Let's start the currently illuminated Montpelier Roxbury board of school director's meeting we'll start at 6.30 and first order business is public comment and again public comment is a place where the board receives input from the public we're in a listening only mode but the feedback give us is very very important we also appreciate the perspectives you bring I also appreciate that that sometimes it can be difficult to get in front of us and tell stories that oftentimes have a personal aspect to them including ones that touch you know your your children or other people that are important to you so anyone in the room who wants to make public comment please come up to the desk and announce yourself my name is Lisa Burns I've been in the district since 2012 I think I am somewhat well known to some of you who read my summary post and I'm a bit of a irritant to many of you I I am afraid that's the information I've gotten back from your feedback but I'm here because well first I'd like to ask if it will be possible to for the public to ask questions after the data presentation will that be a possibility that is not how we usually proceed we're definitely happy to you know have questions emailed to some like our others so no one can ask the public cannot ask questions it's not a publicly open session well usually often it can be made but that's fine because I am fairly certain that all of you have reviewed the data that's going to be presented and I think that probably all the board members have a lot of questions to ask themselves and I just wanted to start by saying I do not mean to be an irritant to any of you I think we all have the same goal which is top-notch education in our district and I think we all think that's why any of us show up here it's the most important thing we ever give our kids and and I I believe that in our district we have an absolute recipe for total success we have brilliant inquisitive engaged children we have wonderful teachers in the district and I mean almost across the board we have top-notch teachers and we have engaged and concerned parents and with those three things I think the academics in this school district can be top-notch and I know this board has decided finally to make academics one of the top three priorities for themselves and closing the academic gap and I am grateful to the board for that so what I would like to ask is as you all listen to the data presentation and you all have the opportunity to question it that you do think about what data is being presented to you what data is not being presented to you in what format the data is presented to you can that data be compared to previous years data in any reasonable form and I'd like you to think about that as you look at the data and like I said I know you all have gone through these numbers and I apologize for offending our superintendent earlier today when I said the data was unflattering she found that disrespectful I think it would be disrespectful if I called the data flattering but that's a difference of opinion and I will just say lastly this the thing that kind of spun me into action as I said I think some of you don't read my maybe none of you read my summaries but they are well read and I have a lot of responses from them but what started me really off was not the track but it was this this assertion by you all that there was no significant no significant academic loss in this district due to COVID and that just strikes me as so absurd and untrue that I was spurred to this year school year's worth of action and every parent I have asked and every student I have asked in a neutral way was there learning lawsuit of COVID I have a hundred percent yes there was in this district and as a starting point for your summer retreat where you will be addressing academics and closing the gap I would like to ask you all to think about if you were sitting in a room with your fellow parents of fellow students if you would look them in the eye and say no there was no academic loss in this district if your child is having a problem that's on you because it wasn't our district and I don't think many of you would be able or willing to do that and so to do it as a philosophy whether it's to justify your spending or whatever that comment is problematic and it is no place to start a discussion of how you want to make academics better in this district and as we look at this data tonight there are appalling problems with academics that are apparent or maybe they're not I've been told many times that my information by this board and the administration is either anecdotal or it I misunderstand it or I just deliberately misrepresent it or I come from a point of privilege because I'm concerned about academics or that I'm disrespectful because I question the quality of the academics and I think that is not a good place to start so please as you hear this data and I will say lastly when we talk about COVID and its impact on our district and how that's affecting us three years later Libby gave a beautiful talk at the high school graduation last week and Jim was there to watch it I know where she said that COVID defined this graduating class of 2023 and yet this board says that COVID had no academic impact on them I just can't buy that and I think when you start to assess where we are academically and how we can move forward starting from a point of honesty is vital and not this self deception that we can only say nice things so I would like to see this board ask hard questions of one another and of administration and the leadership because that hasn't happened and it puts us in a really bad place thank you very much for your time thank you uh any other public comment in the room uh anyone on the screen oh yeah please cool oh hey there hello hey hi I'm Angela Shea and I am a mother of three children in the Montpelier Roxbury school district and I just want to start by acknowledging the enormous challenges educators in our districts have faced for the past few years as we've had to navigate this pandemic and a time of exceptional social change as a former educator and school social worker I know it has not been easy but I thank you for stepping up to help our community during this time and for your efforts on behalf of our children and while I acknowledge and celebrate the good work that you've done and supporting our children I think it'd be disingenuous of me to do so without also sharing the areas where I know our districts coming up short so places where we could do better and be curious my children are not intuitive readers and one of my children has a pretty complex learning profile which means that they learn differently from their peers and as a parent and someone who cares deeply about education and community I need you to know that over the past several years navigating the special ed system and the special education program has been time consuming confusing and at times demoralizing we've been on a very long multi-year journey trying to ensure our child has the support that they need and that they're entitled to and I'm pleased the district's making changes to its reading instruction using evidence-based methods this will be helpful for both intuitive and non-intuitive readers unfortunately we've had a long road of where we have been subject to inconsistent instruction not based on research or best practices for students with learning challenges and pretty much subject to non-existent progress monitoring and while I'm grateful there's change I still remain frustrated that it's taken so long and I'm concerned about the ability and the time that it will take to repair for those who lost so much there are times that when when interacting with leadership about these topics there appears to be a vibe of general defensiveness lack of curiosity or respect for the experience of atypical learners and their families several board meetings ago we heard there was no learning loss however twinfield union berry town berry city and u32 have all acknowledged that there indeed was learning loss in their communities and they've arranged for robust six-week summer programs at least three hours a day for both general and special ed students if we invent if we eventually conclude that there is learning loss in our district can we just plan to seed to think about a similar program for next summer currently as it stands our special ed students in the district if they qualify are entitled to a 30-minute slot lesson for six weeks and at any point in the middle of the day and to me that feels like a pile of assumptions around privilege and resources when you consider that as a schedule in a time frame we can't continue to hold conversations about equity inclusion and mental health without talking about reading and writing I'm a well-resourced woman and I can barely figure this out over the years I've met countless frustrated and confused families who invests thousands of dollars in tutoring online software phonics programs and outside evaluations to supplement their children's learning this does not feel equitable and what about the families who don't know what to look for or worse yet who can't pay for tutors this is a wonderful community and we have wonderful educators who work hard every day I'm grateful and I'm concerned the road ahead is long and real change takes real time so I look forward to future open conversations questions collaborations and brainstormings about these important topics thank you for your time thank you very much and someone else yes please come up thank you I have to tell you I read a story about a woman who was struck with lightning and as I raced across the field out there I thought it's going to be me um I know oh my gosh I did you read the story no but I thought certainly cross my mind was on Apple news oh my goodness um I made it alive my heart might be stopped here um anyway hello I know most of you um but my name is Laurie Duff and I'm a parent of two children in the MRPS system um and I just want to make a quick public service announcement about renaissance star educational testing that makes up the bulk of the educational data at the school board presentation tonight and for people who might be listening or hear this later since 2019 students in our district have been taking the computer adaptive evaluations and they have great data both for the school board presentations and for parents who are wondering how their kids are doing it's not high stakes testing but it's a broad look at how a child is progressing in English language arts and math there's even a graph which shows progress over time and it's it's actually very cool information obviously it's not the end all be all for what a child knows and standardized test scores definitely have limitations they can be easily manipulated they can be used for different and sometimes conflicting purposes but that said it's a great piece for getting a peek at how your child's doing academically and supporting our children and their academics is the fundamental reason we're all here unfortunately most parents aren't aware that their child takes these evaluations three times a year and they've never seen their child's results in our district it's really hard to know how your child's doing academically because papers sort of stopped coming home during COVID the school conferences are led by our children in a performative context and due to the structure of our grading system it's kind of hard to actually understand what something like a 2.75 means on a grade card so it's nice to have some concrete clear data about how your child is doing especially when you can see it over time and you can compare it to others nationally even better the renaissance star company itself is committed to involving parents in their child's education they say no matter how you use the data remember that parents must be involved in decisions concerning their children and to help in the communications the assessments come with parent reports they also say that students perform better when parents and guardians are actively involved in their learning they've created a home connect service which allows parents to have email notifications and access to scores at home so why is it that families in our district have never seen the scores I and other parents have been asking to have the star scores released to families on a regular basis recently the administrative team met and Libby sent out an email which I actually did not receive but which was forwarded to me from a friend and the email conclusively stated whoa great I know right that scores would not be given to families unless they asked for them the rationale for refusing to release the scores on a regular basis was because the star assessment is a screener tool quote the purpose of a screener is not diagnostic in nature it provides overly generalized information and is one of many pieces of information the team may use to decide on the needs of students because of this the district won't be releasing them to families unless they specifically reach out and ask for them to me the rationale doesn't actually make a lot of sense because school screened for a lot of things but they still let parents know for example students are screened for vision problems the test is not diagnostic but I still want to know if my child took the test and if they can see I want to and I have the right to access information under the federal educational rights and privacy act and I urge the school board to discuss this to help find ways to partner with parents around this issue transparency and communication are vital pieces of working together in any system I mean ultimately though I'm wondering if the information from the star assessment is not valuable and it's merely a screener then why does it form the basis of the educational achievement data for tonight's presentation if the information is not important enough to send to parents why are we spending time on it thank you Laura thanks anyone else in the room no thank you anyone on the screen if you could raise you can raise your hand with the lower hand function or you can just come off or come on camera and wave looks as though no one all right thank you you know thank you for the input that was very helpful uh consent agenda is next and also you want to add something right Jill yes okay the finance committee would like to add to the consent agenda an item that we discussed in the finance committee it's a resolution authorizing the issuance of procurement cards for for our municipality for several administrative positions to allow for things like registering for conferences and things like that the expense of processing all the purchase orders is actually pretty excessive when you add up staff time to process the paper and pass it back and forth and the bank that specializes in this is the one that all the Vermont districts use requires a formal resolution so we'd like to add that to the consent agenda a second from above for voting I can read it real quick or I can read it should I just read it now so it's read into the records since yeah sure all right so this is a resolution authorizing issuance of individual procurement cards whereas the board of the Montpelier Rocksbury school district has the authority to enter into an agreement with the bank of Montreal for purchasing cards and let's see anything else we want to add if you don't need to now therefore be it resolved by the board that the chairman is authorized to enter into an agreement with the bank of Montreal to secure procurement cards for each authorized employee of the municipality under such terms and conditions as approved by the board the board authorizes the business manager to execute a p-card program agreement on its behalf it's the resolution great any any questions about that are we the municipality yeah sorry I should