(object banging) - I now call this meeting the School Board of Independent School District 624 to order. Before we begin, I just wanna read something and we'll see if we do this every meeting. The mission of the White Bear Lake Area School District, the community at the forefront of educational excellence, honoring our legacy and courageously building the future is to ensure each student realizes the unique talents and abilities and makes meaningful contributions with local and global impact through a vital system of systems,
distinguished by students who design and create their own future. A culture that respects diverse people and ideas, safe and nurturing and inspiring experiences, exceptional staff and families committed to student success, abundant engaged community partners. And that is our district mission. So to ground us in that, I read it to begin. And my goal would be that before every meeting, we can allow one board member to read that. And with that said, I'm gonna ask the clerk to call the role. - Arcand. - Here. - Daniels here. - Skaar. - Here.
- Streiff Oji. - Here. - Thompson. - Here. - All right, our first discussion item is B1, Central Middle School. Let y'all come up, welcome. - Thank you for having us tonight. We are really excited to have a moment just to brag about Central. For those of you who haven't met Len Elvin, I asked him to come with me tonight. He is our associate principal and has been a really important part of this work. And then I also just wanna acknowledge that Ali Losey, Kelly Murrow and Shelley Johnson, who work in the building
also came to support us in this process. So as we were thinking about how we present at the end of the year versus how we present at the beginning of the year, thought I would take a little bit of time just to talk about the middle school experience and what it's like to be in a middle school and to work in a middle school. And here's what I know to be true. Because we have all attended school, we bring long held beliefs about middle school shaped by our own experiences and memories. However, truly understanding and supporting middle school students is more complex than those experiences alone.
Middle school is a time of rapid change and growth as students learn to balance new privileges and responsibilities, while becoming more independent. Today we will give you a glimpse into the complexity of the work we do at Central Middle School to build a community aligned with our school mission. Our school mission has many similar items to the district mission. And a few things that I just wanted to highlight that we always come back to with this is we're always talking about how are we being equitable, safe and supportive for students.
How are we creating a culture where people are open-minded, they have integrity, empathy, and respect for each other that we cultivate student agency and joy. I think joy in today's world is a really important place to just pause. How are we providing and modeling joy for students and that we are in partnership. In education, we talk a lot about relationships and we're all about relationships. But at Central, we really try to take it one step further and say, how are we all really in community together? And how are we teaching kids who are ages 11 to 14
to be in community together? - The middle school student, every time I tell somebody I work in the middle school, they pat me on the back and be like, whew, thank you for your service. I say, I'm not in the military, I just work in the middle school. But. (people laughing) So there are, you know, some misconceptions about middle school students. Some of them are the students are mean, rude and defiant. Middle school students are emotional and hormonal. The students care only about friends and peer influences.
And students can't think critically about complex topics and ideas. And the one misconception that really stands out is the grades don't matter. You know, at some point in time, some of these may have been true, but the one about the grades don't matter, they might not matter as to impact if you get into a college or not, but they definitely matter what the skills and the habits that you're building. You know, the foundation. And we know how important the foundation is for trying to build something up. And then they also matter in the sense
to help build confidence and provide areas of strength, areas of growth. So grades not matter, that's, you know, one of a misconception that's out there. But it's really, it is a misconception because the things that they're doing in middle school, academically socially they really do matter in like the foundation and building the kids up. The truths, middle school students' brains are in a period of rapid growth and change. Middle school students struggle with executive functioning.
Middle school students care deeply about fairness and justice. Middle school students push boundaries, take risks as they learn independence. Middle school students are self-conscious and feel like everyone is watching them. Middle school students want adult connections. And middle school students are not mini adults. They'll tell you they are, but we know that they're not. But I mean, one truth that's not there is that middle school students wanna succeed.
They want to do well academically. And it talks about that adult connection. They want good relationships with the adults in the building, the students in the building, they want to feel that sense of joy that she talked about and that love and just being successful and being, putting their mind to a task and being able to complete it. - Besides understanding the students, there's a lot of work that goes into being a middle school teacher. I started my work as a middle school teacher and I've chosen to be a middle school administrator because I love working in middle school
and I love working with middle school teachers. We have focused a lot this year on our collective efficacy. And teacher collective efficacy is the belief that teachers working together can positively impact student performance. And I've said to my teachers repeatedly, your work matters. There's too many narratives out in the public that are negative about teachers, negative about the work that we do. And I always remind myself, I don't have to do this work, I get to do this work.
And so I am so proud of the way that our staff comes together to support each other in service of students. With that this year we've had three focuses that have really guided our work. Really talking with students about their purpose for learning. Why are you here, why are you in middle school? Why does it matter? When we do that, students buy in and then talking about the quality of questioning and student status and those really go hand in hand. How are we asking students questions
to deepen their thinking? And how are we we lifting their voices and helping them to learn and to ask questions of each other? We choose to see their strengths before their struggles, which doesn't mean that we don't see the struggle, but we know that when we build on student strengths, we will increase their confidence and we choose to give them a clear purpose and direction. We wanna make this a little bit visible for you. 'cause often you like hear about these things in the abstract and teacher actions have great impact on student achievement.
I took the opportunity to just talk with the teachers and I asked them two questions. The first question I asked was, what have you gotten better at this year? And what has that done for student learning? And I wanna bring, you can read the things here. These are a summary of common themes that showed up, but I wanna bring some of their voices to light. One language arts teacher said, I've gotten better at questioning, putting more back on students. Students have been pushed to respond at a higher level to text. We are reading in class and help others with responses.
Our tech ed teacher said, I'd like to think I've gotten better at getting my students to understand what they're learning has real life connections. I feel that this buy-in from students has improved their learning. Another teacher said, I've always prioritized relationships, but this year I've prioritized getting to know students even more by having conversations for a few minutes at the start and end of class. This has allowed me to show students how much I care about them personally. A social studies teacher said, enhancing student voice in the classroom,
students have been able to make their voices heard in our classroom community and this has allowed them to become better critical thinkers and to see themselves in our world. I appreciate we have our administrative assistant in our student support center and she supports all of our counselors and our social worker and our school psych. So she sees a lot of kids when they come in and they might be heightened emotionally. They're having some sort of concern. And she said, I feel like my patience and problem solving skills have improved as I've worked with smaller and larger groups of middle schoolers,
teaching them step-by-step techniques towards reaching a goal because she is the face that they first see when they come in and she helps them to be able to problem solve. And then one of our special education teachers said, "I feel like I've grown in my ability to ask inquiry questions that help students push themselves and to think for themselves and apply math concepts in new skills they're learning." And that this continues to be an area that she wants to grow and develop. Especially being able to provide opportunities
for all students throughout the school. The second question I said is, if you did this and this was the learning that you had, what are you actually most proud of? Because what I've learned about the teacher psyche and especially at this time of the year is, is we care really deeply about kids and we're always reflective and we'll say, yep, we did this really well, but I'm still not good enough at this. I still need to do better here. So you're constantly working through that cycle of like, what else can I do and how can I give more and more and more?
And I really just wanted to hear from teachers, just pause and recognize, what are you really proud of? And one teacher said, I'm most proud of implementing a new curriculum with fidelity and getting student feedback, voice and choice to make this curriculum even better for students next year. I'm proud of celebrating students on a personal level. It's rewarding to watch them light up when I can put it on display and make their learning public and they can really celebrate who they are. I am proud of partnering with families, teachers and students to provide eight different groups this year
in topics of mindfulness, a girl's leadership group, test anxiety, impulse control, and family change. Our counselors are proud of earning the RAMP designation from ASCA. And I just wanna pause for a second to acknowledge this. Central school counseling program has been identified and recognized as a ASCA model program by the American School Counselor Association. Central is one of 12 schools in Minnesota to receive this recognition this year and one of 208 in the country.
There are fewer than 2000 schools with this recognition nationwide. It requires evidence of a data informed school counseling program that's aligned with the national model for school counseling. This includes evidence of direct and indirect services to students, program planning that incorporates ASCA student standards and improved outcomes as a result of the school counseling program. We also had teachers say, I'm proud of how my students support each other in middle school, where they support each other. They make concerted efforts to include their peers
and are mindful of greeting each other and encouraging each other's success. I wish that more adults, quite honestly in the world would pause to do that for each other. I'm really proud that we've created a community of middle school students where they can do this for each other. - Student and family voice. - Oh sorry. - It's okay, some student voice, they talked about supportive environment and learning, various instructional methods. Students prefer fun games for learning, hands-on projects
and group work, partner choice, bear time, students enjoy choice activities such as grade level tournaments, gym time, homework and study time. And sometimes they just like to be in the space with their friends and they can just chill and not do anything and not have any rules or anything to go back and just sit back and have 20 minutes to themselves just to be teenagers. Students appreciate the five minute passing time and the warning bell to help manage their time. We've been creating new clubs and talking with students about different things
that they are interested in after school. So we have continued to offer a wide variety of clubs, after school activities and fun events like assemblies, after school parties and our snack bar. A couple of direct quotes for some students that they just talked about on the day to day in the school and things that help them feel supported and success. I like when adults in the school know me as a person. They care about me without giving up. 'Cause middle school is the land of mistakes.
Kids make mistakes all the time, but being able to not give up on them and really support them. And then another student said, treat them with respect and then also provide support and a sense of belonging. And we use that with some of our clubs well too. Just trying to create spaces for people to have some support and some belonging within our space. Some family voice, what we're doing well, communication and engagement. Some families appreciate the communication including daily and weekly emails.
Teacher communication regarding assignments and tests, proactive teacher reach out about issues or positive feedback and communication with both the parents and the students. Student activities and support, teaching and curriculum. The staff and environment, we're really trying to build on some of the things that we are doing well or families enjoying because we always want to make a welcoming space that families are interested in coming into the building to our different events.
So we're always trying to get feedback and get information from families or things that we can offer to increase just the overall engagement within the families to get them into our space. Areas for improvement, student behavior and accountability. Communication and information access, enrichment and academic structure, programming and wellness. So the communication and information is really to try to find a happy medium because some sixth grade families who just come into middle school, they want all of the emails, all of the calls
and then some families who are in the eighth grade are like, I've been talking to you for three years, like I know who you are, I don't. So just trying to find that happy medium, that space that we can get everybody the information that they need in a timely manner. And student behavior and accountability. We really work to try to create partnerships with families. No, I talked about the mistakes that will be happening in middle school, but some small, some big. But we always try to work with families to help to talk with them through those situations and figure out a solution that works for everybody.
But sometimes there are some difficult conversations that we have to have with families, but just that communication and that partnership help us make it through some of those tougher conversations. - A few things that we have done based on the feedback, it mentioned the RAMP designation, we are also participating with Avid, we are doing a teacher and student agency survey and I just wanna give a shout out. We've had 25 career guest speakers in to talk with our AVID students this year. And they are people that range anywhere from graduating directly from high school
and going into the workforce, to people who have advanced degrees. And so across variety of different job opportunities, we've partnered with the White Bear Lake Police Department with their net smarts internet safety presentation. We've had a partnership with Career Pathways and hosted a eighth grade career fair. By the end of the year, every student at Central will have received a positive postcard from a staff member acknowledging a way that they have contributed to the school
or where we have seen their growth. And then several other, you know, opportunities as well. And with that we have some results. And so we have some data that backs this up as well. - Our sense of belonging, a 9.6% growth. So we asked the question, I feel like I belong. And then a 9.6% growth to this year to I feel like I belong in my community. So that's something we're really trying to build on
and create a safe space for students to feel like they belong. A sense of respect, 12.3% growth from 2025 to end 2025 compared to 2024. So it says I feel socially accepted and then this year, I feel valued and respected in my school community. And then a 19.4% growth in caring adults. If I had something on my mind, my teacher would carefully listen to me
compared to there's at least one adult in the school I can talk to who cares about me. So there are just, it's been growth in those, these questions that we ask students about just that space that we're trying to create of a warm, safe environment that kids definitely feel like they belong and that they're supported. - I believe that when students have physical and psychological safety, they feel a sense of belonging. They feel like they're a part of a community and we've seen that we have had growth in that, that in turn then leads to a space
where students are able to take academic risks and to challenge themselves. This is our MCA reading data. I know MCAs are important, I know how important they are to the community. And as a mom of two children, I also know that my kids are more than just one data point in time. And as I've said to my staff, we have to be able to tell the story behind this data. And so as I look at 23, 24 versus 24, 25, our sixth grade has remained relatively flat and our seventh
and eighth grade have continued to grow. I believe a huge piece of that is because how we are working to develop community within the school and how we're helping kids to see themselves be a part of the school. We see this in both reading and we see this in math for students. Am I satisfied with these scores? Absolutely not. But do I know that there's more to the story? Absolutely. As I think about moving forward, I really wanna continue to think about the student experience
and the sense of belonging. Creating places for students to be physically and psychologically safe. And as we are thinking about our continued work, we'll continue to do some of the same things that we have done throughout the year. And one thing I asked my staff today 'cause we were with them, I said, as you have reflected and we were doing some self-assessment based on the teacher evaluation. What is one area of strength that you have and what's one area
that you think we need to grow next year? And it doesn't have to be a point of weakness, it can be a point of strength that we can build on. And I went through all of those Post-its, and interesting to me 'cause where people and staff are feeling the strongest is in their classroom environment and culture. And that's what we're seeing in our data and places that they say, hey, we really need support and we wanna continue to grow is in our assessment and in how do we continue to further engage students in their academics. So that's a little bit about a day in the life of middle school, questions. - [Speaker] Well thank you. We can open the floor to questions, go ahead.
