Welcome to this regular school committee meeting of Thursday, October 26th. We have no public comment today. I would like to recognize our AEA representative Julie Keyes. Thank you for being here and our student representatives, Mo Higginbuk and Amy Collar Can I get it right? Oh, and Grant Minnick is online. Sorry. And we will start with you folks. Oh, yeah. To be honest, not a lot of updates this week. People are kind of just doing their academic thing right now. It's a pretty stressful week for everybody. But we're excited for the new building. Sports seasons are coming to a close. So cheer for the girls cross country team because there are middle sex league champions for the second year in a row. Maybe even more. And the fall play is happening next weekend. So you should all check that out. Exciting. People put a lot of work into it. Great. Okay. Next we have the Dowlin, or do you want to do the introduction for the steps? Sure. We have two school improvement plans tonight. Dowlin and Thompson are here to present. And I'll go ahead and invite you up, Mr. Dingman first. I'll be driving slides. So let me know when you want to progress it. And I just want to thank the team for their work with a new school improvement plan template this year. And a lot of additional support from our director of data research and accountability. We've done a lot of work to try to align the efforts of the schools while also providing opportunities for the schools to show their special ways that they are adapting the work that we're doing as a district to meet the needs of their specific communities. So I'm sure you'll hear a little bit about that. And take it away. I will pull up your slides. Okay. Let me, before I do that, Liz, there, I don't know if this affects our public, but on our screen, there's something in the middle that doesn't look like it should be there. Thank you. Okay. Great. Thanks. Do you want that sidebar on there? Or do you want it? We don't need the sidebar. Yeah. Okay. Okay. We should have that here. We're good. Thanks. Good evening, everybody. Did I hear right this is the last school committee meeting in this room? Yeah. Congratulations. That's really cool. Glad to set the tone. Yeah. So thanks, everybody. I'm Thad Dingman. I'm the principal of Down Elementary. I'm beginning. This is the beginning of the 10th year at Down Elementary. I'm very proud of that. I'm proud to serve this community for the last decade. I'm joined by Samantha Corustis, our assistant principal. She's graciously allowed me to be the spokesperson for Down tonight. Thanks, Sam. You got that. Thank you. So tonight what I hope to go through is a few things from the past year that we consider wins and also some challenges that we plan to dig in with our teaching team around this year. We'll share our priorities for 23-24. Priorities that I think are very specific and important to the community at Down, but also are moving our strategic plan forward for the district as well. We'll talk about key initiatives, action steps, you know, and our school improvement plan. So Down Elementary, we're a school of approximately 425 students and about 70-plus staff. Down in the past probably five to six years has peaked at around 500 or a little over 500. So following the pandemic and in the years following sort of plateaued and we remain around 425 students, 20 sections including housing the district supported learning center, sometimes referred to as the SLCB for students in grades K through five. So supporting our community and also supporting our broader community of Arlington students and families. We're very lucky to have the engagement of families in our community. Our PTO is thriving. We've seen volunteerism in our schools rebound in incredible ways since our pandemic. Things like our board seats are all full. Our meetings are full as well. We have a school council that is representative of our family population, teachers and community members and a diversity equity inclusion group that is supporting and tending to all of the voices in Down community. Demographically, Down has changed over the last seven years. We have seen particularly our community that identifies as non-white increased by 15%. We are seeing more languages in our school. We're seeing a multitude of families and experiences and they're asking to participate and be a part of their children's education, which is wonderful. Down, we prioritize three core values, courage, respect and responsibility, and we use those core values to lead our work and helping students to think morally and ethically about their experience with themselves and with each other. Just going to talk a little bit about the segue into the discussion. We have a lot of work to do. Teaching team at Down and some of our core practices that we believe are important. We've made meeting together in professional time, which we call Ace Blocks, our collaborative time where we're meeting across rules in the building. Which slide are we on? I want to say a couple of things about this. What's my name? I point this out because what's been very important is efforts to support students in our school. So that's making sure that we take our time together very seriously. We make efforts to bring special educators, interventionists, coaches, all in the spaces with our teachers every week, following agendas and following data that is collectively identified and valued to improve our student experience. So the professional culture in the school, I would say is very positive because of that. I'm going to talk more in depth, but this year and previous years we are committed to improving literacy instruction for our students. It's been something I've talked with this group about in the past and will continue to talk about. It's an important conversation in our district as well. And also this year we're looking with more focus at our groups within the data that we know who's experienced, we want to shift, we want to focus on. Slide. Generally the data portrait that we've looked at at the start of the year with teachers and administrators, I would say we see several strengths and we see areas of concern emerge. So academically the school demonstrates impressive achievement. We're an 87th percentile school. MCAS supports that our students are performing above the state and with the district. We see strong results for students of math and ELA and science as just general statements. But, and we've also made substantial progress in improving our students' progress towards early reading benchmarks, K through three, as we've paid more attention to those. We've been very proud of the shifts that we've seen particularly coming out again of the pandemic. But then we also need to continue to focus on some of the inequities that become more visible as we zoom in looking at things like, in particular, performance gaps that are existing right now between our high needs and non-high need populations. Particularly when we look at MCAS achievement, that tends to be the key signal to there's something there to understand and improve for our students. High needs is a blanket term. I think most folks, probably all folks have a general sense of what that means. Because it down in our subgroups are small. Students with identified disabilities are multilingual population. Students who are identified as low SES are small groups. Those get clustered into high needs. But there's lots of stories in there for us to learn from. So, you know, in general, I think our data raises questions about specific challenges that those groups are having. We're thinking about the effectiveness of tiered intervention and engagement of our students, particularly students with disabilities in the classroom and within academic discourse. Slide, please. So, in our school improvement plan for this year, we're focused on four priority areas, our priority goals. So, we're going to continue to explore and understand our opportunity gap in literacy, particularly between high needs and non-high needs population. Part of this is the adoption of the EL English language arts curriculum that was happening across the district. Part of it is the expansion of high quality universal screening instruments for our fourth and fifth grade. Our second objective is an instructional objective. This year, our school is looking at the use of protocols to ensure equity of voice in the classroom. It's a high leverage instructional practice that we know is linked to positive student achievement outcomes for all students. It's a central practice in the curriculum that we'll be implementing over the next several years, and it's a practice that we are studying and we'll be learning from as a school. Within the area of equity and culture, we're going to talk a little bit more about our students and their sense of belonging. Sense of belonging is central in our vision statement for the district, and what we see when we listen and look at student voice is our students who are identifying LGBTQIA+, and our students who are identified as having disabilities and receiving services are having reporting a different experience and a different sense of belonging, a less positive sense of belonging than others, than other groups. And in family engagement, we are working, we plan to work closely with our PTO and our staff to make sure that our students see themselves in their school experience, that families see themselves in school experience and that we are creating invitations for families to share the rich diversity of our community in our school. Slide please. I just want to talk a little bit more about literacy and focus on literacy. A few data points to look at. We've been as a school thinking about the experience of our readers from an early age for several years, supporting our staff with professional development, and the district supporting them with the tools to tend to and pay attention to early reading skills. So in the middle you have Dallin, what we look like at your end, using the Dibbles assessment, which is the assessment that we are using now K-5 to monitor reading progress with students. On the far right, we are looking at the MCAS in a trend line of our high-need students and how they are performing on the MCAS assessment. Kind of bouncing, but I hadn't really thought about the order when I was presenting to the school committee. On the left, it's your, yeah, left, good, is the growth from the beginning of the year last year to the end of the year last year for our students in K-3, looking at the percentage of students that are meeting or exceeding the benchmarks assigned by Dibbles. So, you know, what do we notice we see when it comes to early reading skills that our students in K-1 and 2 have made really nice gains and continue to make gains. Our second grade cohort for last year is a cohort where we aside from looking at tier 1 interventions we looked really carefully at our interventions as it's just a larger group of students that need our support. In our third grade we see 80% of our students who are hitting those end of your benchmarks. But still what we notice in some of our MCAS results is a challenge in how those early reading skills are translating into success and the type of questions and the type of ways that we're measuring our students as readers. Particularly what we're thinking about is our students' comprehension and their ability to write responses to their reading. The one intervention that is going to be the most impactful for all of our students particularly when it comes to using MCAS to measure outcomes is our EL education implementation. It is a curriculum that is rigorous, holds our kids to high standards and high expectations, is supportive, is explicit, is teaching them carefully across their years in school how to demonstrate their comprehension. They are reading a ton. They are presented with complex text, with complex ideas. They are reading a range of genres. They are supported. All students are held high standards. All students are reading central text and supporting reading central text. It's not a curriculum where students where the bar is lowered for any particular student. They're learning how to write paragraphs. These are all areas that when you look deeper at those MCAS scores and you think about where is it that they're falling down and you look at where we're closest to the state in our performance. It's essay writing and it's constructed responses. Those are where our students need more experiences in the tier one classroom starting at an early age so that they are prepared for that in third grade. I would argue they are important skills for our kids to have. That is how they demonstrate comprehension. Our students are learning vocabulary. Our students which is important in our students are developing better background knowledge as a part of their experience starting in K1 and 2. Where we have sort of done a better job of figuring out how phonics, phonemic awareness and those emerging skills help students be decoders and fluent readers, we need to give equal attention to students' comprehension skills and language. We have new assessments that we're piling in fourth and fifth grade at Dallin. We have a team that we're developing this year that will closely pay attention to the progress the students are making. That's reading specialists, coaches, special educators, administrators and teaching teams that will be paying attention to progress monitoring. One of our focuses this year on improvement is how we progress monitor across the year and carefully progress monitoring our students in their classrooms. Slide. It's important that another area we're working on is instructional strategy. It's important that we are creating a sense of belonging for our students and the way that we believe that we have the most leverage for that is in their classroom experience. We want our classrooms to be rigorous places for all students. Right now what we see is that our kids are feeling and experiencing rigor in their classrooms. However, if we look a little deeper at our focal groups we see that students with disabilities are feeling less rigor. One of our key central practices is classroom discussion protocols. Classroom discussion protocols are linked to higher levels of student achievement. A protocol, if you're not familiar with it is just a structured approach to a facilitation to a meaningful conversation. And these would happen inside of lessons for students. The purpose is engagement, active engagement, critical thinking, and equitable sharing of ideas. What's central in a protocol to us is it's promoting equity of voice. We want to make sure that all students are participating in a part of whatever the activity is in the classroom. And it's also a way that we create more participation that are and it contributes to our classroom communities that we're developing. Another part of protocols for us and what we're thinking about is how we are appreciating different viewpoints in the classroom. We're encouraging students to work across different types.  