have I just got this a little while ago we're the municipality for the purposes of this okay shanty I apologize who's going to get cards the principals and central office directors and our procurement cards like a district credit card yeah okay currently what's happening is we're all using our personal cards and getting reversed right will the cards have a limit on them yeah they're only up to a thousand oh okay and then they get paid off and so it's like a thousand dollar line of credit on a plastic and I can't remember the exact number but then the volume of under one hundred dollar purchase orders that the business office has to process and therefore the staff has to fill out paperwork to get reimbursed for it was like two thousand or something really different items yeah under a hundred dollars and the cost of the paperwork involved with the reimbursement is about a hundred dollars for each of those things when you add up the cost to staff to process it this will save money I move to approve the consent agenda with the addition of the resolution from the finance committee thank you I'll a second any discussion I'm sorry I'm texting trying to arrange a ride from my daughter who's playing oh I have a quick just request about the consent agenda when when letters of resignation are sent to us would be possible to add a position in the building that they're resigned from because sometimes I don't know who the person is just based on their name we can try that I mean if it's not too much yeah thanks any further discussion all is a favor I I any opposed great consent agenda passes next the board learning focus uh Peggy Sue and Mike and Jess and Nick and Nick thank you for joining us that you didn't if I have a news what we can all yeah I'll start thank you for having us kind of a weird night we have a short presentation that accompanies the board report that you all saw prior so if there's questions that come up from the report as we're going through the presentation feel free to pass those the first slide is the academics and over on the left hand side there's an update on our continuous improvement plan goal which we talked about was decreasing the number of students needing tier three supports to no more than five percent at each school this year was really kind of our baseline year of gathering that data and you can see the percentage of students that access tier three those numbers are a little bit contextual though so for example at the high school there's severe limitations in the number of students that can access tier three because of the master schedule and things like that that we're changing for next year so it's not all apples to apples all the way down through there but additionally what we've done is we've done a lot of learning this year from challenges and from things that we dug into and just kind of want to walk through each of those one of the big things that we walked away with is needing a better understanding of our readers through diagnostic assessments so we have worked really hard this year to incorporate a layer of diagnostic assessments that put together a really clear profile of our readers k through 12 Libby can tell you she walked into my office today and we were scoring spelling inventories and it's just amazing data that can tell us a lot about students and what their needs are so we're really excited about implementing that for next year with fidelity across our schools and that will give us better information about student growth and is what we're doing working and that's the information that we really want to share the second bullet there talks about that a little bit more celebrating focus and focusing on growth through so Julie Conrad the principal at Main Street Middle School actually dug into a lot of the data that we've been collecting and found ways to celebrate students that were may not normally be celebrated for the hard work that they're doing by showing the significant growth that they've made in their goals throughout the year academically particularly in reading and math so we we've learned that we need to do more of that we need to really celebrate those students that are working hard and making progress but maybe out of level or maybe working at a different grade level than they're actually placed in but they're still working hard and they're still progressing and what we're doing to support them is working so we need to do more of that we need to focus on goals and specific skills worked for successful for students so that just feeds into a lot of learning we did in tier three this year with our interventionists really seeing where when we focus on micro skills and progressions for students we see progress success and confidence in those students so we need to keep replicating that we need to keep refining keep getting better at targeting those skills and those diagnostic assessments are going to help us really do that and measure to make sure it's working we did a little experiment this year we involve students in setting their goals all the way down to kindergarten if you went into the UES intervention space you'd often see an interventionist sitting with a student and they before they start a cycle of intervention they write out their goals or they articulate their goals and they go up on the wall so the students can be a part of writing the goals about what they're going to be working towards and we saw tremendous engagement in that through that we also did that at the middle school in mathematics and we saw tremendous engagement so we want to multiply that and empower those students to be a part of that we're making some big changes to mainstream middle school and mhs structures of tier three delivery next year incorporating them more into the master schedule of mhs one of the big challenges here at the high school was working it into student schedules so that they could see an interventionist on a more regular basis there were a lot of gaps in times between visits and and it was really challenging for our interventionists and for our students so we've got an update to that and then at mainstream middle school we're doing something similar we've been working with a few folks a few different folks on how to incorporate a more structured literacy opportunity for adolescent readers specific to adolescent literacy and it's been really fantastic julie conrad and the teachers over there have really done a lot of thinking in so we're we're very excited about that and we've increased the amount of interventionists at main street middle school by two by two Peggy sue and I spent a lot of time talking and we've got some plans to be able to work more collaboratively between special education and tier three interventionists it's actually happened quite organically throughout the year we're excited to really put that into full force next year to make that smoother for families smoother for students smoother for interventionists and special educators to kind of make better use of the resources that we have to be able to target those specific needs for students the big work in curriculum land this year was specific connections to priority standards for tier one and tier two when we're working to improve tier three numbers we're really working to improve tier one and tier two so classroom instruction and that enrich and enhance time with teachers so we've spent a tremendous amount of energy and time working with educators k through 12 on identifying the priority standards creating proficiency scales for literacy and math k through 12 and a little bit of dabbling at pre-k as well to be able to articulate that to also make it clear what is taught when and what are we responsible for at each grade level that was big geeky work that I absolutely love and I'm very proud of the work that everybody put into it it was a tremendous effort by the schools I mentioned a strong focus on adolescent literacy strategies we have dug deep into that land we are working with two resources right now Dr. Sarah Lupo and Julie Brown actually Dr. Julie Brown from Woodstock and we've been working with those two folks and plan to work in a cohort through CVEDC next year with Sarah Lupo so we're excited to have structured support to work on that throughout the year for both the middle school and the high school and then a big focus for next year is digging in on diagnostics for math assessments as well we've we've done a lot of learning and there's a slide later on that will talk about literacy diagnostics but we need that same level diagnostic information for mathematics and our mathematicians so we're going to be looking at a gap for main street middle school and the high school and taking back into the PNOA which is primary numbers and operations assessment for the elementary level we're excited to do that and we've got some great math thinkers and some great folks they're going to help us dig into that Amy Kimball is our instructional coach it's she's all all for it all excited to dig in so I'm confident that we'll have some great diagnostic information about our learners and mathematics for next year. All right so I have some information here just a couple things to highlight just looking at the number of students that we have in the district currently well as of June 1st with IEPs so we started in our November report we were at 115 K-12 as of June 1st we have 139 students K-12 on IEPs preschools crept up a little bit from 18 to 23 so that first graph is just showing you that the graph in the middle just today I thought I wonder what child count looks like so child count is collected by the agency of education every year on December 1st to look at the number of students with IEPs I was able to go back to 2015 so you can see we are our numbers are continuing to rise 2015 we were at 119 and again this year we are 139 so there was a little bit of a dip but for the last four years our numbers have been climbing upwards 504 plans we also have a slight increase not a huge increase over the district but those also are increasing in number and then the bottom graph is just the number of initial special education referrals that we had this year so either initiated by parents or by school teams where the question was as should we be doing a special education evaluation 23% of the teams met and decided not to do an evaluation for different reasons of the evaluations that we did 49% were eligible 19% were not found to be eligible for special education so I thought that was interesting information some celebrations from this year we've done a lot of work to align practices and our expectations across the district so that the experience for families and students doesn't feel vastly different depending on what school you're at or what case manager you have we are working starting next year to create longer relationships for case managers with students and families so we have set up plans next year so that case managers will be with students for at least two years in some situations those will be three-year relationships and at the high school we're looking to do four-year relationships so that families know the case manager case managers know the student they don't have all that time where they have to get to know each other and you know can hop right in when school starts with services and as Mike said a lot of collaboration this year between special education with the interventionists and also the SEL people so that we're building stronger systems for all students I do want to do a shout out to the special educators in the district so with our growing needs all year just a reminder that we had three open special ed positions that never got filled this year so they all stepped up to do what we had to do for kids despite the fact that we were down in numbers so they're awesome and I think we need to make sure that they hear that they're great and that we appreciate them because it's a tricky job and doesn't always feel appreciated I think looking forward next year we are doing some IEP development professional development with the ability challenge in August so that we will have more consistency around what our IEPs look like the summer we're doing some LEA training for the principals around special education and also Jess is going to do some 504 stuff so again trying to increase the capacity of our administrative team big work next year is the implementation of the new special ed regulations so help making sure that the professionals understand it and also working with families to make sure that they understand the changes and what they mean the literacy work is definitely something that we've been doing a lot of work on and just continuing to build the collaboration so we're looking for more opportunities for all of our teams to to be able to meet on a regular basis to talk about kids and practices and all the things I think that's it so I'll talk about sort of like HHB behavior and discipline and then I'll talk about SAO services as like a separate topic so as far as HHB and behavior and discipline I think some successes are we've really increased our compliance and understanding of like HHB policy and what it looks like in action I've gotten a lot of feedback from the assistant principals just feeling like they can move through that process a little bit easier and understand the nuance and can navigate it with more ease we've really increased our use of intentional and consistent use of RP and really pairing restorative practice our restorative practice work in a systematic and more intentional and consistent way to pair it whenever we have incidence or violations that we need to repair a harm for and have really started to focus on restorative work and SCL skill building as really the primary driver of how we respond to incidents that cause harm we've done a lot of work with faculty around trauma informed practices or restorative practices asset based language and our SAO professionals have done their first round of collaborative problem solving which I'm really excited about because they think next year that'll really inform how we respond and how we problem solve with kids around behavior incidents and we've really started to shift our thinking about suspension specifically as a way for us to build in time to be really intentional with how we respond to behavior rather than it being the end of the all sort of response to any behavior that may result in that. Additionally I think we've done some really good intentional work around university universal community building things like dodgeball is happening minute to win it there's dino dances which are really adorable if you walk around UES you'll see kids dancing so you think that's been a really intentional effort this year to so we're not just responding to events but we're proactively trying to prevent them I'm really excited to continue that work we have done a lot of celebrating breakfast and some really intentional transition work to help students transition to different schools and I walked into MSMS this week and was welcomed with a bowl of ice cream as an ice cream social. Next year we're going to really increase and continue training our SAO professionals around restorative practices on how to do that work in a way that's really intentional and supports welcoming kids and wrapping kids and we're going to continue the collaborative problem solving so we'll have another training around and we'll be the SAO professionals will be engaging in coaching to really implement that in a way that's consistent and with fidelity. We also are going to work to like increase our ability to analyze school and grade level data and respond a little bit more swifter there's going to be a swiftly sorry there's going to be a new team structure so we're actually building in an embedding time for teams to look at school level data