12:00 and I'll call the meeting to order. Before we start with our official part of the program, uh we have a special uh little ceremony here to start off with. Uh, I want to note the appointment of Miss Kathy Cobb, uh,
representing the is it seventh? >> Yes. >> Seventh congressional district. And, um, she's been appointed by Lieutenant Governor and Speaker of the Senate Randy McN to fill the unexpired term for Marsha Johnson. She's a lifelong educator. And I'm going to invite other
board members with me to to uh give the pinning, but we're also going to do a multiple pinning because we haven't pinned our uh special student member Britain sat yet. So uh and let me say this about Britain. She's sort of leaving leaving a legacy,
setting the bar for a future uh student member. She's been really active working with student board members from across local districts and really appreciate everything you're doing there. So, if y'all will join me in the front here, we will officially pin
Thank you all. She's so good today. She's responsible. I'll ask Nathan James of our staff to call the role to establish a quorum. Mr. James. >> Mr. Collins >> here. >> Mr. Holtz
>> here. >> Mr. Gentile. Miss Harpool is here for Mr. Gentile. There she is. >> Mr. Jensen. Mrs. Cobb >> here. >> Mrs. Maxwell >> here. >> Mrs. McInturf
>> here. Mr. Mullenhower, Ms. Sap >> here, >> Mr. Wells, Mr. Chairman Eie >> here, and you have eight members. Mr. Chairman, I declare then we have a quorum present and we are duly convened.
Pursuant to section 8 of policy 1.400, the board meetings policy, workshops or meetings of the si state board sitting as a committee of the whole. I ask unanimous consent then that the state board dissolve itself into a committee of the whole for the purposes of conducting our workshop. Is there any
objection? If none then so ordered. I declare that we are in the committee of the whole for the purposes of conducting our workshop. This time I'll recognize members for their remarks. Any upront remarks from any of our members?
Dr. Morrison. I'll be very brief, but it's good to see everyone. This time last year, we were all snowed out and people stayed home and we were online. So, I'm just happy in February to be together in Nashville for our quarterly meeting. And we're thrilled to be joined by a a lot of friends and colleagues from across this
state. We're going to hear from our ELA uh SRC members here soon. We were joined for lunch and before that um with the teacher advisory committee, our teachers of the year from all the various regions of our state. So, it's just great to be surrounded by so many wonderful educators who are partnering in really creative and important ways. So, look
forward to the conversations today. Thank you. >> Thank you. Yes. Uh the lunch that we did have with the teacher advisory committee is always uh highlight for me during the year because we get to hear from the teachers who are on the front lines uh doing what they can for our students as we work across Tennessee. So, welcome
and hope hope you had found the time as valuable as we did. Want to remind all presenters to give their name and position before addressing the board. Also to avoid any jargon where possible so that everyone listening outside can understand what we're talking about.
First item is English language arts standards review. Miss Brianna Summers. >> Good afternoon chair EBN members. My name is Brianna Summers, the director of policy and academics here at the Tennessee State Board of Education. And
the English language arts standards review leadership team and I are so thrilled to prepare and present the English language arts standards for your thoughts and feedback. Before we get started, I'd love to thank the 29 expert reviewers who made this possible, as
well as the Department of Education, particularly Dr. Leairard, Dr. Christy Wall and her team, the state board of education staff, and the Tennessee General Assembly. For the next There we go. For the next 45 minutes, we're excited to introduce
ourselves and the standards review process, share some context about the English language arts standards, and then review the changes between the current standards and the standards as proposed throughout. At any point, if you have
any questions, we'd love to answer them during the presentation or at the end, please stop us and we'd love to get your question answered. Okay. So, uh, the academic standards are the expectations for what students should be able to know and do at the end
of a grade or course. The state board of education is called in Tennessee statute or state law to review the English language arts, math, science, and social study standards every 8 years. This is a collaborative multi-year
process that's outlined in legislation to promote transparency and collaboration. I will now hit the highlights of the process uh to let you know what we've been working on since summer 2024. So, we first start with a public feedback survey as outlined in the
statute. And this is an opportunity from Tennessans across the state from teachers, parents, and students to share, you know, what they like about the standards and what could be better. We're proud that we received 25,000 responses to our survey, which for context when we did science a couple years ago, that's double.
From there, uh, the state board is directed to hire an educator advisory team. And these are 21 expert educators from across the state, three of which are with you today. Um, and they're set into committees, a K5 committee, a 68 committee, and a 9 through2 committee.
And their task is to review the data that they received from the public surveys, use their personal expertise, look at other state standards uh, to kick off the revision process. and we're extremely excited that we received 297 applications for 21 spots. So, this is
the best of the best. And that's the most applications we've ever received since starting this process in 2015. And just to give you a sense of what it looked like, uh, these educators had sticky notes and chart paper and and highlighters really digging in and nerding out on how we can best serve students and how we can best support
teachers. So, I'm grateful for their work and Miss Potter, Miss Moore, and Miss Marlo led those teams with skill and precision. That next group, the standards development committee met later that fall. I would think of this group as a leadership team of the previous group.
So they had sort of two tasks. One, looking grades K through 12 since they were in their subcommittees, making sure we have that alignment, particularly at the hinge point, that fifth to sixth grade, that 8th to 9th grade, as well as looking across our different areas like
writing, reading. How do we look across the board? Then we go back to a public survey and everything's the same as last time. The only thing that's changed is we update the current proposed standards that those educators worked on to hear again from the public what are we doing well?
What could we do better and why? We were excited that we received 24,000 responses for that survey and that's two and a half times higher than the corresponding science survey from a couple years ago. We then wipe the slate clean so to speak at least in terms of members and then we
uh engage the standards recommendation committee and members similar to you. They are appointed by the governor, the lieutenant governor and the speaker and their task is I encourage you to think of this sort of as a a snowball rolling down the hill if you will. You know each committee has a little bit more data, a
little bit more information and a little bit more context to to keep the revisions rolling with you if you will. And hopefully we have a shiny snowball for you to look at tomorrow. from there. Um, oh, Chair Carnegus and Vice Chair Hillyard led that committee with unwavering dedication. Uh, and I
want to thank Cher Eie for joining us for one of those meetings so you could see them in action. And that brings us to today, the state board of education meeting. Uh, tomorrow the proposed revisions to the standards will be on first reading for a vote members and they are scheduled for final
reading in May. and state statute call directs the state board of education members to adopt, reject or propose technical non-s substantive revisions to the standards. Okay. Um that's enough from me. You want to hear from the real experts, the
educators themselves. Uh it's an honor and a privilege to to learn from them and grow alongside them and revise these standards. So with that, I'd love to pass it to Miss Leanne Potter. Good, good morning, I guess. Um, my name is Leanne Potter. I work from in
Hamilton County Schools and I am the K2 ELA content lead for the district. And um just one of the things that I absolutely love about my work with our little youngest learners is watching
them gain the relationship between sounds, letters, words, and sentences. Um it's very fascinating to me. I'll pass it to Nicole. So, my name is Nicole Moore and I work
for Greenville City Schools in East Tennessee and I am a middle school ELA teacher. Um, every year I have students that come in at the beginning of the year and they are like, I hate reading or I hate writing. And my favorite part about being a teacher is a few weeks
later when they're like, hey, are we going to read chapter number two tomorrow or can we have five more minutes to finish this essay or this story that I started? And that's why I love being a teacher. Hello, my name is Tammy Marlo. I am from
Mon County Schools. I actually teach in one of the smallest schools in in the state. Um we are prek through 12 under one roof. Um I teach high school English. So I have freshman, juniors, and seniors. And I enjoy introducing
them to literature and then coming back to me year after year and watching them grow. I'm Larry Carnegus. I'm the adjunct professor from Middle Tennessee State University and retired principal from Wilson
Central High School. My name is Lucas Hillyard. I am a high school English teacher at White House High School in the Sar County Schools. Um, my favorite skill to teach um is academic research and writing. Um, I'm part of a capstone program at my school
which I lead and and I get to the opportunity um to to see students develop over many years and develop substantive projects and and I take a lot of pride in in seeing the growth in their capacity to do complicated complex tasks. So, I'll get us started and um I want to
start by talking about the importance. Strong literacy skills are foundational to student achievement statewide. Reading builds understanding. Writing supports reasoning and problem solving and speaking and listening drive
communication and critical thinking across all content areas. Our committee believed intentional revisions to the ELA standards were necessary to provide clearer expectations for educators,
stronger alignment across the grade levels, and more consistent instruction so every student in every classroom has access to high quality literacy learning.
Once we established why literacy matters across all content areas, our next question was how students actually learn to read. The committee grounded our work in decades of research from the science of reading which tells us that reading
is not a natural process. the students need explicit and systematic instruction and that when we align instruction to how the brain learns, we can support all of our students. This research guided
the committee in ensuring the standards build skills and knowledge coherently from kindergarten through grade 12. This work is also well aligned to previous work from the Tennessee GR General Assembly and Department of Education
through laws like the Literacy Success Act. Okay. Current research strongly supports the use of science and reading uh principles in the classroom. Because of this, the same principles should be considered in the development of
standards. The instruction is based on skills are introduced individually and then expectations advance as the students move through the grades. Basically, K through five is the introduction and development of skills and laying a solid foundation for future
learning. This level demonstrates the individual strands of the rope, each one being a strength on its own. Middle school instruction is used to solidify the foundation with the text complexity increasing. This represents
the beginning of the integration of the standards and the integration of the stands to form a stronger rope. Grades 9 through 12 then focus on sophistication and style, completely integrating all the strands into one cohesive rope that
strengthens the individual skills and enhances the rigor as students are expected to produce work that is college and workforce ready. In sixth grade, the foundational literacy standards become language standards. By the beginning of sixth
grade, the focus moves from being just on finding things to actually using those skills in writing and editing to make works better. This is a movement from the bottom of the rope to the top of the rope. In the K5, the readingformational standards use science
and social studies text to support building content knowledge, which moves from learning how to read to learning how to comprehend what is read. In middle school, these skills are reinforced and challenged with more complex text. And in high school, this
becomes learning how to analyze how the text was developed and why specific decisions were made and how ideas are developed to relate information. The standards identify the skills that the students need to develop to become
future citizens who contribute to society. So if we look at the graphic you will notice that the arrows go both ways and it feeds from standards to curriculum to assessment. The graphic demonstrates that everything is interrelated and more importantly
travels in both directions. Standards are the starting point to develop the state approved curriculum which leads to the development of the units and lessons delivered in the classroom. This shows how we will actually present the skills and information to the students.
Finally, there is the assessment bubble. Assessments can and should include the classroombased formative and summative assessments delivered as part of instruction as well as the end ofear state test. This allows the student a chance to show how much they understand
about the topic or skill and in turn identifies the next instructional step. Um, a classroom example could be ELA standard 910 RLK2, which states, "Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development.
Provide an objective or critical summary." What does that look like in a classroom? The teacher will select a text from the curriculum. For example, for this demonstration, we're going to use the most dangerous game from a freshman text. Um, the focus for this lesson will be a writing and an
objective summary. The students will answer questions and participate in class discussions to indicate the level of comprehension. This information can then be used to develop a summitative assessment which would be the objective summary. At any point in the process, the teacher can
see a need and then retach any skills the students are struggling with. The summitative assessment is an essay that shows the level of analysis and writing ability and it also serves as a formative assessment that lets the teacher see if the students can select
appropriate information for an objective summary. If this is a struggle for some, be teach how to determine what belongs in a summary. The students ability to select the most appropriate information to include in the objective summary is the way this type of standard would most
likely be addressed on the EOCC which is another summative assessment. So when we talk about strong or ideal standards, our goal was for the standards to be challenging but still appropriate for students age and development. They should be clear and written in a way that students, parents,
and educators can understand what students are working towards. They also need to be measurable, meaning we can assess them in different ways, not just one test. Good standards focus on key ideas that connect to the real world and help students develop skills they'll use
beyond the classroom. They're built in sequence, so students aren't just jumping from topic to topic, but are steadily building skills over time. Ultimately, these standards are designed to support both teachers in planning instruction and students in an
understanding what success looks like. So, how are the standards organized? ELA or English language arts skills are really the foundation for learning in every subject. Whether students are reading a science textbook or writing a
response to social studies or explaining their thinking in math, they are using ELA skills. Our ELA standards focus on helping students become strong communicators and critical thinkers. They're organized in four main areas: foundational literacy and language,
reading, writing, and speaking and listening. These strands work together to support students in understanding information, expressing ideas clearly, and thinking deeply about what they read and learn.
So, what are cornerstones? Cornerstones represent the ultimate learning targets for students. You can think of them as the final goal students are working towards to be prepared for postsecary and career. Each standard is intentionally designed to build towards
a specific cornerstone. Each year, students build pieces of these skills they will eventually need to reach the larger goal. Rather than teaching isolated skills, the standards work together to support long-term growth and mastery.
What is vertical alignment? Vertical alignment shows how skills grow and develop from one grade level to the next, ultimately building to the cornerstone I mentioned during the last slide. Each standard is shown on a vertically aligned page so educators can
see where a skill is first introduced and how it continues to build year after year. This helps teachers understand what students should already know and what they are working towards next. It also helps ensure that students are building on prior knowledge instead of repeating the same skill or missing key
steps. Overall, vertical alignment supports deeper learning and help students develop stronger mastery as they move through each grade. >> Okay. So along with standards themselves, the document also includes important support sections like
introductions and glosseries. These sections are resources for teachers and leaders. They help introduce key concepts, provide exact definitions, and include references and clarifications. This is important because it helps ensure that everyone across the state is
using the same language and understanding the standards in the same way. It creates consistency so we're all on a fair playing field when it comes to what the terms mean and how the skills are interpreted. Now that you've had time to consider the components of the ELA standards, we
thought it's appropriate to give you a brief overview of what motivated our decisions when revising the standards. First, we considered a wide range of publicly available research on liter literacy, available data on student outcomes, feedback from multiple
multiple public surveys, and our own experience and expertise from our careers in education or business. Additionally, we made the specific edits to the standards by following a pair of principles, increasing academic rigor,
and maintaining consistency. I'm going to go off script just for a second here and say it was my privilege to serve as a ser as the uh servant leader of this august group. Very very dedicated professionals. We cussed and we
discussed these standards. We went into double overtime. Okay. We didn't use just the time allotted here to do that. And people were dedicated to make sure that it got done and that it got done well. Uh, and I I have to say that they
really did a fabulous job for the millions of students in the state of Tennessee. All right. And then I'll take us on to our next slide. Um, on this slide, we're going to build off those uh principles that were adjust addressed on the previous slide, rigor and consistency.
And and what we aim to demonstrate here is that the major changes made to the standards were uh made in response to those major uh principles of rigor and consistency. Each of the bullet points on this slide reflects one of the major changes documented in the executive
summary prepared by the SRC leadership team which each of you I believe have been given access to. We will have the opportunity to consider each of these changes in more detail in the slides to come. So we won't necessarily consider each bullet point at this particular moment. Um, however, we thought it was valuable to demonstrate visually that
our edits were all made in order to improve both the rigor and consistency of the standards provided to Tennessee students. Thank you. Now, let's begin to uh look at some of those particular changes. Some changes were made consistently throughout all of the standards. So we
thought it was appropriate to take a moment to discuss those changes here before getting into the more specific changes made to particular standards. First, the standard codes 9, 10, 11, and 12 were changed throughout the standards
to E1, E2, E3, E4 in order to reflect that some students taking these courses may not be in the grade level traditionally assigned to those courses. You'd have students from different grade levels taking those courses. Secondly, we were careful to ensure that a clear
distinction was made between exhaustive and inexhaustive lists in the standards so that educators and students are clear about exactly which examples must be learned and which examples are merely provided as an example of a broader
concept. Third, we worked to ensure that terminology was used consistently across the standards. For example, rather than introducing possible confusion by using a wide range of terms to refer to technology,
we opted to rely on the term digital tools, which can include AI throughout the standards. Now we will take a particular look at the foundational literacy standards that
apply through uh two grades uh K through 5. Primarily in these standards, we aim to increase specificity. Given the numerous small skills that must be acquired to read effectively, we felt it was vitally important to enumerate each of these skills to ensure that no
student misses crucial instruction. Other changes were more technical. For instance, former standards three and four were not meaningfully altered in their emphases. However, given how meaningfully connected the topics of decoding and encoding, the subjects of
former standards three and four are in reading development, we thought it was appropriate to combine these standards into one new standard three. Former standard 7, which was somewhat confusingly divided into three separate parts previously, has now been simply
divided into three separate standards for ease of understanding and use. Now, we'll consider the language standards applying to grades 6 through 12. The former standard three, which had focused on applying language in various
contexts, was removed as we felt this skill was appropriately addressed in other standards. Students are already asked by speaking and listening standards to adapt speech to various contexts and students are asked in writing standards to consider context when writing. So repeating that
expectation more broadly was unnecessary. The proposed standard 3 has previously been a source of some confusion for educators as it conceptually overlaps with reading standard 4. To lessen that
confusion, we drew a harder line between those two standards, making this language standard focus specifically on the denotative or literal meaning of words, whereas the reading standard focuses on figurative meanings.
