Our meeting is being recorded.  Let's get started. We're gonna call the meeting to order and first the order of business is gonna be an executive session. Could I get a motion? Move that we go into executive session for personnel matters. Can you state everything? Is student matter negotiations and personnel matter? Chris? For student matter negotiations and personnel matter. Second. Thank you. Any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any oppose? Hearing none, let's move into executive session please. Okay, thank you. Just for everybody here on my speakerphone here with us. So let's move in. We have some agenda revisions because we have a hard stop but let's move into reception of guests. You have been really patient with us. Thank you for allowing us to have a little bit longer executive session. Let's move into public comments and we're gonna start with 15 minutes for public comments and Jim is gonna help me keep track of that. So let's see, could you, any hands up, I can't see. How about if they use their hand raise function, that helps. I just see one sec, Gonzalez, hey, hi, sec. Hello, thank you. I'm actually gonna be reading something on behalf of a member who can't be here today. So I'm gonna go ahead and read what I was sharing. This is from an elementary school member and okay, I'll go ahead and start. This is in regards to the curriculum review findings and then I'll just read his words now. Are we supposed to trust a report packaged in a cheesy format with at least one grammatical usage mistake right off the bat? It is instead of the correct possessive pronoun, it's on page 26 that still displays an underlying flagging as it's incorrect and they're going to be the arbiters of quality. This packet does nothing to describe how the consultant agency came to its conclusions. Many of the evaluative statements in this packet are seen to have a hit or miss accuracy and poorly worded. Quote, system level plans for curriculum management, student assessment, instructional technology and professional development are either missing or of limited quality, that's page 43. Limited quality, limited is best applied to objects with scalable dimensions. So either reduced quality to some linear single variable index or they've made that assertion as part of an overall pitch that there is so much out of whack at our district that of course we'll need to hire them for a number of years to get these problems fixed. What about the infographic on page 33? Is the top half supposed to represent the situation as is with socioeconomic level and test scores being the only operative factors? How does having arrows on the top that mirror the ones on the bottom clarify the significance of that visual? Is the bottom half supposed to encourage us to associate effective schools with curricular alignment and curricular management in contrast to the top half? So when they peddle their particular brand of those things will of course rely on their expertise. As infographics go, this is really Bush League.  It also reminds me how outside agencies have come into local communities to tell them about the problems that they, the experts have noted before solving them on a large scale with things like housing projects designed by expert architects. Other forms of urban development expressway slicing through neighborhoods and or changes in voting registration and boarding procedures to improve the integrity of voting systems. Since we never had the chance to really talk shop with those who actually made the determination of the quality of the education we are delivering to our students how are we to know that they're qualified to judge us? Just because they're described in the report as having impressive credentials. Last, between the lines, I'm just certain that their recommendations boil down to a lock step system of management with alignment getting top billing. Alignment has its place, but in and of itself it's hardly the best-garing tour that every student realizes as much as their own potential is possible. And especially that what helps one student realize their full potential may be very different than what helps another. Did it really take from the time of the visit until now to come up with these one-size-fits-all of generalizations and recommendations? I urge all union members and the union as a whole and the WC-UUSD board to reject this report if there is no more substantiation and justification for its findings than what we see in this packet. Thank you. Thank you, Sack. Hanna Brown. Hi there. Thanks for listening. I'm a community member, by the way. I have two kids at Rumney. I wanna support what I just heard. I have very similar concerns. I think it is the board and the administration's job to relate to the public in terms we understand, not in educational jargon, in terms that we as parents and members of the community can understand as taxpayers voting the bill, really what the specifics are, what the goals of this review are, and what the specific implementations are gonna be. I know we saw two positions listed on school spring that seem to be correlating with this finding. And that's really concerning to me that we are overall reducing staff, mostly through attrition, but we still, for example, at Rumney, we right now have one less full-time teacher than we did. And now we're being asked to foot a bill during a pandemic for a third-party consultant review and then potentially footing the bill for two administrative positions. That's concerning. It's also really concerning to me that we are judging how curriculum is implemented during a pandemic year when globally curriculum implementation is generally agreed to be invalid. We have colleges across the country getting rid of their standardized test requirements because 2020 and 2021 are no indication of the actual quality of our education. So I have deep concerns about making broad, systemic changes based on a review that happened in any time between 2020 and 2021. That's for all end. Thank you very much. Thank you, Hannah. Lisa, Hannah? Hi, I'm Lisa Hannah. I teach five, six at Doty. I also am a Worcester community member and parent. And thanks to the community that has showed up tonight. It's quite the turnout. As we listen to the findings and recommendations of the curriculum audit tonight, I asked the board to listen to what aligns with our values and ask critical and clarifying questions about what does not. I implore us to attend to the language and ask about the intent. For example, on slide 28, we will see the sentence, everything taught in the classroom prepares students for anything they may encounter on any assessment, no surprises. This line in particular highlights the need to ensure our decisions moving forward from this audit are values aligned. Is it a core belief of Washington Central that everything taught in the classroom prepares students for assessments? Or instead, do we want to continue to insist that our core belief is that what we are teaching in the classroom should prepare students to be global and engaged citizens? There's a critical difference there. What do we value? What are the implications of the language in the report? In my experience in my nine years teaching and residing in this district, we have valued the following. We value transparency, ethical behavior and open communication among staff, administrators and board and community. We value teacher voice and collaboration on the mission, vision and direction of the district in order to best serve the community of students we know so well. We value student agency and engagement. We value teacher expertise and shaping, not just delivering curriculum with guidance and support from coaches and administration. We value students as whole people being educated to be active and engaged citizens. As we listen tonight, let us come back to those values and ask what aligns and what we need to ask and more questions about before we act. And as we move forward with this information, let us please ask who needs to be invited to the table to shape our next steps. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Anne Carter? Hi, Anne. Yes, I noticed on school spring and job listing from mathematics program director and I'd like to comment to that. The description says that this position provides leadership and coordination in the development of math curriculum and the implementation of instructional programs of the district while encouraging the use of variety of instructional strategies and materials consistent with research on learning and child growth and development. I'm struggling to understand the need for this position since this work has been ongoing over the last six years under the leadership and support from our current curriculum director. Starting six or so years ago, curriculum camp gave the opportunity for teachers to work collaboratively. Over the course of time, curriculum camp participants worked on levels of knowing, proficiency scales, benchmark assessments, and effective practices. Each year, teachers came together to improve what has been developed in prior years as well as continue to work on developing a course of action. This was all achieved under the capable director of the curriculum director. All of those documents continue to exist and are constantly updated. There have been delays with moving this work forward for over a year due to COVID. However, Ellen Dorsey and I have been working together this year to update the effective math practice and implementation plan with the intent of actualizing the effective math practices tool as outlined in the WCU-USD plan for moving forward from 2021. This document includes implementation of instructional programs, encourages the variety of instructional strategies and materials consistent with current research on learning and child development. We are also in the process of tuning the document given feedback from teachers and administrators, thus allowing for voices from many. Two years ago, the district went through a collective process facilitated by the curriculum director to research and choose programs that were in alignment with student learning outcomes. We brought those programs into the district in 2019 and we're in the process of offering ongoing professional learning opportunities when the pandemic hit. Plans for continuing this work are part of the effective practices document. It appears to me that much of the work outlined in this job description has already been done. Do we need to reinvent the wheel? In addition, the job description states responsibilities include management, evaluation and coaching of district mathematics personnel. As an instructional coach, evaluation, I really struggle with this because evaluation is not part of coaching. It undermines the trust and confidentiality of people you work with. I'm struggling to understand why this is part of the responsibility of this job description. Oversight of the program development and implementation ensuring an instruction is aligned with the Vermont equality standards, guiding district teams and evaluating instructional methods and developing strategies for implementation and approving is exactly what our current curriculum director has done for the last six years or more. It's because of this guidance and leadership we now have version 2.0 of the effective practices document. As far as the other responsibilities, isn't that part of the leadership team's role? Isn't the leadership team responsible for working cooperatively and collectively with staff and other stakeholders? And lastly, as an instructional coach in math, why didn't anyone ask for my voice? As an interested educator, district employee and taxpayer, I would appreciate Brian talking to us about his thought process, internal conversations about this position. Who have you talked to and how did you come to this decision to post it? Thank you. Thank you, Anne. I just wanna let people know that we're about eight minutes. Steven. Good evening, Floor. Brian and the rest of the Washington Central School Board. My name is Steven Ushkov and I teach math the most wonderful students at our own U32 middle and high school. I also serve as secretary of the Washington Central Educators Union. At the risk of taking up too much time for others to comment, but also encouraging each and every voice that waited a long time to speak this evening, I feel compelled to share a letter written and endorsed by the compassionate many I work with that speaks volumes to the initial context and self-evident and appropriateness of conducting such a deficit-based curricular review during a pandemic year. This letter raises many questions, flags and cries for support for our students, our schools and our exceptional workforce that are still largely unanswered since it was first shared with the superintendent and board in early January. So on the appropriateness of our curriculum review this year, we read to you as representatives of the teaching staff of the district in an effort to make you aware of the impact the curriculum review that has recently been imposed on our schools. It seems that this process has been undertaken without consideration for the capacity of our staff or the quality of the data that might come from it and certainly without concern for the impact on morale that has already caused the pandemic and our necessary response to it rightly characterized by Brian at that time as heroic has been traumatic. If we are considering ourselves a trauma-informed school district, we must recognize that this year has been a shared trauma that we are all still undergoing. Most of us are operating in new environments having to adapt curriculum, instructional models and working routines on the fly. Even as we are losing students to technological challenges and fearing for our own health and safety as case counts go up and area schools are going remote due to threats of civil unrest. The teaching staff in the district are courageous, tireless and creative, but we are human in a need of support. To be tasked with any directives that do not immediately support our ongoing operation through this crisis is certainly tone death and runs a real risk of crushing our staff's already fragile morale with the shared feeling that our leadership is this far out of touch with the strains that we are managing every day. We're losing touch with students is the feeling and this is how you help us. This has had a huge impact on our morale. We would like to work in a district that top to bottom has the capacity to support our families in this crisis instead of demonstrating a quote, business as usual blindness to the real suffering and educational losses we are experiencing. We'd also like to work in a district that considers curriculum review as something to be done deliberately, seriously and with care. In our view, there should be a process that best demonstrates both the quality of our instruction as well as reflect reflecting the immense work we've done on district wide curriculum over the past few years. When we reach out to our colleagues about whether our feelings on this issue are shared the consensus response ranges from I'm outraged are they really going to judge us based on this fall through I guess if they feel like they have to through expressive eye rolling do I just delete those emails immediately? I can't deal with that. In addition with our buildings closed all year to community partners and parents to the most important elements in our educational system our colleagues are both outraged that outsiders will be brought in for this purpose and frightened that will be essentially taking the word of some corporate fact finders about their quarantine compliance. In other words, besides the impact on morale the curriculum that is reported to you is not going to be an accurate picture of our true or best selves. If we really