grade level data and individual data so we can see trends and respond a little bit more quickly quicker and based on what we're seeing in the behavior data and in the SEL data and I'm really looking forward to working more closely with up for learning and those students groups so we can increase student voice and what our proactive universal community building looks like in our schools. So as far as SEL services you know I think one of the successes there is that we are pairing SEL needs with SEL work and services so students are being matched and really targeted for what they need and we've really started to create the outline and common language around what our SEL MTSS tiered systems support is going to look like so I think that's been a really good starting point for next year you know we're really the students really showing SEL needs especially with our younger folks and so and I think it's also showing a need to increase our ability to be flexible and cycle kids through services and use data to help understand when we can scaffold student support and what decisions do we need to make when students aren't making progress and are continuing to need SEL interventions long term so again we're going to build in a team structure to really look at the data regularly to progress monitor more intentionally and to help build our ability to analyze that data and use that analysis to inform what we do next with students based on their needs and then I think this also really highlights our need to continue to embed SEL in tier one instruction and figuring out what that looks like and I'm really excited we have two really strong SEL teachers who are going to serve as SEL coaches working with general educators both in groups of grade level teams and individually to help them really embed and shift their practice to embed SEL. So when you say build in like team structures to make sure that that data is being looked at is that like building level admin or how will that happen? Yeah so essentially we're going to have a similar SEL team structure in each of our buildings and so for example there'll be a tier one SEL leadership team composed of like me AP's teacher reps who will look at the grade level data and then once the teacher up will go into their grade level team meeting and talk about the data and what strategy is and how we're going to respond to them. So I will get to share a little bit of the chronic absenteeism data for our district every time I have the opportunity to come in front of you I get to tell you what chronic absenteeism is again so as a reminder or for those that are new if you aren't as familiar chronic absenteeism is missing 10% or more of the school year in our school district that's 18 years or 18 days over the course of the year and so this is excused absences this is unexcused absences this is out of school suspension all of those days missed are part of the calculation for chronic absenteeism the reason we look at the data in this way is that there is a lot of research behind the predictive factors of being chronically absent that hits at being able to read at grade level by third grade that hits at being on track academically in middle school and is a predictor of high school dropout as well so when we look at if a young person is in or out of the building that's our biggest concern we're looking at chronic absenteeism as a reminder we had part of the continuous improvement was kind of setting a target of reducing our chronic absenteeism rate as a district trying to get that number down to 20% by 2024 as we see kind of how the year has unfolded in the way that student engagement has unfolded this year we have not seen the kind of decrease we would have expected here in our district and really what we're seeing across the country as well is that the pre-pandemic levels of chronic absenteeism are not back in the way that a lot of folks were expecting so we're past some of the bigger quarantines which we thought were maybe inflating some of our chronic absenteeism numbers but we are really not seeing that quick bounce back in the ways that we had hoped so a lot of the work this year from my work has been a lot of really significant tier three intervention so supporting young people that are significantly chronically absent really having a hard time just getting into the building for the first time and maybe a year or more students that are that are experiencing some pretty severe anxiety about being around other students just being in this space can be really hard so a lot of the efforts this year were really again targeted toward the tier three students who may be 20 plus percent missing school at 20 20 plus percent or more of their time so as a district this year as of June 2nd we were at 31 percent so so it's come down a bit we've seen the most gains really at the elementary school and middle school this year where we've seen absent chronic absenteeism at UES go from 28 to 24 percent so we are seeing some gains at the high school we're seeing a lot more tier three so we've seen an increase in the number of young people who are missing a significant amount of school so our tier three students here at the high school when it comes to absenteeism has grown this year which we've really been spending a lot of time trying to figure out like how are we engaging these students at the high school level it's a little bit different when we're looking at what it means to pass a course and earn a credit right so if a young person is feeling like there's no chance for me to pass this class why would I come to school I'm not going to get this credit why would I come to school so how are we engaging these young people it's something we've really been coming up against this school year so on this slide you can see kind of some of our student population chronic absenteeism rates so as I mentioned for the whole district we're at 31 percent for our students of color we're at 30 percent so students that qualify as for free and reduced lunch for example it's something we pull out as a kind of an equity indicator we're seeing those levels stay really high so we're at 48 percent as a district so that means 48 percent of the young people who qualify for free and reduced lunch are chronically absent they've missed 10 percent or more of school this year we have also seen the numbers of young people experiencing homelessness rise in our district and those young people this is something that we've got to pay more attention to 75 percent of students who experience homelessness were chronically absent this year high mobility the ability to you know quite frankly if you don't know where you're sleeping tonight how can you be expected to be in school tomorrow and a lot of our families are coming up against that decision as a district we work really hard to ensure transportation is available as best we're able that can also be challenging depending on the mobility of our families and the availability of you know a taxi company a staff member a a bus to be able to be there that very next morning when I get a call at five o'clock the night before hey Nick this is where we are sometimes that could be hard right to to get that so we see the the higher rates of chronically absent students with our students experiencing homelessness so definitely wanted to kind of just note that and we've got to do better there and then young people who have an IEP in our district they're they're right at the same level as the whole student body around 32 percent are experiencing chronic absenteeism the other note that I will put in here is I've got the the graph by grades this is kind of as expected where we see this kind of dip in the middle we tend to see young people in kindergarten have high rates of chronic absenteeism we see that is true in our district with nearly 40 percent of students in kindergarten are chronically absent and then it comes back up again in the high school levels because of what I was naming especially at that we're in 12th grade maybe being in school feels a little bit like I'm passing I've got on my grades I'm accepted into college like the maybe toward the end of the year we see the chronic absenteeism numbers grow and go up as well so that dip is kind of what we would expect to see there's been a real focus again we've kind of dialed in a bit on kindergarten this year as well in our district around supporting families to really have a good understanding of what it means to be in school every day coming out of pre-k being in school for a full day what does that mean how are we building that mindset and supporting our families and getting their students to school so I think that's kind of where we'll put it for chronic absenteeism and as we close out happy to take questions so this is a slide that talks about looking forward and mainly focused on our data landscape a couple of these points we've already talked about one being you know increasing our depth of bench in terms of our data so we have a local assessment plan that's rolling out next year that is comprehensive allows us to get multiple layers of data about students to be able to access to a know what to do instructionally for those students but b also to track progress to be able to say is what we're doing working so we're really excited about that our current report cards particularly in k through a are not very helpful in communicating student learning one of the things that was missing from that effort was updated prioritize standards to be able to report out on what our priorities are for students and a way for parents and students and teachers to understand what does a 2.5 mean what does a 1.5 mean and what does it mean for my student so this summer a big project is working with our report card software company to update our report cards and our first initial meeting went very well it sounds like we can do a lot of the things we want to do so that's a big big push for us is to get those to be useful tools for everybody in that process most of the changing would be k through a 9 through 12 is a little different system and we have the difference between report cards and transcripts so that's that's a little bit of an unpacking but there'll be some at least some aesthetic changes to make it more visually accessible there's a lot of text on our report cards we want to try and use color coding and scales to make it more visually accessible for families that might have literacy struggles or be multi lingual so we're we're trying we really want to focus in on that we are onboarding a new data system that incorporates social emotional learning chronic absenteeism academics and behavioral information we are feeling very optimistic about this tool it has been a very smooth onboarding so far we have a lot of work this summer to incorporate our data systems and our new local assessment plan so all of that is in there for educators to be able to access and we're we're feeling really good about that there's some links there to just some general information about the platform and hopefully in the fall we can share a little bit more about how that's going but so far after all of us collectively have kind of been through several onboardings by companies that promise us the world and so far this this has been very very positive all around a continued focus on data literacy across schools we need to get better at data we know that we need to get better at understanding it we need to get better at reporting it and we want to have that focus across our schools at all the levels so as just was talking about how our grade level teams going to unpack data and be able to talk about that we want to do that across all content areas and all strategies but also as an administrative team we'll get our first look at the vt cap assessment sometime in august allegedly we don't know what to expect we don't know what that format that data will come in it'll be really interesting for us to be able to look at that for the first time and we'll keep you posted on that again focus on progress measures and reporting on our overall progress a lot of the data that we report right now doesn't really tell the story of of progress for students or lack thereof very effectively so we want to be able to be able to have data that easily tells that story to show again is what we're doing working across all our domains um and then at mhs we have some strategies in place to improve um student assessment collection so we have a bit of a challenge uh having high schoolers take uh some of the assessments seriously or take them at all um so we are we're going to try some efforts to really encourage that including you know positive promotion showing how the data is used um incorporating it more into the master schedule so that it's not an optional component or something reliant on students being organized to do that um so we've got some plans to be able to do that to help us make more effective use of the data that we collect at the high school in particular and then the the next slide shows you an example of where we're going with our data landscape in terms of the content area so this shows data from broad to specific on what would be our proposed local assessment plan so at the top we have our screeners and state assessments so those are the broad those give us that general information about students and learners and who do we need to focus in on to get more diagnostic information and then each layer as we go down gets more particular to those strategies and skills for that student and those those lower layers those diagnostic layers really allow us to show progress monitoring for those students and for a collective group of students that are receiving either intervention or tier two and we can see potentially our impact of tier one instruction improved tier one instruction across these domains so this is just a visual to help show the difference between broad and specific data and how we plan to attain that next year in literacy this is a literacy example we would like to replicate this a similar structure for mathematics and eventually for other areas as well questions so part of what I think our role is is to also help like parents or folks who might be watching who might not be like quite in the weeds about educational acronyms and data and things like that I didn't know if you could give some examples of what SEL means and then like what SEL incorporated into tier one instruction like what is what are some examples of what that looks like for families that don't thank you or so wrapped up right then acronyms and education so thank you yeah so SEL is really looking at social martial skills right so those can include self-management time management executive functioning self-regulation collaboration self-advocacy at MRPS we have looked at like five domains that we have for SEL skills that we work under those are really aligned with the castle standards which is just like we have literacy and math standards are also SEL proficiency is so that is really what those are looking at so there's like the non-academic skills and I really frame them as the non-academic skills that you need in order to be successful in education and access your education so as far as tier one instruction those are things like when you're having a read aloud being able to name the character's emotion for example and how they react or really being explicit around hey I'm feeling a little confused right now like here's what I'm going to do I'm going to reread this and really being explicit and thinking out loud how you navigate sort of the the day and challenges and when you're feeling upset and how you handle those so that's just sort of one example can you link how SEL is connected to academics yeah so I think when we think about for example reading or writing both of those skills require a lot of