We also shuffled the order of some of the standards in order to bring them closer numerically to other standards that they are conceptually related to. Next, we'll consider the reading standards. Some changes we made applied
to many of the reading standards. For instance, we clarified some ambiguous terms that had caused confusion among Tennessee educators, such as the difference between theme and central idea and the difference between point of view and perspective. We also paid close attention to the verbs used throughout a
progression of standards to ensure that as the grades pro uh increased, the verb reflecting what the student is meant to do is increasingly complex. Um, correspondingly, we provided increased guidance in standard 4 on what types of figurative language should be taught at various
grade levels in order to create more consistent instruction across the state and in response to public survey feedback requests for clarity. We also created the expectation in standard 9 thatformational texts used in grades K through five will connect two
concepts addressed in the social studies and science standards for those grades in order to promote meaningful interdisciplinary connections. We also aim to enliven reading practice among young people through standard 10. We have added a new emphasis on student choice in reading material to the
standard. And we have also created expectations for students, particularly those in middle and higher grades, to read extended and/or complete texts throughout their years of education. Next, we'll consider the edits to speaking and listening standards. Former
standard 2, which focused on integrating and evaluating information in diverse media formats, and former standard 3, which focused on evaluating speakers argument, have now been combined into a new standard, too. Since both those standards focused on evaluating
somebody's argument, we felt that we were essentially connected, and we chose to make the connection clear by combining them two into a new standard. An entirely new standard 3 has been added which focuses on developing skills
related to listening and note takingaking. We also know that it is vital for students to know how to speak how to listen to speakers and take high quality notes in response to what they're hearing. However, the standards
previously have not made this expectation explicit. We aim to make that expectation clear with our new standard. Now, we'll take a few minutes to consider changes made to the writing standards. We provided increased
specificity on how long student responses should be at minimum at each grade level, specifying if responses were meant to be at least a single paragraph or at least multiple paragraphs. A clear distinction was also drawn between the terms thesis and claim in
the argumentative writing standard. While a thesis is a claim, we find that functionally in most Tennessee classrooms, the term thesis is used to refer to the overarching argument in a text and the term claim is used to refer uh to one of the subclaims supporting
the thesis. Therefore, we were careful to align the language of our standards with that functional usage and we made the meanings of those terms clear in the glossery attached to the standards. The former standard 4 as a tasks students with producing clear and
coherent writing. While we certainly agree with this expectation, we feel that the expectation that writing be clear and coherent is made abundantly clear in standards 1 through three which outline the more specific expectations of what writing should look like in each of its various forms. Therefore, the
standard was considered redundant and deleted. The former standard five required that students develop and strengthen writing by undergoing a writing process and the former standard six required that students use technology to produce and publish writing. We felt that these two standards should be combined into a new
standard 4 to emphasize the essential role that those digital tools including artificial intelligence and large language models play throughout the writing process. former standards 7, 8, and 9 all focused on discrete parts of the research process. We combined all of those
standards into a new, more comprehensive standard 5 in order to demonstrate the interconnected nature of these research skills. This new standard also introduced a substantial number of substandards in order to outline the specific aspects than an effective research process should follow. Lastly,
for writing, to mirror the edits made to the reading standards, we placed an increased focus on writing for self- selected purposes in the proposed standard six to ensure that students can take personal ownership in the writing process. Now, let's consider electives.
Overall, the elective standards were modernized, further aligned to ELA skills, and combined into the K12 ELA standards document to streamline resources for teacher ease and match other SBE reviewed subject areas like social studies. We're now going to
provide an overview of the edits to the ELA elective standards. In advanced co creative writing, the language of several of the standards was adjusted so it better aligned with the verbiage used in the core English classes. We also
shifted the focus of several of the standards away from specific tasks and towards desired learning outcomes that we wish students to obtain. pursuant to state law 49-6- excuse me 1026
and since 2008 the SBE is authorized to approve standards for a non sectarian non-religious academic study of the Bible as an ELA elective course based upon the state board of education approved high school policy 3.205 205.
The standards were updated as the other elective courses to practice applied ELA skills like analyzing perspective and point of view to offer students additional opportunities to prepare for postsecary and career.
We were also intentional about adhering to the state law that dictates that the class should be taught in an objective non-devotional manner that does not disparrage or encourage a commitment to a particular set of religious beliefs
for both the genre literature and mythology. A wider array of potential areas of study was suggested in the supporting language of these standards. We also added standards related to presentation and understanding of context to the genre
literature course to mirror standards already existing in the mythology course. In the four journalism courses, we combined a few duplicative standards for the sake of clarity. We also rewarded a few standards that were considered to be
confusing and their focus so that they uh intent was a lot more clear. Additionally, journalism 3 and journalism 4 students are now asked tasked with seeking out potential venues for publication of their work. Similar
edits were made to speech and communication in order to increase clarity and eliminate redundancy. We also deleted a few standards that did not consider directly relevant to the focus of the course.
In visual literacy literacy, there were previously several standards related to research. So we combined those standards into a single standard that outline specific research expectation for the course. We also for
the sake of con um consideration consolidated three very similar standards related to the author, purpose and audience into one standard that focuses on all three.
Lastly, uh we also made some edits to the supporting materials for the standards. uh we revised the introductory language both at the beginning of the overall standards document and at the beginning of each section of the standard document in order to incorporate research on literacy and to better align with the
emphases of our proposed standards. We also made substantial edits to the glossery attached to the standards document. Terms no longer used in the standards were eliminated. Relevant new terms were added and some pre-existing definitions were revised to make them clear.
And with that, members, we'd love to take your questions. >> Thank you for this presentation and thank you and to your team for just a outstanding piece of work. And I know the the one meeting I sat in on, I was really impressed by the level of detail and that you get into and in the
decision-m process. So, thank you for that. Board members, questions. Miss Mander, >> I just want to reiterate how um thankful I am for you all. I know Brianna, this has been her baby for two years now and and you've been very thorough and I appreciate everything you've done and
this team is amazing and you all are very well read and I know your passion is for ELA. So, thank you for all you've done. >> Thank you. >> I have some questions. >> Oh, go ahead. >> No, sir. >> Oh, Dr. Maxwell, go ahead. >> Thank you, Chairman Eie. Thank you so
much for the work that you've done. I know the countless hours that you've put in. Um I think having been a former classroom teacher, ELA is like my most favorite thing in the world. Okay. So, um taught college graduate classes with
it. I was excited when I saw Scarbor's reading rope in your presentation when I looked at it. So, that tells you how nerdy I am about this. >> Um thank you for the alignment and the specificity. Teachers have been begging for that.
you know, they need to know in fifth or, you know, fourth grade which uh punctuation marks to teach. Um, something else I noticed the consistent tech uh terminology that you've applied. Thank you so much. And I have to plug
student choice. That is a critical point that we have to have our students engaged in order to get them to that skilled reading point. So, just kudos and thank you so much for the work that each of you have done. Okay. So, I'm ask my question and I'm
not an educator so some of these may be dumb questions but uh >> uh as I read through uh you did talk about uh the difference between theme and central idea. Can somebody explain that to me? It seems like to me the same. We had lots of discussion members.
>> Generally speaking, theme is used most often with literature and it's the lesson that the author wants you to learn. Central idea is usually the idea that runs through anformational text that you can trace from beginning to end.
>> Okay. Thank you. Um you talked about uh acknowledging digital tools that you used uh and with AI coming the way it is right now help me out a little more what you did there and and what you see in the future and
>> yeah I'll be happy to speak to that. Um we were this was a subject of of extensive conversation throughout the process and we wanted to make sure we we handled this correctly. um technology has already existed in the standards previously. So we're not adding technology to the standards. It already exists, but we want to make sure it's
talking about technology in the appropriate ways. Um we had to weigh kind of two impulses. We want to be contemporary. We want to address um what is happening in technology, especially in the context of artificial intelligence as this giant paradigm shift within the way we engage with with
the world. Um but we also have to recognize these standards will come into practice in 2930. um and they will be existing um until 2037. Um so we were reluctant to to use specific terminology knowing that it's such a it's it's a
beginning field. It's kind of at the seed of a of a of a movement that will likely to continue and as time changes uh there's likely to be terminology shifts and we what we don't want is say in in 2035 we don't want to use a terminology that hasn't been in practice until 20 since 2026. Um so we felt that
this focus this increased focus on digital tools um will shift the attention to the digital tools, shift the attention to the groundbreaking work that's being done with with artificial intelligence without um using specific terminology that might end up sounding quite dated a few years down the road.
>> That's very helpful. One of the things I do struggle with like you say is these are set for eight years and as we've seen just artificial intelligence just in the last year has changed tremendously and so question I have and this is sort of rhetorical you don't have to answer but how do we address
those changes in the future in the next two three four years that are obviously going to happen when we're not going to revisit these standards for eight years thoughts or concepts how to do that? That's an excellent rhetorical question, >> Dr. Morrison. We're gonna put it on.
>> Well, I don't have an answer. Probably more questions for your question, but um well, before I answer, give myself a little more time to think. I I also just want to applaud this work. I mean, it's always just I mean, I've been in this role for a while now, and I've seen multiple iterations of standards review come forward, and it's just always so
amazing to me, and this was like a perfect example of just the intentionality, the strength of the product that emerges. I just I you know we have lots of conversations during legislative session with legislators who want to change standards or think about what we're teaching in in Tennessee as they should. That is their prerogative and that is part of what we reflect in
these standards certainly are the laws that have passed. Um but we have such a strong process in Tennessee that I think really assures educators, parents, citizens of our state that we're equipping our students with the skills and knowledge that they will need to navigate the future including AI. And so I I think while it can be hard to know
that it's a long timeline between because of everything that hinges on the standards as that one slide that you all shared states the standards really drive everything from the instructional materials to the assessment checks for understanding. I mean it's it's the foundation. Um and so I hope that the standards will continue to be the standards. How we think about the ways
technology help increase our understanding and our um interaction with standards is probably where we need to wrestle. But in conversations that I've had with people who are far smarter than I am on these things, they continue to say the standards still need to be the standards. Like that's what our students need to know and be able to do. The way technology helps us access those
standards is is where we're going to be focused probably over the next few years. But for what it's worth, I think I think these are very strong standards. Well done. Thank you. >> Good good answer. Um yes, Miss >> Harpen
Gentile is not Stephen Gentile. Not today. Um, thank you all for your dedication to this work. Uh, representing higher ed and the higher education commission. I wanted to extend my my appreciation to professor Kernigus uh for representing higher education faculty in this process. K12 prepares
our post-secary students for success. So, I really appreciate the dedication to collaborating on highquality K12 standards that ensures students are prepared for college and career. And I would encourage more subject area faculty to engage with the K12 standards process as the subjects come up for for
review so we can help ensure our students are prepared for success. >> Thank you. Pardon? Okay. Go ahead, Chair Collins. >> Thank you. Uh echoing the sentiments of my colleagues, thanking you all for your
service on this important work. I spent the first half of this week um observing um high performing school district in another state and um clarity of the standards leading to highquality
instruction was a very central theme in that experience and from the work that you all have done I see that you've removed ambiguity uh you haven't forsaken academic rigor which is where we want to be and uh that leads to the high quality instruction
that needs to happen in the classroom. So, thank you again for your work and appreciate your service. And one question, is there a way to engage those other 200 and some odd people who expressed interest that weren't uh a part of the
committee? >> Absolutely. Um once those educators applied, we were intentional about directly sending them survey too so that their voices were heard. We also enlisted the experts here to share with their networks to make sure that the public surveys were were driven by teachers and parents and students across
the state of Tennessee. Um, and you know, we engage them in the future of like various questions that we have or certainly the next cycle I'll be bugging them. >> Had a couple other questions. one in your executive summary, it made some specific recommendations that were outside the bounds of the committee and
and specifically it talked about writing assessments and industrial additional instructional time for literacy. What will be done with these recommendations because obviously it it looked like they were very solid uh recommendations, very good recommendations, but they're not including these standards. So, what
happens to those? >> Thank you for the question, Chair Eie, and I have to shout out the Department of Education, Christy Wall's team, many of which are here, and Dr. Dr. David Leard moved moved mountains and water and all the things to to be great partners in this work and in fact some of the recommendations that were um
organically brought from the committee were separately recommended by the department of education. So it's always wonderful to see everyone on the same page and collaborating. So we've shared the recommendations with them in the executive summary. It's been incredibly collaborative and after the standards pass on final reading we'll share that
final list. Essentially, committee members had a tab on a spreadsheet that said wish list. Knowing that the the confines of their task was the standards document, but there's so many folks at play from the department, the textbook commission, districts and schools, it really takes all of us to to get these standards in the in the hands of
teachers and in classrooms. >> One of those recommendations was additional time. That's not something that's going to be taken care of at the department. is going to be taken care of at the district level. And that had to do with trying to teach all the it
impacted especially at the middle school level and they were concerned about teaching all the standards in writing all the different uh forms of writing. Um it needs to be done. If you want to be
in the top 10% in America, you have to follow what everybody else is doing. And those those those school districts that are exceeding expectations are doing this. We can do this too. Right now there is a variety of amounts of time that are offered at
the middle school level to language arts. Some double over. So it would be incumbent upon each of the districts to consider how they can use different scheduling systems to offer more time for instruction for literacy for
language arts at the middle school level. >> Thank you. Um, one other comment I have and you talked about it is that you know we're at 50% level and with these standards you feel like we can go to 10% uh up to
the top 10% which I think is an outstanding and and you've mentioned some of those ideas today but what gives you the real confidence that you can do that I guess. >> Yeah, I can speak to that. I you some information your question had been
passed along to me so I I prepared a response here. Um I so first of all I wanted to to kind of outline where we're at defining ourselves as top 50%. Um so on the national assessment of educational progress back in 2024 uh Tennessee
earned the 20th highest average scale scores in eighth grade um and the 23rd highest scale scores in fourth grade. um slightly higher than the top 50% but but roughly um around that range. Um and we want to to push that. We want to encourage um further achievement. And so
top 10% if we're going to be the top 10% we need to be among the top five highest achieving schools uh or states. I apologize. Um so we wanted to recognize that to make that happen the the changes made to the standards have to be meaningful. Um and uh we just wanted to to provide some statistical backing for
the idea that our our changes were not small in scale. Um there are 450 current standards for the core K through2 ELA courses. Um 80% of those standards have been changed in some way in our proposed standards. Um 14% of them have been
deleted and only 6% of current English standards have not been altered at all. Um additionally 23 new standards have been introduced. Um and then I also wanted to talk uh they many of the standards might have changed um largely technically um but we do have substantial changes meaningful changes
at other locations. Um uh jackard similarity index is a statistical measure um that can be used to calculate how similar two texts are on a 0ero to1 scale. Um so I calculated that uh jackard uh similarity index for uh the currently existing standards and our
proposed standards. um and they generated an index score of 0.3587. Um I won't get into all the statistical measures and what that specifically signifies, but it does suggest a relatively low degree of similarity between the two texts. So meaningful changes have been made. Now I do want to
speak to any um educators who might be listening right now um just to alleviate any concerns about that. Um we also hope that the changes we're making are going to be welcomed uh by Tennessee teachers and instructional leaders. As we previously mentioned, these changes were not made in a vacuum. um they were chiefly informed by feedback from
educational stakeholders and our own experiences in education. Uh we recognize that educator enthusiasm about the new standards will play a vital role in achieving the performance gains we seek. If if educators aren't enthusiastic about what we're doing, it's unlikely to to see that kind of growth. Um so we sought to provide the state of Tennessee with ELA standards
that will both enrich students and encourage teachers at the same time. Ultimately, we believe that these changes we propose are largely those that teachers and instructional leaders already wish to see. Um, as a high school English teacher myself, I believe we have successfully walked a pretty tricky tight rope here. Um, the
standards we propose will enrich the learning of my students, but they are also going to facilitate my own classroom instruction rather than make it more challenging. I'm excited for the 2930 school year uh to teach these standards. >> I I think that's outstanding uh the level of detail that you've gone into. And so at least one last question I have
is so if you've changed and I don't know if it's 65% difference of 100 minus.35 or whatever from an engineer standpoint that's how I would take it but how do you then get the teachers you know to do that shift uh effectively so they are
teaching to these new standards in an effective and quality manner. So what's the process to do that? happy to take a stab at it and also welcome our department of education experts because they are really who make the magic happen there. Um you know after these standards pass on final reading and in fact emails are already in my inbox.
They they are excited to revise the standards guides which are Bible accompaniment of the standards that really bring them to life, add that context. So I'd say the standards guides can play a really important role in those coming to life, teacher training, professional development, you know, not
our exact sandbox, but but certainly um important collaboration and leadership and I welcome anyone from the department who'd like to weigh in. >> Any other question? Thank you. Thank you for that. Uh, I would like to make one. Oh, yes. Go ahead. >> I was just going to say back to the um
conversation of how we're going to get to the 10%, the top 10%. We have really been intentional about our foundation, our K2 foundation. And if you look at Scar Bro's reading rope, the strands
before they're woven together are all individualized. That's where we start. And if we get that right, it's going to make a huge difference. And we have been extremely clear and we've been extremely um
coherent in the way we let teachers know what they're teaching in the foundational skills in kindergarten, first and second grade. >> Excellent. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you again for just an outstanding piece of work to me. He's got
>> Being the new kid on the block, I didn't think I'd have too much to contribute today, but I have to go back many years to when we first started the standards. I was on the standards recommendation committee. So, I do appreciate the hours that you've spent putting into refining and revising the standards. And also
going last, you get you steal all my questions because you all just pretty much took all my questions today. But I do want to appreciate uh the complete text because I've had so many teachers at my school saying we have a piece of a text but we need the whole text for the students to really appreciate the story.