- Thanks for the report, was great. Really like hearing about Central Middle School. I spent many years at Central myself. I love the building, I love the school, I love that age group, like you, I just, I found my fit there. So with all the new construction and the new spaces and the new cafeteria and all those things, how has that impacted the year four students overall? I mean, you know, I know it's a long projection and how it impacts, but just what you're seeing this first year with all that new space.
- I am so grateful to have the space. My first year, we actually had a classroom in the media center. We were so packed, we were all on top of each other. And when kids are just all on top of each other, there can be a lot of like tension. And just having space has been fantastic, to be able to have kids have space to spread out. Having one side of the building for sixth grade has really helped to smooth the transition and giving them just sort of their own little house and their own little home to be able to transition into middle school and then having seventh and eighth grade on the other side.
Our new cafeteria is absolutely phenomenal. We can have three lunches in the cafeteria. We have 325 to 350 students that are in and out and they know how to handle those rituals and routines and they absolutely love all of the outdoor spaces and the new gym spaces. Middle school students love to move and be active. So being able to have a variety of those spaces has been great. I also think I just wanna thank the community because when we invest in our kids and our kids have seen these spaces,
they know how valued they are in the community and how much the community values them and we take time to remind them of that as well. - Just one other question, when you're comparing sixth grade to sixth grade last year and this year? Seventh seventh eighth eighth. Those are different groups though, each year, right? So it was last year sixth graders, this year sixth graders. - Correct. - So there's that too. That kind of factors into test scores. - Absolutely. - It's a different group. - Absolutely, it's a different group each year. And so we will take time sometimes to look at it by cohort,
like what does it look like from that sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade? And then sometimes we also look at it by grade because sometimes we'll notice, gosh, there's a pattern of something that's happening and what can we learn from our sixth grade teachers or gosh, eighth grade's really making gains for our kids. What can we learn so we can figure out what's happening in the system to support kids. - Thank you. - Okay, thank you, other questions? - So thank you for sharing about Central Middle School and looking at some of the data, your 19 point gain in caring adults and kids that feel that they have caring adults
is really commendable, actually, also with the sense of belonging and growth in middle school, that's huge. So I really appreciate you sharing that and the focus that you have on the whole child and not just that academic score and then yeah, just really appreciate the whole child picture and the work that you all are doing to really make sure kids feel safe and willing to take risks so that they can gain and grow academically as well. - Thanks, thank you. - All right, Mr. Skaar.
- Thank you. Thank you for the presentation, appreciate it. And when you were, earlier in your presentation you mentioned that some people were like down on teachers and I know I read a Wall Street Journal article that showed teachers satisfaction level was going down, trending down and turnover was going up. This is nationally, I'm not talking about this particular district. Can you add any color to that comment that you just mentioned?
I'm interested in that. - 100%, I absolutely can. Like you say, you've read that article. I think if you're on social media you can find, you know, comments on social media feeds. I think when sometimes there are, sometimes there's misconceptions about what's actually happening in school. I think teacher turnover, we are consistently asking teachers to do more and more and more and know the kids, right? And it's a really, really complex job.
And I wanted to take this opportunity to say it's also a job that's really worthy. It's a job where are highly skilled and they're highly trained professionals. These are people who have graduate level degrees, who have studied what it means to be a learner. And I wanna disrupt sometimes the narrative that is out there in the world about what it means to be an educator or to be in education and to bring that forward. And my hope today was really to exemplify also what is their voice. Here are the things that are actually happening,
so that we as all leaders and members in this community can step out in the community and say, actually when I hear somebody saying something, here's what I know is happening at Central. Here's what teachers are doing at Central, here are some of the strengths that they have. Because I think it takes all of us to bring that narrative forward and I just want people to really value the educators and to really value the middle school students. There's lots of misconceptions about middle school students and they're really important part of our community.
- Thank you, you know, I have an idea, you know, I was talking with a teacher from the district, he's retired now, he was retiring a couple years ago. He was I think a fifth grade teacher and he went into the doctor, you know, he went into like urgent care emergency and the doctor was his fifth grade student and he told him what an impact he had because his kid was having problems and he took him aside, talked to him, coached him up and I thought it was a really good story.
So those stories are really helpful, I think could be helpful, if you guys think it's worth it. But I think when you hear the success stories of a teacher that had such a significant impact on a kid, you know, and they remember it, it's kind of important. How many kids from our middle school go to White Bear Lake High School? Is it 90%, 80%? - I am not gonna have the exact number on that, but I would say the majority of our students
transition from eighth grade to ninth grade at the high school. - But we don't have a percentage. - I am not gonna quote a number because I don't have that and I'd wanna be accurate with you on that. - I think it'd be helpful because that's kind of, when students transition to a different district or go to private schools, it's like at the elementary, it's at the end of junior high, you know what I mean? That kind of thing. So I think that's a good metric for us to look at.
What's our capacity at the middle school, how many do we have enrolled at the middle school and at Central and then what's our capacity, do you know? - Yeah, I have about 958 students. And it's about even across all three grades and it looks to be almost the exact same number next year. And really proud of the fact that our students have stayed and we've had some students that have come back also from, you know, other either online or charter options.
And the building can hold more than that given the expansion of the building. - So you have capacity to grow. - Absolutely. - Let me see if I can understand, oh, the disciplinary trends, the DRR trends we heard from the high school that I think on April 13th that their trend was like 40% down and their attendance went up. So we're saying that maybe that's a direct corollary.
How is that, do you guys know off the top of your head? - Yep, I follow discipline all the time. I would say philosophically I believe that if kids aren't in school, they aren't learning and if they aren't in class, they aren't learning. As Mr Van said, we really work in partnership to be able to problem solve because what we do know to be true is middle schoolers are gonna make mistakes and so we're gonna work with them through those mistakes. Over the course of the years that I have been here, our out of school suspensions have continued to drop and have been amongst the lowest in the district
and our attendance rates have increased. And so we have seen that and now we've really seen these also big jumps. Not only our kids in school and know that when they make mistakes they have a space where they're gonna be held accountable and they have to learn and they have to repair the harm but they're also gonna be valued for themselves and be able to overcome those mistakes because there are caring adults and they're going to be, also, when they make mistakes with each other, the adults are gonna help them to learn how do you solve those problems?
And then we've seen growth in our academics because of that. - Thank you, and then when you're looking at those charts, you had it divided into one, two, three, four, what does that mean? What are the one, two, three, four mean? - Sure they're two different surveys. So we just looked at like what are some correlational data. One was our bar survey that we gave at the end of last year and one was our student experience survey this year. And so it is from something where it goes from, you know, most agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree to least.
And so it's in next year. - So number four would be where they strongly agree? - Correct. - Okay, and that's a good metric to track. So the trend line for those that strongly agree, that's kind of where you want to be. So when that goes up, that's a good thing comparatively to the other categories, I would just based on my past experience with that. I was looking at the MCA scores and, you know, when you look at, as I've said before,
you gotta look at the trend. The trend is up in seventh and eighth grade and that's a good thing, as opposed to looking at the raw scores, the trend is good, it's flat in the sixth grade. Have you guys delineated from the scores based on which elementary school they came from? I mean is it one school delivers higher results in sixth grade versus another elementary school?
How many elementary schools feed into Central? - The schools that primarily feed into Central are Otter Lake, Oneka, North Star and Lincoln. We have a few kids that come from Mitoska, some from Birch and a couple from Lakeaires. But I have not dug into which elementary school, what I have dug into is looking at our data to say, what are we doing? Because what we know is that our kids are coming in fifth grade and sometimes there's been a dip in seventh grade
from our sixth to seventh grade. I've also dug further into the data because what we've shared here is who are our students that meet or exceed. And I absolutely want students to always meet or exceed, but what I do know is that about seven, if I include the kids who are partially proficient, we're at about 75%. And here's what partially proficient means on the MCA. It means that they have some level of learning but it's up and down. So maybe they haven't mastered it as deeply as possible yet. And middle school is a time of that rapid change.
And what I know about our Minnesota State standards is a lot of them are cyclical and so they're gonna have that repeated practice. And so we wanna look at who's met and exceeded. We also really wanna dig into who's partial and what do we know and what do we have to do better in the system to support them to bump them back up? - Okay, thank you. - [Speaker 2] Thank you. - All right, Ms. Thompson. - First thanks for the presentation. You guys always do such a good job. One thought I was thinking of
just kind of on the sixth grade data is they're transitioning from elementary school where they made it to fifth grade, right? You're the oldest kids in school, you're like the ones that all the other kids are looking up to. So there's this sense of maybe empowerment in the students. So like I made it to fifth grade, I'm almost done now, I'm gonna be a middle. Then they get into middle school and now they're back to kind of starting over in the social aspects of school, right? Like now you're the youngest kids in the school and you're in middle school. It's a whole different world.
So I'm wondering if a lot of it could be transitional based impacts on their ability to really dig into the work. 'Cause they're in this whole new environment and they're learning how to navigate a middle school socially, there's all kinds of things happening. So while we can say that they're not just hormonal, they are going through a lot of change, right? And so that may be an impact. And as they finally get into eighth grade, it's like they've made it, they're used to the school now, they're used to the systems, they're used to how things work and they get back
to that level again, right? Then they go off to high school and now they're in ninth grade and it's kind of a similar cycle. I feel that we kind of see that in the data when we look at that. - I think that aligns to our sixth grade family saying we would like continued and more support and how do we help our students transition to middle school? - Yeah, so I think a lot of the questions you're asking and you know, how do you feel? Are you feeling valued? Are you making those connections with adults? And I think that's all very helpful because it can help them to have somebody
to help them go through those transitions, right? And feel that they're supposed to be there, right? And that it's not so scary and nervous. And I had the great honor and pleasure of taking part in the teacher of the interview, the teacher of the interview process recently. And our teachers, well A, they're just amazing human beings and I'm so thankful for them. But you hear a lot of this story of an elementary teacher who made a relationship with a student in elementary school
who is now in high school and is still reaching out and communicating with that teacher because that teacher was their person, right? And those connections are so important and it's oftentimes with students who have extra baggage that they're bringing to school every day that we don't see, 'cause it's not a notebook or it's lived experiences that they have outside of our school. So I just, all the work and everything that's in here is really showing what we're doing here in the district to try to address
all of those things that impact our students. So I'm just thankful for it. And while yes, we always want them to do better and to improve, I've noticed that all the things we're impacting to help remove those systemic barriers are having impacts in our schools. So I just wanna say thank you for that. - [Speaker 2] You're welcome. - All right, well thank you very much. - Thank you. - And we're just proud that our students have an opportunity to learn to make decisions, fail, recover, and move on
because that's so important as they start navigating and they're stuck between the child's world and the adult world and that in between is so important that you play a vital role. So thank you for doing that. - [Speaker 2] Thank you. - Thank you. - All right, we're gonna move on to discussion B2, Otter Lake Elementary. Welcome Ms. Nelson. - [Nelson] All right, hi, good evening everyone. So Otter Lake is one of the elementaries that feeds into Central. So I guess it's a match made tonight. All right, so tonight I'm gonna focus
on our priorities. Just a big overview of Otter Lake, a lot on our academic goals, some really cool student experience things that we've done, some of which you've witnessed, signage outside that was mentioned at the last board meeting. It did not survive that storm of last weekend, but students got to bring them home and it was really cute because they were like, I'm gonna hang this on my door. And it's messages that said like, believe in yourself, shine today, don't give up. So super cool, and then what's next? So Otter Lake. So at Otter Lake we are currently at over 500 students.