want to do this right now is not the time to be clear the educators in Washington Central unified union school district are committed to the continuous improvement both in professional knowledge and practice. We believe in good actionable data from our students and from our own professional feedback our reservations the timing of the field review and regard this regard stems from the fact that when people are for lack of a better word tapped because of the current state of our staff they're concerned that their ability to not only show their best work and practice as well as in their submitted work is severely limited as a result the quality of the data will suffer. This will not be the case next year. Because we are committed group to being active in the solutions of challenges despite not being part of the planning we offer the following ideas in case the review simply can't be put off until next year. If there's a classroom observation component we suggest using other times and this could be met. One suggestion is using the summer program as our site for observations. It will allow time for the current COVID spike to decrease is limited to one or two buildings with children in smaller groups and focuses on our practice on the students who need the most support. Curriculum camp. This has historically been a time when staff members gather to do the important and necessary work or refining and enriching our current curriculum framework. That would be in our opinion a better time to submit our work in an organized and cohesive manner. If it is in fact necessary to continue with the field review we ask that observers of classes are done through Zoom or other online platforms. We have no way of knowing about the testing or quarantining of these individuals who would otherwise be coming into our rooms unnecessarily damaging, endangering our students and our staff. We understand that you might have already committed district funds to this effort that can't be taken back. If so, this letter should stand as a reminder that there is such a thing as bad data and bad data will drive bad decisions. We're committed to making the best decisions we can make for our families and communities and this is a decision we cannot support. Yours and colleagueship, thank you. That's a letter from January from our staff. Thank you. Sorry, I was muted. Thank you, Stephen. So we're gonna do a few more comments if somebody has some comments that haven't been made or that you haven't been identified with what has been said and then we'll move into the board meeting and have more comments at the end so that we're able to do both, okay? Thank you. I'm just going back to my list up here. Patrick, Willie and Madeline, you're on deck. Thank you, Flor. I wanted to underline a few things in detail in the packet that was provided from the board information. These comments will build on the letter that Stephen read and some of the comments that Hannah said. I find that, again, I find that conducting a review of the curriculum this year is inappropriate and two pieces of evidence of that in the packet that's presented I would like to outline right now. The quantitative information in the bar chart certainly spans a few years and we can see that that doesn't fall under this comment. But finding 2.2 where the slide says most reviewed student artifacts were on grade level but a substantial portion of elementary artifacts did not fully align with the content of the district's performance indications. Artifacts generally were low cognitive demand and employed less engaging traditional classroom context. I think that's understandable given the difficulties that everyone has had in the last year and I could probably write this in an email to my own bosses about my own performance this year. So I don't think it's appropriate to judge our students on that piece of qualitative information. Also in 3.1 classroom visitation revealed instructional practices that are not consistently congruent with district expectations geared toward lower level of cognition and lacking in differentiation strategies. I think again, this is a finding that it is inappropriate to hold against our teachers or our students or our schools or however we are deciding what is taught in our buildings. So I wanted to bring those two specific findings to the attention of the boards 2.2 and 3.1 and I hope that you can ask the questions to get to the bottom of how these pieces of information are being used and hopefully they're not being used at all to further any kind of policy change. Thank you. Thank you, Patrick. Madeline. Hi, yes, I'm Madeline Doherty. I am a teacher at U32. I teach special education and English in the Zenith program. Before I came to U32, I taught in a charter school in an inner city district in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And that charter school focused on rigor and test prep above everything else to the point that it destroyed students' mental health, it destroyed teachers' mental health and they had a 50% turnover rate. And the kinds of things that went on there are very similar to the kinds of wording that I am seeing in this report and in the slides. And I find that extremely concerning. I know I'm talking really fast. It's because I'm trying to respect a minute and a half. So when you have this focus on everything you do has to be aligned with any assessment that you may be given, including the aspects which are graded by robots. Like the essay is graded by a computer. It is not a valid test of what our students are doing. And yet every single thing we do is supposed to be aligned to that test. I find that absurd on its face. I also notice the language around essentially that this curriculum management audit will somehow help us to disrupt the fact that students in poverty have lower test scores. The only thing that is going to change whether or not students in poverty are doing well has been shown time and time again to be getting them out of poverty. And furthermore, things that have been shown by the Economic Policy Institute and the broader Boulder Education Policy Framework. The other things that help have nothing to do with what's going on during the school day. They are out of school and summer experiences that develop community connections and build on real life meaningful experiences for students. It is not related to what's going on in schools and a district like ours where we have already shown that when our students graduate and go on to jobs and colleges, they are extremely successful. We hear reports from college professors and other students about how intelligent our students are and how well they are able to reason. None of that is going to show up on a test. And I also wanna encourage our board to be mindful that private interests like those of this curriculum management group and like those of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and other test-making and test prep companies do not necessarily align with the goals of a public education system. And I really do hope that the board is mindful of the profit motive involved in any kind of effort like this. And again, to keep in mind what everyone else has already said that there's a pandemic going on. And there is no way to get valid data on our students or our teachers during a pandemic. Thanks, Marilyn. Becca. Hi, thank you. I wanna echo all of the things that all the other folks have said previously and then ask a couple of additional questions. I read through the board packet but wasn't sure where to read the full report. I assume there's a lot of textual data and other data that's not in the board packet. So just if someone could share a link in the chat, that would be great. And then another thing that wasn't clear to me was how the sort of the findings of the report and the plan for the curriculum positions are gonna address some of the, I know there's an inequality is a really big issue for the school and I was struck by discrepancies between kids on free and reduced lunch and kids who are not. And I'm really curious about how these interventions are gonna directly impact that. So I would love to see where the report goes into those details because that would be really interesting to see how that's being addressed directly, very directly. And then the last question comes out of, or there's two things actually, one of them comes out of, I didn't realize that folks were in the classrooms during the pandemic starting this fall and really curious about why parents weren't informed about strangers coming into the classrooms during the pandemic. I know we weren't even allowed to drop our kindergartner off. I should have introduced myself. I'm Becca, I live in Middlesex. Those were my kids eating dinner. They're in pre-K and K and really taken aback to hear that there were people in the classroom. So I wanna hear more about that and looking forward to answers on that as well. And then finally, just from what I understand, this process just did not feel transparent for teachers or parents. I didn't even know this was going on and I know a lot of that's on me for not coming to board meetings in the past but one thing I would just really say to the board is that previously before the consolidation, one of our board members always alerted us to meeting times, always sent out notes and synopsises over front porch forum and on other channels. And so that's really been a challenge about how to stay connected as a parent during this new consolidation where we just feel extra disconnected from the school. So really looking for the board to make sure that they're completing the loop and updating parents with stuff as soon as things are being decided or if there's important things, making sure that they're letting folks know how and when they need to plug in. Thanks. Thank you, Becca. We just have a few more. I'm wondering Ben, Kyle, Kathleen, Mike Kaelin and Emily, if you would be willing to wait to the end of the meeting and we could start listening to the report and that might illuminate some of the questions that everybody has to. Is that something that you'd be willing to do? Are you gonna stay in the meeting regardless? Otherwise, we can do five minutes for the five of you and move on. I'm not seeing any. Ben, Kyle, I know you both. When will the meeting come to an end? Is the meeting still gonna, when is the end of the meeting? We're hoping to wrap up at 7.30, but so we would try to have comments, 10 minutes before 7.30, but allow us to listen to what we have, Jeffrey here already, allow us to listen to the report and it might be, everybody else get a chance to listen to the board meeting. I'm sorry. You what? May I just make a quick comment? Sure. I have to make a quick meeting, I have to make a quick comment. I'm Mikaela MacCair, I'm a Dodie in U32 grad and I have two kids at Dodie right now. I just wanted to kind of echo what Becca just said, which was I was a little, I found out about all this today and I was a little shocked at the lack of transparency in this whole process. And again, I agree, that's somewhat on me, I've been a bit distracted as a family physician with two young kids during a pandemic, but this is worrisome to me and the main thing I'm gonna keep a real short, the main thing that worried me was I didn't see any evidence in this report about really what is at the heart of the U32 district and what makes U32 unique and the principles it was founded upon and how we went from a school with no walls and no AP exams to, or no AP classes to this is a little shocking. So I'm planned to be more involved, but I hope that any evaluation really took into account the uniqueness of U32 district. Thank you, sorry. That's okay, we're here for you. So we're gonna move on into, we need to make a couple of changes into our agenda for tonight, we're gonna move the personnel part because we really need to do that tonight to four and we'll start the reports after personnel. Any other changes? Seeing none, let's move on into personnel and we'll approve new teachers, resignations and retirement. Can anybody please move the new teachers? Lindy, by any chance, or Steven Luke, or I can read them up. I'm having internet issues, Floor. So I don't think I have anything. Floor, I got it. Okay, thank you, Jonas. Floor, I will move to... One minute, Vera, could you mute yourself, please? Thank you, all right, go ahead Jonas. I move to approve the new teacher nominations for the 21-22 school year for Elizabeth Guido, U32 health education teacher, Amanda Morse instructional coach in the district, Jennifer Ingersoll, also an instructional coach in the district, Michael Abadi, special education teacher in the district, and Mackenzie Kernow, special educator at East Montpelier. Second. Thank you, Jonas. Thank you, God. Any discussion? All those... I have a quick question just because do we need to have... I saw there was a caveat, basically, on Amanda Morse that it depends on the hiring of special ed position. Is that the Michael Abadi position or do we need to have it on record that it is contingent upon a special ed hire? Yeah, it's still contingent upon a special ed hire. And the same thing goes with Jennifer Ingersoll, the contingent upon hiring an English teacher, because we don't wanna have coaches and have empty classrooms. I will amend my motion to note that the new teacher nominations for Amanda Morse and Michael Abadi are contingent. Thank you, Jonas. And I see Scott approves the amendment. All those in favor of approving the new teacher nominations as read, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. We're in. We're in duty. Okay, thank you, Chris. Is the hearing... I'm sorry to interrupt, but it wasn't Michael Abadi being contingent. It was Jen Ingersoll. I just wanna make sure that that was clarified in the minutes. I think that is clear, Steven. Yeah, Amanda Morse and Jennifer Ingersoll. Jennifer Ingersoll. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So hearing none, opposed, the motion carries. Resignations? I move that we accept the resignation of Kate Liptak, Berlin Elementary Music Teacher. Second. Thank you, Scott. Any discussion? I would say with appreciation. Yes. And I just wanna ask that is where this process has led us for her to resign for position. Thank you, Vera. