula in our schools that we are leaving behind and now adopting with our new curricula ? Yes, I'm happy to share um, so I'm going to try to give as accurate a history as possible. I was not a part of the district when this initially happened so if somebody if I get the years wrong please correct me but roughly during the rollout of the common core circa 2010 at the time there were very few publishers who had common core aligned published curriculum at the time the district made the decision to actually write its own math curriculum and so the district engaged in that multi-year endeavor in writing its own k-12 curriculum. I will say at specific grade bands it did borrow pieces from published curriculum um that we had been paying licensing for for many years. However it is in-house developed curriculum so that's been in place since roughly the adoption of the common core
standards um I also recognize that we're also going through pre-algebra implementation and so how does how did the two implementations mesh together and what's that effect on our goals? Yep, I'm happy to answer that. So in the initial evaluation of curriculum when we evaluated middle school curriculum for the potential to move them forward to piloting and then the potential to move them forward for adoption, it was at the same time that the wood district was engaging in the redesign of middle school math courses and so at the time we were very specific that as part of the evaluation we had multiple criteria but we looked at programs that also middle school programs that also had algebra one and so in the case of amplify does most math, those teachers who have been piloting in middle school have been piloting across four courses which are math six,
seven math eight and algebra one as a publisher amplified as math. Math provides a series of course offerings they are inclusive of those four courses in addition to a compressed math six seven and a compressed mass seven eight um so what I would say is that they are concurrent but separate initiatives and so specifically in asking for the adoption of amplified as most math the adoption is for grades six seven and eight which is not course specific so any place in which the district lands in a decision about middle school course offerings that can fluidly match the adoption of amplified does most math because of the breadth of core offerings from that specific publisher. One one follow up question because we're supposed to be students that you know our goal is to be student centered rather than adult centered and I'm curious has there been
feedback from students or the student experience and in this and I can give you anecdotal from my daughter is and is in sixth grade but I want to hear from your I would love nothing more than to jump in our next presentation and so one of the things that you'll see highlighted in the next presentation associated with the adoption is for us it's incredibly important that when we are doing pilot data collection you'll see it from multiple groups inclusive of students. So again without at the risk of jumping forward. So for example for middle school we had over 4400 student surveys completed based on those are surveys about their experience within the pilot and we had a roughly 45 student focus groups for elementary school and for eye ready we had over 1300 student surveys for imagine learning over 1100 we had over 50 student focus groups for each of those and that's all student data collection. So it's specifically focus groups and in surveys for
students reflecting on their experience not just of the materials but the instructional practices of their teachers. So you'll see highlighted within that data there are no decisions about how their teacher practice changed in comparison to different programs and over time well I can just give you like an actual student example last week I was in a classroom and they were doing I had to look at a graphing inequalities on a number line with an open circle versus a closed circle. I was like I have no idea what they're talking about right there. I was like oh thank GOD I'm not evaluating this lesson but the principal and I he was like go ahead, talk to kids. And so I went up to one of the kids and they were like telling me the difference I'm I'm still not going to explain it to you. But at the end I said when would you need to use this? And you know, that's always a fun question to a kid and she looked at me and she goes well if I got an amusement park for example and it tells me that I have to be 54in to ride this
ride if it were an open circle and I can't remember if it's yes or no but anyway she thought she used a real life example and I was like oh I said so this is useful. she's like oh yeah, very useful. I was like all right. so they I was going to say you might my daughter you know she collected about 15 friend feedback you know 15 friends and her feedback on those and the response was that you know this is this is okay which in middle school language I mean that is high praise right? So you know I, I was going to say I mean, you know, there's like one thing rude sort of in some of the drawings that sort of says play video or something and it's on the on the workbook and it's sort of like how am I supposed to play that? oh my GOD. We literally had that conversation in a different class because some of the the teachers are using a combination of workbooks and cd and chromebooks and they alternate for lots of reasons notwithstanding like oh we want