We're at 72% white students, 18% free and reduced. And then 25% of our population is special education. We have a huge staff that is so incredibly amazing and they have over 500 years of combined teaching experience. Some of the most senior teachers in the district live at Otter and we're so incredibly happy that they're there, continuing to lead and be mentors for new teachers coming in with as much excitement
as they have the first year that they started. So programming wise, we have five special education cluster programs. So what that means is students are identified at needing a really high level of service and they can come from anywhere across the district and they'll be bused to Otter to be serviced there. And then we of course have our Spanish dual language program. So this is me really bragging for a second, but last year we went through a really extensive process as a staff and a parent and student community to become a school of excellence.
And so the process really was that we had to collect extensive data around our academics. We had to fill out extensive rubrics to see in multiple categories that was identified by the Minnesota Association of Elementary School principals to say, if you do all these things, you do them really well, you're a school of excellence, knowing that everything's a process and not everyone's perfect. You also had a highlight gaps that you might have and what your plan was going to be to address those gaps.
And so I call it the Otter Lake Master thesis. I think it's literally 70 pages, super proud. And then in the fall of this year, we were awarded a School of Excellence and so had a big community celebration, also celebrated the opening of our brand new playground that the students and families got to help design. So just so much to celebrate to kick off the year. And there's me showing off some of our awards, bringing about Otter at the MESPA Institute. So here is our Otter Lake Elementary priorities.
You can see our mission is over there on this side, but what we really focus on honestly is this whole targeted area in the middle. And so ensuring that academic success of each student. And in order to do that we have to, as Catherine and Van mentioned, we have to make sure that they belong, they feel cared for, they feel safe. That's where those true academics can really start to shine. So their experience matters, their family engagement matters, making sure we look at everything through a lens of equity matters. And of course our staff wellbeing really matters.
People need to enjoy coming to work. There can be some really hard days and you know, I can tell you in our cluster programming, there can be some really, really hard days. And in the end, people come back and start over new each day. They love and care for the students so incredibly much and just love our families. So I wanted to do just a little comparison data. So we do a lot of tours at Otter Lake. And Otter Lake is situated in a unique spot where families have some choice, where they tell me,
yeah, I see a White Bear bus drive pass, but I also see a Centennial bus drive pass. Or I also know that my neighbor goes to Mounds View. So these are the schools where families really could choose that is very near our boundary area. And these are straight from MDE, these are MCA scores and you can see that Otter Lake, I brag about Otter Lake, I think it's the best place on earth, but really it can show through our data as well
that our students are achieving at a really high level on MCA scores. And our attendance is actually, I think even higher this year. So really proud of that. Always working and striving to make sure we're not leaving anyone behind and that we know the story for every single student who is not achieving at the rate that we want them to. But whenever I give the tours, I say, I'm biased. I think Otter is the best, but I would challenge you to find a better elementary school and most of those families come. It's one of those things
where you can look at the data points when you walk in the building. You can feel that you belong. It doesn't matter if you're student or family or coming new to the building. So then just a little bit about our academic goals for this year. So that is that 80% of students will demonstrate low risk as measured by FastBridge and then that 95% of students meet their IEP goals. We do have all of our students take the FastBridge assessment, and that is to use as a data point for us because that really is what this is.
I'm gonna show you our mid-year data point. It's a dipstick, it's a one time, here's how they're doing it on this particular day. And it gives us really great data for all students, even students who maybe would not take the MCA, right? Maybe that they would take the MTAS and just getting data in a different way. But just as a reminder that FastBridge is a monitoring tool, it's a screener and that it is really going to be looking at individual skills. It's to help us create groups for students
so we know if they need enrichment, if they need intervention, are they on grade level? it's important data in that way. Whereas the MCA is students take all of those things and put them together to take the MCA test, which is a much more summative test. All right, so you can see for kindergarten, our English section, sections, excuse me, I just have it where it's gonna show fall and then winter, you can see that our kindergartners came in right around the 50% mark and made tremendous growth into the winter screener.
Know that this is obviously really old data I'm actually showing you. So this winter screener is given in January, right when we come back from the winter break, we're gonna be giving the spring screener here at the very end of May. So who knows when I come back next year, I'll share that data with you too. But huge, tremendous growth and this is our Spanish Dual Immersion Program. Students coming in really high. And this is in Spanish. And I kind of referred to this before, but how it works is all kindergartners are required
to take an English screener. Then the Spanish immersion students also take Spanish screeners because that is their targeted language that they're gonna be learning. So that is the language in which we want to progress, monitor over time to see gaps that they may have. We also will be keeping track of the English portion, but in kindergarten, really the majority of their day is in Spanish. There's minimal English instruction. So we would not continually assess them in English and we would not anticipate huge growth
because they're getting 30 minutes a day only. Okay, all right. And so our first grade here, you can see that when kiddos came into first grade, I'll tell you, this group of first graders ended their kindergarten at around 94% low risk. They came back in and had quite a dip. And so working super hard to make some growth, I did take a peek at their data just to see like where are the kiddos that were kind of, oops, on the bubble.
And six students have already met their spring growth goal that were in the winter high risk category. So like I said, this is kind of lagging data for us, just given the timing of my presentation, but making some growth. Here in second grade, again making tremendous growth. You can see from 75% to 88%, third grade started out at 80% and had a slight dip. I am confident that that will rebound quite nicely based on all the assessments I've seen since this data.
Students working super hard, same with fourth grade, came in really high, had just a little bit of a dip and they're working really hard, doing a great job now. And then kind of the same with fifth grade, still our low risk category is really something to be proud of, given this kind of just midway checkpoint. And I just wanted to note on here, you know, how we do look at data too is we don't just look at high risk, low risk, we look at multiple different categories. So in between this, there's students
who are just like on the MCA, like a partially meets and some of them are one point away, it just happened to be, but they're so close, we are confident they will be low risk to end the school year. Some of our action items that have helped us reach our academic goals is we follow a really strict instructional schedule. We work hard to make sure that our students are receiving all of their core subject areas for the amount of time that's allotted and that every single student is receiving the tier one instruction.
So that's the instruction that every student gets. Even though we have a really high special education population, we're very careful about when students are getting pulled for specialized services and really trying to be as inclusive as possible. We have a really structured what I need time and MTSS process where we're reviewing data every six weeks and carefully considering what skills students will be working on. And we use flexible grouping and so students may have a different teacher during that time so that they can really narrow their focus
on what they're working on. We've spent a lot of time this year practicing and reviewing and refreshing the letters learning and different and instructional strategies that they learned in their letters learning. And really now taking our CKLA curriculum with their letters learning to make the curriculum come even more to life. A strong focus on our team collaboration. Last year we had started a really robust parent volunteer program that is still going strong. I know some of you have been at Otter
and have volunteered, read books, et cetera. This year, we also had students from the high school reach out to us and that is the photo that you can see on the slide. They had come to Otter last year to help volunteer at our school carnival and they loved it. And so these two young men said, yeah, we have this new thing where we can do student groups on Wednesdays at the high school and we would love to see if students would like to come with us back to Otter and volunteer. I was like, whoa, and this was in the spring of last year.
I thought, okay, that sounds good. I didn't really know what would come out of it, but you can see a really large group came on Wednesdays. They had their own little name badges, they would check in, they were assigned classrooms. And really the goal, much like our parent volunteers is we wanted them to work with students in whatever it was they were doing during that time. So nothing special, it wasn't gonna be drop everything. Now we're just gonna play a game because our high school volunteers are here. So if they were doing something with literacy, the high school kids were sitting next to them doing literacy or helping with math or playing the math game.
Some of them had specialists during that time and they were really excited. So they got to play the ukulele in gym and all those things too. So that was a really successful experiment I'll say, 'cause we weren't sure how it was gonna work out. But they took it very seriously. They did a training, they signed a code of ethics with us and of course the elementary kids think they're celebrities and want them to come every day. The other thing that we worked on this year as a staff is learning walks. And I'm sure you've heard about that over the course of this year with some buildings trying out different things.
But essentially what it was, was we together as a staff, we defined what we felt a vision for student learning was. So that is different than our mission. The mission is what we ensure, we are going to ensure students are gonna be able to do X, Y, and Z. A vision for student learning is what is the student experience, what does it look like, sound like, feel like in the classroom? And then what would a teacher do to create a condition to make that happen? Once we narrowed that focus down, we had two focus areas this year. One on student engagement,
so active participation and meaning making. And then we also focus on assessment and students constructing learning goals and then tracking their progress towards those goals. These are just a couple of snapshots, but what we did was once we had defined those areas, created some look fors, teams were able to go into each other's classroom and watch each other's classrooms in action. Again, really focused on what are students doing and then what is a teacher doing to make that happen? It was so powerful
because we would go into a classroom one day, the next day we would go into that teacher's classroom that was an observer and they would already be putting into action something they saw that were like, that was a great idea. I can't believe I've taught next to you for 20 years. I never saw you teach before. I can't believe I didn't know you did that. So really right away replicating that. And I think a change of culture in terms of allowing people to come into classrooms is that we are really focused on where do we wanna be is the ideal state. And then wherever we're at is where we're at.
But then we're just gonna take a baby step to move forward. What's the small tweak we can make in our system, in our routine, in our instruction that will get us to the next step, knowing that we're not gonna be able all just jump there. So those have gone really well. We did two cycles of learning walks. One was just within their own team as we got used to the process. And then the next time around, I allowed teachers to choose like what grade level or if there was a specific teacher they wanted to do a learning walk with and then myself, our instructional coach
and then the teacher would do that and then have a debrief. So a lot of learning took place this year at Otter, I am excited to see our MCA reading results. As you know, we don't get that until far later, which is such a bummer 'cause you know, a third of the students who take it will be on their way to Central Middle School. But we are really confident in the work that we've done this year and we're just really excited to see that play out. So for student experience, we do a lot of different things at Otter.
So we have, there's a few pictures on here. We do bear awards where teachers can give students, it's a bear award really recognizing something amazing they're doing. And then once a month we draw and each grade level has three students. They can choose a prize or eat with myself and my building assistant, Molly Franta, and then bring a friend and you would be shocked how many kids want to eat lunch with me and Miss Franta. It's a lot, so it's really exciting. We also have a really big read-a-thon event with bringing community readers in. This is our second time
that we've had the Black Student Union come and give an assembly. So just so many fun things. The other thing is we've had a year long theme of kindness, so Otters for Others, and this was all teacher driven. So two teachers put together, it's like a mini curriculum, each month had a different theme related to kindness and it really started with kindness to yourself and wellness, branches out to your classmates, to our school, and finally to the community and world, which is what you saw on display
outside of Otter with the signage. With that, they do kindness journals every other week. Each student has a little journal and there's prompts that they write in. And then they also have buddy classrooms. And with those buddy classrooms, there's events and challenges all related to kindness. With the last Buddy challenge being that we were able to secure some donations and they got to purchase a present, if you will, for their buddy class related to something that they did with their challenges and students. I can't even explain to you how excited they were
to pick out what they wanted to purchase for their buddy class. And they're just so excited to give it to them. The Post Office was like, you guys are not my favorite people right now. There's so many packages coming to Otter. But students were coming up to me and like begging to get more money because they wanted to give more to their classes. So really amazing. And then we have a really large student ambassadors program at Otter Lake. It's nearly all fourth and fifth graders.