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all of those in favor of approving the resignation of Kate Lema with appreciation, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, the motion passes. Change in FTE. I move to approve a change in FTE for Tyler Smith, an instructional coach at Berlin Elementary to 0.4 FTE. A 0.4 FTE, the intervention to 0.4 FTE instructional coach while retaining a 0.6 FTE as an interventionist. Second. Second. Any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, the motion carries. New hires. I move to approve new hires, the hires of Christopher O'Brien as the district's director of facilities. Caroline May as the principal of Romney Memorial School and Jessica Wills as the assistant principal at U32. Second. Thank you, Jonas. Thank you, Scott. Any discussion? Any questions? Chris? Brian, can you describe the principal search process for Romney? What are you involved? Yes, so we ultimately follow the district interviewing and hiring process for these vacancies, including the Romney position. I had asked all committees in these positions to submit multiple candidates for my review. After site-based visits where they were interviewed by at the site, I did receive feedback from staff and parents. And at my level then when the folks were brought to me for my consideration, I created a new procedure to help me determine who would be best able to meet the needs of children in each school. We did performance tasks. With the Romney principle, we did performance tasks and involved two other elementary principles in our district to help me assess each candidate's readiness and skills required for the position. And I'm just very confident and pleased to have had such qualified candidates. Okay, thank you for that. Now, I have to raise a concern in regard to Caroline May having nothing to do with her qualifications to be the Romney principle. My concern is what, and it's a concern that was actually raised during the policy committee when we were talking about principles deciding whether or not a student who's beyond the cutoff time for kindergarten should be assessed. And there's concern raised about the principle making that decision because of potential pushback from parents and that would be an uncomfortable decision. And one of the things that was floated was whether or not having a neighboring principle actually make a decision on whether a student who had missed the deadline by birthday would otherwise be qualified or able to attend kindergarten. So my concern here is that Caroline will have three children, I believe, at the Romney school and having her as a principle, as a decision maker in regard to own children, I think raises a potential conflict of interest and I think we should address that. Was that discussed at all during the interview process? I really can't get into anything about conflict of interest. I mean, this is a personnel decision that my job as a superintendent is to analyze the candidates based on the process, which I've explained to you. And I'm here just to let you know that I do not see any conflict of interest in that regards. I think we have some really great candidates here. So I understand that, but the potential conflict is Caroline deciding on a discipline or a course of action for her own child as a principle. And that, I gotta tell you, that is uncomfortable for me. And it's just, I think you can put staff members in an untenable position. Yeah, I don't think she should. Because she's a supervisor. Yeah, I don't think she should be put. And I'm not saying, it's the appearance issue. We're always trying to avoid an appearance of a potential conflict. And I think if we should address this before rather than in the backside, and I think it'd be easily handled. I agree with you. I don't think she's the first principal to ever have children in their own school. And I think that you're right that there's a way of trying to make sure that any types of conflict of interest are resolved, possibly even by someone else. Like a neighboring principal in a neighboring school. Chris, hold on one minute. We have other board members with questions too. Jonas and then Stephen Luke. So just to Chris's point, I would note that Caroline was extremely diligent and thoughtful in her recusal over the last couple of weeks. And I would expect that her thoughtfulness would continue. Brian, in terms of the process of hiring, searching and hiring, was there a search committee or an interview committee for the principal and assistant principal positions? Yes, yes, they're on the nomination form. And what was the time, were they involved in that from the beginning? Or was there a time at which people were brought into the process? Yeah, so it's ultimately the interview committee. The interview committee, it's a site starts off at the site-based and then they follow their process with the interview, they do a site visit. They typically, you start off with a number of candidates and it gets smaller and smaller until it gets to the superintendent's level. And then I held my own interview where we did some performance tasks and I had some other principals also attend those performance tasks with me. So I'm just noting that Kat and Aaron, the principals from Calis and Berlin, their names are written there in pen. Were they added to that process later? Yeah, what happened is, I anticipated this question tonight, Jonas, and I want it to be as transparent as possible. Those are the two principals that helped me in the final round interview here. Steven? So I think one thing, and I think there's agreement between Chris and Brian said, I think it's prudent upon the board to examine and develop some policies around potential conflict of interest of employees that have students in the system. And the other thing I wanted to point out was, this is not new or unique. There are multiple employees throughout the system that have students and that are principals that have students that they're responsible for. And it has been ongoing for many years. But I agree that it's prudent for us to develop some policy around decision making of employees that have oversight over their children. I might think that's a prudent thing for us to undertake. Thank you, Steven. I agree. Any other questions? Our members ready to vote. So could we vote in the new hires, please? All those in favor of the new hires as moved by Jonas and Scott, please say aye. Aye. Thank you. So now moving right along, we're gonna move into the add quality part and the discussion of student achievement and the curriculum management. So back to you, Brian. Yeah, thank you very much. I see we have a great. Can I just suggest we take a five minute break? We've been meeting for two hours. I'm sorry, but I may not be the only one who needs one. Yeah, that's okay. So five minutes is 1857. I'll see you in five minutes. Thank you. Okay, seven, oh three. Let's get started again. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So there's two things that I in the rush to listen to everybody I forgot and I wanna get in two motions from, well, three motions from an executive session. So if Jonas, are you available to do those three? So the two, well, actually, we are not doing the two negotiations. So just the students, please. I move that we accept the superintendent's recommendation for the two student matters we discussed during executive session. Thank you, Jonas. Second. Yeah, it was three actually. It was three. Was it three? My bad, three, sorry. Yeah, second. Okay, thank you, Diane. All those in favor of approving the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. Any opposed? Hearing none, the motion carries. So now we get, Brian. Yeah, this was the other piece just from personnel. Now, so we're still looking for a business administrator position to replace Lori Bebo. And there's a article in your packet, basically just talking about what we're doing in the process to date. So right now there is a, we've been developing a temporary plan that would involve coverage. And so for having Virginia Brear and Matthew Kittridge work on that working on to fill the role of Lori and Lori's retirement. We've also asked Lori to work on a developing a project timeline and work plan that assigns tasks and identifies how this could work with Matt and Virginia for the next 12 months and for the entire physical office. Cause I know that this is a very big piece. Right now we're, we're planning on using professor and budgeted funds to pay for the position to pay folks for their time because doing, doing the work extra work will require a different amount of time for Virginia and Matt. And the ultimate thing is, you know, what I want to ask is that while we're, this is a contingency and while we're still looking for candidates, I will say that we've met with a number of candidates for the business administrator vacancy. And I will say that some of the candidates have requested some sort of mentoring slash crossover and support. So I'm definitely trying to have conversations with Lori and, you know, seeing what's available, who's available and what, who may be available to do that work. And so ultimately I was going to ask the board tonight to make a motion to authorize me, the superintendent to issue interim contracts for the business administrator vacancies. And so that's what I would do right now. Any questions before I ask? I don't see any hands up. And my screen is, I see Chris. Okay, there's Lindy too. Okay, Chris, go ahead. And then Lindy. Contracts for, for which vacancies, Brian? Who are you talking about? Business administrator right now. We're trying to, so I would be looking at an interim contracts for business administrator vacancy, potentially using Virginia and Matt Kittridge to fill that position until, fill that work until we either find a, we find someone who can do it and also try to figure out and working out with Lori, how we can make this work in the interim while we're, where we find someone. So are these contracts for Virginia and Matthew? That would be the plan. That would be the plan. But I would say that, I would probably go forward with staying interim right now. I believe that they are, that we've talked about it. I don't know if Lori has anything else to add on that part. Okay. And would it also be contract for Lori cross-training after June 30th or whatever it is? Okay, Chris. So that's a great question. If it happens, I mean, that's, just on your sense as to what you're asking for. What authority are you asking for here? So as Lori's supervisor, and only if the board wishes to authorize me to do this, then I will work with Lori about a temporary contract, but I would need the board permission to do that. And of course, I would need to talk with Lori. Okay. Thank you for the clarification. Lindy and then Carrie. I think my question was very similar to Chris. He just said to issue contracts. And I know Virginia and Matt have both been there well over 10 years. So they should have a pretty good handle on how the operations work. I guess my concern was just voting yes for a contract that I don't really know what it is. If it's just for him to write up a contract for an interim position, we would have to approve the hiring, I assume, but that was my concern. It was a little vague. Yeah. Thank you, Lindy and Carrie. My comments, questions are along the same lines. And I guess the first thing is, Brian, do you need this approval tonight? Or could you, could it wait for two weeks? I think it always, everything could always wait. I just worried because I can't, I don't want to put Lori on the hot seat or anything. Lori is a great employee and she's here tonight. And it's, I had to have a conversation with her, but two weeks from now, it's June 2nd. We're running out of time. Okay. I understand that. I'm just asking what I have the same sense. I think that my colleagues do, which is there's not enough detail on this proposal for us to be fully comfortable. And I'm wondering if we do give approval tonight, can you come back in two weeks with a little more detail about what this looks like? And in particular, what I'm interested in is, what are we giving up? Where are we foregoing or what are we risking by not having a, you know, by having this contingency plan in place. And, you know, I'm in support, but I'd like to know a little bit more. And I can definitely come back with more information, but I wouldn't be able to move forward until I, you know, got the board permission to move forward in this direction until, and then come back with, you know, what's happened. Brian, I think what we'll be best is for you to move forward in solidifying what the interim would be. I thought that when we had talked about this with the hiring committee was about giving us stipend for both Virginia and Matt. So, you know, why don't you come with the full plan with more details to us? It doesn't preclude from you working on getting some options to us. I don't think we want to get in a position of doing a contract at this point without enough details. Okay. So what you're saying is come back to the board with the plan. Yeah, it doesn't preclude you to having a plan. That's why we know that we need some contingency. We've had a hard time finding a candidate. We have had some good interviews, but we haven't had successfully got one. We are still working with this search firm and we're hoping to get a candidate. We just need to have a contingency. So I'm up with the contingency, solidify it and present it to us and then we'll approve it. So we won't, we're not holding you up. Jonas. Yeah. I'm just curious. Is there anything that precludes an employee who takes early retirement from contributing to the district as a consultant or a contractor? I believe there are some rules and regulations that we have to follow. And that's something that I would explore, but I didn't want to explore anything without speaking with the board. You know, in previous renditions, we did incorporate something like that for teaching, but I don't think we did that this year. With these, I think it's statutory, I think we'd have to incorporate it as a condition. Okay. Thank you, Chris. Sure. So, Brian, to be clear, we would be working with Stephen, I'll let Stephen and Lindy, do you have your hand up again, Stephen? The only thing that I was gonna say, and I'm trying to see if I have a feel for the board, but I'll speak for myself, Brian. I in no way want to hinder any possibilities that you might be able to create to allow the district to still function in that role, in that need. And I want you to be as creative and forward thinking or outside of the box thinking. I don't want to encumber you at all. I think what I'm just hearing from others and from my point of view is tell me what you want or tell me that these are two possibilities and we've got to do one of them. And then we can have a talk about that and make a decision. Okay. Thank you, Stephen. I mean, I would just again, I would go back to having authorizing me to issue interim contracts for business administrator vacancies, but I'll do what the board wants because I still have to have conversations with Virginia, Matt, possibly Lori. And if I come up with something on June 23rd and you disagree with it and we don't move forward, then we only have seven days left without a plan. So I'm just trying to, that's why I was trying to work on that, but I understand. So let's move on. You have clear direction, Brian. We just need a little more detail to be able to authorize it, but we're not holding you up. So let's move, Lindy, is that a new hand or an old hand? The new hand, just a concern of why we need contracts when we have employees who are very familiar. And I understand perhaps an added stipend for them to do extra work or the COVID money, the way Brian worded it, I thought was in case they needed to hire extra clerk help in order for Matt and Virginia to handle the workload, but I didn't understand the contract part. And like Steven, it's not to get in the way. It just seems like we have some very capable people who've been in that office a long time. And it seems kind of last minute that it's just now being thought of that they would do this. So that was my concern. Yeah, I would disagree that it's not last minute. We've been talking about thinking about having a contingency. I would just caution that, just assuming people will be doing extra work, I think we have a very professional outstanding physical office, but I'd hate to have to lose anyone either by making expectations on folks. So that's why I was trying to have the opportunity to negotiate and work with the folks that we have here for an interim contract. Okay, I believe we're all talking the same thing, Brian. We do not wanna, we wanna count on our team. We just want more details.  