kids off the devices sometimes we want them to talk in groups whatever and the visualization they like play the visualization but it says it in every single one of the more and the kids that the kids are like this doesn't make any sense. there's no video here. Well, that's a it's a fun one for them to talk about. Are there any questions to wrap up this section here? It will be a wrap up. I won't go off on a tangent this time, I promise. Never said anything but assistance. Assistant superintendent steiner I think you were the one to mention the adoption of fewer tools. Right. Oh, sorry, MISS Kriegman. Sorry. Implementing fewer tools but with more fidelity. And I really appreciate that like based on some of the conversation we had earlier about actually the causal data and trying to figure out what is leading to the improvement it can be when you're trying to do too many things so so I really appreciate that but that also leads us to the
conversation around strategic abandonment which is something that we've struggled with for ages as a district. So what does strategic abandonment look like when it comes to tools that are no longer effective and how do we move forward and growth mindset and culture change and pulling like those tough conversations just like what does that path look like? And one thing I I'll just start with is I do think to a certain degree curriculum adoption is strategic abandonment and specifically removing curriculum that is low quality and replacing it with curriculum that is high quality and so that replacement can sometimes not sound like strategic abandonment but truly it is in terms of the mindset shift and the instructional shift that educators need to take on. So I wanted to name that piece around here one I think specifically around additional supplemental supports for many
years there have been a multitude of supplemental supports present within the district for numerous reasons schools become individually attached to certain tools and in some cases those tools have very strong alignment to the tier one curriculum and in some cases they really don't. And so one of the things that we have engaged in is in partnership across multitude a multitude of divisions and departments is in alignment and an evaluation of those tools and whether or not we will move forward with them. And so that process has already begun over the last year with the language and literacy adoption there are a series of supplemental tools that schools have purchased that we are now saying no to the purchase of those tools because they are no longer in alignment with the districts curriculum and instruction that same process is engaged in with math . One of the things that you will
see in the math adoption which we named in some of the questions for example is reducing the number of supplemental math tools so that they are fewer in number focused on the ones with the highest usage and the ones with the strongest alignment to tier one. So it is in some cases saying no to continuing to purchase those supplemental resources. I just wanted to follow up on my question about the coaches who the coaches will be for math of their literacy folks or something else. Thanks. so I can speak specifically to elementary um jen can speak to middle assistant superintendent steiner can speak to middle but specifically for elementary the instructional coaches who have been supporting language and literacy will also be supporting math next year and one of the main shifts I'll say is has been in anticipation of that they are intentionally named instructional coaches as opposed to literacy coaches and we did anticipate to a certain degree them picking
them up and so one of the things that we are engaged in right now is designing their professional learning plan for next year to balance holding both language and literacy and math. We have conducted a series of focus groups in one on one interviews with coaches as well as administrators to try to better understand what they believe the heaviest support needs have been inclusive of schools where there was heavy math piloting and where there was not. That's the same at the kindergarten through eighth grade school. So at schools that are k-8 schools they're allocated an instructional coach currently and that instructional coach will continue to support next year in math at the middle school level there was a decision to allocate instructional coaches to middle schools initially and then many of the middle schools said what if that's not what we need? And so kiley and executive cabinet and I engaged in a back and forth conversation with schools to say well, what is it that you need and how are you
meeting the rollout of the new curriculum and the implementation of the new curriculum with fidelity and goal two? And if you can make a case for us then we'll consider swapping it out for a different allocation. So some of the things that they requested were if they lost an assistant principal allocation many of them went from two allocations to one they would have to make up the difference so that it was cost neutral with their supplemental funds. But that particular assistant principal would be focused on instruction and supporting grade level grade level and department level collaboration and so that made sense. Other other people requested a second counselor and so they needed to do a little bit more work to prove to me that a second counselor would have anything to do with math. And there were two sort of um strategies or rationales that people came up with. One was around the strategic focus around focal student populations and mathematics and specifically ensuring that a second counselor could do academic counseling around math.