It's a service orientated group where there are student ambassador mentors that come in. Is anyone a mentor? I know there's some mentors in this room, but they come in once a month and they'll work with students on, maybe they'll be creating birthday bags for Solid Ground. So it's collecting donations and then putting the bags together to have a little birthday party. So cake mix, cards, things like that. And everything is around service.
There's a day of service that's coming up the last week of school that all fourth and fifth graders participate in. And right now we're in the middle of a big diaper drive and one of the many activities they'll do on that day is actually when you donate to the food shelf, they like you to pair things down or if you don't, they will for you. They don't just give out full boxes of things, but they'll package them down to make it more manageable and to go to more families. So really excited about that. And then just really focused on doing so many fun things in the classroom.
So one of the pictures up there eating the chicken leg. Fourth grade had a medieval unit in CKLA. And so for lunch one day, they worked with our food service and food service made a specialized lunch for them, which would be what they would've eaten back then. A chicken leg, it was the funniest thing. Kids dressed up, they thought it was the best. And then we really try to do a lot of community events once a month, whether it's PTA sponsored or we sponsored at the school level, so a community dinner. We did a game night with Nashke Games
and that is American Indian Games, Tanya Flowers is actually in this photo, I think this was her second day of work, but also she is an acquaintance of Nashke games. So families came in, they had a community dinner and then they got to learn and play Native American games. It was a blast. So yeah, just trying to do things to bring community together. If you've been to Otter, we're really spread out building and so you could go a long time without seeing people in another wing. And the way, you know, elementary school is designed,
They all have separate lunches, separate recess. They might not ever really see the older and younger kids. So we have to create those opportunities. And we do that by some of the things I just mentioned. I didn't put our student experience score on there, but I think we're right at like 98% of students feeling loved, cared for and safe at school. We'll give our spring score here in just a bit, but future opportunities. So we are actually going to be starting a new special education cluster program at Otter Lake.
We will roll Spanish dual immersion up to first grade. So we'll have kindergarten and first grade. I didn't put this on here, but we're gonna be adding an additional preschool program. The Tamarack preschool program is just wildly popular. I think it filled in like one minute or something. And so we'll have three preschool rooms at Otter next year we're gonna be implementing new math curriculum. And then we really started this last spring thinking how do we want students to set their own goal to monitor their own learning?
And we started small because that's actually an interesting task given grade levels. So for example, second grade tracked spelling. But what we would really like is to expand that, to be thinking more individually like a student making their own goal and tracking it. Because we know when you set a goal and track it, you're going to see improvement. It's a great way to model for our students doing it. And so we're really gonna lean into that even more next year. And then of course this is our Otter Lake chant that all of our students, we say it every single day.
It's adorable. I just met a preschooler this last week who had never met me in person. They've met me in person many times. My hair was up, but they're like, I only ever see you on the TV. And I was like, okay, yes, celebrity. All right, so with that I'll take questions. - Well, thank you, I just have a quick question about the FastBridge. I know that each year they take it, but as they go on, the rigor increases, so that also affects the scores, right? - Yeah, and actually
I'm really glad that you brought that up. So they take it three times a year and that is mandated by the state of Minnesota. When they take it in the fall, it's not a review from last year. They're already, you know, jumping up a little. But fall the winter is a really big jump for every single grade. And then winter to spring, it still increases. Not as big of a jump as from fall to winter, but it is significant how much harder it gets, yes. - [Speaker] Okay. - Thanks. - Ms. Streiff Oji? - [Speaker 2] So can you share, like you talked about CKLA and aligning that with the letters training,
there's lots of questions that I hear and get about that. How are you going about doing that to deepen the knowledge and skills of your teachers? - So the letters learning really, I came from an avid school. We're not an avid school, but many of the strategies are just high impact, best practice teaching strategies, maybe with a different label, might be labeled avid, might be labeled letters. It's very similar. So when we have our professional development, I model all of those. And so what I do is we might be reading an article
on anything, but we're gonna use a strategy like marking the text, like pre-reading and we're gonna work through that strategy together. And then I also then have them write and document like, okay, this strategy is called this. How might you use this in your classroom? How have you used this in your classroom? Doing some brainstorming. But you know, when you start a new curriculum, it's a heavy lift. It's a lot and it's a lot of new learning. And so many of the strategies are things people have done
their whole careers that may have just taken a back seat as they got used to the new curriculum. Now we're in year three, there's a lot more comfortability around integrating these strategies again. And I think that we will see our scores raised because of that. - Thank you. And I love that you're modeling it for your teachers also. And then when you get your data, can you give us some examples of what you do with the data? - Oh, sure. So we have really structured data meetings that we do by grade level.
That includes all of the special services that might be included. Our school psych, our social worker, grade level team members. And we have one interventionist and then our instructional coach. And like when we kind of start fresh with a new batch of FastBridge screeners, we are looking to see where have kids landed, who is in the red, we call it the red. So that is the high risk category and why are they there? And then we go up to yellow, same thing. Any student that's in red
or yellow is gonna be put in an intervention group, whether it's in the classroom with a teacher doing that flexible grouping or with our intervention teacher. We continue to progress monitor that data then each week and then at the end of six weeks, that's a round of intervention. We'll review that progress monitoring data to see if students can exit intervention or if they need to have it strengthened, maybe they are flat or maybe they dipped. That actually helps us identify if students may need a referral to special education.
You know, students come into elementary school and it's part of our responsibility as educators to ensure that we are finding students who may have a learning disability or they will continue to fail their whole entire school career because they do just need something different. So we repeat that process over and over and over, quarterly we review our building data as well. Much like Catherine said, today we were with staff and we did data meetings all together
in the library and people could move around and ask questions, put students in groups one last time for the year. And then we also really reflected on where are we at as a building this year? Where do we wanna focus next year? What worked, we did the stoplights, so what works so well? What do we wanna continue but that needs some refinement and what do we think we can just stop doing? Of course the stop doing list is like nothing, which is kind of, I think it's every educator's curse. Like no, we can keep trying more things
and not wanting to let anything go. But, so I think that's what you're looking for. - Yeah, thank you so much. - Yep. - Other questions? - One's a comment, one's a question. I love the idea of your learning walks and the, you know, the teachers are benefiting from those and it's great. And then with the preschool Tamarack, do the kids then go over to Tamarack from Otter? Is that when you say it's Tamarack preschool? - [Nelson] So we partner with Tamarack and now two of our preschool classes will be outdoor experiences.
So really very similar to Tamarack but on Otter's property. - Okay. - They do go over to Tamarack too, but it's not on site. And then we do have one preschool that's a Spanish exposure, for people who are interested in that. - [Speaker 2] Yep, great, thank you. - [Speaker] Other questions, Mr. Skaar? - [Skaar] Thank you for the presentation. Congratulations on winning School of Excellence. Did you like get a new car or something for winning it? - I should have, it was a lot of work. - [Skaar] I agree. - Yeah. Well we got a great banner and a really cool plaque.
- Okay, well that's good. Hey, you know, on the 18% free and reduced, is that a meaningful statistic anymore given where we are in Minnesota with that? - To be honest, I don't think it's accurate. You know, especially at the elementary level, we ask families to fill it out but we ask very generally, we're not gonna ask any specific families. But with, you know, free lunch and breakfast, there isn't as much incentive, you know,
once you get into secondary, there's reduction for fees for after school activities. We just don't have that at the elementary level. I would say I think it's much higher than that just based on experience and also based on families that are seeking out additional resources. We have a partnership with the food shelf for food packs on the weekends and so we can't make a family fill out the form. But we'll still service families
and make sure that they have all the resources that they need. - So there's probably other ways to measure that that are better. - Yeah, I think it's hard, you know, it's a very private thing, if families are struggling financially, it's great when they trust the school and reach out for additional support. But we are really protective of that information and just really hold it with a lot of care because it takes a lot to ask for that level of support. So I don't know that there's a great measure to be honest. I think it would maybe have to be something at a higher level that would say,
we're gonna count this in a different way now that breakfast and lunch are free, but. - All right, thank you. Also, I appreciate you benchmarking against our surrounding districts and you know, we're doing well holding our own and actually doing better. And I would encourage all of the principals across the district to benchmark like you have and my friend from Matoska has, and was the last one, I can't remember if I left them out, I apologize for that.
On FastBridge, I sense that that is a very meaningful statistic. You would agree with that? - Oh yeah, yeah. We use that data. It is a significant data point I would say it's not the only data point we use in those data meetings, but it is a main one. We also use CKLA assessments when it comes to literacy in partnership with that. And then there's another assessment we do called Words Reading and Isolation. We don't put any of that, you know, data out public facing.
But all three of those data points are gonna be used to help determine if they need an intervention group and what skill they're gonna work on. - [Skaar] Would you say FastBridge is more reliable than the CKLA one? - Well, FastBridge is nationally normed, so that I would say is important. CKLA is norm within our building. I think that they both hold a purpose and they both have a place, which is why it's really important to use it all together. - All right, thank you. So one thing on the what I need, the kids that say their grandparents need more money,
I wanna meet those kids. (person laughing) So what would be like the number one compliment that you get from parents regarding your school and then like what's the number one complaint that you have to feel? - That's a really, really great question. I would say the number one compliment is just how good it feels to be at Otter Lake. Families in general are very, very happy with how we really focus on the whole child. We try to make it fun while also holding
really high academic expectations and really high just expectations in general when it comes to behavior and attendance, I would say a complaint. I think over time there's been some traditions that you know, used to be long standing and since over the years curriculum has changed, standards have changed and things that people held really dear. For example, every grade level used to go to Tamarack. That was a really meaningful partnership and Tamarack and Otter worked together to create curriculum
that aligned with standards. Since then, things have shifted. So now only half the grades go to Tamarack. But a cool thing is the other grades go to someplace else to still have a field trip experience that aligns with their standards. So I think it's not like a complaint, like I'm gonna pull my kid out of Otter. I really wanted them to do that thing. But I think just over time, if people have had students that Otter for many years and we do have families that have a number of students that have gone through, they'll be like, yeah, I remember when my oldest did that, but yeah, it's cool that my youngest
gets to do this instead. So I think it's more of like just changing with the times and longing for some of those old traditional field trips and things like that. - All right, thank you. - Okay, Thompson. - Well when looking at the results for the kindergarten Spanish right from the fall to the winter and seeing, you know, it's a pretty significant drop. But I would imagine as you were mentioning, the rigor is different and it's a whole new language. - [Nelson] Right. - So like when you were testing in the fall, is it just like basic knowledge of like, you know, Hola,
like more simple uses because they haven't dug into the work yet and then by the time they get to winter, they're probably trying to like speak a sentence or? - Yep, just like all of our fast word screeners, they do start off, you know, I don't even wanna call it easy. It's hard for the kids to do those screeners always. A lot of the students in our Spanish immersion program, you know, even on the English screener, screened very high in the fall. When it's in kindergarten it is not, you know,
expecting the world of them. But really it's looking at them, they've had no teaching. They take the fall screener before school even starts in August. So it's really just a benchmark. But then, you know from there in the winter screener, yes it's definitely trying to gauge where students are at based on the teaching and learning up to that point and become significantly more rigorous with expectations, yeah. - And then are they only taking the Spanish, like are they doing it in Spanish only or both, Spanish?
