session and obviously today is is pretty informal in terms of business I think everyone's seen the agenda so I'm not going to take any time kind of going over it again. Unless there are questions that people have about the agenda I'd be happy to address those. Seeing none I think Bill has a couple things we wanted to say about logistics and the facility and then I'll make a couple of introductory remarks and then introduce Nate we'll get started. Great, thank you Matthew. First I want to thank Floor for this idea. I'm really excited about today. This is going to be a great day. Thanks for coming to BizGit. Some of you have been here before but just to point out some of the obvious the bathroom is right over there to the right there's water fountains norm with La Petite and most of us have seen before is providing lunch and snacks this morning so please take advantage of that. I know a couple of you said you've got a couple of things I know it's difficult to take a day off from work from your pain job to come and be the school board member so I really appreciate that and you need to take care of those creature comforts so please do. You need to take a call there's room upstairs they're good about there's a little conference room at the top of the stairs that I know it's gracious that no one's in there the door's open and by that with that I was having a great day. What Nate's about to show you here I think Chris and Matt said it best to me when we saw Nate back in May I think of this year and like wow that really kind of showed me the system the so yeah I also want to thank all board members for being here it is hard especially during the week and during the summer to make a day for this so really appreciate that I also want to thank the leadership team for being here because this may be their busiest time of the year and if it's not it's close to it and so for them to take a day to spend with us on this topic also is really great and very much appreciated so obviously we're here today to talk about one of our three goals which focuses on student learning specifically and I was trying to think of how to introduce that topic a little bit and I sort of thought of the old saying that you know we often don't make enough time to talk about things that are important but not urgent and as boards you know we're often caught up in the kind of business at the moment and whatever sort of coming into our windshield or our radar and so we try to spend time talking about student learning but we often don't get the luxury of this kind of time to sit together and really delve into the issue and think about how are we doing as a school system and how can we possibly perhaps do better but then I also thought that important but not urgent doesn't really describe our focus on student learning accurately because I can't really think of anything more urgent for us actually to be talking about I mean the reason that we exist is that we want to try to provide the best possible education to every kid in our community so student learning is literally our reason for being and so this is the most important thing we could possibly talking about and it's important so it's a perfect thing for us to focus on with our time today and as Bill mentioned I think the reason one of the reasons that we wanted to invite Nate today to lead us through this discussion is that I think you'll sort of recognize as he goes through the presentation that some of the topics he touches on some of the points that he makes should sound familiar should resonate with you because they're things that we've been talking about here and there somewhat piecemeal from time to time and it reflects things that our leadership team really has been working on over the last two or three years and again as Bill mentioned when we saw the presentation we thought well that really kind of pulls things together and it's always good to kind of hear that information from a different perspective we also wanted to bring Nate because as I mentioned in my email he spent the last two or three years really studying this issue in Vermont and working intensively with 10 or more I think SU's across the state some of which are our neighbors and really doing a deep dive at a very granular level kind of studying what are teachers doing what are administrators doing what are schools as a whole doing on this issue and how does that compare to best practices in the field and so on so just to introduce Nate Nate has a very eclectic background he spent six years as a school board member so he's been sitting where you're sitting right now he's also served as a superintendent of a school so he kind of has things from that perspective he's been a for-profit business leader a nonprofit leader about the only thing he hasn't done I guess is run for political office so okay and you know he's really well positioned to take us through this discussion today so please join me in welcoming Nate thanks much it's great to be here really appreciate everybody coming out you know if I do start to sweater such it's PTSD I'm a former superintendent and only at seven school board members I see a room full of this many all these stories he's flowing back through my head but we'll try to stay focused on the here and now I appreciate you know this question of urgent versus important and hopefully as Matt said this is both but we're kind of framed today's discussion on almost two important dimensions the first is this is a blame-free day nobody's done anything wrong bad we're not here to talk about shortcomings but we are going to talk about the fact that as a state and as a country but we have as a society of the last 40 or so years kind of been on this journey of how do we take care and educate our kids and we've done some things really well over the last 30 40 years some things not so good and we fix and there's some other topics and we're going to talk about them that it seems somehow as a country and you all are just part of that trend I went down a certain path and good smart people probably people like me who came in to talk to people like you said hey this is the past we want to go down smart people not every smart person's idea turned out to be a good idea what we see in Vermont what we're seeing across country is a number of practices that become really commonplace and they're not working so this is not criticism of how we got here but if we really care about our kids being successful we really care about all of our kids being ready for college or career having kind of the lives and life trajectory that you want for your kids we're gonna have to do something different so the first thought is we had to do something different because we are to our kids second thought is the path forward is both easy and hard let's start with the easy part as board members nothing we're gonna talk about today has a dollar more than your spend there's no hey we need some money for this desire as new as a board member always hated these like great ideas that always started with and we just need a quarter million bucks because it didn't seem like such a great idea at that point so nothing we're gonna talk about far as much but nothing we're gonna talk about today is really easy to do because just my first point we've been down this path we were moving this way as a society for 20 30 years and we're gonna move the cheese for teachers special educators parents principals board members and that's the part that makes it kind of hard because it is a shift in thinking there's a shift in the way of what people who come to school every day have to do and that is never easy of the hope is that folks see enough urgency that there's enough reason to because we owe it to our kids to do something different and better that will overcome our human reaction to hey change is hard I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to school board members is because you all are often there to make or break you've got to prove these things you've got to support these things you've got to expect that some people are gonna come and say hey this is hard and at the end of the day either you know word say yet hard and we'll help smooth the way but we're gonna do this because as Matt said that's our job that's like you get the big box right or word say whoa this is a little too hard we got some people come in here I got two phone calls which usually gets reported as a hundred for people who say this doesn't make any sense so I do think that you know it takes an awful lot of people to make these things happen make things better for kids but but in my experience and I've been doing this for almost 20 years now school boards can really be the maker break as to whether this can happen in your schools or whether it's just like one more good idea that didn't quite so here's the overview of the day we got a lot to do the good news is you're gonna do at least half of it so you don't actually have to hear me talk all morning and all afternoon but we're gonna start the morning it's been about an hour and a half just sharing some background what does the research say what is the research say about how things are done in Vermont and what does research say about how do you really raise achievement for kids in struggle then we're gonna give you a lot of time in a structured way to think about that process it criticize it ask questions about it I don't expect you're gonna like everything I have to say as far as if you did I don't suspect it'll make perfect sense the first time you hear it although I'm kind of pleased that a lot of people will tell me it is common sense but not common practice we'll get it you'll get away in our mat then lunch in which we will not work but just eat and connect and then I want to spend some time talking about the lessons we have learned around how do you move forward how do you implement this because the first step is knowing what to do the second step is being able to do it and I think the second step is a lot harder than the first step and we've learned a lot about the do's and don'ts for moving forward we're also going to give you some time as a group to think about what are the next steps because you can't do everything at once it took us about 30 years to build these practices they will take more than 30 days to build so I really want you to have some time to think about prioritizing doing a couple of things and doing it well it's the first step it's gonna be a lot better than trying to do all of it and then you know today it's really only successful if something changes as a result I want to actually give you some time to do some planning about what what could be the next steps coming out of this and then we'll wrap up and and with folks that are getting a chance to share some of their reflections on the day so that's the agenda as folks said you know if you got a nature calls or if the need for coffee you won't insult me just get up and do that we will roughly stay to the time table but I never stay exactly with the time table all the other promises we will definitely end on time but everywhere in between you might be a few minutes earlier a few minutes late so just start with a quick icebreaker before I jump into so we're gonna find somebody you don't normally work with or know well and discuss one of two things one is what do you hope to learn today or what's the strategy that you've used or heard of if you think could help some of the kids who struggle so arise find somebody and chat for about two minutes so Okay, this is proof I was never a first grade teacher because I cannot keep the class's attention. Remember to grab your seat. So I'm going to ask for two brave volunteers. I will cold call if necessary. Two people want to share what they hope to learn today. Great, thank you. So I hope to learn whether this is the better of the best practices that are out there and how to implement it. Because as I read the article, it seems that the focus is on additional class time for new learning for children and students with teachers as opposed to parents. And so there's this transition there in terms of first and now. So how do you implement that with the state policy? I appreciate that. Yeah, I build on that too. I, in reading the materials, you know, I noticed that they were, they're great. It's all good and true. It's also built around suburban and urban models where there's a lot more density, a lot more resource. You know, so it's easier to have diversity of resource. How, in a, in any scenario, consolidated or, your resources are still thin. How do we effectively do that? This is a matter of resource utilization and efficiency of operation. That's a great point and we will actually spend much of the afternoon on that. At least the good news is what you want to learn on my slides actually align. So let's jump into it. That's good. We're both in the same, the right room. So let's talk about what do we know? What do we know? Because we actually do know a lot from the states. And I think there's an important point is, you know, one of the benefits I've had is, yeah, I've worked now in 28 states, about 125 school districts. And yeah, I've gotten to see a lot of the country, but I think for you all, what's really valuable is I've been working in Vermont now for about six years. We have worked in Special Ed in 14 SUs, and we have worked more broadly with districts that represent far more than half the case in the state. We, this is some of the data, not all of it comes from this very deep dive of I spent, what, a year studying what went on in 10 SUs across the state intentionally chosen to be geographically diverse, to be diverse in size, whether they're unified or not. And it was funny. We'll put funny in air quotes. But as part of this research, myself and three others, we interviewed face-to-face about 860 teachers. We got schedules, what people actually did for a week from over 1200 people. We logged an awful lot of miles, much of it in the winter and mud season. And we visited schools and classrooms from one corner of the state to the other. And one of the interesting parts was, you know, because we had a team of four, and every night we would connect on a conference call to discuss how the day went. And, like, the running joke goes something like this. Every place we showed up.  