But the in the majority of these schools as well the focus around the instructional leadership team was a focus on how are we ensuring that our department time is really focused very specifically on the rollout of the new curriculum with specific learning walks and so well we're going to see how that rolls out. There were two places where people requested a switch where we declined the switch because they couldn't make a rationale that was strong enough and so I feel hopeful that they will be able to do that. I think there's still discussions to be had. You know, we had four release days this year for the pilot teachers. That's a conversation about what do we want to learn from that about what was successful and what do we want to do in order to support the new teachers for next year and economically how do we make all of these ends meet with the myriad competing interests for budget? But there will be some coaches at some middle schools especially those that are
engaged in lesson study and then other middle schools instructional leads, teacher leads with stipends and or assistant principals will lead the curriculum, roll out so in how it goes. just speaking of strategic abandonment, I guess I have a follow up question about additional math minutes and whether there's been any consideration of strategic we abandoning some of our early release days to allow for more math minutes and also maintain the middle school redesign and in seven periods I'll just say that my initial reaction to that is that would have to be renegotiated with you and I haven't seen it come up um from my perspective on the negotiation team but maybe I could have missed it to change the work hours for teachers would be there would be a redo association with you. We we are in labor negotiations.
We are working okay. Um I also want to acknowledge um, MISS Renee marci thank you. I know you are one of the few people in our central office who are helping to lead this work and I know it's a team effort, but I just wanted to acknowledge you and thank you team for just one. I will echo the the report itself was incredibly illuminating and very helpful and super concrete. Um but also just want to acknowledge I think of all the things that we invest in as a district in our work curriculum is probably one of the most significant investments that we can make in addition to teacher development and leadership development and and so I just I want to thank you for your continued effort with our work here and look forward to seeing you all again soon at the end of the year to talk about our recap cap recap no cap yeah. Okay. Thank you. Having um I know, I know that's
my bad. Um that being said, uh uh we are moving to our one action item item g uh, one instruction materials adoption k five and six eight math curriculum can have a motion in a second please. So moved second and I will have the superintendent call on staff so I guess tonight is the devin kriegman show so thank you so much. I have to say she's she's fantastic. our executive director of content of everything and has been a amazing, amazing leader within curriculum and instruction and then of course she's joined by rene marci who is our one and only math and science content expert . she is the math and science person for us.
So thank you so much for being here. Both of them did a fantastic job and helping us as a district to come to a great selection of a math curriculum that we are presenting to you today for hopeful approval and moving forward in implementation. Take it over ladies. thank you so much for the warm introduction. We are incredibly excited to be here this evening and to provide an overview as to pilot data and our recommendation for adoption for k-8 math curriculum. If we can go to the next slide . as a reminder we are more towards the right in the formal adoption stage of a multi-stage process as previously reported to the board throughout the 2324 and 2425 school year we have engaged in intense curriculum audit and instructional diagnostic to identify our needs and the reliability and validity of our preexisting curriculum based on the results we then engaged
in a multiphase curriculum evaluation to narrow programs for piloting. We then went into piloting which included data collection. we are now at the stage where we are making a recommendation for formal adoption to be followed by an implementation plan if we can go the next. So as previously shared within prior board reports throughout the 2324 and 2425 school year the audit and diagnostic work identified three primary areas of need for the district when recommending a new curriculum for adoption and those three areas of need are the standards for mathematical practice, the accessibility of the curriculum for different learners and then the usability of the curriculum and associated materials for teachers. And so throughout the process of reviewing the data from our pilot, we're going to highlight these three areas and the feedback that we got on them to ensure that the curriculum being represented is as
responsive as possible to the additional identified needs of the district. Speaking of the next slide, so to provide a brief overview on our elementary data collection based on the evaluation we piloted two programs one unit from I ready and one unit from imagine learning this occurred throughout fall 2024 as part of the data or as part of the pilot you can see the data that was collected and we were excited that we had a very robust group of elementary pilot educators this far exceeded our language and literacy pilot from the prior year. In addition, we were excited for this number and level of engagement given they were also implementing year one of a new language and literacy curriculum. If we can go to the next slide. So throughout that pilot I'm going to give a little bit of a summary of the trends that we saw throughout the appendix of this slide deck is more detailed analysis of each of these points made available but