self-management and a lot of ability to concentrate right so if you can't regulate yourself you won't be able to concentrate and you won't be able to be as an effective reader I think it just it goes the other way too so if we have poor access to instruction for a student that impacts their confidence and they may act out in ways that show us behavior but are academically based so we we've actually worked together to how do we roll out curriculum in curriculum in a way that is universal so when teachers see the SEL curriculum they see it in the same kind of format as the literacy curriculum or the math curriculum so that we can access that equally stop thank you um can you guys hear me um so yeah I'm thinking I'm thinking about the um the results of the audit that was presented uh meetings ago and one of the take homes I got from that was that we as a board certainly as a as a district um can do a much better job of engaging families um and and then given that and the information on that last slide or the second to last slide about looking forward I as a scientist I really appreciate the increased like interest in data and so I guess I'm I'm interested in knowing how we can better engage families um in in understanding the data that we we hopefully will be collecting going forward and so I've got a couple examples uh it's a great question I think the report cards is one I'm not a huge fan of report cards so I won't I won't pretend to be I think that there are much better ways of reporting but um we have them and people use them and people utilize them and I think we can leverage those in a much better way to access more information about our students and learners the other thing that we're planning to do panorama the new data tool that we have for um students that are receiving intervention supports or intervention plans there is a method by which we can share those intervention plans and progress monitoring directly with parents via the platform so that as that students working and that that's an intervention in academics SEL absenteeism whatever it is it's not just academics um the student the parents would be able to see both uh either narrative or numeric updates on progress monitoring for the students to see how the students are responding to the intervention and supports and see the data associated with it in live time so any day that they want to log in and take a look it's there um so I think those two things are a huge step in the right direction um and then also our teachers and educators having more confidence in being able to understand the data that they're seeing and be able to share that with families as they're working with them um was hopefully going to be a big effect of our work in literacy but also just having a more concrete and fidelity based plan for local assessments I'm feeling pretty hopeful about it we've done a lot of listening sessions as well with families around a lot of things including literacy special education but also report cards specifically and that was really interesting K through 12 to hear all these ideas about things that would make it more accessible and more useful to them so we're continuing to explore those things as well but I think we'll see this is a big goal for us to make that data useful for everybody and accessible but also sustainable um that's why we're we're all kind of quietly geeking out about panorama because it takes a lot of the sustainability um and puts it into play for us you don't have to quietly geek it I'm a big fan of of data in all forms yeah and transparency thank you very much yep I have a great follow-up to that and I have other questions too but um the follow-up my follow-up was um would you be able to speak directly to the public comment around like the star assessments and why that wouldn't be so you're talking about sending a better report card um can you speak to why star assessments might not be shared you know widely with families and caregivers well I think the initial response to that was that we didn't want renaissance star to become perceived as high-stakes testing by students and that was advised to us as we were onboarding with renaissance star way back when now five years ago but that was the initial response I think what's difficult about difficult about the rent star data that as we're presenting it here we're presenting proficiency levels so one of the challenges is we could have a student so let's say we have a third grader that's working at a second grade level but progressing at a second grade level showing a full year's worth of growth at a second grade level they will still show as below on the proficiency score so that makes sense so so it's missing some contextual information about progress for students that's not really telling the story or lack of progress where the areas that were not progressing and so those proficiency levels don't necessarily tell the story of what we're doing or should be doing at a deeper level that's why we're excited about those diagnostic levels because those will give more specific information about a student when we do a renaissance star assessment it gives a student an expected grade level equivalent for reading but the program doesn't listen to a student read it doesn't hear them read it projects based on an algorithm where the student might be in terms of their grade level equivalent the only way we can get a proper fluency diagnostic on a student is to do a running record and understand how they read out loud what their fluency and accuracy is and their comprehension the screener just does kind of a once over to say okay we think this is where the student probably will land based on these factors and admittedly we did not have a good layer of diagnostic information below that and that's why we're focusing in on that to provide more meaningful information that's specific to where a student is based on those diagnostic assessments and how many like what percentage of students roughly are doing like the other diagnostic assessments versus like the star assessment right now it's it was pretty much the students receiving intervention support or special education services but we hope to do everybody doing those diagnostic at least the first layer of diagnostics the fluency assessment and the spelling diagnostic it feels like maybe um what you're what you just said about some of the reasons why star assessments would not be sent home was mostly pertaining to students who are receiving special ed services because of the variety of other assessments that are being done and that they might conflict with you know I can only share my opinion it was an administrative discussion so it wasn't just a mic thing not sending home the renaissance star my opinion is that it could send the message to students that this is a heist takes test and we really need them not to think that particularly in our middle school and elementary school because we want to see them in their natural environment when they take that assessment to be able to give us things it was recommended to us by renaissance star to not do that at the time that we onboarded that was that was kind of my stance on it and then as an administrative team we discussed it what last week and unanimously it was the same opinion but i'm gonna wait it's we can rotate through okay okay um i appreciate you including the um those continuous improvement plan goals i'm curious to know from you know what you think it will take to get to hit the can we hit the goal by this point next year of having having five percent of students in each school receiving tier three supports and what will it take to get there i i think i'm very optimistic about it okay um it is a it is a challenging number to get to i'm optimistic because of our focus on tier one and two uh two getting that number in tier three is not about improving tier three necessarily it's about improving tier one and two and i think we're going to have more tools to do that next year particularly in literacy and mathematics um in a way that is thoughtful engaged the educators everyone's kind of aware where we are where we're starting in the fall we're at a really good launching space for the first time in several years to do this kind of curricular shift so i'm feeling very optimistic about it the the i would say the same about the chronic absenteeism goal um that is an ambitious number for us at the at this rate but also feel like we are in i don't want to speak for nick but feel like we're in great space we've been doing the right work we're focused in the right areas we've got our plan for the fall feel like we're we're doing what we can to reach those numbers i have a follow-up question to that um i think specifically the rbs numbers were somewhat glaring at 52 percent which is 25 out of 50 if we're working out of at those numbers so half of our students are needing tier three supports um if that's the case does your kind of prescription for getting their tier one to tier two is that adequate for rbs or is there going to be additional strategies needed there um and i don't know if you're ready to speak at the granular level and kind of a school building specific but i think for my community i think if folks are looking at those numbers that that does feel pretty glaring so i'm curious if you think that's going to be sufficient at rbs okay actually yeah the rbs educators have been as involved as the ues educators in all the curricular work towards the end of the year here we've worked with the reporting measures um we've got the articulated curriculum we've got the diagnostic assessments we've got a plan to roll out those trainings rbs educators will participate in letters training along with ues teachers next year so i feel like we've got all the right ingredients to support that out there for sure yeah great thanks i would love to know from each of you um as as you all know i think the board is going our retreat is in about a month and we are focused during that time period on um within the three priority areas the board is identified based on the um visioning work that we that we did with the community we're going to be setting indicators of success so and we are definitely looking to you all as the educational experts we would love to know from you what does success look like we're looking at what our current status is right now with the report you've provided for us which is greatly appreciated and it's a little hard to know is that good are are we where we ought to be and in about a month we as a board are going to be saying kind of kind of setting that in maybe not stone but pretty well on paper um and that will be the benchmark that we're aiming for and that we look at when we have these presentations a few times a year and it'll be so it's we need to i think we need a little bit more information from you on what does success look like so that when we have these conversations we know whether or not we're we're getting there so i'd love to know from each of the four of you within your expertise areas what does success look like i'll start i i think um i think success um for academics should take a look at progress um and i'm not sure of how to do that with the metrics that's that's weren't learning that we're focusing in on how do we how do we extract progress or lack of progress from students to be able to report out on that information you know libya and i were looking at some of the the data that we had and we saw evidence of some very great growth in students at us for example and but we need to get to a layer where we can see within that progress who are the students that aren't progressing and why and understand that zone and also if students are progressing what is it that we have done that has impacted that progress and that were that rate of progress of the total progress we need to understand progress more um than focusing on uh proficiency benchmarks from your from term to term can i can i just a bit kind of ask her i i i totally understand that but i mean i can see two situations one where you have someone who's progressing but constantly progressing behind where they should be at and how do you address that and then what about the students that have that are far along at the progression scale and are kind of running out of room to progress without being pushed we should see that too yeah that's that's reteaching enriched component that we really need to get in there and we don't necessarily again get that data from proficiency because those kids always just get a three and four and we're like oh there's there's our threes and fours so it's that i agree with you it's that how do we how do we get to that layer of being able to analyze progress or lack of progress and normal progress what is what should be expected at that average range of progress and how does that apply to to the different ends yeah i agree i would say from from my domain you will not be surprised to hear that it is the absenteeism rate is the monitor of of what we define a success and the reason that i would push that is that absenteeism is an indicator of student wellness engaging academics family wellness uh and students feeling connected to the building right so when you look at absenteeism numbers you are really looking at academics looking at social emotional wellness you're looking at community wellness young people are not able to to access their academics if they're not in the building they're not going to have feelings of belonging connectedness if they're not in the building and oftentimes when young people are not in the building there may be something happening with the family as well where they're not feeling a level of connectedness and well-being connected to education so i think absenteeism is a really strong indicator of kind of all of the above thinking about special education students with i up's certainly growth and rate of progress or two things that we need to try to figure out how to look at as a system um compared to other places so i did try to look up some data to see um nationally the us department of education the last year that they have data from is 21 22 and um the national average was 15 percent of students who had iEP so we are lower than that we're about 11 percent in vermont that same school year the rate was 18 percent um so that is just interesting information to think about but i do think that trying to figure out how we can system systemically look at how students are growing you know like we we had students exit special education this year so those students obviously have closed that gap but how do we um you know kind of make sure that that's happening that all students are progressing and being able to report that out and that's something that we're still trying to figure out a way to um do without me sitting there you know doing it all by hand um so excited to see if panorama will be able to provide us some of that opportunity one of the things that is really glaring whenever i do these data presentations um is in the scl world right now our landscape is measuring scl progress based on like how many kids have incidents right so it's really looking at um sort of like the negatives rather than having a really good way to measure the actual scl skill and all the wonderful things and the ways that kids are being resilient um and growing and learning how to communicate and learning how to adapt to hard situations um so my hope is that in the future panorama really gives us a tool to measure those um and we'll have um universal screeners around belonging climate that we can leverage to make more informed decisions rather than just our progress being based on our behavioral incidents are going down our suspensions are going down um those are all good things and things that we want to see and it doesn't really shed light on all of the great things