And also you just answered the question about the level of detail from the state department on that was my question about the study of the Bible because if we don't do specific standards and the steps of what to teach and when to teach and what not to teach and how to stay in the realm of objectivity then sometimes
we go off script and do things that we probably shouldn't do. So thank you. >> Thank you. Any other final comments or again thank you so much for your efforts? It clearly shows uh just think uh 10 years from now you can look back
and say I made a real difference to our students as you see that moving to that get to that 10%. I'd also like to make one final acknowledgement and that's to Miss Brianna Summers for just doing an outstanding job leading that. Thank you.
All right. >> Next item is Tennessee Education Survey. Dr. Amy Owen as well as Tennessee. God, they were terrible. Great. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and board members. It's great to see you
all. I'm Amy Owen, executive director at Tara and also a lecturer at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. And I'm Caitlyn Binstead. I'm a senior research specialist at Tara. And we're delighted to talk to you today about the results of the 2025 Tennessee Educator
Survey. And we will also conclude with remarks on the 2026 survey which launched this week. So, we're excited to speak about that. For folks who are not yet familiar, uh the Tennessee Education Research Alliance is a research practice partnership between Vanderbilt
University and the Tennessee Department of Education. It's actually one of the first and still only research practice partnerships of its kind across the country being at the state level and focused on education policy. A lot of RPs are at the school district level. We have a whole state level view. Uh Tara's
history goes back to 2016 and actually even further back than that to 2012 when Vanderbilt launched the Tennessee Consortium on research evaluation and design in the race to the top years. Uh a research practice partnership means that we try to bridge the re research
use gap. And that's what occurs when the research that academics and faculty do um either isn't used by or isn't useful to the people in your seats, the policy makers who need to make decisions in a given field. And so we try to bridge that gap by making sure research is
relevant and accessible to policy makers. So we at Tara work not just with Vanderbilt faculty but with ed policy professors from across the country including um Michigan, UVA, Brown, John's Hopkins, UT Knoxville, number of institutions on projects that align with
TDOE's research agenda and needs for current policymaking decisions. We house over 20 years of Tennessee student and teacher data that's deidentified and research ready. And we also work on state level projects with other agencies
including higher ed tack and TBR uh office of evidence and impact. We have a project with them right now on teacher labor markets in rural areas and the governor's early literacy foundation. Historically, Tara has done quite a bit of work on human capital projects, teacher and principal labor markets,
studied school turnaround, student health and mental health, and we're increasingly getting into the college and career pathways space. So, with that, I will turn it to Caitlyn and she'll tell you more about our topic today, the Tennessee Educator Survey. Um, the Tennessee Educator Survey is an
annual joint effort between Tara and the Tennessee Department of Education. Um, where we seek to gather information about what is working and different opportunities for improvement in Tennessee's schools. Um, so in the spring of 2025, we administered the 14th
annual Tennessee Educator Survey. Um, and in that survey year, we had over half of teachers and administrators respond to the survey. Um, so we had almost 40,000 teachers and over 2,000 uh, principles and assistant principles who responded. Um, for the results that
we're going to present today, um, analytical waiting is applied to the teacher and administrator responses to produce more representative results statewide. Um, and we have several different publications. that came out of the 2025 educator survey. Um, we work in
coordination with TDOE to um to make these publications. Um, and we seek to make them accessible to various audiences. Um, so we have different types of publications of of varying lengths. Um, so one of them is the the TDOE report that is released every year
with the survey. Um and so that's a longer publication um that gives an overview of like various topics that co that are on the survey. Um this year for the first time we published um what we called survey snapshots and they're just one page um overviews um with a few key
findings on different um topics within the survey. Um and then we also published four Tara briefs that did a deeper dive on some of these topics in the survey. Um, so the four TERA briefs this year covered the topics of dual enrollment, CTE, school leadership
pipelines, and strategic staffing. Um, and I'll share a little bit more about a couple of those um later on in this presentation. Um, and then finally, the um, TEES website launched on August 8th of 2025. Um, so we aim to get the
results of the survey onto the website um, available for public consumption towards the end of the summer. Um and so that information is all publicly available. So if you are interested in seeing how teachers and administrators responded to the survey um in the
districts that you serve um feel free to check out website. Um so some updates that we made in 2025. We we do keep a lot of our survey items consistent across years so that we can look at um changes over time, but we
also are receptive to making updates each year so that we can incorporate different topics that are emerging uh state priorities or emerging topics in in education. Um so we added a couple of new branches for different types of teachers. Um we added a high school
branch for nonCTE teachers this year. Um and we also added a computer science teacher branch. Um we also included questions on some new topics like cell phones, artificial intelligence, financial literacy, RTI squared. Um so
we were able to to add new questions on some of these different topics. Um and then like I said, we also um produced these survey snapshots in 2025 for the first time. Um and I'll talk a little bit more about the snapshots in just a little bit. Um the the survey components
just kind of an overview of what we're asking participants to do here. Um each respondent gets a core section of the survey and then some teachers and administrators go on to take other sections. Um but the core sections of the survey are given to all respondents
based on their role. So teachers have a core set of questions that they'll answer, administrators have a separate set of questions. Um and we also have different core versions for counselors, mental health professionals and other certified support staff. Um then
teachers uh and administrators go on to take a branch of the survey based on a more specific role. Um so some of the teacher branches that they might take are early career. That's for teachers in their first three years of teaching. CTE teachers get a set of questions. PreK
teachers get a set of questions. Um there's questions for ELA and math teachers about curriculum and resources. Um and then there's a branch for high school teachers. Um and a branch for computer science teachers in 2025. Um and then administrators also get a set
of questions based on whether they are a assistant principal or a principal. Um and then finally teachers go on to take one of these modules. Uh we have three academics, educators and student readiness. and those are randomly assigned to teachers. Um, so because the
survey is lengthy, so we don't want everyone having to answer all three sets of those questions. Um, so one of the the most I think important things that we do with the survey data uh is that individual
schools and districts that achieve a 45% rate and have at least 10 respondents on the survey are able to receive that individual district or school level data. Um so in 2025 we had over 120
districts and over a thousand schools who uh were able to receive that individual level data. Um and we hear a lot of feedback from folks in schools and districts that this data is just really um helpful to them when they're thinking about school planning and goal
setting for for the following year. Um, so you know, we appreciate any efforts that this group can make to help us get the word out to encourage educators to participate in the survey so that as many schools and districts as possible can get that data.
Um, so these survey snapshots that I mentioned earlier, um, these were sort of a new concept in 2025. You can kind of see what they look like. They're just these one pagers with a couple of key findings on these different topics. We made nine of them in 2025. Um, and
that's the list of topics that we covered on the survey snapshots. Um, and then the the 2025 TDOE report is based on these nine survey snapshots. Um, and it just expands on the topics from the survey snapshots. Um, so I'll share a
little bit more about some of the key findings from the three that are in bold. Um and we came up with this list in coordination with TDOE and other folks on our advisory council. Um Erica from the state board sits on our advisory council. So she's very helpful
in you know communicating to us different topics that are of interest. But if there are topics that are really important to the state board um we are very happy to hear that feedback. Um so the first uh set of key takeaways that I'll show you is from the survey
snapshot on teacher evaluation. Uh we know that this topic is really important to the board just given your role in establishing the rules and policies around teacher evaluation. Um so over eight and 10 teachers agreed that teacher evaluation helps them improve
their teaching. We have seen consistently across years that teachers seem to be pretty satisfied with the processes um related to their teacher evaluation. Um and 2025 was no exception. Um so we had 86% of teachers agreed or strongly agreed that the
processes used to conduct teacher evaluations were fair. Um 85% agreed or strongly agreed that uh the evaluation system helped them identify areas for improvement. and 81% agreed or strongly agreed that the teacher evaluation process led to improvements in their
teaching. Um, and these percentages are actually even higher for early career teachers. Teachers in their first three years of teaching. Um, 91% of early career teachers agreed or strongly agreed that the evaluation process led to improvements in their teaching.
We also asked administrators um about how much time they spend on different administrative tasks um to try to get a sense of how much time they're spending on tasks related to teacher evaluation. Um and administrators reported that they spend about 15% of their time on tasks
related to teacher evaluation. Um and that was less time than they reported spending on other things like student discipline, supporting teacher instruction, and other meetings or supervision. Um so we don't get a sense from this that administrators are spending an overwhelming amount of their
time doing teacher evaluations. Um and actually only one in 10 school administrators identified uh a teacher evaluation as an area where they felt that they um were least prepared or needed additional support. Um so it
seems like administrators are pretty well prepared to do these evaluations. Um and then we also asked school administrators about how they use the results of teacher evaluations in their schools. Um and nearly 90% of administrators reported that they use
teacher eval evaluation ratings either to a moderate or to a large extent for setting student achievement goals and identifying areas for professional development. Um so it seems like there's a lot of utility here for these teacher evaluation ratings in schools.
Um, this year we also added some questions on artificial intelligence. Um, since all districts now have to have a a district-wide policy on AI. Um, so we added a few questions for teachers and administrators just to sort of get a sense of of what AI use looks like in
schools. Um, so we asked teachers if they had ever used any AI tools in their teaching and about four in 10 teachers reported that they had used AI in their professional roles. Um, this was more common among teachers with fewer years
of experience and high school teachers uh were more likely to say that they had used AI in the classroom. Um, and we are going, we're adding some new questions on AI, um, and refining some of these questions for the 2026 survey, um, to to
get a more nuanced picture of what this looks like in schools. Um, then we followed up for teachers who said that they did use AI tools and we asked them what they used AI for. Um and so most teachers who said that they had used AI tools um reported that they were
using it to generate assignments or assessments. Um so overall it seems like the the most frequent use of AI is sort of to save time on some of these planning type tasks. Um and we asked a similar question for administrators uh about what they used
AI for. Um about six and 10 administrators said that they had used AI tools in their professional roles. Um and the most common uh use for administrators was to help them write emails or other communications. And the final snapshot that we'll
describe for you and all nine of these are available on the Tara website so you can open them up at any time you like. Um but we wanted to go in depth on these three topics knowing how important they are to the board. and I was still at the state board when we began working on changes to the high school and beyond plans. This was rolled out in 2023 24 to
replace the less detailed four-year plans of study that were previously in place. So, we know this is an area of emphasis for the state board's master plan and that you want to track improvements over time. I also know it's part of the department's uh future ready TN four pillars related to individualized advising. So, we are
staying in close touch with state board and department staff about the questions we ask and who we ask them to uh regarding high school and beyond plans. When we asked just CTE teachers last year, twothirds of high school CTE teachers said they were familiar with
their school's efforts toward high school and beyond plans. Um, and half of CTE teachers thought their students were familiar with their own plans. So making progress but certainly not statewide coverage at this time. And then when we look at high school
counselors, um high school counselors as opposed to CTE teachers for this question, we see that counselors who are located in towns and rural areas reported more familiarity with the high school and beyond planned effort than teachers in suburban areas and particularly in city or urban districts.
So, I know this is something that our colleagues at the department have already looked at and have begun rolling out different trainings and resources to try to address this gap. And in terms of what they're doing with these plans, counselors most often said they were involved in creating plans
with the students assigned to their case load. Um, and other types of work that were less common were updating the plans annually, uh, talking to parents, facilitating career assessments, and kind of providing other generalized oversight. So again, this is something where we're hoping to see, you know,
improvements as time goes on and people become more familiar with these plans and have more training and resources. As a preview for 2026, we are asking questions related to high school and beyond plans to all high school teachers, not just CTE teachers, because
really any high school teacher who knows a student well could help them think about their future plans, whether that's college, career, or military readiness. It's not exclusive to only CTE teachers or only counselors. We'll turn shortly to our longer briefs.
Um, I don't want to take too much of y'all's time, but on those three snapshots that we covered, is there anything you'd like us to go back over or questions just on the snapshots? >> I might have some questions later, comments, uh, particularly associated with the high school and beyond plans, but we can wait till the end.
>> Sounds good. All right, I'll turn it back to Caitlyn. All right. So, we will move on uh to talk about a couple of our Terara briefs from this year. Um so, the first one that I'll go over is on school leadership pipelines. So, this covers um
perspectives from administrators on teacher hiring and then some opportunities for teachers to move into school leadership roles within their schools. Or I'm sorry, that was that's the second one that's coming. This one has to do with um retention among uh
principles and assistant principles who are currently serving in leadership positions and um uh teachers who may be moving into leadership roles. Um so we ask school administrators um questions
about their retention plans for following years. Um and so over the past five years, we've consistently seen that about nine and 10 school leaders uh report plans to continue in their same role the following school year. Um so this is good. You know, we don't want to
see a lot of turnover among school leaders because we know that this can be have challenging effects for schools um if the transition isn't carefully managed. Um and the survey helps us sort of get a sense of how much turnover we might expect in the coming years. Um, we
also asked principles and assistant principles uh how many more years they thought that they would stay in their schools. Um, and so principles on average said they expected to stay in their schools for about six more years and assistant principles expected to stay in their schools for about seven
more years. Um among uh assistant principles, we asked them whether they had been encouraged by their principal to seek a principal role in the future. Um and so assistant principles who said that they had received that encouragement from
their principal were about twice as likely to say that they are seeking a principal position. Um so uh almost half who said that they plan to seek a principal role in the future. um had been encouraged by their principal, but
um only a quarter who said that they were not encouraged by their principal to seek a principal role said that they plan to seek a principal role. Um and then we see uh similar trends for those who say that they're currently seeking a principal role. Um they were about twice as likely to to say that if they had
been encouraged by their principal. So that really speaks to the importance of principal mentorship for that pipeline of developing strong APs and encouraging them to seek that principal role. >> I think another factor of that you look at it different way. So 50% are being
recommended or encouraged by their principal to seek it. 50% of that number are interested in it but there the principal doesn't recognize that or whatever. So I think there's two ways to look at that. >> Yeah.
>> Um and then we also asked a set of questions to teachers who have administrative licenses. So these are the potential pool of people who could move into those leadership positions in the future. Um and so about a quarter of teachers with administrator licenses
reported that they are actively seeking a school leadership position. Um we saw some differences based on teacher and school characteristics. So, male teachers and black teachers with admin licenses were more likely to say they were seeking school leadership positions. Um, and teachers in city
schools and high schools were a little bit more likely to um say that they were seeking those leadership positions. Um, and then the second brief that I will share an overview of is our strategic staffing brief. So, this is the one that that talks about
administrators perspectives on on hiring teachers. Um and then uh leadership positions for teachers within their schools. Um so about 60% of principles say that they find it challenging to recruit effective and qualified teachers
to their schools. Um over the past few years we've seen that you know consistent reports that that it is challenging to find these teachers and hire them into their schools. >> Do you find that surprising?
Not really. >> Um, and then we looked at how successfully principles in different uh contexts are able to fill their vacant positions. So, we ask school leaders to report the number of um open positions
that they have before the school year starts and then the number of positions that are left unfilled at the start of the school year. Um and so using that we calculated a percentage of positions that were left unfilled out of the number that were were vacant going into
the school year. Um and so principles in city and rural schools seemed to have the most difficulty filling their vacant teacher positions. Um fewer principles or fewer vacant positions in suburban schools were reportedly left open after
the school year started. Um and then this question was new in 2025. We asked teachers um whether or not they were currently serving in these different teacher leadership roles like being a mentor teacher or department chair. Um and then we asked them also if
they were interested in that role. Um so almost about a third of teachers reported that they are currently serving in a teacher leadership role. Um but almost 60% said that they are interested in teacher leadership opportunities. Um so one thing that came up when we were
kind of going through this data was that it we would like to know which of these positions are actually available to teachers in their schools. Um so we've refined the question in 2026 um to see you know if teachers are interested but maybe the position just doesn't exist in
their school. Um, and hopefully that will sort of help us understand these big differences we're seeing in interest in serving in these positions and actual participation. And finally, we'll give you all some brief updates on the 2026 Tennessee
Educator Survey. We added several new topics, including questions specifically for instructional coaches to better understand their roles and responsibilities and the landscape of where they work across the state. We've added questions for early career teachers who are teaching on a permit,
those one-year permits that can be issued up to three times about what supports they have and what they might need. And we worked with the department to add questions on instructional alignment and coherence across tier one core instruction and tier 2 and tier
three student supports. We did not continue asking questions on the computer science teacher branch. that was um specific to a policy change that is now in effect. As Caitlyn mentioned at the beginning, we ask some questions year-over-year, we ask some questions
for a limited time when they're the most policy relevant. So, we do see these additions and deletions over time. Um, and I will say as we formulate our questions and modules every year, that's really handinand glove with our colleagues at the department. And we also share opportunities for feedback
with all the members of our advisory council. Additional updates, we added more questions about cell phone policies at the school level uh to align with a national survey called Phones and Focus led by Pr uh Professor Angela Duckworth
out of Penn. And so this is going to allow us to make comparisons between Tennessee and other states. As Caitlyn mentioned, we've adapted our questions on AI to become more specific as we understand the AI landscape better. Um, we also added questions specific to CTE
teachers integration of AI in their relevant career fields. And as I also mentioned, we've added questions on high school and beyond plans for all high school educators. Um, here's just a quick timeline with some important dates for 2026 survey.
Um, so we actually launched the 2026 survey this week. It is now open. Um, and the survey window will close in April. Uh, I think it's like the second week in April is when we close before testing and everything really gears up.