Something that we've been focusing on as a school and as a district for several years is our students' sense of belonging. And this year in our goals we are intending to learn even more and understand why some of our students feel so positive about their student experience and why others are not reporting on the same. What we noticed in the data that you're seeing is student voice data. It's panorama, it's from 190 students who are reporting about their experience. So one of the things that we feel good about is last year our focus was on connection with kids. We noticed that our data seems to indicate our students are feeling more connected. Those numbers showed strengthening. We noticed a significant rise in the sense of belonging from our adults. I should talk more about our staff, but this was something that we were very intentional about is making sure that our adult community felt connected to each other. And we noticed great increases for students who are on IPs, students who have identified disabilities. Somewhere in the fall to spring experience, those are real positives for us. Where I think that there's we have more questions than answers is some of the decreases that we noticed. And the swings I think should be noted can tend to be big because those groups are smaller in size. But in particular the theme that emerged in our data is students who identify as a gender other than male or female. And so that's one of the questions or identifiers that students are provided with. We noticed their student experience was less positive particularly from fall to spring. And it's a community of students that we have tried to create affinity groups in spaces for. We've tried to think about the ways that we are allies and creating safe spaces for kids. We I really feel like our adult community is not satisfied with that with those results. So for us to see that dip in this particular focal group sense of belonging is a challenge that we want to take on very seriously. I'll talk a little bit more about key actions in just a second. That particular sense of belonging for our students is something that we're noticing and are going to act on. Slide and I think the segue between I want to talk about our instructional leadership teams it's important that we don't stop at surveys. It's important that we don't stop at tests that are already behind us. It's important that our work, our actions take us closer and closer to the student experience. Our instructional leadership team is something that we've it's part of our district work. It's a part of our school work. They are they are in the leading edge of our priorities. So our instructional leadership team their focus this year is our school-wide focuses protocols they're the first to implement they're the first to open their doors and share with their colleagues. When we're talking about understanding the experience of our focal groups these folks are already identifying students and going to them and interviewing them and talking to them and bringing that information back to our larger instructional leadership team to make sense of and understand. The thing I want to say about our instructional leadership team this is an important initiative in our district and these folks are the role models and the leaders in our schools and that's how we're treating it at Dallin. We have a great team of teachers who are moving that strategic plan forward thinking about instructional coherence thinking about what professional development can look like. On top of all that what our instructional leadership team is intending to work towards this year is more peer collaboration and peer observation. So the best learning I don't mean this facetiously, but teachers learn best from each other. The more authentic the experience the more authentically your voices to the work that you do with kids the more that you learn and listen. So we are trying to cultivate that in our school and our instructional leadership is trying to do that while also moving forward our priorities as a school around equitable discourse and understanding the student experience. Thank you. Is that my one minute Mark? So just trying to synthesize some of our key initiatives and action steps we are as leaders in the school trying to create a culture of learning where our teachers feel that they are supported by each other and available for each other and so that's something that is really important for Sam and I. We want to make sure that our school is a safe and inclusive space for our families and our communities and our students and we know that we are going to need professional development and to be very clear about what are the practices that we know lead to a student feeling like they belong and we know that we will do that by learning from our families and learning from our students and learning from learning from our community. What some of our work this year is around more synthesis we want to combine our groups so we have an instructional leadership team we have a school council with PTOs we have SEL teams this year one of our key initiatives is to bring those groups together more often so that groups so across roles folks can see how they are working towards the same outcomes and how we can develop more relationships of people who play key roles in our schools those voices that are central and part of that is again continuing to cultivate our Dallon ILT our academic initiatives something we are taking very seriously is supporting our EL implementation in grades 2 and 3 looking at high leverage instructional practices across the school developing a team of interventionists and reading specialists special educators and coaches as a core literacy team to more closely progress monitor students across the year and develop communication systems so that we are more transparent with our community that is something our community has asked from us using assessment tools and also part of our work is we are creating a core experience where students do not miss core instruction in any of their content areas that has been really important to us and importantly I just want to say that our teachers they demonstrate their commitment all of our teachers have these priorities somewhere in their professional practice and student achievement goals for themselves so we create common goals across our school so that we are all working towards those same outcomes importantly with a focus on student groups namely our students with identified disabilities and students who are identifying as LBGTQA plus and slide and I will spend a ton of time on this but if you get it if you have a time to read through I think we get really serious about what our kids we believe our kids need and what they want and how they learn best we sit and craft great plans for professional development and what we think will engage our teachers but what we have been doing more of last year and this year is just talking with kids and trying to understand where the glows are in their day the things that they appreciate and love and also listening to our teachers to get a sense of where they are at and where they believe that we need to be going so I have shared some of those from the empathy interviews as just an example of how it is important to go past surveys and to listen to people and make space to hear their stories slide thank you and questions great thank you very much anyone have any questions Mr. Schluckman thank you very much first I want to ask you for the bottom line question as far as we are you are before us you are talking about your school what do you need from us I think if you ask teachers what they need it is time and how I think about that is to some degree if that was the blanket we just had time to do these things it probably wouldn't still be enough I think it is time and it is leadership I take that really seriously what we do is intentional I think the continued support of the school committee I feel like even when there is hard questions to ask I have always felt supported and felt like our community supports our schools we need that continued support I think we are going to learn this year I imagine as we pay extra close attention to how our focal group experience changes what we ask and what we say we communicate that we need I don't want to use the word concern I am impressed by the fact that the district is going through a major implementation of a new literacy curriculum which is going to take a whole chunk of time as soon as you have heard time I know that that is something that has got to be eating up a lot for you yeah and how you do all do your work you know how to do your jobs protect our schools protect our schools from the distractions that will take us away from important conversations about the student experience I have mentioned several times tonight there are students in our school in 3rd through 5th grade who say I am not this gender I am having an experience that is different help me have that experience I do worry at times we get very serious about that how we take care of our educators and protect our schools in doing that work I am always worried about who is caring for our caregivers I hear the discussion I know that there was a major impetus in terms of literacy because we saw the need to shift our curriculum I am glad you were talking about assay constructive response I think the key word here is discourse the transpires among students that sort of an outcome that usually pops up on EMCAS in those areas but that is also a way to gain connections great research base I mean student discourse has a great research base in being effective it has always been a key leverage point thanks for your questions ok thank you so I guess my question and again Dallin mirrors the district in this so it's the same so first of all to Dr. Ford Walker who have all these slides mostly look the same which is amazing so there is a template and we can go and go back and look at the district data so that's my question so thank you for that so the achievement gap in ELA on the EMCAS between high need students and all students has never been bigger than it is now since 2019 anyway that is the case of Dallin it's the case across our district so what are the I mean obviously we have a new literacy curriculum right we're we brought we're doing more you know bringing foundations through grade 3 sounds like there's still some potentially some work to do there in the implementation just because that's what I think when I see growth from fall to spring is like we want to see them we don't want to see 2% fewer in the spring obviously meeting and exceeding but working on that so what do we do about that other than having a new curriculum so I think we measure the efficacy of our interventions so we assume that we have to assume the students who are identified as high needs are in some way known by the school so high needs is like those would be part of that group and that is this blanket it bothers me in the sense that there are very unique experiences even under that and there's a lot of intersection I think there is an intersection between disability and our students that are multilingual that is compelling and needs closer attention to understand what works for students and for students what we can expect or what we should be doing more of or less of and I think that I think low SES is a hidden population for us at least in our community but it's getting bigger if you look at our demographics these are groups that are getting bigger for us but they've been hidden their experiences have been hidden and so there's lots of great research and lots of great practice that we can lean on but I think and I think we have