Yeah, I would just hate to lose any of them. That's all. Okay, yeah, we're not talking about losing anybody. Okay, good. So let's move into the curriculum. Student data, sorry. Student data. So, yeah, so I'm gonna have Jim put up some, I'm not gonna go through every single slide because of the essence of time, but I just wanna share with you some of the data. This data is obviously nothing that you haven't seen before. So, but I just wanna make the following observation. I know we heard from a lot of folks tonight about the Curriculum Management Review and I think that this data will give us some additional context. I know we had a lot of some parents. We have mostly a lot of teachers coming in to discuss their concerns with the curriculum review. I think Jeff Thunberg, the lead auditor, reviewer, lead auditor is here tonight. I think he can shed some more light on the Curriculum Management Review. I don't think a lot of folks truly understand the purpose of the Curriculum Management Review and I just wanna caution the members of the public, our teachers who have shown up here tonight, not to feel like you have to respond or defend items that are in to end up in this presentation or future document. I just, I don't want folks to think that our district is trying to defend itself. I really think this is a tool to improve our practice and try to find a way to look at continuous improvement at all levels in our district. The data though, again, saying you haven't seen, it's nothing you haven't seen before, but I also have to reiterate that my job as the superintendent of schools is to be a voice for all families and students. And I know that as a superintendent, that's my role and I'm gonna continue to do that in my role here. And I'm gonna advocate for students who may not be represented here tonight. I think that's part of my job is to advocate for some of the children and families who are not here tonight. And so one of the things is I just wanna point out the major discrepancies is, I know folks were talking about this year and last year with the pandemic, but I decided to go back five years. There's a lot of information in these documents, but some of the real things that come out to me is a major discrepancy between free and reduced lunch and those who do not get free and reduced lunch, right? This is how it looks like across all of our grades. We also have documents that talk about the differences between students with IEPs and students who are not on IEPs and what the differences here. And these are very stark major differences and one of the purposes of a curriculum management review, and I'm sure Jeff will talk more about it, is we're gonna look at what it is that teachers are using in the classroom, how are they teaching, but how is the system? It's really about the system. How is the system structured in order to provide support for teachers, how to provide support for administrators, how do we plan our professional development? How do we, what is our system here and how do we plan for improving our practice across the district? So it's really about, again, a process of continuous improvement. And again, I would just caution, I heard a lot of folks talk tonight. I would just be cautioned about, let's listen to what the report is actually about. Maybe, and if you have additional questions, I appreciate Anne Carter tonight, coming here tonight and saying she would like to talk with me. I'll be more than happy to talk to folks about what's happening. Better come see me. Well, I'll definitely talk to you. I also know we had some folks talking tonight about, one person did say something tonight and I did have to fundamentally disagree with what the person said. It was a teacher who said that the only thing that we can do to get children out of poverty is to get them out of poverty. And I think that a lot of times in schools we can really work in trying to give our children opportunities to be successful. And that's what the curriculum actually was about. Brian, can I just stop you? I really wanna hear the presentation and I'm really running out of steam. It's 7.20, we've been here a long time. I don't think it's appropriate for you to respond to all the public comment. I'd like to hear the presentation. Do we as a board understand what you're putting forward? Okay, so then what I'll do is then if we can just, Jim, can you move down to the high school graduation rate?  So right now, this is our last three years. And so we have seen a dip. It's gotten better. It's gone up two points, but part of this curriculum management review piece, I think it's also about, again, the system. What is our system? What are we gonna use in our system? And I think ultimately, this is an opportunity for our staff, our district and our children. And these are just, again, the rate between free and reduced lunch for three year graduation rate. And last but not least, I think we have the IP as well. All right. And that's all I'm gonna show tonight, but I just wanted you to be aware that there were some real reasons why we're looking at our system in general, and that was it. So I'll turn it over to Jeff. Thanks, Brian. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. Is this the PowerPoint that you had that I submitted earlier? Yes. I believe it is. Okay. Because since I presented yesterday, I did correct that typo that was in there with the misplaced apostrophe. So I just wanna make sure that whoever made that comment has a sharp eye and apologize for that. That one is on me. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Flora and the rest of the board and teachers that are attending tonight and listening in. I appreciate your interest and hearing about the overview of the curriculum review that was conducted in the district. Let me make a few comments before we get too heavily into the slides. I represent a group called the Curriculum Management Solutions Incorporated out of Johnston, Iowa. And we provide this type of service to public and private schools where we are invited to come into school districts and take a look at their curriculum management plan. That can mean different things in different schools, but essentially what it means is how well is the district in providing the educational programming according to their own expectations and standards that they've established for themselves. When we do this, we do more than just look at the curriculum that's being taught. We look at the support systems to support that curriculum as it's being rolled out and implemented in the classrooms to the children in the community. It's a long process that takes place. We have been doing it this year during the pandemic year across the country. We haven't had as many schools requested this year for all the reasons that were mentioned by the teachers. I certainly understand that. I have a daughter who's a teacher. I come from a family of teachers and I'm in the same boat with you in many ways. And I came in with some trepidation as well. Not quite sure what to expect, but actually what I found is, yes, things were different during the pandemic. But when you look at, see what we looked at when we came into the district, you'll find that many of those items that we use for our data sources and preparing our findings for the review, our written documents and those written documents have been in place for many years. They're the same this year as they were last year and the year before that and they'll be the same next year unless some changes are made to address some of those documents. We were contacted, at least I was contacted in early December about leading this project on behalf of the district and for CMSI Curriculum Management Solutions Incorporated. So the work started in December and it's wrapping up now in June. Someone made the comment before asked the question, when are we gonna see the final report? Well, the final report is actually done. Brian and Jen have seen a draft just to go through and make sure that it is factually accurate in terms of names and locations and dates, things along that line. But the report is done, it's being printed currently this week and will be sent out to the district. I would say you should have it by the end of next week and what you'll receive is an approximately 140 page report and a 12 to 15 page executive summary. I'll talk a little bit more about that when I finish up here. So we started the work on this project, myself and three other team members in early to mid December. The site visit to take place on campus was during the week of February, well, the days of February 8, 9 and 10, 2021. So myself and one other reviewer came on site under the guidance of, is it Elizabeth Ward, I think, who made sure that we complied with all Vermont expectations in terms of safety and COVID regulations, which of course we did. The work actually began, like I said, in December, we had the final draft in mid May, which has been looked at like I said by Brian and Jen, and the final report coming out, I would say next week you should have it. There were four team members, two of us on site, two of us were off site, one in Arkansas, one in Texas, reviewing documents and helping myself with the assisting me with the writing. Yeah, just leave it here on this slide. I'll tell you, who's clicking the slides for me here? It's Jim, Gary here. Okay, okay, Jim, just so I can say, Jim, you can move on or skip a slide or two because I think we'll probably skip some of these here. As part of the process of looking at the curriculum management system, can I go back to the first slide? Move back one more. Okay, hold on right there. We did around 50 interviews, most of them remotely, with many of you that are listening in tonight. It says in the report we reviewed 80 documents. We actually reviewed many more than that. So the policy book is considered one document, but you had, I think it was 64 policies that we read. And we looked at all the curriculum, the assessments that are in place in the district, instructional models. We looked at a number of different items, all your planning documents as I'll talk about later. We did visit classrooms where they were in session. We didn't observe any remote classrooms. We did just on-site classrooms for a quick two to three minute classroom walkthrough. We visited 53 classrooms to get an idea of what's going on on a typical day in a pandemic in your school district. We also solicited information from staff members and parents using surveys. We had 368 survey responses among teachers, principals and parents across the district. And then as the teachers all know, we asked each teacher to submit one student artifact we call them. And really it's an assignment the students are completing that shows that they are mastering some skills. We had 213 student artifacts that were submitted to us. I want to thank some people for helping with this project because it's a huge undertaking, especially in a smaller district like your own. I want to thank first of all, Jen Miller Arsenault who coordinated the whole thing and was the district liaison. So Jen, my appreciation to you for all of your work and helping to support that what we were doing here. Melissa and Michelle in the district office, administrative assistants, I believe for Brian and for Jen who also did much of the work collecting information, collecting documents for us and supporting us when we were on site. Carla Messier who also was instrumental in helping us and also provided to us, brought our meals into us when we had late nights. And then of course the teachers that were involved in this process, like it or don't like it, we appreciate the fact that you were forthcoming with your comments, with your submission of documents and with your surveys that you completed online for us. So what I'd like to do tonight is, as you see the five parts of what I'm going to talk about a little bit on the review philosophy, a little bit on the actual process in Washington Central, go quickly over the findings without laboring the point and talking too much about the specific data that supports the findings because that data is all found in the actual report that you'll be receiving and talk about the generalized recommendations that we are making to the district that have been customized for your district. Then we'll talk a little bit about next steps in the report. Go ahead to the next slide, please, Jim. Okay, what is a curriculum review? Really this slide should say curriculum management review. Brian touched upon this. It's not just about the curriculum or what's being taught in the classroom. It's about the entire system and how it supports the work that goes on in the classroom. As you know, we have frontline workers and we have support staff. Teachers are those frontline workers. They are the ones where the rubber hits the road doing the hard work of educating the children with the support of their principals and then support of everybody else in the support staff from central office to bus drivers to cafeteria workers. You know, we're all in the same boat together. What we wanna make sure that everybody understands is what role do they play in supporting the ultimate goal of the school district which is to educate the children to the best of there and the best of our ability. So what is a curriculum review? First of all, it is independent. None of us has any association with anybody in the school district. It's third party. We are intentionally coming from the outside where we have no vested interest in what's going on there. We are coming in strictly to see what it is that you are doing and doesn't meet your own expectations. It's unbiased in the sense that we don't have any preconceived expectations of what we're going to see when we come into the school district. I heard a comment about finances and money and profit motive. We don't have a profit motive.  We're in this for other reasons than the profit, obviously. And those of us who are working on this review, we are prevented from securing any future employment with your district in the future. So the fact that we were here working on this review precludes us from working with your district in the future. So after you see me tonight unless Brian gives me a call in the next week or so, you probably will not see me again because this ends it for me. And there's a processor for yes that shouldn't be there. So when we say what is it, we ask what is it you are trying to do? And then we look to see to the best of our ability how well you're meeting your own goals for yourself. But let me talk a little bit about what a curriculum review is not. First of all, it's not an evaluation. I hear that frequently from educators when we go into districts and do this, you're evaluating us. We're not evaluating you. We're analyzing what you're doing but we're not evaluating you in the sense that you don't get a grade from us. It's not like a state report card of a school district ABC, you don't get a grade. You get a written narrative. It's not an accreditation. So it's not as though you're striving for some outside agencies goals to meet where you can get a stamp of approval and a banner to put in front of your school. We don't award banners. We don't give flags. We give an exceptions report as someone mentioned earlier. Also, it is not a comparison of you to anybody else. We don't compare you to any other school district because your goals aren't your goals. And we don't want to confuse your goals with anybody else's goals. How well are you doing what you intend to do for the children in your community? Also, we don't compare building to building within your school district. So for instance, when we visited classrooms, we went to all five of the elementary schools but we do not break down the data. We do not disaggregate it by building. We don't want to pit building against building. We look at it as an elementary fourth grade decisions that are made in terms of curriculum and instruction. So what it is is an exceptions report. And in the exceptions report, we point out those discrepancies between what it is you're striving for and where you currently are. In those cases where you're meeting the goals that you've set for yourself, we'll acknowledge that. We'll simply say you're meeting your goals. We don't shoot fireworks or give you gold stars. We simply say you're doing what you expected to do. Kind of like you don't applaud when the buses run on time. You expect the buses to run on time. We expect our schools to be high quality