So you'd show up to a school of 60 or 100 kids, and a teacher at a principal would say, I'm so glad you came to my school. Because if you did not come to my school, you would have no idea what we do, because we are so unique. And something on the board of 800 people told us how unique they were. And here's the weird part. You're not. Now, you are in one way, so to be fair, and this is actually an important point. If you're an educator in Vermont, on average, you've been an educator in Vermont. Folks, I mean, it's a nice place. I love being here. I'm here almost every week. I get what people come and what people stay. The one downside to that is that, and we see this all across the country, states have a way of helping kids who struggle. And if you move just right over the border, when you could sometimes, you know, we have done studies of two school districts, demographically identical, size-wise identical, depending identically, are from center to center six miles apart. But one is in Massachusetts and one is in Connecticut. A student, if they move from one to the other, same student twice is likely to be identified for an IEP or not. Three times is likely to have a power professional or not. Five times is likely to be taught by a special educator versus a general educator. The student didn't change. He moved six miles. But mind if you moved within Massachusetts or within Connecticut or within Vermont, the changes are not that great. But states have adopted, developed, and never consciously. You know, there was never like the grand convening of the powers that be of Vermont, and they debated it and said, this is what we want to do. Just somehow over 20, 30 years, little decision one by another, I moved to another school and I bring with it what I did before and what I saw elsewhere. States have become unique. And there is no question that Vermont is unique. But the schools and districts and S.U.s across the state get a lot more in common than you have in difference. And we have logged enough miles and talked to, as I said, nearly a thousand folks to say that with some confidence. We did a lot of research. You know, again, talked to people, visited classrooms, looked at their schedules, looked at data, looked at staffing, looked at spending. And what we were able to come back to, to you all, to the state and say, hey, here's what's fairly common across the state, and let's compare and contrast that to a set of best practices. One thing about best practices, and this confuses people a lot. So I want to spend a minute or two on this. But some people will ask me like, are you here, so you're here to talk about special ed, right? Yes and no. Are you here to talk about kids who struggle? Yes. We use the term struggling students. You will not find that in state statute. You do not find it in textbooks. You definitely don't find it from the federal government. As a country, we label kids, either they're Title I, or they're ELL, or they're special ed, or they're general ed. I don't care, and they don't care. Here's how we think of the world. Some kids are doing just fine and others are not. Some kids struggle to read, and some don't. And it turns out that not all, but most of the best practices make really good sense to work for kids who struggle. And it didn't matter what label or what funding source, they were part of it. So we're going to talk about helping kids who struggle. Some of those kids have IEPs and some of them don't. And we're going to try to acknowledge that we live in a world in which those labels make a world of difference. So often, the first thing we've got to know is, does Nate have an IEP or not? They do. What we're going to do for him is entirely different if I had the exact same problem, two years behind in reading. Don't understand factions. Have challenges with behavior. Having an IEP or not takes you down an entirely different path almost never to the benefit. I don't intend it to be to the benefit of kids, but very seldom to the benefit of kids. You know, an exception to this, it applies to most kids' rule, is some kids definitely have either more severe disabilities, intellectual disabilities, or some kids do have very unique needs. So I'm not saying this applies to everybody, but it applies to the vast majority of the kids who struggle. And as I said, it applies because their needs are similar, and it applies because what has been proven to actually help is similar. So I use the term best practice, appreciate, maybe it's a better best practice, so let me define that. Because I try to keep the jargon to a minimum, and best practice is definitely where to throw around a lot. So here's my definition. First of all, it has been proven to be effective in multiple settings. This is not a discussion of theory. I'm a very practical person. I want to know and see and believe what has happened over and over and over again. It's got to be cost effective. If it's a great idea and you can't afford it, that is no good to anybody. I mean, it's got to be practical given the complexities of a public school system. As I said, I've been both a superintendent and a school board member. One of the lowlights of my life in that role was when Fox News came to my house. I don't know whether it's good or bad.  And the good news was, I was not home. The bad news was, my wife was. And they didn't believe her when she said he's not home. But this is a political world, and we appreciate how do you make this transition in a political environment. But everything we're going to talk about today is politically feasible, as well as economically feasible. Let's also talk about what a best practice is not. Because I think that matters. It's not one amazing school or teacher. You know, I'm going to make some comments about XYZ may not work or has not shown to be working well. And you may be thinking, hey, Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith does that. My kid had Mrs. Smith, and she did this really well. And that's probably true. The problem is, cloning is both illegal, expensive, and really, really slow. Like, if we had a way to get, you know, 100 Mrs. Smiths, well, maybe what Mrs. Smiths said can be our strategy. But we know that there are some teachers who are just rock stars. We're just way more effective than the average. And they probably have a different way of doing things that we're going to share. That's not very helpful. It's great if you're kids in Mrs. Smith's class and be thrilled that you've got a Mrs. Smith working for you. But if it's not scalable, if you can't ensure this happens in every classroom, in every school, that's not the best practice in my book. That's just fortunate. Second, it's not a program. People always ask me, and I travel the country talking about this a lot, they always ask about Read 180 or, you know, foundations or this program or that program. Here's what I know about programs. And we'll take Read 180 and foundations. They're really good programs. I've bought them as a superintendent. I've bought them as a school board. I've worked with districts who have bought them. Here's the funny part. If I go into a high-performing school system, place a closed achievement gap, hey, they use Read 180. Pretty darn good. And the teachers say it made a world of difference. I go into 20 school systems that have a huge achievement gap that hasn't closed one bit. That's the funny thing. They bought Read 182. They bought foundations too. There just aren't that many programs out there. Everybody's bought all of them. That has no relationship to where their kids learned or not. So there's nothing that we're going to talk about today that says, hey, this will be so much easier if you go out and buy something. Buy this program. I'm not tapping on the programs, but I guess they haven't been a variable, a lever for significant and rising achievement. And lastly, it's not hope. And I think way too often we hope some of our ideas will work. We hope they would when we roll them out. There's an expression that we hear a lot in the ed reform space, and it's called the stubborn achievement gap. We always put that adjective stubborn in front of the non-achievement gap. And I think it is stubborn that it resists change. In the last decade, some people have referred to the last 10 years as the last decade. Nationwide, we've made almost no headway in the achievement gap. For kids with special needs, we've made some progress. It's gotten worse. And yet, and yet, you know, when I was a superintendent as I chaired you know, I've actually implemented all the stuff we're going to talk about. We closed our general ed special ed achievement gap by 40 points, 4-0, at the secondary level. We did that while cutting the budget on my back. More broadly, we reduced the number of struggling readers by two-thirds. We brought the number of kids reading on grade level up to 92.5% when I left. It was a very middle-class community and it rose to about 96% many years after I left. So if it got better when I left. So draw whatever conclusion you want from that. But we've always hoped that what we rolled out would make a world of difference. We need to try something different because that achievement gap has been very stubborn. As we looked across the state, we saw five tough opportunities for really making a difference for kids in struggle. We're going to talk about four of them at it in a fair amount of detail this morning. They're the fifth focused on kids with those more severe disabilities and it's important that that's a discussion for a different day. You know, briefly, the first idea is core instruction matters a lot. If you've taken any notes, yeah, core instruction matters a lot. If you want to put something in parentheses as a state, you guys don't get that. As a state, we saw less focus on core instruction than the other 24 or so states I have looked at. And again, nobody got around and had a meeting and said, it doesn't matter. But it just kind of evolves that way. Second core instruction, kids are going to need more time to learn. We didn't see a lot of that across the state either, but we don't see a lot of that anywhere. Third, which I sometimes refer to as the Homer Simpson finding duh, students who struggle should get taught by really skilled teachers. The teacher matters. Again, as a state, we didn't see nearly as much of this here as we see elsewhere. Number four was that if we're going to do these first three things that are very academic in nature, we're really going to have to help our teachers and our kids and our principals meet the social and emotional behavioral needs of kids, because that's very foundational. If my life is in chaos, if I am stressed and strained as a student, I cannot focus on finding the area of a triangle. It's too unimportant at that moment. What your teachers are telling us across the state is they are waving the white flag there saying help, maybe it's like the pirate flag upside down or something, but they're just at their wits' end. They really need a lot more help and it's interesting, as I said when we work with a lot of districts across the state, every district we've met has taken steps to help address this issue. You guys know about this issue, but when we're hearing from administrators, leaders, boards, it's like hey, we're working on this. We're taking it seriously. When we're hearing from teachers, we're not doing enough. It's not working well enough. So we did see kind of a gap in perception. Yeah, please. Sure, that's a great question. So the question is on the is there less focus on tier one? You know... Yeah, so for number four we'll go deep into that. You're going to need a stronger tier one and a stronger tier two and a stronger tier three. And I think, you know, as far as like across the country I would say that fewer than 1% of the school systems feel they have this under control. There are vastly fewer places that feel that from either teacher or leadership perspective that we are meeting the social and emotional behavior needs of our kids as well as we want to and need to. This one snuck up on us, I think. But honestly, in the last 10 years there's been an explosion. We don't know why, we don't know but it's happened and I don't think anybody was prepared for it and everybody was figuring this one out. It's a lot of company. So let's talk about the first one. Because this is both common sense but definitely not common practice. You as a state there's a great part about Vermont. The weather, the scenery the people and your commitment to inclusion. You guys really were early, you are deep you want all of your kids in the general education classroom that's good, ethically, morally academically. So kudos. You have a high level what we call geographic you put a bubble force field around them you have separated them within the room and the separation comes in a lot of different ways but let's acknowledge that for most kids who struggle in kids with disabilities they are in the general education classroom they are in the general reading they are there for math they are there for intervention they are there for science and social studies they are there for art and that's good but when we interviewed teachers classroom teachers here's what they told us oh yeah, Nate he's way behind or he really struggles or he's got a specific learning disability he's got some challenges but we've got him covered and he's got a power professional right beside him taking care of Nate over and over and over and over proud, caring, thoughtful teachers told us oh no, no, that's not my kid we're not care about him and I check in with him in the morning but he's got challenges and we've got other people for that and what I call the devil's bargain is there are these other people in your schools and as the teachers describe them, they're very special people they even have special in their name special educators special art professionals these other people have said hey, I'm special I will take care of Nate I will help him and there's been this kind of bargain that the gen ed teacher said not really my job and they've said that not because they're bad people but because they're not actually sure what to do like they know demonstrably it hasn't been very successful what they've been doing as Nate's a couple of years behind in reading or really struggles in math they're not sure what else to do and then these other people magical, mystical incredibly well trained, special in their name they're designed to help Nate for each side feels like they're doing a really good thing doing the best for Nate here's the problem it's not working oddly enough I'm not sure what we thought it would work but in every single school system that has ever closed the achievement gap gen ed, core instruction has been the foundation strong effective gen ed core instruction is the foundation of closing the achievement gap let's face it these kids are going to spend 80% of their day in that classroom that classroom teacher may very well be the most skilled, most trained most knowledgeable person that teacher has to be the primary teacher of all of her kids instead now we'll talk a bit we'll get to the implementation of how we're going to make that happen because those teachers are telling us I'm not sure what to do but there is no sub contracting out this education of most of your kids I mean subcontracting not to a third company but to another adult classroom teacher has to be the teacher primary teacher meeting most of the students needs you know I'm a huge fan and I don't know how many of you have read the work of Richard DeFour who has invented PLCs RTI we've seen this pyramid RTI is a great idea and there are a lot of good ideas but there was some kind of whoops didn't read the fine print RTI was designed to be this extra help for kids who struggle and in his district where this was invented 12% of the kids got extra help that is his number 10 to 12% most of your schools got more than 10% of your kids struggling that classroom teachers got to be meeting the needs of 80-90% of the kids you cannot afford the kids enough time in the day to have somebody else other than a classroom teacher now the other thing that's a little funny about Vermont is sometimes we again 100 plus people all of them very unique and all of them said the same thing you know it's really really hard to do this kind of differentiation because I've got so many kids in front of me you know I've got to do something different for Bill and something different for Matt and that's really hard let us be clear you have the smallest class sizes anywhere in the country now we do work in Minnesota it's a middle class district because normally puts 28 kids in the kindergarten or first grade class there's nothing of it and we work with those districts the ones that have closed achievement gap that teacher with 28 kids is meeting the needs of virtually all the kids in his or her classroom and they have structured their classroom and structured their instruction so they can differentiate of their struggling students I've been from one corner of the state to another and I've seen cafeterias that may have 28 kids in them I have not seen a first grade classroom that's got 28 kids in them so we have to get first you have to believe that it is the job in the classroom teacher to meet most of the needs of your struggling students then we're going to have to take some steps to help the teachers be able to do that we're kind