that kids are doing and all of the really strong work that our educators are doing to support students in the scl world awesome thank you um so Peggy so you mentioned that we're like 11 um with uh students with ips i think you just said the state average is more like 18 um and and that i'm assuming that's the current number which is like 20 higher than it was just a year and a half ago and so i how do how do we interpret that increase in i like is that good does that mean like those students weren't accessing the services and now they are um yeah so just that that that increase of 20 of of the students 20 more students on ips um how do how do we interpret that 20 percent in the district are you talking about yeah for the last eight years yeah i think in what you presented november 2022 was like i can't remember what you said 119 and now what's up to 145 or something like that okay so 2015 it was 119 and um and then this year we're up to 139 um i don't necessarily know i was here so um you know i just have the reports you know as far as uh you know what was happening at that time part of what i did look at um is comparing like the disability categories that we have in our district compared to the national um averages that were our information that was available and again this is the 21 22 school year so um nationally um but our rate for students with specific learning disability um is about the same as the national average one of the things that was a big difference but i think it's also a difference um in vermont in general and it's an anecdotal thing i've just heard over the years is that nationally only five percent of students qualify under emotional disturbance and currently in our district we are all about 15 percent um and i've always heard that vermont has more students that qualify under emotional disturbance i've never really heard why but it's just something that special education directors talk about all the time um so i don't i don't have a really i wish i could tell you more um i do i think it will be interesting to see what happens with our numbers of students with iEPs with the regulation changes because now we'll be looking at the functional skills and SEL skills as a basic skill area which requires us to do figure out how to progress monitor and measure that and so it will be interesting to see in the next year even what what that looks like for students because i think we have a number of students with section 504 plans that potentially we could be looking at needing more intensive and specialized instruction around those skills so but i don't sorry i don't have good interpretation because i don't i don't know um so i want to rewind a little bit and just give like a moment of praise for the four of you sitting here and two of you sitting back there but there's three of you up there that are brand new this year and two of you have brand new positions as of this year is that right these are new positions that didn't exist last year nick and jess oh jess has been here for two so very new work that's being done for the district and two really awesome new principles that are sitting behind you and even might isn't new but you were asked to do a million other things during the pandemic and so really you weren't able to like do the work of a curriculum director the way that you have been able to in the past year or year and a half or so so i think it's really incredible the amount of progress that's been made just on my tenure on the board watching the work that you all have done so i really appreciate all of that and it's definitely reflected in this level of data presentation that we didn't really used to have so i i really appreciate it thank you um and another another question that i had was for nick i was wondering if you have any data around how our absentee rates compared to some of our neighboring districts yeah it's uh hard to say when compared to neighboring districts so vermont is one of the few states that does not have chronic absenteeism as a part of its um like as a plan uh so there's 35 states that have it as part of their plan and those states do really well about reporting absenteeism things like that i have a strong feeling if i would go to some of our neighboring districts and ask for their chronic absenteeism rate um it's not something that would be the top of their list it's not something and again i i haven't had these i i've i've communicated with a lot of our partnering districts around a lot of things but when i bring up chronic absenteeism standalone i don't tend to get a lot of traction um so it is hard to say uh compared to our local districts where we would stand from a purely chronic absenteeism percentage what i would say is student engagement absenteeism uh in our neighboring districts when i'm on calls with like agency of education we have other folks there it's with the crew that i'm talking to the number one thing is like these students are not coming into the building um it's so hard to turn uh these young people that have really disengaged to a point that the re-engagement for those tier three students is so tough and there's a struggle of like do we go the court route do we go the restorative route do we go uh the route that is maybe more challenging which is like just build capacity around meeting with those students and families to case manage almost outside of the school um that is a topic that is rising to the top across most of the districts around us and throughout the state did you have a chance to compare our data with any of those other states that actually do look at it yes um so when we look at 2023 uh so states there's only three states that produce chronic absenteeism numbers like live so uh those three states have numbers like through june maybe today that we could look on their state report cards and see their numbers um it's like connecticut rhode island and i think there's one other one i think massachusetts um and their numbers maybe in the 20 to 30 percent range but the interesting thing that we've seen this year happen is that when we look at 21 22 data to 22 23 data they're very similar so in connecticut i think it was 23 percent 21 22 and this year it's 22.5 percent for the state so again when i was saying earlier where we aren't seeing that big reduction that we were all kind of like man i hope i hope we see this return now that quarantines aren't as big of a thing from the data that's been released this year so far it's not something we've seen so you have the data i have well he doesn't not quietly is there any data on what the most effective things a school district can do for chronic absenteeism because there's so many factors that obviously go into chronic absenteeism a lot of them are very hard for the school to address yeah so there's there's a large number of things and as a state like we have truancy laws right that we have to follow and we have to report to state's attorney and we have to go to dcf one of the big parts of research will say truancy isn't that effective when we talk about sending families through the court system because they're not coming to school you don't see much return on investment there you don't see many gains there you see gains in compliance which doesn't translate to school engagement connectedness anything like that which is really what's going to move the needle so the research would say it's about positive engagement it's about early engagement it's about um jason and julie and i uh going out this summer and doing home visits with our students and families that were chronically absent this year to say we can't wait to see you next year how can we help right it's not to say you're not in school we need to fix you it's to say like my name's nick here's my number call me if you need anything we're going to be in touch this year it's really about building capacity to build connectedness with our families so there's a lot of research out there it is not about truancy that's shown time and again it is about positive engagement family connectedness student connectedness and despite the numbers nick has had some serious successes with with families who last year would not step on our parking lot let alone in our buildings to to kids come to school every day so nick is nick has done a marvelous job and picks up kids regularly in the morning to get them here you know of any other neighboring districts or in vermont who have a position like yours do you have colleagues in other districts not as explicit as my role but like i was like berry uh had reached out to get the position description to because they want to introduce this kind of role in berry i think we've heard that from a few other districts and there are some districts that definitely have a person that's been kind of doing this work um maybe not with the explicitness of like you know i would say like i spend more time in living rooms than classrooms and that's something that i would push for more to see more of out of folks that that are doing this kind of role yeah i think the hardwood does just to get about you know yes there are there are many factors that contribute to why you know students go to school but i also wonder if this would be interesting data for our state legislators to see um because this is clearly connected to affordable housing it's connected to emergency shelter so you know this would be great information for us to collect as a state and anything that we can do to advocate that or bring that up you know with legislators feels like it could be really important because it's having ramifications that legislators probably can't see that it's not a clear direct line but right like these factors in our state are clearly affecting our kids ability to go to school which could actually impact their ability to be successful in their life and that is no small thing um so it would be great if the state as a whole would collect that information like many other like the majority of the states in our country are doing and so i'm curious like what agency that sits with you know is it something that we would advocate for the agency of education to collect or something so that it could have this kind of bigger impact and decision making yeah i have lots of thoughts i will keep it short and say you can google right now chronic absenteeism vermont and it will take you to a dashboard from aoe that has data from 2021 which is the year that anybody that took attendance in 2021 i don't know what that was how it was defined if people took attendance so if you look at that dashboard from the agency of education the chronic absenteeism dashboard you will see that vermont is crushing it they are at two percent you will see that there was two kids at mom pillier high school that were chronically absent it's a data issue i would say and i've said this to folks of the state you could also call the agency of education which has a lot of really good people doing really good work and and i've asked like who is my point person to talk to about attendance and i will get three or four different names and they're like well we don't really uh the last thing i'll say is um there's an organization called attendance works uh it's a national organization that is chronic absenteeism work and they just released a state policy scan where they kind of outline every state website uh report card chronic absentee how they do it if they do it uh vermont is one of i think six states that doesn't have data as of 2122 school year so vermont is like one of six when it comes to chronic absenteeism that their data that they've published online is so outdated um so i i just think it's not front and center here again it's not part of like our the state plan with with the the department of education and so it's not centered and i think it should be yeah um i have a question for peggy sue so um i think i understood that you were reporting that 23 percent of people who i don't really understand the data but 23 percent received of kids in the data set received no evaluation and i know you spoke to that quickly but i just wasn't totally sure if you maybe you could give me some education on what some of the general reasons why um an evaluation might not be done sure so um some parents or families may um ask for it and then when we have a conversation and talk about what it is they may say oh that's actually not what i'm looking for not what my kid needs um we have some families that the school has reached out and the families don't want to do the evaluation um sometimes teams get together and look at student data and they don't see any evidence that would show um a suspected disability or that there is um any concern about academics and so then they may make the decision not to do it let's say those are the three big ones um and in uh cases a lot of cases not a lot of cases in some cases um once parents understand the difference between special education and section 504 they say oh actually section 504 is what um you know i want to look at and so then an evaluation happens through section 504 instead of special education and would there be would there be a case i mean where a family or caregivers um wanted an evaluation done but then could not have that done like we're refused that would it be like a time management thing like we're not seeing the evidence of a need to evaluate so therefore you're falling to the sort of the bottom of the priority list uh it wouldn't be around time management or priority list if we um if a team gets together and there's no evidence to support the need for an evaluation then we may not do an evaluation but um we it wouldn't we can't say like we're not going to do it now because we don't have time so we'll do it later like we that we're not allowed to do that so but yes there could be situations where parents ask for something and when we look when we get together and we look at the all of the data there's nothing to support and we need to do an evaluation that's pretty rare but yeah and would there be a mechanism in that rare situation for families to say well we're seeing something at home maybe that you're not catching in and like push for it or would they have to then go to an outside organization um so if um in in a situation like that uh the family gets a it's called a prior written notice so it's an lea decision and if they disagreed with it then there are different weight mechanisms that they could go to to try to change that decision yeah another quick question for you is just about the position the empty positions are they filled for next year two of them are we still need what we need a person at the high school still okay so if anyone knows any special educator that for some reason doesn't have a job in june um maybe moving it out of state or something like that you know we're really hopeful to still try to find somebody this summer um I also wanted to echo what Emma's gratitude and also broadcast it out beyond the people in this room because I know that it's taken teams and teams and teams of our educators and our staff so to to have an academic year like this one and to be able to produce the um report that we're seeing today so also wanted to um make sure to acknowledge that so thank you for that and I have some follow-up questions on the literacy um data um first is a little bit of a clarifying question for you mike I just want to make sure I'm reading the fmp proficiency score that's essentially using the same scale that we would see on a report card right yes okay so um that's helpful for me because when we shifted from like it was like percentage of I think it was the ren star was like percentage of certain schools or grades are at proficiency going from percentage numbers to decimal points was throwing me off a little so the clarification is helpful and then when it says that our third graders are at 2.64 