- Nope, so it used to be required that they would do both by the state and they changed that actually right before we started our program. And we were so grateful because assessments in kindergarten take a very long time. They're done one-on-one or in order to get to do them. And so if we were having to do both, it would take a lot of instruction time, which is why we're not going to do that. But really, we are monitoring the language, their target language that they're learning, which is Spanish because if they needed intervention,
it would be in Spanish. I'll just highlight that if there is a student that is really struggling, we have given them the English fast word screener to see like where are they at because it is still our responsibility to find students who might have a learning disorder or disability and we don't want that language piece or instruction to get in the way of that. So we take that into account when we're looking at the data. But for most students, they're just getting used to having their entire day be in Spanish where they don't understand all of it
but they are moving and grooving with it. - Yeah, thank you for that. And then just, it's not really a question, but having the student, the high school students come into the school, I just absolutely love that for several reasons. One, hopefully some of them become teachers, right? Like that's our hope. And then it also meets some of our strategic planning, 'cause I took part in both of the strategic plan processes and in the last one I was in the fourth category, which was we will establish healthy vital engagement with our entire community. Which I think that's one
of the things we discussed in there is like how can we get our high school students to be engaged in our middle and elementary student learning experiences? Because I think it helps them, elementary kids love it when the high schoolers come in and walk through at the end of the year when they're grad, right? Like oh yeah, because they look up to them and it's the someday that's gonna be me, even though it's many years away, that is something that they look up to. So I think that when they're partnering together like that, the learning that's happening and just the building of relationships is probably fantastic
and I would love to see it. - Yeah, it's really, really cool. And just the focus that it's not just like we're gonna have fun with them, but like to see the high school students be students, is really powerful. Like oh they have to read too, yep. - Well 'cause it hits, I mean it really hits all of them but it hits the second one that will promote, encourage and support students' personal learning experiences and aspirations. Right, so we're getting several of them tied into that experience that they're having and to see how many you had engaged, that's really wonderful
and I hope that we can continue that. And have that happen in our other schools as well. So thank you. - [Nelson] You're welcome. - All right, well thank you very much and even though the signs are gone, every time I go by I am gonna sparkle. - [Speaker 3] Good, so that's what we're about. High impact, Otter Lake. - Thank you so much. - Okay, we're gonna move on to discussion item B3, high school winter and spring activities update, welcome. - Thank you. Hi Chair Arcand, members of the board, I'd like to first introduce Taylor Turvet.
She's our assistant activities director, she's gonna present for us tonight. I also wanna send the regrets from Brian Peloquin who had a family emergency tonight. So I'm gonna co-present and really be here to answer any questions with Taylor. So welcome Taylor. - [Taylor] Awesome, thank you'all so much. So on behalf of the activities office, I was just gonna give a quick overview of our winter sports and highlight some of the things we have coming up in the spring activities office as well. So this is just a rundown of our, who's in our office, who's working with our students, our student athletes.
We actually recently hired a new activities finance clerk, Mac leverty. So she's been a great addition and really our goal is to help shape students through the unique power of sports, music, activities and at least get one or at least have them involved in one thing that they love. So if 80% of our students in White Bear Lake Area High School can find one thing that brings them joy, that's our goal right now. And the way we kind of measure it, whether or not that's happening is through buckets. Like if they're having fun,
if they're growing in their skills or in their sport, if they're learning lifelong lessons as well, building relationships, purpose and culture. So those are kind of the six buckets that we really hope to bring to life for our students. So just to kind of jump into some things that brought joy to all of us. First of all, we had a Winter Spirit Week. The first week of January we really kicked off the new year with a fire and ice theme and there were two different teams, Bonfire and Ice Castle.
There was dress up dates and we with a pep fest at the end of the week and a big winter dance. It was really fun. Mr. Res actually also lip synced to a song from the the Frozen movie. So yeah, he had a great time but it just really was a great way to kind of, you know, get some spirits high and having a good time in January when sometimes it can feel, you know, like a long winter here. So in the sports world of our office we have 11 MSHSL sanctioned sports
that we offer in the winter and then the One Act Play is a a sanctioned performing art that we have as well. So I'm just gonna give you a a little bit of a overview for all of those different offerings. First we have the adapted floor hockey team. We have 15 participants with that crew and they didn't win that many games but they had a lot of fun. I don't know if you've ever gotten to see one of them, one of those games played, but that's really an excellent group. We have a lot of teacher coaches involved with them as well. So they do a great job. Our boys swim and dive team has increased participation, so they started with 25 last year, they're up to 30.
There's been some continued growth there, which is really great to see. And we even had a stay qualifier, Benedict Hoefer, in the 200 freestyle. So really big congratulations to him and to coach Jake for all the growth that's going on in that program. Alpine skiing, we had some state qualifiers, as well on the boy side we have 14 participants and the girls had 16, they practiced really closely together. And then we had two boys and Josie Guidinger the girls side qualify for State, Cooper Feirn and Josie, this was their second year in a row qualifying.
So excellent to see them return there. And then the Nordic ski side, those programs are really booming too with boys having 23 participants, girls at the 22 mark and they also practice really closely together. So it was a better year as far as snow goes, compared to last year. So they were all really happy about that. A lot of success in our gymnastics program. As far as the participants go, we had 14, which is a healthy number given the facilities for this group. And for the first time in 21 years,
the entire team qualified for the state tournament, which was really excellent. We've had individuals qualify on their own but this was the first year that the entire team qualified so that was really great to see them at Roy Wilkins Auditorium. We also still had a couple individuals, Mira McQuay and Grace Mueller, they qualified as individuals as well and we're only graduating one senior so that's gonna be an impressive group to keep your eye on. And Sara was also the coach of the year, so she's just doing excellent work in her second year
as the head coach. Cheer, the competitive cheerleading team is incredible as well. That's not a MSHSL sanctioned sport but we treat them as a varsity sport in our office. They have 16 varsity competitors, also a huge feeder program with 32 in the middle school and elementary. So much so that we're adding a JV group next year, which is really exciting to continue that growth. And they still have a really big state tournament. It's not run by MSHSL but they do a great job in their own right. We finished second in the Game Day Competition
and then third in what's called the traditional ones. So that was a really great showing for the girls there and they got to qualify for nationals. They went down to Florida to compete and earn third place in game day competition there as well. We had another Minnesota coach of the Year, coach Bre Sherrick. So this was her first year as our head coach and she's just fabulous to work with. The girls really love her. So I'm excited to see all that she'll continue to bring for the program. On the hockey side, it's been really fun to get to know the hockey culture at White Bear Lake,
in the high school. Our girls numbers I think are really healthy on the boys side too, but girls hockey is kind of on a downward trend as far as participation goes across the state. But here we're really healthy. We had over 40 girls try out, we kept 37, they finished eight 17 and one, but we had a Miss Hockey finalist and Maddie Lee, she also earned her 100th career point. So she was an incredible player moving on to play in college at St. Cloud. Our goaltender Macy reached 1,000 plus career save. So she had a a great year.
She saves a lot of shots and has been wonderful just as a junior. And then on the boys side, it was a heartbreaking end of the season, but they finished 13, 12 and three but seven of those losses were one goal losses. So I mean that speaks for itself. That's a really competitive, really talented group. They advance all the way to the section championship game and that's what I was saying, it's a heartbreaking loss to Gentry to drop to them in the championship, but they only graduated a handful of guys
and we're expecting them to come back and be a really strong program too. So I dunno if any of you went to go see the section final at, but that was a packed house and really great energy at that event. In the girls basketball scene, that's historically been a really successful program. They have a younger crew this year, but they still finished 10 and 17, they had 39 participants. It was great to welcome some of the middle schoolers up into the program too. So that helped build those numbers. We were still able to field four teams.
The boys side, numbers are booming. 53 guys, they had over 70 tryout too, but just due to facilities, and there's not that many schools with over five teams. So we made some cuts there. They finished nine and 18 but another milestone was had by Colin Piper. He reached the 1000 point club. So there was a lot of highlights for that group as well. Our wrestling program had a lot of success. So girls wrestling right now is a partnership emerging sport is what the high school league calls it. So they still put on a state tournament for them, but they don't have like a girls team tournament.
They have individual opportunities and we qualified four girls to participate at the state tournament. So with 11 on the entire team, four out of 11 going is pretty excellent and I would say 11 is actually more than a lot of our peer schools, the numbers are pretty healthy and we keep going up from seven last year. So that's really exciting to see the growth there. And then our senior Jinet Demanou, she finished second overall in her weight class. So that was really an incredible feat. She also medaled last year,
so she's the first girl from White Bear Lake Area High School to medal at state and now to have medal twice. The boys side, the numbers are huge with 43 and they practice really closely together between the boys and the girls. So that's a health, a healthy partnership. And we had another state qualifier on the boys side, Indiana Kane, he's just a ninth grader so we expect big things from him to continue on as well. All right, and that's just a snippet or some highlights from our sports, but we have a ton of other offerings as far as performing arts and fine arts goes. So the One Act Play is an MSHSL sponsored activity.
And this year we performed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and I also saw that our tech director Morgan is back there. So I just wanna give him a shout out, he was excellent. They finished first overall in the subsection final. The performance was incredible, sadly we went over to, and the stage was a little different, so the setup got kind of funky and they ended up getting DQed, but really just because of the setup time, otherwise they would've won. So that was a bummer, but it was an amazing performance. We had 13 performers, seven crew members,
and then the two directors. So shout out again, to Morgan in the back and to Braylin, who's our director. This year we offered a spring musical, as opposed to just a student led performance. So "Dear Evan Hansen" was the musical this year. This was the first year in a while we've done a spring musical. We always have the big fall one, which is excellent. But this was a really opportunity to be the first ever high school in the nation with the performing rights for Dear Evan Hansen. So it was like too good to pass up.
We ended up selling over 2000 tickets and it was such a big deal to get the rights that we were sponsored on Fox Nine. So I actually have a clip of that to show you in a moment here. But it was an amazing production and again, just really put White Bear Lake Area High School on the map nationally. And then we have a lot of other activities going on. So Speech had a couple of state qualifiers, three national qualifiers. DECA was a newer emerging program in our school. So we had a state champion in the entry level interview event.
Brooklyn Brown is a 10th grader, which is incredible for her and for that program's growth. And then the big music event for us in the winter is the SEC musical festival. So Mounds View hosted that, this year we send 70 band kids, 37 choir and 35 orchestra kids to go tour a weekend event to work with famous artists and conductors and just really got to have an amazing experience there. At the end of that, there's an opportunity for them to get asked to perform in the honors concert.
So we had 10 band kids take part in that. 14 choir kids and then seven orchestra kids were asked to participate in the honors concert. Overall we have over 70 coaches and directors in our winter programs that we partner with. And so it was just an incredible year working with them. And to give you kind of a little highlight of our Dear Evan Hansen video, I think if we were a little bit hesitant about the audio, so, shout out again to Morgan here for the help.
- [Speaker] Just wanna make sure this is on. Okay good. Wait, before you play until I get back there. - [Speaker 4] You wanna turn the captioning on? - Thank you. - [Speaker] Okay, we're good. - [Speaker 3] Oops, are we still good? Okay. (upbeat music) - So that was just a little snippet of what was played on Fox Nine and the amazing performance that those students and our tech crew put on. So we can send the full Fox Nine interview too. But that was just a little preview
of the whole performance there. Just some final activity highlights and other data for you all to note. Our pride here at White Bear Lake Area High School and our community has just been something that I've been really taken aback by. And the number of people that show up for our events is amazing to see. So we have student passes that allow our students to get into our competitions for free. Over 2,000 students of the 2,700 have downloaded those, which means they're showing up for events. We also have adult season passes that can be purchased.
So we had 651 of those sold and then 210 senior passes were sold to. But as far as individual game sales go, we are selling over two 12,000 competition tickets. So people are really showed out for our winter sports, Cinderella, oh 4,151 tickets were sold for those performances. So many of those were sold out or packed houses. We also use Hudl for many of our broadcasting games.
So almost 9,000 streams came from those. So people are watching all around the Twin Cities and family can watch all around the country or world even. And then our local SCCTV broadcasts at least 10 competitions as well. So those are really nice broadcasts that they put on for us every season. Again, the Boys Hockey Section Championship was a really big highlight. We sold out the 31,000 seats in Aldrich Arena there. And we're just continuing to highlight our student athletes, our activities, all of our programs
as many ways as possible. As you probably know, one of the best ways to do that right now is through social media. So we try to partner with the sports photography classes and some of our student classes to highlight through those platforms. So that's been a fun partnership as well. So that's kind of the recap of our activities office and everything that we've been up to this winter. We also launched 11 spring sports that are sanctioned by the MSHSL.