of like in that 12 step thing but you've got to have the belief first and we found at least across the state that is not a widely shared belief and again good people, they're not lazier on caring they've actually been taught in many ways from their experiences from what they see that hey you will identify a struggling student and send them to a specialist it's not working and the weird part is it hasn't worked anywhere the correlation if you want to predict how well struggling students do in a school, in a classroom in a district in an SU, in a state or in a country the number one determiner is how well general education should do the correlation is good core instruction raises achievement for everybody that is a big mind shift but it is a necessary mind shift within core instruction we've got to go really deep on this issue of reading reading is the gateway skill you want to know how a kid will do an eighth grade math which is third grade reading scores you want to know who's going to college look at the third grade reading score you cannot excel in school can't even do mediocre in school you cannot read and count for his well reading it explains for about 40% of kids who struggle, that is their core need in some studies it's been as high as 80% and again I was still guilty telling a particular group of educators that reading is important so I thought we've known this one for 20 years but again in conversation in actions in the attitudes didn't really have reading as being the most important thing in the world and so yeah this is another shift that we just we need to take what we call the known doing gap sure we know reading is really important we now have to act as if it is really important and what is acting as if it's really important it means monitoring how kids are doing and reading every two weeks and if you were really sick and your doctor said once a year you can do it you'll find another doctor it means if I tried something and it didn't work it means that two weeks later I'm going to try something different it means quite honestly never having a non-teacher teach reading we guys as a state have more non-teachers we call them power professionals I like to call them non-teachers teaching reading in any place in the country I read it at a grade level I have been reading for a very long time since third grade at least I could not teach your kids how to read teaching reading is a skill that's pretty hard the fact that only 40% of the kids in America read it at a grade level we did a level that was bringing them to college says it must be really darn hard to teach we're not seeing the level of the action that says reading is the most important thing in a student's life trajectory we definitely know people know that but we've got to move into day to day actions that reflect that across the state almost 40% of the kids are not reading at grade level to be very clear reading at grade level is marginally sufficient that the bar is high-ish it is not super high and what we've seen as a response and again I know people know reading is important and what people have said through their actions it's so important that we better put one adult to work with one or two kids on it it is a quantity game but that one adult you're putting on it is not a reading teacher I shared with you that in a district that ran we reduced the number of struggling readers by two thirds let me tell you how many power professionals were involved in that effort zero let me tell you how many highly skilled certified reading teachers are involved in that a lot we created a core of our most talented teachers created status said you had to actually have data that showed you could teach kids how to read better than your colleagues then we said if you're that good we'll let you work with our struggling readers you guys are just totally opposite of that and that's where again I know you know it's important that's why you hired somebody to help but the action somehow implies that just anybody can teach a kid to read and it's a furthest from the truth what are what your teachers are telling us is first of all they do believe power is held again good care in people they have drunk that cooling second they've interestingly enough they've said they're not sure what to do they've tried and didn't work you know I didn't push too hard but if you as a teacher experience undergraduate degree maybe master's degree you're having trouble so the power you are will do a better job I think there's an implicit belief that that one on one is the magic as well as the 8 or 10 to 1 but it's not working and a lot of people have said that the teachers are just getting overwhelmed with the social emotional that they're trying so again acknowledge there's not a message here that your teachers just tell your teachers to go do this and it will be better they're telling us they're going to need a lot of help but we've got to help them because there's no one else who's going to be able to make this happen than your classroom teachers so the first big idea is more instruction matters a lot it's got to meet most of the needs of most of your kids but for some of your kids that great core instruction it's a foundation but it's not everything some kids will in fact need more time in addition to so here's the word you've got to write down in the circle in addition to so just write down the word addition because extra time matters now here's what's kind of weird so here's a schedule as an elementary student here's a schedule of a typical student I mean by typical grade levels, doing fine college bound learning at a good clip reading for 90 minutes math for 60 launch art, some science and social studies very traditional perfect now here's a student who's struggling in reading we've got to help Nate because he's struggling in reading so the first thing we do is we pull him out of reading to get some help in reading you know that IUP meeting we thought we were giving him some extra help you'll actually notice that he's getting less core instruction than the student who's not struggling this we saw in about 80% of the schools the so called extra help actually was instead of as opposed to in addition to now like so many kids though me included when I was a student I didn't just struggle in reading I had six years of speech therapy and I owe everything to speech therapy I talk for a living and nobody could understand the word I said for most of my early childhood when are we doing speech therapy? only time speech therapist is in the building and had an available slot was during math all these services we put in those IUPs on average they're happening during reading in math so here's a student who struggles struggles to read doesn't get one more minute of reading it's less core instruction and for make math a little worse nobody sat down and said this is a great plan nobody said you know I think the best time to do speech therapy is during math I think Nate hates math and we want him to fall further behind so he really just likes coming to school no, but what happened is lots of people working independently trying to balance I'm only in the school on Tuesday and Wednesday warnings and I got my IEP and we'll go to jail if I don't do everything that's on the IEP matters so much I gotta make sure I meet all the requirements of the IEP which we do but what happened is nobody got together first and said it is unacceptable for a student not to get all the core instruction and we will have to change the way we schedule change the way we plan change the whole process such that no student loses core instruction and it's doable and it does not cost a valid war it takes a lot of planning but so first thing we found was the core instruction mattered across the state kids who struggle get less core instruction not more but they really do need extra time we are working with districts across the state they are working themselves as well to say we've got to build intervention time and enrichment time into the schedule so that it is available for everybody everybody needs it and it's possible nobody's lengthening the school day nobody's hiring more teachers if you plan and if you make it a priority you can schedule it I want to look at the secondary level some of your schools across the state are doing some extra time at the elementary level we found very very little at the secondary level again, here's a typical schedule of a student who doesn't struggle it's a seventh, eighth, or ninth grader basically I call this the one of everything I got one period of everything some of your periods got six some seven, some a block but I get one of everything now here's a schedule of a kid who struggles in math two years behind in math so trick question but what's different at least from the time perspective they look absolutely similar now we are doing some things that are different what we're doing is hey, Nate's got some needs so during that one period of math we're going to have to do some shoe horning we're going to squeeze into that period maybe two teachers and we'll do some co-teaching or maybe there's a para or maybe we'll change the curriculum we'll slow it down a bit but we're going to try in that one period to do a lot for Nate here's the dilemma from that classroom teacher here's what she or he's going to tell me given the amount of content I need to cover given the pretty high standards we've gotten to stay it takes me every minute plus a few to cover eighth grade math in one year it takes me every minute and I wish I had a few more of those minutes to cover ninth grade math for most kids when is she supposed to cover sixth grade math when is she supposed to talk about the concept of fractions and number sense a fifth grade skill that some of your eighth graders never quite mastered there's a funny thing about struggling eighth graders and ninth graders they were usually kind of a little foggy the last three or four years when in a day do we teach the things that I did not learn two, three, four years ago and then let's just acknowledge I've got three kids they're as different as can be I'm fairly certain I'm the father of all three but damn you could question it because they are so different in so many ways and one in which way they are different is the way they learn my oldest son when it came to math 20 minutes into every hour he was done with the class he just heard it once got it finished up the lesson on his own and he's an engineer my other son is also an engineer he's as slow as can be always has been he just takes him twice as long to take a test it takes him twice as long to understand an idea it's actually very, very good in math it's also very, very slow in math the four ones said learning should be the constant and time should be the variable we want everybody to learn all of eighth grade math and we need to acknowledge that some kids only need more than 47 minutes a day to learn but when we've done this country we've said no, no, no we've got one period for math and here's how we know how much you learn we invented something called grains if you learn it all we'll give you an A if you learn most of it we give you a B and if you didn't learn much of it we'll give you a C or a D and then we move you on to the next grade we have to start varying the time and again on top of really good core instruction when I interview a lot of schools create this extra period of math some people call this double time some people call it double blocking kids are going to need all of core instruction and they're going to need extra time to learn what they didn't learn in the past they're going to learn they're going to pre-top the lesson for this week they're going to re-top the lesson from last month that I didn't master and it's just remarkable that when I talk to these teachers who are teaching this extra period and this is the model that we use to drop our achievement gap by 40 points that's 4-0 not 4 when I interviewed those teachers the number one complaint was I only got 46 minutes a day for 180 days to make up for 3 years of struggling math or struggling English imagine that classroom teacher doesn't have 40 seconds so we've got to create schedules got to create plans in which kids are struggling get all of core instruction plus extra time to re-learn re-teach, pre-teach master the stuff that is accumulated all along the way so I'm going to stop talking and give you all a chance to start so at your tables we'll kind of reflect on whether it's the elementary or the secondary level what extent do your kids get extra time to learn, how consistent is that no matter which school I went to which teacher I've got which grade I'm in reflect on who gets extra time and is it different whether I'm an IEP or not so talk to them yourself so let me think about it first of all I'm calling it's mine it's black but for everybody it's correct so no no no it's a healthy mix of both so teachers can call back but then probably the goal is to teach children is white children or is it really building that I think well I think it's kind of like I see that it's really special and so then we're going to see if we go behind and and yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you know mm-hmm we'll have a video and we'll have a video for that We have to make priorities within the school, and I haven't, that's what I'm hoping. If anything is taken by board members today is that we have to be willing to take priorities and say to our communities, I hear you want everything, you want the whole child, you want the whole child too, but if we, so here's my thing, and this is what I try to say, and I think you've probably heard from me from a board member, if kids aren't literate reading, he's reading as a tool to learn by third grade, we've just done what he was talking about, they're probably not going on for something post-secondary. If they're not numerate by the end of fourth grade, so I want kids to love the arts, to be, think of any extra, I just use the arts, but any extra that you want, if kids aren't literate and numerate, they won't be able to get to that, and so if we want kids to be artists or workshop or performers or athletes, they can't get there without being numerate and literate, so what that means in elementary schools, we have to put the priority on literacy and diversity, and we have to be willing to say, I'm sorry, and this is what we've, I've talked to you about at Calis, you really have too much phys ed, we have to be willing to say we're not going to use all that phys ed time, and we have to be willing to say that to our community, and that you'll actually, and what Nate will show us later on, is we'll be able to have more time to provide extensions for students who need those extensions. It's like, it's not, we're not serving just one, we're going to serve all this way, because having a teacher that has to differentiate this far, is really hard for a teacher. We have it. We have it. We have it. We know it. We know it. We know it. We know it. And, and our work has to be... It's not about, we need to know who the best teachers are, who are the most struggling students. We have to put the best teachers where the kids who struggle the most, but it's really about increasing the skills of the average. Yeah, it, we're not going to get it, where it is, as Nate said earlier, it's not about superstars, and it's about having the average teacher having the skills they need to meet 80% of the kids. And that's what Amy just told you. She told you the ways in which she's struggling. So, Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's really funny. Okay. No, Romney has the highest by far. Yep. Continue. And, and so I was a physics and counterteacher. I have no business teaching, reading. I've had four courses in how to teach, and I still have no business in teaching, reading. It takes, you know, for those kids that