great dedicated teachers who want to see different outcomes for students so all that to be said by paying closer attention to the interventions that we're doing meeting frequently and being flexible trying to learn from this experience and making changes there was a time probably where you would decide on what your course of action is and you would stick with it over the course of maybe a year we don't do that anymore we have people who bring in a milieu like they bring from their backgrounds and if you put a reading specialist a special educator and an MLL teacher next to each other and a coach that you've had in the past and somebody asks a question that hasn't been asked in the past so we've already started that work and then all of a sudden you see folks when you give that type of agency like they're leaders on the ground too so there's this sense of commitment to students that takes place in creating those structures so that's what we believe the magic wand approach I don't necessarily have that instructional practices instructional approaches that people are trying and my other question you didn't touch on it in your presentation so this feels a little it is maybe unfair but we heard a lot from Matt Coleman when he talked about absenteeism and like efforts that were being made to sort of work on that and know that in Karen's presentation she talks about it and I was just curious sort of the 30 second version of your philosophy on working on chronic absenteeism in your population developing compassionate close relationships with families because they're also experiencing the burden of whatever the core issue is so I will say that this is an area where my partner Sam has done a really good job being more helping us all be more aware of the patterns of attendance that we're experiencing and our social workers have never been more important great thank you so much Mr. Kardon so related to the high needs group the percentage of IEPs the percentage of students that have IEPs at Dallen is quite low at 9.4% it used to be as high as 14 and the other schools you have an SLC so it's hard without taking those numbers into consideration but the other elementary schools are the closest is 11% at Bishop and significantly higher at some of the others so do you think there's something notable there what has changed in the last five years about putting people on IEPs at Dallen or is there anything that I wouldn't say there's a single story that I can think of I think that in our work particularly with the by housing the supported learning center we are acutely aware of disproportionality I think that has sharpened our practice so if you think about our populations where disproportionality and disability tend to come together it's low SES it's black and brown these are all populations that are very low for us I think couldn't someway speak to the important role that intervention has played for our students how accessible our intervention is for our families you know so I would say the expertise of those interventionists too is a fact that they've had on students over time you know I think when something I look at is if we pay attention to the non-high needs trend lines they remain pretty stable and high so there's nothing there that screams students are you know we're missing students we're lost in we're missing stories I think we're doing a better job of identifying our students that need the most and now we need to do talking to Jane about is make sure that those practices are impacting those populations thank you I appreciate your concern and highlighting the challenges or the decrease in positive responses for students who don't identify on the gender binary but I'm sort of curious because there's three categories here and the top one which is how much support do adults at your school give you it looks like there's been improvement on right and it's the other two that are the striking declines and I would love to know sort of what you attribute that to and how you know if there's something you can learn all of us can learn from there in that distinction to help all of these students have a better sense of belonging going forward yeah I have I have hunches I think in particular so one thing I want to say is this group is around I think it was nine in the fall and eleven in the spring so we're talking like when the pendulum shifts on some of these we're talking about four or five kids so four or five kids think and how they understand and what they're asking for when they respond to these questions so it's like so when I think is that our teachers what I believe is that our teachers are creating safe spaces in their classrooms for kids and we need to but we're a very connected school I mean Dowan is like a box and so we're all over each other all the time which means we're very visible with each other when we create a safe space and students feel like they can share the fullness of themselves I actually think that that that a student wants to carry that into their school and continue to share the fullness of themselves in all of their spaces so how we do a better job of that is what I believe and we've tried we use announcements like very visible methods and I think it's somewhere in the human connection but I want to hear from our kids and we're going to have our kids tell us great I think we should probably move on what but thank you very much for coming and for your presentation thank you everybody appreciate you nice and hot for you Karen right here alright it's a nice cool seat I wasn't sure about the temperature so I was like I'm not even wearing a sweater today I'm just going to come in it is pineapple time welcome Mr. Nato I'm going to pull off your slides for you and Thompson is our biggest elementary school and one that I always have such a wonderful time visiting and I know you'll hear a lot about what they're up to to make it even more fun to see I used to joke that I wanted to be the biggest and now we are Mr. Dukoff and I used to go back and forth I'm like I think you're only like five more than me now finally it was our turn so welcome I mean thank you for having me I'm happy to be here my name is Karen Donato for those who don't know me I am the principal at Thompson proud principal at Thompson and like Mr. Dingman I have started my 10th year in this position it feels like I'm new every year but people call us the veteran principals these days I'm also here with my wonderful assistant principal Chris and Chevalier who also has allowed me to take the forefront and speaking tonight our motto at Thompson is to be a pineapple stand tall and be your best if you ask a student who went to Thompson will they ever look at a pineapple the same again I don't think so right that's it right next slide please so I can't actually see my notes but I can see that so this evening my goal is to share with you a little bit about who we are at this moment in time share some of the highlights about our priorities for this year and then review some of our glows which are the great things and some of our grows which are things we know we need to work on thank you got my flow this year we are 522 students strong and over about 80 staff members just to highlight a little bit of the picture here the pictures in the middle is a pineapple of course it says good vibes and underneath says amazing things happen here something that I hear often which I think we take great pride in at Thompson is when people come to visit who haven't been there before they say I really like the vibe here I really like what's going on and that's so important to us that when people come including our families and our students they feel welcome the minute they walk in the door to the left you'll see a smaller picture or a picture that we can't see so clearly but it's Misha Valle reviewing our recess expectations with kindergarten over on the what we call the town side field we are have begun our PBIS implementation last year and our core values of being safe be responsible and be respectful and we start the year by going over what that looks like sounds like in all the various places including out at recess and to the right you'll see a part of our staff at our opening staff meeting this year each year I try to surprise them with a theme and this year you'll see construction hats in the picture and we were talking about going back to basics what are some of the basic things that we need to do lay out the foundation for us to continue to build back to where we used to be pre-pandemic this is just a little bit about us some of our numbers I won't necessarily go through all of them but here we are by class size with our smallest cohort is in fifth grade we have 76 students in fifth grade and our largest cohort in second grade is currently at 97 we joke and say the in is full in second grade and our diversity is also represented by the pie chart I'll just highlight but we know that's a huge piece of who Thompson is and the important piece that the diversity plays into our day to day operations across the district the average of 3% of students identify as African American and we are at 5.4% and across the district an average of 8% of students identify as Hispanic and we are at 8.8% just to highlight a couple of comparisons we embrace that we get to work so closely with such a diverse and representative student body and at the bottom is just a quick look at our number of ELL MLL learners with 23 level 1 and 2 and 23 level 3 and 4 students this year this is just a slide highlighting the four school priorities that we are going to focus on you will notice that as an elementary principal team the four priorities are exactly the same for the elementary schools we got together early on as a year started and recognize that our data has some real similarities to it we work collaboratively together collaboratively together on some of the areas that we know we all need to improve on even though it might look slightly different at each of our schools I was laughing when Mr. Dingman was talking about how he was talking about his data charts that he showed because I'm also not going in order so our first goal is we are going to continue to address the opportunity gap in literacy between our high needs and our non high needs students and focusing on the adoption so with the middle graph you will see this summarizes our performance of our K-3 students and using the universal screener of Dibbles we have been able to identify those students who require more detailed target instruction we are slightly below the district aggregate of 83% we were at 81% K-3 but we also recognize that over the last few years the addition of the Hegerty and Fundations programs those are helping us address some of the needs in our K-3 grade span and we know that we are shifting from learning to read to reading to learn at that time moving to the graph to the right I wanted to highlight that Thompson overall continues to meet or exceed state determined benchmarks for our MCAS MCAS across the math, ELA and science areas but with our continued focus on literacy our high needs focal groups continue to underperform and our implementation of the screener at these grade levels with the addition of grades 4 and 5 helps provide us with additional information for what our interventions should look like at that grade level those grade levels as we support closing the gap and with our upper grades we too are taking a look at comprehension and targeting our interventions in that area if you look at the graph to the far left we haven't done a deep dive yet but I thought it was important to include this because I feel like there's both a glow and a grow on this the glow is from 22-23 the percentage of our students who identify as African-American has increased their meeting or exceeding expectations from 23% to 47% conversely there's a grow there and that from 22-23 our students who identify as Hispanic Latino they have declined from meeting or exceeding expectations in ELA from 41% to 26% so this is a piece of data that we really need to dig deeper on in the coming weeks with our ILT and during our ace meetings so we have decided to focus on both K-5 at Thompson we have grade 1 and grade 3 who are the grades who are implementing EL this year but K-5 we have focused on two main high leverage practices we want to improve general classroom instruction for students and we want to take a look at the use of protocols and deepening student discourse on this slide I've just highlighted those two practices talks about how we're going to be working K-5 on those this year and we know that if students are more engaged and if they feel seen and heard in their classrooms and throughout the building they are more available for learning all grades are beginning to implement these protocols this year and that will help support our transition as we go to full implementation next year K-5 I wanted to include the short video I'll give it just a little context before you hit play so part of what we're trying to do is highlight different protocols that all staff can use K-5 in any subject area so that staff isn't seeing that this is just EL it's going to be applied to that these protocols are going to also go across the other subject areas so that students start to feel more engaged in what they're doing and also increase their discourse through the use of