Um, and so then, uh, at the end of the school year, early in the summer, districts receive their district and school level data reports for those districts and schools that achieve that 45% response rate that I mentioned earlier. Um, and we also prepare a file
with open-ended comments for districts. Um, so all of those go out early in the summer. Um, towards the end of the summer is when we launch the TEES website and usually that coincides with the release of the TDOE survey report.
Um, and then probably rolling throughout the summer, we'll we'll release some of these survey snapshots um, as they become ready. Um, and then usually in the fall is when we release our our Terara survey briefs. Um, so you can look out for those in fall of 2026. And
just some early numbers, we sent surveys out directly via email to 83,555 certified educators across the state. So this does go to individual ed educators. It is confidential, but we are able to
find their deidentified background context to know, you know, are you in a rural district, an urban district, are you early career, are you high school? Um, so that's 83,000 folks are getting this have gotten this survey in their inboxes. Uh, as of 11:00 a.m. today, we had 6,253
completed surveys. So, we're at a 7.4 response rate statewide in week one. And I know everybody will uh help us encourage folks in your area to take this. You can now, you know, really attestify to the fact that we use this to make policy decisions. and we have at
least one response from 146 eleas. In terms of what the state board might do with tees data, um, as I mentioned, please share this opportunity with your networks and with your regions. As you go out and visit schools, you can look at the tees website and help understand
the context of the schools or districts you might visit. Are there some areas where they're high performing compared to the state? Some areas where they might want to see improvement or anything you might want to ask questions on? You can review everything that Caitlyn and I referenced today on the Tara website in terms of snapshots,
briefs, and the report. Um, and Dr. Erica Light on your team serves on our advisory council. So, you can share any ideas for future questions or products with Erica, or you can also work with us directly. Feel free to reach out at any time. And thank you for having us. We're
glad to answer your questions. >> Thank you. Very good. Very helpful. uh always amazes me the the data the level of the data that you get and it is valuable data that we should all be using. So comments or questions? >> Vice Chair Comments.
>> Just uh one question on the first survey that you shared um and correct me if I'm wrong. So teachers said that they felt like the evaluations that they receive is fair and helpful.
And so administrators said that they spend roughly 17% of their time on teacher evaluation and another 15% on supporting teacher instruction. And so when I combine those two, that's
about a third of their time basically supporting teachers and helping them be successful. And that sounds appropriate. Um, I guess my question that I would really want to drill down on that on is really understanding, and I know it may
be different from school to school or district to district, but the frequency of that evaluation >> and support. Um again where I just came from that is a very intense part of their model that
um data is provided in real time in the middle of the school day to let you know and feedback and coaching all you know happening in real time every day. And so, um, just interested in understanding what that looks like. And I know it may
be, you know, a myriad of different, um, approaches, but, um, I don't know if there's a a question in the survey that can sort of tease that out going forward. >> It's a great question. I would say it's a two-part answer. Um, via state law and state board rule, there's a designated
cadence for teacher evaluations that has to occur based on years of experience and prior evaluation scores, but that's the floor. Um, and from there, to your point, districts will have very different approaches to how often they do informal walkthroughs where then they provide coaching. Um, that's something
where if you have specific districts you're interested in, you can compare their responses to the state average on the TEES website. Um, it's also something we can consider if there's any way to build that into future research projects related to teacher support and student outcomes. So, it's a very
interesting question because there's the state policy floor, but that's not the ceiling. Miss Maxwell. >> Thank you. Um, just a couple of quick questions. So, this is at no cost to all districts. >> Yes, ma'am.
>> Absolutely. Wonderful. Um, also I appreciate the timeline because this looks like really valuable data that can be turned around quickly. So, question, comment, and you've already spoken to this. How can we encourage all districts especially you know larger
ones to participate in this? I mean all sizes actually. >> Uh because being you know with the accountability hearings coming up I think this would be an important part of of looking at what they're doing and what they need to be doing. And also
uh the teach the anonymity of the survey that's really important um and I don't think that could probably be stressed enough from Tara uh because there are individuals who feel that if they respond
and say what they really want to say that in some way someone at central office or somewhere else is going to find out who they are. And I mean that's a real thing. I hear I've heard that all my life in education. So I think you know
if we can promote it and pass the word that you know this is free this helps the district um it helps us it helps everyone and also uh encouraging more people to participate in this valuable survey. >> Yes I appreciate your comments. Um the
survey is confidential in the sense that um tarot with the way we have one person who works on a secure computer to deidentify the data one person has the crosswalk and that person is not able per Vanderbilt institutional review policies to participate in any research.
So the researchers don't know who these respondents are. The districts don't know who the respondents are. That's part of why I know it can be a frustration if a district or a school can't see their data publicly, but it's really to protect people's privacy. You have to hit these individual 10
respondent counts and that 45% rate to have public reporting. Um the only thing that goes back just to districts that could even maybe identify someone is if someone fills out an open-ended comment along the lines of, well, as a high school Spanish teacher at such and thus,
I think. So, we embed in the survey very specific directions to not provide identifying information and any open-ended comments. Um, but yes, we hold this extremely closely. We are bound by not just our contract with TDOE, but with Vanderbilt's institutional review board policies. So,
it is confidential. Um, and we take that very, very seriously. And you had a second part of your question about encouraging larger districts to participate. Some of our larger urban districts give their own um customized school climate and teacher perspective surveys and that's their prerogative to
do so. We are very open to conversations with large districts in the future about ways we can make tees continue to serve them better if there's even specific modules that a very large district needs or specific questions. Um this is free to districts. We have a 5-year contract
with TDOE to administer it. So, we're open to ways to continue to improve response rate from some of our big urbans. Thank you. >> Thank you. And as a previous director, thank you because I did read my survey responses and all of that and it's very helpful.
Miss Cobb. >> Uh, yes. In the the percentage of the reporting, I'm wondering, and you may do this on your own, uh, for your own information, do you, uh, disagregate the data from like one to five year teachers
to six to 10? Because the responses are certainly going to be different as far as I fill out a survey after 44 years and someone who's a first year teacher. Um so as far as what's available on the website in a disagregated way I think
you can view I believe it's like K to five teachers or K to8 teachers there there are some options to look at disagregated data by um the grade level that a teacher teaches um by whether or
not a teacher teaches a tested subject. Um so the website has some functionality with that. Um and and a lot of times when we do our reporting we also like try to disagregate the data in ways that we would expect different responses um
from you know different types of teachers. Yeah it's something that we can build into our research the snapshots and the research briefs because we're trying to maintain those end counts for security um and privacy. We are not able to do that at like the public website level, but for research
purposes, we can say how long has this person been teaching? Um, sometimes we even look at their pathway into teaching. Is someone who's coming from a traditional EP versus a job embedded or a an education related organization? Are they having similar experiences? So, we can do that on broader research
questions if not fully publicly on the state website. >> Are you connected with the upbeat survey or is that something separate? Okay, that's a new one to me, but I'd be glad to learn more later. >> Our district does that and that gives each school specifically specific
pathways what we need to work on for the next coming year. >> Thank you. >> Other questions? Here we go. >> Your comments? Uh just on the uh results
relative to filling teacher vacancies and um uh 60% of principles finding it challenging to recruit effective qualified teachers to their schools. um if possible at some point and I don't
know if it's uh part of the survey but I would just like to understand how um school letter grades factor into that equation and knowing that um in these territories uh particularly
city and rural schools uh sometimes where the biggest challenges are and the most challenging circumstances getting teachers to come into those environments I think require a different set of strategies than maybe in
suburbia. And so to the extent that we can um at least identify those layers, I think um it may yield some strategies that could be helpful across the state to those principles at those particular
schools. >> Yeah. And in a past year, I either were either in one of the Terara briefs or something that we put together, I remember looking at these questions um and breaking them down by different
types of schools. And so we did find that um we didn't look specifically at letter grades, but we looked at like school level, so elementary, middle, high school. Um, high school teachers, I think, found it the most challenging to
um to hire qualified teachers for their vacancies, which makes sense because they have, you know, specific subject qualifications and things like that in high school that are often difficult to fill. Um, schools with uh higher proportions of economically disadvantaged students also reported a
lot more challenges with recruiting teachers to their schools. Um, and we're presently doing a study in coordination with TDOE, but supported by the Office of Evidence and Impact on labor markets specific to teachers in rural areas. And when you look at rural areas, you kind
of have to also look at the suburban and urban areas as a as a comparison group. So, we'll be able to share that in the next year or so as well. >> I appreciate that. And I think with our accountability hearings coming up in about a month, this information is helpful because I know that uh or I
assume that um some of these types of challenges will come up as topics when we're um getting answers to our questions about performance. Thank you. >> I think Tennessee has a real resource here in in getting the data. Uh and and
thank you for doing this. Uh the question is for us how do we use that data? How do we change things to make improve? So the next time you get the data, you know, 65% of the people don't know what a high school and beyond plan is or something. And I've got some
questions associated with that and I'm going to wait until the next next topic to do that. But I I think the point I want to make is that we have the resource. If we identified areas of data that we wanted to have taken, do we just come to you and say, "Here's something
that we think would be of value or what?" >> That's correct. Um, we're a great starting point and we can take your ideas and turn them into survey question format and then with our contract with the department, the department has um final review of all the question items. And usually that looks like a
collaboration. They might say, you know, this isn't quite how we'd phrase it. We want to tweak it to make it make sense with our current initiatives. Um, so we have some back and forth there, but obviously if you have something that's a priority, we're glad to work with you on it. And commissioner, you have a comment. >> Hey, so absolutely. Um, we can
definitely collaborate, um, when this when we go through this process again. Um, but what I wanted to say was that was one of the things that we internally and with in partnership with Tara was we wanted these questions to be actionable. We wanted it to be where we actually
learned something from it and then thought through the opportunities for policy to address those issues because before it was more just a lot of questions and you just got some answers. You didn't really know what it's like okay
>> and then what right so so these um questions were developed intentionally to try to draw some um ideas and and and opportunities for further action. >> Great. Thank you. Yes, Miss Harpool. >> Um, I wanted to say thank you to Tara as
well because they have partnered with us when questions have come up that we've had particularly around um what professional development might counselors need uh around the uh college and career space, how to advise students there because of the just the amount
that's on their plate. Um, so speaking of actionable feedback of what and how uh can we provide professional development to them and again we brought an idea and they helped us make it into a question that we could get usable feedback from
>> and I think we as board members as we attend superintendent study council meetings etc can encourage the districts to encourage their teachers to to submit responses you know because that's where we're going to get the most value is when we have a high percentage of
responses know where they're coming from. Any final comments? Thank you again. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Next item is high school and beyond plans. It's Britney Slegel.
All right, good afternoon everyone. Uh, my name is Britney Slaggel. I am the manager of individualized advising within the division of post-secondary workforce CTE and military readiness with the Tennessee Department of Education. Um, I want to give a special
shout out to the two ladies who um, came before me because they've really teed up this part of the presentation nicely and that was not planned at all. So, I do appreciate that. Um, today I'm going to talk to you all about the high school and beyond plan. Uh, where we're at in
terms of progress with implementation, how the high school and beyond plan looks like, what it looks like in practice, and as well as our plan for our path forward. So, I am very very excited to talk to you all about this today. Uh, for numerous reasons, but for
the probably the the biggest reason outside of this is the body of work that I spend a lot of my time working on. I have personal experience with the high school and beyond plan policy as well. I I've been with the Tennessee Department of Ed for about just just a little over a year. Um but before that I spent 10
years of my career as a high school counselor. So I was very involved with all things high school and beyond plan related um right whenever everything was starting to roll out. So I do have a lot of real life practical knowledge around this topic as well as what it looks like
from our side on the state department end. So today we're going to go over just um the relationship of high school and beyond plans, what that looks like in conjunction with the future ready TN initiative. Uh we'll talk some we'll talk about some historical context as well. We'll also look at some um
separate data snapshots that we've taken through a survey that we've conducted uh with career coaches and school counselors as well as some feedback from practitioners who who um really have that intentional experience with high school and beyond plans. and our
response at the department level with how we are hoping to move the needle forward. So, first off, the relationship of high school and beyond plans to future ready TN initiative. This initiative is made up of four different pillars that are all interconnected. So, we've got
credentials of value, individualized advising, seamless transitions, and work-based learning. The high school and beyond plan really serves as that connection piece between all of those different pillars. It's the conduit, if you will, that keeps them all connected. In the credentials of value pillar, we
know that the high school and beyond plan really helps students intentionally select and plan for industry credentials and other post-secary credentials too that are really tailored to their specific interests and aptitudes. in the
individualized advising pillar. We know that the high school and beyond plan is that tool that is quite literally created in that advising space. So this tool, the high school and beyond plan does help school counselors and other advising professionals really be able to
have that intentional individualized conversation with students around what their goals, their aspirations, their dreams are and help make those connections in the classroom while while we have them in the K12 space. So, in the seamless transitions pillar, the
high school and beyond plan really serves as as a way to to help support those transitions. And a lot of times we think the biggest transition that we think of in high school is that transition out of high school and into the world of post-secary. There's
another transition piece that's important in with this high school and beyond plan policy as well. And that's that transition between 8th grade and high school. So, as you all know, the high school and beyond plan, it does start in 8th grade. that's whenever it's created with the student. Um, so that
really helps prepare students and their families for what opportunities exist at the school that they will be attending. So I didn't want to not mention that transition because that is a very important transition whenever you're working with eighth graders and freshman students and their families. And it also
helps support the um the transition we most often think of whenever it comes to to high school and graduation and that is stepping across the stage and into whatever their plan is for their future. So, this high school and beyond plan
does serve as as a as a tool to help help students and families kind of connect the dots between what they're learning in school, what their interests are, and how all of those things play together to be able to set them up for success with confidence once they graduate. And then in the workbased
learning pillar, the high school and beyond plan, it really helps advising individuals. So, school counselors, work-based learning coordinators, um career coaches, it helps those folks help students make intentional connections to the workforce, knowing that the information that's on this high
school and beyond plan is really connected to that student centered data, the information of their um career aptitudes and interest assessments, their just general likes, um where they vision themselves in the future, experiences that they already come to
the table with. So the high school and beyond plan, like I said, is really that conduit that kind of helps bring all of these pillars together for students in in our schools. Just some historical context for folks. Um the high school and beyond plan was added to middle grades and high school
policy in the 2023 24 school year. Um before that, a less vigorous policy was part of um high school policy called the four-year plan of study. And this four-year plan of study really looked at
um what happened within those four years a student was in high school. It was really a scheduling tool which is very important but it didn't go into as much depth as the high school and beyond plan does. Now that the high school and beyond plan is on the scene we know that the ante has really been upped in terms
of creating a tool that is usable and understandable for for students and their families. So this high school and beyond plan now serves as a personalized academic and career planning tool. It takes into account students career aptitude and interest assessment results
as well as um student student centered data. So again talking about their likes, their dislikes, what kind of career they envision for themselves in the future, their post-secary pathway. Um it also does focus a lot on the the the road map to get them there. So
counselors are working with students to fill in those courses that's required for graduation as well as taking into consideration the many course substitutions that can take place that's unique to that individual student. So that's that's where I think the high school and beyond plan really shines
because we all know that two students might have the exact same end goal in mind but how they get there is going to look drastically different. Um, so I think that serves as a really great advising tool for school counselors to be able to use when having these advising conversations with students. So
in addition, um, like I mentioned, this plan starts in 8th grade. It's updated annually as a student metriculates through high school. It does include the connection pieces with the career assessments. We're looking at industry certifications, how to fold those in, relevant early post-secondary
opportunities, work-based learning experiences, and once a student is a junior or in 11th grade, it really looks at the dates and deadlines and this post-secary plan specific information for that student. So, it populates a lot of that information in there as they're
starting to kind of really dig into what life after high school is going to look like. So, in order to kind of look at the individualized advising space and how high school and beyond plans play a part in that, we conducted a an independent
survey, if you will, um, with career coaches, school counselors, and then other advising professionals just to kind of get an idea of what not only the advising landscape looks like in Tennessee, but also how that high school and beyond plan is, how it's rolling
out, how it's going, just to kind of get a pulse on where we're at. Um the data, the next few slides that you see, I do just want to let you all know that these are very preliminary findings. Um we rolled out this survey right as the ice storm hit. So it was the most inconvenient time for us to roll this
out. Uh but uh we've the survey is still open. So, um, in light of the ice storm and the, uh, the snow that hit the east end of the state, we wanted to allow for these adviserss, school counselors, and career coaches to have enough time to kind of dig in to to what we were
asking. So, some background on this this survey. This is a survey that um I I did last year whenever I came to the department and then repeated again this year with the primary focus of trying to figure out what uh career coaches
specifically needed in terms of professional development which we can talk a little bit about career coaches if y'all have questions about that. Um, but we really wanted to to kind of dig in and drill in with these career coaches to see what what needs they had in terms of professional development
space and what they wanted to learn more about. While we had them in this survey, I wanted to be sure to include questions about high school and beyond plan and advising as well. So, this survey was emailed to about a thousand um combined
folks that range in um careers from school counselors, career coaches, and then other advising professionals that exist within the school. So, we distributed that to about like I said a thousand folks at this time. Whenever this data snapshot was taken, uh we had
about 120 responses. We drilled that down even further because we wanted to be super intentional with these specific advising questions and really really um really give these questions to the folks that work with the students that the policy covers. So meaning um if a career
coach or school counselor indicated that they worked with 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th grade students, they were given this separate set of advising questions. So really only these questions were um geared towards folks that interact with the high school and beyond plan or provide that advising uh to students. So
what we found um uh we have like I said we had about 120 responses at the time of this snapshot of those 120 responses 60 of those indicated that they interact with students in those those grade bands
and of that 50 different districts were represented across the state. So, not huge huge numbers, but we're getting there. We're getting responses in every day. So, I do totally expect um these numbers to kind of flex and change as we continue to get submissions in. But one of the first questions that we asked, we
wanted to know what percentage of students in that school has an established high school and beyond plan. I think this tells the this slide and the next few tell an interesting story. Um, we learned that 36% of respondents
indicated that 76 to 99% of students have an established high school and beyond plan while 25% of those respondents told us that 100% of the students in that school have an established high school and beyond plan. The next
question, keeping with those same percentage ranges along the bottom, we wanted to ask about quality advising. And for this question, we defined quality advising as individualized advising that is goal and future
focused. So not just coming in and having a one-off conversation, 5 minutes, but something that is intentional and individualized to the student. And this was the information that we got back. So here we had about 27% of respondents saying that 76 to 99% of the students in their school do
receive the quality advising. um and then 31% say that a 100% of those students receive quality advising at their school. When we overlay those two different data sets, I think this is where the story comes in. And again, while this is still very very new and
very you all of these facts are very preliminary and I don't know that we can confidently say that there is causal relationship between the two data sets. I do believe that there is a relationship between the schools that have higher percentages of students with
established high school and beyond plans and the uh percentage that receives that intentional um individualized advising. And as we can see here there is towards the end um the bars on the graph represent the schools that have established high school the higher
percentages of higher the higher percentages of established high school and beyond plans and the line across that's where that advising participation comes in. So we do see a little bit of a relationship there towards the end. the more schools that have the higher established high school and beyond plan,
it appears that they also are uh receiving that individualized advising as well. So encouraging. We still have a lot of we've got a lot of room to recover in this area and I'm excited to share with you all some ways that we are supporting um the knowledge of high school and beyond plan throughout the
state. So I do look for uh both these numbers and the numbers that um our friends at Tara who have engaged with high school and beyond plan. I do expect those to increase over time. >> Yeah, if you don't mind me just interrupting. >> Yeah. >> I mean that's an obvious question is the
reconciliation of these numbers versus terrorist numbers. I think I did see Terry that said like in the city 65% of the people don't even know about high school and beyond plans and uh those that have it or a small percentage
>> certainly not 75 to 100%. So, >> right, >> it may be that that you've got a small data set, >> very small in >> that the ones who've responded are the ones who are excited about it, which is great. I mean, they all be excited about it. Uh, but uh yeah, as you get more
data, it'll be interesting to see if they come in more in alignment or or something. >> Yeah. And something just to keep in mind, too, um the Terara survey was distributed to a lot more folks than than this survey was. So, I do fully expect there to be some some discrepancies, but um but I'm I'm
hopeful that through the work we're doing, we're going to kind of be able to make those match a little bit as time goes on. I >> I would think that the higher number of data responses would be more better data than than a smaller number. So, >> for sure, definitely. Yes. All right.