are struggling, or it takes someone that has a certificate and reading a special certificate. So you're, you'd have a whole negotiated agreement discussion. I'm not going to go down. I'm not going to go down because that's a, so that's one that's not there, but bonuses have shown in motivation for employees don't really work. In, in. So let me, let me just say it a different way for professional, for professional occupations. You can take engineers, you can take teachers, anyone that's that. So I just, that Don, to me, it's a, it's a, for professional occupation, however you want to define that. To me, I define that as like a graduate degree with your complex tax. I love how you put that in there. Bonuses don't help professionals perform better. It's usually intrinsic. So that's a cross. That I will agree with you. If you have a, if you have a higher paying job and you do that across your workforce. Yes. I think that's true in any profession. Yeah. In our, in our pay. I agree. The other thing, just to give you Allison some piece of that. Okay, we're going to come back together, but not to worry. We're going to have a lot more time today. And we still have a lot to talk about. But there's one more. That's the best practice that I want to share to round out your conversation. But just as I was listening to what all you were talking about, I was stopping. I think there are two pieces I want to share for the whole group. One is, to be fair, as a, as you, we know you've actually taken some important steps in this direction. So over the last couple of years, this is happening. And so, you know, it's not a question of going from none to some. I think it is much more a case for, for many of you, from going to some to more. I've often heard people ultimately get to the place where they'll call it the guarantee. For example, we had a reading guarantee in my district. And the guarantee was pretty simple. The guarantee that we would find and identify as early as one week before kindergarten started. All kids who struggled to read. That was the first guarantee. We would know who you are. Second guarantee was we'd get 100% of core instruction. And we had ways of checking, etc. I mean, we are not leaving this to chance. And third guarantee was that if you struggled, you'd get extra out five days a week from the most skilled teachers we could find. And the fourth guarantee was that if that didn't work, we would convene and do something even more. But those were guarantees. Those weren't like wishes. They were actually ultimately put in policy. We had systems to monitor and check. And the power of that was the second thing I heard is like, what's the rule of the board in all of this? And a few of you said, I'm not sure how much extra time we have. You guys need to know because managing time is as important as managing life. And you know, almost all boards, they definitely make sure they manage the money well. And the reason I think it's important for you to know this and to support these kind of changes, at this stage, I've done this conversation. If I've done this in hundreds of districts, at this moment, it's 10 of 10, I can get almost every teacher in this country to say, you know what I mean? I get it. You know, we should have core instruction for all of our kids. We should get extra help. I think a teacher should help them. Like I can get 99% of teachers to agree. Now, I'm going to come back a month from now. We'll start not with faculty meeting and the principal says, you know, remember that guy Nate, we talked about those guarantees. So great news teachers, great news. I did the schedule. Well, you guys were having the summer off because when I looked at your schedule, I realized, damn, half our kids don't get extra time and two thirds of our kids at IEPs don't get all of core instruction. So here's a new schedule. Okay, two scenarios. Responses, thank you principal. Whoa, you must have spent a lot of your summer indoors on sunny days making all this happen. You're a great guy or gal.  We can't do that. Oh my God, I don't go to that school on Tuesdays. I don't do that in the morning. I do that in the afternoon. No, what do you mean? Somebody's not going to have 20 minutes of social? People push back. Let's face it though. The thank you notes are really short and far between. People like the idea of this. And interestingly enough, once they do it, they actually like the reality of it. They're going from the idea to the reality. Not that many people really like that. They really don't. Because we are changing something. And you'll notice I've said the following. Reading matters the most. I just said that. Educators, like, they like that right up until there's a corollary. Everything else matters less. Like, people are totally fine with something mattering the most. They're totally uncomfortable. That maybe we will actually reduce social studies by integrating some of the social studies texts and books that we're going to read on ancient Egypt or the colonial times into the reading block. But people will have social studies really just like that. There's going to be a trade-off. So my experience has been that you all have to become convinced that this is worth guaranteeing. You have to have the fortitude to definitely navigate this. Because once you get through this, this transition, people never go back. There is no buyer's remorse. But there's definitely... I will tell you when we've done this in so many districts, 8 out of 10 districts, build a really good schedule and then rip it up before it's every year. Did you want to? I do. Before this don't manage time, let's go ahead for professional staff. What we do is be behind the concept of something like this. We support it in the community. We become the shield and look to enable that. So, I mean, that's where I think the end is. That's the difference. We want to clarify this. We have to manage. You have to know what it is. We have to know what it is. And we have to make that or certainly support it. Because people will come running to you. And because I'm telling you that we have a good division of the best schedulers in the country. It's just part of our business. We do schedules all around this country. And whoa, when we moved into that business, we just so misread this. Because I'm going to just confess. I'm totally thrilled. We thought that if you built a great schedule, it would come. It's like the first 20, 40, 50 schools we built great schedules for. We had everything we were talking about. The principal, oh, this is great. Like literally 10% of them got implemented. 10% of them. And now we learn and we'll get the information for it. People make schedules really specially. I'm not going to teach reading in the afternoon. But let's be really clear. If 100% of your classrooms teach reading at 9 o'clock, either all your special educators and all your reading teachers do nothing from 9 to 10 30, or they pull kids out of reading. Those are only two choices. It's funny. Kids are 1,000 times more adaptable than adults. They're totally fine. Now, if you think about the double-time model, we had kids sneaking into the extra math class.  Turns out, and we always feel like some kids don't like math. That's actually not true. They don't like being bad at math. They don't like being confused day in and day out. They actually like mastering math. Kids want and see progress. I know there's all this discussion about tracking and flexible grouping, and you're afraid that the bluebirds and you don't want to label kids. Let us be 100% clear. Every kid knows whether they struggle or not. Every one of their friends knows who struggles or not. We're not fooling anybody but ourselves. If we can get them to catch up, they will do anything. It is the adults who have a very difficult time with this. Kids, not so much. Just acknowledging that the role of the board is to be the support, because this transition is hard. I mentioned that people refer to this stuff as common sense, but not common practice. These are not the hardest concepts to master. They're just pretty hard to implement, because we have built our schedules, our systems, our norms around a different paradigm. It's that shift that is uncomfortable, and it is uncomfortable for the adults. It's often framed around the kids' bill of rights, a guarantee for students. Once you've set those, your staff, your principals, your leadership, you can implement this stuff, but it definitely starts with, you have to believe this is important enough to weather a little bit of anxiety along the way. There's one last part of this. This first three really goes package. That is ensuring the students who struggle get all of their support from somebody who is highly skilled. Basically, this summarizes as the teacher class. Teachers matter a lot. The research, we have done so much research in this sector as a country, and we have been shown for about 25 years some teachers are more effective than others. The difference is huge. You take the same student, pop them in one classroom versus another, nothing else changed. Same schedule, same amount of time during the length of day, same curriculum, same mediocre superintendent, same overworked principal, nothing changed except the person in front of them. And that student moving from one room to another will make six months more growth in the course of the year. That's how big the difference is between an average teacher and a highly effective teacher. Now, the quality difference between a highly effective teacher and a mediocre teacher, and that's a good one, not that you'd ever have one, is you can fall six months further behind in the course of the year. The teacher is a huge variable. The program, the curriculum, not nearly as big a variable. And when people try to prove like they're programs effective, they're looking at weeks of additional gain. Teacher quality, half the year. So, nothing. On that, I mean, I can see in a situation like this, even from a board perspective, that this is where having a really strong staff is really valuable, because you don't have a parent. If you have mediocre teachers, you're pulling really good teachers who you have to do... Thanks for having me, sir. Then you're going to do a half the parents. If I'm starting my kids, then we don't want that teacher. So, if it comes to the parents, that would be really wonderful to be doing it. At least I would think. Is that your experience? I think there's a two-parter how do you get great teachers? One is you want to hire great teachers, and second is you're going to have to build the capacity of the ones you have. Because you've got a bunch, and there are going to be varying abilities and skills and experience, and you really got to work both of those. But the other part is you just need to, as a state, get over the fact that parent professionals are not great teachers. They're not even teachers. To be fair, and I always overstate this and I always get criticized rightfully so, there are some parents who are retired teachers. There might even be a couple of parents who are just graduated from teachers who aren't yet teachers or will be teachers next year. So, yes. Remember I said, a best practice is not one great teacher. It's not one great parent either. There are exceptions to the following statement, but on the whole, parents are not great teachers because they're not teachers at all. As a state, you have three and a half times as many parents as the average. In this model of shifting to great teachers, you will still, in nirvana, you know, make great world view of Vermont, you might have two and a half times as many parents as the rest of the country. We're not talking about parents going away. We're not even, I can't even imagine you ever getting to the place where you were even close to the middle. What we're talking about is on the margin, having two and a half times instead of three and a half times as many parents, so you have a few more highly skilled teachers. Because I do think this conversation, it's ridiculous to the extreme and sometimes teachers and sometimes I've probably contributed to this thinking, oh my God, I can't imagine our school running without a single parent. Well, neither can I. You have twice as many. You have two and a half times as many. You'd still be so much better off than so would your kids. So we're not talking about going to zero. Is it possible that this remark suffered from a lack of abundance in affected teachers or teachers that are far from perfect? Are those have been the band-aids to that? Do that gap? I don't think so. Now I want to be fair. Every state has a teacher shortage, especially on teachers, math teachers, not so much general elementary teachers. So everybody's struggling. But we see, we have a saying in our office that you never get to have three and a half times the national norm of anything unless you really like it. I own 27 antique radios. Now nobody needs 27 antique radios but to be really clear, I like them. That's how you get 27 of them. You guys like Paris. I mean your classroom teachers think they help. We've heard it in the statements. We've heard it in the interviews. There's this model, this mindset that says if Bill struggles, the best way to help him is to have one adult sitting right beside him. Now maybe in the worst case, two kids will sit with him. But there's this mindset that says one on one is really helpful. And I think like from 10,000 feet away, you can kind of see that. But it doesn't really hold up. But I believe that the reason you have so many parents is in large part because people believe it was helpful. Good caring people, but they're doing the right thing. Now there is this other, and I'm going to rip it in a way that should digress, and I shouldn't, but as a state, you have this really weird thing about teacher shortage or teacher availability is that you spend a boatload per student in the state. And the recent study says you're about number two or four import people spending just for passive living. You're definitely number one. So you spend a lot on education.  Average teacher salaries are not great. So you get this really weird contrast of hey, we spend a lot on each kid, but not a lot on each teacher. The reason for that is you're taking that lot of money and you've spread it over so many months. Even like if we were building this place from scratch, I would have said have fewer teachers, fewer parents and pay them better. And if you ever want to get rid of a shortage, pay people more, and it is much easier to attract people to the job and keep them there. So it is very odd that as a state, when only states in the country that actually has high spending for people and low spending for teachers and we go to the other high spending states like New York New Jersey, super high spending their teachers on average make $110,000 a year. Now they have 20 kids in every classroom and they spend 20,000 bucks on every health insurance policy but they have taken that high spending and spread it over a smaller number of teachers. But I think that's a digression. I do think the general theme is you have so many powers for the same reason I have so many clocks. I'll answer it. I guess one of the points of my question is that do we have the internal capacity of teachers? You're going to have to build a capacity.  