that means that our third graders are ending the year as a as a whole not yet reading at grade level is that essentially what we would the data here which show that the students that took the assessment of the students that took the assessment that that's the person that's the the average of all those students why would they not meet why would they not take the assessment in some cases this past year when students were already achieving or above they were not reassessed in the winter to avoid over assessing students so that would maybe tell us that we do have there's there would be students that if they didn't take the assessment because they're oh okay achieving that's a part of that's a part of my whole proficiency doesn't tell the whole story okay component yeah because we removed the students that would contribute threes and fours potentially right in that element but that's something specifically that we are going to address next year with consistent assessment okay throughout right for students that the challenge with the f&p is it takes a really long time to administer and so when we were looking at those diagnostics and literacy we were looking for things that gave us the same or better information but potentially more efficiently so that we could assess students across consistently across the year without a teacher not being able to instruct for a week while we're assessing or students having to take 30 to 35 minutes assessments three times a year so we're feeling really confident about our plan for next year being able to do that in a manageable way for teachers students families the whole got it the whole show okay so then then what we're looking forward to next year like at this time next year would be a number that tells a more complete story of say where our third graders are fourth graders are our eighth graders are at correct got it okay is that just is that for one type of assessment or all of the assessments i'm not sure what you mean so like star ren star found to some panel are you planning to give the all of those assessments to all kids or are we just talking about star so the last slide shows that broad to specific that second layer we want students to have the universal screeners and state assessments and then we want them to have common diagnostics is the box that's on that last slide decoding fluency automaticity comprehension and influence the expression we want all that data on all students and that data is collected by which assessments a running record and a spelling diagnostic so not ren star and not found to seem to know ren star would be at that layer above sorry include a running record okay yeah i had a question too around the just it seemed like it was a very low rate of participation in the star testing and so i didn't really understand i think i'm understanding it better now i follow up question on that is main street middle school for the reading the star reading all three rows for that data are exactly the same and i'm just wondering if that is accurate and then also why main street middle school is such an outlier of having only three percent of students not tested when other schools range from like thirty to fifty four percent of students not tested it's a great question part of it is because julie conrad's awesome that's a big part of it now so one of the things that main street has in play for consistent assessment is they just have a good system for doing it to make sure happens they have strong oversight that's not to say that the other schools don't because i'll share what impacts their assessments but this is also very exciting that their data stayed the same because it means that the students were achieving years worth of growth at an average rate which is is actually great that's a really good thing at ues there are two different ren star assessments that are administered one is the early literacy assessment that's generally given to k and one students so roughly 20 well was it yeah 40 percent of the school takes that assessment not the reading assessment the way ren star works is that they show is not having assessed in the reading assessment even though they took the other reading assessment so that's one of the things there there's also discrepancy these scores consolidated report within renaissance star which takes a lot of general data and gives you a summary one of those things is that if a student in the fall takes the assessment but then moves out it just shows that that student didn't take the assessment in the winter didn't take the assessment in the spring doesn't show that they moved out so that's one of the challenges with this consolidated report at the high school as I mentioned we have some engagement challenges with students taking the assessment and we put in a full court press on getting those makeups and sometimes they just don't happen or we have students take the assessment the whole assessment in six minutes or less and so that's also not contributing to excellent data at the high school but jason and I have got a handle we're going to fix that up so I think you kind of touched on a little follow-up question I had sorry people are wondering with questions but that in that msms reading star assessment that stays the same there's a growth average scale score reported of point eight can you speak to that so like the percentage is staying the same but the scale score is eight yeah point zero so we put this in here because this is our attempt to really start to understand growth perspective I did tell a story I'm not just saying this because Julie's here but um Julie dug into some of the the scale score growth and the growth measurements within renaissance star and we found students that were probably below proficient according to proficiency that showed significant growth in their skills by looking at things like the scaled score growth so what this column shows is is the average increase of scaled score across students from winter to spring according to renaissance star so irregardless of proficiency the average student went up eight points in their scaled score of their their assessment and you can see at rbs they went up 32 at ues three and at the high school one so it's a little hard to understand for someone who's not as data oriented as you and I think Scott seems to be um but uh but so like if at or but if 70 if it stays consistent 73 but there can you just kind of like give me a little story an anecdotal story of a kid who would stay consistent with their but then like have all this growth in proficiency so in the in the fall the scaled score arranged to get at or above proficiency is here in the winter it moves here yeah a student can still progress and miss that window but show some pretty serious progress and then the scales the the scale score range in the spring moves again to get above or at or above proficient because grade level is now closer to the next grade that they're about to go into so they're moving through the proficiencies at grade level essentially yeah but scaled scores give scaled scores give like a total points per student and then the proficiencies are based on ranges of scaled scores but those scale those ranges move fall winter and spring okay and it goes again back to why that that proficiency sometimes doesn't tell the full story particularly for students we do have students that are working below grade level but showing significant progress but their proficiency is still going to show that they're below every time so did you ever pay attention to the s back page sheets that were sent home for your kiddos and you could see like the graph on there showed scaled scores really nicely like if I think of my daughter right she just barely made it into the three like she was in a three proficiency so she was at grade level but she's like made it by like 10 points on the scale score right um so what what could happen to show that growth is a kid barely made it into the at or above proficiency right with their scaled score but then when the scale score moves their scale score grew quite a bit you know like that's how you show the range of proficient is up is yeah multiple right they could have they could have gone from the beginning of a scale score grouping to the end of a scale score grouping and they'd still be in the proficient range but that's more growth than one you know time period that they're expecting does that make sense yeah that's helpful I wonder if there's a way to um you know to show that more visually like the how you're talking about that that feels more important to you and your team to show growth than or lack of growth or lack of growth um that if there might be like a better way to sort of like showcase that yep and you're saying that might come through this new software well I'm saying that that's a big focus for us that's that's where we want to shift the data focus is to be able to understand that growth more for lack of growth okay yeah yeah this is my example of this the third grader is reading at a second grade level like we don't need to make one year of growth with that kid oh we need to make a year and a half of growth or two years growth with that kid in one year right so we have to like that's something to really pay attention to it also translates to the report card we want to figure out a way to make report cards meaningful for students that are working out of level instead of na and ones and twos every time that report card is useless for students like that students and families we want to be able to report out on the student's actual progress on the goals and skills that they are working on versus what we're doing now which is reporting the proficiency at grade level it seems related to what Jess was talking about around like the deficiency model you know of behavioral reporting and that perhaps it might be interesting to look at you know positive growth all as well sorry this is data demystified this is really really helpful i am enjoying this um just in terms of like the diagnostics so are those tools that are going to be primarily used like internally to inform instructional practice and intervention or are those like diagnostics that families will see results from that might come up in you know conferences or is most of how student progress is going to be communicated to families through the report cards and ideally with like these additions of like you know showing growth i'm just curious about the diagnostics and then like are we creating them in house to respond specifically to like our priority standards and our priority or and our curriculum or are those things we like get from like an external organization like because i heard you say like we might be another year out for math i think yeah math will take us a little bit but not much yeah just one of the math assessments that i mentioned was the oh gap it's it's got a a weird name ongoing assessment project or something like that um but that requires some serious training to be able to do it that's going to take us some time to be able to implement and so julie and i've been talking about that at the middle school and have a plan to start training a few folks to build our capacity and be able to hopefully pilot by the spring at least one element of that assessment but it's a it's kind of a big deal and the pnoa at the the elementary level is a little easier reach for us we have access to that already we just need to look at how it aligns with our instructional components so i think that's well within reach i think to answer your question about the literacy what was challenging before we were kind of it could be a cart and horse analogy but now that we have our prioritize standards our proficiency scales our scope and sequence for literacy instruction it makes so much more sense to be able to align the diagnostics to that when we were trying to die get diagnostics and not have that there was this kind of disconformity of what are we what are we doing like what so i gave this assessment now what do i do how does it inform my instruction now we've got that that loop set up so that it would make sense we already have access to all of these tools so that's great we're not going out and trying to create these things or to find them somewhere we're already doing that we did a small pilot of this stuff this spring with fourth graders at us and rbs to inform fifth grade for next year and then julie and i and a crew of people also did this work with five through eight which actually gives us eighth grade to ninth grade as well so we and we learned a whole lot about the assessments and how to build them into our systems so that they can inform instruction and inform communication with families so i there's some particulars to still work out you know without sounding dramatic but it was down to the final minute of doing this work this year so there's some summer things and then there's some roll out in the fall with educators on on how we're going to use this more consistently everyone's aware of the plan they know what it is next year will be the hey this is how we're going to do it this is what what's like day to day and some practice on packing that like i'm julie julie's a math person i'm an elementary person we did the middle school data and we were both geeking out like little children excited about what we knew about kids from these assessments and so we're excited to do that with educators with live data with students that are in their classrooms that they can act on that right away very cool yeah yeah this is just a really helpful behind the scenes and like clearly this work does not happen at the snap of a fingers or a waving of a wand there's a lot of build out to do and so i'm just appreciating the commitment and the diligence around it and then being able to communicate it to us so thank you so i just want to be mindful of time we're half hour over i'm sure these folks are excited to go see their families it's maybe take a couple more questions and and because we're going to have this is a continuing discussion so emma and then yeah and then if anybody else cap results you said um maybe sometimes in august i know that there's a lot of people in this community there are maybe having a little trauma response around that because of the embargo day other data and how long it's been taking for the community to see numbers um do we have any fear that this will be embargoed as well or that we actually are going to get it okay i'm sorry guys i'm aside yeah you'll probably know at the exact moment that we do i don't know i would hope not yeah we did everything that we were supposed to do in the multiple updates of the manual on how to do it so hopefully it's there you know and having said that that's why i'm hedging a little bit about i i don't know what format the data comes in do we get a big spreadsheet is there a dashboard you know and they've already said ninth grade won't be there in august because right great test was so messed up right so it's it's hard to say what we're going to see and be able to clean from it i think my big question is what what's the depth of the data how far can i dig into the results um you know at least with with aspect we were able to see different layers of reading skills and writing skills and and we could parse it out a couple different ways i don't know the structure of the bt cap the kids also had a much different testing environment for aspect than they did for b cap i mean these guys can can tell you that you know put into julian jason in the back that like our sixth graders some of our sixth graders were in tears for frustration because they kept getting kicked out of the test and we had to just stop it automatically i mean it's and that and we're not alone with that like the the entire state experienced similar responses my ninth grader came home and