So, another question that we wanted to ask was how advising was documented. Um, we know that as the high school and beyond plan serves as that tool for individualized advising, we also wanted to know how those advising conversations were being documented. 44% of the
responders in this survey did indicate that doc that um advising was documented on that high school and beyond plan. So that further goes to kind of show us that not only is it an advising tool that um helps students kind of see their
path forward, but is also helping the educators kind of keep track of these advising conversations as they happen. So along with the um the data just presented and that we've gone over earlier today, we wanted to also kind of
dig into some qualitative feedback as well. Um and these are just stories that we've collected from the field um through professional development sessions that we've offered, conferences that we've presented at uh office hours
that we've we've been involved with. So a lot of the the feedback that we've gotten from practitioners who use and uh who implement high school and beyond plan kind of falls within these three different buckets. The first um the one thing that we've noticed is that
implementation of the high school and beyond plan policy varies all across the state. No two districts implement this policy in the exact same way. Um which lends some creativity, some room for creativity with how the high school and
beyond plan, how a template is developed. So we see primarily two ways that high school and beyond plans are um how they are uh stored with students. The first is through a digital storage format. A lot of districts have created
templates that they um they're able to access quickly and easily if there needs to be updates. Other districts have opted for more of a paper pencil version of the high school and beyond plan. through this. A lot of districts have
stated that um if if there could be some uh if I don't know how to say this, but there that schools have a a need for high school and beyond plans to be in a
digital format to increase sharability so that students have easier access to the high school and beyond plan. um their families have easier access to it and then also those relevant stakeholders that engage with students um at the school. So the the biggest
population that kind of rose to the top with this was um students IEP case managers. They would like to also have quick access to high school and beyond plans um so that they can really use that in addition to the transition plan
um and other accommodation plans that exist for students. So, that was a one of the most common questions that we that I've received from folks in the field is just how is it allowed are they allowed to store high school and beyond
plans digitally or do they just need to be a paper pencil copy? So, we've gotten a lot of really interesting feedback here. Another another type of feedback that we've gotten involves the verbiage that considers whenever students withdraw and enroll in in different
schools. Um, this is particularly important for our highly mobile student populations that sometimes change schools multiple times throughout a school year or within their time in high school. So, being able to have that portability of the high school and beyond plan is very important. Districts
have asked a lot of questions about clear guidance and expectations on that. Um, which is totally that that the level of expectation is a local decision for sure. Um, and we've also had a lot of feedback about single approved career
assessment vendors. This also kind of plays into that student population that's highly mobile because that is a very difficult piece of the high school and beyond plan to capture if you are just looking at the high school and beyond plan because a lot of times the schools um they partner with a career
aptitude or interest assessment vendor that is specific to their school only. So, it's very difficult for for the administrators, the counselors to pull that information um that a student has previously tested through and the results they've gotten. It's very
difficult to pull all of that information um since there's not one approved vendor. So, just some considerations that we've gotten from um the field that I wanted to be sure to share with you all today. The next part of this presentation I
want to focus on is the different ways we at the department are answering the call. We know there is a huge need for advocacy around high school and beyond plan for professional development around high school and beyond plans and just to have a just to have conversations around
what this policy looks like and how it and how it's so meaningful for students. So, one of the first ways that we've tried to answer this call is through creating several different resources, all of which I believe you have access to in your packets for today. Um, the first resource that we've created is a
high school and beyond plan guidance document, which does a a real deep dive into different parts of the policy and goes a little bit further too in um in giving examples of different activities that can help inform that high school
and beyond plan. That's not limited to just one-on-one advising. We know that there are um wonderful career fairs that happen that help students make those connections, not necessarily advising that happens during those career fairs, but it gets their wheels turning about
different options that they might be um interested in. So having conversations with post-secary institutions that come into their schools, this document really kind of does a deep dive into all of the different ways that a high school and beyond plan can be informed um as well
as having those individualized advising sessions with students. Another resource that we've created are three different journey guides. I'm a visual learner. I like to have something that is that is a nice picture in front of me whenever I'm talking through something. So we created
these journey guides from three different perspectives. From the educator perspective, a student perspective, and then a family member perspective as well. Um, and what this does is it puts a visual a visualization to the policy um, and helps students,
educators, and family members kind of be prepared for different milestones that happen within that policy and how how those are related to their time in middle and high school. The next resource that we have created is the career coach network. And I will
say this the name of this network is would make one think that these are resources just for career coaches. However, this resource is open to all advising professionals. So not only career coaches have access but school counselors have access, administrators,
really anyone with the link. This is housed through Best for All Central. Um, and is something that, um, we've heard the career coaches and school counselors say they would um, they would like access to a one-stop shop, if you will, for advising resources. So, as it stands
right now, we launched this network just a little over a month ago, so it is still brand new. It is ever evolving. We will continue to add resources to this this page as they become available, as they're created. Um, as of last
Wednesday, I I believe the page had about a thousand views, which I think is pretty significant, meaning only the folks who have access to the link have access to the page. So, within a little a little over a month, um, we've
garnered about a thousand views to that. And we're seeing that educators that interact with this page, they are spending a a substantial amount of time on the page engaging with the different advising resources that exist. So we're very excited for that to continue to
grow. Um along with those hightouch department created resources, this this website also has um information about webinars. It's an archived uh webinar collection as well as registration for upcoming webinars which I'll talk about
in just a few minutes. Um and eventually we would like for there to be a spot on this page for highquality district created resources to live as well. That way schools can um kind of look to their neighboring district and see what's
working for them and learn how they can be creative and implement something along those same lines at their school. The last bubble on here um talks a little bit about our collaboration with our outside partners. Through collaboration with SCORE, Harvard states
leading states initiative and the Appalachin Comprehensive Center. We're working hard to develop high quality, even more high quality um advising resources to help the folks in the buildings doing the advising so that their work is meaningfully supported um
with the different resources that's created through through these different collaborations. The next bucket and this is really where I want to spend some time is the professional development. Like we said, we know that there is a huge need for professional development in this area.
Um, this is something that I am taking very personally because I the high school and beyond plan policy is near and dear to my heart. Um, so we're answering this call by providing uh highquality professional development options for practitioners in the field.
So, for example, just last fall, we hosted seven different in-person events for school counselors, career coaches, and then um advising professionals that uh work with the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. So, in collaboration with TEKC, we put on these
um seven different events where over 400 different advising professionals attended. One of the main topics of this session was high school and beyond plan. So, we did a deep dive into the policy, what it looks like, almost line by line to really just break down what that
means for students and how impactful it can be. Um, we also hold office hours every other week, uh, where practitioners in the field can come and meet with me and other members of my team, of our team, um, just to kind of talk through different things that
they've got going on at their school, really to kind of serve as that as a real time feedback if they have questions about specific parts of the policy. And then the most important part I believe of these office hour sessions is it provides districts time to collaborate amongst each other to talk
about what how how they're approaching high school and beyond plan and then to maybe help them think creatively about how that could look in their school or changes that they could make to help reach more students. So as I mentioned earlier we do have monthly webinars that take place. Uh these are called lunch
and learns. They're not specifically high school and beyond plan, but they are the each monthly topic um is centered around advising concepts. So, and we know high school and beyond plan and advising, they really go hand inand with each other. You can't have one without the other. So, we did want to
spend some intentional time monthly with um different guests, different professionals and experts in various areas to be able to convey information around different topics as it relates to advising. We've had four of these so far. We started these in November. We've
had monthly webinars ever since around topics that um that overview Tennessee financial aid. We go into information about the direct admissions program. Um just recently we had a uh a guest
speaker come on and talk about designing impactful career fairs for students um as well as teaching students the value of networking. Coincidentally, next month in March, our topic is about high school and beyond plan. So, we we will
be um doing an overview of that policy as well as bringing in two districts that are really making strides in this space to implement high school and beyond plan in a creative and intentional way. So, we do want to spotlight those districts um and allow
them to be able to share their best practices, lessons that they've learned from the policy and how it impacts their students every day. We've also um spoken with nearly 30 districts who have requested one- on-one support with high
school and beyond plan. Whether that's coming in to do a presentation with all of the administrators in a specific district or really drilling in with those school counselors in a smaller setting um to kind of help them work through what that policy looks like. So, this is something that that I have
really enjoyed. um it kind of gives me the opportunity to to learn about what's going on in the field and then to kind of prepare for how we can respond at the state level as well. And then the last way we are answering
the call is by sharing best practices. We've established a career coach advisory council where we talk about high school and beyond plan um frequently in this space. We meet monthly. Um, career coaches are profession advising professionals that
kind of they advise students through the lens of careers and help them make those connections. So, in addition to the school counselor being able to have these advising conversations, we know career coaches are having these advising conversations as well. So, we want to make sure that they have a good understanding of the high school and
beyond plan policy as well as other career advising aspects um that we that we kind of learn about. Uh this this initiative with the advisory council provides a really great two-way communication strategy for us to be able
to give updates to the folks in the field and then for us to also for them to tell us about um different things that they they've got going on in their buildings as it relates to advising and high school and beyond plan two. I mentioned earlier that we love to highlight district spotlights. I think
there's real value in shining light on districts who are doing things innovatively. Um we've showcased different districts in a variety of ways. Um as I mentioned, we're having one or two districts come on the lunch and learn session next month. We've also highlighted them through various um u
social media post, quoting them in different um different documents that we've created, including the high school and beyond plan document. There's a whole different or the guidance document. there's a whole section that kind of spotlights different districts in there. So, we do think it is important to really shine a light on
those folks who are doing well in this space. Um, and something else that we are also really excited about is a career coach employment standard to be able to um help our career coaches improve their advising effectiveness. And hopefully that is something you all
will see come this summer. Uh, so we're excited to be able to share more about that. And then lastly, we know that the high school and beyond plan, just to kind of wrap it up in a nice package, uh we know that the high school and beyond plan is foundational for students. Um it's
foundational for folks doing the advising. It helps create that personalized education plan that students can use to help them make informed choices about their life after high school. We all know that the goal
of advising is to help students find jobs, but we really want them to we really want that goal to not only help students find a career, but also something that that makes waking up every morning worth it. We want them to we want to connect them to these options
that that really help provide for their families, help give them self-confidence about their futures. Um, so we know we can do that through intentional individualized advising and that's why this high school and beyond plan is so important. And as I mentioned earlier, we know there are so many different ways
that students can can metriculate through high school, different opportunities as far as course substitutions go. There are so many options uh with flexibilities and program of studies and CTE options. We want to be able to um through this high school and beyond plan, we really want
to we really want for students to to really know what all of their options are so that they can walk across that stage after they graduate and step confidently into whatever plan lies next for them. >> Any questions?
>> Thank you so much, Mr. Legel. I'm really happy to see the focus that the department's putting on the high school and beyond plans because it's as we work toward our mission to prepare students for postsecary success. It is so critical >> and to see that that's the emphasis
you're placing on that questions. >> Vice Chair Cumins. So I heard uh toward the end of last year um Commissioner Thomas from um the Department of Labor talk about 10 works
which is sort of a combined set of agencies economic development >> uh I believe education um labor and workforce and I'm wondering about alignment across all these
different entities and efforts to prepare students for um postsecondary success and um since I've been on the board and that's been 8 years now um I remember one of my very first
meetings the topic was about school counselors and how overwhelmed they are with a myriad of duties uh that uh challenge them to properly properly advise students on dual enrollment um
you know and all matters of other things because they're, you know, administering ACTs and doing a bunch of other things. And so my concern in that is just about capacity. >> Yes. >> And with high school and beyond plans,
how do we ensure that, you know, the numbers change in terms of students having a plan and knowing their plan and then being able to execute on a plan. So, um, Tennessee Achieves comes to mind just in terms of mentors and the
possibility of of this all working together and even potentially AI if, um, capacity is an issue. So, um, I just put that concern out there in question and there may be an answer. I don't know, but just wanted to to understand alignment and capacity particularly.
>> Yeah. So, I'm so glad you asked that because that is a very real concern that we hear from folks in the field specifically. >> Is your microphone on? >> Oh, is this better? >> Okay, it's on. I don't know why it wasn't. Um, but I'm so glad that you asked that question because that that is
a very real concern from folks in the field. Um we know that school counselors have so much on their plates and that often times um the the needs the student the mental health needs of students take priority which they should um sometimes
it's a matter of life and death. So in that moment school counselors aren't necessarily thinking about how to advise they're thinking about how to make sure students are safe um which is the way it should be. So one thing that we are doing is is really I think that's kind of where this professional development
hinges uh because we know that the more conversations the more normal the the term high school and beyond plan becomes with practitioners in the field it will eventually just be common understanding um of the policy itself and then of ways
that these practitioners can really learn more information. Um, again, there's a difference between learning information and learning true information that's actually helpful for students. So, that's a big part of it that I am wanting to take an intentional look at is making sure that the folks
that are advising have access to real true information that really helps move the needle for students. I think over time we're going to see that, especially as dual enrollment continues to grow, as AP opportunities continue to grow. I think we're going to see that naturally.