And the way people will do that is I did say this is all cost neutral. If you were able to go from three times as many powers to two times as many powers if you were able to go from 12 kids in a classroom to 13 kids in a classroom, these are not radical changes. You could add a reading coach to every school. Having a reading coach who spends part of his or her time as students and part of his or her time as teachers builds teacher capacity, builds student achievement. Should you guys share professional development across schools and districts? Yeah. We're going to have that super efficient and your folks need it. Yeah. I can think of that excellent teacher potentially being in a school and having six kids in a classroom. And if we had a way to have that excellent teacher go from six to 12 we would absolutely be able to pay more and get what we need and not to struggle in our district. We did. It's funny that there has been this debate about equity sweeping the country and people define equity differently. But one of the, for me, one of the core measures of equity is access to great teachers. And when you start to think about that you have this resource called a great teacher there are districts that are paying the highest performing teachers extra to teach more kids because that's the greatest thing you could do for those kids. It totally flips the whole class size smallest better paradigm if you start thinking we are actually denying some kids access to a really skilled person. But once you start realizing how important the teacher is you do actually start to view the world a little differently. Another thing about great teachers is, and again this is always so embarrassed saying this great teachers know their stuff really well. You want to teach somebody how to read? That's a skill. A skill that some people have and some people don't. A lot of people get master's degrees in it some are just classroom teachers who build that capacity. You're going to help a kid who struggles in math. You should really know math very, very well. Because here's what great teachers do. When they're helping a student in math and they see a wrong answer they already know what the student did wrong. Divided by two instead of multiplied in the third step.  The other thing about great teachers is they have to have two or three different ways of teaching a concept. Let's be clear. Every struggling student sat through a good teacher presenting material and it did not sink in. They heard it and it didn't click. Teaching it the same way again is like talking louder because somebody doesn't speak English. I remember I saw this teacher so remarkable. Third grade classroom and I was an engineer in a part of my life and she had asked where the question was five plus seven equals how much?  But she didn't stop there. She said to the student tell me how you knew five plus seven was twelve. And the student said I never really thought about it but if I think about it five plus five is ten. There was two left over so ten plus two is twelve. And I said to myself of course that's how you add up to numbers I can do that my whole life I still do that. Then the teacher did something that really surprised me. She said there's a different way of doing it. I don't think I don't think there is a different way to do it. And another student raised a hand and said yeah five plus ten is fifteen and I went three, two, four so I had to go back to twelve. And the student said whoa, that is really weird. And then she asked again is there another way to do it? And the kid like really said hand up at this far and said I don't know why it is but it is. That's totally valid. So I go home that night in my household horrible household to go up in dinner table discussion is what went on in the classrooms that I saw during the day and I'm telling this story about go ten, five plus ten going too far, going back. I've been an engineer my whole life I've never, ever, ever contemplated addition that way. Two of my kids said that's the only way they know how to do it. I was shocked. So here's what I learned when I was a 40-year-old somebody. Kids learn differently. Different strategies work. That going too far thing has the weirdest thing in the world for me. So how am I going to teach a kid who struggles? I better know at least three ways to teach them how to get to add up to numbers. Because at least one or two of them won't make any sense to them. Contrast that to what I call a generalist. There are special educators many of them. There are paras many of them. They are teaching math and English and science and writing IPs and doing behavior management and knowing the law. A lot of them don't have three ways to add up numbers. A lot of them do not have four ways to explain what pi is if you're going to find the area of a circle. What we saw across the state and what we see across the country is we're asking special educators and parents to do a wide range of topics from academics to non-academics to law to assessment to IP writing. They're not experts in them. Just ask them. They'll be the first to tell you. And as a result, you're not doing a lot of direct instruction when they do have time with their kids. They're doing homework help. They are quizzing them for prepping for a quiz. So when you do see like a special educator who might have extra time or is pulling a kid out, I have sat in hundreds and thousands of classrooms very rarely do you see a special educator or a power professional at a board teaching three ways to add up a number. That's what the kids need. The parents and the teachers will be the first to tell you you're not sure how to do that. So as we think about giving this extra time, the last step with this is the person providing the extra time. It is direct instruction. It is targeted instruction. What I mean by targeted means you're teaching me the thing I don't know. Now as obvious as that may sound, I get people all the time coming up to me and saying, oh, I'm going to love what we did. We bought foundations. We use it for care too. Fundations is a comics program. I'm a huge advocate of comics because the research is very important. Here's the problem with foundations. If I struggle in phonics, it's not a bad thing. If the teacher can teach it to me three different ways. But what if my phonics is just fine thank you and my fluency and comprehension sticks? The fact that you bought a phonics program and that's what you use for intervention not helpful at all to me. So what we do and who does it during that extra time matters as much as having the extra time. Your power professionals they spend an average 58% of their day doing direct instruction in academics at least across the state. 58% of their time they are in a role of doing academics. 20% of it for reading and almost all of it is one-on-one. 60%. So this is that model. Not very skilled, but very small group. Very expensive, not very effective. Special educators, 80% of their day they're doing content instruction. Half of all special educators in our study we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them we're teaching at least two different subjects a day some of them as many as five different subjects a week no general education teacher will do that and the secondary level.  See what they say. You say that to your special educators and say sure, I do 115. I do what you ask. If you ask them whether they think that's a great idea they usually tell us not really. But if we ask them to do it they will do it because really hard work can do that. We just ask them to do things that maybe we shouldn't. We'll give you about five. We're going to run a little over but just take five minutes because again we're going to have more time but tell me about talk amongst yourselves. Five minutes. Where do you think what is the right role for our profession? As a state you've got to walk where do you see it? And again we'll come back to this in the afternoon. So what I think I want to do is if you earn 15 minute break let's come back at 10.35 and then we're going to talk about the social motion behavioral piece. This is really the foundation that we've got to address before we can really do a lot of this great academic stuff. 10.35 promptly we'll start back up. About 15 minutes or so touching on the social motion behavioral foundation basic theory here is if you don't meet the social motion behavioral needs all this great academic stuff the kids aren't ready to absorb aren't able to engage there are some parallels and there are some things that are very different so I'll try to make those clear. Then I'm going to give you about give you about an hour at your tables there are structured conversations you really continue those conversations we've been having about reflecting on these best practices we're relevant we're starting from so I'm going to give you a good hour to really wrestle with this but let's talk about this social motion behavioral context fairly simple is the story goes something like this we don't know why but we've got more of it than ever before the kids coming to school today walking through the door in the morning bring with them more social motion and behavioral challenges than we've ever had before we know this in a couple of ways we do surveys across the country there's almost not 86% of principals report a dramatic increase not just an increase but a dramatic increase I know from my own work that when we 10-15 years ago we had a conversation about behavioral support the question was always 7th grade or 9th grade this was the middle school high school thing all the elementary principals would take out their phone and check an email because this didn't apply you just see these charts 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade middle school, high school I have not met an elementary principal school is just we've got one or two kids or three or four or five kids this is an issue in almost every elementary school when we talk to elementary teachers it is making them leave the profession we talk to principals who are leaving the profession they're retiring early this is when we talk now about problematic behavior it is not uncommon when we're talking pre-K and K that never had that conversation every day we do not know why this is it doesn't mean there aren't like 50 theories on it I have my favor but the research is we don't know but quite honestly it doesn't matter because we got the kids that we know and they're coming with needs it's a wide range it's a destructive behavior it's anxiety it's certain challenges at home it's trauma it can be race, it can be violence it is a really big topic and we're not going to do a lot of justice to it today because we're just touching on it but it is impacting fortunately everybody teachers, students parents, principals or here's what we've heard from those 800 plus conversations what we hear is, listen to your teachers is we don't have significant enough services effective enough support we have the kids we have the challenges we have some efforts coming from central office but it's not enough well enough that's not a fact that is simply what all of your teachers are telling us we have been working with a couple other groups of districts in the state and we've been spending a lot of time with them on the social and emotional behavioral stuff and what we're finding from that work is, first of all, this disconnect I talked about where central offices are often feeling like they were homeless and every time I talk about it, I will have in a room of central office folks I'll take a poll how many of you have been to a conference specifically on social and emotional behavior in the last 12 months and 80% of the room raises their hand people are aggressing this issue the head and the sand kind of problem that's not it they have bought programs with sort of justice they have looked at data around suspensions they've added power professionals I really want to be respectful and appreciative of real meaningful efforts of being made and I want to be honest and candid with you that your teachers are saying it's either not enough or it's not working our sense of it is the reason it's not working is because we're using a really wide paintbrush and trying one solution across what is actually dozens of issues so if you look at social and emotional learning that is such a wide topic in and of itself so let's take extreme social and emotional learning means having empathy for your peers and colleagues it means not taking a stapler and throwing a teacher's head it means being able to work through a hard problem and not quitting it means being able to read other people's cues and react to it that's just a short list those are really that's like saying you know if we were just starting this from scratch we said we want to teach you stuff we want to teach you learning academic learning we've gone a little further than that we actually call it math and we have math teachers we have an English curriculum and social studies is somehow different from science and social studies actually European is different from US so the first point is as we tackle this we are seeing people approach it as a very general approach when in fact within this are really different things different skills different needs the other part that and this is probably even a bigger issue is that we've used this term tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 I tend to you know again trying to kill the jargon hey there's some stuff we should do for every kid tier 1 and some stuff we gotta do for more kids and then we've got some kids maybe it's 2% they need something really different we find as we talk to people and look at their programs I think they'll say hey we bought a store of justice or we've trained all our teachers in the sponsored classes these are both decent ideas but they're actually decent as a universal tier 1 and I don't want to pick on the store of justice means helping people understand the impact of their statements and actions and the consequences on others and you know if Nate pushes Johnny on the playground and having those two kids sit together and say hey what if Nate tells Johnny how it felt to be pushed and what it means and that can be effective and I'm not at all against the store of justice but when Nate takes a stapler pulls it at a teacher's head misses by this much and you say oh we're a store of justice school let's have a meeting let's have a tell her how now that's the room solution in a particular situation you know there's this great saying that if all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like an M we're just seeing that people are picking one aspect of these areas or one level of need and applying it to everything and it is the moralizing your teachers because it kind of makes them feel like whoa this is just all crap it's not all crap it's actually just crap for this particular need and the area that we're finding that people are having the hardest time with is in significant challenges and it does not mean that the other stuff is important doesn't mean that you shouldn't be addressing it but if you don't address the significant behavioral challenges and this in Vermont will be harder than in other states and we'll talk a little bit about that this afternoon because you guys have smaller schools thinner pipeline of highly skilled behaviorists and greater distances so I'm going to be honest this one's a little tougher in Vermont than it would be in Massachusetts 20 minutes outside of Boston there are solutions but our experiences when we're hearing from your teachers if you don't address the significant behavioral challenges it is really disruptive to all the other things we want to do for those kids and for all the other kids and for your staff one of the things we also know is like what staff you do have whether it's social workers or special educators or school psychologists that are helping in this area on average they spend two hours in meetings or doing paperwork for every hour they're actually helping a kid so one of the things when people say we don't have enough staff which is true you don't we also need to find ways of streamlining those meetings and paperwork because these people are too valuable and again we're not saying meetings and paperwork goes to zero but if you only spent one hour out of every three that would double the time they get up kids and