these protocols so this is a video that a first grade teacher sent me shortly after we had our first our opening day meeting and then starting school where we were taught the back to back and face to face protocol and right away the teacher went and started using it even before we really got into the nitty gritty so this is the first grade class and they are practicing back to back and face to face and they are actually using it during their morning meeting share so it's not necessarily in science, math, ELA it's something that these protocols are things that can be used throughout the day in different instances so this is just a short snippet of okay do you want me to play it on my computer do you want me to put the speakers on do you want me to play it for my computer but if you play it while I hit play on this even though it might not necessarily exactly match up would they hear the yeah if you put your microphone next to your speaker I'm not ready yet alright alright we're gonna hit play at the exact same time I have to log back in sorry tell me when you're ready put the mic down by your speaker alright ready go okay so today we're gonna do our weekend share with our back to back face to face share so everybody has an idea of what they what they did this weekend now turn face with your partner and take a turn sharing with your partner what you did this weekend when you finish you can make a tent with your hands you and your partner make a tent yep when you finish you and your partner make a tent hands together just like Isabel and Alara when you finish sorry it didn't match up as well as I had hoped but to me quickly we can take something that we were learning and put it right into practice and hope we start to see students become more familiar more comfortable with using these tools and see that ability to increase their conversation and discourse with each other next slide please so this slide we're gonna talk about our culture and climate goal and that's we want to improve belonging for students and all students across the board we understand as people supported by the adults and feel respected and have a sense of belonging so as we continue to grow as our numbers continue to get bigger our diversity also increases and I feel like for years we kind of shied away from highlighting particular cultures or maybe particular things because we didn't want to forget anybody but over the years we've realized that is a practice things other students are also encouraged to share about their own individual cultures even if it's not necessarily something that we addressed in the highlight but we want them to feel all throughout the building an increased sense of belonging so on our panorama data 59% of students in grades 3 through 5 had responded favorably when asked how well do people at your school understand you and we certainly want to see that increase we want our students to feel as though they're seen and heard through all aspects of their day we did conduct empathy interviews at the end of last year with a number of our 5th grade students and I just thought it was important I highlighted a few things that they tend to, the students reported that they really feel a sense of belonging at recess and in the cafeteria when they're with their peers so that's the time when they're actually mixed not necessarily in their isolated classrooms that when they get together as a whole grade level and they also reported that they would also feel a greater sense of belonging if the adults at school let them talk like we are right now literally said right now and actually listen like you're not talking Mrs. Donato you're actually listening to what we have to say and in that moment I was like oh you're right like we're taking time because time is a big thing for us we're taking the time to actually talk to them not necessarily about academic or something that may have come up throughout their day that we have to address but it's asking them a couple questions about how they're feeling at school what are some things that make them feel like they belong and it was in that moment that I was like alright this is something that we really have to somehow figure out how to incorporate throughout the year and one of the students highlighted that creating the all-gender bathrooms and our rainbow alliance has also made them feel like they belong and I just wanted to say that the pictures on the slide they are from our multicultural festival and I don't know if any of you have had the opportunity to come to one right now we're doing it every other year but it is my first year when I went to the multicultural festival I just I was so emotional because walking around and seeing our students and their families in our building so proud of who they are and the things that they do and in their cultural clothing it just was something that I just felt so emotional about in those moments in that moment and take great pride in it was just it's something that I can't capture but if you get the opportunity to have the opportunity to come I hope you do it's an opportunity where students can participate in a fashion show and where something that represents their culture is parents and students and caregivers they bring artifacts from their culture and have display tables and boards there's activities that families are running based on their culture and it is it's just amazing it's really something that captures who we are and when that was talking about kind of his PTO and his volunteers and things like that how that's really strong I've seen a decline in that which kind of leads into my next slide in addition to the chronic absenteeism that's on there but due to person power and all that goes into running an event like that we've shifted from every year to every other year so there's pieces like that that due to some circumstances that we weren't prepared for we weren't able to keep this going every year but we do get volunteers them right now every other year leading to the next slide so this slide represents and I just put this piece on it because I think this is a piece of the puzzle for us there's a lot of different things that I think can go into a sense of belonging for our families and re-engaging our families so just speaking to the table we know that our attendance rate is slightly lower than the district average we also see that for our focal groups the rate is cause for concern and this is something we really need to focus on I look at the second to last column on the right the percentage of chronically absent 10% or more and when you look at our families who identify as low income, high needs our students with disabilities and then our African-American and Hispanic or Latino students those numbers are particularly high our Hispanic populations chronic absenteeism is almost double is more than double than all students so this goes back to some of the ways that we want to engage our families so that they feel that they have a voice at the table that they feel that they're who they are matters and with our ILT we want to increase the ways that we communicate with families we've done some various things over the years but it's still not the one thing the one thing that's going to reach all of our families so how can we really take a look at who is actually either not attending events who's not signing up for parent-teacher conferences who are our students who are chronically absent there's a whole host of reasons and different things but the fact remains that those numbers are high and we need our students in school so that they can engage they can feel that they are part of the community that they can be available for learning and show their own academic growth so that is a big focus of the work I want to do this year with our ILT and what are some of the ways that we as individuals in the school not just looking at the school as a whole but the individual people at the school what can we do differently what can we tap into that's going to help increase our communication with families support them and support their students next slide almost last slide this is just a few of our glows we've expanded our ILT which I think is really important we didn't have all grade levels represented last year we didn't have staff who were ready to participate we have service providers support staff specialists and coaches as part of our team we are regularly using ACE time so that staff can collaborate and look at data and we can talk about some of our instructional practices math was a part of our focus from our CIP last year including student discourse specifically in math and just overall we've seen growth in our math scaled scores and growth percentiles our PBIS team continues to grow and our implementation has been strong thankfully under the direction of Ms. Chevalier and we're consistently working with students on holding them to high expectations in all areas of the school we had partnership and we continued a partnership with we the people for enrichment for students and professional development for staff about being culturally responsive and a partnership with PFLAG for professional development for staff around supporting our LGBTQIA plus students slide please and our grows we want to increase our participation in our panorama survey as I mentioned before our students who identify as Hispanic and African-American have significantly higher rates of absenteeism and we want to work to understand that and improve upon that increase our communication with caregivers around student progress as well as opportunities to come to school events with their student something that we've talked about under that is that we had reached a nice rhythm of grade levels inviting families in during the school day or hosting evening events before the pandemic we'd have a math night, we'd have a literacy night we'd have volunteers, we'd have teachers we would have teachers have parents in during the school day if they were available and I feel like we had gotten away from some of those things and we're slowly getting back into that but that's an area that we really want to focus on across all grade levels this year is making sure we're providing opportunities for families to actually come into the classroom to see and be with their students in class and experience some of the things that are happening for them there and then a grow and something that I'd like to particularly focus on and I know as an administrative team we want to provide dedicated time and space to meet with specific caregiver populations so that we are hearing from them directly things that may be going well things that they need our support in and things that we need to do to improve in order to support them so that we can elevate their voices in our school community I feel like we work really hard with our students and provide for them in all ways even beyond the school walls and there's still a missing piece in connecting with the adults in their lives on a regular basis not that we don't connect with them and bring them into the day-to-day things that are happening in the school not just parent-teacher conference or this event that we're having or a phone call we want to hear from our specific populations of the things that we need to do so that they feel a part of our community more deeply great, thank you questions Ms. Ekston thank you for this presentation I remember last year there was there felt like so there was some struggle for you and this year this presentation felt like things feel better so I hope that that is the case for you and I hope that last year went okay but what I wanted to mention or say was that as you were talking about the absenteeism I was sort of thinking like what can we as a school committee what supports would Thompson benefit from which is the district need and then you shared this in your grows but I'm just wondering what what relationship you have with the welcome center and the director of community and family engagement and how can that department help you with some of these ideas that you have here I think that's going to be huge I've already had lots of conversations with and we are tossing around different ideas about how teachers themselves can communicate more effectively and efficiently with families who may not speak English right now we don't have a particular platform that all teachers can access for translation we have lexicate we use that it's not as quick and easy as we want it to be how can we quickly get messages to families how can we quickly reach out to a parent not necessarily giving teachers using their cell phones or giving their cell phone numbers out but looking for a way where we can effectively not just go to google translate and try to hope we can get the information we need to families selectively I frequently I use school messenger all the time to get big messages out to the entire community or even grade levels and that provides me the opportunity to translate and to highlight families chosen languages and it does have a character limit so at times I'm not all that wordy but sometimes lots of information has to be broken up but there's not something that we have found that's so quick and easy for staff to be able to contact a parent and just say hey can you send in the permission slip it's Vicki at the front desk so and so didn't send in the permission slip then