We also are really excited to have added girls flag football this spring. So that's taking off around the state. Over 100 teams are competing with that group. Right now it's run by the NFL or the Minnesota Vikings are really kind of championing it. But we're really excited about where it's gonna go. We're actually hosting our first home games this weekend. I know some folks in the room are gonna attend. So those are on Sundays. But that's been a really fun addition to our programming. And then other activities that go on a spring fishing, ultimate Frisbee and trap shooting are all other non MSHSL sanctioned
activities that we really support seriously in our office. - Thank you. - Yeah. - I just thank you and your group because one of the things we don't talk enough about is the career readiness skills these athletes and these participants learn, they learn to fail, they learn to get up, they learn to try again, they learn to be successful, they have to work as a team, they have to communicate no matter if they're on the field or on the stage. It's so important that they learn these skills. Plus it builds ownership of the building.
They wanna be there because it's now their building. And that's really important, so I want to thank you. I do wanna mention of spring sport, I had the opportunity the other day to go to the boys track meet. - Oh yeah. - Oh my goodness. How well that track meet was run was incredible. - [Speaker 3] Yeah, those are serious productions for sure. - So I mean, and I was just really impressed how well it ran and how quickly they got through and did a great job. So keep up the great work and I'm gonna open it up for other questions. - I don't have a question, but again, a comment.
I went to the robotics tournament at Marucci at the U of M. It was fabulous. I learned so much about robotics, which I knew nothing about really. I mean, I've heard about it for many years and it was really great to see the participation of the students. And then I was so impressed. There were students that came back that were in robotics years ago that come back and mentor and help the team and then volunteers from Medtronics and different organizations that come back and work with the teams on Saturdays and after school.
And it was just really fun and really impressive and very exciting. If you ever get a chance to go, it's great. I'd encourage anyone to go. - Yeah, yeah, we have two robotics coaches that we work with out of our office and over 30 kids that were involved in that group in the high school. I know the middle school is a really robust program with robotics too, so. - Yeah, right. There were some eighth graders there too. - [Speaker 4] I bet. - In the competition. - Yep. - It's great. - Thank you. - Other questions, Ms. Thompson? - Don't really questions, just comments.
It's fantastic to see this because as chair Arcand said, it's just another way for our students to learn how to work together and to overcome challenges and to build strength and endurance and all of those wonderful things. And I had the wonderful pleasure of going and watching the "Dear Evan Hansen" performance. And I had to keep reminding myself that these were high school students that I was watching perform, 'cause it was just phenomenal performances. And there were a lot of tears in the audience
by all people that were there. Not just women who seemed to be a little tailored as more emotional, but there were men crying. There were people who, and it seemed like certain parts of the performance or the subject matter hit them at that moment. And then you would notice that people would get emotional and just the raving of everybody that was there of how wonderful it was. Truly remarkable. And then just a highlight for me that I thought all of our students who have won and do the work, it's amazing.
But the DECA student, for a 10th grader to win in an interviewing event, I mean, I just think that is pretty special and I'm looking forward to seeing where she goes as well as all the other students who have done so well, and flag football. With the kids that I work with it, everybody is like, I wanna sign up for flag football, I wanna play flag football. So it's exciting to see that that's a new sport and I'm sure it's gonna have, it's gonna grow. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, you'll have to come check out
our girls team at some point. And thank you for visiting the Dear Evan Hansen performance. - It was wonderful. - And I did see the Fox Nine interview and the student was in the interview. - [Speaker 4] Yeah. - And how long did they have to get that together? 'Cause it wasn't a planned. - Right, it was a little bit short notice and Morgan could correct me if I'm wrong, but it was under five week turnaround time. And usually it's at least a six to eight week is the ideal situation for a musical production. - You would have no idea. It was fantastic, so thank you. - Thank you. - Right, Mr. Skaar.
- Thank you for the presentation and your enthusiasm and command of the details of the program is really impressive. So thanks. We hosted a speech event, maybe it was a month and a half ago. Two months ago, I was wondering how that went and how the facilities, you know, what kind of comments did we get back from the people that we were hosting? - Yeah, yeah, that was a great event. I was here on Saturday for that. Our facilities are incredible. So I just like to take a moment to recognize that. And I know I wasn't here working in the district
when everything was being built or being funded for, but wow, we are so lucky. We were able to have actually a volleyball tournament going on. So there were, it's like over 20 volleyball teams here in the youth program. And we had the state or this big speech event with teams from all around the state. So the facilities were being used in every square area. There was also a performance from the Lions Club going on in the performing arts side of the building. So the fact that we had the, first of all,
the parking and the capabilities to have three huge events going on simultaneously in every square inch of the building was pretty incredible. And there were no complaints. We had a lot of signage to direct people towards the right doors and whatnot. But yeah, that was a really special day just to see every square inch of the school being used. - Do you think it'd be worthwhile to survey folks that are at the events, just, you know, kind of what their experience is. Maybe ask them like three or four questions real quick.
Something like that. That might be helpful. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, I think that's a great idea. - So you have a activities finance clerk, does that finance clerk, does that person report, does that have a dotted line of reporting to the district finance or what's the reporting relationship there? - [Speaker 4] Yeah, she reports directly to Brian Peloquin, the director of activities, but she works really closely with the district finance office as well.
- Okay, thank you, thanks. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, thank you. - Anything else? Well, I guess thank you for everything you're doing, and go Bears. - Go Bears, thank you all. - Thank you. - Okay, we're gonna go on to our next discussion item B4, Elementary multi-age updates, come on down. - Members of the board, I'm gonna introduce myself here with me and I have a statement that I wanted to read and then we'll get into our presentation. So as you know, Jen Babich, director of Teaching and learning. Carrie Kruismark, who you've seen recently, principal at Lakeaires Elementary, Julian Stanky,
who you've seen recently at Birch Lake. And then Lori Moser at Oneka. I don't normally do this, but I really wanted to make sure I got my thoughts out and succinctly as we make sure we have enough time to talk through everything. But I wanted to take a moment just to ground us in this decision 'cause it is very complex as we think about multi-age. So I'd like to take a moment to ground us in how decisions like this are made. Because clarity about our process matters, especially when there are strong perspectives. At the center of every decision we make is our responsibility for student outcomes.
That responsibility is shared across teachers, principals, and district leadership. And it guides how we design learning experiences for students each day. Each year, staffing decisions are made at the building level based on student needs, enrollment, the professional judgment of the principal within clear district expectations and support. This is a comprehensive and often complex process that requires balancing enrollment, academic and social emotional needs, programming and the strengths of our staff. Multi-age classrooms are not a mandate.
They're one of several strategies principals may use when aligning staffing to best serve students. These decisions are not one size fits all. In some cases, that means single grade classrooms and in others it may mean multi-age structures. Multi-age classrooms are also not new to our system. We have used them in different contexts over time and we have learned from those experiences, both what has worked well and where stronger supports are needed. What is different now is the level of intentionality, alignment and system-wide support being put in place
to ensure they are implemented thoughtfully and effectively for students. We have heard from families, including some who are also educators, and we take that feedback seriously. Families care deeply about their children's experiences and that perspective matters. At the same time, these decisions are being implemented across multiple buildings, with leaders moving forward based on their specific context and the needs within their schools. Staffing is one of the most complex responsibilities we hold. In a system like ours, with elementary schools varying in size
with uneven grade level cohort sizes, that complexity requires thoughtful, flexible approaches rather than a single standardized model. Our role at the district level is to provide clarity, expectation, and support. Our principal's role is to lead, while making informed decisions within that framework for their students, staff, and community. As district leaders, we also lead alongside our principals to ensure the conditions, alignment and supports are in place for this work to be successful. This evening you will hear directly from principals
who will share more context about how they arrived at their decisions, the plans we have in place to support students and staff and where we are in the process. I want to take a moment to thank our principals and staff. This work has required thoughtful collaboration, professional courage, and a deep commitment to doing what is right for students. Collaboration across nine elementary schools is not easy work. It requires time, trust, and a willingness to work through different perspectives in service of a stronger system.
You'll see that some of our principles are presenting today and many others are in the audience, that reflects the level of shared ownership and commitment to this work across our system. I'm deeply grateful for their leadership, their willingness to engage in this level of collaboration and the care they continue to demonstrate for students, staff and families. When we create space for building level decision making, we create the conditions for leaders to respond thoughtfully to their communities while staying aligned to our system. Limiting leaders to a single approach, regardless of context, would reduce their ability
to make responsive decisions that best serve students. Our focus remains on strong instruction, thoughtful leadership and decisions made as close to students as possible. Thank you. So as we start, this team worked really hard, so I just wanna make sure and shift, but I'm connecting and really wanting to focus on how does this align to our strategic plan. And we've had some good questions from people. And so we have four tactics and when we think about when or four strategies, we will create and sustain a safe, equitable
and nurturing environment, you'll hear from principals. But this is about consistent class sizes across our system. We have had class sizes, we have ranges. And if we didn't do multi-age, we might have classes well below the target class size and well above the target class size. And so this really is about balancing those class sizes, ensuring a consistent student experience regardless of school or cohort size. And then really working on those strong relationships and a sense of belonging that you've heard from Angie at Otter Lakes, Catherine at Central, and our focus as a district.
Thinking about, I'm gonna skip around a little bit 'cause really they're the highlight, not me, but we'll promote, encourage, and support students' personal learning. This really allows for more flexible, responsive instruction as we think about meeting the needs of our fourth and fifth graders. We wanna maintain grade level expectations. And you'll hear that, ensuring all students are supported towards readiness for middle school and beyond. And then I think the one I wanna land on and finalize is really thinking about how we continuously transform. We have had educators leaning into multi-age for many years. We have a school that's built around multi-age
and we've supported it the best we can in terms of when you think about them more as a reactive structure. And this proactive support is really built on continuously improving. And how can we better support our educators, students and families for a stronger experience. So with that, I'll shift to my colleagues. - [Speaker 6] All right, thank you for having us. So here's just a few pieces around our multi age classrooms. So seven of our nine elementaries are gonna go to multi age for next year. Maka and Otter, they are gonna stay
where they're at right now and make that shift in the future due to those other programs that they're implementing currently. So how did we get here? Like Dr. Gillespie shared, we do have both currently single grade level and multi-grade level classrooms, and multi-age classroom, excuse me, with varying levels of educator support. And we have class sizes that exceed the district average because of the relative size of our neighborhood elementary schools, despite educator to student ratios remaining consistent year over year. And so schools that are implementing multi-age
are doing so to support greater stability and consistency in our class sizes, recognizing natural variations in student cohorts, that again speaks to those sometimes extremely large cohorts or extremely small cohorts that create the smaller class sizes or the very big class sizes, especially felt at the smaller buildings. And then all schools will remain aligned to the same district expectations for high quality instruction and student experience. - [Speaker 7] So when we think about, you know, what we've been doing building and what we've learned, all our elementaries have been doing multi-age,
at some point over the years successfully, but in different ways. So through these experiences, we know that we are gonna be able to take these experiences and the variety of styles and we can strengthen from those experiences, our approach across our system and apply to what we're gonna be doing in the future. And next slide. So then with this system wide approach allows us to bring some more clarity.