to give you a data point in a non-profit or teaching hospital environment like you know the Nateville community health center teaching hospital folks who do this kind of work are generally expected to spend 85% of their time with patients so they do all that evaluation paperwork notes and such in 15% of their debt as a national average so if we could get it to just 60% get that meetings and paperwork double what other people do we would actually double the amount of time they have so one of the things we're going to want to think about is for the folks we do have who have these skills we've got to help them because they didn't invent that meetings and paperwork we gave it to them we've got to help them do less of it you know I paperwork is coming from the education bureaucracy itself the boards don't we do not create paperwork we're having to live within regulations that are created by the education expert basically the experts advising our legislators and it's kind of the same with behavior intervention we don't we rely on you know our professional staff to tell us what to do there we will support that and we have this comes from within the education professional staff no this is definitely the job of streamlining the meetings and paperwork we're going to come from the leaders of your schools and districts as a board you need to support it you can't manage it directly the other piece that we're finding is you remember I told you that not everybody is going to be a great math teacher not it's only great at managing behavior it is a skill people get masters and PhD's some people are very good at it some people are not one of the biggest shifts we've got to see across the country, across the state in your schools is we generally assign behavior management based on your title you are a school psychologist you will do behavior you'll also do writing IT's, you'll also do assessing basically if I look at your title I have a job description for your title and you know again in some of your smaller schools there is like one special educator who's going to do all of it and we look at their title and say all the things that have to get done you're going to do it if you actually ask these special educators school psychologists what are you good at and do it without their bosses in the room and give them just a little bit of assurance that you will keep this secret they will tell you in a heartbeat oh I'm really good at managing behavior or I know nothing about it don't want to know anything about it these kids scared me it is not what I signed up for we didn't even know about this stuff when I went to school I do it because somebody has to we have done this game where we say hey go to this corner if you want to do behavior go to this corner if you want to do the IEP process go to this corner if you want to do academics and people they'll say the first brave person gets up and walks to a corner and everybody walks they know exactly where they want to go nobody has ever raised their hand and said well what if I want to go to all three hmm nobody does we need to allow our special education and our social emotional staff to play to their strengths we need to stop pretending that they're good at everything we need to stop looking at their title and assuming we know something about them because it tells us only what piece of paper they got from the state does not tell us about their training like you can be a school psychologist deeply trained in behavior management or not you can be a special educator and be deeply skilled in teaching reading or not just isn't actually very relevant now here's the implication again I'm jumping to this afternoon if I have only one of these people in your small schools like people say well we got nothing there's nothing we can do about that but you've got to do it all or you start assigning people specialization and they do actually work to do it in one school so one of the drawbacks of small schools is it is so much easier to push you into generalists but generalists are not very successful and what's worse even though people say they don't like being in more than one school can I get that here's what we also got to keep in mind special educators are leaving the profession at a faster rate than any other role and fewer people are choosing to become special educators all 56 now is for the shortage of special educators it cannot be coincidence and it's not the pay because we're not seeing a shortage of classroom teachers what we have done is we've created a job that's as few as people want to do and vastly more people want to stop doing it we've got to help restructure this work so it is both more effective and more rewarding for your staff does anyone ask why they're leaving what are the answers they feel unsuccessful they feel overwhelmed they feel buried in paper they're teaching four subjects and doing 30 different things and they do not feel successful in many of them so doesn't that boil down to this is a high education especially with you I know the paperwork is an issue that's a really good question I was educated the paperwork used to be doubling on an annual basis they would have to do the documentation even within like in every district and in every state we know people who get the paperwork done twice as fast as somebody else it's 20 hours a week that's newer than it it sounds to me like that we measure failure by people moving that's true my assistant was one of the specialists the biggest things were I'm not paid enough to deal with all of this because they're not people and so if this is a skilled need any other one is the parents of this question is this constant playing and the feeling that she should be solving all the problems and the kid should be just fine and get home not just parents we have the kids but we're not doing enough about the whole family and the whole unit what can we do to support the family to support this question we get that kid from 70 hours a day we got it all and I always say I have the second toughest job being a special educator a job that is so much harder and they're voting with their feet unfortunately I'm curious about that so one of the practices we've seen if you allow, so here's the logic model families are a big part of the solution one is people who can actually devote most of their energy to that often a little harder than Vermont people are trying to build relationships outside of the schools with community-based or insurance funded supports these are other people who actually want to help and actually have some money to help and I think the idea is if I'm a special educator and I'm teaching four subjects testing for IPL eligibility and doing some behavior stuff those parents and those kids that's like maybe 8% of my day and I got like 92 other things to do if I was able to specialize I'd probably be more inclined and more able to work with parents so we do think that specialization is and partnerships both are going to make a world of difference for parents and kids and also your staff the last thing I want to talk about is empathy for your classroom teachers remember that if you're really subtext of the early part of this conversation we're going to ask our classroom teachers to do more they have to be the primary instructor for academics that's the fact and we're going to have to help them get there and get more complicated that's a lot and here's the other thing we're doing and I want you to hopefully this audio works this is a shoot let's see if we can get this I love this one let's see let's see if this I hate when the technology doesn't work hmm here's something hmm a little thing we'll figure it out and play a little bit later it's worth hearing about here's what you would have heard one really frustrated teacher she just shows frustration better than I can explain it your classroom teachers are going to we need to support them better in this area because what we've heard across the state is they're pretty overwhelming and we're laying a lot on their feet on the academic side so unfortunately I like to be upbeat all this stuff is doable we're talking about it's true all this stuff is affordable that's true but at the same time just as I think for our students we need to meet their social emotional needs so we can meet their academic needs what makes this a heavy lift for a lot of school systems is if we do not meet and support our classroom teachers in and around the social emotional and behavioral stuff they can't focus just like the kids on learning how to differentiate learning how to be the primary instructor learning how to take on these new responsibilities learning how to build schedules differently so unfortunately for both our teachers and our kids we're going to have to move forward on both of these and both require us to think a little differently about how to do that in the area of the social emotional behavioral we're going to need folks who are experts this is a skill this is a really highly trained skill this is like masters and PhD level skills for many people some people have learned how to do it on their own but it is a highly specialized skill you do not have a lot of these people in your building you do not have a lot of these people in your state it doesn't change the fact that you need them and you're going to there are many complex strategies on how to get them yes here's us on departmentalization so so the research is very clear the logic less clear so the research is very clear departmentalization has not been effective but it doesn't mean that the logic wasn't sound so a quick story that I think highlights this so I was a system superintendent for curriculum instruction and we had a school that departmentalized fourth and fifth grade math and fourth and fifth grade reading and at the time I thought it was perfectly logical two years later who saw our math scores plummet plummet I was thinking, well this was intended to raise them, not lower them so as a relatively new system superintendent for curriculum instruction very data driven this is my challenge for the year let's figure out why they plummet I'm thinking we're going to do all this analysis we're going to go through a classroom we're going to look at data and what our course was math teachers and said hey, I want to share with you some results well yeah we knew they weren't good but I didn't quite realize they were that bad I said why do you think my math teacher is at the fourth and fifth grade this is happening I think it's kind of down at there knees and fingers well it's okay probably after a good conversation I just, even as a pretty close to it, why do you think this is happening? First one says, you're not gonna follow me, are you? I said, nobody ever gets fired in this profession, you know that!  You're not gonna get fired for telling the truth. I throw up most mornings on my way to work, because I'm so nervous about the questions that kids are gonna ask, because I can't answer a lot of their questions. You know, Nate, I've fearfully passed math. I've positively pulled this back a moment. You were the math teacher for the entire fourth grade. She was, yeah, somebody had to do it, but nobody wanted to do it. Had the least seniority, principal asked, she's a very nice person, didn't quite have the nerve to tell the principal that she nearly plunked high school math. So when we've seen across the country, it's two things happened when people especially did departmentalization. The first was that everybody rushed to be departmentalized on the English and reading, and the math folks often were the least senior and least top of the nicest people, but not the most skilled. The second thing we saw was that really good classroom teachers integrate math with everything they did. And when you see the departmentalized, that's not complete. So the logic of specialization, I'm still a fan of it. The practice of it is a lot harder to do. So you can really get folks who are really strong in math to be math folks and still get other people to integrate it. And I think that's totally true in this, my last stuff, is that you want to get time to do some work. This is also, when we talk about teachers applying to this sector, which is in fact a form of departmentalization. Specialization, what happens is, and while you have to face the same, you can say, hey, we're gonna have some people specialize in behavior, and some people specialize in the IP process, and some people specialize in academic support. That only works if the people who are specializing are actually good at that. And I've had in too many places where they take the team they've got and say, okay, your behavior, but you're not skilled at it. And you're academics, and you're not skilled at it, but now we specialize. So often you need to roll this out over time, and so places start to hire new folks. So, hey, we're gonna hire new school psychologists who's gonna specialize in behavior. Tell them that before they interview, not after they've been hired. And then different people apply. Your hiring process is different. So skills matter most, and that's why your example has an alas, but we'll get to that one. But I wanna really get you wrestling with this. So here's what we're gonna do between now and lunch. You have got, I apologize, a sheet, hopefully if you didn't grab one, there are a front that is called Reflection and Discussion Activity. Here's how this works. You're gonna ask it to take about five minutes individually, so just kind of find it individually. On the front side of this page, we're gonna ask you to think about relevance. So this is the question of these, particularly for the four best practices we've shared about. How relevant is it for your resume? Very relevant, somewhat relevant, not too relevant. And on the back, if you think about moving in this direction, this is like how hard is it gonna be? What strengths do you already have? That's the first column. Like, hey, we've got some of this. So what are, let's build off of your strengths. What strengths do you have that are gonna help make this easier to do? And then an honest reflection of what are the obstacles? What would get in your way? And I'm making an assumption at this point that at least half of you are thinking, if I had an easy button and I could push it and we could have great core instruction and we could have really talented teachers in front of our kids and they'd get extra time. And a lot of you would push that button. But it's not easy. So I really wanna start reflecting on what's gonna get in the way. So about five minutes on your own, I would ask that each of you identify one person at your table as a facilitator. Because what the facilitator's gotta do is notice when everybody's done and then start a conversation. I really want you to discuss amongst yourselves what relevance and implement ease of implementation. And then we're gonna spend about 10 minutes sharing out at the end. But in the discussion, facilitator needs to know when to start it and needs to make sure everybody gets some airtime in that. How about it? Pick your facilitator, work independently. So can I do it or do you wanna do it? Can I do it? Yeah, we're gonna do it. It doesn't really matter that. We're all just here. No we're just just here. Sorry I said it off. The first one now, I think is for you. The first. How about you all? I won't start. Okay, so yeah a lot of that sort of thing. It was interesting to hear the different lenses that each of us brought to even just answering the check marks on the front page, board members versus a new theory, a specific guy and what's going on at different schools. One thing that I think is worth sharing would be the dramatic shift in what would be defined as education and that's the addition of the social emotional piece. I think historically we've all heard the three R's, reading, writing, and arithmetic, but