it's Vicki who's trying to get a hold of the parent and they're at work so they're not able to respond quickly so we're looking for ways like that and we have been discussing I'm learning that there may be a piece to school messenger that will allow us to do that I also think for some of our families they are not always at their computer so checking their email may not be something they are able to do quickly often times I think checking a text and being able to respond quickly is something that is something that they could access so looking for something like that I think is going to be important and I feel as though I know we're trying to centralize some things but partnering with the family engagement center is going to be really important because a lot of our community relies on us in our building that people in the community when there's new families that move in they say oh go see Vicki or go to Thompson and they can help you with the registration or they can help you get this document and things like that so I think somehow coming up with some protocols or structures that allow us to also still have the family engagement in our area is going to be important yeah thank you just to add to that Ms. Donato is on the working group with Ms. Pierre that is focused on community family engagement these conversations about tools that would make it easier for us to communicate with families in a more immediate way particularly who use different modes of communication because we make an assumption that everybody's on email they're not and so I'm thrilled to have Ms. Donato on that working group because the challenges that we experience with communication with families many of them impact families at Thompson and so your perspective on that particular working group is really valuable as well as that perspective around how we make sure that the schools are still the hubs for family connection even though we have a family welcome center to provide resources to make that possible so thinking about how we're at once very local and centralizing processes so that they're consistent is something that working group is going to be thinking about a lot thank you other questions Mr. Cardin so this year we gave you an inclusion specialist instead of another classroom because you don't know room for classroom originally that was for grades I think one and two but one ended up not being overly oversized compared to other schools so can you just talk briefly about how you're utilizing that position and how it's working out whether it's helping or not we haven't yet filled that position we are working to fill it the applications for most of our open positions have not been many this year it's been an interesting year to try to hire even for a social worker was a position we had open at the end of the year so trying to have enough of a pool to do some interviews to be able to hire is where we're at we actually do have interviews that we're going to schedule we have a handful of candidates now so I think once we are able to hire the person their strengths where they've been their experience that will also help us shape where we wind up utilizing them and we appreciate the position when it's filled we're really looking forward to being able to utilize them okay okay one of the weaknesses the MCAS on the elementary levels you're only doing three grades and so if you're doing a year to year comparison you lose your fifth grade you get a new third grade and you've got a relatively small cohort of African-American and Hispanic Latino kids so that when I see that kind of pattern I'm just wondering if that's a cohort effect and I don't expect you to know the answer tonight but I know that you're going to go and do the data dive so that the exercise that you should be thinking about as you're going forward is to take a look at the cohort effect your growth numbers are good so I think that you probably are dealing with a cohort effect that's making that graph look funny the one the one thing I want to is your tenants data on one level you're telling me that the African-American students have a significantly higher ten absentee rate which is true for chronically absent your 25% of the African-American students are chronically absent compared to 17.7% of the whole student population but overall for the attendance rate for African-Americans kids is 94.2 compared to 93.7 the average number of attendance is 10.2 compared to 11.2 for the whole school so in every attendance category except for the chronically absent your African-American kids are performing better than the school as a whole which indicates to me that you've got 75% of your kids in that cohort group which are really struggling with the tenants and 75% of the kids in that cohort group who just come to school no matter what so I think that in terms of Christmas of discussion internally within the community as you're looking at kids walking in the door I think it's also important to recognize that within that cohort 75% of them are your all stars so being more crisp here I think it's just important both for the kids and for visualizing the community but I thought your progress in terms of what we can see from the test scores is impressive so I'm going to come back with the two questions that I asked Mr. Dingman in terms of the literacy program is a huge huge thing how's that going relative to everything you need to do and what do you need from us that's fine I think the literacy program with any change and a big change like this I feel like obviously it's going to come with some growing pains I feel like for our teams right now that are implementing it it's a huge change they've got a lot of work they're constantly not that they worked before but they're in early they're printing they're trying to be ahead of what's coming next I love the collaboration that I'm seeing with our special educators with our ML teachers with our coaches with those cohorts in particular I think and I've said this to Dr. Holman before time is always a factor you know we've got our constraints on that whether it's including financial constraints I think we want to make sure that we continue to be competitive salary wise I feel like I lost a couple of key players this year to neighboring districts who pay more so I think that's going to be important for us thank you for saying that it's important to have on the table when it happens we need to know about that sure and I think too we are continuing to see the effects of the pandemic and while we have I feel like we are well staffed we've got a lot of resources and I don't necessarily know that I have the one thing the magic wand that that referred to but I give my teachers permission I think this is really important that there are going to be times where they can't continue to forge ahead in a lesson you have to stop you have to let them know that you hear them you see them that they are struggling and it's okay and we are going to help them and I find that some teachers can do that really well and then other teachers just continue to feel the pressure of wanting to do what they are expected to do curriculum wise as well so how do I find that balance for them how do they find that balance for themselves and I think we are going to feel this for a few years I mean just thinking of where we see some struggle right now it's in our younger grades with some of our students and their emotional regulation their social skills development so giving staff and our support staff and Chris and I also spend a lot of time supporting the kids ourselves so that instruction can continue for the rest of the class but we have to find ways to allow for some more time in those areas too so part of what is a part of EL is that they are going to continue by having protocols being able to find ways where kids can't feel that they are part of the conversation regardless of maybe their background knowledge or what they did over the weekend or what they got as holiday gifts like finding those ways so that the kids that SEL is going to be embedded in some of the work of EL so trying to find and highlight some of those practices is going to be really important because we don't have enough time to also have a SEL block in our day while we do EL, while we do math while we do science, social studies and specials and I'd say for Thompson what we see is that there's a lot of crossover in our focal groups we don't just have the students on IEPs the students on IEPs might also be the students of color might also be the ML students or the students who are socio-economically disadvantaged so as we try to support them throughout the school day without necessarily pulling them from missing core instruction we have to find the ways so that they are still getting the support that they need and feel as though they belong and are part of the class and the grade level and have something to offer that was kind of a long-winded explanation but I just think that's a really important factor for us and finding the time to address some of the social-emotional needs that we're seeing is going to continue to be something that we see over the next few years I was the principal, the worst days were the days when the social worker was absent Thank you Thank you Any other? Okay, I had I just wanted to comment two questions and these were actually kind of for both of you but first I was just wondering how effective is Dibbles for students in grade three where there a lot of them are starting to understand how to read and I'm just thinking if you're doing nonsense words that it start to me it feels like it would start getting confusing right because they're not words and I don't know how it's done so maybe I'm totally wrong Not since words cut off in second grade Yeah, it continues I think it tells us if kids the operating theory of the research is if students are struggling to decode too many words then it's going to affect their comprehension so it does give us by third grade information over which of our students are really still in that area of need they also start in second grade to use a quick dipstick around comprehension called the maze assessment and I think that's where we have more to learn because really this is all about helping students be able to read fluently and to support their growing comprehension we see in our MCAS scores that that that's what really MCAS is looking at very closely is their comprehension skills some of their written skills And I think too what we were finding is we were doing the initial assessments this year some of the scores that may have flagged for a particular student especially in the upper grades was around the maze and we had to take time to kind of look at what the students response was because it's a timed assessment so just because a student may have flagged as a lower or well below in that particular area if you go in student by student you can see that actually they only answered seven but they answered all seven correctly so you know there's some cause for like not just taking it as it says oh they're flagged we've got it right away but we need to dig a little deeper for some students and take a look at some specific some of their responses Thank you and then the other thing was sparked from a conversation I had just before the meeting about how the community around elementary schools is so different than it was for our two oldest daughters where when we were dropping off or picking up most there was a lot more people interacting and now we have partly because the demographics of town have shifted we have more two parent families and less interaction and then that's combined with COVID and COVID's this overlay where you have a whole cohort of people who never met in kindergarten and that's really where most people kind of that's where you get your community and Ms. Donato has had a lot of mentioned things where they're trying to bring the families into schools and I think that's just so important right now because we need to come we need to have some other ways that we're building these communities which before happened more organically and for some are broken and now they're kind of the role models for the earlier we kind of broken something and we have to kind of rebuild it just like you've been talking about and like and I'm not saying we've done something wrong but like not having class lists not having phone books and stuff all these things are things that have made it more difficult to build community outside of school and to me that has an effect on the community that's inside of school because if the parents feel part of more part of this school it's easier for them to convey that's the message that they give the kids and anyway I'm just I'm mentioning that because it came up and I hadn't really I don't know somehow our conversation made it really clear or more apparent to me and I thought I'd pass that along because I heard that kind of in both of your presentations yeah I think that's I think that's really true and I'd say I feel like it's hit us a little bit harder than that report about like his volunteerism is up his PTO board is full we are not in that place and I don't know that it's necessarily that people don't want to be involved it's more like time constraints or jobs have shifted or family dynamics have shifted and we need to try to hear from those people who maybe not be