said well i've never seen half the things that was on that math test they've never taught it to me like i've literally never seen it did you know that graphs could curve like he'd say things like that to me you know so there are so many problems with this roll out with the test that uh okay so manage expectations yeah and then be hopeful cross fingers we did get better at it msm has worked out most of our kinks mhs had less kinks and i think ues had the fewest out of all and thank thank heavens for the little guys okay real quick if you run out of data to um review um a lot of montpelier rocksbury kids are part of that longitudinal adolescent brain development study that uvm was one of the sites and they have a 97 percent retention rate so like the kids that are i mean and i can only speak because my kid i was one of them um that are like you know freshman sophomore now started when they were like 10 and i don't know if if you folks were aware that that's like going on so it basically was a national study there's 11 000 students in this pretty extensive brain development study and it started like i said several years ago and then a pandemic came along too and they were able to continue that study so they do mris every other year they do a ton of student surveys and a ton of parent surveys and they're releasing data each year as they go so there's just some really interesting stuff in there for the sort of bigger picture because i have to say what i'm leaving with tonight frankly nick is the 78 percent that my heart still hurts after hearing that like i that as a community we need to be doing more and i i appreciate it jim's question of like is there is there something the district could provide that could support those families better a lot of us drive our kids to school every day we've got room in our cars i know that's a lot easier said than but like what would another one of you or i know we're going to talk about our budget and like the transportation is a major factor so i i think there are a lot of things that we're all bumping up against that are out of our control but also can really inform that support and i'm rambling but i wanted to mention that study because i do think a lot of it is provides even sort of additional state and national context for like what our kids have been going through over the last eight years my kid was in that too really interesting and i also remind the board that um you all voted in the budget to get nick to america members for next year to to help his work as well so i can't imagine a better mentor than nick and team to mentor america people so they will from assuming they're joining us it's all about your belly what program ended from no way washington county youth service bureau ran a youth development corps for 30 years and we finished our application we submitted it and they recently decided they are not going to run programs moving forward so there will not be two america members that's day joining so nevermind well we have the money we have the money so then figure something out you can reallocate that thing even if you just get like somebody to drive with that money college insurance yeah we'll get there i wanted to switch gears back to um the some of the behavior data because it looks like there is a really a pretty big difference in the percentage of our between of our overall population um with behavior incidents and a percentage of kids who are reported for behavior incidents who are in the economically disadvantaged demographic um as well as kids on ips and i'm curious just anything that you have to say like what you make of that just yeah i mean i think it's a lot of similar as far as the economically disadvantaged a lot of the similar stuff that nick has spoken to um i think that if they're in out of school more they have less of a chance to internalize a lot of the expectations and so we tend to see students who struggle with expectations if they're not in school and there's a really big correlation as we've seen with economic disadvantage students and chronic absenteeism i think as far as students with ips i think that's sort of twofold um i think that sometimes um we need to better understand how to shift our expectations how to make them more accessible to a wider variety of students and we also have students who are on ips because they have disabilities that make it really hard for them to behave in sort of typical ways um so that's something data that i'm definitely looking at and thinking a lot about especially in how we respond and use seo skill building and cps and our sort of practices rather than punitive discipline because we know that that's not going to make a difference for those students um i'll also note that like students who identify as male also were significantly overrepresented in that data as well and then we'll have really gone yeah like final question from if we reach our if we reach our goal of no more than five percent of students needing to your three supports how close is the board to the goal of closing the achievement gap i guess and what is that it's a loaded question and then i'm not positive to the i don't think that's why it's sort of a question for all of us i mean i think we'd be closer i mean the other other thing that comes to mind is the cost which i think the answer is there isn't a dollar amount it's a matter of time and effort the cost of the cost of closing the of closing the achievement gap like yeah i mean i don't know just the idea that you know um that it doesn't take time and effort and skill skill building oh it takes a lot of that's what it takes so that's not really yeah and quite honestly the board has done a job over the past five years um of adding human resources to intervention and peace we had three when we started yeah um across the board and that's including social motion learning and academics um and interventionist interventionist yeah and we we now have quick math in my head or at least ten yeah so over the past five years there has been a cost to that right um and the board has gone with us on making sure that we have the human resources we need and now we need to ensure that those human resources have the skills um and we have the systems and the structures and to enable it like the five percent number isn't pulled out of you know might's left ear it's it's pulled from national research around rti um of what an appropriate percentage of students with high impact first instruction would need um that's where that five percent came from it's actually through research at florida of all places that happened a bit a bit ago i don't know if there is research to say if you have a five percent rate around meeting tier three if your opportunity gap is there i'm not sure if that research exists or not be an interesting question for somebody's dissertation let me get mine yeah go for a test uh anyone else well thank you so much and i think thank you yeah i really appreciate it and yeah echo uh emma and neah's uh courage these are great work and you know really putting together a fantastic theme and a lot of progress and you know again i've been on the board for a while and the data just keeps getting better and and you know recently the the data is is really fantastic and i i appreciate your presenting it and i also appreciate your desire to to build it out more and and to to get even more compelling data so we can tell a more complete story because it really helps us understand where the district's at and where it's going thank you here we go great so we have some policy readings uh i have a quick financial oh financial it was still part of that same agenda item and approval thank you for reminding me all right i will make the finance committee update quick this is under this was directly under the board learning focus under the data presentation you folks should have received the third quarter financial report um christina was explaining it's a little behind so it only goes through the end of march because it's the third quarter and then we will get the fourth quarter so like the whole shebang at our i think our early august made it because we're not meeting in july so i won't take a lot of time to go through i do think um she does a good job of carrying on that tradition that grant had of actually providing comments that sort of explain a little bit more of the why so on the one hand while we have had significant vacancies which do create savings we also had um you know a high number of out of district placements for 504s and we also had spent a little bit more on transportation for the homeless population which is obviously well worth it so those sort of those things with a special education especially sort of cancelled out some of those savings but we're still on track to be um within our budget um in each of these line items and there's certainly lots more to unpack in each of those if folks have questions um one example is the buildings and grounds we had pipes burst at some point during the the season but that was able to be filed as an insurance claim so we will get that reimbursed which is good um we also did do um what what christina called two airtime buyouts where we're we paid out the rest of someone's um retirement so that they could retire if they had less than a year of of service left to be you know fully vested so um yeah things to keep an eye on are continued vacancies but also continued special education across challenges um the second page of the report is revenue and some of the pieces we wanted to make sure to mention and again the percentage received in that in that column is really only at the end of march so in some of these cases a lot of them say zero but since this was created they have probably been reimbursed to some extent one piece of concern was the Medicaid reimbursement she noted that the revenue for that is going down which does fund positions and because fewer families seem to be either eligible or reaching out I don't know if you have more information on what that means but that was something she just wanted us to be aware of that that revenue had gone down and of course now I'm going to have a coughing fit while I'm trying to talk to you all on the bottom of the second page sort of gives the snapshot of our reserve our fund balance the unreserved set asides there's the the final payment of that outside placement is the final $500 of that we have the 50 000 that the board has set aside for the potential net zero study and then my understanding is that the rbs heat pumps which is the the final one that's 50 000 are going to be completed within she said by the end of this month which is good news let's see so we still do have a pretty significant amount in our fund balance so related to that we had a dishwasher issue you yes and I didn't realize how quickly these dishwashers usually work but a long story short there is about a 19 000 unanticipated expense because one of the dishwashers I think at UES broke and so as always being resourceful Jim and Christina and our team applied for a grant to split that cost with us but we still want to make sure that we replace the dishwasher so it raised the question that I think is a good one is sort of to think about as a board do we want to work with Libby and Andrew and Christina to have like okay there's this like unexpected things like a that every year there's probably something that comes up or breaks or gets broken and is the fund balance the a place that we could pull from if we needed to for something like a dishwasher we definitely don't want to get in the habit or the practice of like the board micro-managing every time something small breaks that the district clearly needs because this apparently the newer ones or at least the ones at the middle school do 45 loads in an hour like they got to keep the dishes going so this is not something you can like patch together or replace with people I can't even imagine doing that yeah so it's something for us to sort of consider and think about is do we want to and and like we've talked about in the past as a board we also have things that sort of come up like oh wouldn't it be nice if we XYZ and we sort of have struggled with like or not struggled with but wrestled with you know having things either jump to the front of the line or are they nice to have versus need to have and so maybe as a board we sort of want to talk about like and I think we have started to do that of like how we kind of make these decisions about when things come before us that are unexpected you know and how involved do we want or do you want or need us to be in making those decisions too I think a big question that I'm sorry wasn't at the finance committee I was writing around had hundreds of people in the building that was without power we only could hold it because there was still natural light in this room one of the questions that Grant and I both talked about and Grant with our business manager and Christina and I it came up with the dishwasher scenario of is there a price point that the board wants us to come to you with of saying to get the approval out of the fund balance or is it everything is it you know like what what's the dollar amount you know because I think it was like 23,000 or something for the dishwasher and and so as I said to Christina is there anywhere in policy that says the board needs to approve that type of purchase and so we look through policy and there isn't it's not specific to any policy so or just have a standing practice you know if there's if there's a number I mean it's more solidified if it's in policy because when I win the power ball and leave then the next superintendent will be able to will be able to just know that that's my power but but it's also just a I think it's just a good practice for us to yeah well and I can see different scenarios too I can see you know like if if something comes up and it's not urgent and it's $25,000 I think that's something we'd want to probably maybe talk about talk about if the dishwasher breaks and we're going to have kids eating on dirty plates and it's $25,000 or just yeah whatever but yeah we're yeah we're we're the you know there's a an immediate need yeah then I think we want to hear about it but I don't think you need to wait till the next point I mean like how do we codify that yeah I would just suggest this would be a conversation that the finance committee have with Christina maybe you joined them Libby and then come to the board with the yeah here's what we've worked out and yeah yeah I was going to say policy or finance committee I also think there could be some sort of like threshold where you know like maybe there's like a discretionary sort of set aside where it's like up to this amount in any given year you know whatever you decide and then after that like maybe there's a dollar amount 10,000 or something like that yeah I knew that we hadn't considered yeah and with some sort of report back so we should probably talk that to the policy or finance committee Mia I have a question related to the report did Christina say or do you maybe you know Libby are we anticipating using the 400,000 that we had set aside saying that we had anticipate budgeted to use from fund balance to cover expenses this year do you know if we're going to actually end up using it that is typically decided at the audit time oh yeah that's that wouldn't be decided just yet Christina might have a hunch that she said to the finance committee I'm not sure but that is typically decided once the audit has gone through okay which happens a few months after the end of the fiscal year right right it's yeah it's kind of ongoing from around now through the early fall okay it came later this year because we haven't got a company should come earlier next year okay and then the last page which you folks should check out if you