Um, and then just just by way of advocating for school counselors, as we all know, school counselors oversee the high school and beyond plan, but they do not have to be the only folks that inform that high school and beyond plan. So, making graduation requirements,
course substitutions, making that common knowledge for every educator in the building is really what increases that capacity. So, it doesn't fall solely on the plate of that school counselor, but of a high school English teacher who loves to talk to students about their future or a football coach who has a a
really good relationship with their their team their team members. Um, so I think I think that's really the answer is just advising doesn't happen in one person's office. It's a it's a life it's a lifelong thing. Everyone advises
everybody at some point. So just making sure that those folks that are doing the advising have access to real and relevant and true information is really what I think will move that needle. >> So vice chair, so you know that really is the foundation for developing this
future ready Tennessee. And so you know when I came on board the department was very absent from a lot of these conversations around how we fill in that workforce pipeline. And so this has been a a journey of um of the team the the uh
under Deb Null and her team and really thinking about how we can as as as Miss Laggel said really think about you know not thinking about counseling in a vacuum and how do we better support them give them more information that I think you heard a presentation that Deb
brought to the board about this idea of a portal and really thinking about how we can utilize artificial articial intelligence tools and we're actually seeing some demonstrations here in the next couple of weeks to really think about how we can actually implement something so that it is at a ready and
so everybody can have a role in really helping kids decide what those pathways are going to be. I think you know we all know then at least you know when I was going through the process you know you went to college and then you figured out what you wanted to do when you grew up and so what we really want to do taking
advantage of innovative school model dollars and the work that's happening in middle school and the ideas that um many of our educators are pushing forward and really helping identify interests and once you identify those interests then how do we support them in in ensuring that the courses they take are going to
lead to where they want to go and that it's not just one road right there are off-ramps, on-ramps. Um, if a kid's really interested in the health, I use this example all the time, so sorry it's ad nauseium, but a kid's interested in in in being a nurse and that's what they want to do and they take their first
phbotomy class and they realize they can't handle blood. Well, that doesn't mean they can't pursue a profession in health in in health, right? There are other opportunities. There's hospital administration, there's data um um input, you know, like there's a lot of
technology involved. So, it really is about arming kids and their families and their and their adviserss and their teachers to really help guide them through their K12 experience utilizing not only our career and technical pathways but also the experiences that
they need for rigorous coursework. Right? So, I have said this over and over again. I don't understand why we are not pushing our so-called four-year college pursuers to also take career and technical education courses because then they're applying their knowledge to the
skills and they're also building that opportunity to really know what those pathways are once they get into the real world or their post-secary life. So this is really a culmination of a lot of conversations with our stakeholders. We have been talking not in our own vacuum
but also getting information from our directors of schools and really helping understand what it is what is real like what is a the realistic pathway for these kinds of efforts. And so you know I'd love I you know I'm I think of this as the foundation that I hope the next
administration will take and champion. And so having y'all here understanding the kind of work that we're doing, hopefully we can continue the momentum um and building this out so that we do, you know, have kids, you know, on the ready so that when ECD is out there
recruiting um companies from all over the world, they know where our expertise lies in our high schools so that that's where we can target where our K where those companies can can already have a a workforce pipeline that's ready to go
into those into those into those industries. >> Excellent. Couldn't say it any better. >> Yeah. >> And as you talk about the innovative school models, etc., you know, work-based learning. I think this we talk about that where kids spend half their days in in a working environment.
I mean, this is great. >> Yeah, it is truly amazing the work that's being done in this space. >> Transformational with students. >> This is really exciting. Thank you, Miss Legal. update and my thoughts a little bit all over but following vice chair coins and commissioner here um I've had
that wondering for a while too I mean it one high school counselor two three whatever the ratio is seems wildly insufficient for all the things that we ask them to do much less really quality advising so um you talked about career coaches and you mentioned maybe a little bit more you could share with us because
I I wonder a couple things like I'm a former high school English teacher I love talking with students >> to sort of assume that I'm just going to do that on the margins though, as opposed to as a district thinking about how do you really intentionally put that hat on different runs of your teacher leaders potentially and how do you free
up space in their schedule? How do you at the state level help bring them together to train them? Like what are the standards that we're using expectations so we can be consistent and intentional. Just wondering where that is in the works. I know it's things you're thinking about and probably advanced further than my thoughts have. >> No, you you totally hit the nail on the
head. That is definitely conversations that we are having in this space daily. Um, we know that once the innovative schools model grant became on the scene, a lot of districts opted to use some of those funds to hire career coaches to support advising um and and to alleviate
some of those the issues that school counselors face every day. Um, at this time we have about 200. That number last year it was 206. We've seen it decrease just slightly um this year, but we know there are about 200 dedicated career
coaches serving in districts across the state. Now, if we want to talk about case numbers and ratios and things like that, there's definitely a a deficit of career coaches. Um I would love to see more of those. I think that would be um really transformative for students and
for the folks doing the advising. Um, but as as it stands right now, we are working to develop, like I said, that employment standard that will kind of create a framework for career coaches. Um, because we've one thing that we've learned as we're engaging with these
career coaches is that their backgrounds are very different. Some are former school counselors that have turned career coach, uh, some are that high school English teacher that wants to really engage with that student. Other career coaches are pulled straight from industry because they've got um that
industry related knowledge to help students be able to make those informed decisions about their next step. So the range of backgrounds that career coaches comes they come to the school with it's very different. It is not standardized across the board. Um but we are working
to develop frameworks that really um creates a standard for those career coaches and um really helps students kind of understand their role in schools as well as administrators and folks that make decisions about um their employees.
>> That's great. So if I'm understanding that correctly, the employment standard, would that tag to lensure in some way too that would make them recognizable for the teacher education or educator survey that Dr. Owen talked about and other ways that we can kind of assess the work then? Yeah, ideally um some the the career coaches that are pulled
straight from industry, not all of them are endorsed teachers. Um so there are some special considerations that we have to make with what they are eligible to earn. Um but ideally we will we'll have this an employment standard that is open for all folks that are serving in that career coaching space and then hopefully
even further as time goes on be able to open that up so that more people have access to those highquality foundations for advising students. >> That's great. And just my last comment is to put a plug in for that portal that Deb Nolles was talking about in East Tennessee in November because it just feels like and your your survey data
shows it that without having a digitized way for these plans and the other activities that are happening in relation to it to live. It's just, you know, how can labor and all the workforce partners that we have across the state really see how can parents see it? Just I hope we can make that happen. That sounded so wonderful when she
described it. >> Yeah, I hope so too. And ideally with that that portal, we're hoping that's the foundational piece, the high school and beyond plan. So we know that students will be able to interact with it, their counselors, their families, industry, workforce, all of those folks will be able to to see bits and pieces
of what that portal includes. So we are very excited to have that as an option um whenever it whenever it opens up for students. Let me know where we need to sign on and support. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> Any other final comments or questions? >> I have a question. >> Yes, Miss
>> So I love everything that you're doing with this. As a senior in high school, I feel very well verssed in like the beyond part of the plan. So, in the spirit of making sure that like this is meaningful for students and not just like a chore or something that students have to check off their list to make
their counselor happy, is it possible to like gather data how many students follow through with the beyond part of their plan just to make sure that like it is helpful and what we're doing is working. That is a wonderful question.
Um to answer that advising as a whole is really hard to measure. Um we see a lot of right a lot of the research that exists right now it involves students that have already graduated and moved on into the world of post-secary. We don't
see a lot of research around what happens in those four years in high school and how that translates to the beyond like you said. Um, so that is definitely an area of research that I think we do need to tap into to be able to see if advising practices are
effective and if not to be able to change course with the resources that we provide, the professional development, um, all of that information, uh, to help kind of course correct if the advising is not working. Um, I know that we've we've got several different research
groups that we're working with and that is one common question that keeps coming up is we know what the educator needs. We know what they need to be supported and to feel supported, but how do we make sure what they're actually what they're doing is actually working and moving the needle for students. So, I'm
so glad you brought that up. That is information and research that I am I want right now yesterday. >> That's a that is a very good question and actually I think the process exists. The questions I mean and that's P20 data. >> Yes. And that's
>> we've been looking for some time. Too many times we silo ourselves K12 higher ed workforce. The P20 data is there. Data systems are there. That is a question that ought to be asked in the P20 data to track that to get that answer. >> Yeah.
>> Well, we also have Tara here. Um so and as uh Dr. Owen mentioned they're doing some work in the college career readiness space for us and this sounds like an opportunity to really think through what that protocol could look like. >> Yeah, wonderful question. >> Thank you. Yeah,
>> other questions, comments. >> Thank you very much. Very good discussion. >> Thank you all so much for having me. >> Uh let's take a break. It's 2:25. Let's reconvene in 10 minutes. One minute. One minute. This is how my husband eats when he's
not here. Del. >> All right. Can we reconvene? >> Piece of funding. The state's role. Maryanne Derski, we'll turn it over to you and you can introduce your other participants there.
>> Well, good afternoon. Um, thank you for inviting us over this afternoon to talk to you about the local budgeting process. I am joined today by my colleagues, uh, Karen Burke Holder, the director of data strategy, and Ginger Leech, assistant commissioner for
district and leadership support. Today we're going to talk through various pieces of the local school district budgeting process. We'll touch on the transition from BEP to TISA as the state's funding formula, TISA and
local budgeting timelines, uh, state and TISA supports for districts in relation to the budgeting process. And we will also discuss the TISA survey results as they res relate to the budget process and uh the TISA accountability report. And finally,
we'll transition to a district perspective with presentations from two school districts, Rutherford County and Bedford County Schools. In fiscal year 24, as you know, Tennessee transitioned from the BEP, a
resource-based funding formula, to TISA, a student-based funding formula. Unlike the ratios and positions that were used in the BEP, TISA introduced a different revenue budgeting framework based on each individual students
characteristics. And this requires districts to more intentionally assess their student needs and allocate their funds accordingly. Uh the department has established a timeline for TISA so that districts can know when to expect certain uh pieces of
data and information that they use in their budgeting process. In December, initial data inputs are shared with districts and are shared monthly thereafter through June. This data reflects back to the district
the information that the department receives from each district's student information system. This helps to ensure that the data is accurate. Um and that is absolutely critical to accurate TISA calculations. We cannot stress enough
the importance of data accuracy. Also in December, outcomes funding is distributed and this is based on the results of the prior year's assessments. February marks the first TISA projections that districts receive from
the department. Projections are released monthly after that through June and offer another opportunity for districts to verify their data as they see the impact that their data has on the allocations that they're receiving.
We are expecting, if all goes well, to release the first uh February projections uh by the end of the week, which is tomorrow. also the end of the month. Um in April the department receives the
updated fiscal capacity numbers from Sber and Tasser. These are then reflected in the April al u projections. Districts may see a shift in their projected allocations at that time due to the revised fiscal capacity
and they may need to adjust their budget projections accordingly. Although fiscal capacity numbers are not due to the department until May 1st by statute, we have been receiving them in April for the past several years and therefore have been able to incorporate
them into the April projections a little bit earlier than normal. This is very helpful to districts. The sooner they can receive those updated fiscal capacity numbers, uh, the better for the accuracy of their budget projections. And finally, in July, the final TISA
allocations are issued based on a full year of prior year ADM reflecting updated fiscal capacity as well as any legislative changes that may have been passed by the general assembly. Every district has a budget timeline and
a process that is unique to that district. There is simply no one-sizefits-all process that every district can use. What we've put together here um is a general overview of the process that we um have seen
based on our observations of district policies and practices. Most districts uh begin the budgeting process with an assessment of local needs for the upcoming year. And this is also um or rather often part
of a multi-year process. Some districts uh project one, three, fiveyear budget cycle just to incorporate advanced planning. By January, most districts have already begun this process and some have begun as early as November and
December. So budgeting becomes almost a year round process. During this time, um, district leadership meets with central office staff and school leaders to identify their priorities and their resource
needs. These can include staffing needs, instructional materials and equipment, maintenance and operation needs, and capital outlay. Also considered are salary increases for both certified and non-certified
personnel, increases in the cost of benefits, and other projected increases such as diesel fuel, utilities, contracted services, and so on. I will note that for most districts, somewhere between 80 and 85% of their
budget is um allocated to salaries and benefits, which leaves a relatively small amount of their budget for all of those other district needs. As the district leadership meets with their um central office staff and school
leaders, um a district-wide priority list is usually compiled and used to inform the projected expenditures for the upcoming year. County or city funding bodies provide estimates of local revenues for the
upcoming fiscal year. Communication between the school district and the funding body is essential so that everybody is on the same page regarding what the local revenues are going to look like for the upcoming year and a budget can be developed that fits within
those um revenue projections. Maintenance of effort is also usually a part of these discussions. um making sure that the district is going to be able to meet the statutory maintenance of effort requirements when the budget is uh completed and approved.
Beginning in February when districts have their TISA allocations um they look at both the state share and the local share of the TISA allocation. This is again important in their budgeting. This should be shared with the local funding body to ensure that
the required local contribution can be met. The budget cannot be approved if that local contribution is not met. The April projection uh will reflect the new fiscal capacity number provided we received those those numbers uh earlier
from uh Sber and Tasser and this should be carefully reviewed to see what if any impact it has on the budget projections. the overall allocation may not change, but what could change is the share paid by the state versus the share required
by the local funding body. And so, it's important to share that information and to make sure that the local contribution is going to be met. Districts are required to have an approved budget by July 1. This is something the controllers's office oversees.
This typically requires at least one school board meeting, uh, one or more city council meeting and county commission meetings. Some districts have an approved budget as early as April according to local policy. And so, an early start in this process is necessary
to make sure that these milestones can be met along the way during the budget process. If districts do not have an approved budget by July 1, they may operate on a continuation budget, which is based on the prior year's budget, until October 1. After that point, they
must have an approved budget um or their state funding is withheld until such time as they have an approved budget. Along the way in this process, the state offers a a number of supports to districts. Uh the finance department through the
local finance team holds in-person workshops in each grand division every spring. Various financial topics are discussed at these among others and they include budgeting and accounting updates. Regional finance consultants hold
meetings every fall in each of the eight core regions. And again all kinds of fiscal information is shared uh particularly any changes in budgeting, revenues, reporting and so on. Um in the department a number of teams
uh not only the fiscal team but a number of the programmatic teams hold office hours bi-weekly or monthly where districts can call in and join the meeting and discuss relevant topics. During the budget season, there are always specific office
hours to address concerns and questions that arise in districts during the budgeting process. Individual meetings are held as requested uh where cons fiscal consultants can uh provide one-on-one assistance with issues or questions
specific to a uh district. And finally, the TISA website offers targeted training sessions on TISA implementation in a variety of formats. Uh we have one pagers, PowerPoint presentations, frequently asked questions, and videos.
And there is a dedicated email address for districts to ask their funding questions. Uh the infamous TNedu.funding tn.gov email, which is by now very familiar to all of our districts. TISA itself uh includes three key
provisions that support fiscal predictability. The first is the BEP transition. Any district that was slated to receive less funding under TISA than it received in the first year of TISA than it
received the prior year under the BEP. would receive up to four years of gradually step down funding to provide time for the district to transition and uh realign its operations to fit within the actual TISA allocations. So
initially the the gap was fully made up and then each year it has declined. Uh this would this upcoming year will be the fourth and final year of the BEP transition if there are any districts left on that. Uh secondly, we have the 5% safety net.
Any district that would experience a more than a 5% decrease in funding from one year to the next qualifies for this safety net. The district would receive 95% of the funding from the prior year. This allows
districts to know at the very beginning of the year what their minimum funding for the upcoming year is going to be. This is especially important for those districts who are seeing a decline in enrollment which which affects their
funding and could uh impact them negatively. It eliminates a lot of the guesswork. They know that they will receive no less than 95% of the prior year's funding. So, it gives them a base from which to begin their budget process even before we've sent out estimates or
shared any data back. The third provision is new in FY27. It's the funding floor. Any district whose FY27 TISA allocation is less than the prior year allocation
and they uh have experienced a decline in nonverirtual ADM is going to qualify for the funding floor. After initially qualifying for the funding floor, a district um will continue to qualify if they have a TISA
allocation for one year that is less than the preceding year. The funding floor provides that the state will allocate additional funds to a qualifying district to bring their allocation back up to the level of the prior year. So that uh funding floor is
100% state funded and districts can qualify initially for the funding floor in any year not just FY27. Turning now to feedback. Um annually the department conducts a TISA survey. This gives districts an opportunity to
provide us feedback with the on the formula. What works well? what is may not be working so well for them, what can be improved, suggestions for changes and so on. One of the questions asked of districts in this in the survey is had
they made any changes in their budget process under TISA. 20% said yes, they made significant changes. 47% responded they had made some minor changes and 25% said no, they had made no changes.
I would note that when they say um they made no changes, that does not imply uh that the local budgeting process isn't already tied to a more student-based process. It could be that they were already using those best practices that
Tissa has reinforced, monitoring student enrollment trends, uh collaborating with district leaders at all levels, and aligning resources to student needs. The TISA survey also asked to uh districts to describe how their
budgeting practices had changed. Common themes in the responses uh included an increased investment in salaries. We saw increased funding for certified and non-certified staff including adjustments to meet the state minimum
educator salary requirements. As you all know, this coming this coming July, the minimum salary for an educator in Tennessee with a bachelor's degree and no experience will be $50,000. We saw more student centered datadriven
decisions. Districts are now more focused, it see um on enrollment trends and aligning resources to student needs. Stronger collaboration and strategic alignment was noted. districts saw increased involvement from department
leaders and principles uh with budgeting much more closely tied to district goals and TISA priorities. They also noted fiscal pressures from the loss of federal relief funds. In some cases, the loss of effort esser
esser funds and rising operational costs um have impacted their budget decisions. We do want to note that our districts did a great job of not tying their relief funding to recurring projects. Uh they were very intentional in identifying one-time projects that could
be funded by ESSER funds uh that would not have to be sustained once those ESSER funds uh closed out. Tissa encourages um a link and a collaboration between district planning, accountability, and resource allocation.