that's gonna be a belief and a shift in a lot of the mindsets of the educators that. So I wrote an article that talked about the four R's. The fourth R is now readiness. And I feel guilty as all hell, just because I talk all the time about and have such empathy for classroom teachers. These are supermen and superwomen. We have asked them to do so much. Those first three goals asked them to do even more. We gotta make them get outside their comfort zone, we gotta change some of their behaviors. And I just so wish, I just so wish I was smart enough to come in and say, here's a way to deal with the social emotional behavior that did not place it on classroom teachers in part. And no one has come up with that. And this is where, and so I really appreciate your highlighting that. We are asking a lot of classroom teachers. And as we think about how we help them, one is to just have empathy. It's really tough. Second is moving away from that model. We go back 20 years ago, there was this joke and it's funny because it's actually true that new teacher shows up, first day of school, the principal stops by, says, hope you have a great year, and stops in the end to see how the year went. 20 years ago, people used to talk about teachers going to their classroom, closing the doors, and thinking we're swimming on their own. We've moved a long way from that. Lots of people go into their classroom, lots of books, helping. So we've definitely gotten a lot better. But I still think this idea that teaching is a team sport is gonna take people, lots of adults and lots of expertise to help them. Because we've definitely thrown a whole new, to the fourth art, right on top of the other three. The first three was gonna be challenging. Please stay. So you talked more depth and breadth than I had to do. That's okay. But I think part of the two-in-one conversation was pretty similar around how to provide an evaluation model of work, and then how that was communicated to people of numbers. So we're all on the same page about what's happening in the classroom. But also, I think the fact that the board should not be so far in that they feel like they're, but there are some things happening. Coaches, I mean for that, for the second one, we actually a lot of differences about the school. So I'm having all of you models, but it could be different. So we think about doing, so good place to end on. Yeah, John, that's good. And I appreciate that they come out and coach you. You know, we've talked about supporting classroom teachers, talked about building with their capacity. You know, if you think about the, some of your special educators, some of your behavior folks, it's definitely the strategy of allowing them to play to their strengths to specialize. So that their range of what they need to be great at, it's a little narrower. Your classroom teachers don't really get that option. And you really got it, they've got to be good at a lot of things. And the research is really, really clear that effective embedded in the classroom coaching is one of the largest, most powerful levers for raising teacher performance is, and we're going to need to be cautious of is classic, well called classic professional development. You know, smart guy at a podium talking to a group of people, something they tend to do for a living. Most of the work we do is not this kind of work, because we know that like this talking to people is very helpful for a short period of time to build some knowledge, share some knowledge. But to actually change behavior, this is not the method in which behavior changes. And I embedded long-term support through coaching and which we do a lot of flow, is that's really what changes teacher behaviors. So I think that tends to be if we're going to build classroom teacher capacity, like the coaching has been trying to be the single most effective way to do that. Any questions? Oh, thanks. We talked about some of the things you guys have discussed and we I think had two sort of novel, they're a little different. One, we talked about community buy-in on some of these things and the vocal minority, which rarely represents struggling students. And the second thing that we kind of brought up, Amy brought up like this whole organization we have a social DCF and like sort of helping families and how now like what is the role of the school and how does like the school can't really integrate with these otherwise overworked branches of government. And so how we could kind of finding that line of how we define what the school is supposed to do, what resources do we have and how can we help with that part of things. And I just heard, so where I see the world going, slowly but standing there is really deep integration with those other organizations. So for example, you had a district of about 5,000 kids. We brought in 17 FTEs from the community, nonprofits, fee for service folks and government folks. And it was a very funny thing. There are all these people out there whose job is to help families and kids. And the funny part was we had the kids all day long. So we used to do focus groups with these providers. Worst part of their job is only work afternoons and nights and weekends because we've got the kids. So we actually gave them office space and built their appointments right into our schedule. So you would actually see in our high school when our computer printed out a schedule, it said go to algebra one for the first period. It's a second period going to room 1473, which happened to have a community health worker or somebody from the state actually in that room, that was their office. So we've seen, and again, the more rural you are, the harder it is to do, but we've seen more and more people deeply embedded on the outside world because we have the advantage of we know the kids for at least a big portion of the day. And even after school, it's pretty hard because very few kids will actually go to these places if it meant not going to sports, not going to drama clubs. So it's slow, but there are other people who want to help. And there are things we can do to make it easier for them. Great, right over here. We've talked a lot about kind of figuring out whether or not two or one instruction is actually needed in those kids and how we would know that and what it would look like. And as a board, that's a question we should ask our administrators and our administrators should be able to decide where to go That's a great question, yes. And last but definitely not least, friends in the corner. A lot, since we're last at the same time. Hardest to go last, I know. But one of the obstacles we, while we found that the district of the Supervisory Union is a pretty good place with implementing a lot of this. And it's a place, one of the things you said earlier that I thought of, I thought is the stacking changes and adjustments in order to, you can't fire a teacher. We'll be also starting a fire, one who might have the expertise in certain areas for the school. So putting the training and taking time away from the school that they see is always difficult. Just like you said, you can suggest it, but it wasn't everybody's mind that they tried to change something that I've been up to here and there. So that's, I don't know. I agree. And I think there's this idea of having the staff with the skills you want, the skills you need. This is a long haul. When you don't get to, when you play cards or I'm a Scrabble player, the bad Scrabble players like me, occasionally you just say, damn it.  It's a term, but you hope you'll make up for it. Like, you don't get to do that. You've got your teachers, you've got. And, but honestly, sometimes when you start looking at it through this lens, you say, you know, if I was really thinking about it, who would have wanted something with more behavior background or something as strong as a reading background? And you don't get to turn in your pieces. So what we're seeing is this kind of double strategy. Strategy one says, let people play to their strengths because we actually do have people with skills and help build those skills. And we've gotten a lot of folks, share your story about your BCBA because I think so is that one. I think that was fine. So that's fine. So as we were hiring at U32 this year, we had the opportunity in one of our special education hires, a person who is interested in becoming a BCBA. And so- Which is a behavior specialist. Yeah, yeah. And so we will, so we felt like this is a person to take a chance on and to work on providing the professional development to grow in that area. But it's not an unfamiliar model to our system. So we've had three paraprofessionals that we have supported in them becoming special educators. So in there, I know one of them at U32 and I don't know where the other two are, but I know they're out there somewhere. Yeah, and so we do that. And we actually, I didn't even share it. We have an English teacher who has expressed desire to become a reading specialist. And so we've reassigned the work that she will be doing this next year. And we're supporting her and getting her reading specialist certificate as well so that we have somebody who has much more skill in these areas.  We're now moving her over to our reading intervention classes so that she can start teaching there. And she's a way of training right now to be ready for that. I think I love those sources. This is really about, it's not like a sprout, it's really about chess. You make a bunch of moves, not always a straight line, but you know where you're trying to get to. And it really is this kind of many, many small steps of letting some folks specialize, building some people's capacity in areas that they're very interested. It can definitely go to, when you go to hire people being very clear about what you're looking for. There's no one thing that'll get you there and you don't get there overnight. One thing that I totally recommend is never, ever, ever risk somebody to get there. If I said I did not take them as a superintendent, so that's why I know for sure. Nobody should lose their job in this process. I would have an expression that I wish I knew 15 years ago, so be a superintendent. Nutrition is your friend. Yes, having enough nutrition. People leave on their own accord. So if you can start this process by saying, hey, nobody, yes, we're gonna specialize, yes, we're gonna let people play to their strings, yes, we're gonna have more teachers, and yes, no one will lose their job. It's a very nice thing to say. But it does mean that every time somebody does choose to leave, whether it's a power, a teacher, a special educator, a psychologist, you gotta pause and say, okay, somebody left. What is the skill and use and purpose that we need most? And not reflexively just say, hey, school psychologists left, we're gonna get another one. You may get another one, but in what specialty? In what focus? So think chess, lots of little moves towards this kind of longer term role will really help you get the team you want with the skills you want, but it definitely doesn't happen overnight. All righty, any folks? Well, I'll just put this out and see if we can come back. Because you are keeping us all for lunch, so. Oh, yes, I think it's important, which is that long term goal, and it being vivid enough that everyone of us can taste it, and we're all aligned, like we agree, this is where we need to go, like we need to go there. And there are like three things that are urgently needed yesterday in order for us to get there, and it's the same for the teachers and it's the same for everybody. And so, and then like, because the kind of cultural change that we're talking about has to happen at the board level as well as within the institution. So, and this would be great if we could hear it more for a minute, but I've seen that before. After lunch, but I agree that this has, in the places that have pulled us on. When people came to study in my district, it was funny, and we had a lot of people come, is they said, oh, this was your North Star. You know, like every board member to every custodian. Custodians actually knew, you never pull it out of reading. It just became, as you said, everybody aligned on this and stuck with it for more than a decade. With that great place to pause our lunches behind us, how we moved back there, 1235.  But you can actually design and write in your IEPs and everything else you do so that you can get the folks doing what we want them to be doing. And as a state, I know there's a task force being formed and to identify any of these obstacles, both around certification and IEPs regulations are written to facilitate this kind of shift. But generally speaking, I have this observation that if your parents and teachers want to do something that's good for kids, you will be able to, the laws, they're a detour, but they're not an obstacle, typically anywhere you want to go. Try to put that. Here's the other big takeaway. Here's the other big lesson. And this one is a bit of a bummer for some folks. And I want to be really clear about where, every presenter brings baggage to the table. So I'm gonna put my baggage right out there. I am not a team player. I played singles tennis and that doubles has at least one person too many on the team. You did not see me play in baseball soccer or football. I'm not a team player. I ski and that's like me in the mountain, just the two of us. What we have found is that for schools and districts and SUs to really effectively and cost effectively implement the best practices we've shared takes a pretty high level of collaboration. There's a lot more teamwork to this. If you wanna do the old thing, teacher goes in the room, locks the door and checks back with the principal in a gym. Solo sports are much better suited for the old way. The new, these best practices, a lot of collaboration.  Your schools are small. 