haven't already it's just a the summary that's always helpful about the capital fund so just you know replacements of things you the auditorium things like that those those are documented there and then food service is listed here and we did follow up to our last board meeting we had a discussion or maybe it wasn't our last last board meeting but about why a food service entity at a school district has to be like an enterprise fund and there was a very specific federal reason that AOE gave our folks so while this says there would end the year with a surplus that's not really true we but they are not going to need to dip into as much of the we had allocated a certain amount of money for them to get to cover any deficit I think it was something about the reimbursement rate through COVID was really high but that's not necessarily going to stay that way other funding we again have another fantastic educator in the district who's been given a Rowland Foundation grant um Keanna Bromley so that's documented there in addition to the ones that we've Sam Bromley has it oh is it Sam but oh gosh yeah I was like thank you um sorry Sam and then there's just the the the continued summary of our long-term debt that just sort of shows out when our bonds are going to be paid that was it and do we need to prove it yes yes so we're looking for a motion for the board to approve the fi 23rd quarter report so moved second any further discussion all the favor any opposed thumbs up from Scott through report passes um so we have a couple of policy readings which don't require action but very part discussion we have a second reading of a couple policies the policy committee has worked on anything you want to report out about the changes well when we had our first read um we had ended up having to be absent that night and so so part of what we wanted to get um feedback on was the process by which we may end up engaging families around the adoption of this policy because because that's a requirement that's written into the policy and um I think Jim ended up emailing you with those questions and I have not had a time to read your answers I apologize don't know if you did circle back but maybe if we could if you could just sort of quickly summarize that for the board yeah I actually spoke to I know y'all were looking at Mrs. Coy Valley's and Franklin Northeast's policy which are two excellent policies to look at because um after I received Jim's email and had a conversation with me and Jim after the last board meeting I talked with both Julie and Lynn who are the superintendents in those two districts um and they went through either a monitoring or audit around this around their title one and this policy was a part of it and the actual model policy on the vsba website which they had followed had inaccuracies according to the aoe's definition the aoe's reading of the law around the policy so the two policies from Franklin Northeast and Mrs. Coy are ones that they worked with the agency of education on and were approved by the agency of education so we should really be looking at their policies as the model as models yeah um and I couldn't tell you what the difference was because we didn't have a chance to go into that level of detail there has to be an app for that yeah but those two um those two policies and I've looked at both of their policies they're very similar except their bullet points are different and how they engage families um are both really good examples I think from a lot of the things that we would do the other things I noticed from Franklin Northeast and Mrs. Coy Valley were both were future written and I think this is what I said to you um so for instance parents will be involved in the development of the LA plan by um like that future language is very prominent in their policy so um the that is what I gathered from it as like your community can be involved in policy readings and policy development through this process it's why we have three readings it's why your practice is such um and that the policy has written for gathering feedback as a future forward that that is done through the you know you hold the district accountable through the monitoring process am I making sense I think what I'm gathering from you is that you feel that a that a that the three reads that are typical in a policy adoption process by the school board would be um sufficient to adopt this policy but then that moving forward there would need to be uh it's part of the policy right how this more engagement yeah yeah and with this policy in particular I would love for Mike and I to sit with um the policy committee to make these bullets um and do you just for like I mean we don't need to spend a ton of time on it but but do you picture or did you talk to the other superintendents about what that process might look like in the future once we get there of engaging title one families yeah it's all in their policies if you if you read through yeah the bullet yeah the bullet points and they're different for each school district and those resonate with you as they were written for these other districts or do you feel like you would probably change some of it I think we would change some in person borrow some of these personalize some of these and you put some of our own stamps on as well okay yeah so I wonder if it would make sense just for like time uh management for you and Mike to look at those bullet points and maybe draft them and then bring your draft to the policy committee sure does that sound good to other staff rent yeah yeah July 10th at four well yeah our next meeting is July 11th at four if if you're looming that but it's okay if we that's a that's a that's a that's just for uh any further questions on title or you won you on title one party parent family engagement would there be a way to notify families that are receiving title one funding or support services um to be notified of like the third read let's say of this policy and like with the school board agenda would there be a way to like send an email to all those families or is it just not that simple maybe maybe because you're because we're we're not a console we're not consolidated schools we're targeted title one so we're talking about families who are who qualify with the economically disadvantaged or handle homeless so it's it's a very specific sector of family that I'm not positive if in power school with our blasts that we can pull specific family yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm not sure if we can do that because I just wonder how closely the majority of our constituents are following this process and it would be great to just at least know that we reached out I think it would just be easier to send something to everybody yeah in the three three up there's only three out of our folder four schools received title one dollar so union does not okay I mean that's something I would be interested in I don't know how other people in the policy committee or the board feel about that but one is it beneficial for just anyone in our community to weigh in on this yeah but it does in the language of the policy does talk specifically true you know so it it does feel like the spirit of the policy would be I mean I think you're right anytime we're bringing up a policy for the reading process it would be great to have like an extra little boost of PR around that happening so that everyone knows and can weigh in because you all could advertise the policy committee meeting that's happening yeah on the 11th and when this comes up for its next read at a board meeting I could make it when I do the front porch forum post I could just highlight it as this is because I didn't today I like included it in a list of things but I could highlight this like oh and by the way here's the draft of the policy right the agenda on the 11th this is more about our plans for summer work and less about reviewing sure so whenever it is yeah yeah okay uh and no on c-13 so we ended up sending there was a mistake where I only sent one policy to the equity committee and then I was like oh right this was meant to be sent as well so but and you looked at the you looked at the discipline policy yeah that's our homework for next week great um and so we all we want to gather input especially in particular on the statement of intent from the equity committee as well for c-13 um the only comment I have on that one is is um we want to put people first all the time so there's a couple homeless student references and we want to say students experiencing homelessness yeah we made some of those changes in there the one I'm looking at uh like we said students in a homeless situation up here academic well-being of any homeless student okay just just remember to do the people first language so yeah thank you other than that I shared that statement of intent with Nick and Nick said it looked great thank you for doing that in the first key definition to find some of the students I know so we struggle in the policy committee with these um required policies these uh by the BSBA because PHO basically has asked us not to change them significantly but that probably is one of those things that's not significant yeah yeah picture was not a fan of the preamble either or the statement of intent is that how he responded to our question yes so we had a chat about the statement of the tense and like and whether we felt like that was like an okay addition to require policies that we put sort of a value statement up front yeah sounds like he does not he thinks it models things and potentially creates some rights or expectations that the policy does not intend to create or I mean we don't you don't have to listen to your lawyers but that's what he says provides it to make it more focused so that it meets the spirit of our intent and does not hold the promise yeah I think his answer would be like the intention of the call should kind of speak for itself and what it requires I wonder if you could take a look at this one in particular because this one so this statement of intent was drafted by Bridget and and Ryan yeah and me and Amanda it was before so a while ago most mostly and then we sort of finessed it in this new version of the policy committee so I wonder because it is pretty lengthy and wordy I wonder if this one might be a good one to give to peter to see if he has like specific pullouts like this is something that I would really want you to look at removing sorry I see 13 steps who are homeless just because I feel like the intent of that portion is to make it easily digestible for everybody out there like I my my eyes go blurry as soon as I jump into legalese or tax forms agree right that was part of the impetus behind adding it to the policies um another question is not creating rights or well it also could explain that this policy is a required policy by law right so like that I think that disclaimer doesn't sound like a bad idea but also if you could ask kato if that do you feel like that's okay it's a peter's time to like look at this draft I could definitely go back to him I mean this is this is the one he looked at so okay the other question is so this is a required policy it's a model policy we start with the model policy from the bsba it the title is students who are homeless should we consider as a district retitling it students experiencing homelessness no students who are homeless it's okay that's fine okay because it's the student who's first right not the homeless identifier yeah it's just like we want to say it's a special education student okay the student first right if they aren't homeless that's not their identity exactly they're experiencing it exactly I'm just wondering if we should change that I wouldn't have since it's required by law okay any other feedback from board members and then next we have a first reading of two policies which are required in which we have to adopt by the end of August right uh technically in the law August 1st and they have told us superintendents that by we should try our hardest to get the policies adopted prior to the start of the school year so we also have learned that we actually do not have to have three readings as a practice we just need it ten days ten days so um we could we could adopt these at our retreat in April and the you mean July July whatever um Jim's going back into yeah we could do it in April too we'd be out of compliance but we could do it in April um and have them ready by August yeah there's not a lot of wiggle room for you here this is recent legislation the government governor is very much behind these two policies in particular and what they say there's not there's really no wiggle room for the board on these so we can't write a statement of intent three months to do it I will let the board decide if they want to write a statement like it's one of those things that we could add later it's true um so I the policy committee was Scott kindly went through and and changed all the wording that needed to be changed like the fill in the blanks things but other than that we did nothing to these model policies so it's exactly the way that they're recommending that we adopt them and I think actually oh the versions that are in our board packet because I had I had put in some suggested changes um and they're not there oh it's probably that thing where if they're attached you know what I mean like you need to have edit access to be able to see the board has them all as BDS right so you can't then see the suggested edits in this mode from the agenda is to the word document oh great does that change it says Montpelier Roxbury Public Schools but it doesn't have any suggested edits I don't see yeah so Scott are you seeing Montpelier Roxbury Public Schools in the version that you're opening yes and then you made additional suggested edits yeah the one ounce of wiggle room that we have okay you just maybe go with summary of that so we can state that it was publicly disclosed also I don't have edit access so I can't make a comment but whoever does have edit access in this room maybe you could make a comment with Scott suggested edit and that way we can bring it forward to be adopted at the retreat so Scott did you are you talking about to a where it says optional yes what what what's the what's the change yeah I've heard call was quite brief not seeing it oh I know because I'm on the wrong follow the only structure I can think for educational reasons that would be remain unlocked is the the green the green now the greenhouse back here that's a student accessible piece of you know structure so Libby I think are suggested that it was something like the district recognizes the need to leave certain outbuilding structures unlocked as needed so that would give you and Andrew and Andrew whoever the sort of wiggle room to like if you needed to leave the shed near the bleachers for athletic purposes unlocked or if you needed to leave I know there's one at the middle school where kids leave their skis if you needed to leave that unlocked on a Wednesday night for the Bolton Valley program you know I mean that we would that would give you the leverage to be able to do that you wouldn't be out of compliance with the policy right so I'm just having that yeah yeah it's not appearing on the Google apps that we can see just because we don't have edit access but that's fine we know what you're doing and was that it Scott was that the only change yeah he's nodding okay yep thank you great all right so we can we're going to visit those at the retreat and the mod and then if we want to you know be with them later we can we've been on to the policy monitoring report do I have a motion to approve the policy monitoring for C2 student alcohol and drugs so second by second any discussion all in favor and then finally motion to adjourn second all second all in favor