With KOR's guidance, the TISSA accountability report and the district and school planning are being combined into a multi-year process of goal setting, upfront budgeting and resource identification, progress monitoring, and year-end
reflection, accountability, and financial reporting. The TISA accountability report um is framed around four basic questions. What student performance does the district want to improve? How does the district intend to improve it? How will the
district know it has improved? And what funding will be leveraged into the improvement efforts? Again, the focus is firmly on student needs, goal setting, and intentional resource allocation. While state and uh
state supports and resources are available to all district, as I said earlier, budgeting looks different across all Tennessee districts due to some local context and district priorities. There are some common budget themes. uh
but these may differ across districts. Is the budget process centralized at the central office or is it a school-based budgeting process? How are the funds distributed among the various sites in the district? Are there economies of
scale that can be uh utilized and how do we project our student needs and priorities? Uh these are some examples of the questions that districts address during their budget process and that likely differ from district to district
depending on size, staff capacity, resources available as a whole to the city or county. There are other departments in cities and counties besides education and how the government structure is set up in the county. Does the school district have a separate
finance department and take care of their own payroll, purchasing, accounts payable, reporting, or is it a more centralized process as we see in counties that operate under the Financial Management Act of 1981 where all of the county's departments
financial uh tasks are handled at the at one central location, typically in the county finance office. two very different setups, but we have districts that operate under both of those and then some that operate under some combination of those um two.
Um we are joined today, fortunately, by two uh representatives from two of our school districts, Bedford County and Rutherford County, who are going to share with us their specific budget process and how it has been impacted by TISA. before we ask them to join us. Uh
we are happy to take any questions that you might have. >> Questions for the TDOE team. >> I have a question is probably more for Mr. James than for you. Uh we have the
TISA uh review recommendation committee coming forth uh that we have to provide a report by November. Is there any schedules for those coming up forward >> first? It'll be November 1st. The the uh the initial meeting will probably be in
April. We try to wait until the conclusion of the legislative session so that we know any laws that change the landscape for us. And I I think we'll uh we'll proceed similar to how we did in the last few years of the BEP review
committee with uh the creation of a list of priorities and um uh some active feedback that we'll we'll give um both to uh TDOE and finance and administration in a time frame that makes sense because
if if we just kept to that November 1st report date, of course the executive budget is mostly put together by that point in time. So, we'll um I think we'll proceed as as we have, you know, from 2016 to 2022 at least with with the
BEP committee. That's all right. >> And that committee has been established and >> you appointed it. Yes, sir. >> I'll be chairing that committee. Vice Chair Cobins will be on that committee and as well as I think Miss Derski is on that committee. Is that right? >> And Mrs. Cole has actually been
appointed as well. Oh, that's reason. >> Well, great. Absolutely great. We look forward to those committee meetings. Other questions or comments? >> Chairman Navy? >> Yes, Miss Maxwell. >> Thank you. Uh, first I can attest to how
valuable Miss Derski and her team are um as director, federal programs director. Um, I I just sincerely cannot give enough praise to this lady and what she does and her team. I mean it is it is it just has to be noted. I would be curious
this time next year and I and this may be in the TISA reporting that comes out. Um the three funding support provisions I I would be interested to know how many districts um fall into those categories if they fall into those categories. That
would just be something I would be interested in. we we can absolutely share that with this board and thank you for your comments and I do I do want to acknowledge I have an extraordinarily strong team and then and supports from other teams as well including the two teams that are represented here at the
table. We have a I think we have a very strong department and uh we work well together and we are we are honored to do so. >> Comments or questions? Okay. I I totally agree with uh what Miss Maxwell just said. So, thank you.
And we'll now look forward to uh Bedford County and Ratherford County. a low rider chair. >> Bear with me. >> Good afternoon, chairman. Good afternoon, board. Thank you for the opportunity.
>> Oh, thank you. Good afternoon, chairman. Good afternoon, board. Thank you for the opportunity to present today. I'm Tim Harwell, assistant superintendent of Beer County Schools. This is Neil Watson. He is our HR director. Both Neil and I have been a teacher in the
classroom, an assistant principal, and a principal. And for the last five years, we have served in our current roles as assistant superintendent and HR director. Today we'd like to share with you our budget process in Bever County schools and also the impact that TISA
has had on Bever County schools. Uh to give you an idea of what Bever County looks like, we have a student enrollment of 8,734 students. We have 16 schools which includes our Befford County Learning Academy. That is our alter alternative
school. uh our breakdown as far as racial and ethnic student breakdown American Indian Alas Alaska Native Asian 1% black or African-Americans 12% Hispanic 33% white 54%. We have a 27%
economically disadvantaged in Befford County and 13% of our students are students with disabilities. As Miss Derski was talking about earlier, we are an 81 ACT county. We have a centralized finance department with a finance
director that oversees all of the government agencies in Bever County, obviously including the Bever County schools. Um, that is an interesting relationship that we have, but I I think we we we do a good job in that partnership with our county finance
department. to go over our budget process. Uh we start in mid January. Actually, starting in the beginning of January when we get back from Christmas break, we send out a document to all of our supervisors and all of our principles. Uh Dr. Garrett,
our superintendent, uh Mr. Watson, our HR director, and myself, we meet with all principles and department heads to discuss their submitted budget document. The document that all of those parties receive include the following things. staffing changes, additional staffing
requests from all of our principles and supervisors, materials and supplies requests, technology requests, building grounds repair and maintenance requests, and capital uh capital projects request. One question that we added to that
document in the last uh this last go around our budget process. We asked the question, what items funded by our board education have the biggest impact on student achievement that you would not want to lose? And uh of all of our principles in particular, it came down
to personnel. They did not want to lose instructional coaches. They did not want to lose interventionists. And they made that very clear because of the impact that those particular positions have on student learning. So each one of those I'm going to go
back uh to that slide. Uh we meet with those it's about a two-eek process meeting with all those principles and all the supervisors. Each meeting uh lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to to an hour. After that, Dr. Garrett and I, we sit down and we look at every line item
in our budget and we take all these uh requests in mind as we're looking at that and we look at those line items and and see how we're currently funding each one of those line items and and we determine if there are any adjustments we need to make um in particular
reflecting on the year and uh have we overspent in some of these line items or have we underspent some of these line items coming into this next budget. Do we need to move some monies around in order to uh support our individual schools? February through April. Uh April, we
have budget work sessions with our school board. We've already had our first one in February. We met um with our school board. Uh at that point in time, we really don't have a lot of working numbers to go by. We just want to u have an opportunity to meet with
our board and talk about priorities from their perspective. So we uh take that into account and we already have three other work sessions scheduled with our school board. We are waiting on our revenue projections for from our finance
uh director in Bever County and also the the Tissa projections. We will use those numbers to guide our budget process. Our goal is to have the budget ready to be voted on at the May be uh at the May board meeting. By the end of June, our
county commission will vote and hopefully uh pass that proposed budget. >> Mr. Watson, >> I need >> that one. Thank you. on the budget allocation breakdown. Just some points
to make about our uh 141 account, the GP, our personnel make up 80 to 85% of that budget. On the next slide, I have some numbers, but um something that Miss Dersky has shared working with on that school level and with our principles and
our supervisors, we go through u person by person in every department, and every uh teacher, every line to make sure that all those folks are accounted for. for those positions. U matching up our open positions with just making sure
everybody's accounted for and um we do focus on those student numbers and you know unfortunately do people need to move from one place or another with that accountability in mind. U but with that 80 plus% being personnel uh what's left
for capital outlay and curriculum and textbooks and instruction and those items you see on the screen there and it's 15 to 20% um capital outlay just to give you some ideas on on that kind of thing. This current uh budget process we're working
through our uh plant and operations supervisor is requesting $2.6 million. And if we added up, and we did, uh, and got estimates on every request our principal or supervisor made for buildings that we still have, uh, school
in every day that are built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. U, those were over $25 million. And he requested 2.6 to try to, you know, repair and and replace and patch. Uh, everything from roofs to boilers to chillers, doors, windows, you
name it. Um textbook budget request this year is looking like 1.6 million. Uh we need more buses and those, you know, around 170,000 each and we're trying to get three or four of those. Uh athletic fields, if I bring that into the
conversation, in the last decade, we've built two schools, an elementary school and a high school. And outside of the decade, we had built another high school. Neither high school has any athletic field on site. And that pro those projects are 20 plus million each
to outfit those. Uh so an 80% I go back to that is personnel and roughly 20% is for everything else and trying to work through that from year to year. Um we have generous I did want to mention the generous donations uh for our largest
high school in Buffford County, Shelbyville Central. Uh local donor Cooper Steel. They completely updated all the athletic facilities, um, turf fields, football, soccer, baseball. Um, that allowed us to take GP funds and do
other renovations and upgrades at our other two high schools. Uh, but without those types of generous donations, which don't come often, um, we're back to how does we fit that into our budget from year to year. Uh, in those breakdowns,
you mind hit that? Uh, and I did note on that last one, that's okay. I could go back, but uh, the federal budget, basically 90% of the federal money is on personnel, and that's the instructional coaches, uh, interventionists, things like that. And as Mr. Harwell said, principles do not
want to lose those. This slide uh just a breakdown the last three years uh for uh state, federal, local, and then grants to give you kind of a picture of what we have for Buffford County. And this breakdown, if you just take the
state and local, that percentage is basically 85% and 15% local. So if I go back to the last slide with personnel, u personnel pretty much takes up all of our state portion of TISA. uh leaving that local portion to also cover
personnel and the other projects. Um grants and just we put those on there just to give you an idea. And I thought it was interesting that the grants are decreasing if you notice. And if you noticed grants that we consistently have those same grants from year to year,
we've noticed that those grant amounts even though it's the same one that's uh seems to come back we apply for and returns each year. those numbers keep going down from those grants. So, I thought that was an interesting number. >> At this time, we just want to give you a good idea the positive impacts that Beer
County has received from TISA. Uh, right out of the gate, Beer County got an additional $11 million. Uh, it definitely helped level the playing field a little bit for rural counties like us. So, we're very appreciative of that. an additional $11 million. It gave
us a little bit more autonomy in how uh how districts use those particular funds and our focus on particular programming and personnel within our district. It allowed our our school system to be more competitive in salaries. Uh in particular, Rutherford County right
here. Uh it's it's hard to keep up with them. uh but provide uh it also provided monetary incentives uh for hard to fill positions such as math, science, ESL and sped. And you ask any superintendent, uh we're all scrambling for those
particular types of teachers because they're far and few between. It also allowed our school system to hire additional teachers, especially in high need areas such as special ed. I'll give you some more numbers here in the next slide. It allowed our school system to
increase the number of CTE teachers. I know your previous uh presentation was about innovative school model. It allowed us to really hone in on um remodeling our high schools and what they look like in Barefoot County. And I'm going to give you some numbers on
this next slide that supports that. Uh increase our number of CTE teachers programs, dual enrollment, and work-based learning opportunities. It also allowed us to break down per pupil weights and outcome bonuses per school. That's that gives us a good idea per
school, how they're contributing to the amount that we uh eventually get through TISA. It uh more positive impacts from TISA. It helped increase our personnel and our social emotional learning uh SEAL
department. Uh the year prior to TISA, we did bring on an SEAL coordinator. Uh I don't know about other districts but since COVID we've seen an uptick in uh just behaviors and just overall social emotional issues with our students. So
uh this department is really really needed. We were able to add two additional so social workers and four additional school counselors. It also allowed us to hire 13 additional ESL teachers. six of our schools, six out of
the 16, the majority population in those schools are is Hispanic. So, we needed those ESL teachers and TISA allowed us to uh uh to bring that particular program up to where it needed to be. Also, it allowed Before County Schools
to hire three additional sped teachers and 15 additional SPED assistants. It allowed Barefoot County to hire 14 additional CTE teachers and sustain three career coaches and work-based learning coordinator from our innovative school model.
If you're looking at data and how it's impacted uh I firmly believe bringing in this additional support in particular in the area of personnel, it has affected our accountability and uh as far as what we're accountable for data wise from
state and from the federal. you can see our increases in our college and career readiness rate. We're very very proud of that. But the things that we've done in our high schools, adding those career coaches, uh adding more um EPSO
opportunities, early post secondary opportunities such as dual enrollment, AP, uh getting students an opportunity to uh earn more industrial credentials. You can see that increase. We've increased from 2324 and these are the three years in which TISA has been in
place. Uh we've increased from 43% and 2324 to 46.7 and 2425 and a significant increase projected increase to 66% for this particular school year. We also have improved in our success rate across
grade bands. You can see those increases there 3rd through 5th from 30.5 to 41.2 two from n in sixth through 8th grade middle school 19.5 to 27.7 and at our high school level 18.7 to 33.1 those
numbers obviously are not where we want them to be but the needle is moving in the right direction and something that we're very very proud of is that beer county schools have we've improved from a satisfactory designation that's kind of where we were
we were at for quite a number of years but as a result we believe of being able to add these additional positions and programming we have moved to an advancing designation that's one designation away from amplary and that is our goal and we uh that last year was
our first uh year as having that advancing designation and we were able to retain that this second year so that's something we're very very proud of some TIA challenges um you've heard through this presentation that capital
outlay is one of our biggest challenges in Bevery County. Once you take 80 to 85% out of our budget and uh devote that to personnel, there's very very little money left and that has to go to many many different areas. And as Mr. Watson
presented, we have several old schools in Ber County that we're having to having to maintain. Whether it's chillers, borders, roofs, none of those things, as you can expect, are cheap. takes a lot of money to keep these buildings up and going. TISA doesn't address that and so we have to rely you
know um on our local dollars to help meet those needs. Uh we are very uh grateful that uh we were held uh not only Beer County but all districts were holdless status due to the criteria change that happened in the economically
disadvantaged um portion of TISA. We're very grateful because uh if if we were not held um held harmless in that particular area, Beer County would have lost a few million dollars, a few million dollars that we cannot afford to
lose. So, uh uh we we we hope that that holdless status stays in place for quite a while where we can adjust and figure out how we're going to make up make up that money. Um that's all of our presentation. Any questions for us?
questions at this point in time. >> Why don't we move on to Rutherford County and then we can combine all the questions. >> Oh, I'm sorry. >> Hey, I just wanted to provide a clarification and I think um Maryanne the team back there can >> give me the the specifics, but the
eligibility criteria did not change for uh economically disadvantaged. So, I just wanted I'm sorry. Hold on. this I am trying to do too many things at once but you know how that goes. >> Um so uh that uh so just to really
clarify that there was no change in the eligibility criteria it was um it's I don't know Maryann can you kind of give that explanation for me if you don't mind. >> Sure thank you and if I >> if I stumble Karen will correct me. um
what we have not the the eligibility criteria um or the the way we define economically disadvantaged has not changed since 2017. What we have seen change is um the qualifications for families to uh receive SNAP and TANIF
benefits. Those have become more stringent. So we are seeing a a significant decline in the number of students qualifying that way. Um, so I just we just want to clarify that our our definition has not changed, but we certainly have some outside circumstances that have impacted the
number of students we identify. >> Thank you. >> All right. Thank you. My name is um Dr. Jimmy Svin. I'm the proud superintendent of Rutherford County Schools and with me today I have Dr. K. Martin who's our deputy superintendent and Mr. Brian Renan, our CFO, and also the only chief
communications officer that I know that has his not only one Facebook page, but two Facebook pages, uh, Mr. James Evans, who is back here as well. And so, he is our local celebrity in Rutherford County. I'm excited to present to you all because normally, unfortunately, in Rutherford County, we've, uh, had some
controversial topics with our board we've discussed the last couple years that I've had a lot of fun talking about. And today, I get to talk about finances, which I love to talk about. And normally when we get to this part of the board meeting, everybody gets up and leaves. And you all, I guess, can't get
up and leave. So, I'm excited to uh to talk about this uh today. So, a couple things about Rutherford County. We are the fourth largest district in Tennessee. We surpassed Hamilton County um during CO 51,400 students. Just our quick breakdown. American Indian 1%,
Asian 5%, black African-American 21%, Hispanic 25%, and white 48%. We have 52 schools. Uh we are averaging about one school a year that we are adding 6,600 employees. Uh we are a a growing district. Uh this year we actually
shrank in enrollment a little bit but we are normally a growing district about a thousand students a year. For those watching we have four municipalities Murphy'sboro, Smyrna, Lever, and Eagleville. And something we're very proud of we had the highest to growth of any district in Tennessee um in the 2025
school year because it is all about student achievement. in talking about our budget and our guiding principles. Uh, one, you're going to hear some similar things because when I found out who was presenting with us, uh, I was a principal in Bedford County for seven years. So, worked with both of these
gentlemen. So, a a very unique thing. And what you're going to hear us talk about, we are governed by a private act instead of the 81 act, but our private act is very restrictive. Um, we do have our own finance department, but we do
not have our own payroll department. We do have accounting, even though our pay our private act says that we have a centralized accounting. So, we are not 81 act, but pretty close to having an 81 act. And I'll let Mr. Ren talk a little bit more about that. Um, and I failed to
mention, of course, with my joke, I do want to thank you all for letting us be here. Commissioner Reynolds, executive director, and state board of education. Thank you all. And I want to echo what somebody said with Miss Derky and her team. Uh, absolute allstars. Anytime that we need, I do have a secret weapon that Mr. Ren worked for her. So, anytime
that I need, I always like to call on Brian and say, "Hey, see what you can find out." So, that helps. We have a couple guiding principles that we use. First, we constantly train to increase our knowledge and understanding. I had a mentor that told me that I love my
finance director, but as a superintendent, if you don't learn finances, you are not only going to get run over by your own team, you're going to get run over by your county commission and your funding body. So, you have to learn finances. So, the first couple months and year, I truly spent a lot of time trying to understand
all the ins and outs about revenue, expenditures, account codes, object codes, uh really just nerding out on everything I could about finances. Second, you have to make sure that information then is taught. I'm a teacher at heart, a math teacher, and teaching your staff to understand all
that information. So, we started with our central office, then training our principles to understand all that information. So, trying to build that collective efficacy of our team. We want to be transparent with everything. Uh, but everything for us starts with people, being people first and trying to
build that trust of being fiscally responsible. Uh when you are a large district, there's a large number. Our budget this year for revenue was 574 million with expenditures of 583 million. Those are huge numbers that we're going to talk a little bit more
about. When you put that though in per pupil expenditure, we are 125 out of 143 in the state because most of our funding goes to new buildings. And so that doesn't leave a whole lot uh for our students. What we work on with our board
is to set goals. And so our budget process does start early in December, but annually we set our goals with our board because ultimately our board along with our staff should drive what our budget process is. We start with staffing usually because we lead with
people first. As Mr. Harwell said, we have seen a lot of uptick in behavior. So we've put a lot of supports around behavior and also around capital projects. A couple things we're going to talk about are our RCS budget calendar, which we set with our county finance director. some principal requests,
department requests, our board retreats, and then our just revenue and projections. Here's just an example of how quickly we start. And as Miss Derski said, it's almost a year- round process. This is this year's budget calendar. We started
December 17th. Uh we started with a principal meeting going over here are your budget request. you need to make them around instruction, salaries, people, all the different areas that you get to to make budget requests. We did
have uh the ice and snowageddon, so they got an extra week than they normally would have had, but we asked them not to make the request themselves. They have to meet with their leadership team and then submit those requests. So, we do expect them to do those things. Um, and then you will see it's colorcoded. The
board starts working on theirs February 5th to discuss board priorities and then we get into May. Our board has to pass it by May 15th as in our private act when it has to be passed. We normally don't get our revenues set until right before May 15th by our county government. So we are going right up
until and there's my county mayor calling me right now probably telling me I can't have more money. And so uh we go up until the very last day in setting our budget um priorities. Mr. Renan, I think you are up to thought
about our common knowledge we work on. >> Okay. To Ryan Renan again, CFO Rutherford County Schools. And if anything is wrong on here, you can blame it on Mary because she's the one who taught me everything I know. So, no, she actually I I got to credit her for every
for being here, you know, in this in this position as well as Dr. Sullivan, Dr. Martin. So, um, I'm going to dig a little bit deeper into our funds and give you a little bit of idea of of what they are. Um, so I'm going to start off with fund 141, general purpose school fund. That's our largest fund. That is
where the majority of our salaries and benefits reside. And then the majority of our non- salary and non-salaried items uh, also reside. Uh we have a couple of other funds that I'll talk about here in just a second, but just to give you a little overview of what that
that fund looks like and also going back just to take a step back real quick. We are the largest district in the state of Tennessee that is still audited by the comprollers's office. So we are following their their chart of accounts with these numbers. So these are not just numbers we made up out of the blue.