every day of the week, every year of the student's school cycle. So sometimes these reports can be hard to read. They can be humbling in many cases because we are brought in to ask the question, what is it you're not getting done to your own satisfaction? And then what recommendations do you have for us to ameliorate those discrepancy between where you are and where you hope to be? Okay, Jim, if you can move on. A little bit about what we do when we come in and look at the, do a curriculum management office or audit or review in this case. And sometimes I use those terms interchangeably, but this is not a true audit. It's really more of a review of what you're doing. We look for the alignment of what's called the written, taught and tested curriculum. Educators you're familiar with this, non-educators, maybe not quite so much. There's three components to a high quality education program, the curriculum or the work plan. That's the blueprint the teachers work from so they know what to teach and how to teach it in their classrooms. There's the assessment piece in the lower right-hand side that's the measurement of how we assess and determine whether the students have mastered the skills we're teaching them. And then on the left-hand side the teaching and that's the actual work that is done to deliver the curriculum and prepare students for that assessment. So it's a triangle, written, taught and tested curriculum. All three areas are important. The alignment part is how well those three items are aligned with each other. Okay, go ahead Jim and go one more slide after this. Well, no, go back to that slide. I do want to point one, I wasn't going to use this slide but I want to point out that last bullet, everything taught in the classroom prepares students for anything they may encounter on any assessment. The worst thing we can do for our children is have them take some type of an assessment for which they haven't been prepared. Nothing's worse as we all probably have lived through where you go on to take a test and there's a question that makes no sense to you at all. You've had no background, no training, no experiences in it and that's what we want to avoid. However, when we say any assessment we're not just talking high stakes tests that are coming from the state or the federal government. It might be an AP exam. It might be a district prepared exam. It might be a classroom level assessment. It might be a project that they're working on. It might be a performance that they're putting on for some sort of a fine art class. It can be any sort of an assessment. We want no surprises.  Regardless of what that assessment looks like. Okay, go ahead to the next slide, Jim. So when we talk about alignment we have two variables that take place. What is the district responsible for as opposed to what is the school building responsible for? Now, prior to your consolidation for the elementary districts this was pretty easy because they were one building districts with small student populations, a principal, a school board and dedicated teachers. But now that you've consolidated you have to look at things in terms of what is my job as the district representative if I work in the district office and what is the job of those people that work in the building? Because they're very different than you might expect. The district is ultimately responsible for developing the curriculum and the assessment piece. The reason that we say this is because someone has to be responsible for the design of the curriculum. So regardless of which elementary building a child attends they'll be exposed to the same curriculum, performance objectives, performance indicators regardless of which building they attend. So when they move to EV32 they're prepared for sixth, seventh grade whatever it might be when they arrive regardless of their zone of attendance in previous years. In addition to that, those assessment pieces, the tests for lack of a better word are designed at the district level or adopted at the district level in linking with the curriculum and aligned with the curriculum. So the curriculum and the assessment is strictly a function of the school district or the central office. Doesn't mean there's no input from the building level there certainly is but the design of that comes from the district office. Next slide please. This talks about the delivery alignment what's the school responsibility and the school responsibility is on the left hand side is to deliver the curriculum to prepare the students to receive the assessment to deliver the instruction so they can be prepared for the assessment. So the district does the design work the school does the delivery work. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about the design of the curriculum for a school district. Next slide please. And let's go on one more slide. What we're talking about here and this is detailed in the final written report that you'll see under finding one talks about those roles that are tightly held and those roles or obligations that are loosely held. And as you can see tightly held are system-based they are expectations that we've all agreed to as members of the school community. It's the ends, the mission, the goals and standards and priorities many of which you've always talked about in the past the students objectives or what they can master from grade to grade and subject to subject and those student assessment pieces like I mentioned before. However, we realize that there's variability in classrooms between students between teachers and between buildings. So some things are school-based decisions that need to be made. These are what we call loosely held meaning they might vary from building to building or even within a building between teachers. Things like instructional choices, instructional strategies, grouping of students or grouping of teachers to perform the work of the delivery of the curriculum. Staffing decisions that are made within a building could be very different from building to building. Resources and material are other examples of loosely held decisions that are made. So the point here is now that you are a larger district and a consolidated district with five elementaries and a middle school, high school, some things need to be held tightly and some things need to be held loosely and we have to be very careful not to step on one side over the other side, realize what's done on a system-based decision and what's done on a school-based decision. Next slide please. Why is all this important? If you look to the bottom of the slide, the curriculum management, what do we mean by curriculum management? Curriculum management is anything we do, intentionally do as a system to impact the learning of the children. Look at the top, we know the highest predictor of student test scores is their socioeconomic level and you don't have a high level of free and reduced price lunch students, but you have a significant number plus you have other students that have other variabilities that might impact their learning, whether it's cultural, whether it's familial, whatever it might be. So we know the best way, we've learned this over the last 40 to 50 years with effective schools research, the best way to level that playing field for the students so they can be successful on whatever that test is or assessment is, whether it's a performance or a high stakes test, is to do things within the district to impact that, make decisions to level that playing field. So we're talking about effective schools characteristics and we're talking about what we call curriculum alignment, that written, taught and tested curriculum so students all have experiences that they need to be successful or increase the likelihood of success on performance day or test day. Next slide, please. So the curriculum review really we examine how well the different departments, when we say departments, we're talking about the assessment department, we're talking about the professional development department, we're talking about the fiscal department, we're talking about the special ed or intervention department, how all these different departments work together to manage the design and delivery of the curriculum so it's all aligned in the three areas you see at the bottom, not just the content or what the students are learning, but the context of the teaching or the conditions around the learning and the cognition level or the level of rigor the students are exposed to. Next slide, please. So in the process, we ask what is it you are trying to accomplish? What's Washington Central Unified Union School District trying to accomplish? Let me preface this slide by saying in organizational management, we talk about organizations being what they call rational and by a rational organization, we mean it's an organization that has a common goal or common goals and missions and they have written documentation to support this. School districts are classic examples of rational organizations. We have written documents that tell us what to do. For teachers, it's the curriculum guide. For board members, it's the policies. For departmental central office leaders, administrative leaders, it's planning documents. Those tell us what to do, what our job is as members of that organization. And then we hire specialized employees like teachers to implement those strategies. So we ask the question, what written documents support that which you are trying to meet in terms of your goals as a district? And we ask the following three questions. The first question is, do these written documents even exist? Yes or no? If they don't exist, we tell you to write some documents. You need some documents and we give you recommendations on how to do that. If they do exist, we evaluate them. Are they any good? Some documents districts have are not very good and we suggest to them that they tighten them up and give them a specific recommendations on how to do that. And then whether they're good or bad, we ask, are they being used? And if they're good and not being used, that's an issue. If they're not any good and being used, that's also an issue. We want the documents to exist. We want them to be high quality and we want people to use them as well. Again, you're not being compared to any other school districts, you're being compared to yourself. Next slide please. Let's talk a little bit about how we write our findings. We do have findings. That's the basic result of our analysis of all of the data that we see and observations that we make. Findings are supported by triangulated data. So we don't take one data source and write a finding. We make sure that we have at least two of three data sources available to us before we feel confident to write a finding. So the first data source are the written documents like I mentioned before. We look over your written documents like all your planning guides, your district improvement plan, your strategic plan, your building level plans, your assessment plan, staff development plan right on down the line. We read your policies. We read your handbooks. We've looked at your mission and vision statement. So that provides one data source. The second data source that's available to us is what we hear, which is one of the reasons we like to come on site so we can have conversations with people. Although most of them were done remotely as we said before. We have conversations with people and then we also use our survey data as a type of anecdotal information, what we hear. Then the last thing is what we see is our actual observations of what we have seen. So that's why we take building tours, get into as many classrooms as we can so we can collect information based on what we've seen with our own eyes. And like I said, we need two of three data sources in order to substantiate a finding. Next slide please. The result. The result then is a written report like I mentioned before with findings covering the relevant standards. We'll talk about the standards as we move through the findings here. I will say in this report, we have five findings that we focused on. Being a smaller district, we conducted what we call a small school review of the curriculum, rather than a full blown more exhausted review of the curriculum management plan because we realized you have limited staff to incorporate too many recommendations. So we chose those areas that we thought would be most urgent for you to address first. There were other things we looked at but decided to hold off on those and only give you those things that would have the strongest impact on helping move you forward. Then for each of the findings, we have recommendations and those recommendations then are very precise and detailed in terms of what you need to do step by step if you choose to adopt the findings and the recommendations. Like I said, there's five findings, there are four recommendations. Now, remember earlier, I said that we don't compare buildings to buildings. A curriculum management review like this and Brian addressed this a little bit earlier in his opening comments before I started are district level. Everything here is presented district level. So our recommendations are directed to those people at the highest level of the organization, the board of directors and the superintendent. You will not see any recommendations that are geared towards principals, district staff, teachers, bus drivers, anybody else, parents, anybody else in the organization. All recommendations are directed to the board of directors which are primarily policy recommendations that's one of their major functions. And the superintendent who then decides which of those recommendations to incorporate and then delegates those to the appropriate people within the organization. So my point here is that recommendations are directed to the board of directors and to the superintendent only for them to consider. Okay, next page please. These are the five review standards. I'm not gonna go over these in detail right now. Other to note that standard one is what we call control, those are the governance pieces that dictate the vision and the mission of the organization as a whole. Number two is what we call direction. That's where we really get into the nitty gritty of the curriculum itself. Let's go on to the next slide please. You know, when we do these reviews, we are really precluded by our training through curriculum management solutions. We have to stay neutral as neutral as we can and we cannot put anything in the review if we can't substantiate it to support a finding based upon one of those five standards. But you know, we're human, we're all educators, we go into schools, we see the works that's being done and we like to point out things that were really impressed us while we were there when we worked with you. So I throw them in this PowerPoint here which is an introduction. You will not see the strength anywhere except in the executive summary. Some of the things we talk about in the executive summary briefly, we would like to point out to you some of the strengths. One is the commitment to the district merger or consolidation. We know that there was a lot of discussion. There's still discussion going on about that but the general consensus we had is that whether you like it, hate it or somewhere in the middle, you're going ahead and making the best of the situation. And that impressed us. We've been in other situations like that before where people didn't support some of the decisions that were made. You have that going in your favor, however. The second thing we were impressed by was the focus on long range planning. You have a strategic plan. It is expiring this year. You have district improvement plan. You have building improvement plans. I understand some of those are legally required but you have them and people refer to them from time to time. That impressed us as well. Next slide, please. The third thing is the emphasis on the individual child and your program to really focus on the skills for individual children and build their strength. And this was commented on by some of the teachers about not everything is about high stakes test. Boy, I'm on the same page with you on that. And you've really taken that and operationalized that with your personalized learning approach that you have. There isn't really a place that we could reflect on that in the report itself. So we put it in the executive summary to emphasize the fact that we do see that. We did see it. We do recognize it. And that of course is part of your strategic plan and part of your long range plan into the future, I'm sure. The fourth thing is the dedication to curricular alignment. We know that you have unpacked the Vermont standards very detailed and assigned standards to courses in the high school and also in the elementary school. We were really impressed by that and thought the work you did there was really fine and outstanding. And then the next slide, please. Devoted teachers and staff. Well, we heard it tonight. Passionate you are about the education of your kids. I've got a little narrative in the executive summary about that, not what you said tonight, but we heard some of these similar comments in the surveys that came in. They were not all that way. We heard a lot of comments. Some pros, some con about what's going on in the district. But the point is people are not shy about expressing their opinions and that's because they care about the work that's going on and they care about the kids in the schools.  