at the table all the time to know what can we do to make this more accessible to you as well not just you know good one thing to that and this is so I'm thinking about this from the perspective of uniquely down I'm thinking about it as a building leader and I'm thinking about it as a parent in our system and what I hear from our PTO that I think I hear in other places too is they don't just want to be invited into what they want to understand the learning they want to be invited into the learning that's something our PTO does specifically this year we want to do all these things we want to be intentional about bringing people in and embracing the diversity in our community but also we want to come and see what our kids are learning and how our kids are learning and know about that so that's the challenge they've given us this year great thank you very much thank you both next we have Dr. Janger with the and her genius grouping of update fresh off of a meeting about the move and ready to move into a new building we're going to play pink Floyd all the way over there we'll make sure you know where to go for the next meeting you'll probably know better we will keep coming in the same way you did come in before you know a funny little building in the back that is coming off of Mill Street that's like three stories tall that's where we're going to be okay yeah they're separating us from the real teaching and learning yeah it's coming all right tell me when to go so hopefully this is you know a relatively short presentation you may have lots of questions because what I'm focused on presenting today you can go to the next slide is just this review of grades from the end of last year so we finally got the punchline on those we've been looking at semester grades before and then the participation rates for the fall and then I'm happy to answer questions about sort of how the fall is going so chugging right along so just a quick recap we'll go quickly through these so this is just a reminder of the slide that I keep putting up of what we said we were going to be looking at in terms of measuring the success of this pilot program and so today as I said we're looking at participation in honors and student grades next slide so going forward I'll be back here in December when we will have term one grades to look at so we'll have one more data point for the fall and we'll have finished conversations with the English 9 and probably English 10 teachers and becoming to some sort of proposal about what we see as the next phase and as I understand it there are three questions that we'll be looking at in December and those are going to be primarily do we continue the heterogeneous grouping in English 9 whether or not we consider rolling it forward in English 10 and whether we think of any modifications in the format around heterogeneous grouping for things like honors for all next step so now we are up to the final grades so if you go to slide 6 so these charts are all a little bit hard to read for various reasons one of the things just in terms of data points for good data visualization for those of you who are sticklers for good data visualization this is not a trend chart that can be looked at reliably because the distance between the dots is not the same as the distance between the grades what you're looking at there on the far right is the end of year grades for school year 23 so last year that's the main new data point but I've left on this chart the quarter one grades just so we can see the relationship between those then we have for the previous year the end of year grades that's SY 22 Y1 and the previous years quarter one grades so again we can see the relationship between the quarter one and quarter two grades and then I wanted to go back to comparison years where we had leveled classes so if you go back to school year 2020 the problem was that our end of year grades were already into COVID so I did not put the end of year grades for 2020 that's why there's only quarter one grades there and then I had the end of year grades for year for SY 19 going back so it's a little bit of an apples to oranges but if you look at the comparison years it would be the end of year grades for SY 19 to the end of year grades for SY 22 which is now heterogeneous and to the end of year grades for SY 23 the punchline is very similar to what we found at the beginning of last year which is that the grades overall are stable that the lower line which you see in the blue line going down these did under heterogeneous grouping with a large proportion of the higher performing students who would have been in level A are now at level H but not getting lower grades and so that's why the red line stays stable the yellow line stays stable even though it's a lot more kids and the blue line drops and that's consistent with our recommendations to students which has been if you're getting an A in level A we think you should probably try level H because the students who thought they were going to get A's in level A have moved up to level H next slide to have to turn my head backwards the whole time so then the tables that follow are just because my labeling isn't great so you can see this in table form so the next slide is even harder to read next one because there's so many of these but again you want to be looking at that light blue dot to the green dot to the red bar to the blue bar and again what you'll see is that the end of the year grades remain relatively stable and they're either the better equal to the previous year or better than the earlier years and you can see the same thing a little bit better if you pop down two more of the grades by gender where again you'll see that the grades in recent the post-COVID years were stable post-COVID years that is the grade reports I did break the grades out by race ethnicity by level but because our numbers within each of those subcategories is relatively small I didn't report it out by level there's only between about 30 and 18 in each of those categories if you divide that in half you're starting to have ends under 10 which I don't want to report those grades on alright so now distribution by race so now if you'll go down next slide so now we're up to participation rates so the good news is oh you gave us that one you put in the one I asked you to put in that slide is not in the materials that I sent to you but just for context I wanted to show this information so as you can see the breakdown is relatively small it's one of the categories and that's consistent across the years and that's why I don't break out the subcategories by level even though I did look at that next slide so the punchline is that the percentage of students participating in honors has continued to remain high it actually went up by about 5% so it's now over 70% for this year and then if you go down further and now because they are for comparable years I drew the little trend lines and so as you'll see although they bounce around in some of the smaller categories the overall trend is upwards so if you look at the subcategories that were the most volatile would be for African American students whereas you can see in 2020 in 2022 they were only about 25% and then it jumped up to some more than the neighborhood of 60% it's gone down to about 47% I think you can see on the chart this year but it's still about twice as high as it was in previous years and so the overall trend lines although volatile in the small groups remain positive let's see the same thing in gender again the trend lines go up the sort of gaps remain pretty similar over the years and if you look go down then to IEP status you'll see a really significant impact so if you sort of round off your numbers for IEP students almost about 4 times as many students in IEPs are participating in honors level curriculum about twice as many African American students comparable proportions for Hispanics and multiracial students and I believe that is it that is the whole presentation I can also speak to just quickly I spoke to the English teachers today just to talk a little bit about what they've been working on they met over the summer, they're going through the same pattern that we did last year they met over the summer to review the panorama data to review the participation data to talk about what they saw they are focusing heavily on both sort of classroom citizenship academic discourse which is a focus both in their classes and throughout the school and thinking about what they mean by high expectations for all students because that was an area of particular focus I brought and I left it back here hold on one second this was something that they are implementing in all their classes but it's not the same so this is just a focus on really thinking about how they create a collaborative classroom environment so they wanted to have consistent practices across there is similar work being done around having similar specific instruction on academic conversation and that's something I'll actually talk about during my SIP presentation so I won't go on too long for that questions thank you this was helpful can we get an update about what was said at the we had so I heard about it on Facebook love getting my information from there but I don't know if it's accurate so it would be helpful to know what was said then around particularly around expansion yeah I'm trying to remember that was a few weeks ago from what I recall what I can't imagine I would have said differently about expansion is that we are not to Dr. Jinger's point what he has on here is that if we are considering recommendations for a program of studies to discuss around this particular pilot that this pilot is isolated to conversations about English at the high school there was a community member who was there to ask particularly questions about mathematics we had some discussion about if we were to consider any changes in mathematics first of all that's not something that's on the table right now for this year for next school year but the math is a different discipline that you have to take a measured approach to any leveling practices you're going to adjust in any discipline that our priority is always going to be to involve members of the community in that and that if anything what I think this pilot has taught us is that we want to provide more opportunities for more students to level up the results we've shown at the high school this year are that more students are participating in more high level classes more classes that are considered rigorous by the state and that's a positive trend and that's the goal so if we do any adjustment of leveling practices that it's towards that end and if we were to do that in mathematics then what we would provide more students with access to the rigorous mathematics courses and make sure that we have additional doses of support for those students who might need it in order to access that we did some differentiation between what because I think sometimes there's not understanding about what the difference is between math 7 and math 7a so there are questions about at the middle level what the difference is between those two it's the difference of two units in the math classes and what we would do to make sure students have the ability to differentiate when they get up into the high school so once they get through up into the high school space how much latitude they have to choose a direction in a discipline in a mathematics discipline or any other discipline that they have but we didn't say anything specific about plans to expand or not because we were very specific this pilot is for ELA right now at the high school so I don't know what was grade 9 or grade 10 or the message that I heard was that there were not plans to expand beyond grade 9 at this point but maybe that's not what was said, I don't know I don't remember exactly what I said at a subcommittee meeting recently like Jeff was there but he's not here no this was at the chat so it's on a subcommittee meeting it was a school committee relations subcommittee meeting it was the chat it was the chat it was a public meeting right well ish I'm just curious about what was said so that would be helpful it's okay okay so last year's freshmen are now sophomores do we have data on how many of them how they sorted into sophomoring roughly 65% continued so it's a comparable percentage okay so 65% of all students who were I just want to you're saying 65% were in honors roughly 65% of the expressions class students which is sophomore english general ed english roughly 65% of those students are participating in honors this year okay so the percentage that was last year sustained into this year that was sort of what I wanted to hit so that we've got more kids in sophomore honors now as a result of what we did last year although the percentage was relatively high last year and I need to do a deeper dive to try to disaggregate cohort effects from general effects but the question is what happened in sophomore year as a result of what we did in freshman year because sophomores totally unaffected by what we did well it appears we had 67% of students in honors in ninth grade english last year we have roughly 65% in honors and expressions this year so it maintained a high percentage this year so the grades first semester grades it would be also helpful to track the 10th grade grades as