So fund 141 is general purpose school fund. Um it is a $575 million budget this year uh revenue side. 5808 8283 on the expenditure side. We did have to dig a little bit into
fund balance to balance this budget. Um it's 80% like I said salaries and benefits. Uh the local portion of this is 193 million. for us to uh pass our budget with the with the state, we have
to have a 3% fund balance amount um and maintenance of effort. So the maintenance of effort that is required by our our county commission to provide for us is actually 110 million. So they they fund approximately
um 40 45% over currently of of what they're they are required to give us uh which we very much appreciate it. But as Dr. Dr. Sullivan said we are one of the largest and fastest growing districts in the state of Tennessee. So sometimes the growth is not paying for itself. So we
we have to we have to shift our uh views of what we're trying to do and sometimes in order to make things work. Um 382 million of it is from TISA uh you know this this current year. So, you know, it's it's a balance of being able to
know, you know, what part of TISA needs to go where, what part of the local funding needs to go where, and how to ask for more local funding if, you know, the TISA is not making or if we can't make it up with the with the TISA funding. Um, fund 143 is our centralized
cafeteria. The majority of the revenue from that comes from USDA reimbursing. Um, and it funds basically cafeteria personnel and any non-salaried uh items that are being done as far as renovating
our cafeterias in our 50 51 52 schools. Uh, it currently is around 20 28 to $29 million. Uh, it has reached 30. We the only issue we're really having with that right now is is we did develop a pretty
good a a good fund balance in there which we obviously submit a spending plan to spend that down uh every year. Um so it's a it's a it's a good problem to have but yet at the same time we make sure that you know we're we're putting the money where it needs to go in that
fund. U Fund 177 which is our capital projects fund. It funds basically everything from LED lighting projects, HVAC HVAC projects, roofing, um, anything that, you know, is is is a large large dollar amount. Um, but
that's mainly funding from our local funds. So, property taxes and then some impact fees that we do receive at the at the county from the county is what u funds that. It is currently right around $21 million. We allocate 2.5 to 2.6 6
million of that per year to these schools at principal discretion. $50,000 per school for them to be able to do whatever capital projects that they so choose. Um, and then we have about 17 million that we use for the rest of the
52 schools for uh a lot of, you know, HVAC issues, LED lighting projects, you know, like I said, a lot of things that are constantly with our buildings aging. You know, a lot of those those issues come up. So, um, we definitely spend that fund down almost every year
>> and we're about 500 billion behind, um, in our capital projects just because we are so large. That is a fund that I know is pretty unique to Rutherford County. Our county government gives us uh, funding for that. >> Also, we have fund 142. I'll finish up
on that that slide. Uh, we have fund 142, which is our federal funding. You know, our title ones, our title funding, and our IDA funding. Um and then the last one we have which is one of our um one our fund that is not audited by the
comproller. It's our fund 1889 fund. It's our building projects fund. Uh basically all the money that we borrow to build our buildings. That's where that money goes into and and is receded and spent out of out of fund 181 or 189. Something I wanted to hit on this real
quick is good for I think the um state board to understand is as a director of school I'm really the the CEO without a payroll department um without an accounting department and one of the most unique parts is are we don't
control revenue and so the county commission which is our funding body sits our revenue and we get our local revenue May 14th with our budget due on May 15th. Uh you have to have those great relationships with your funding body. We do. We have our maintenance of
effort. Last year we did get it increased for the first time. It was increased $2.9 million. And we train our principles on understanding what maintenance of effort truly is. So that's what those are highlighted in yellow. Those account codes. We're not going to go through those just for the sake of time. But we do expect our
principles to have a knowledge base of here's what m maintenance of effort means and here are the different tax codes that really build into maintenance of effort. So then we get into kind of our developing our common knowledge of I
didn't take your slide did I? No I'm still here. Okay. Uh very quickly I know Maryann has already talked about this TISA with our base weights direct outcome fast growth and high performance. uh you'll see that the importance she talked about having clean data. This is huge for us uh with our
SIS and our attendance people making sure that it is so clean even having a 1% error rate. If we're getting 360 $370 million in TISA then a 1% error rate on student characteristics on course schedule changes we're looking at a $3.6
million loss. When we get those emails from TNE Edgy funding we send them to our principles. here's what we're looking at districtwide and you need to look at your files to be able to see what are your students generating and that is a different role that principles aren't used to being in is to look at those files to truly see what type of
errors do we have and they're able to clean a lot of that up but that is a lot of stress and a lot of pressure but it is operating like a business a little bit different than operating like a school and that is where we try to remove the barriers for our teachers so that they can focus on their students
The last thing that we look at um that you'll see Brian talked about really 84% of our budget is built on staff and benefits. What did TISSA do for us? And we received 55 million from TISA. We were $28 million in the deficit. I say
that with a caveat because you're going to find here in just a little while we have an extremely healthy fund balance. We have a healthy fund balance because our funding body and our current county finance director likes to keep revenues low so that our fund balance gets high
and I know a neighboring county does the complete opposite. We were very close to having a 20% fund balance this year. Uh which is pretty ridiculous in my um opinion. Uh but I'm the school system of course I think that is crazy to have a 20% fund balance. So we were able to get
out of that deficit 55 million. We took 28 million to gather the deficit. We were able to use about 15 20 million of that to be able to increase and get closer to that 50,000 threshold and uh do a 5% raise across the top. The last portion, 10 pennies were moved off of
our um budget and we paid for three high school additions which added 1,500 seats. And so that is what Tissa did for us. We were able to fund $150 million of high school additions. It was huge. We talked about Brian talked about the funds. We expect our principles to know
what these codes mean. Uh so when they're doing budget requests, they're expected to know the chart of accounts to do budget codes and submit their items. >> So um Dr. Sullivan has already told you, hi K. Martin, um deputy superintendent for Rutherford County. Dr. Sullivan has
already told you that um he is a budget finance nerd. I am not. I am an educator, English teacher at heart. Um but he has um truly walked that talk that he has talked to you about today. And that starts each year um in monthly
in December when he starts to meet with our principles. We meet with our principles K12 once a month. And that December meeting that's when he gives them information and to review all of this information you're seeing today is the same presentation that he presents to them. He does that yearly with them.
Not only does that he do that in a large group setting, but he also does that with each individual 52 principles one on-one. Um, and we do that in the month of January. That's usually a 45 minutes to an hour, an hour and a half um, sitdown presentation where they really
get to talk specifically about their school, their teacher, and their needs. Um, so what he does with that is very similar to Bedford County, we send out a Microsoft Forms link to all of our principles. They then complete that link. That includes anything from
positions, your certified, classified staff, programs, instructional materials, technology, capital projects, maintenance, any of those types of requests. He then also shares that at the same time with each of our assistant superintendent and those in sup
assistant superintendent are then able to look at that and how that compares to their budgets as well. Um he talks a lot about um the awareness of that but also being consistent um and also being transparent. So our principles feel like
not only are they a part of our indir school budgets but they're also very much part of the district budgeting as well. So taking that forms then we take that to each of our departments at our central office. They look at that they analyze those forms. They also look and
ensure that um the district and the school goals they're aligning and that we are prioritizing our district to meet the needs of our each individual schools. Um and so um we have been able to in the past um look at that and
determine our schools are spending some money, we're spending some money on some of those same needs at the district level and put all of those together to make sure that our funds um are really meeting the same goal. Um for example, um we had a few years ago we noticed
that all of our high schools were spending different types of money on ACT. Obviously, um instead of each school kind of spending that money in different places with different programs, we centralized that. We purchase one program for the whole
district. Um and then we were able to oversee that um and have a little more direction and uh focus from the district level down, but then it also took a financial burden away from our schools and um open up their allocations to use
that in a different way. And so our kind of next steps that we take is again we started meeting with our board. Our board gets the priorities set in February. We email all of our principal requests and our department requests to all of our board members
which is unique. Uh they actually um our board members do look at those. So we we hope our principles submit things that are appropriate. Um if they don't then I that's going to come out pretty quickly. We have a budget retreat. one or two days, the assistant superintendent are going to present their budget requests.
We have an open discussion on revenue and expenditures, our five-year projects. We update our five-year plan at this time when then through the March of through May, we really are just continually having open discussions during our board meetings, principal meetings, county commission meetings. Uh
the way our county commission meetings are structured in Rutherford County, we love to meet. So we meet as a board uh four times a month and then our county commission meets one time a month but then we present to a health and education meeting and a budget meeting. So we meet seven to eight times a month
and so we are building that narrative throughout the months of February, March, April and May. The last thing we wanted to talk about is kind of our performance. We've not had an audit finding the last two years. Uh we have been in the lowest 15% of per people expenditures in the state. US and
Williamson County are one of the two districts that have been recognized for high performance the full amount the last two years. The last thing I kind of wanted to hit on was just as a director for revenue control. The fund balance as a state requirement is 3%. Our current
status is we are at 15%. I mentioned earlier in the year we are at 20. Right now we're at 15% which is 90 million. And this is tough for our school board. Uh we tried to for an example to take $70,000 out in December. Um and and we were un unable to take 70,000 out
because it was going to go below that 15% threshold that our county likes us to stay at. For an elected body to be told you have $90 million in your quote unquote savings account and not be able to do that, that's pretty tough. And so each year when as a state board what
would help us and to just hear from the field when money is coming in and I I understand the timeline but when it comes in after July 1st it's rolling straight into fund balance for districts and when it goes into the district at July 1st I'm not going to be able to
spend it because my county great relationships great but that is just their budgeting priority. If you're not somewhere between 15 or 20% you're not going to be able to spend it. And so that's that's just a tough sale. So what have we been able to do though? The the positive u positive we've
utilized 30 million to build an elementary school. Um so that helped the tax base. I don't know of any other school system that's done that. Uh we've paid 6 million for design fees. Instead of putting textbooks into our budget, we utilize fund balance to buy textbooks.
And those are just unique budgeting ways because the money coming after July 1st. So I guess still the same money. it's just coming backwards, I guess. And so, uh, some of those challenges are, again, director of schools and our school board doesn't necessarily have control over revenue, and right now the checks and
balances are a little bit one-sided, but I know that is always a challenge between your funding body and your school system. Um, but how have we been successful? We have great relationships. Uh, we will joke with each other constantly. I meet with the chair of our
um, health and education committee before every meeting that we have. We have not had to have a tax increase even though we have built $350 million in new schools and additions the last three years. We've added 400 uh 4,200 seats to our schools. And then our
student outcomes are argu arguably the highest we've had in our history. We have 32 level five schools this year. Of our 48 that test, we had 26 schools earn a we had the high performance bonus again this year. So something we're extremely proud of and we try to talk
about what's our difference is that we put our people first and that is where our budget process starts and ends with making sure we protect our people. So happy to answer any questions. >> Excellent. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Questions for either Bedford County or Rutherford County.
>> A comment. >> Go ahead. >> Just a comment. Uh thank you all for presenting to us today. This is very clarifying to know that um this new formula is having an impact on student achievement and outcomes. That is really
the goal and to see that in clear data form year after year after year was really um encouraging and inspiring. So thank you for your hard work. Having served as the chair for a local board for uh four years and sitting on
that local board for 16 years, I understand the challenges that you go through and appreciate what you are going through and uh to work through those challenges are important. It looks like that you're doing that. I did have one question for res. Why is it that you're still under the controller or is
every all the schools smaller size that you are under controller? What who's not? What? Great question because it is a unique challenge. I think from my understanding the controller can choose and so we're still the largest district that they choose to audit. Um and so
that's where we are. >> Well, maybe if you continue to do what you're doing without any findings, maybe it'll give you some relief. >> Maybe. And so it brings a We love talking to them. So just come on. We have a seat for them and they're there for a couple months. We're so large. >> Just don't point them to Bford County,
please. We appreciate that. But as you can see in your presentations, it is a year-long process and that's critical and again thank you for what you do. Any further questions or >> and Dr. Morrison >> also an English teacher here. So it's all very educating to me too and it's helpful to us as a board because as uh
vice chair comments I think mentioned we're going to be holding these accountability hearings. A lot of that is about Tissa um Mr. Derski and her team have been very helpful to us to try to get us ready and educated for those conversations. Um, I just wanted to say too, I know Warren Wells is not able to be here because he has his board meeting, but he really hated to miss
Very Counties presentation. So, I'm just conveying his regret for not being here and really appreciate all of you all taking time, especially during a busy time of the year to come and help educate us and make sure that we have the right things in our our minds as we're thinking about these hearings and just what our schools need. So, appreciate all your work and for coming
today. >> Warren covered his bases. He tested me. So, >> Okay. Okay. Good. I'll give him credit for that. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, John. Next are lender disciplines. >> Good afternoon. Todd Madison, senior associate counsel for the board with
Jamie Formon, Alex Anderson, associate counselss. We'll be presenting for you the state board's rec or staff's recommendations for license or discipline at tomorrow's meeting. Um, one note for you is, uh, under consent
item C, uh, item number one or item number two, Mr. Zebula, he has requested to speak and will be present. We anticipate being present tomorrow to speak on his own behalf. Um as a result that item will need to be pulled separately and cons and considered
separately from the others. Um if there are any questions clarifying concerns that we can address at this point or note any other items for uh to pull for further discussion tomorrow. Any questions or comments for our legal
team? I will say this as I came in yesterday and and Mr. Anderson showed me a couple of videos I guess this morning and >> uh yeah uh it was very helpful. I appreciate that. So
>> and on that for anyone that hasn't seen the videos or wants to see them again just catch me after we adjourn and that that can be arranged. >> Any other comments or questions? >> Thank you. We'll see you tomorrow. >> Thank you. Final comments from any board members.
Dr. Morrison, I'm not sure I have much else to add, but it has been, as usual, a really full and um fruitful workshop. Really appreciate everyone that comes out to share various updates and the conversations that we're able to have as a result of these presentations. always always leaves my brain full, but it's
been a good day and look forward to another good day tomorrow. >> I'll I'll also again shout out to the teacher advisory council who came in today and hope this has been of value to you. And then midway through our meeting today, the Bradley County lead group
came in. Uh they were with us yesterday in a presentation that uh uh Mr. Mr. Derline and Miss Summers and I gave on state board of education and and they've had a full day today, I'm sure, and we're happy to have you here. Uh you
again represent a a great two districts there and and uh appreciate the conversations that we had with you. Uh one final shout out, uh appreciate uh Josh Walton for uh providing all the logistics and uh running the computers
and everything else that he's done has been very smooth. Thank you so much Josh for for all you do for us from a communication standpoint and and and for the state board. So >> we have no further comments then the purposes of the committee of the whole having been fulfilled. Declare it and
the board adjourn.