200 kids and less at the elementary. As a district, I mean as an SU, about 1500 kids. Here's what our math has shown. This is not opinion, it's just kind of what we see. To effectively do all of what we've talked about, the minimum efficient scale, it's about a district of 5,000 kids. I don't think of any of those as a mistake. You get a few getting close, but I'm not sure you've been, and you guys are not even close. Schools, elementary, you need 500 to 1,000 kids. You don't have any of those either. So one of the things we know is that your schools and districts and SUs are smaller than makes this easy. There's not many you can't do it. I'm not telling you that you gotta go close all your schools and go one mega school middle, but it does mean that you cannot do this. And I really appreciate all the principals we shared. When you guys are just doing great things, marching forward, but you're making it hard on everybody, trying to do this school by school by school. And even SU by SU. And here's some of the reasons. One is a current theme through this is you need experts, you need specialization. The day of being a special educator who does reading, math, science, social studies, behavior, IEP writing, evaluation, keeping compliance and parent management. That's an awful lot. Really hard to be great at all of it. The idea that we're gonna really meet the social motion, especially the tier three behavioral needs. You need a BCBA, you need a highly skilled behavior. Here's the dilemma. Schools of 200 don't need a full time one of any of those. They really don't. We've seen on average a highly skilled behavior has been support 758,000 kids. Highly skilled reading coach, 20 to 30 teachers. All these numbers are bigger than a school. And we know, and I totally get, nobody likes working in more than one school. We make some people, but nobody likes it. And so what happens is we have cut this deal with our staff, with ourselves, and we've said, hey, I'd rather one person than half of two people. Nobody thinks it's okay. But here's the deal. That one person is a gentleman. One of me. And so one of the things we're finding is if you're going to have expertise, you're much more likely to have to share that expertise across schools. Especially at the elementary level. So in this density model, that have that, I mean, basically have two options. Let's say we consolidate it. You would still have a huge geographic area that that expert would have to cover to be able to come close to those numbers. So versus, I mean, why not, why can't you share that across multiple districts? Yeah, there's discrepancy around it. But we can't, at least the way I figured, we cannot bring the history of 5,000 people even in the close proximity. We need busing kids for three hours, each way to get them. So we have, that means creatively, providing that expertise over a fairly large, you know, big, a lot of coordination. That'd be over a large area. But that which moves to the next part, we've talked about scheduling. I really appreciate Kelly and all the principals happy about how important the scheduling is. Here's the lesson, we learned the hard way. Scheduling is a team sport, has to be a team sport. It isn't typically. You know, I told you that when we first moved into scheduling, did 50 great schedules and 10 of them got implemented. You know, the old model, I mean, we just see this was, you know, principal, smart caring person or consultant who owns the schedule and he brings it to the staff and says, hey, here's a great schedule. And they say thanks. No, they don't say thanks. So what we're seeing as one of those implementation best practices is actually building the schedule with all the teachers in room. You're no more doing it at home and showing it to them. And what we've seen is that you have teachers who are deeply understand and committed to these best practices that simply requisite. Then you start saying, okay, we're not going to pull kids out from reading. Then you start building the schedule and they're in the room. And they see, okay, this is true story. So you're starting to place the reading blocks into the schedule. And then you get to like fourth grade and reading blocks after lunch.  I don't do it after lunch. And the fifth grade teacher says, well, I'm coming even after that. I like that even less. And at that moment, they all say, hey, no, no, you wanna be before lunch. It's in that moment with them in the room where you get to say, okay, now let's take a look at this. Oh, so we're gonna pull kids out of your class and your class and your class for extra help. Because if everybody's doing reading at the same time, that's gonna happen. Then people say, oh, I didn't really think about that. Now, oh, that's why you do that. So you're not just like mean or dumb. You actually have a reason for it. They only think that. They don't say that. They only think it. And what was really remarkable was we've built some tools that help people visualize this and see this in real time. The number of cases where the teachers are in the room and had come to commit to these kind of practices. Second grade group of second grade teachers said, we don't wanna do it in the afternoon. Who will take it? And they started building, managing the trade-offs as a team. But then because you're small and you're gonna share a staff, here's the next thing you gotta do. All your staff and all your principals actually have to be in the same room. Because like your schedule and your schedule are actually deeply connected.  But that might not actually be the right time. That was the time that they were scheduled. So we have seen in districts as large as 70,000 kids. I wonder if that's this entire state, plus it is. We have facilitated scheduling parties. We have hundreds of people, principals, special educators, art, music, EE, in an auditorium. And they stay for up to two days, but they can't leave until they've all built their schedules together. And so that literally like if I'm sharing, you know, a speech therapist between two schools, those principals and those speech therapists are in the same room. And they're scurrying from one to another saying, I know you had me over here on a Tuesday morning, but it seems like I need to be over there on a Tuesday morning. Otherwise, I'm gonna be pulling four kids out of math. And so, well, you know, maybe if we had the art teacher come on a different, well, the art teacher is in the room. And it was interesting. It took them two, two and a half days. The first, this is 70,000 kids. They get it down to about four or five hours now. They know who they need to meet with. They know what the pairings are, but they are scurrying. And it's just interesting to watch how many conversations were needed. I mean, how many different people to get all these schedules to align to do their best practices? And what was, to me, what was the mark of it was, up until doing these scheduling parties, they all built their schedules alone. Took them two and a half days of conversation to actually get it right. But they got it, but they, I didn't even send emails to each other. Scheduling has historically been a solo story. And we just find with your teachers, with the specialized staff, with the staff from other schools, bringing people together and doing this as a group exercise with the framework of we have committed to these kind of guarantees.  Because then when you, what we end up doing is we rationalize. We said, the schedule won't allow me to do it. Here's what I gotta live with, because Mary's in the building Tuesday morning and that's the best I can do. I'm gonna move away from the best I can do. We're gonna move to the guarantee. Collaboration will get you there. The other form of collaboration is something that I'm starting to plant the seeds across the state is, as I mentioned, the districts in the SUs are still pretty small. We actually think they're gonna need to, it would be better and easier to collaborate across SUs as well. There are a lot of folks in the state who want to raise the capacity for teachers. Who want to improve tier one core instruction. Who are thinking about, hey, what goes on in that extra math class? Like, there isn't a thing you get to buy. Like, on Tuesday do this. And so we're suggesting that neighboring districts, neighboring SUs, start bringing job-alike groups together. We're gonna be pretty powerful if you could get 10 or 15 folks who are teaching secondary math intervention. I don't think you would have 10 or 15 in your SU. But there will be 10 or 15 within driving range. That I'm fairly confident. And let them plan and share and coordinate and think this through, doesn't mean that one gets to tell the other what to do. But you have a lot of people trying to go down a new and interesting path. And if just one of them has one good idea that the other 12 hadn't thought of, historically that'll just stay in the one school that's doing it. And it'd be pretty powerful if all of others said, you know, I hadn't thought of that, but I really like that idea. That could be, let's, we won't check back in three months to see how it's working. I tried it. I thought it was a good idea and it bombed. How come it worked for you? Creating larger communities of folks who are working on this. I think it will accelerate by the effectiveness and this depth of implementation. And I think the last piece that you may need across SU, cross district collaboration is, you know, some of you have said, and I hear this in a lot of places, I'm not sure we can find enough behaviorists. I'm not sure we can even find enough reading coaches. Sounds iffy. But certainly on the behavior side, people are pretty nervous. And you know, my gut says there's probably not enough in the state to go around. So what we've seen in other states, this is a little bigger. This is not something you're gonna do tomorrow. I think everything else you could do this year. But where in other states, Ohio is my favorite, districts have come together. And I wanna point out that these are districts of five, 10, and 15,000 kids. Five, 10, and 15,000 kids that said we're not big enough to do this on our own. We need to actually pool some of our energy and resources. And they've created these regional centers. They tend to be nonprofits. And I'm working with one of the best I've ever seen out in Columbus, Ohio, where they have created a series of behavioral and emotional swatch teams. I don't quite call it that publicly. But this is a group of four people. And we've got a couple of these teams now. Behaviorist, a social worker, a drug and alcohol expert, and just a general person who knows an awful lot about all of this. And this team is hired by an independent organization. Now the organization is actually managed, it has an executive director, but it's board or the superintendents of the districts that it supports. It's 100% self-funded, meaning the state doesn't give them a penny. And if you don't use their services, you're hardly given a penny. I think all the districts throw a very small fee to help basically share the executive director. But when you pay for the services you use, which created a really powerful dynamic, the services had to be really good. And there were some really neat things that happened, because they did this because the districts were reminded, this is Columbus, Ohio, more metropolitan and much larger, and they still couldn't find the people they needed. But they found was that if you created these teams, people really like, if you're an expert, you don't really, it's not the best being like the only one in the school, the only one in the district who has your expertise. Go alone. So they found by creating this team, more people wanted to do this. This was a very nice place to work. They also found that the compensation was very different. The benefits were more, shall we say, market-based. They didn't have pensions, they had full-on case. They had more traditional health insurance plans, which allowed them to raise the base salaries.  I probably don't want to do it for 30 years. So I'm actually not so sure I'll ever see that pension. So I would actually much rather a job that had current compensation that was higher. And the other thing it had, which none of you will ever have, then they were big enough to have a half-time recruiter who spends their entire year finding, courting, work going out to universities, courting out job fairs, pitching, looking outside the state because these people don't grow on trees. So there is a question, particularly on the social and social behavior, whether something bigger than even the SU is going to be needed. That is not something we can start tomorrow, but it is an idea I want to plant because there's a current theme about being able to implement this. And I promise you I'm going to stay like this far away from Act 46, and I just don't want to go anywhere near that. But I will tell you having watched, and again you can do this as an SU, but having seen places that have started to build scales and they went from groups of 800 or 1200 to three to 4,000, they're finding it easier to have the specialization. And again, there are different ways of getting to the scale, but 1500 kids is not a lot and schools of sub 200 is not much at all. And that's just, those are numbers that make this hard. And whether it's just bringing your teachers together across the SU and there's huge value in bringing them together with schools outside the SU, but lots of people are moving down this path. We did a project for a few years in which we brought the staff together from 11 different districts, the smallest of which had 2000 kids, the largest of which had 12,000. We brought all their special ed directors together, their principals together, and they were moving down the exact same path. These were the best practices they wanted. And the power of collective action was amazing. The district schools that were running the fastest set the pace for everybody else. Here's one of my favorite stories. We've got all these people in the room, not surprising, some were fans, some were not. And you have people saying, you know, this is pretty good. We can do this. And you know, we should take two, three years to plan. It's big adaptive change. Nate said, you can't do this overnight. And they're sitting at their table thinking through their two years of planning, and then a year of piloting, and one person says, screw that.  You know, we're gonna plan between this is in September, between now and January. And nothing in the law says you can't change the schedule middle of the year. And when the kids come back from Christmas break, we're gonna have intervention blocks. Like people are just like looking around and saying, like, is this legal?  Like, people don't change schedules. And a good 45 minute conversation went, but well, I guess, you know, we don't really spend three full months scheduled normally. And so we've got three months and kids really seem to need this. And I will tell you that eight of the 11 districts chose to change their schedules either after the Christmas break or the spring break rather than like one year or two years. So what we use is term positive peer pressure. Doing this work with others. We have found, helps get you there. It actually, there's great comfort. We also found with the special educators that they're thinking, oh, has this guy crazy? And to have like three or four special educators in the room say, no, no, no, like, we've been doing this. So Kelly gets to say, now we're like in our third year. This is good. And the others go, really? Like the world didn't end. Like nobody went to jail. Kids didn't die. So I think as you move in this direction, thinking about all the different ways in which you collaborate within a school, they're going to come to the scheduling, across schools, when it comes to scheduling and training and sharing of staff. I definitely think from the political side, having all of your school committees, announcing and supporting the exact same guarantees makes it much easier. Partnering with neighboring districts and SQs for the sharing of these highly specialized staff or sharing of training or just building these double-edged communities and generating the positive peer pressure, this is a team sport. It makes the work easier. It will definitely make it more cost effective and it will definitely get you there sooner. But that's a big shift. And I think it's a shift in any place, but I think in Vermont in particular, when you guys are small, local, and proud of it. And it's just got to be, you don't have to give all that up, but you're also going to have to, I think learn to play well with friends and neighbors because your kids will benefit if you can get comfortable with that. So that's what we're seeing. Again, my biases, if there was a way to do this alone, I would be giving you advice. We just don't see it as likely. And again, you've made good headway, but it's hard in itself as a result. That's all the stuff I just talked about. So, what do we do next? There's a lot you might want to do next. So what we're going to do for the rest of the afternoon, and we'll do this in a couple of different steps. One question I want you at your tables to wrestle with is, what do you do first? What are the part of, you can't do all of this right away. But this is a long journey here. I keep telling people it's a marathon on a sprint. So we've got an activity, which I will find and share with you. There's a sheet that looks like this. Great, it's called the Partization of Opportunities. Impact. So here's the way this works. And again, we're going to ask you to do this individually first, and then discuss it at your table and we'll discuss it as a group. But as we think about, where do you start? One way of thinking this through is that the idea that there ar