I don't mean them that way. I'm just telling you what our takeaways were outside of the review itself where we have to remain neutral. Next slide, please. Standard one, I'm gonna get into the findings here are what we call control. This is where we look at things like policies, plans and planning, not just plans, but the ability for planning to take place within the district. We look at job descriptions and the organizational structure. Okay, next slide. Click it one more time for the 1.1 to come up. Okay, finding 1.1, just stop right there, Jim. I'll just read this and then talk a little bit about what I mean here. It says, while some elements of district and school planning are evident, the outdated strategic plan and district and school improvement plans are not sufficient to direct district efforts in achieving high levels of learning for all students. It's not very specific, I realize that intentionally because it's supported by the data that's available to you in the report. What we found is that, of course, your strategic plan is outdated and the district and school are not outdated but they need to be renewed every year. We have criteria or characteristics we look at for planning documents of high quality planning documents and we compare your document to these characteristics of high quality planning. Depending on the plan, it's anywhere between 12 and 16 criteria we're looking at and we ask whether you have met those. So what we have found here is most of your plans do not meet these high quality criteria. I mean, they're high, very few plans do meet all the criteria to see if they are adequate enough to take you where you want to go. So finding 1.1 talks about the first part of this finding, talks about the district and school planning and the plans that you have in place. And what we found is they are not adequate to provide you with the guidance that you need to make decisions throughout the entire district. Jim, click one more time. The second part of standard one findings has to do with board policies. We reviewed, we were presented with 64 board policies, all of them. We found 15 that had any reference to curriculum management. So there were a few, but not a large number. And we rated those policies on a scale from zero to three, awarding points for the specificity of each of those policies. And then we evaluated them in a sense. We compared them to our rubric that we used to come up with a rate of adequacy. You need to have meet 70% of the criteria in order to be adequate. In your case, you met only 8% of the criteria. So what it says is missing and incomplete board policies prevent the district from providing local direction for curriculum and establishing quality control of the educational programs and organizational function, organization functions. The issue here really wasn't that the policies were bad. It's just so many policies don't exist dealing with curriculum, assessment, instructional technology, instructional models, resource development within the district. Remember I talked about rational organizations and we have written documents to guide our work. The most critical written documents are board policies because those establish the groundwork for all of the decisions that are made. The policies basically become the law of the land and then how they are interpreted by the board to the administration to come up with administrative regulations and procedures to incorporate those policies that were schooled as critical in a rational organization. So the issue here is not that your policies are bad it's just there are so many policies missing and I will tell you I'm providing a sample curriculum management policy that covers many of those areas. I just talked about assessment, instructional models, instructional monitoring and how we make determinations in terms as to whether the curriculum is actually being implemented in the classroom or not. So there is part of a finding here dealing with board policies. Okay, one more time, Jim, click at one more. The third component of finding 1.1 deals with the plans for the various subcomponents within the district. The curriculum management system, the student assessment system, instructional technology and professional development. What we found is those plans they are compared to a rubric of criteria like I mentioned before to see if they meet adequacy you need like I said 70% of the criteria to be considered adequate. And the issue here once again is that most of these plans don't even exist. Doesn't mean you don't have curriculum documents or assessment documents or instructional technology it means you don't have a plan to guide the decision making that takes place. So you have these rational organizational pieces in place. As far as professional development we'll talk about that a little bit more. You do have a professional development plan that met much of the criteria. That is in part because you have a very precise policy that directs professional development within the district. Whereas these other areas the curriculum management assessment, instructional tech there is no policy essentially no policies to direct that with any specificity or any precision. Okay, next slide please. Now we'll move on to standard two. And this is where we're talking about the curriculum itself. We look at the curriculum management planning if it exists at all. We look at the existence of curriculum, looking at scope, the quality of the curriculum and I'll talk a little bit about how we determine quality and then the alignment of curriculum and assessment to resources. So next slide please. One thing I wanna make a comment about is state standards. You know, when school, when district started coming out with state standards about 30 some years ago many school districts said we don't need curriculum people anymore. We're just gonna teach to the standards. Many school districts still say that and they struggle. The problem with standards in states and Vermont is one of those is they're too broad. They're too general and they're too vast. They're not stated at a level of specificity as it says the teachers can use to help make decisions about lesson planning. They're frequently not spiraled, they're not sequenced and they're just too general for teachers to make much sense of them in terms of making decisions for daily instruction. So one of the issues is that as you have found you have unpacked the Vermont standards and assigned standards to different courses which is exactly what you should be doing is that we haven't gone to the next step beyond that writing curriculum documents as a district. Notice I'm saying as a district, not just as a teacher. So go on to the next slide, please, Jim. So what must the curriculum do in schools at the system level tightly held? They must focus on what's essential and significant beyond just the state standards. So this is your opportunity to incorporate your locally developed expectations as well. You need to connect them between grade levels or within grade levels between schools. And you must provide opportunities for all students to have access to the curriculum. It's called an equity piece. If students for some reason don't have access to the curriculum their educational opportunities are limited and we'll talk about that a little bit later on because equity did come up as one of the finding points. Next slide, please. The standard two finding. Okay, click one more time. Here's the first part of the finding. Remember I talked about scope. The scope of the written curriculum is complete. It says, and stop there. When I mean scope, there is an expectation that any course that's taught in our schools has written curriculums to support it. So how do teachers know what to teach? They go to the written curriculum. They go to the curriculum guide. We have an expectation in our process here that every course taught has written curriculum. Now I'm not saying whether it's good or bad or not. I'm just saying it exists. That written curriculum can be a full blown curriculum guide with all the details and all the bells and whistles or it might be a syllabus for a high school class. We're not particular about what is a curriculum guide or what is written curriculum. We just wanna know that curriculum exists. And what we found in the district that you have 100% compliance with all of your curriculum. So every course that's taught has written curriculum to support it. Then our next step beyond after that after we've determined that there was written curriculum is to analyze it. And what we said here, but the quality of the written curriculum is insufficient to provide direction for planning, teaching, and learning to assure alignment of the written taught and assessed curriculum. Now we can only analyze what's submitted to us. You may have some teachers in your building or you may be one of those teachers that has all the details contained in your lesson plan book. And we wouldn't see that because we're looking at that from a district level. But let me talk about the six criteria that we're looking at when we are trying to determine whether the curriculum is high quality or not. Like I said, there's six components, six criteria. The first component deals with clarity to the standards, how well is the standard defined in your curriculum document. The second area has to do with alignment to assessment. Where is that skill that's being taught in that standard or in that lesson assessed? Whether it's high, medium, or low stakes assessment or a classroom type of assessment. We expect that that's gonna be included in some fashion in your curriculum documents. The third area we look at are prerequisite skills for the student to be successful at mastering what's contained in that standard or expectation. Now, what do we mean by prerequisite skills? It might be a scope and sequence for a course. It might be a prerequisite class that a student needs before they take algebra two that they need algebra one and geometry or before they take geology, they need earth science. There's a number of different ways we can define prerequisites. But the point is teachers need to know what skills students are coming in with before they even pre-assess them to start the school year so they know whether the students have the background necessary to be successful in that class. The fourth area we look for are major instructional tools identified. This could be textbooks, it could be web resources, it could be something that's locally developed by the district or by the building. But somehow whatever is being used to do the teaching of those standards and expectations needs to be vetted at the district level to make sure that it is tightly aligned to the content, context, and cognition type of that standard that's being mastered by the child. The fifth area we look at are suggested classroom approaches to instruct that lesson. So we like to see a sample lesson so teachers know where to start when they're planning their lessons, maybe they can use that lesson, maybe they'll spin off from there, maybe they'll develop one of their own. But it's still one that's gonna be a suggestion to the teachers so they know where to go and they're not going to teachers pay teachers to download documents that may be a questionable quality. Not saying you shouldn't use outside resources, I'm saying we have to vet those for quality before we incorporate them into our classrooms. And the sixth area we look at are suggested student activities that they are asked to master those skills. And hence, those are the artifacts that we had you turn in earlier this year that we analyzed later on as part of this finding as well. We did an alignment piece to see whether those were actually aligned to the performance indicators that the teachers identified that they were aligned to. So we looked at those in terms of the content, the context, and the cognition level as well. So you have six criteria. You're rated on a scale of zero to three so you can get a possible three times six is 18 points total. You need 14 points or approximately 80% to be considered high quality. None of the courses that we looked at met the criteria of 18 points. Some departments were a little higher than others, but let me address why you didn't make the 18 or even 14 points that you need. It's just because you're not doing some of the things that we are looking for here. Standards was your highest area criteria one because you've unpacked the standards. And those were pretty tightly aligned, very tightly aligned in most cases. But things like prerequisite skills just has not been addressed. Coming up with instructional methodologies, this has not been addressed at least to the point that it's contained in curriculum documents or curriculum guides. That's work that needs to be done to make this more tightly held. Although we know some decisions about instruction are on the loosely held side. We recognize that, but they still need to be vetted for quality. In terms of by content department, the math courses had the highest overall score of 6.1 out of 18. The English language arts was next with 4.6 out of 18. The global citizenship, social studies, we call them most places 4.0 and science was 3.9. So there's some disparity there between the scores, some higher than others. And the other courses, the specials were all less than that. Those are the four that I'm focusing on here. Okay, so let me read through this again. The scope of the written curriculum is complete, but the quality of the written curriculum and use are insufficient to provide direction for planning, teaching and learning to ensure alignment of the written taught and assessed curriculum. I didn't spend time talking about the use of the written curriculum. I'll let you read about it in the report. But when we survey teachers, we found that the district curriculum documents were one of the fewest of the options of teachers of what they use. More often than not, teachers are more likely to go to another teacher or to an outside source like an online source somewhere to come up with their instructional ideas. And that runs counter to the tightly held, loosely held piece once again. Okay, click one more time and one more time. Okay, so finding 2.2 has to do with the student artifacts that were submitted to us for review. Like I said, we received more than 213, but some we couldn't use either the performance indicators were too voluminous for us to do with the alignment piece or the lesson is just not one we could analyze. So we had 213 artifacts that we use. 168 were elementary, 45 were secondary. Generally what we found that they were on grade level that was no surprise because of your work with performance indicators. However, we also found that they were generally of low cognitive demand, lower on Bloom's taxonomy and they employed what we call less engaging traditional classroom contexts. When we're talking about how you teach or what students are involved in, we categorize three different contexts. One is typical classroom type work like worksheets, teacher led discussion, working with another student on completing more of a low level activity. We have real life learning, which are more like projects. And then the third category is high stakes test preparation or test preparation in some fashion.  