well okay the other question is the reason why we got into ninth grade english is because it was the ninth grade english teachers were excited about doing this as a result of how they taught during the pandemic when everybody was forced together the other group of teachers before us telling us yes yes yes we want to play we're the science teachers so I don't want to go anywhere near math because it's a whole different discipline but I think one of the biggest things for making this kind of thing successful is the enthusiasm of the teachers for going forward in this what are you hearing from our science teachers so my understanding from the science teachers is that they are interested at this point they're really working on one of the reasons why we step back on that was because again there are curricular changes that need to happen within science that already happened in math I mean sorry in english and so they're still working on that we've also had some turnover in the staff so making sure that everybody is on board it's a smaller cohort because in the sciences it's physical science teachers specifically so whereas the english department has a bigger sort more than 20 people to pull people from we have 4 or 5 folks who are teaching physical science so that's the other question is within the community of teachers at Arlington High how many of you sat up and take a notice and either want to play or have an opinion I mean in general our impression is that there's a pretty strong I mean again it depends on the content area and it depends on the particular class so the idea that in 9th grade physical science and potentially 9th grade world history you might do this so that the 9th grade experience was more inclusive and students were having more of a common exposure to high level curricula in high school that's something that people are interested in as Dr. Homan said math is another conversation but I also think that there's right now we've done the work in english it's successful in english and there's a much bigger conversation going on about how do we give all students access to high level curriculum and how do we encourage deeper learning across the school and so I think right now everyone wants to sort of hit the pause button on the heterogeneous english is the solution to everything or heterogeneity is the solution to everything and think about how we have our practices be rigorous across those classes and those curricula be aligned I think that other teachers in this content area the big one I'm thinking is history social studies is that if they're assigning written assignments to students say in 10th grade right now they should be seeing stronger products as a result of their stronger literacy skills I mean and one of the things we've said about this right is because inclusion in general increases opportunities for students and increases the advantages and benefits of diversity of our community they may not even if they're not seeing better they're seeing the same and they were already seeing pretty good skills amongst our students right that is a vote in favor of being able to continue inclusion in that model in 9th grade and in 10th grade potentially I think the data is impressive so I just want to take every opportunity I can to explore the next steps of what the ripples of this project are throughout the school which I think if we're looking for we're going to see a lot of them I mean I will say this right we do a lot of large scale or other efforts to sort of impact student achievement and the effect sizes are often fairly small right we're looking at fairly small changes over time to have moved almost 20% of the class right from 15 I can't remember 19% of the numbers are but of the class into honors level curriculum with their grades still being the same and seeing the positive impact is a pretty significant effect yes we threw a big rock in the pond thank you any other questions okay I guess my question I mean first I am very impressed at the increase in participation for smaller IAPs etc I guess for me for it to be and I think that's a really good reason to try and make this work but I would also I'm still thinking about the parents who were concerned how rigor was going to be delivered for students who in if they're in a non-heterogeneous world would have been in the honors classes and their concerns that their students wouldn't get the same that the experience that they get in the heterogeneous class would not be similar to what they get in the separated classes homogenous classes so I guess I'm wondering how that's going I mean I see no evidence that students are getting a less rigorous experience than they were previously and I see ample extra evidence that they're getting a more rigorous experience than they were previously teachers have looked at examples of student work before and after they looked at examples of student work and what their expectations were and what high expectations were in English what kind of discourse what kind of writing skills what kind of reading skills they were expecting and how they accessed them they've done common grading and normed their practices across those and they are delivering to students I mean they are the assessors of that student achievement and they are relatively reliable and they're saying that the students are performing higher what they're saying is that now 65 to 70 well last year 67% of the students were earning an equivalent grade but now at the honors level and they are rating that work against past honors work they're the same teachers they're norming on the same standards they're working together collectively in terms of norming that practice so that's not exactly the question that I'm asking though which is for the students who would have picked honors in a in the homogeneous classes would they be learning more even more which is what the parents felt I guess that I think I am answering the question because if I'm a student who took honors last year and I got a B and I took honors this year and I got a B I was doing the same rigorous work both years and we are seeing that those students are still doing and achieving the same rigorous work in this different setting when we looked at the panorama data and we asked the students did you learn a lot they said I learned a lot did the teacher make the class interesting the teacher made the class interesting was the teacher you know I mean those things were in there the one which we've already commented on right is the four questions or five questions on engagement and the one on teacher expectations which we will work to this we will work to try to understand that and to sort of figure out look at how that changes this year it's something the teachers have studied and they're working on looking at that question around engagement we've had a lot of conversations to hear about and to interpret the one question about expectations but other than that everything we can see from the teachers is that the students are producing the same rigorous high level work the same teachers assessing the students on the same standards and more rigorously than they had in the past because they've had a lot of time to really work out that question of what does rigorous work look like we're seeing that high level of performance the students reported relatively high quality classes overall okay thank you anyone else any other questions oh please with a chime in on that just because I teach heterogeneous classes the way you design them is not to design for the middle and accelerate up it's you design at the top and then scaffold and modify to get everybody up there so for somebody who's concerned that having a heterogeneous class is going to take down the level of rigor it's not you keep it up there you're just building in more supports to get other people up if that helps okay that's helpful thank you and the experience and reporting from the teachers is that the level of discourse and conversation in the classes is improved by having a more diverse group of students great anything more okay thank you very much finance report number one which one do you want to start with we can start with the finance reports that's thank you good evening school committee members I was going to try to make this more pretty a sly deck but we've been working on this office so tonight you have the memo for the first finance report which is for financials as of October 24th as of Tuesday the night that was sent over to you or right before and at this moment we are about 18 percent 18 to 19 percent obligated in terms of what we've already spent and that's around 16.6 million dollars on the general fund and 77 percent encumbered at this point which would include that salaries and all other contracted services instructional materials that we're anticipating spending on at this point however department heads are still trying to determine what they're going to spend their funds on based on their needs or getting their all of their orders in place some notables for the general fund is that there were obviously we're still hiring for some positions and so you'll see that at the top that we have we have some some salary savings currently but I would hold off and wait until we fill some more positions to decide that we're going to move on that and then all those savings are time to just newer positions coming in at lower salary rates we have some vacancies still substantial in facilities their maintenance team is still they're half I mean filled at half rate they have about six vacancies in that department so there's probably going to still use a lot of contracted services to do the work you know normally facilities department would encumber the power electricity and natural natural gas line items over the course of the year in pieces so this year we've actually encumbered the total projection up front I'm going to inquire about the natural gas item and why that's slightly off I think that's under encumbered but that was what they were was directed to ensure that we had enough funds up front we were seeing that there was some higher electricity usage last year and this year with new buildings and then new rates kicking in also we've hired our new building systems manager and we have the backfill maintenance position so that's where we are with facility lines another major the main driver we budgeted a much higher amount for tuition so we were anticipating 14% increases and those have happened but there's also once again a reduction in enrollment due to aging out of students and we're down to 55 out of district students but I'm understanding that there's a couple of placements that might be made or there are extended evaluations that may be happening so that's the number that we should continue to look at and and that's it for the general fund portion revolving funds we have to do some maintenance due to the close of the year there was some issues on the budget size but in terms of the actual spending this is as well as as of October 24th and I don't have any notable items to mention besides that hopefully in the next period we should see more revenue for our after school rental programs for those that are tracking that and then you'll have your grant the grants account report nothing at this point to really note besides that we're still we made a last minute amendment to some grants and due to the state changing their systems over a new accounting system for us to track grants which is called gems so when making an amendment it's causing a hold up to give us our final record of award we're entitled to these grants we're going to get the funding but those accounts are then held by the Comptroller to not be set up with amounts so they're being withheld from this report but they should be in the next can you tell us what page you're on for the grant accounts report so that's page 11 so you'll see the note thank you for slowing me down so and there's a note there that the report is missing and I'm sorry I didn't I forgot that you had it up there so grant accounts report on you'll see there's a note that Title I and special education grants we're still waiting for our final approval for allocation so that we can set those accounts up in Muniz but as an entitlement grant we've been allocated the dollars is not that we're not going to get these dollars it's not on this report because the accounts are not set up and the expenditures are pulsing somewhere else temporarily for that I can stop and answer any questions slow down I forgot that she was running running point on that and I was just kind of going through the pages any questions anything in here giving you angst or anxiety your stomach medicine um no not yet I think I'm concerned is the utility rates you know so and how the utilities play I think hearing that this winter may be a rougher winter I mean those are the things that I'm concerned about so making sure that we have funds to make sure we get through that obviously switching the high school out of that building out of this building and moving over there should what I remember from previous reports it's going to have an impact on utilities as well correct yeah so now you have a building that's more spaces that are being ventilated at a higher capacity and cooled later on at a higher capacity it's going to be more efficient more efficient and more comfortable so for