wanted to provide a summary. So the first piece is for teachers in particular we did see some trends with regards to an a comparative analysis of the two programs. It is not unusual within the context of a pilot for the first program being piloted to start somewhat higher in teacher perception than the second. However, one of the things that we did see is significant declines in teacher perception of eye ready throughout the course of the pilot as opposed to the perceptions of imagined learning being comparatively stable. One of the major identified areas of difference for teachers was that they felt that the imagined learning materials were faster, longer and their support for multilingual learners highlighting things like accessibility of language and visual representations from student responses leaned much more heavily towards imagined learning. Some of the specific areas that we wanted to highlight was with
regards to student perception of the quality of teacher questioning and the degree of student collaboration and we were excited about those both in terms of their relationship to the identified areas of need of standards for mathematical practice as well as the level of academic discourse to support our multilingual learners. The next piece is with regards to the classroom observations conducted we did see stronger instructional practice with imagined learning. Again to go back to that theme of questioning and the degree to which the teacher was asking students to explain and justify their thinking or discuss one another's thinking. the next slide for middle grades we engaged in similar data collection although different in that in the case of middle grades this was a full year pilot of amplified as most math. Again we had a very large and robust pilot group with a high level of participation in all of the data collection metrics. If we can go to that next
slide, thank you for teachers in particular perceptions of amplify does most math increased over time? Teachers were very excited about the level of supports for students with thinking and learning differences and multilingual learners for students. As I mentioned earlier, high praise from middle school students I cannot say enough is unusual but overwhelmingly middle school students felt positively about their perception of not just the curriculum but teachers instructional moves particularly around teachers demonstrating multiple ways to solve a problem or modeling strong examples and similarly with classroom observations we did see a notable increase in comparison to our 2023 audit around there are a variety of teacher instructional practice. next slide. so as we prepare for formally recommending imagine learning and amplified as most math based on the data shared, one of the other pieces that we wanted to call out was strategic k eight alignment both imagined learning
and amplified as most math are based in illustrative math which is a problem based open source math curriculum and it uses a very similar lesson and unit structure and a shared pedagogical perspective. And so one of the things that we see in our current student data is a significant drop off between fifth and sixth grade. And so for us when we consider adoption having two programs with a similar design and shared pedagogical perspective strengthens that pipeline of k eight alignment to better build proficiency over time and support a shared pedagogical structure and set of instructional practices. So in addition to the strength of each program individually we do feel like they are a particularly strong pairing for the district. Next slide. So in summary, based on that data collection and in order to best support student outcomes we are making a formal recommendation for adoption as an overview and the approximate
cost for these adoptions is an estimated $11.6 million as previously named. This includes a five year purchase for k five which is would be for imagine learning and an annual one year purchase for middle grades which would include all teacher and student materials, digital licenses and digital platform and then all launch professional development which would occur during the summer of 2025. And so with that if we can go to the next slide and in alignment with board policy 6141 and guardrail three and based on the research data and evidence we are formally recommending that the board adopt imagine learning illustrative math for grades k five and amplify does most math for grades 6 to 8. Thank you. Given we just had a robust discussion around goal three I will carefully phrase this question of are there questions
that MAY impact your decision that you would like to bring forward right now? Great seeing none. I will call for a roll call vote please. This is for the instructional materials adoption k-5 and six eight math curriculum. MR. Alexander commissioner fischer. Yes. Commissioner gupta. Yes. Vice PRESIDENT Huling. Yes. Commissioner ray. Yes. commissioner rice. My word. Yes. PRESIDENT Kim. Yes. Six eyes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your support. Absolutely. Thank you for the very important informative briefings that kept this discussion very short. my pleasure. Okay. Um, we just really hoping to get out of here by 1030 so my bad. Moving to item eight consent calendar are there any items withdrawn or created by the superintendent? There are none.
Can I get a motion a second on the consent calendar? So moved roll call. Vote on the calendar please. So so sorry. Second, you know what is process right now? Yeah. Commissioner alexander. Commissioner fischer. Yes. Commissioner gupta. Yes. PRESIDENT Huling. Yes. Commissioner ray. Yes. Questioner wiseman wirth. Yes. PRESIDENT Kim. Yes. Six. Thank you. I during this meeting at 10:32 P.M.