So you do wanna spend some time preparing kids for high stakes tests, but not so much that it takes away from the real world learning where the highest level of learning can take place in the highest cognition. What we found is in the artifacts we looked at, they tended to be more traditional classroom contexts. I'm just reporting what was submitted and they tended to be of that less engaging type activities, more traditional worksheets, fill in the blanks, multiple choice, things along that line. As far as the cognition level, I'm gonna contradict myself here. It's gonna sound like I'm contradicting myself. I'm really not because we had so many elementary artifacts submitted. What we found is in the elementary artifacts, 30% were at higher cognition, but at the secondary level, 62% were at higher cognition. Not saying that's reflective of what goes on on a daily basis. That's just reflective of what was submitted to us. So then the next step of what we did is we took four of your sample lessons that were submitted and we did a deep alignment analysis of those of content, context and cognition level to see how it was aligning with the performance indicator that you had identified. And we provided that to you as a sample of an activity that could take place within the district to help the central office staff, help principals and help teachers in being discrete consumers of our instructional materials that we are using in the classroom. When we look at the curriculum itself, we look to see if it's aligned in what we call topological alignment. That means a close match to the performance indicator, whether it is deeply aligned, meaning it goes beyond the performance indicator or whether it's an alignment mismatch and it doesn't meet up with the performance indicator at all. And we gave you examples of all of those based upon what you submitted to us. Okay, next slide, please. Now we're up to standard three where we're talking about connectivity. Here we're talking about the equity issue where all students give an opportunities to learn the skills, consistency across the district, instruction, luck, expectations, staff development, monitoring things along that line. Okay, Jim, one more click and one more. In finding 3.1 stop right there, deals with the professional development program. What we found is that you have a very robust professional development program in part because you have a good policy on that and you have a professional development plan that's pretty prescriptive. Doesn't meet all the characteristics. Like I said, this is an exceptions report. So I'm sorry about that, but that's what I'm required to do. But the professional development plan, what we found it is tightly based to, tightly campus based in part because of the history as a school district of being multiple districts. And there is not a lot of district wide oversight in terms of some of the activities that take place within those professional development offerings. I don't mean oversight in a sense of evaluation or quality, just oversight in the sense of what we're training our people to do to become more effective teachers in the classroom so we can all maximize our potential. Curriculum monitoring comes up in terms of how we are monitoring the curriculum implementation in the classroom. We survey teachers and principals about how often we see principals in the classroom. Got a variety of answers on that. Not a lot of consistency in terms of what principals are looking for when they come into the classroom or what teachers expect principals to look for when they come into the classroom to make sure that the curriculum is being implemented with fidelity according to what our expectations are. Okay, one more click, Jim. The second area deals with classroom visitations. And of course, this is the hot button area for everybody this year. And I'll be honest with you, it's a hot button area even when there isn't a pandemic. People ask about this all the time. So we went into classrooms just to take a snapshot picture.  We wanted to get a flavor of what was going on on February 8th and 9th in the school district, in the snow. And what we found is that it's tough to do right now because of the situation. So in finding 3.1, you will see a number of disclaimers about that, that it may or may not be reflective of a typical school year within the district. We tried to couch this in a way to make sure that you knew, that we knew, that you know that things are not the way they normally are right now. Well, the written curriculum is the written curriculum, the assessments of the assessments. But in terms of the decisions teachers were forced to make in their classrooms, that might have changed. We did ask going in, what are some instructional practices that you would hope we would see in the school as we were visiting? And the two areas that we saw, that we heard the most about were differentiation that wasn't defined for us and project-based learning. And as it says here, most of what we saw were lower levels of cognition, not exclusively, but they were lower levels of cognition and there weren't a lot of differentiation strategies that we saw. Now there's different ways to differentiate content, context, cognition level. You can differentiate how students practice the information, you can differentiate and how they perform the information for their assessment or when you determine mastery. The point of this is that, this is what we saw on the days we were there. We in the past, we have asked districts if they don't like what they saw there or they don't agree with it, find to do it yourself sometime. You should be doing this anyway, monitoring the instruction in the classroom. So next school year or the year after that, when you're more back to normal, I would certainly invite you to go in and do some visitations, teachers observing other teachers, using some protocols, using some strategies to collect some data in terms of what you're seeing in that classroom and share that information with your colleagues as part of a discussion with your staff meetings. So we can see where and how we are implementing the curriculum to our expectations. Okay, next one more click there, Jim. The last year here, I won't spend too much time but we did hear a lot coming in about students or in buildings that are not given opportunities like they are in other buildings, predominantly at the elementary but not exclusively at the elementary. We heard about foreign language offerings in the elementary school that were in some and not in others. We heard about music offerings, physical education that was not in keeping with one building to another. Nursing services that I believe has been addressed at this point but it was included in the report as well because we had heard about it. Opportunities for high school students with transportation to go to a local college campus and take high school classes or college classes for credit where students without transportation didn't have access for that. And in some cases math and science equipment that was not consistent in the elementary building is causing some students not to have access to curriculum materials because they didn't have the science equipment. Basically, we do have one recommendation on this and this recommendation is you need to crystallize this you need to come up with a policy that addresses it a procedure to address it and put it in place. We know what's been talked about at staff leadership team meetings. We know what's talked about in the community. We heard about it in interviews with board members and administrators. We included it in the final report because we know you need to address it and have been working on it. And it's an area that I think it's not an easy fix but it's one that needs to be on the agenda regularly. One more click please. Now we're looking at standard four which is the feedback of the assessment standard. Click one more time please, Jim. And again, what you see here is one finding for standard four. This finding really deals with an ability of a school district to determine whether their programs they have in place are working or not. And this is a tough one because you need to collect the data, you need to analyze the data and then you need to make a determination whether that program that you're spending money on is giving you the productivity that you're hoping for. Now what we found with assessment is that the district does not have a strong assessment program in terms of a program assessment plan. We talked about that in finding one. You do have an assessment plan but mostly it's a list of test dates and how that test data will be distributed to the schools. What we found in talking to teachers or interviewing teachers through the survey is that teachers utilize student assessment data to inform decision making at the classroom level like intervention, grades, placement for future years, all appropriate uses of student assessment data. But what is lacking is a district-wide systemic process to determine the implementation, continuation or termination of programs. And I'll point out one program is not a critique of the program but is one that was mentioned to us and that's your math program that you adopted a few years ago.  Well, the math scores, they didn't really change much at all. In fact, that's one of the things we were asked to look at. So our question was, well, what was your baseline data you used going in and then how did you determine how did you determine that the program itself was not providing the results? How did you measure that? And how often do you measure those results and make a determination as to whether you need to continue or make alterations to that program? And the answer was that there was no answer. It just isn't done. So there needs to be a plan in place as part of your student assessment program for a system that's used within the district. So when programs are adopted or think they need to be adopted, we have a measuring, a yardstick basically to determine whether it's working or not or whether the money should be spent on other programs or other activities. So that's basically finding 4.1. We did not spend a lot of time looking at your assessment data. Brian shared a little bit of it. Assessments are all out of whack now because of no testing last year or this year and last year's testing was suspect and the whole pandemic thing. So we did not spend any time looking at your assessment data other than to compare your math results to other similar districts like yourself to confirm the fact that you're not getting those math results and actually what we found is not that you... The fact your math scores have leveled off is an issue but what's a bigger issue to us or more urgency is that you're behind your similar demographic districts and that would be concerning to me if I was working in the district. So we included that. That's actually in finding two. Okay, one more click please, Jim. Standard five is productivity over look at budgeting practices and interventions. One more click. Another click after that. We had no findings there. It's not that we couldn't have had a finding but we go back one please. Okay, it's not that we couldn't have found a finding there if we wanted to about program based budgeting and measuring the results of the dollars spent on all the productivity type issues that you get into in a fiscal audits or fiscal review but we found the other areas were more urgency for you as a small school district. Okay, now go on please. So those five findings, we have four recommendations. It's our best advice based on 50, 60 years of experience of doing this. The first curriculum program review was done in 1976 in Columbus, Ohio and we've been rolling with these things ever since. They are not quick fixes. They are detailed recommendations and the timeline to put them in place. Look at the bottom three to five years to put into place longer to institutionalize. So you have to pick and choose what you're gonna work on first, second, third or some things you may not decide to work on at all. It's really gonna be up to you. Okay, one more click. You will see things like vision, mission, philosophy, beliefs.  These are opportunities for you to crystallize what your mission and vision are as a school district and make sure they are in written language that will guide the decisions that are made on a district level and even in a campus building or classroom level. Another click. The first recommendation deals with governance. Remember we talked about governance, those overarching ideas of what the district needs to be doing. We have a recommendation that policies need to be revised or developed if they don't exist. The second component of recommendation one deals with district and building plans. We're suggesting that you meet our review criteria for quality, make sure your objectives are reasonable. Schools have a tendency to have way too many objectives more than we can possibly do in a school year and make sure they're communicated to all the stakeholders. Heard some comments before about transparency that's always troubling to a school person to hear comments about transparency or lack thereof. We emphasize in these recommendations to make sure everybody is up to snuff on what's going on. The third area has to do with what we call departmental plans. I had the question yesterday when I talked with some of the central office staff about departmental plans. Really, I'm not talking about math versus social studies versus science department. By departmental plans, I'm talking about professional development as a department, even though it's the same people. Program evaluation as a department. So our recommendation is to make sure your departmental plans, if you don't have them, get them, if you have them, work on them to make them tighter that they're aligned to the district and school improvement plans and the curriculum management plan. Okay, next slide, please. As far as the curriculum management, this is recommendation two, to design a curriculum management plan that meets the review criteria. And once again, you'll be able to read about what those criteria are in the report. Then revise your K-12 curriculum for all subject areas but go beyond just the content alignment. Make sure you have context and cognition alignment as well to make sure we are teaching the students at the level of expectation that the performance indicator requires. If the performance indicator is vague, the district has to make a decision about how to teach that at what level of rigor. Make sure the curriculum is deeply aligned to the state standards, whether you like or hate state tests. We gotta take them and we have no choice about that or write your letters to your legislators about that. But as far as we're concerned in doing a curriculum program review like this, we have to make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure the students are ready for those high stakes tests as well as all the other assessments in our school districts. Another area to look at are district wide expectations for instructional resources coming up with a process to make sure instructional resources are tightly aligned.  