the students so other questions so I guess more of a suggestion than a question we have positions like the inclusion specialist that we heard about tonight that we are still planning to fill it would be helpful to have those funds reserved somewhere rather than them falling into the balance looking like we can go spend it somewhere else you can't encumber it because you don't have anybody in that position but you could put it in the projected expenditure column usually when I do add it I will make note of that when I speak to it but in this projection I did not do that anything more so this is I don't know that you will know the answer but I saw that the MSBA has made changes about funding projects and I just wonder is that affecting our project because it talked about projects already ongoing but they didn't give what I was reading didn't give any details about exactly which ones it talked about nine ones and 30 projects and stuff I haven't heard anything from my end I will look into that and see if it impacts us I would imagine we would know if whatever change would have impacted us so at this point I haven't been informed of any of that so I will get back and send an email it was just released it was just released I am just looking for more money right I mean from the state and it was increasing the reimbursement rates for site work and for project management and stuff and it talked about the stuff which we have seen in the building project as we have gone along and it will apply to the people who are now going but it also talked about applying to projects which were approved before 2022 so that's where I am like oh maybe keep our fingers crossed I see the buzz going on but I don't know the exact impact so I will look into it I am just curious thank you anything more on this seeing none and then you were going to talk about it I was going to suggest that we actually look at the enrollment numbers projections at budget subcommittee since they are not final and that was my intent yeah so we will just have this shared for everyone's information and they will be discussing it so I think we are good so moving on I think that makes sense because they are not certified yet so we don't want people in the audience thinking something and it turns out not to be please I think it will be certified either by tomorrow or midweek next week yeah there is no rush I will say in committee reports budget is going to meet in early November so we will go over it then okay superintendent's update quick fall athletics update we have had 556 students who registered for tryouts this fall 491 of them made it onto a team roster impressive results to share the APS golf team has qualified for its state tournament our girls soccer field hockey football and volleyball teams are on track for the state tournament as was already mentioned by our students our girls cross country team is having a fantastic season its undefeated 4-0 boys cross country at 2 and 2 our girls swimming and cheering is preparing for the middle sex league meet we have a lot of swimmers and cross country runners ready to participate in state meets our Nordic ski team will begin its very first season as a varsity sport and we are looking forward to that we had our launch of our all district professional development last week the feedback was just as wonderful as it was last school year we have a really exciting list of courses that I talked about the last time I had an update and we had some really high participation and excitement about this year's offerings we went to our deeper learning dozen convening this week we had a team that includes Ms. Keys one of our math coaches at the elementary level building principal curriculum director as well as several members of the cabinet team we did a lot of learning this time around about systems change and how our strategies are impacted by the mindsets that we carry into the transformation work that we're doing and the equity work that we're doing we spent a lot of time at Harvard hearing from professors who have done a lot of work around development systems change this past week and it was a lot of fun and a lot of really intense learning we're all tired but it was really great work our November 1st professional development day is next week we're doing a lot of effort around building some learning and planning time together giving teachers as much time for guided planning and collaborative planning as we can hearing what Mr. Dingman and Ms. Donato said today about time being sort of of the effort since when you're trying to do so much change we're trying to prioritize giving people time so that they can do that change work and we're basing that on feedback that we got both from teachers and from students about what our teachers need on November 1st and we're integrating that feedback into our plan for the day so we've shared that agenda out with everyone we're making sure everybody knows where to go when and are looking forward to that day and giving teachers some additional challenges to build belonging and growth in the schools our strategic plan our working groups are meeting we have two sessions that we've completed they've met for like I said twice for about four hours total this is designed as an action research oriented inquiry cycle team so they're sort of intended to get together the next thing they're going to do is identify voices that are missing on the working groups and get those voices into the groups so right now it only consists of administrators we wanted those groups to get together sort of look at the strategic plan think about what some of the tasks are of year one and then think about who do we need at the table in order to actually make those things happen and so the next step is going to be inviting those voices into the working groups I mentioned this before but this is funded by an Arlington Education Foundation grant that is going to pay those who join the groups for their time to participate in and contribute to the work of the system so we'll be doing that next each team there are eight working groups they are facilitated by two APS administrators who meet with the cabinet team once a month to do their planning that planning is supported by a deeper learning district coach Kim Fruman who was with us this week at the deeper learning it's actually their deeper learning districts now they're not calling themselves the deeper learning dozen because there's not a dozen of them but that work is supported through the work of that coach and your enrollments are in your packets I'm happy to answer any questions that you have about this or anything else any questions so I want to point out that the buffer zone report was due this at this meeting per policy and it's my mistake that it didn't get to the agenda so we'll have it for you I mean I'll request that it's ready for the next meeting but that was my error one question sorry you should have asked it well Dr. Jango was here you know what the transition plan is for the high school they're doing half days or what's how that's going to work out yes so they are doing two partial days to two half days with the early release at 1145 to facilitate the move and rolling so that is to make sure that the movers can come in be in the building while students are not in the building so they will move from that moment at the middle of the day when the students leave through the evening following day the teachers of the disciplinary area that moved the students won't have class in that class the days are stacked such that the students have sort of a full day over two days so they'll miss one class even if the teachers have two periods over which they're moving I have the full calendar and I'm happy to share that out with you if that's helpful great thanks I want to ask you something I know I forget oh well so next is superintendent evaluation materials so I sent I think about two weeks ago now materials to the committee they are on this website that is now posted in novice the link to it you might need to copy and paste it into your browser to be able to see it just as a reminder I had a student learning goal practice goal and then two district improvement goals for three district improvement goals for this school year and so evidence is provided on the front page of the website for each of these goals with an emphasis I attempted to place a significant emphasis on student outcomes for goal one which was close opportunity and achievement gaps for students through focus on instructional practice and classroom systems and structures the professional practice goal was to continue our focus on deeper learning practices across APS through participation in various professional organizations I will note that the goal written here is the goal that was approved for this past year for me to participate in new super intense induction I've since no longer participating in that because the induction is done but we're still participating in deeper learning district and other professional networks including this year the Massachusetts association of school superintendents network and the full cabinet team is doing some work with that group district improvement goal one was to create and develop a comprehensive five-year strategic plan for the district in collaboration with stakeholders so there's evidence related to the work that was done in that area which all of you have been deeply involved in goal two was to recruit and retain diverse staff and continue to develop shared leadership structures to support continuous improvement so there's evidence of the work that we have done to support the continuous improvement of administrators of staff to continue to improve our recruitment practices and diversification practices in that area and district improvement goal three was to refine and improve a collaborative values driven visionary and inclusive budget process Mr. Mason and I did a lot of work around budget process last year based on feedback that was provided during my last evaluation and I've provided a little bit of evidence of that including some of the timeline around our organizational charts and the restructuring that has happened of the administration of central office and of some of the roles that we have throughout the district along the top is a reflection on some of these goals and a reminder that there are standard indicators associated with the superintendent's evaluation so this is the document on this last tab that was approved by the school committee back last January as well as the highlighted performance indicators that we chose and that you or I chose and that all of you approved the reflection is really focused on what those indicators were and I'm trying to provide a reflection aligned with those indicators and also reference any evidence that's on the front page so any issues navigating please let me know if there's anything that access issues with any of the documents on the front page please let me know and if there's anything else you'd like to see in evidence I'm also happy to add to the site. So I will be providing you with an updated evaluation document probably over the weekend and I will have a deadline for it we won't so that I can create the summative evaluation for November 16th meeting and if you have any questions for the superintendent regarding more information or whatever if you would see me on them just so that I can see if there's like a administrative problem or something that I want to make sure that everyone gets the information and is there any other questions or comments about this okay seeing none good yeah so next we have the consent agenda all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion there will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence warrant number 24085 $932,966 and 98 cents dated 10 1723 school committee draft minutes for the meeting of October 12, 2023 all in favor any opposed any abstentions so that's unanimous and now we have subcommittee and liaison reports budget as I said we'll look for a meeting in early November to go over enrollments start talking about the budget picture for next year thanks community relations there was a school committee chat on October 17th Mr. Thielman and Ms. Gilson attended as well as a number of members of Dr. Homan's cabinet team and my understanding is there were two community members that attended Ms. Gilson is that accurate? that is accurate we are having a subcommittee meeting on November 15th to follow up on the chat schedule and new protocol and also to discuss the advisory role of community groups to the school committee and APS I can elaborate more on that once we have our meeting okay curriculum we met earlier this week we talked about the overnight experience at the Gibbs and Special Ed and we are going to meet again in January facilities is not present anyone who is on it know anything the meeting is scheduled I think for next week policy we need a schedule meeting okay and building committee it is moving the high school is moving we just heard about that that is great that is right we will be in our new space next time our audience will not anyone who wants to come see us will need to enter on mill street is that right? millbrook and announcements none future agenda items okay next is adjournment motion to adjourn all in favor aye okay so that is unanimous we are adjourned okay