Obviously we're gonna be doing a lot of more work and some of that work has already started, but a unified multi-age approach improves support for both our students and our teachers of course. Grades four and five specifically were chosen or paired because their standards in those grades and the assessments just have a lot of natural alignment, which is an important part of what we were looking at, which just made like a lot of common sense
when we were looking at this opportunity. And then educators will cover all the core subject areas in these grade levels, following the state standards as we should, for both those grade levels. And then thinking about that student and staff experience, which is a key important part of what we think about for our students and our staff. Building strong relationships and communities in the multi-age classroom environment
is an important piece. Multi-age can bring peer mentoring opportunities and leadership opportunities for the students. That might be the older students or maybe it's the more mature students, maybe age doesn't necessarily matter and teachers can have routines and norms established early in the year if they have those looping opportunities in their classrooms. And incorporate those things right away. Having done this for four years in my building,
I can tell you those teachers love that day one, day two, those kids that they've had, day one man, they're just flowing and going. They don't have to teach a lot of the things. And the rest of the kids are just, they absorb and learn through osmosis and those are things that you just can't, time is of the essence. So some of those little things are magic and the staff experience is one of unification amongst colleagues that they get to work with. And not just one or two teachers on a grade level,
but it's all teachers. And not just my building, but it's at Julian's building. At Dan's building at North Star, at Birch, at Otter, or not Otter, sorry, but at North Star, at Oneka. Every building it's a unity of educators doing this together. We often say we are better together. This is, we are better together. - All right, so how are we preparing to do this? So we are, Julian, myself and Jen Babish and I are co-facilitating the design team.
So the design team is made up of, you know, classroom teachers, some of our SPED educators, specialists, interventionists, ML teachers. And we have started, our first meeting was on April 13th and we met and we talked and looked at a lot of research, you know, grounded in this work, this multi-age programming, not just at four or five, but you know, across, you know, k, you know, all the way through high school, you know, to like start, you know,
and grounding ourself in the work and what does that look like, what does that mean, you know, for us as we go forward with this. And then looking forward to, you know, like our meetings that we are currently having, you know, we are looking at you know, building that framework and then going forward, you know, with what that will look like when we get to June where we can actually do some dedicated curriculum writing where, you know, any four or five teacher can join that or a specialist or SPED or ML intervention to really look at what it will look like.
Here's what you are teaching, here's what these curriculum plans, unit plans look like. And then, oh, go back. I didn't finish everything, sorry. And then looking at also professional development, you know, for our four or five teachers and thinking of, you know, we've had a great community of practice, you know, for each grade level and department, you know, throughout, you know, the last couple years. So making sure that we have, you know, that dedicated next year for our four or five teachers. And then looking at what we can do
beyond just communities of practice, but also more, you know, like detailed or professional development for our four or five teachers throughout the school year. Not just at our communities of practice, but how we do that maybe at the building level as well. And then how we are communicating and how we have communicated. So as soon as we knew we made this decision, you know, we communicated with staff first and then we sent it out to our incoming third and then our current fourth grade families,
you know, just to share what was going to be happening for the next year. We've also communicated with our PTOs or PTAs and had, you know, conversations there and then stakeholders. So last week we had our systems accountability committee and we talked about it there with our teaching and learning department, our other fourth and fifth grade teachers, we continue to get information from them. Like just today when we had our communities of practice, we gathered more information, you know, from them, you know, to help guide our work. And we took that and actually use it today
in some of the things that we worked on. And then also from all of our teachers and staff who are going to have some kind of touchpoint with our fourth and fifth grade students. So they're specialists, ML teachers, and then any student support staff in sped. So then creating that common language using that guaranteed and viable, we have that already developed. But then how does this four five fit with that? And do we have to make some, you know, like differences in how we look at what four five is
compared to what everything else is. But knowing that, we have to align that with our already established guarantee from the curriculum for instructional expectations, which then will help create that consistency among all nine of our elementary schools. Because that is like the most probably important and impactful thing that we can do is to have that consistent experience for all our fourth and fifth grade kids across all our elementaries. - [Speaker 5] We didn't have a question, sorry.
- Thank you. - We turn that on, thank you. I just had a couple of questions to share and I hope I'm not playing gotcha 'cause that's not my intention. One of the things we do know that the number one thing for success for this to happen is to have teachers on board and trained. How have you gone about getting teacher buy-in to make sure that they're on board to do this? - Yeah, I can talk a little bit about how we started and then they can talk more.
But we've worked really closely with Tiffany, the union president, to really gauge, the past two rounds of negotiations, we do interest based bargaining, so where it might not be a topic that is contract related. We talked about the supports that we have, knowing that multi-age has been here and it's been a discussion on how can we best support that. So in terms of the system level, really keeping close to her, talking through things at our professional learning council. But you guys would be able to talk about her specifics. - And each time Tiffany has also sent out a survey,
you know, to just our design team as well. And then getting feedback and gathering that from our fourth and fifth grade teachers has been really impactful to help us and guide us with, you know, like what else our teachers need and then also supplying them with talking points or, you know, like a summary of the work that we did, you know, each time that we've met. - Okay, I just have one other quick question is how are you addressing the concerns of parents, especially fourth grade parents
or third grade coming into fourth grade who are concerned that their students is gonna struggle and get further behind? Can you talk about how you let them know how they won't and how we can deal with that? - Have you guys heard from parents? - I haven't heard, I've only heard from one, but it had nothing to do with like curriculum and, you know, assessment or anything like that. So, so far I have not had any. - So having done this for four years at Lakeaires, and not that there aren't parent concerns for that specific question, every question I've taken
has usually been something completely different. And I don't wanna disregard that type of question, but usually questions are usually around like the age thing and we talk through that. Or sometimes questions have come up, things that I've tried to think through like, okay, what kind of questions could come to me? And usually when you get asked something, there's something that you could never predict. It's like, my son is in this classroom and their lunch and recess doesn't match up with their friends.
And it actually had nothing to do with multi-age, it was just magic of the schedule and schedules are a nightmare. And it, you know, or it was, what are my chances of my son having this teacher? Well, it has nothing to do with multi-age. Typical, like, well, you know, but they had an older child that had that teacher. So maybe that's just me at Lakeaires, and I've been blessed not to have too many things. But a lot of it is about just any questions, please come ask and ask and ask.
Making sure, and same with the teachers. I've always said, if you hear anything, let's, you know, reach out or have me, you know, notify me so I can reach out proactively. I don't wanna have a parent not reaching out. I'd rather like, hey, I heard that maybe you were wondering something. Let me be proactive and just like, let's have a conversation, rather than stewing over something. But I have not had very many in four years and everything that has come up has been a good conversation, so. - All right, thank you.
I'm gonna turn it over to the rest, Ms. Streiff Oji. - Yeah, so I multi-aged for 10 years as a teacher and I was at a school within a school that was multi-age, all multi-age. And I know about the benefits of multi aging. There are many and I also acknowledge that it's late right now. And so it's a short time for people to get ready. So my questions are around, do you anticipate students changing classes when you talked about getting them ready for like middle school, is that something
that you anticipate, changing classes and teachers that would take on different subjects? Have you even gotten there with your design team or? - No, so you're talking about like maybe departmentalization like within? - [Streiff Oji] Yep. - That is something that our design team is definitely looking at, but we haven't landed on, you know, like what was best for kids just yet. But it's something that, yep. - Thank you. When you talk about dedicated curriculum writing time for educators, but it's voluntary. So what does that look like for those that choose not to,
which I'm gathering most will not because they wanna be prepared. And then when they do that, will the curriculum and pacing look the same at the various schools as they? - Yeah, great question. So part of it is this is how we would do curriculum writing with any new standards or new instructional materials that we would get. And so the design team, I wanna just point out that we have broken up into working groups.
And so the design team is able to choose if they wanna work on curriculum assessment and development, student experience specifically with our specialist. And so as we think about art and music and PE, what may that look like? Also, we're focusing on the student experience as we think about SEL field trips, fifth grade graduation, all of those important moments that maybe fourth grade has and fifth grade has.
And so one of the things that we're doing specifically with the curriculum assessment and PD group is we're really looking to see first, the standards, and then how do we ensure that students are gonna be proficient in both fourth and fifth grade by the end of that academic school year. And so we start with that base and then we're looking at each content area separately. And so we have a math group, we have a literacy or ELA group, social studies and science
we'll be doing next. And so we have two more dedicated half days that our design team is meeting to work through that. And then we have our voluntary two days in June. And so what happens is we have kind of the group that's able to meet and wants to meet and does kind of front loading that work before the summer starts. So then when we start the school year, then we can get everyone immersed and looking at what that scope and sequence may look like.
And then we have those intentional communities of practice throughout the year where grade level teams are meeting specifically to look at how are things going, what are things we need maybe need to take a note of that maybe didn't go so well for next time that we can improve. And so we have both kind of that front loading for those that are able to, and then everyone's able to kind of look at it over the summer. But then knowing we have an intentional work that we grade levels meet throughout the year to be able to tweak things
and to give feedback so that we can improve that student experience. - Great, thank you. I just know that it stretches kids in a lot of ways, beautiful ways, social emotionally, academically, the ongoing, if you can have the same teacher for two years, it's lovely over time. I actually was a product of four, five, six so three grade levels and I know it can be done and I think it's much more of a real life model. So I'm excited to see where it goes and excited to see that you're doing it
across the district and not in isolation because it's really difficult for teachers that are trying to do it in isolation, so thank you. - Thank you, other questions, Mr. Skaar? - Yes, I would ask, is this gonna be a topic on the May 11th meeting where we have the benefit of public forum so we can hear from parents and families or no? - [Speaker] Well they can come and talk about it. - But this presentation and discussion won't be on the May 11th. - [Speaker] I'm not sure at this point, but.
- I would suggest that we have it on there. How was this decision made? Who made this decision, how did it bubble up? - The principals made the decision. So every year they get an allocation for staffing in their buildings based on enrollment, that staffing allocation hasn't changed. And then they decide, each year, some of them have had to do multi-age classrooms to be able to stay within those classroom sizes. And so then together in partnership with teaching and learning staff, they decided to do that. - Okay, thank you. This seems to be a significant decision,
a significant change. And you know, from what I've heard from parents, they've used the term blindsided by this and also at least one indicated that there was a potential that they would leave the district and go to a different district, which is concerning to me because this decision could have enrollment impacts. And right now, enrollment is something we're all keen on
to make sure that our numbers grow to the level that we expected when we passed the referendum and spent $400 million on our facility. So that highly sensitive to that because as we all know, enrollment translates into funding. So I just wonder, with the significance of this and the significance of the decision and you know, and I hear the process that you went through,
but it seems like it was not enough to educate parents and families on this change, the impacts to it. And I would also suggest that something this significant as a change should be made at the board level, as opposed to individual schools. And I think it should come to, I think this decision should come to the board to deliberate and discuss. - [Speaker] I'm sorry, I may make sure you were done.
- Yeah, I'm done, thank you. - Has everybody had a chance that wants to talk before I start over? Okay, go ahead Daniels. - Yeah, so really it wasn't really a financial decision, it was more about balancing class sizes and keeping within our parameters and giving some flexibility to buildings as they do staffing. And I do remember years ago when we had very, very large class sizes, I mean very large, in the 30s and upper 30s in elementary.
And that caused a lot of parents and a lot of families to leave the district. So I appreciate that you're trying to stay within those parameters that we had by being flexible in creating this. And then my question is, when you've done research, and I know Chris has alluded to this, that there are some benefits to this in the data that tells us that cross age classrooms are beneficial. Can you just speak to one or two of those things that you've researched or seen?
I happen to read, like we had a guest at our house last weekend and they brought a paper from Winona, Minnesota and it had a whole front page article on the benefits of cross age classrooms. And I should probably get a copy and and send it around, but they've been doing it, they just started last year I think and they had many wonderful things to say about it. But I just wondered what you could tell us about you know, what you've read or researched. Chris kind of alluded to some of the stretching and some of the role modeling and things like that.
- Sure, yep, yep, so we alluded to some of those things with the student experience. I think looking at the research, both if it's single grade level or multi-grade or multi-age, there really is a status quo, I would say as we look at academic achievement, it really matters more about supporting teachers and having consistency with our planning and support that's gonna have the impact.
The research does say though, with the social emotional learning of having a multi-age class, they really see benefits in both students that are in fourth and fifth grade or whatever the younger, the older students that they're seeing that they're really achieving at a higher level when it comes to leadership, mentoring. You know, you're really raising the bar for all students in that area. And so, you know, we're really focusing our efforts on supporting our educators to be able
to have a consistent multi-age experience for kids across the district. And then really focusing in on what is that student experience and how can they have those, you know, moments that they would have in fourth grade or those field trips that are really important or fifth grade, fifth grade graduation, those kinds of things. So our intention with the design team is really to focus in on student experience, professional development for our teachers, curriculum writing and yeah. Is there anything else anyone else wants to add?