Direct instruction, we saw a lot of that in classrooms. That's an instructional model, project-based learning. We saw some of that in classrooms. We've heard comments from people that you're not gonna see any project-based learning because of the pandemic. Well, you know what? We did see project-based learning in a number of classrooms. It wasn't a high level, but they modified it for the pandemic. So the teachers came to the classes rather than the students going to the teacher's room to keep that distance. The kids, of course, were naturally masked. They cleaned the manipulatives after each portion of the lesson where they touched things. Students working together in small groups, they weren't groups of four, they were groups of two, but they were on the same side of the table so they weren't face-to-face. They were facing the same direction to keep the chance of contamination down. So we did see instructional models like project-based learning, direct instruction, Socratic method, we saw some Socratic method taking place. So if there is an expectation, we've got to make sure people are trained in that. And then it's implemented with fidelity. Once again, I'll use that word to make sure students are likely to be successful at high stakes test time or whatever the assessment is. And then the last one here is to develop unity in the monitoring practices. And we mentioned that earlier, that there are walk-throughs taking place from principles, but it's not consistent across the district in terms of how often it happens or even what those principles were looking for. Not to evaluate people, to see if the curriculum is being implemented the way the district expects it to be implemented. Curriculum and instructional choices. Next slide, please. The third recommendations deals with professional development, which like I said, you have a strong professional plan already, professional development program already. We recommend you enhance your professional learning plan, align it to our criteria for those areas you didn't meet expectations, link those professional development offerings to district priorities that you'll be redeveloping with your new strategic plan, and then monitor the results of that professional development. You know, they're really, most school districts do not monitor whether the PD is being used at all. They train teachers, train principals, how to do things and then nobody ever checks if it's used at all or whether it's successful when it is implemented. You need to have a system in place to do all of that. Another click, please, or recommendation number four. And this deals with assessment. Come back one. There you go. Full screen, please. Deals with assessment. We've touched on this already, design both the student assessment plan and a program evaluation plan that allows you to determine whether you're successful in what you're doing. You know, the program evaluation plan would be for programs like interventions that are specialized programs to address students deficiencies. The student assessment plan is used to determine whether the curriculum is effectively written or not. So you look at some of your test scores on these state tests, and you say, well, our kids aren't doing very well. We ask why. Well, there's only so many things you can do to tweak it. You can look at the curriculum to see if it's aligned to the assessments. You can look at the instructional practices to see if those are the right instructional practices that you've been using to teach those skills. Or you can look at the professional development of the teachers. Maybe the teachers don't even have the skills they need because we haven't trained them. So determinations have to be made based on your student assessment program to help inform you about the choices you're making in terms of curriculum selection and alignment and your instructional choices. The second bullet you see here using student assessment data to make informed decisions about curriculum effectiveness. I just talked about that. A formalized process for selection implementation and evaluation of programs and using data as part of the feedback loop for the continuation and termination of programs. So those are the four recommendations. They're huge. They can all be done at once. We'll be asking, I'll be suggesting here the next slide that the superintendent take a look at these recommendations and make some suggestions to the board. So Jim, go on to the next slide. How to read. This says auto report. I changed that before. I should see how to read the report because this isn't really an audit but it's a slide I used from before. First, start with the executive summary. Skim through that so you get a flavor of what the report is about. Like I said, that's around 12 to 14 pages. It includes those strengths, includes generally the recommendations, includes generally the findings. Then when you have the full audit report or the full report, the 130, 140 pages, I'm gonna suggest that you not start at the beginning and read through it but start with each finding head. So 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1. You will see the finding head. It'll be in gray. And then beneath that finding head, you'll see two or three paragraphs describing why it's important to discuss this topic. Why is this finding even something we wanna talk about? So it puts it in some context or perspective in terms of the whole district-wide system. So read each finding head and then the first two to three paragraphs of each finding. Jim, click the button please. From there, go back to the recommendation section in the back, it's around 25 or 30 pages and read through the recommendations section so you can see how detailed these recommendations are in terms of what we are suggesting that you do. Jim, click. Then you can look through the individual findings to see the rationale for the finding or the data points. That's where all the data is at. That's where all the rubber meets the road, so to speak, information is at. The data is simply there to support our finding. Like I said, the data is triangulated. We don't have any finding that's not supported by at least two of our three data points and most are supported by all three data points. One more click, Jim. It's not a cover to cover read. You will find that right away. You don't start at the beginning and read to the end. It's not a James Grisham novel or anything like that. It's a technical piece of writing that's used as a resource, kind of like an auto repair manual. You're flipped to the parts that you need. Okay, go ahead, Jim. What's the next step? Well, like I said, the board will receive the report next week. You'll receive a number of hard copies and then a PDF. Notice I underlined the word receive. I'm suggesting to the board that you not accept the report and you did not approve the report because we don't want you to give the impression that you agree with everything in the report. We know there's gonna be things in there you don't agree with. So you receive the report. That just indicates that it's arrived on your doorstep. Then what I suggest you do is you direct the superintendent to prepare a response to the report. In his response, he might wanna prioritize the areas needing attention. There were a lot of them. He can prioritize them based on what he knows and what you know about the district. What conditions most adversely affect students? There might be some things that are higher priority from his perspective than we might be aware of. Which findings most adversely affect the system? So which things should they be, should you be looking at first, second and third because they are critical urgent issues? And then he should also, this is a suggestion for me, develop a board of directors, central office, district plan to address the recommendations. Another comment about the what's next here, what I would strongly encourage the board not to do is to respond to the report themselves. You wanna keep the chain of command in place here. They have hired the superintendent to exercise his professional judgment, to guide them in the decision-making process that they're involved in on a monthly basis at their board meetings just like you heard tonight. So rather than them responding to the report, what we suggest is that the superintendent responds to the report and they respond to his response. So any decision that they make as a board, speaking as one voice is always strongly suggested, is in response to what the superintendent is recommending to them. That way it closes that feedback loop and they're not adopting something or approving something from an outside agency from out of state. I happen to be in Ohio, the central office is in Iowa. So we're all over the country where we may not have the local flavor as you've mentioned in some of your comments earlier today. So the board receives the report, asks the superintendent to prepare a response and then they act on whatever his recommendations are to the report. Another click. And that's me, Jeff Thunberg. So appreciate your attention. I forgot to look at the clock to see what time I started. I know it's, I've been on for a while here, but I made it through. Well, we had six pages of viewers, now we're down to four, so. Okay, Flo. Thank you. Flo, do you want to, let me take any questions. People might have a few questions. Yeah, thank you, Jeff. Board members, do you have questions? I think it's pretty late. I see Jonah, Jonas, please go ahead. So I have a few questions. Jeffrey, thank you so much for this. So I have a couple of different questions. The first one, obviously I'm not an educator. So can you describe the educational philosophy that is at the foundation of your rubrics and your evaluation methods? And I'll just list my other questions to give other people an opportunity. What kinds of different recommendations, from these that you've given us, do you often make to districts? That is, what are you not recommending to us? Do you, two more. Do you have any data on how districts have improved following CMSI audits or reviews? And how important, can you talk about how important leadership and stakeholder buy-in is to success in implementing recommendations like these? Sorry for the laundry list. Yeah, let me take the last item first, you said about stakeholder buy-in. There's an old saying that says culture trumps strategy every time. So if the culture of the school district in this case is one that is resistant to any sort of recommendations or outside change, you're gonna have trouble. Or regardless how strong the strategies are, how right on key the strategies are. So culture makes a huge difference. So leadership then makes a difference as well. That's why I think it's a good opportunity when I was contacted about this, it's a good opportunity to take on a project like this because of the recent consolidation of the school district. So people are redefining their roles anyway in terms of what's my domain, what's somebody else's territory, there have been some turf issues going on in terms of what I'm responsible for. People don't like to give up those areas where they are their favorite areas to work in or areas of expertise. So there needs to be some compromise with all of that as well. In terms of the philosophy behind the recommendations and the criteria that we use, they are based on 50 years of effective schools research and you can read about it in the full audit report. It talks about the procedure that we go through with that. It was started by Dr. Fenwick English. Like I said, back in 1976, he's still working now a professor of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Even though he's in his eighties now, he's still working away. He's really the father of modern curriculum alignment. He's the one that wrote the book on that and he's developed these procedures and protocols down to the years. I'll just leave it at that other than to say we look at all aspects of the implementation of a plan or planning processes to make sure it's most likely to succeed. Thank you, Jeff. Diane and Jill, you're on deck and then Kari. Well, Jill had her hand up first.  Go ahead, Jill. Oh, it looks like I'm already unmuted. So I guess, Jeffrey, it's hard to listen to the presentation having not read the full report. So I'm looking forward to seeing that. Can I just say one thing about that? In fact, I always recommend we do the presentation before you get the report or else I can never get your attention. It's kind of like when you're teaching fourth grade and you want to do a lesson in math and use a lot of manipulatives, the kids are using blocks and cubes and things. The teacher never passes them out until first they made the assignment to the kids. So I've given you your assignment. Here's the general overview. You're going to get the report. Now you know where to look in the report to find the salient information. So go ahead, Jill. Yeah, thanks. I guess that's my question because I have to say listening to your presentation. So I'm not an educator. I'm a board member. So I'm not steeped in education, policy and curriculum. And so for me, it feels very jargony. And so what I'm trying to understand is whether the report is going to give me what I feel like I need as a decision maker, which is a better understanding of in an ideal world, what might this look like compared to what we look like now? And then really specifically what changes might we make? I think that sounds like that's more the job for the next step of the district and the superintendent and his team. But I'm just trying to understand if the reading the report is going to give me a better understanding of what the heck we're actually talking about because it's really hard for a non-expert, at least this non-expert to really grasp what it all means. Maybe it goes to the latest of the hour that always impacts me. I'm pretty much cooked after two hours of board meetings. There is that. Well, it's definitely a technical report. There's no doubt about that by design. You remember the, I think the second thing or third thing I told you to do after the executive summer and redefining heads go to the recommendations because the recommendations are broken down in such a way that they're pretty much plain English, plain language and it will tell you precisely what the board of directors should consider doing. And some of it is to assign jobs to the superintendent but others are to adopt the policy based on this and look to this page in the document or this finding in the document to see what we mean by that. So it'll be pretty well spelled out and Jill, I think you'll be able to get a better grasp on what your decisions should be or what choices you should make in terms of what your role is in helping to put these pieces into place. Okay, I'll look forward to that. I won't be reading it while on vacation next week. I have to confess I'm going to wait. You can get on your phone. Yeah, no, I won't be doing that. Thank you, Jeff Diane. Yeah, so I am an educator and also I was an educator in Washington Central a number of years ago. And to me, it would have been helpful to see the report first because as I'm looking through that, I could recognize the work that has been going on in this district for a long time. And I think that, so and I wanna be clear that when our questions come up it isn't that we're being resistant, it's that we're trying to understand. And so when