- No, that was good and I'm assured that you're gonna be like looking at it measuring and reflecting and all of that. I mean I obviously you're getting, we're at the base, we're just getting going but. There'll be time for teachers to do some of the, I mean with their teams but also individually some extra time for them too. - Yes, yep, so part of the agreement with the teacher union also is that we would support them with curriculum writing hours above and beyond what we would normally give as just, we know it's an extra lift
to getting things up and running and to be able to support them that way as well. - Yeah. 'cause I think if you were end of one in a second or third grade classroom or in a building, it would be difficult but now you're gonna have the support of the entire district, all the seven elementaries. Yeah great. - Thank you. - That's all I have. - All right, Ms. Thompson? - A couple things I guess, I think, you know, change is hard for people to come on board with and I have to say I had some questions myself about this,
but the more research I did and the more questions I asked, the more I am starting to see the benefit to this and it is happening in other areas where they are having benefits from this and in the world we live in a multi-age environment every day of our lives. So when kids start in daycare, they're in a classroom with the infants and then as some of them get older, they go into a classroom with other, right? And it's a multi-age class and it's all the way until they get into kindergarten or well into kindergarten,
'cause even preschool is a mixed age classroom. And then we keep them separated until middle school starts to kind of have some crossover, like if students are in choir or other things. And then high school, we know our kids are in multi-age classrooms so we're already doing that. And in Lincoln we have our Gifted Services Program where those students are third, fourth and fifth graders altogether. And that has been going on for several years and has had amazing success
and we have third graders in that classroom, right? And people are buying into that and they want their kids to be in that program if they qualify for it. So I think, and that shows that our gifted students are doing these things, right? So why shouldn't all of our kids have the opportunity to do that? It's an equity issue and it also allows like the mentoring program, right? So we think about the high schools who went and mentored at Otter and the younger kids look up to them, it's the same thing in fourth and fifth grade, right?
The fifth graders are the big kids, they're gonna be the ones. And so everybody always looks up to that group. So this I think is also another way to allow them to learn from each other, to grow together. The older kids can help the younger kids kind of come along in those things. Some of my questions are, are we gonna loop this? 'Cause that is another thing that I like, I met somebody at one of my first national school board conferences I went to who, it was on a school board in Illinois and she did her dissertation on Cuba's literacy rates.
And so she went and actually lived in Cuba a couple times while she was building and collecting her data for several months. And the main thing she found that was the key success there was that they loop, so their kids start in kindergarten and they graduate school with the same teacher that they start with and that builds a relationship and it allows them to form that like bond with each other. So they are they, you know, I mean you think a Cuba and people are like they have a higher, I don't know if it's today, this was many years ago,
they have a higher literacy rate than we do, right? And usually you think that they'd be behind but they're not. And a lot of it has to do with the way that they loop their students and it's also they're very good to their educators in their in the country. But I guess so like I think there would be a benefit to looping these students so they stay in the same classroom with the same teacher if that's a possibility that we could make that work. In the teacher of the year interviews,
many of our teachers talked about wishing that they could loop with their students. And when we've had that happen where students are put back with the teacher because maybe they're struggling or they have other things and they built that bond, we allow them to be with that same teacher and it helps them or teachers have actually asked to go to the next grade level so they can go with those students, right? And I think that has a really a great benefit to doing this. And these kinds of things are happening
all throughout the world in other countries where we often look and we go, well we should be more like them. Well this is our opportunity to see if this is a great way to help our students success. And it is a big ask for our educators. So I definitely don't wanna dismiss that. And it's a big ask for them. In the past we've done things where we've given some time like you know this is coming but it's maybe a year away and this is like we're doing this in the fall. So I'm a little nervous about that
and hoping that, I'm sure you guys are doing this and getting the teacher buy-in and I would just say since you've notified families that everybody knows this is happening, if they have an elementary age kid, I personally in my emails and I check my spam and I check everything, I've only had three emails so far on this. Not to say that maybe we won't get more coming down the road, but you know, I would think if it was something that families were super concerned about, we would hear from them because we always hear from them when they have a concern about something that we're doing
that really impacts their life or their family or their student's education. So I'm excited to see where this goes and you know, if we have, I guess a question like so which school as an example for people who kind of aren't maybe still getting on board with this. So if we have a classroom in Oneka that has 32 students in it, but maybe at Birch we have a classroom with 20 students in it. Now this will allow us to even that out
across the board so that no student is in a classroom where we have 31 students, 'cause that is not helpful for all of our students or the teacher in that classroom. So maybe if you could just speak a little bit to that piece 'cause I think while it's kind of mentioned in here, it's not very specific. - So I did the calculation just broad. So right now if we didn't multi-age, we'd have uneven enrollment. The lows would be 19 to 21 students with highs of 30 plus students.
And that can require pulling staff from other areas right now because we're able to multi-age, it's also allowed them to keep grades K through three within those class targets. And sometimes that can cause one of them to bump up if you're evening out a bigger class on fifth and then it really can result in the same inconsistency in a school. So one of our schools, if they didn't multi-age, would have 20 per class in fourth grade and 31 per class in fifth grade. Just as an example. - Comment. - Thank you, I don't have any other questions. - Mr.Skaar, you think you had a question? - Thank you.
Did you look at any studies that showed that the combination would be detrimental to student success and family concerns? Any studies that you looked at? - [Speaker 5] Not that I looked at, no, no. - So would it be safe to say that we have confirmation bias that we made a decision and we're looking for studies that confirm the decision. We didn't look at other studies that possibly would be detrimental.
- [Speaker 6] Were there studies that you found that said they would be de detrimental? - So perhaps there's none out there that are, okay. - I think most studies out there show that it's the teacher impact and that would prevent any negative learning issues that the teachers overcome that, that was the few studies I read said that, that that's the biggest part, the training and the teacher involvement and that's the major factor that will prevent that. - Okay, thanks for the answer. I had one other thing just for the board.
You know, we have a lot of challenges with, you know, academics, enrollment. I mean is this just another change? You know, it seems we already have like a fire hose that's coming at us. Is this just another change that can potentially derail us, would be a question for the board and that's why I would like to have this on the next board agenda, to discuss this more and actually talk more about how we solicited parents' input on this
and family input on this. The other thing is, I don't know if I would use Cuba as an example, it's a communist dictatorship that imprisons political prisoners and they can't even run their electricity grid. So I don't think that's a good benchmark, thank you. - [Speaker] All right, I know Ms. Daniels had a question or comment. - So I think all questions from parents and community are important. So even if we get three or four emails, the questions, you know, are important
and I think we have the capacity to answer them all. And I would encourage parents or community members to watch this work study is gonna be, you know, the video will be on our webpage. Do we have to replicate it in another meeting? I don't think so. I think this is a great presentation. This would get some discussion going and they could get a lot of their questions answered if they watch this. And they certainly, community members can come to work studies just like any other meeting. And then if they watch it, they'd be prepared maybe
to then publicly if they had questions, call their principals or an administrator. And I would encourage board members to do that, which I do as a general practice when I have questions and I think it's an expectation that when I have questions or other board members or community people have questions, there are resources to get those answers. And so I would say please, if you have questions that are not answered that you don't have answer to, to call your principals, call an administrator,
call somebody that can, you know, help you figure those answers out because your questions are important. All questions are important, but my feeling is no, we don't have to redo the presentation, but we can have people watch it and then, you know, and also ask questions. - I thank you, any. Did you have something? - Yeah, I just wanna say, you spoke to how the decisions were made. You spoke to how the principals looked at complex problem solving and worked together to make this happen.
And I trust our administrators in the district to do what's best for our kids. So I feel like that is a management decision and not a governing decision. And we are a board that should be governing and not trying to tell you all how to do your jobs. - I think one thing that maybe is getting missed a little bit is how difficult these decisions are. And we have had multi-age and we're trying to do it better and we have varying sizes of elementaries and so it is frustrating for staff, frustrating for parents to have class sizes
that are below the targets but well above the targets. And they're well above the targets in a sense that if you have to allocate an FTE there to make it, then they're really small. But it does pinch other parts of our classes. But this has been a really intentional decision because fourth and fifth grade standards are very similar. So for example, the team's diving in, but the lexile level that's tested for fourth grade reading on the MCA and fifth grade reading is the exact same lexile range. And so we have unit plans for fourth grade. We have unit plans for fifth grade.
If for example, Birch Lake would have to multi-age, if we weren't doing this, Birch Lake teachers and Julian would have to figure out how to multi-age with two separate unit plans. Carrie's team who's been wonderful working for years, they didn't have the supports that is what we're used to 'cause it's really hard as a system to support one certain area. And so this really is allowing us, but fourth and fifth grade was selected purposefully on the alignment of standards, which I'm not trying to minimize at all. It is hard, and the parents we've heard from, it has been more from one school. I partner with the principals when they have questions,
people often are frustrated at the district. I get that, that's communication, that's hard. And so it really is best to start with the principals. I just sat in a phone call with another, with Brian at the principal there. We partner really closely, but it is each principal really, this is not an easy decision. Staffing is really hard and no one's complaining, it's been like that forever because we're trying to be fiscally responsible with the resources we have and we have been able to maintain our class ratio and staffing for many years.
It has not changed since I've been in this role for six years and these guys have made really difficult decisions within that time. - Thank you, I have one request. I know you talked about the research that you looked at. If you could send it, not anything else, I just love reading it, I'm sorry. You know, I'm not the kind of being a curriculum person, I love to go through it and read it and if, if it's okay I can share it with the rest of the board if they wanna look at it, but I just like reading it. - [Speaker 3] Absolutely. - I would just say, or I don't know if we're,
if you know Tiffany was waving at me. I don't know. She can't talk. - [Speaker] She's not a speaker. - Okay. - [Speaker] You can speak to her afterwards if you'd like. But right now, unfortunately that with the rules, we don't do that. - I thought the whole board would benefit from whatever she was saying. All right, thank you. - I was gonna say the same thing, but I guess my thing then would be that these decisions are made because funding in public schools is lacking.
And it has been ever since I've been on the board and long before that. And it is not keeping pace with inflation. It is causing our districts to have to make these kinds of decisions because we don't have the proper funding. I still think this is a good thing because I think this is the way that things will move in the future is we're gonna start seeing more and more of this because it is beneficial to the students. And I'm really hopeful that that's what we can show down the road as we move into this transition. But if people are upset about having to make this move
because we can't afford to hire more teachers to ensure that all of our schools have lower class sizes, then I just ask our community members to advocate with their representatives and those who make these decisions at the legislative level. And in federally, really the federal government does not participate in public education in a way that they should financially participate. They leave it up to us states to do it. And then, I mean, we could go into all the other nitty gritty of it, but that is where people really should start advocating if they think
this is something that they don't like. Because we can only do what we can do with the resources we have. And so thank you for making this very tough decision and having to dig in and do this right now because I'm hopeful that it will show a great success. And, you know, that's what happens when we have to do these kinds of things. - Just one last thing, our total funding in this school district has exceeded inflation for the last 20 years.
That's just a fact, thank you. - All right, and that's disputed. So we'll just leave it at that. I want to thank you for coming in, you know what? I know this wasn't easy and I really appreciate you that I was throwing questions out there and you're able to answer and they're more, you know, please don't understand that was outta curiosity and I've heard things and looked at things. Keep doing what you're doing because at the end of the day, the reason you're doing it is because our children and that's what we make our decisions based on, to provide our children the skills they need to be successful.
And we want every child to be successful to grow and be able to reach for the stars that anything they wanna do. So I want to thank you for that. Have a good day. - [Speaker 3] Thank you, thanks a lot. - Appreciate it. Ah, we're finally to the part, we are at the adjournment. Can I get a motion to adjourn? - So moved. - Okay, by Daniels a second. - Second. - All in favor of say aye. - [All] Aye. - Opposed. Thank you very much, we are now adjourned.